Translation and the double bind of imaginative resistance

ABSTRACT

Imaginative resistance is a reluctance to buy into morally deviant fictional worlds. While most people have little trouble imagining acts of violence happening in fiction, they will struggle to entertain the idea that such acts could be the moral thing to do, even within a fictional universe. Although this phenomenon has received a lot of attention from philosophers, it is absent from the translation studies literature despite its relevance. This article explores the significance of imaginative resistance for the literary translation process. A number of areas are identified where translation research can make an important contribution to philosophical debates on this issue. In particular, imaginative resistance is theorized as a new translation double bind. By bringing together research from two disciplines, this article aims to encourage novel ways of thinking about both the translation process and the puzzle of imaginative resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Imaginative resistance
• double bind
• literary translation
• fiction
• morality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Séverine Hubscher-Davidson is Senior Lecturer and Head of Translation at The Open University, UK. Her research centres on psychological translation processes and the role of emotions on translators’ work in particular. She has published articles focusing on translators’ personalities, intuition, tolerance of ambiguity, and emotional intelligence. Her monograph Translation and Emotion was published in 2017.

Notes

1 It is noteworthy that scholars have distinguished cases giving rise to IR from cases giving rise to the related phenomenon of hermeneutic recalibration, which has been defined as “a common literary technique of temporarily puzzling the reader so as to cause her to reconsider and reinterpret the work” (Gendler and Liao 2016, 407). While hermeneutic recalibration entails an eventual acceptance of the utterance expressed as fictional, IR is more persistent and the perplexity remains even after one has fully digested the work.

2 The topic of genre conventions and their impact on both translator behaviour and reader response is already an established area of study in TS.

3 Recent work in audiovisual translation (e.g. Wissmath, Weibel, and Groner 2009; Wilken and Kruger 2016) has explored target viewers’ transportation into particular fictional worlds in relation to dubbed, subtitled, and audiodescribed content. To my knowledge, there is currently no published research in TS which discusses the translator’s own propensity to be transported from a cognitive perspective.

4 A counter-argument is that translators’ professional (critical) reading of the text could lead them to question the author or narrator’s motives more so than other readers (it is, after all, the nature of the job) and thus to experience the disengagement effect of IR to a greater extent than “regular” readers. In this case moral contamination is unlikely, but the translator runs other risks such as an inability to complete the translation successfully due to not being persuaded by the narrative.

5 Interestingly, it was also found that the fact that individuals can imagine a morally repugnant scenario does not mean that they necessarily find it less objectionable than individuals who have less ease in imagining said scenario (Black and Barnes 2017, 77). However they may, as we have seen, be more affected by it in terms of their emotions and beliefs.

6 To some extent, the idea that IR may work below conscious awareness is also consonant with cantian theories which peddle the idea that IR happens because individuals are not able to accept morally deviant claims due to a process that automatically overrides one’s effort to do so. This is also aligned with the account of emotional and alief-driven automatic responses to texts.