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©
Anthony Pym 2001
Review
written for The European Legacy
Experiences in
Translation is based on a series of lectures Umberto Eco
gave at the University of Toronto in 1998. The book is divided
into two halves. In the first, Eco discusses translation as
a matter of personal experience, both as a translator and as
a novelist who has been translated. The second half presents
a more formal theorization of translation, distinguishing between
“translation proper”, “rewriting”, and the more metaphorical
types of translation that occur within single languages or move
between different semiotic systems or “purports”. In both halves
of this short book there is a broad appeal to common sense as
the ultimate proof that translation should remain “translation
proper”. That is, the translator should ultimately be faithful
to something variously described as “the intention of the text”,
“the same effect as the original”, or “the ‘guiding spirit’
of the text”. In this, Eco’s experiences run firmly against
the trend of contemporary Translation Studies.
Eco’s initial approach
works through a series of simple binarisms such as form vs meaning,
source vs target, archaic vs modern, in each case using literary
examples to indicate that the solutions rarely fall entirely
one side or the other. A plenitude of illustrations is similarly
used to address questions such as whether a translator can change
a story (yes, if for the sake of “the aesthetic goal”), how
various partial losses can be recuperated through compensation
techniques, and the supreme importance of translating textual
rhythm, which in itself constitutes much of the distinction
between “translation proper” and modes of interpretation more
akin to definition or paraphrase. Since most of these points
are argued with reference to translations of Eco’s novels, they
more or less preclude debate as to what the “intended meaning”
was. Even if Eco places the intention in the text, it is with
authorial authority that he does so. Similarly, several long
delightful discussions of translation problems in Nerval’s “Sylvie”
come from close authoritative experience of the text. Nerval
is not around to tell us what he meant, but Eco’s own translation
of “Sylvie” is supported by years of reading and analysis, with
an attention to detail that bespeaks love if not obsession.
Or again, in the final discussions of Finnegans Wake in French
and Italian, the effective translator is identified as Joyce
himself, who as author had enough authority to go beyond translation
when it pleased him to do so. In all these cases, the elusive
“intention of the text” is backed up by the authority of some
kind of authorship. There is thus little effective liberalism
in the Eco who purports to have traded mere “suggestions” with
his translators, or learned from them, or discovered details
that could become improvements on his texts. Eco the theorist
is still legislating what is or is not (good) (literary) translation,
without ever really elaborating on the terms we have just put
in parentheses.
On the more theoretical
level, Eco’s main points of reference are Hjelmslev and Jakobson;
his argument could probably function quite well without citing
any text published after 1960. We thus find no effective consideration
of the issues that have concerned translation scholars over
the past forty years or so: specialized readerships, varying
translation purposes, target-culture effects, the translator’s
discursive presence, the asymmetric power relations between
cultures, culture-bound notions of concepts such as translation
or aesthetic value, translation as a relation between people
rather than with a text, or critical deconstruction for that
matter (written off here as a desire for a cheap pun on the
name “Sylvie”). Derrida is cited in the bibliography, precisely
the text where he takes Jakobson to task for ambiguously isolating
“translation proper”, yet Eco never really addresses Derrida
and blithely follows Jakobson, albeit inconsistently. In the
parts based on Jakobson and Peirce, Eco believes in semiosis;
when he is adapting Hjelmslev and searching for Aristotelian
categories, meaning is suddenly fixed and stable. There is no
awareness of any contradiction here; categories can be demonstrated
by cheap jokes that go beyond them; thus will a list of names-for-things
allow common sense to reign above the rest, even when the world
is moving with more than reason. Yet if common sense were really
common, no one would have to read Eco to know about translation.
As if to recognize
this, Eco’s major product here, the list of names-for-things,
the authoritative isolation of “translation proper”, is only
justified by the supposition that “the task of semiotic analysis
is that of identifying different phenomena in the apparently
uncontrollable flux of interpretative acts” (129-130). That
kind of analytical hope mostly fails to inspire; it addresses
few of the pressing problems facing cross-cultural relations.
It could even stand as a tombstone to the institutional failure
of semiotics as a discipline. Eco will remain a figure of insatiable
inquisitiveness, an amiable novelist who gives good value as
a lecturer and whose scholarly humour no doubt carries well
in whatever translation. Yet his experiences do not contribute
substantially to the current issues of Translation Studies.
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