Several Theoretical Imperatives Supporting the Proposition That You Should “Shut the Fuck Up, You Moron!”

BPU2 have asked me to give a bit of a speech: 40 to 60 minutes. Somehow, this speech should relate to translation. Which is a bit odd as I am an editor and not a translator. Also, I’ve never bothered to try to sit down and work out a formal rationale for the thing.

Still, sitting in smoky rooms with the BKF, slugging down beers, and working our fitful magic on text, some vague outlines have emerged. The problem now is to work these inchoate themes and ideas out of my head – to untangle them from the detritus, the voices suggesting that I kill, then kill again and again until I can kill no more, forever – and get them into some clear English words that won’t unduly tax Freshmen.

No sweat.

Now I’m reading all these theoretical texts. Which only brings my general distrust of theories bubbling to the surface. It’s not that I like dislike theories per se, in fact they are similar to girlfriends – good when used appropriately, but becoming stuck on a particular one leads to madness (I should know!). Some time ago I came across the excellent article “The Hegemony of Theory” and today I found another excellent one in my intarwebs ramblings today. This is Maria Teresa Sanchez’ “Domesticating the Theorists: A Plea for Plain Language.”

It’s title is drawn from an absolutely horrible passage of academic jargon produced by Lawrence Venuti who describes translation as the “ethnocentric violence of domestication” that produces “the effect of transparency, the illusion that this is not a translation, but the foreign text.”
Well, I suppose we should call an immediate halt to that sort of thing, then?

Disregarding the reality that if we did, no literary work would ever cross any language barrier. If this is the conclusion that Venuti is drawing, he should be aware the he might simultaneously be arguing against his own tenure, as the elimination of translation might also mark the end of translation theory.

I suppose, in his own horrid way, this might be what he is after. If the pesky reality of translation were to disappear, theorists would have that situation they have eternally dreamt of, an empty and arid canvas on which to speculate. It is a simple dream of control – Like a man who, incapable of understanding women, wants them all gone, replaced with a mute and blank-faced dolls against which any kind of theoretical structures can be applied, and no hideous flesh-and-blood to argue, demonstrate, or remonstrate against those structures.

Sanchez takes Venuti to task for the obvious redundancy of “ethnocentric” and “domestication” as well as his commonplace that translation does violence (in the sense of meaning, though Venuti’s overheated prose seems intended to hint at darker and more hegemonic evils) to text. Then there is the notion that a translation causes an “effect” of transparency that leads people to believe they are reading the foreign text.

Well, other than the fact that readers generally seem to have a good handle on a) their native languages, and b) the languages they don’t know. Consequently they look for translations of foreign works. Heck, the translator’s name might even be on the book, just in case a reader were forgetfull.

Venuti’s language is the language of the smooth, thoughtless bureaucrat. It reminds me of something I read long ago – perhaps Lewis Gizzard, perhaps someone else, who, after noting that the Census had officially designated lovers as POSSLQ’s, commented something like, “I don’t exactly know what “Person of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters” was meant to imply, but they’ve just come up with the ugliest way I’ve ever heard of to describe two people who are fucking.”

Venuti, I suspect, is a tool.

In the bad way. ;-)