Introduction

Today poetry may well be the least translated literary genre, no matter where the translating literature ranks in the global hierarchy of symbolic capital that is so unevenly distributed among national literary traditions (see Casanova 2004). Because the hegemonic anglophone cultures have long translated less, their figures for poetry offer no surprise (Venuti 2008, 11–12). Every spring Poets House in New York City showcases most books of poetry published in the United States during the previous year, building an online bibliography that enables a comprehensive view of the contemporary scene. Translations comprise a tiny fraction of total annual output, hovering at 5–8%. In 2009 US publishers brought out approximately 2,200 books of poetry, but only about 115 were translations (just over 5.2%). Much lower in the global cultural hierarchy, in Slovenia, for instance, the situation is not much better, even if the considerably lower figures reflect the smaller size of the publishing industry. In 2009 Slovenian publishers brought out approximately 300 books of poetry, including 33 translations (11%) (Kastelic 2010). In a culture like Italy, where since the 1980s translations have constituted 20–26% of new titles each year, more poetry is translated, but again the percentage is small compared to native production: in 2009 Italian publishers brought out 3,769 books of poetry, which included 520 translations (13.77%) (Peresson and Mussinelli 2009; Mondadori's publicity department provided the 2009 data). If in sheer quantitative terms poetry translation appears to be such a marginal genre in the West (and no doubt in other locations as well), why should we bother to devote a special issue to the study of it?

The marginality is in fact the first reason to move poetry closer to the center of translation studies. Poetry translation attracts a narrow audience and therefore occupies a tenuous position in the process of commodification that allows other literary genres, notably the novel, to become lucrative investments on the foreign rights market. In the US most poetry translations are issued by small and university presses, limiting their print run and distribution and making many of them ephemeral publications. These factors, as Pierre Bourdieu observes of poetry in general, turn its translation into “the disinterested activity par excellence”, determining that it will invite not only “charismatic legitimation” but also “a succession of successful or abortive revolutions” as translators seek to garner “poetic legitimacy” by distinguishing their work (Bourdieu 1993, 51). Released from the constraint to turn a profit, poetry translation is more likely to encourage experimental strategies that can reveal what is unique about translation as a linguistic and cultural practice.

It is the uniqueness of poetry as a form of language use that occasions any such revelations. “The poem,” argues Alain Badiou, “does not consist in communication” because it performs two operations: a “subtraction” from “objective reality”, whereby the poem “declares its own universe” and “utters being, or the idea, at the very point where the object has vanished”, and a “dissemination” which “aims to dissolve the object through an infinite metaphorical distribution”, so that “no sooner is it mentioned than the object migrates elsewhere within meaning” through “an excessive equivalence to other objects” (Badiou 2004, 233, 236–7). To translate a poem, then, regardless of the language, culture, or historical moment, has often meant to create a poem in the receiving situation, to cultivate poetic effects that may seek to maintain an equivalence to the source text but that fall short of and exceed it because the translation is written in a different language for a different culture. The poem that is the object of translation inevitably vanishes during the translation process, replaced by a network of signification – intertextual, interdiscursive, intersemiotic – that is rooted mainly in the receiving situation. Hence poetry translation tends to release language from the narrowly defined communicative function that most translations are assumed to serve, whether the genre of their source texts is technical, pragmatic, or humanistic – namely, the communication of a formal or semantic invariant contained in the source text.

The articles I have gathered here contest this instrumental model by setting out instead from an understanding of translation that is hermeneutic, translation conceived not as the reproduction of an unchanging textual essence but as an act of interpreting a text that is variable in form and content. In each case, even when the translation under examination is governed by some concept of equivalence, the translator's verbal choices are treated as interpretive moves that vary the source text according to a complex set of factors that include knowledge of the source language and culture but also values, beliefs and representations that circulate in the translating language and culture during a particular period. Ruth J. Owen documents how between 1967 and 1990 the widely distributed magazine Poesiealbum presented opportunities to evade censorship in the German Democratic Republic by selecting certain foreign poetries for German translation and by rendering them so as to criticize East German society. Eric Keenaghan analyzes how a queer ethics, entailing a recognition of minority sexual identities that fosters and sustains a community, is foreclosed or enacted in several English translations of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda's work, all published after his death in 1963. Josef Horáček indicates the modernist avant-garde materials that inform the US poet Jerome Rothenberg's versions of Native American oral literatures during the 1970s, interpretations that put into question the universalizing tendency of Rothenberg's own commentary by foregrounding performance. Zoë Skoulding considers how the relations between place and language are reinterpreted through translation in the British experimentalist Geraldine Monk's 2005 collection Escafeld Hangings, wherein the reader is compelled to translate between different dialects and moments in the history of Sheffield, and the limits of anglophone nationalism as well as of the global hegemony of English are exposed. To address poetry and translation confirms the methodological ineffectiveness of instrumentalist thinking by showing that translation communicates not the source text, but an interpretation of it, one among different possibilities, which can go on to serve multiple functions, literary and cultural, social and political.

Clearly, I am formulating a hermeneutic model of translation that diverges significantly from prevalent concepts of the “hermeneutic”. From my point of view, Jerome McGann's distinction between “hermeneutic” and “constructivist” or “radial” kinds of reading is dubious and ultimately collapses in his exposition (McGann 1991, 104). He calls the former “an act of decoding”, the latter “an act of constructing”, yet “radial reading involves decoding one or more of the contexts that interpenetrate the scripted and physical text” (ibid., 119). McGann wants to limit the meaning of “hermeneutic” to “deciphering the linguistic text”, where “linguistic” assumes a notion of the text as a container of stable meaning (ibid., 104). But he makes clear that all reading is hermeneutic because it is indistinguishable from the interpretive act of decoding. What he actually does is to broaden interpretation to encompass the text as a material object. Thus he argues that texts possess “spatial styles (or codes)”; they are “visually and materially coded for different audiences and different purposes”; and a “critical edition” holds a “special hermeneutic advantage” in “allow[ing] one to imagine many possible states of the text”, so that reading must take into account textual editing, the “bibliographical codes” that are just as constitutive of meaning as linguistic features (ibid., 115, 121, 122, 123). Karen Emmerich establishes the importance of introducing this view into translation studies by displaying how a particular edition of the source text – her case is the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy's unfinished work – inscribes an interpretation which then limits the translator's interpretive moves.

Behind McGann's questionable notion of hermeneutic reading, I suggest, lies the German tradition of hermeneutics, particularly as exemplified by Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of interpretation. And McGann is right to oppose this tradition. Gadamer promisingly describes translation as an interpretive act that is “not simply reproduction” (Gadamer 1992, 386). Yet although he mentions “the fundamental gulf between the two languages”, admitting that the translator “is always in the position of not really being able to express all the dimensions of his text”, his account assumes the instrumental model:

[T]he translator must translate the meaning to be understood into the context in which the other speaker lives. This does not, of course, mean that he is at liberty to falsify the meaning of what the other person says. Rather, the meaning must be preserved, but since it must be understood within a new language world, it must establish its validity within it in a new way. (Ibid., 384)

For Gadamer, the source text contains a semantic invariant that the translator must transfer through the translation. He never clarifies how “meaning” can be “preserved” or its “validity” established “in a new way” except through a cursory reference to his notion of “fusion of horizons” (ibid., 388). By “horizon” Gadamer understands the different but overlapping presuppositions that gave rise to the “traditionary text” in the past, and that the interpreter brings to the task of interpretation in the present, so that interpretation is a “relation of question and answer” whereby the cultural difference of the text questions the interpreter, who in turn is led to articulate “the question to which the meaning of a text is understood as an answer” (ibid., 374–5). Meaning proceeds in one direction, however circuitously, from tradition to the interpreter, inexplicably retaining its “fullness” despite the “changing process of understanding” (ibid., 373). Tradition escapes any questioning, but its very dependence on later interpretation for its continuing relevance should make any interpreter wary of putting the past or its value beyond question. Gadamer's hermeneutics is founded on an essentialism that represses the indeterminacy of language, the transformative nature of interpretation, and the exclusions at work in any construction of tradition (see Caputo 1989).

To advance the study of translation, we must not abandon the practice of interpretation but rather reconceptualize the hermeneutic model so as to take such points into consideration. Translation is an interpretive act that involves what Jacques Derrida calls an “inscription”: “the written origin: traced and henceforth inscribed in a system, in a figure which it no longer governs” (Derrida 1978, 115). The source text is always already mediated, whether read in the source language or translated into the receiving language, and that mediation consists of an interpretation that is itself determined by a network of signification beyond the author's control, whether in the source or the receiving culture. The source text can never be viewed as strictly original, then, because the inescapable inscription “bring[s] the origin or a priori principles in relation to what exceeds them” (Gasché 1986, 161).

The inscription can be made more precise and turned into a serviceable tool both to produce and to analyze translations by drawing on Charles Peirce's notion of the “interpretant”. Peirce makes clear that the interpretant constitutes a “mediating representation” between a “sign” or signifier and its “object”, where the object is itself a representation, a content or signified (Peirce 1984, 53–4). In Peirce's semiotics, as Umberto Eco observes, “a sign can stand for something else to somebody only because this ‘standing-for’ relation is mediated by an interpretant” (Eco 1976a, 15). Eco's examples include a dictionary definition, an encyclopedia entry, a visual image, or a translation into another language, showing that the interpretant facilitates a semantic analysis: it is a code or theme that invests the sign with a certain intelligibility by transforming it into another chain of signifiers (Eco 1976b, 1469; Eco 1976a, 70–1). Eco's inclusion of a translation among his examples can be misleading insofar as every translation requires the application of an interpretant as a necessary condition of its existence: interpretants enable the translator to turn the source text into the translation. With this qualification interpretants can be seen as precipitating an endless chain of interpretants, codes used to produce a translation but also to analyze the interpretants in practices like translation.

The hermeneutic model I have rapidly sketched casts Clive Scott's argument in a different light. In theorizing reading as translation he discloses the process by which an interpretation is inscribed in a text read or translated. He has not abandoned interpretation but allowed “an autobiography of reading and associating” to become a source of interpretants, so that Edward Thomas's poem “Adlestrop” can be meaningful to the “reader of Proust” through a scene from À la recherche du temps perdu, and Rilke's sonnet prompts Scott himself to create a visual analogue to the acoustic dimension of the text. Yet his insistence on personalizing the interpretive act, on expanding the range of interpretants to encompass autobiography and performance, defers the question of value. To address this question is the project of my own contribution. If we agree that a translation transforms the source text, then evaluation cannot stop at a consideration of its relation to that text, but must explore the manifold conditions – linguistic and discursive, cultural and social – that figure into its interpretive inscription. These conditions are transindividual, situated in communities and institutions, and they lead to a formulation of a translation ethics, where the good is the creative and the innovative. Because translation traffics in linguistic and cultural differences, it ought never to maintain the cultural and social status quo but always to challenge it and, if the conditions are advantageous, to inspire the development of new communities and institutions in the receiving situation.

My overall aim has been to make translation the site of the most searching thought about language, literature and culture while increasing our knowledge of translation practices. The choice of a genre like poetry to stage this investigation, a genre that retains a certain prestige despite its marginality in publishing and in translation studies, was strategic. Perhaps that prestige can help to stimulate new research in translation along similar lines, particularly the translation of text types that are more central than poetry to intercultural exchange. We know more about the translation of technical and pragmatic texts, where the interpretants tend to be relatively limited to idiomatic usage, standardized terminologies and precisely defined functions, than we do about the history and current state of humanistic translation, translation in the full gamut of the arts and human sciences in such areas as anthropology, art history, film, philosophy, political history and religion, where, as with poetry, interpretants are constantly developing to reflect changing cultural and social conditions. In the end, the question that this special issue poses is much broader than the focus on poetry might suggest. I would phrase it thus: What might the hermeneutic model bring to light about the translation of the forms and practices by which most of us are likely to encounter other cultures?