The Translator’s Invisibility

The symptomatic reading is an historicist approach to the study of translations that aims to situate canons of accuracy in their specific cultural moments. Critical categories like “fluency” and “resistancy,” “domesticating” and “foreignizing,” can only be defined by referring to the formation of cultural discourses in which the translation is produced, and in which certain translation theories and practices are valued over others. At the same time, however, applying these critical categories in the study of translations is anachronistic: they are fundamentally determined by a cultural political agenda in the present, an opposition to the contemporary dominance of transparent discourse, to the privileging of a fluent domesticating method that masks both the translator’s work and the asymmetrical relations—cultural, economic, political—between English-language nations and their others worldwide. Although a humanist theory and practice of translation is equally anachronistic, inscribing the foreign-language {39} text with current domestic values, it is also dehistoricizing: the various conditions of translated texts and of their reception are concealed beneath concepts of transcendental subjectivity and transparent communication. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, is historicizing: it assumes a concept of determinate subjectivity that exposes both the ethnocentric violence of translating and the interested nature of its own historicist approach.

III

The project of the present book is to combat the translator’s invisibility with a history of—and in opposition to—contemporary English-language translation. Insofar as it is a cultural history with a professed political agenda, it follows the genealogical method developed by Nietzsche and Foucault and abandons the two principles that govern much conventional historiography: teleology and objectivity. Genealogy is a form of historical representation that depicts, not a continuous progression from a unified origin, an inevitable development in which the past fixes the meaning of the present, but a discontinuous succession of division and hierarchy, domination and exclusion, which destabilize the seeming unity of the present by constituting a past with plural, heterogeneous meanings. In a genealogical analysis, writes Foucault, “what is found at the historical beginnings of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (Foucault 1977:142). The possibility of recuperating these “other” meanings explodes the pretense of objectivity in conventional historiography: its teleological emphasis betrays a complicity with the continuance of past domination and exclusion into the present. Thus, history is shown to be a cultural political practice, a partial (i.e., at once selective and evaluative) representation of the past that actively intervenes into the present, even if the interests served by that intervention are not always made explicit or perhaps remain unconscious. For Foucault, a genealogical analysis is unique in affirming the interested nature of its historical representation, in taking a stand vis-à-vis the political struggles of its situation. And by locating what has been dominated or excluded in the past and repressed by conventional historiography, such an analysis can not only challenge the cultural and social conditions in which it is performed, but propose different conditions to be established in the future. History informed by genealogy, Foucault suggests, “should become a differential knowledge of {40} energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science” (ibid.:156). By constructing a differential representation of the past, genealogy both engages in present cultural debates and social conflicts and develops resolutions that project utopian images.