Review

Author(s): Thomas O. Beebee

Review by: Thomas O. Beebee
Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1997), pp. 94-98
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247099
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94 COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES

stages. He distinguishes between the early echoes of Petrarch and the

later developments he calls "anti-Petrarchan."He is particularlyeffec-
tive in his explorationof Garcilaso'sdebt to BernardoTasso'stheories on
the imitation of the Classical writers in vernacularpoetry and his prac-
tice in GUAmori.ProfessorHeiple also gives us the first complete treat-
ment of the sonnets, analyzingevery one in its relation both to models
and content. His investigation of the neglected "dedicatory"sonnets
brings to light some fascinating material, in particularthe role that the
Marquésdel Vasto, whom he identifies with the "clarfssimomarqués"of
Sonnet 21, may have had in the poet's life. This is a model of meticulous,
and productive, scholarship.The present volume provides another step
in the still incomplete revaluationof Spain'splace in the European"Re*
naissance"by providingspecific informationon the depth and breadthof
the commitment of Garcilasode la Vega to the new spirit and formsde-
veloping in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel
University of Illinois at Chicago

The Translator'sInvisibility: A History of Translation. By Lawrence Venuti.

New York & London: Routledge, 1995. $65.00 ($18.95 paper).

Few would disagree with Venuti's assertion, announced in the title of

this book, that at the present historical moment the translator has pro*
gressively been excluded from the domain of co-authorship and reduced
to invisibility. Venuti outlines the complex of factors which have pro*
duced this situation: a persistent ideology of creativity and originality as
fundamental criteria of authorship; the imposition of scientific research
as a model for the humanities; and the political, legal, and economic
constraints of publishing converging on consumerist notions of "trans-
parency" in Anglo-American writing. Venuti's "history" attempts to trace
the present ideological positioning of translation activity - and a few of
its discontents - through past historical cultural formations, mostly in

COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE Vol.34, No. 1, 1997.
STUDIES,
Copyright O 1997 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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 BOOKREVIEWS 95

England and the United States, but also including Italy and Germany.
The book's last chapter returns to the present moment and suggests vari-
ous changes to the status quo, such as changes in copyright law which
would greatly reduce the period of a foreign author's translation rights to
encourage repeated translations of important works. (Venuti is quite cor*
rect: there is currently a "Gresham's Law" of translation - bad transla-
tions drive out good ones, since getting there first is more important than
doing the job well.) The reassertion of our rights will benefit not only us
poor, downtrodden translators; there is a benefit to society in general,
since bringing translation from the margins to the center will challenge
dominant cultural practices (e.g., canon formation).
After an introductory chapter which outlines the general thrust of
this argument, Venuti moves into the distant past, comparing several
English translations of Virgil's Aeneid, most notably Sir John Denham's,
on the basis of the relative fluency and specificity of the translation. Venuti
insists on identifying John Dryden and his period as the culprits in the
solidification of domesticating translational practice. The author's next
extended stop on the literary-historical trail concerns two late eighteenth-
century translations of Catullus. Here Venuti sets up a convincing oppo-
sition between John Nott's deviant version and George Lamb'stransparent
one, which censors some of Catullus's sexual references. Venuti's next
chapter, "Nation," moves us into the early nineteenth century with Francis
Newman's "populist" Iliad and Matthew Arnold's response: "Where
Arnold's Homer was elitist, possessing 'nobility,' 'a great master' of 'the
grand style,' Newman's was populist and, to Arnold, 'ignoble'" (132).
Venuti then turns to the dissident side, examining Iginio Ugo Tarchetti's
Italian translation of Mary W. Shelley's Gothic tale, "The Mortal Im-
mortal." The Gothic qualities of the translation violated Italian literary
norms of the period, as did Tarchetti's omission of the original author's
name - the latter innovation constituted an "eminently foreignizing trans-
lation practice. Because his translation was a plagiarism, it was especially
subversive of bourgeois values" (166).
Moving into the twentieth century, Venuti identifies Modernism (also
known as Ezra Pound) with foreignizing translation strategies which use
archaisms, foreign loan words, and other devices to produce a trans-
lationese style as different as possible from native poetry. Here, however,
Venuti drops the political side of his argument in favor of an in-depth
exploration of the Oedipal struggle between Pound and one of his most
devoted disciples in translation, Paul Blackburn. Blackburn followed
Pound's modernizing tendencies in his translations of Provençal poetry,
which failed to find a publisher largely, Venuti suggests, because of Ramon

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96 LITERATURE
COMPARATIVE STUDIES

Guthrie'sdominant-culturecritique of Blackburn'sexcesses. Blackburn's

moment in the sun came with his translation of Julio Cortâzar'ssubver-
sive Spanish prose into English (Venuti offers no close analyses here).
Venuti then becomes autobiographicalin recounting his own efforts to
find an Italian poet his own age, who was simpaticoto his own poetic
ideals, and who could then become his translation project throughout
his career.The paradoxof identifyingwith a poet who rejectsnotions of
subjectivity is highly interesting. Venuti found his ticket in the experi-
mental poet Milo de Angelis, whose workconsistently combatsthe "poet-
centered aesthetic" which constructsa unified meditative consciousness
at the center of every poem. De Angelis uses ambiguousgrammarand
heteroglossia to deconstruct notions of a unified self, and Venuti ap-
proachedhis translationswith that central theme in mind, "abusing"(the
term is Phil Lewis') the amphibologiesand indeterminaciesof the origi-
nal. The results,Venuti notes, are difficult Englishpoems which conflict
with the prevalent trendsin moderntranslationthat have causedEugenio
Montale to be translatedso manytimes. In orderto provehis point, Venuti
sharesthe reader'sreportsfromhis rejectedmanuscriptof de Angelis trans*
lations, as well as negative reviewer'scomments on individual poems.
Something that can arousesuch hatred must be good.
Venuti's book is more valuable for its insights into specific transla-
tion strategies, indeed for its presentation of a brief and selective "his-
tory"of translation, than for its overall thesis. There is no doubt that the
choice between domesticatingand foreignizingtranslationstrategieshas
been a significant divide in the practice of translation over the last few
hundred years.The problemcomes with the attempt to identify transla-
tors'choices in this matterwith their social classesor their political agen-
das. The vocabularyusedto drawsuch parallels,derivedfromourpresent,
itself ravages the historical material. The Procrusteanbed all too often
producesstatements such as the following: "Fluenttranslatingremained
affiliated with the British culturalelite [in the 18th century]"(66). The
problemwith this statement is not that it is false, but that it is so totally
redundant. It makes me imagine hordes of peasants and laborersoppos-
ing their oppressorsand raising their cultural awarenessby consuming
non-fluent, ethno-deviant chapbook translations of Boccaccio and
Catullus.As no evidence is providedfor this scenario,I ratherthink noth-
ing significant has been revealed.The need to set up this sort of opposi-
tion at all costs detracts from otherwise sensitive readings of specific
translations, as when no mention is made of Nott's having rhymedhis
"deviant"versions of Catullus- a transparentlydomesticating strategy

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 BOOKREVIEWS 97

for unrhymed Latin poetry. In my (undoubtedly bourgeois, dominant'

culture) opinion, this book becomes more interesting as it comes nearer
the present, as the wealth of biographical material (e.g., Blackburn's pri-
vate letters to Pound and interviews with those who knew him) causes
translators and the stresses they suffer from to become three-dimensional.
At this point, Venuti's political argument fades into the background as
our attention is drawn to the very human struggles of the translator against
egotism, opacity, and the cunning of history.
The idea of counter*translation, of translation which challenges and
disorients its readers, thus making them aware of both the gap between
original and translation and the arbitrary nature of dominant cultural
practices, has had notable adherents, from Schleiermacher to Benjamin
to Nabokov. Notably, most adherents of this theory were academics who
knew more than one language, and who didn't themselves need to make
use of the foreignizing translations they advocated. The perspective of
the monolingual is, of course, quite different, and will always be in favor
of "domesticating" translation. It is unfortunate that Venuti does not treat
Nabokov's extreme foreignization of Pushkins' Onegm (admittedly a chest-
nut of translation studies), because Nabokov's aristocratic class alliances
are so patent. But Nabokov's arch-conservative, cultural-elitist call for
the ideal Onegin as "mountains of footnotes" to which are appended little
patches of text, and his virulent attacks on Walter Arndt's domesticating
translation, supposedly repulsive in its readability, do not fit Venuti's two-
dimensional scheme. Also a pity that Venuti does not address arch-con-
servative Rudolf Borchardt's extraordinary translation of Dante into
German: like Nabokov's translation, it is impossible to read, because
Borchardt invented his own brand of quasi-medieval German to parallel
Dante's medieval Italian that has remained understandable to modern
readers. Borchardt's Quixotic purpose was to use translation in order to
create a missing linguistic link which would better put Germans in touch
with their "Kultur" in its historical dimension. Here then we have the
paradox of extreme foreignization and the creation of a "minor" language
used for nationalistic purposes. To be fair, Venuti does observe these para-
doxes in translation theory, such as Schleiermacher's, but his own ap-
proach is far from dialectical and will only countenance examples which
show a supposedly ineluctable link between foreignizing translation and
cultural critique.
While some readers might find the subtitle of this volume, "A his-
tory of translation," somewhat hubristic (indeed, ethnocentric - the ad-
jective "Anglo-American" should have been inserted), this book does

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98 COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE
STUDIES

what we expect histories to do: to eliminate certain details in order to

construct a coherent narrative(since real life is incoherent); to sacrifice
the trees for the sake of presenting a forest. Venuti has done this very
well. Who now will give us a biographyof translation?
Thomas O. Beebee
The PennsylvaniaState University

LiteraryIndia:ComparativeStudiesin Aesthetics,Colonialism,andCulture.
Edited by PatrickColm Hogan and LalitaPandit. Albany: State Univer-
sity of New YorkPress, 1995. xvi + 289 pp. $59.50.

Precolonial Indian- and other non-Western- literature and aesthetics

have been less fully addressedthan their Western counterpartsin com-
parative literarystudies. This fact and the contrast it offersto the promi-
nence which Indian scholars and Indian concerns have assumedin the
postcolonial critique call for a new beginning. It is time to intregrate
fully and meaningfullyIndian- and other non-Western- literaturesand
aestheticsin the comparativecompassand to transcendwhat PatrickColm
Hogan calls the "Occidentalism"of currentcomparativeliteraturestud-
ies. In taking a principledstep in this direction, LiteraryIndiaoffersmuch
to challenge the intellect and sparkdebate. The essaysin this collection
engage the readerboth at the theoretical level and in fine-grainedcom-
parisonsof specific works,and in a rangethat extends fromclassical San-
skrit works of literatureand aesthetics to contemporaryfolk dramaand
film.
The volume opens on a programmaticstudy by joint editor Hogan
who eloquently argues for a nondichotomous approach and a disman-
tling of Kiplingesquepseudo-differencesbetween East and West. In an
exemplaryfashion, and with particularreference to literaryinnovation
and structural unity, he compares, but does not contrast, the classical
aesthetic theories of Aristotle and Anandavardhana,Abhinavagupta,and
the Nâtyalâstra with particularrespect to the performingarts; he also
observes them at work in plays such as Kâlidisa'sfamed "Sakuntalaand

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 34, No. 1, 1997.

Copyright © 1997 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions