35.3431, Review: Translation; Translation as Creative–Critical Practice: Javornik Čubrić (2023)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3431. Wed Dec 04 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3431, Review: Translation; Translation as Creative–Critical Practice: Javornik Čubrić (2023)

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Date: 03-Dec-2024
From: Marijana Javornik Čubrić [mjavorni at pravo.hr]
Subject: Translation; Translation as Creative–Critical Practice: Javornik Čubrić (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.768

AUTHOR: Delphine Grass
TITLE: Translation as Creative–Critical Practice
SERIES TITLE: Elements in Translation and Interpreting
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Marijana Javornik Čubrić

SUMMARY

Elements in Translation and Interpreting presents innovative studies
on the theory, practice and pedagogy of translation and interpreting.
In Translation as Creative-Critical Practice, Delphine Grass
challenges the separation between practice and theory in translation
studies by analyzing creative-critical translation experiments.

Traditionally, translation studies as a discipline has been organized
around a clear separation between theory and practice. According to
the author, creative-critical writing is a growing field at the
crossroads between research and creative practice which seeks to use a
wide range of genres and media to engage with writing about art and
literature.

In the Introduction, the author asserts that she aims to attempt to
deconstruct the relationship between theory and practice in
translation studies by exploring translation practices as a form of
critical thinking on the nature of translation. She argues that
creative-critical translation is an experimental approach to
translation practice as a method of research into wider theoretical
concepts pertaining to translation equivalents and the differences
between languages and cultures.

The volume is divided into three parts, followed by a Conclusion. In
the first part titled The Translation Memoir as Autotheory, the author
discusses how the division between practice and theory in translation
comes under scrutiny in ‘autotheoretical’ translation memoirs
predominantly written by women, in which they explore their experience
of the relationship between practice and theory in translation. The
term ‘autotheory’ appeared in the 2010s and it refers to writings in
which memoir and autobiography are fused with theory and philosophy.
This combination of theory, philosophy and autobiography is indebted
to feminist writing and activism. In Autotheory as Feminist Practice
in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Lauren Fournier extended the meaning
of the term, stating that it refers to the integration of theory and
philosophy with autobiography, the body, and other so-called personal
and explicitly subjective modes and applying it to other disciplines
and practices and arguing that the divisions between art and life, or
theory and practice, were blurred by many artists a long time ago.
Grass suggests that autotheoretical works challenge the neutrality of
the critical ‘I’, which judges translations on the grounds of
invisibility and transparency, challenging the position of authority
of theory over the practice by confronting this distinction with
translators’ social existence. She analyzes several translation
memoirs by different authors, such as Corinna Gepner, Kate Briggs and
Diane Meur. The translation memoir by Kate Briggs is called The Little
Art and in it, she explores her approaches to translating Roland
Barthes’ works from French into English. The little art from the title
refers to an art attending to all the small differences, and Grass
concludes that in this context, translation can be redefined as a
subject or task with the attentiveness it requires. She also acutely
observes that Briggs experiments with language in order to translate
her experience of translating Barthes. In her translation memoir
Entre les Rives Diane Meur, a writer and translator, explores her
translational practice and offers an example of receiving a letter
criticizing her translation from the writer whose work she was
translating. The letter made her realize that she was the one signing
the translation and therefore the one responsible for her translation
choices. Grass observes that a translation in her name but which did
not belong to her would be a way of abdicating her critical agency as
a translator.

The second part is titled Performative Translations. The term
performativity stems from J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity,
also known as speech act theory, in which Austin distinguished between
statements that can be true or false, and performatives that cannot. A
performative is an utterance which performs an action. Grass argues
that translation has also the ability to perform its own
translatedness by acting out the transformative encounters of the
source text with another language, culture and temporality. This means
that some translations have performed themselves as artistic practice,
or in other words, it means the translations that force us to pay
attention to the artfulness of the translation. In this part Grass
analyzes the works by Charles Bernstein, Erin Moure, Karoline Bergvall
and Anne Carson. Among other examples, she examines Charles
Bernstein’s poem ‘A Test of Poetry’ and its translations into several
languages. The poem is based on a letter written by the Chinese
translator to Bernstein while attempting to translate his works and is
composed of questions to the author about the meaning of certain
expressions in his poems. The poem and its translations seem to test
the idea that poetry cannot be translated which is attributed to
Robert Frost. Bernstein responds that poetry is what is found in
translation. While examining Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s
works, the author notes that rather than filling the gaps behind the
fragmented archival materials, Carson performs the translator’s desire
for the source text through the framing and foregrounding of gaps,
silences and absences in the target texts. The analyzed examples show
that performative translations show source and target cultures as
changeable places which translation can transform.

The third part deals with Transtopias, defined by the author as
translation art and literary translations which use experimental forms
of translations to challenge normative representations of place and
identity funneled by the nation. Grass warns that, although the term
echoes the term ‘utopia’, transtopias do not refer to translation in
utopian terms. According to the author’s viewpoint, transtopian works
make visible the paradoxes inherent to translation conceived as the
management of stable, pre-existing differences. As a creative-critical
approach to geographies of belonging, transtopias remind us that
translations can rewrite pre-existing differences.

EVALUATION

In this concise and well-written volume, Delphine Grass encourages the
reader to re-examine the established role of a translator as an
intercultural expert and go-between whose task is to transmit a
message more or less passively, and effectively shows that a
translator is much more than that. She reminds us that every
translation is different and that translators have ceased to be
invisible or unmentioned. It is a fact that many people choose books
based not only on the author but the translator as well. Some
translations are truly artistic and literary subjects in their own
right, as the author reminds us. What she calls performative
translations are those that make translations visible as art.
Transtopias are translations that go far beyond bridging existing
differences between target texts and source texts; they are the ones
that contest and rewrite these differences.

Grass challenges the traditional postulates of the field of
translation studies, aiming to inspire renewed activity in translation
as a field of political and theoretical engagement through practice.
One of the most inspiring ideas that she offers is that it is possible
to view translation failure as a site of cultural production and
resistance. In her concluding remarks, Grass advocates for the
pedagogical applications of translation as creative-critical practice
in current curricula.

The greatest value of this well-written and highly interesting volume
is its ability to make the reader contemplate the nature of
translation and the role of translators, reminding us that some of the
greatest literature we have all ever read was probably translated for
us. Anyone interested in new approaches to translation studies and
translation as a creative and critical practice would benefit from
reading this volume.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marijana Javornik Čubrić is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law,
University of Zagreb and a translator. She holds a PhD in legal
linguistics and has authored several LSP textbooks.



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