Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic

Abstract

Lawrence Venuti has become one of the most influential brand names on the international market of literature in translation studies. It stands for the expertise, challenge, and novelty that characterize the scholar's writing. For decades Venuti has been a trend setter, dismantling canons and providing a new vision of what translation is and does, amplifying the views of his predecessors in a provocative manner, which has allowed him to shape thinking and writing about translation by those in the field. Every piece of his writing is reception-oriented and demands corroborative reading. Each is aimed at the simultaneous frustration and satisfaction of his audience's expectations. The book currently under review is no exception. It is designed to convince readers to reexamine how they think about translation and is meant ultimately to trigger change in intellectual approaches.The target of the author's polemic is succinctly stated in the very title of the book Counter Instrumentalism, which simultaneously provokes the reader with the word “counter” and arouses curiosity to find out what exactly instrumentalism is, why the author opposes it, and what he suggests should supplant it. According to Venuti, instrumentalism comprises a model of translation that has dominated thinking in translation theory, commentary, and practice for millennia. Conceptually, it sees translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text (an invariant form, meaning, or effect). In the author's opinion, this model is overly simplistic, clichéd, and moralistic. According to Venuti, this has resulted to the present day in marginalization of translation by literary studies from the vantage point of looking at which translations are ones that do not contaminate the integrity of the source text rather than ones that bring the translator out of obscurity through her or his work. As such, instrumentalism must be replaced by translation research and practice that are radically hermeneutic. Hence, inspired by German romantic poets and critics (Goethe, the Schlegel brothers, and Friedrich Schleiermacher), as well as Antoine Berman, Charles Peirce, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida, Venuti elaborates a hermeneutic model that conceives of translation as an interpretive act that on the one hand inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to the intelligibilities and interests in the receiving culture, but on the other can encompass different concepts of equivalence. According to this model, a translator turns a source text into a translation by applying interpretants—formal and thematic factors that affect the translator's decision-making process. This results in a relatively autonomous target text. The latter is a model of alternative thinking that, to Venuti's mind, breaks the vicious circle of instrumentalism rooted in the long-entrenched idea of a sacred original and radically turns it into a Schleiermacherian hermeneutic circle as an ever-increasing spiral that incorporates new interpretations. The core principles of the hermeneutic model include variation, radical transformation, proliferation of meaning, multiplicity of interpretation, and evolution.The materials the author uses to build his arguments involve a variety of languages and cultures (Arabic, Danish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Korean, Latin, and Spanish), which are examined from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives in various sites of intellectual activity (Renaissance humanists and contemporary scholars of comparative literature, structuralists and poststructuralists, translation scholars and educators, poets and poetry translators, as well as film critics and subtitlers).To perform the ambitious task of eradicating instrumentalism from all paradigms of thought about translation, the author analyzes the abovementioned materials using archeological method as suggested by Michel Foucault, which is aimed at articulating the “episteme” (the model of translation) of a specific culture in a particular historical period. The discourse that sustains the implementation of the method employed by the author is marked with radicalism that could be exemplified not only by ideas she or he generates but also by verbal choices she or he makes (“translation remains grossly misunderstood, ruthlessly exploited, and blindly stigmatized,” “derail,” “abandon,” “put an end,” etc.).The persuasiveness of the author's arguments and comprehensiveness of their presentation stem from a demonstrably effective structure of the book. Its polemics trifurcate in three overriding directions (Hijacking Translation, Proverbs of Untranslatability, and The Trouble with Subtitles), mirror-framed by instructions for pursuing hermeneutic ways of thinking about translation (Start/stop–Stop/start), which makes the book itself a performative act in an Austinian sense.The title of the first part Hijacking Translation is destined to become another quotable catchphrase of translation studies discourse along with other of Venuti's coinages (the translator's invisibility, foreignization, domestication, ethnodeviation, ethnocentric narcissism, etc.). Here the author explicitly shows the need to demarginalize (“hijack”) translation, to reassess its role in creating world literature, since, according to David Damrosch (2003), as cited by the author, world literature is simply literature that crosses borders, and it is translation that performs “the wording.” Therefore, the focus of research should be on different modes of reception of the target text rather than on a recreation of the “original.”The discussion in the second part of the book rests on the popular catchphrases encapsulating the idea of untranslatability namely “traduttore traditore,” Robert Frost's phonocentric “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” and Derrida's paradox (“in a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense everything is untranslatable”). The author convincingly proves that each of them fails to meet quite a few requirements of proverbs as a genre (variability of context, unlimited range of application, proliferation, and dissemination of meaning) and as well reveals an instrumentalist nature. However, a hermeneutic message may as well be inferred from Derrida's paradox if interpreted as “everything can be translated but in a loose sense of the word translation.”The third part sheds light on the scope of the dominance instrumentalism has exerted not only on long-established modes of translation such as poetry or creative prose but also on a more recent field of research and the practice of audiovisual translation and subtitling in particular. From the vantage point of instrumentalism, a talented subtitler demonstrates an ability to select and condense the essence of a message with a minimal loss of information. Whereas in line with the hermeneutic model, as suggested by the author, the subtitler performs an interpretive act that can establish both a semantic correspondence and a stylistic approximation of the speech on the soundtrack while still transforming that speech according to what is intelligible and interesting in the receiving culture. Due to spatiotemporal constraints, subtitling is always violent toward the source message. The author aptly refers to Nornes' distinction between “corrupt” and “abusive” subtitlers. The former adhere to conventional subtitling practices, hiding their repeated acts of violence, whereas the latter bring the fact of translation from obscurity, turning precisely those conventions into the object of the abuse. Of particular significance is the argument that underlines the importance of cultivating in the reader or viewer the ability to recognize and appreciate the translator's or subtitler's work and perform her or his own interpretive act.Overall, the ideas discussed in the book resonate with extant theoretical speculations and practical experience. In previous research, scholarship has devised the idea of a model of poetry translation that conceives of an individual translator's reception as a means for modeling the meta-image of the source text through the filter of a translator's creative individuality, the recipient literary polysystem, and the sociocultural milieu. The conceptual core of the model consists of the principles of reception aesthetics that emphasize each particular reader's interpretation in making sense of a literary text. From the perspective of a reception model, the translator is the human locus of intercultural activity that leads to the creation of a target text as a rightful and fully fledged component of the recipient literary polysystem. A key method that could be applied in the framework of the reception model of poetry translation is a stereoscopic analysis that needs to be conducted in a reverse (opposed to a traditional approach) direction—from multiple translations to the original. This method has proven to be effective in determining the variability of translators' decisions.Just like any piece of thoughtful writing, this one is open to and begs for further discussion. We can just partly agree with some assumptions made by the author. For instance, he recurrently refers to translation studies as an emerging discipline. This might be true for an “aggressively monolingual” country like the United States, but Europe has seen emancipation of translation studies from literary studies and linguistics back in the 1960s. However, the function translation performed in different social and cultural contexts has been different. Hence, statements about the marginality of translation practices might not be applicable to all situations. In light of postcolonialism, history has often witnessed translation occupying a central position in the evolution of national literary polysystems. For example, for many Ukrainian translators, American poetry has always been an effective means of their self-expression, allowing them to legitimize their own poetic experiments, which often have led to translation itself being a catalyst for evolutionary processes within Ukrainian culture and its revitalization such as the current general shift to free verse influenced by translations such as those of the Beat Poets by eminent contemporary Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych, who eschews fidelity (an aspect of instrumentalism) in his interpretations.The ideas expressed in the book are in line with the modern episteme of dynamic functional systems. However, the issue that invites further elaboration is the measure of the translation's autonomy from the source text that differentiates it from other genres of world literature. The author discourages us from thinking about translation as a metaphor, arguing that it is rather a material practice that is indivisibly linguistic and cultural. We do support this opinion. Nevertheless, some metaphors suggested by other scholars perfectly fit the hermeneutic model, one of them being Rosemary Arrojo's “palimpsest.”On balance, the book is a manifesto of translatability, since even the word most resistant to translation is saturated with context and can be interpreted; it celebrates the translator's creativity, as well as cultivates the reader's intellectual hedonism.One of the elephants in Venuti's room is half of his title—instrumentalism, which may be somewhat forced and too all-encompassing in its striving to create a polar opposite foil for his own seeming theory of everything in translation studies. Things are not all black and white in the past and present of the field, which comprises far more shades of gray. The very term instrumentalism, therefore, may not be as efficacious as other of Venuti's coinages. It intrinsically does not convey a lot without explanation of what it encompasses by the author.While “instrumentalism” may perhaps be too procrustean, “hijacking translation” is quite clever. Paradoxically, Venuti himself ends up falling into the trap of instrumentalism by trying to find the invariant core in the works of presumably instrumentalist scholars. Any kind of “isming” or “zationing”—is about exaggeration, generalization and, inescapably, distortion stemming from scholarly extremism. Outstanding scholars whose reputation is undermined by crusading against their ideas, including Benjamin, Jakobson, and Nida, deserve more (or at least some) credit. Yet the killing of the king along with the messengers does comprise an effective rhetorical device to cast down a gauntlet. Striving to build a Tower of Babel one-size-fits-all philosophy of perfection in translation is, however, doomed to failure. Moreover, by promoting the ultimate value of “variance” of translation decisions Venuti perhaps should have encouraged “variance” of ideas in translation strategies, including “instrumental invariance.” Venuti also does not show where the demarcation line between instrumental and hermeneutic approaches runs and he sometimes contradicts himself by saying that a hermeneutic approach does not exclude some kind of equivalence, that is, invariance. And yes, by promoting Derrida's “difference” in translation as well as abuse he advocates all-permissiveness when Barthe's “death of the author” rather becomes “murder of the author” and vandalism.In practical terms, why would, for example, hermeneutics and older concepts such as dynamic equivalence be mutually exclusive? In a metaphorical way of looking at it, translations can only be simulacra and therefore imperfect copies of an original. If you alter too much of the original there is a danger of hermeneutic overkill, of thinking too much, and you run the risk of making it an imitation or something just inspired by the original. The translator's task consists of a balancing act between two languages and between hermeneutics and intuition. A translation does not exist without the original, and the two are linked in a symbiotic relationship like a planet and a moon exerting gravitational influence on each other. The original for practical purposes has certain significant aspects that need to be translated and, often enough, interpreted. All translation comprises this act of interpretation with consciousness of and deference to the norms and historical literary moment of the target culture and language.All in all, the book is extremely thought provoking, and Venuti has achieved his receptionist goal—of making his reader ruminate over how she or he thinks about translation, even though it could be exactly the opposite of what he thinks. Ultimately, the readers of a translation will decide whether a translation succeeds or does not.