Whose Voices?

What kinds of voices and reading experiences should literary translation recreate beyond conveying meaning? Both readings made me think about this question, and I found them especially accessible because they were originally lectures.

In “Hearing Voices: My Encounters with Translation,” Rebecca Copeland describes moving beyond her initial desire to translate every word toward an awareness of what remains unwritten. Discussing Uno Chiyo, she writes, “The challenge with Uno’s texts was dealing with the ‘unwritten,’ the depth of meaning wedged between sentences and behind words. The magic was in the voice of the narrator” (135). Uno’s sentences may be simple, but their intimacy, hesitation, emotion, and rhythm are much harder to recreate. Getting every word right does not necessarily bring a character to life. This makes translation seem like an impossible task: the translator has to translate both what is on the page and what is left unsaid.

I was also struck by Copeland’s observation that “[t]he voices in the text, the perceived voice of the author, mingle by necessity with the voices in the translator’s head” (142). Her memories of familiar people help her hear the characters, but she also has to keep those familiar voices from taking over. I find this tension fascinating: personal experience makes interpretation possible, yet it can also lead us to impose something on the text before we have fully listened to it.

The question of cutting or reshaping a translation seems equally difficult. I find the binary between preserving the original and giving readers an enjoyable experience questionable. Readers are constantly developing through what they read, so how can publishers assume in advance what they will enjoy or tolerate? If unfamiliar narrative structures are repeatedly removed, readers have fewer opportunities to become familiar with them. Copeland’s criticism of book covers raises a related problem: “They capitalize on their audience’s fascination with the Japanese ‘geisha,’ with the seductive ‘Oriental’” (148). This felt especially ironic after seeing the physical books Professor Elliott brought to class last week: most of them did indeed feature Japanese women on their covers. These covers made me wonder how much publishers respond to readers’ expectations and how much they actively create those expectations.

Howard Hibbett’s discussion of Tanizaki adds another layer to this question. He considers the value of both naturalization and strangeness, acknowledging that the distinctive qualities of translated language can introduce something new into the target language. I was particularly interested in his response to criticism of the exotic image of Japan associated with translations of Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. Hibbett points out that Tanizaki himself created fantasies of the exotic, drawing on China, the West, Japan’s past, and even Westernized life within Japan.

This made me wonder what happens when exoticism is already part of the author’s imagination. Although Tanizaki’s fascination with the exotic is not necessarily identical to the Orientalism Copeland identifies in Western marketing, it complicates the question of where these images originate. How can we distinguish an author’s imaginative use of the exotic from the ways translators and publishers frame it for another audience? And what happens when those different fantasies overlap?

--Kerry