번역을 향한 증오

Abstract

Despite its provocative title, this paper aims at stressing the need for an awareness of the functioning of translation. If there is such a thing as a hatred towards translation, it is because, as Jacques Derrida reminds us in his essay "Des Tours de Babel", man is 'doomed' to translation ever since he tried to build the biblical tower of Babel. Translation is unavoidable, and yet throughout its history it keeps telling its imperfection. The foremost outstanding testimony of translation's imperfection can be found in the fact that, whereas a piece of literature, in its original language and form, never turns old and keeps - given its status of work of (literary) art - being new whatever the epoch it is read in, a translation, on the other hand, prevails only until another one reveals both its flaws and its obsolescence. Thus it is common practice to have one same text translated over and over. Instead of accepting this fact with a sense of fate - since we are 'doomed' - we should acknowledge its various implications. First of all it brings on the question of the translator's status. The usual trend is to promote what Lawrence Venuti calls the "translator's invisibility", which means that when we read a translated text, we should not be aware nor feel the intermedium that is the translator. Thus, the translator should make himself as invisible as possible. The counterpart of the translator's invisibility is what we have called the 'translational pact', meaning that a reader in front of a translated text acknowledge the fact that he is reading not the original but a translation of the original, and yet pretends he is reading the original (for instance, when an english speaker reads a translation of Dostoievsky, he will say and believe that he is reading Dostoievsky). Yet, to achieve a genuine invisibility is only possible for a text that is not challenging both linguistically and intellectually (such as user's manuals, etc.), but whenever a new translation of a text (especially literary) is published, it carries the idea that the other (older) translation(s) are not good anymore (if they ever were). It therefore casts a doubt on the trust one can have in a translator. How can I judge whose translation of a same text is better? Is such a question even pertinent or legitimate?This kind of questioning emerges when a translator is not invisible any more. Such cases happen every once in a while, from Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles' Antigone, Nerval's french rendering of Goethe's Faust, Baudelaire and Mallarmé's translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works, etc. Since the 90s, a debate has started in France with the new translation of Dostoievsky's complete novels by André Markowicz. Markowicz's translations were so far from all the other existing translations that the question could not but be raised as whose translation in closer to the original russian text. And since there are obviously no objective criteria that are satisfying enough to establish what is a good translation, we are forced to reformulate the questioning on the status and functioning of literary translation. As soon as the translator is no longer invisible, he then becomes an author himself. In this sense, the translation of Dostoievsky by Markowicz becomes "Markowicz's Dotoievsky translation" the same way we speak of Glenn Gould's or Sviatoslav Richter's Bach's Well-tempered clavier in music. In conclusion, what this paper tries to say is that as long as translator try to remain invisible, he somehow lies to himself as well as to his/her readers since he 'pretends' he is not here; but once we are aware of the translator's presence (his/her visibility), the status and functioning of the act of translating should be deeply re-assessed, in the sense that the translator now stands next (even though he might wish to be beneath) the author of the original work. Hence the so-called hatred of translation is more about concerns (about what translators should or should not be) than actual hatred