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WILLIS BARNSTONE the POETICS of TRANSLATION - HISTORY, THEORY, PRACTICE New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993

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WILLIS BARNSTONE the POETICS of TRANSLATION - HISTORY, THEORY, PRACTICE New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993 WILLIS BARNSTONE THE POETICS OF TRANSLATION - HISTORY, THEORY, PRACTICE New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 312 pp. In the preface to his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson defined the lexicographer as "the humble drudge" who may not aspire to praise but only "hopes to escape reproach" (Johnson, 1788, a). Some eleven years ago, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Translator's Association, George Steiner echoed those words as they applied to the translator, declaring that "No literary translation will ever sastisfy those intimate with the original" (Times Literary Supplement, 1983: 1117). Not unlike Steiner's confession, the ineluctable dilemma "traduttore, traditore" was on the author's mind when, at the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, Harris Thomas posed the simple question: "Is translation possible?" (Thomas, 1990). Willis Barnstone tries to answer these questions in a well-thought- out book, that focuses on three issues and is, in reality, three volumes and a short essay, all bound in one. Part One (pp. 3-131), after a brief Introduction (pp. 3-14), deals with General Issues, i.e., "Problems and Parables" (pp. 15-131). Part Two (pp. 133-216) with "History: The Bible as Paradigm of Translation." Part Three (pp. 217-62) is an abridged course on the History of Translation, from the Greeks to our own times; Part Four (pp. 265-72), finally, is a very brief "ABC of Translating Poetry," stemming mostly from the author's own activity as a translator. Barnstone is not only a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, but has cooperated with and been a translator for 118 such literary giants as Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. As a matter of fact, many of Barnstone's theories stem from his contacts with Borges and Paz, and from the writings of Pierre Grange, the latter having the most profound influence on our author (Grange, 1927). Since they share the common act of "reading," according to Barnstone, not only "translation theory and literary theory come together," but they are one and the same, since "reading is translation and translation is reading" (p. 7). Whether this definition would be acceptable to reading specialists who share in the belief that reading is an interactive process between the reader and the text (Wisconsin, 1989: p. 2), "requiring the coordination of a number of interrelated sources of information" (Anderson, 1984: p. 7), is open to discussion. Equally debatable is the very wide interpretation given to the act of the translation that would make Shakespeares's Antony and Cleopatra "a translation of a translation, for Shakespeare did a free version of Thomas Nashe's translation of Plutarch" (p. 87). Accepting Barnstone's theory "in toto" would result in considering the very act of thinking as an act of translation since the firing of neurons in the brain is translated into thoughts and words; the result would be that the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am," would become "I translate, therefore I think." And indeed Barnstone contends not only that any reading is translation but that "translation is metaphor, or, expressed in a fuller axiom, translation is the activity of creating metaphor" (p. 16). To the question whether literary translation is literature, Barnstone, in agreement with Devy, answers definitely in the affirmative (p. 10), since "good translation is good literature" (p. 12) with the result that the final product of translation is the combined effort of two poets. Thus, when Ezra Pound began his epic Cantos with the translation of Book 2 of Homer's Odyssey the final word before us is "Homer and Pound" (p. 13), and the translator, "as a receiver and creator of art, is free to set and upset the parameters of translatability" (p. 20). After having established the "unholy principle of untranslatability" (p. 42), Barnstone concludes that "if we apply the standards of creative writings to the activity of translation, the question of untranslatability ceases to be ominous" (p. 47). After giving us a good overview of the history of the theory of translation, in Benjamin, Bloom, Derrida, etc., the author opens a highly interesting and controversial chapter entitled "How through False Translation into and from The Bible Jesus Ceased to be a Jew" (pp. 62- 119 81). The very name, Jesus, is an English translation of Latin Iesus, from Greek lésons, from Hebrew yeshua or yeshu: Mary is from Greek Maria or Mariani, from Hebrew Myriam, and James is the English version of the Greek name Iacobos, from Hebrew jacqob. According to Barnstone, the adulterations in names were created by design as the Scriptures passed from the oral and written origin into Greek (p. 72), in order to purposely identify the group opposing Jesus, namely the Jews, as the enemies (p. 73). The final result of "this transmission of the history of Joshua the Messiah," has been, in Barnstone's words, "two millenia of hatred and extermination, from diasporas and ghettos to pogroms and holocaust" (p. 79). Barnstone had already published ancient esoteric texts from Pseudoepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the early Kabbalh, and other sources in a book that has shed new light on the conflict between orthodox Christians and Gnostics and has increased our knowledge in regard to the New Testament (Barnstone, 1984). This chapter, showing the negative impact of translation upon the history of the Jewish-Christian relationship, should more properly have been included in Part Two, which is solely devoted to the history of the Bible. Barnstone reverts to his treatise on translation "as a double art" (p. 83), and on the translator as a "freely creative person or as an erroneous slob" (p. 117), whose most grievous sin is infidelity to quality (p. 123), to finally conclude that the translator is "the Courier of God" (p. 126), a God "who has been eternally translating, changing precosmic data into thought, words, and the linguistic might out of which he uttered the commanding word to transfer us into life" (p. 131). In spite of this explanation, that makes of the lexicographer a holy vessel in the service of God, I would take strong objection to some of Barnstone's definitions, especially the one expressing that "A bilingual dictionary is not prepared to handle sentences" (p. 115): a good bilingual dictionary is indeed able to offer both syntactical and grammatical equivalencies. Part Two, "History: The Bible as a Paradigm of Translation," begins with the prehistory of the Bible and its invisible translations (p. 135), to continue with the history of translations of the Hebrew Bible (p. 165) and the consequent creation of the new religion, Christianity. Translation is so important in the history of religions that not only is Christianity a child of Judaism that became an independent adult, but that, six centuries later, Mohammed "performed the same duty for the 120 later child of Judaism and Christianity, Islam" and, in the process "translated Moses and Jesus into Islamic patriarches in the Koran" (p. 180). Not all translators were as lucky as Mohammed (if we accept Barnstone's very wide definition of translation); some suffered punishment for their erroneous sins, and some, like Etienne Dolet, were executed, for having had the audacity of mistranslating one of Plato's Dialogues. The committee that toiled on the translation of the King James Bible, on the other hand, performed its task in a marvelous way, in spite of straying from truth in favor of dream (p. 215). Part Three, "Theory," brings the reader from "the good old days when theory wasn't theory" (p. 219), to Roman Jacobson and Russian formalism (p. 226), to end with Benjamin's parable (p. 255). A few pages sum up the author's position on the translator's task: Barnstone concedes that the Italian maxim "traduttore, traditore" is on target and that, as translators we have "the duty to betray" (p. 250). And yet, as translators, we carry a very heavy ethical boulder on our shoulders that indicates some of the rules that we ought to follow; to this dilemma Barnstone is undecided and says, "yes and no" (p. 261). Maybe we ought to remember Voltaire's advice and, each one of us, translators and lexicographers, toil in our little garden the best we can. If you expect to find decisive rules in the "ABC of Translating Theory" (pp. 265-71), you will be disappointed, since Barnstone's A to Ζ rules are more vague theoretical statements than prescriptive recipes; it could not be any different for an author who hates prescriptions himself. Some of Barnstone's statements will smack of being "smart- alecky" such as "Religion is God's bureaucracy" or "A good translation is a good JOKE. Reader you are fooled." They are also proof of what a magnificent puppeteer Barnstone is, playing with words, that, at times, burst in his hands like a soap bubble, and at others soar in the sky like pyrotechnics. The book is interspersed with hundreds of quotations, that range from Saint Augustine, Maimonides, and Luther, to Octavio Paz and Pierre Grange. Some are elementary, others are extremely complex and require a good foundation in formal logic to unravel. The notes (pp. 273-8) are clear and not too cumbersome; the bibliography (pp. 279-81) is up to date; the Index (pp. 293-302) is accurate. There is nothing fundamentally new in this book, but there are also very few books on translation that have been written so clearly, so lucidly, and so beautifully. This volume on the poetics of translation is a very poetic 121 book itself. ROBERT C. MELZI Emeritus, Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvania WORKS CITED Anderson, Richard C.
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