I just read, in Scandals of Translation.* Venuti, Lawrence. London: Routledge, 1998, that Ezra Pound had an interesting application for translation which in 1918 he passed along to other modernist writers, "Translation...is good training, if you find that your original matter 'wobbles' when you try to re-write it. The meaning of the poem to be translated cannot 'wobble'"...So then, Venuti suggests, "...translation can be instrumental in the construction of an authorial identity, but also that this construction is at once discursive and psychological, worked out in writing practices open to psychoanalytic interpretation" (76).
I think he's right. My original matter 'wobbles' quite a bit, and not only or not so much when I try to re-write, but when I try to describe, orally, what I'm working on. In fact, I've been told that I'm sometimes incomprehensible. It's because I'm trying to translate ideas that I don't have in English and it doesn't quite work. That's partially due to the idea of Schleiermacher's that I cited in a previous post, but also due to the fact that I'm simply kind of bad at translation. Profe A1. says that it's something that takes a lot of practice.
* Despite the dramatic sounding title, the book is quite informative. Quite CultStuds/Anthropology/Linguistics tinged. Along with "scandal", however, Venuti also likes to employ the word "violence" among other instances, to translations that "domesticate" the texts to such an extent that they conform to styles, themes, even ideals of the target - in this case, English-speaking and hence dominant culture.
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