The translation of reading

Abstract

This paper proposes that it is translation's task to capture the phenomenology – the whole-body experience, the kinaesthetics – of reading, rather than the interpretation of texts. This entails the definition of alternative modes of reading, hermeneutic and constructivist, and the development of “multilingual” translational processes able to register the reader's psycho-physiological and multi-sensory involvement in text, where “multilingual” refers not only to national languages, but also to the languages of textual presentation and projection. A phenomenological approach to translation presupposes the translation of the linguistic towards the paralinguistic, and of the textual towards the performative. The paper undertakes two translations: an intralingual rendering of Edward Thomas's “Adlestrop”, in two versions, exploring layout as a model of readerly consciousness and the reincorporation into text of associative mechanisms (radial reading); and an interlingual rendering of Rilke's Orpheus sonnet I. 13, again in two versions, the former addressing vocal acoustics, the latter introducing doodling as part of its graphic language.

Keywords:

• phenomenology
• hermeneutic reading
• constructivist reading
• radial reading
• multilingual translation
• graphism

Acknowledgements

This is a revised version of the first of the Clark Lectures of 2010 – “Translation and the Resurrection of Reading” – due to be published in 2011.

Notes

1. This distinction between hermeneutic and constructivist reading has certain affinities with Roland Barthes's distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts (1970, 10–11).

2. Medial-axis, or Mittelachse, verse is most commonly associated with Arno Holz's cycle of poems Phantasus (1961–1962). Holz began the cycle in the late 1890s and by the time of his death in 1929 it had reached something over 60,000 lines. His work bears out that principle of addition into, of expansion from within, of infinite embedding, that Mittelachse verse seems to be driven by. With this sense of a world oozing out of a cleft in the middle of the paper, it is not surprising that Mittelachse verse should attract processes of agglutination and compounding, of morphemes and lexemes fusing together, so that scriptio continua seems an almost natural consequence. It is often suggested that this verse-structure, with its symmetries developing long arabesques, is perhaps an inevitable product of fin-de-siècle cultivations of sinuous, organic forms.