Original Metaphors of Translation: continued

In a recent posting, I began to write about metaphors of translation. I now continue this discussion about metaphors.

While doing my doctoral research, I devised a couple of original metaphors of the translator herself. These metaphors are, for me, useful ways of viewing the identity and role of translators in general, but especially literary translators. In the first of two original, self-coined metaphors, I see the translator as a fused entity, a merging of two persons, viz. the source text author and the translator herself. This I call the Tuvix metaphor. I hope it will appeal to people who are fans of the Star Trek Voyager television series! In the second original metaphor, I draw on my background in local government law, to see the translator as being akin to the executor or executrix of a will. I begin by explaining the Tuvix metaphor.

In Season 2, Episode 40 of the American television science-fiction series Star Trek: Voyager, first aired on 6th May, 1996, entitled Tuvix, two separate individuals, Tuvok and Neelix, who are prominent crewmembers of the eponymous star ship, become accidentally fused into a single entity. This ‘merger’, which has created a new crewmember who decides to name himself ‘Tuvix’, has been caused by the ‘symbiogenetic’ (2007:1) properties of a collection of orchids handled by the two crewmembers in question.

The newly created individual appears to his colleagues to be a ‘strange yet oddly familiar alien’ (2007:1) who combines, in one new person, the memories, abilities and markedly different temperaments of the two people whose fusion has brought him into existence. Tuvix begins the effort to adjust to his new identity and settles into his new (only known) environment aboard the star ship, and while his fellow crew members become accustomed to him, Neelix’s lover, Kes, is simultaneously drawn to and disturbed by the affection of this ‘amalgam’ (ibid: 1) towards her.

Ultimately, the ship’s Doctor creates a means of ‘restor[ing] [Tuvix] to his two original components’ (ibid:1), so that by the end of the episode, Tuvok and Neelix have been completely reconstituted, though at the cost of ending the life of the hybrid entity Tuvix: the fact that the ship’s Captain (following the refusal of the Doctor on ethical and professional grounds to perform the procedure which will rehabilitate the two original officers, as it entails the execution of the syncretic being who protests his right to live) has effectively assassinated the hybridized, living being, constitutes the central moral dilemma of this narrative.

However, I also see Tuvix as being, perhaps, an unusual metaphor for the inherent fusion of ST author and TT producer which, according to translation scholar Theo Hermans (2002), is a fundamental characteristic of translating activity and its products, a metaphor which draws attention to the textual presence of the translating agent, alongside or intermingled with that of the original author. Translation theorist Cees Koster has also written an interesting article, published in 2002, concerning the textual presence of the translator within the target text.

My task in my PhD thesis, as a DTS researcher, was, like the Doctor on board Voyager, to somehow ‘separate’ these two individual identities present in the TT. For instance, I tried to identify how much of a particular translation was attributable to the translator's creativity, and how much to the creativity of the original author, Jules Verne.

Nonetheless, the crucial difference between a hybrid being such as Tuvix, and a TT or a translator, is, similarly to Chesterman’s point in Memes of translation (1997), that while translations do indeed propagate ‘memes’ or ideas from SC/ST to various TC/TTs, the original entities (ST, identity of the original author) do not cease to exist. Rather, a new fused entity is created alongside the original (source) entity, a newcomer which, like Tuvix, may initially be seen as ‘new’ or ‘alien’ in a TC, which may nevertheless habituate itself to the new form: and yet, especially to those familiar with the ST, the TT may seem not just strange or somehow disturbing, but also ‘oddly familiar’.

To further develop the ‘Tuvix metaphor’, the so-called ‘symbiogenetic’ (2007:1) qualities of the orchids which helped create this new humanoid in the TV episode referred to, are also features of translating, translators and of TTs themselves: translation may be interpreted as creating symbiosis between ST/SC and TT/TC, and between ST sender and TT sender, often to the mutual benefit of all such parties.

Memes, the ‘cultural genes’ which are ideas (Dawkins, 1976), survive across time, languages and cultures, based on their strength, usefulness and adaptability, and they are, through the medium of translation, replicated, faithfully (in theory or aspiration) but more often as ‘imperfect copies’ of the original text/memes/genes, to use Dawkins’ (ibid) Darwinian terminology. Just as genes are spread and multiplied by a replicator which is a living organism, so too are memes spread by the replicator of the translator and the target text; and just as newly (re)produced living organisms are not perfect copies or clones of their replicators, but are hybrid and original, similar yet also different to the parent, neither are translated texts identical to their sources, but are, rather, new, original, and a hybrid of source author and translator, together with the hybrid presence in the TT of environmental influences i.e. the multiple causes of translation. A single source text will continue, over time, to evolve and mutate unpredictably, just as living species and individual genes are transmitted and end up changing in the process. Around the World in Eighty Days has been translated in full, into English, by at least eleven different translators, over a period of more than 130 years, from 1873 to the present. Each translation of this same source novel has its own literary style and sometimes contains personal interpretations of meaning on the part of the translators. The ST novel thus evolves continuously in retranslation.

I now go on to briefly explain the legal metaphor of translation I have come up with, viz. the translator as executor of a will, prefacing this legal metaphor with a brief reference to the existing metaphor of the translator as an artist, a performer, e.g. of a piece of music. Here, the French term interprète seems apt. The translator who translates a literary work of art places her own style and interpretation on it. S/he 'performs' the ST work in the TL.


This performance metaphor is suggested by Williams and Chesterman (2002), when they ask if translation as a process might be viewed as being akin to playing a piece of music. For me, as somebody who has both translated text and played pieces of music (composed by others in a distant past), this is a ripe, apt image. A creative literary translator who does not feel unduly constrained by norms or regimes will provide a fresh, personal rewriting of a source text, in much the same way as a pianist may create a unique interpretation of a celebrated piece of music, pouring his or her own feelings and understanding into the performance.

Thus, the act of translation is a performance by translators endowed with differing degrees of talent, creativity and freedom – George Makepeace Towle and William Butcher are just two of many ‘performers’ who have individually, thus uniquely, interpreted Verne. How have they done so, exactly? And what is the reader’s evaluation of, or response to, their translations? These are among the historical and evaluative questions I tried to answer in my doctoral research.

The question I asked myself in pondering the translator's degree of creative freedom was inspired by personal and professional experience of dealing with the last will and testament of various individuals: could a translator be likened to the executor of a will? The executor (or executrix) is carrying out, or executing, the wishes or instructions of the deceased, as expressed in their last will and testament (which I liken to the source text). The question is whether the executor is merely a figurehead, mechanically following instructions provided by a will and by a solicitor, or a proactive agent making genuinely individual choices which will make a difference to an estate and its benefactors (whom I liken to the target text and target readers.) Depending on the particular circumstances surrounding specific wills, or specific translation situations, executors – and translators – may be sometimes ‘rubber stamps’ (though it is to be hoped that this is rare, especially in literary translation); at other times, they may make significant choices.

Cronin’s (2000) metaphor of the translator as nomad, in his monograph Across the lines, is echoed by Anthony Pym, when he refers to the translator as an ‘intercultural cause’:

Thanks to their material bodies, translators can move. And thanks to their knowledge of foreign languages and cultures, they can often move further and more easily than…those who depend on their translations. This could mean translators are never simply ‘in’ a culture or a society…
(Pym, 1998, p.172.)

Pym sees translators as moving, not just between cultures, but also between centres and peripheries, into power structures and through networks. Towle is clearly an example of a translator who moved between several different cultures, held significant power in each, and used his knowledge of foreign language and culture to translate.

This point reminds me that Jules Verne himself, in writing Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, was drawing on several different cultures to create his characters and locales. It is interesting that the central character, Phileas Fogg, was an Englishman, and that the opening chapters contain many knowledgeable references to British culture. In fact, it was because of this that, when I first read Around the world in eighty days as a child, I failed to realise that it was a translation and that the author was a Frenchman. The novel’s point de départ seems so deeply rooted in a British cultural setting, that it became, for the child reader that I was, a quintessentially British work of literature which must have emanated from a British author. (During my viva, Andrew Chesterman revealed that he, too, had not originally been aware that this novel was a translation). This overt 'Britishness' within the French ST is a reflection of Verne’s intercultural confidence; many of his heroes and heroines do, in fact, come from a diverse array of nations.

On a darker note, however, this British flavour, combined as it has been with TTs which fail to acknowledge the ST, SL, or the translator's identity/input, also reflects the deliberately covert presentation of translation as something which it is not, thus willing the original author's nationality/identity, and the identity and very existence of his translators, into oblivion.

In sum, I would be interested to receive feedback from readers as to what metaphors of translation and of the translator are found useful, and why.