Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation Literature and Translation Literature and Translation is a series for books that address literary translation and for books of literary translation. Its emphasis is on diversity of genre, culture, period and approach. The series uses an open access publishing model to disseminate widely developments in the theory and practice of translation, as well as translations into English of literature from around the world. Series editor: Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. EthicsCanada and in the FrameAesthetics ofCopyright, Translation Collections and the Image of Canada, 1895– 1924 Exploring the Work of Atxaga, Kundera and Semprún HarrietPhilip J. Hatfield Hulme 9781787353008_Canada-in-the-Frame_pi-208.indd 3 11-Jun-18 4:56:18 PM First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Harriet Hulme, 2018 Harriet Hulme has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Hulme, H. 2018. Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation. London, UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352070 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 978-1-78735-209-4 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-208-7 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-207-0 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-210-0 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-211-7 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-78735-212-4 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352070 To my parents, Alice and Brian Hulme Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the encouragement, enthusiasm and inspiration of several people. My thanks firstly to Timothy Mathews, for his assistance in the development of my ideas, his advice during setbacks, and his absolute dedication to helping me extend my critical understanding. His support during this process has been exceptional, and I am incredibly grateful to him for his hard work, his faith in me and his friendship throughout. Lucia Boldrini and Theo Hermans read my work with a rigour which pushed me to sharpen and develop my critical approaches to the question of translation. At UCL, Stephen Hart, Florian Mussgnug, and Jane Fenoulhet provided excellent advice during the early stages of the project. I am grateful to Moira Fradinger for advising me during my semester at Yale. The first chapter of this book draws on two previously published articles: I am grateful to Clare Finburgh for her excellent editorial advice on my article, ‘Creating Anew, Again: Deserted Islands and Textual Inhabitations in Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak’ in Comparative Critical Studies, 11.2–3, October 2014; and to Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer and Svetlana Page for editing my chapter ‘Self Translating Between Minor and Major Languages: A Hospitable Approach in Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak’ in Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in Multilingual European Contexts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Many thanks also to Margaret Jull Costa for her help with my research on Bernardo Atxaga. My friends and family have encouraged my work in numerous ways. I am particularly grateful to Francesca Barrie, Joanne Brueton, Alexandra Hills and Alice Podkolinski for numerous inspirational conversations about literature; and to Hugh Michell for his help and for introducing me to the work of Bernardo Atxaga. To my family – the Hulmes (both sets), the Hugheses and the Hingleys – for their support. Particular thanks to my mother, Alice Hulme, for her unending faith in me, and to my sister, Cressida Hughes, for her constant encouragement and her Spanish expertise. Finally, to my husband, Jonathan Scrutton, who has shared in this book from start to finish, reading my work, discussing ideas and always helping me keep things in perspective. This book would not have been completed without his unwavering and invaluable support. Contents Introduction Translation: perspectives on language and on life 1 1 Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak: towards a minor literature of translation 31 2 Milan Kundera’s Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli: a hospitable translation 99 3 Jorge Semprún’s Quel beau dimanche!: a ‘relevante’ translation 167 Epilogue On violence and vision: translation and Europe 238 Bibliography 252 Index 270 viii ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF TRANSLATION Introduction Translation: perspectives on language and on life You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.– Anne Michaels.1 In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels relates translation to questions of forgetting and remembrance, belonging and exclusion, understanding and confusion. For her protagonist, Jakob, life becomes a matter of translation: having escaped the Nazis as a Jewish child living in Poland, he makes a new life for himself in Greece, and learns to speak Greek and English. This linguistic gain enables him to survive the traumas of his past, but only by erasing his memories of that past: the experience of moving from one language to another, Michaels implies, involves an escape that is also, always, an erasure. In the extract quoted above, Michaels suggests that every moment of translation forces us to choose between freedom and constraint, significance and precision, past and present. These choices apply to the ways in which we interact with texts, but also to the ways in which we interact with the world. Do we live freely but lose our attachment to the past that shaped and formed us? Or do we cling to that attachment, at the expense of giving our life meaning in its present incarnation? In Fugitive Pieces, these questions have no easy answers: language and memory intersect, troubling Jakob’s attempts to move forward, hindering his efforts to go back. But Michaels also suggests that translation offers us a unique perspective: operating from ‘between the lines’, translation enables us to explore what is unclear or uncertain, even as it sometimes obscures what we seek to understand, helping us to bridge the very differences which we create as we move across and between languages, cultures, identities, past and present. TRANSLATION: PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND ON LIFE 1 As Michaels reveals, translation is about how we approach language, but it is also about how we approach life. When we translate a literary text across linguistic and cultural borders, we negotiate a series of aesthetic questions regarding the interaction of form and content, the location of textual meaning, and the challenge of transmitting that meaning interlingually while preserving the artistic shape of the text. But we also confront a set of ethical questions about our interlinguistic, interpersonal and intercultural relations. As Sandra Bermann suggests, ‘the translator’s task is inevitably an ethical one. In attempts to translate, we become most aware of linguistic and cultural differences, of the historical “hauntings,” and of experiential responsibilities that make our languages what they are and that directly affect our attitudes towards the world.’2 In the movement it creates between languages and cultures, translation offers us a model through which we can explore the losses and gains involved in all our communications with another. Can we recognize the diversity of our linguistic and cultural perspectives? Or are we trapped in monolingual and monocultural frames of reference, blind and deaf to alterity? Translation also highlights issues of memory and forgetting. When translating, we confront the spectres of the past – the original text, language, author and moment of publication. How should we negotiate those spectres: on their terms, or on our own? Can those two perspectives ever be aligned without annexation or erasure? Translation helps us think about ethical questions because it foregrounds the appropriations and forgettings we enact even as we attempt to recognize and remember. My conception of the role translation can play in these ethical debates has been formed particularly by the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Ricœur. In this book, I draw upon these thinkers to develop a critical vocabulary of translation which explores not only interlingual but also intercultural, interrelational and interdisciplinary issues in the work of three bilingual authors. Bernardo Atxaga writes in both Basque and Spanish; Milan Kundera has written in Czech and French; Jorge Semprún wrote in Spanish and French.3 Focusing particularly, although not exclusively, on one text by each author, I argue that, in each, translation – integrated into both form and content – works to raise and negotiate ethical questions surrounding some of the major political moments of twentieth-century history. But in each text translation also highlights a broader set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual 2 ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF TRANSLATION and collective remembrance. Through these texts, I read translation as offering a potent, often violent, but always illuminating, vision of the possibilities of differentiation and connection, generation and memory, in temporal, linguistic, cultural and political terms.