| Anthony
Pym 2001
The following
is the text of an email interview carried out by John Milton,
Adriana Pagano and Irene Hirsch, published in John Milton,
ed. Emerging Views on Translation History in Brazil,
special issue of Crop 6 (Universidade de Sao Paulo),
273-284.
Where and
when did you begin to be interested in the history of translation?
Translation
history? Better: Translator history, or the history of translators.
There are two answers:
First, in about
1993 Mona Baker asked me if I would write an article on
the ‘Spanish Tradition’ for the Routledge Encyclopedia
of Translation Studies. I replied that I had no special
expertise in the area; I suggested she contact Julio-César
Santoyo; she insisted, so I started reading, to see what
could or should be done. As I waded into the mists and mysteries
of the twelfth-century translators (Toledo and all that),
I very quickly became hooked. Not only was the material
itself fascinating, but the existing research was full of
the most wonderful, biases, partis pris, or simple wishful
thinking, much of it due to nationalistic frameworks unsuited
to medieval dynamics. The more I worked on medieval Hispania,
the more I become convinced that what was needed was not
simply more raw information, but some serious thought about
the models and methods of translation history itself.
The second answer
is a little different. I would have to go back to 1981-82,
when I was wandering around Paris in search of a topic for
a doctorate, or more exactly in search of a director for
my research (the two sides tend to modify each other). Now,
Paris is not exactly the most hospitable place for young
Antipodeans with very bad French; those were quite hard
years. Gradually I found myself becoming part of a loose
grouping of foreign students, with minimal contact with
local French people. We formed a community of semi-nomadic
would-be intellectuals. It was then only natural that, in
my doctoral research on writers of the 1890s, I became interested
in the similar networks formed by the foreign writers in
and around Paris. The community of foreigners I had around
me was some kind of model for the community that I eventually
came to study. And the study became mildly passionate, even
obsessive: I was looking up the addresses where the foreign
writers lived, I would go to where some of the meetings
had taken place almost a century previously, I was reading
the journals of the period, the countless “Notes from Paris”,
the published correspondence. That was a strange and fascinating
kind of community: mobile, moveable as they say, even volatile,
alienated, exploited (I think of the Machado brothers working
on a Garnier dictionary), pretentious (Wilde), alcoholic
(Darío), hypocritical (Nordau), entirely marginal
with respect to French society and letters. Yet those were
the people ultimately responsible for the myth of French
and international Symbolism; they had considerable historical
power that went well beyond what they themselves were aware
of.
Many of them
were also translators, of course, since that was one of
the ways they made enough money to get by. But at that stage
my research was not on translation. I worked in a Groupe
de Sociologie de la littérature, and I was quite
happy with that location. Later, in need of money, I got
a grant to study in the Comparative Literature department
at Harvard. Needless to say, there I was basically in the
same kind of community, the network of foreign research
workers, entirely on the fringes of any kind of American
society. It was a more self-assured network, better paid,
perhaps more arrogant with respect to the locals. In any
case, it was thanks to that network, and not to Comparative
Literature, that I became interested in negotiation theory
as a set of ways to think about social and cross-cultural
relations. That general interest has remained. When I ask
about how intercultural
communities are formed, how they gain and exercise power,
my models owe much to regime theory and increasingly to
cooperation theory à la Axelrod. I guess I arrived
in the United States with the standard French Marxism of
the 1980s, and left with Neoliberal ways of thinking about
the same Marxist questions.
I mention this
earlier background for two reasons. First, I was and remain
basically bored by Americans discovering Derrida, Bakhtin,
Foucault, Baudrillard, and the other usual French suspects.
I had come from that; I still see no reason for going back
to any politics of difference, subversions, critique, or
otherness. I simply have a different set of questions (How
do intercultures use power? How should they use power? Can
answers to these questions help me live my own life?); I
seek rather more affirmative or orientational responses.
Second, my prime interest has never really been in translation
as such. Even now I don’t claim to be doing any history
of translations. I am far more interested in histories of
intercultures, or of intercultural relations as seen from
the perspective of the people involved. It just so happens,
quite logically, that many translators have been active
members of intercultures, and that some translations have
had considerable cross-cultural influence. But it would
be stupid to suggest that all kinds of mediation are really
translation, that intercultures are peopled only by translators,
or that translation is even the main mode of using power
in this field. Such claims are academic fancy, used to create
institutional ponds where minnows can seem whales.
Why should
we study translation history?
Well, there
are quite lucrative professional reasons for pretending
to know something about translation. Translation programmes
are still popping up like mushrooms across the globe; they
are currently full of students; there is a large training
base providing funds for academic jobs, publications, and
occasionally research. At the same time, this growing community
of would-be translators includes some very good students
and some wonderfully dynamic modes of interdisciplinarity,
and the graduates enter a very wide range of mediating professions
(a third, if that, might become professional translators
for any respectable period of their life). These factors
make translation schools effective training grounds for
the intercultures of the future. They also make them places
where we might expect power to accrue. This is because,
with increasing globalization, power ensues from manipulating
information rather than controlling lands and seas. The
people who are able to use and develop complex codes, in
whatever field, in whatever set of languages, are the ones
most likely to influence the destinies of our cultures.
So it is quite
obviously there, in the translation programmes, that I would
like to try to give the developing intercultures some sense
of identity, some idea of why they should operate according
to non-national criteria. History is a very good way of
doing precisely that. Ultimately, I would like to be able
to say to professional intermediaries, be they translators
or otherwise: You are in fundamentally the same position
as all these intermediaries of the past; that is your identity;
that must be the basis for your ethics; so please think
beyond the possible glories of Brazilian, Spanish or Australian
specificities.
From that, it
follows that there are less-than-ideal reasons for doing
translation history. It is quite possible, for example,
to write a catalogue of all the literary works translated
into English and to thereby proclaim the strength and glory
of English literature, which has become the “storehouse”
to which many minor literatures now turn to translate works
to which they do not have direct access (such was the role
Schleiermacher sought for German). Alternatively, one could
write a history designed to show how little has been translated
into English, and how every translator for the past three
centuries or so has translated in the same bad way, give
or take the odd isolated demi-hero. For me, both those histories
would be equally short-sighted; neither would do more than
characterize the target-language culture. If you want to
write about English-language culture (or Brazilian culture,
or Hispanic culture), you don’t particularly need translation
history to do it. Just write directly about the cultural
institutions and education systems, or about good versus
bad ways of writing, and spare us the pretence to be doing
something different. Such histories can merely reinforce
the national identities of mediators. And that is a long
way from what I want to do with translation history.
Of course, there
is a certain pragmatism to be admitted here. Research funding
tends to be channeled through national or sub-national bodies;
our language departments tend to be structured according
to the same criteria; there is thus both external and internal
support for a national frame or focus. We have to work with
that. But I, for one, would prefer projects based on networks
between sets of cultures, or on regional circuits, in order
to trace the role of intermediaries rather than the glories
of nations.
What are
your opinions of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS)?
You mean the
moment of Holmes, Even-Zohar, Lambert, Toury, Lefevere,
Hermans, D’hulst, and friends? Since that is a self-critical
and evolving group, much of what I might say is already
being said within it. There were and remain some very good
things there:
- The original
emphasis on empirical work, on getting down and looking
at actual translations, broke with a lot of academic waffle
about good and bad translations. (Note, though, that in
the medieval field this break happened early in the century,
when pragmatists like Haskins and Thorndike insisted on
going back to the manuscripts instead of repeating the stories.)
- The emphasis
on system was similarly necessary, since it made researchers
look beyond isolated linguistic details or isolated displays
of elitist erudition (I mean, it was them or George Steiner).
- There was
and remains a close link with translation practice behind
many of the above names, despite the scientistic need to
pretend that the academic is one person, the translator
another.
Unfortunately
those points come with rather more negative riders:
- The emphasis
on empirical work set up descriptivism in false opposition
to prescriptivism, as if there could be any purely non-evaluative
description. (Even the Kantian distinction between judgement
of fact and judgement of value devolves into a precarious
separation between things we choose to agree on, and those
we can legitimately choose to disagree on; it can be maintained
without recourse to any myth of the non-effectual speech
act.) This in turn supported a pretence to scientific detachment,
which is okay only as long as the scientists don’t believe
it.
- The emphasis
on system worked in much the same way, but with rather more
disastrous consequences. Since the things being described
were translations rather than translators, the resulting
systems were sets of structural relations, with as much
openness and dynamism as you like, but without people. This
led to a kind of descriptivism fundamentally unable to answer
the questions I was asking. But it no doubt worked well
for others. When Theo Hermans points to “the translator
in the text” (the way the translator is linguistically figured
or eclipsed in a translation), he is apparently quite happy
to believe he is studying people. Personally, I need a rather
more sociological and collective subject; I want to study
more than translations.
- Third point:
These are researchers with a background in literary studies,
and often a certain practice in literary translation. This
is perhaps why they have instinctively looked at texts rather
than at people. This might also be why their questions—when
indeed they set out to do something more specific than just
“study” a given corpus—often seem to be rather unimportant,
or of interest only to narrow coteries of literary specialists.
I mean, we find a lot of technical theorizing, a few quite
respectable corpora, occasional roasting of traditional
chestnuts, but not many actual findings that could say much
to anyone from beyond the discipline. I think this shortcoming
has been felt and responded to, at least when José
Lambert (a professor of Comparative Literature) addresses
issues like the role of global media networks on mediated
communications, or when Itamar Even-Zohar offers his models
as a means of culture planning.
Little by little,
DTS is becoming rather more than descriptive. When Even-Zohar
openly criticizes Israel’s immigration policy in a discussion
article ostensibly on translation theory (in Target
10:2, 367), I quietly cheer within, not because I agree
or disagree with him (who am I to opine on such matters?)
but because I do want a way of doing history that can have
something to say about things like immigration policies.
The DTSers are
good people to have a beer with. Grand philosophies and
fancy words tend not to hold much sway at their table.
Do you think
DTS have been central to historical studies on translation?
Not as much
as is sometimes believed. A lot of work has been carried
out by rather more traditional scholars, using the methods
of philology or comparative literature. There are no solid
grounds for talking about a ‘pre-scientific’ stage that
was suddenly enlightened by DTS.
What recent
work have you been carrying out?
In 2000 I published
Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures
in Hispanic History, which is the fruit of the interest
that started back in 1993, so I guess it embodies about
seven years of work. That project has been criticized in
Spain for not being “systematic”, for sliding from point
to point (just as the article I wrote for the Routledge
encyclopedia has been criticized in Spain for “insisting
on certain aspects to the detriment of others”). What
seems not to be appreciated is that I spend a long time
on pre-1492 Hispania, and then not enough on what happened
in Spain after that date. So my work seems to lack “system”
(which at one point becomes synonymous with giving equal
textual space to each successive century). I can live with
that criticism. I mean, if one is fundamentally interested
in the history of intercultures rather than the origins
and adventures of the Spanish state, there is simply much
more of interest in medieval muliculturality than in eighteenth-century
francophile fops, and much more going on among the external
colonizers and exiles than in the heart of the Catholic
canon. In order to show that, in order to say something,
as a foreigner, about things Hispanic, it is obviously necessary
to buck any quaintly quantitative “system”. Such systems,
you see, tend not to allow me, a nomadic intermediary, to
find a past for myself in these lands.
I have also
started rewriting a 1992 book called Translation and
Text Transfer. But then I started to put the word “localization”
in the place of “translation”, and the book has since become
something quite different, a set of questions about the
effects of globalization. At the moment I don’t quite know
where those questions will lead.
What major
projects are there in the pipeline?
The five-volume
Oxford History of Literary Translation in English,
to be co-edited by Peter France and Stuart Gillespie; the
De Gruyter Handbuch project seems hopelessly overdue
but might appear one of these years; there is a Historia
de la traducción en España under way; the
Translation Committee of the International Comparative Literature
Association currently plans to put together a series of
sub-committees along regional lines (Asia, Africa, Europe,
North America, Latin America) although the aims are not
yet clear; Jean Delisle has produced a CD-ROM on the history
of translators and I believe he is continuing to develop
it as a major teaching resource. In the meantime, the Fédération
Internationale des Traducteurs abolished its History Committee
this year because no new projects were forthcoming.
In sum, there
is no real shortage of projects in my part of the world.
What is lacking, however, is any viable alternative to the
single-target-language frame (translations put together
according to the language they are translated into). If
you think about it, it would make just as much sense to
write histories based on source languages (“the fortunes
of Catalan literature in translation”, for example), if
and when our educational institutions were set up to handle
such mosaics. And it would make even more sense, for me,
to write about historical networks linking sets of cultures.
But we are not yet there.
How do you
view translation historiography in Latin America and, more
specifically, in Brazil?
I view such
things with great interest, if and when I can find people
working in the area. Indeed, a great deal depends on finding
the right people. I mean, looking at the Routledge Encycopedia
of Translation Studies, we find an article on “Brazilian
Tradition”, then another on “Latin American Tradition” (which
should have been called “Spanish American”, since it only
deals with Spanish), one on “Spanish Tradition” (mine),
and nothing at all on Portugal. Why? Basically because it
was hard to find the right people. Things have become a
little easier thanks to initiatives like Jean Delisle’s
Repertory
of Historians of Translation. But even so, a reviewer
in Spain has criticized the Latin American article because
it was written by Georges Bastin, then in Venezuela and
now in Montréal. In any case, Bastin, like Pym, is
not Hispanic, and we are going to be suspect whenever we
tread the turf that someone thinks is their own national
past.
Why aren't
there any major projects on historiography of translation
encounters in the Americas and the exchanges between Spain
and Spanish America and Portugal and Brazil?
Because Portugal
and Spain have long had their backs turned to each other,
and Brazil has long since floated away from Portugal. The
ties are stronger between Spain and Spanish America, and
are actively promoted by current Spanish cultural policy,
but this has not yet given fruit in the area of translation
history. In all cases, however, the deep historical relations
are obscured by stories of national liberation.
Sometimes these
things are more easily seen from the outside. I mean, it
makes sense to teach Portuguese and Spanish together (plus
Catalan, Galician, or whatever), or at least in the same
department, but that only be done with any degree of political
correctness if your department is in Germany, France, the
United Kingdom, etc. It is then quite natural for a scholar
from beyond the Iberian mix to see these cultures as one,
or at least attempt to write about their relations. For
example, it was relatively easy for me to argue that there
should be an “Iberian” chapter in the De Gruyter Handbuch,
but there remains absolutely no recognition of Portugal
in the project for a Historia de la traducción en
España being organized by Lafarga and Pegenaute,
nor, I hasten to confess, does Portugal appear in my own
book on “Hispanic” history.
In the communications
of our age, the intercultural has long exercised more effective
power than the national. But in the organization of our
histories, we may have some time to wait.
- Last update
2 July 2001
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