The literary translator as author: A philosophical assessment of the idea

ABSTRACT

In contemporary scholarly literature on translation the idea that literary translators ought to be acknowledged as authors of the works that they produce (TA) is a recurrent one: numerous theorists have engaged with it approvingly, others have sought to undermine it. In this article I scrutinise existing theories and studies on authorship and on the ontology of literary works as undertaken in the field of analytical philosophy of art, in order to assess the notion of TA in the context of literary translations. My assessment affirms neither one of the current antithetical positions on TA: translators, I argue, can be justifiably called authors but, normally, not of the kinds of works that defenders of TA commonly assume; that is to say that, rather than being authors of literary works proper, even of a derivative kind, they are authors of constrained representations of literary works.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary translation
• authorship
• ontology of literary works
• translation as representation
• appropriation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Katerina Bantinaki received her PhD in 2005 from King’s College, University of London, and worked at the University of Manchester before moving to the University of Crete in 2008, where she is currently Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Her research interests include the nature and value of pictorial representation, aesthetic perception, issues relevant to authorship and authenticity in art, as well as topics at the intersection of philosophy art and philosophy of mind.

Notes

1 The notion of narrative should be, at this stage, broadly construed so as to involve the structured expression of ideas and emotions in poetry. See, however, my point regarding the case of poetry.

2 I take this commitment as an empirical fact, and so I do not argue for it, nor do I evaluate it. For the need to ground ontological claims, in general, on a “pragmatic constraint”, see Thomasson 2004.

3 See Howell (2002) on a pertinent point with respect to performances of works like ballads, which is all the more relevant in light of the fact that translation is often described as performance (see Zanotti 2011).

4 In the last section I discuss cases of creative translation as literary appropriation but note that literary appropriation is not bound to translation: a word-for-word identical text can be a case of literary appropriation (see e.g. Hudson Hick 2013).