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ABSTRACT
This article begins with the premise that the shift from source-oriented approaches in Translation Studies to target-oriented approaches has left the concept of the original largely undertheorized. As such it remains haunted by Romantic notions of originality that in turn associate translation with loss, distortion, and contamination. Tracing the transnational circulation of a Russian-themed English poem, Thomas Moore’s ‘Those Evening Bells’, and its Russian translation, the author models a kind of cultural transfer that has long been ignored in literary studies and translation studies as ‘inauthentic’. Only by historicizing the concept of the original, the author argues, can Translation Studies fully participate in the transnational turn in cultural studies, serving as an important critical site for interrogating the legacy of Romanticism it has until now merely replicated.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, where he teaches translation-related courses at the undergraduate, Master’s, and doctoral levels. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS), general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies, and co-editor, with Michelle Woods, of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury). He is author of the monographs Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (2009), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2011, and Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (2015). In addition, he has edited a number of collected volumes: Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy, with Geoffrey Koby (2003), Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011), No Good without Reward: The Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (2011), Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology, with Natalia Olshanskaya (2013), and Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli (2015). He is also the translator of Juri Lotman’s final book-length work, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013). He is currently working on an annotated translation of Andrei Fedorov’s (1953) Introduction to Translation Theory.
Notes
1. Here I am referencing a special issue of the journal Target (24:1; 2012), entitled The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies, edited by Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts, and Luc van Doorslaer, in which leading scholars in the field – all former CETRA professors – reflected on areas they felt were still in need of scholarly investigation. I have, for my purposes, reversed the term to describe a concept, the original, which many consider to be self-evident and that is often used without reflection but that is, in my opinion, in need of rigorous, systematic conceptualization.
2. In the Hebrew tradition, the belief that the Hebrew letters themselves held divine meaning generated a resistance to translation, as described by Seidman (Citation2006).
3. We see this still today in legal settings, in which literalist approaches are promoted so as to leave questions of interpretation in the hands of the ‘professionals’ – in this case, lawyers and judges – as if it were possible to create translations that are entirely devoid of the translator's interpretive decision-making (see, for example, Elias-Bursač, Citation2012).
4. A good example of this is Kornei Chukovsky's A High Art, which underwent numerous revisions over the course of the author's life, but had only one English translation.
5. However, many scholars note a tension in Young's argument. As Matthew Wickman explains,
Much of what remains compelling about Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (Citation1759) devolves from a tension between the essay's thematic contradictions and the energy that shapes them. These contradictions primarily arise from the discrepancy between Young's effusive polemics advocating original thinking and expression, and his elegiac tribute to Joseph Addison in which he admonishes his readers to imitate Addison's noble death (Citation1998, p. 899).
6. On the way translation of news is introducing new paradigms of translation and new concepts of the original into Translation Studies, see van Doorslaer ‘The Double Extension of Translation in the Journalistic Field’ (Citation2010) and ‘Translating, Narrating and Constructing Images in Journalism with a Test Case on Representation in Flemish TV News’ (Citation2012).
7. I would argue that those technological advances merely render the contradictions in our conception of the original more visible; they were there from the advent of Romanticism, marked by a quest for authenticity and originality that occurred alongside the fall of patronage and the commodification of aesthetic objects in the new free-market economy. So, the contradictions were always there.
8. The information regarding Tolstoy's translation of William Lloyd Garrison's essay was presented by Galina Alekseeva from the State Museum-Estate of Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana at the 2014 AATSEEL Conference held in Chicago, Illinois, on 9–12 January 2014. The title of her talk was ‘The American Collection of Books in Tolstoy's Personal Library: Original Sources for Work and Life’.
9. Tolstoy's treatise, incidentally, was banned in Russia as critical of the Orthodox Church and so was first published in Germany in 1894.
10. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin largely dismissed the problem of its ‘authenticity’, considering the whole question of whether the work was ‘a translation, an imitation, or his own composition’ to be largely irrelevant given the fact that ‘everyone read and re-read [Ossian] with delight’ ([1830]Citation1986, pp. 276–77).
11. All translations mine unless otherwise indicated.
12. The Russian author and translator Vladimir Nabokov recounts a similar incident in the essay ‘The Art of Translation’ (Citation1976, p. 268), in which the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov asks him to translate into English a Russian poem that he wanted to set to music. Nabokov then discovers that the Russian original was in fact Konstantin Balmont's translation of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘Bells’.
13. In fact, it is typical in Russian to use adverbial modifiers of place (e.g. gde-to, or ‘somewhere’) to refer to time, as in the phrase ‘Gde-to v marte’ (Somewhere in March). It is unclear whether Webster knew any Russian, but the usage appears to be a borrowing or structural calque. What follows in the song supports this interpretation.
14. Barrett, Powley, and Pearce (Citation2011) describe the centrality of translation to Gadamer's thinking on the nature of interpretation:
Gadamer add[s] another dimension to what it means to “understand.” Understanding is related to agreement. To understand a text is akin to entering a dialogue between conversation partners seeking to achieve some kind of common ground. This is not the same as grasping the author's intention. Understanding is always translation, a matter of putting things into words, taking something foreign and articulating it in terms that are familiar. Understanding, application, interpretation, and translation are terms that are almost interchangeable in Gadamer. (2011, p. 189)
15. We hear an echo of this in a remark made by the nineteenth-century Russian translator Vasilii Zhukovskii in a letter to the writer Nikolai Gogol: ‘My mind is like flint that needs to be struck against a rock in order for a flame to ignite’ ([Citation1847]Citation1960, p. 544).