The Translator, Translated

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 2 uses a multilingual corpus of English, Japanese and Chinese translations to survey general tendencies and experimental approaches. My focus on extreme cases reclaims the work of the translator as authorship. The analysis starts out with an account of Werther’s own translations from Ossian. Amid the text’s French, English and Italian translations, William Render’s translation of Werther stands out for pushing editorial interferences to their extreme, entering a grey area between translation and adaptation. With some delay, Werther also reached East Asia. Japanese and Chinese translations document the state of the two languages at the onset of the twentieth century that were undergoing considerable change. Arguably, the most idiosyncratic East Asian translations are the Japanese by Takayama Chogyū and the Chinese by Guo Moruo. They violate the modern standard, thereby draw attention to the questionable aesthetic norms that dominate contemporary translations. There is a remarkable feature that can be found in free and conservatives translations alike: they implicitly or explicitly take issue with the edition from which the translation is sourced; instead, translators pursue the creation of an Arch-Original, a text that claims to be truer than what others would consider an Original. In replacing the rich complexity of the text, they advance their own vision of an uncompromised Original.