Lawrence VenutiContra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic

Abstract

thank Janet Hong, whose translation so beautifully captures this tension. Of the ten stories included in the collection , three are speculative (“Waxen Wings,” “Nightmare,” “The Woman Next Door”) while the other seven explore how characters can be haunted even when there’s nothing supernatural about their situation. Taken together, these stories provoke a kind of existential dread that is at once terrifying and familiar. It’s unclear in “Waxen Wings” whether or not the narrator is haunted by an actual ghost of her past self or just a figment of her imagination, but ultimately all that matters is that her efforts to fly have resulted in her disfigurement, reflected in the text’s deadpan style. “Nightmare,” however , explores the nature of memory in the face of violence, with dead bodies appearing and disappearing, until one can’t tell reality from a horrifying dream. In “The Woman Next Door,” one of the collection’s most powerful and disturbing stories, a timid, lonely woman who is ignored by her husband and son befriends a new neighbor. Before her (and the reader’s) very eyes, that neighbor slowly takes over her life, starting with a borrowed spatula. Once again, memory gaps and disorientation turn a seemingly normal life into a nightmare. Ha deftly and relentlessly depicts the neighbor metaphorically sucking the life out of the lonely woman. The unbridgeable gap between men and women and their inability to escape the claustrophobic space of the city informs both “Your Rearview Mirror” and “Onion.” Each of these stories ends with an unlikely couple attempting to flee their respective pasts and getting into horrific traffic accidents. The sights, sounds, and especially smells of the city are heightened in Ha’s text: the same billboard ad shows up in two different stories, while the almost tangible stench of rotting garbage emanates from “Flowers of Mold,” “Toothpaste,” and “Early Beans.” Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal comes to mind, both because of the similarly jarring titles (“Flowers of Mold” and The Flowers of Evil) and because Baudelaire too used a sophisticated literary style to discuss, for instance, roadkill, haunting shadows, and a city’s spiritual and physical decay. Flowers of Mold offers readers an alternative perspective on city life, relationships, and ambition; and while it may be dark and unrelenting, it is also hauntingly lyrical. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Lawrence Venuti Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2019. 216 pages. Lawrence Venuti is the lightning rod of translation studies. Among his most enduring contributions to the field is his claim that publishers “domesticate” translated works by expecting translators to strip them of their inherent otherness in order to make them more palatable to American audiences . What’s his remedy for the book industry that, among its many faults, renders translators invisible? “Foreignizing” translations, i.e., retaining of foreign names, diction, syntax, etc.—anything that made the foreign text appealing in the first place. Given the rise of so-called world literature, a bland mush of worn-out plots and stock characters , it’s hard not to agree with him. In his latest upending of entrenched thinking about translation as a practice whose final product is often judged as “faithful” or “unfaithful,” Venuti aims his polemic at instrumentalism, a mode of translation that conceives of it “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 its place, Venuti proposes an alternative model, which he calls hermeneutic. In arguing for translation to become an interpretive act that is both linguistic and cultural, Venuti reminds us that every translator applies, often “intuitively and without critical reflection ,” formal and thematic “interpreters” to the source-text. “The application of interpretants ,” according to the Temple University professor, “guarantees that a translation is relatively autonomous from its source text even while establishing a variety of interpretive relations to that text.” Tracing the origins of the instrumental mode to the Romans and providing examples from more than a half-dozen languages and cultures, including Arabic, German, Greek, and Spanish, Venuti argues that instrumentalism “grossly oversimplifies translation practice, fostering an illusion of immediate access to...