Literary Translation and Transmediality: Clive Scott’s Reader-Oriented Translation Theory and Practice

Marko Pajević

doi:10.46809/jcsll.v2i2.53

Abstract

The British translation practitioner and theorist Clive Scott has presented an approach to literary translation that integrates the transmedial into textual translation. His translations of poetry contain doodling, handwriting, crossing out, writing over, typographical experimentation, and photo-collages; he even offers photo-poetic translations consisting exclusively of photos. By including such extra-verbal matter, they play with the medium of literature and integrate a rich variety of visual forms. Scott wishes to stress the role of perception in translating; he offers a reader-focused theory of translation. He is much less concerned with translation as a service for people who do not understand the original language than with the act of translating as a school for reading and hence for developing our capacities of perception and self-awareness. The materiality of language plays a major role in such an idea of translation. His approach has little to do with intentional meaning, focusing instead on the accessibility of sense. Translating is a process, and it is the relationship of this process to what Scott rightly sees as the multi-sensory process of meaning-making during reading that is at issue in his theory and practice. By analysing Scott’s theory and examples of his translationwork, this paper considers what this approach to translating says about transmediality in a phenomenological sense: it sheds light on how we read and perceive and on what the transmedial elements in these processes do. Scott’s transmedial translation theory and practice bring to the fore the multiplicity of media involved in the perception of a text in the reader’s mind and thus sharpens the awareness of what language is and does.

Highlights

This article investigates the role of transmediality in translation by analysing Clive Scott’s recent theory and practice of translation
In any case, exposes the multilingual and multi-sensory aspects involved in the act of reading and appears to suggest translation should make these psycho-physiological aspects of perception manifest
Scott’s inquiry zooms in on the translator as reader. He embraces the position that ‘translation is a mode of reading which gives textual substance to reader response; reading is reading-totranslate.’ (Scott, 2012a, p.10) It is evident that a shift takes place between the text and the processing of the text in a reader’s mind: Translation is the act by which we reveal to ourselves, and to other readers, what a text has made available to us in terms of linguistic experience and the renewal of perceptual consciousness

Summary

Introduction

This article investigates the role of transmediality in translation by analysing Clive Scott’s recent theory and practice of translation. Literary translation became his chief focus, resulting in several publications with Cambridge University Press and Legenda, top-ranking British publishers, with a peak in 2012 when two books appeared simultaneously It is from these that I will draw the most in this article: Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012a) and Translating the Perception of Text. One of the objectives in what follows is to demonstrate why Scott’s reflections on translation, while certainly representing an extreme case, help to understand what translation is doing, and add something to the practice of translation, with transmediality playing a major role in this contribution It may be useful, at this point, to present an example of his translationwork without any further introduction:. Why does Scott proceed like this? What could this tell us about translation, or rather, about the activity of translating? In presenting his theory more systematically, I will pursue these questions

Translating for the Polyglot Reader

Scott’s Translationwork

Conclusion