Retracing transparency: calques and creativity inmodernist translation
Samuel Trainor

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Retracing transparency:
calques and creativity in modernist translation
Sam Trainor, 2014
Section 1. Tracing Transparency
Transparency pervades modernity. Walter Benjamin predicted it would become a ubiquitous andrevolutionary feature of the modern technological and social environment. As he notes in the
Passagen-Werk :“It is the peculiarity of technological forms of production, that their progress and theirsuccess are proportionate to the transparency [Durchsichtigkeit] of their social content.
(Hence glass architecture.)” [Passagen-Werk N4,6, P.465 The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Havard University Press 1999].
That last parenthesis is a nod to Paul Scheerbart’s strange utopian Glasarchitektur (1914), notableas much for its influence on the ‘panopticon’ dystopia of Yevgeny Zamyatin, as for the uncannyprescience Benjamin recognises in its modernist redefinition of the architectural interior. Again, thiscomes from the Arcades Project
The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency [Transparenz], its tendency toward
the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense. [p. 104 ([14,4]) Arcades
Project]
But the built environment is not the only aspect of modern technological society for whichtransparency is a ubiquitous, radical feature. The proliferation of transparent plastics means that
virtually nobody in the developed world now leaves home without something transparent about
their person: the dial of a watch, contact lenses, the screen of a smartphone, sleeves for credit cards,
the cling-film around their sandwiches, a bottle of water.... in fact, the late capitalist phenomenon ofbottled water as a staple commodity depends entirely on the possibility of manufacturing cheap
transparent plastic bottles.
Karl Marx suggested that the late stages of commodity fetishism would be characterised by a kindof paradoxical transparency – the fetishism becoming easy to ‘see through’ [durchschauen], and yet
all the more pervasive. André Gide once described the desire (la convoitise) for the commodified
object as a spiritual loss of ‘transparency’ – j’éprouve que chaque objet de cette terre, que je
convoite, se fait opaque, par cela même que je le convoite, et que le monde entier perd aussitôt satransparence. But our society tends to figure the process of commodification as the presentation ofan object in some kind of see-through plastic packaging.
Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)1

One can’t help feeling that the political and corporate tropes of ‘transparency’ might be related tothis point-of-sale packaging industry. Almost every recently elected representative in the so-called‘Western World’ has claimed at some point to uphold ‘transparency’. For example, the firstmemorandum written by Barack Obama after his inauguration in 2009, begins:A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As JusticeLouis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."
Moreover, transparency is a heavily exploited quality, and a recurring theme, in literature and art,
particularly since the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’. Think of Art nouveau glasswork,
Mallarmé’s obsession with windows and venetian glass; Van Gogh’s ‘glass of absinthe’, Manet’s
repetitive paintings of flowers in glass vases, the decanters and carafes in cubist still lives, Stephen
Dedalus on Sandymount Strand – ‘Limit of the diaphine in, why in?... diaphane, adiaphane’ –Marcel Duchamp’ ‘La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’, John Cage’s ‘plexigrams’...
and a thousand other things.
So transparency pervades modernity. But what exactly is ‘transparency’? Tropes of transparency
abound in philosophical and critical discourses across language cultures. They form fundamental
cognitive metaphors, but, especially in translation, they seem troublingly nebulous. And, crucially,
within discourses that discuss the problems and possibilities of translation, they seem not merely‘troubling’ but genuinely troubles... as clear as mud.
I’m going to take a few minutes to trace one or two of the highlights from some of the best known
core texts of Translation Studies to demonstrate what I mean. I’ll begin with one of the foundational
texts in the French tradition, Georges Mounin’s Les belles infidèles.
Mounin’s book concludes with a typology of translation strategies – pre-empting Ladmiral’s cibliste
and sourcière – under the self-consciously poetic headings Les verres transparents and Les verrescolorés. Les verres transparents are figured as translations that are functionally indistinguishable
from contemporary writing emergent from the literary tradition of the target language. They aspire
to an ideal attributed to Gogol, which Mounin (unfortunately) gives only in French as: devenir unverre si transparent qu’on croie qu’il n’y a pas de verre. On the other hand, les verres colorés aretranslations that carry various perceptible tints of the language, culture and literary tradition of thesource text. The analysis is canonical and lucid, but the metaphor is problematic.
The first thing to say, is that this trope (seemingly unconsciously) reproduces Mallarmé’s fondness
for the pun on verre (glass) and vers (verse). Slight cracks seem already to be forming in thesurfaces of our supposedly perspicuous signifiers, muddying the waters ...
The second thing to note is how deeply problematic it is to figure the ideal ‘invisibility’ of glass as aSamuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)2

material – quite apart from colourlessness, this also implies the disappearance of any of thereflections, distortions, magnifications, depths, dust, cracks and blemishes that render a pane ofglass perceptible. And to refer to this illusion of metaphysical absence as ‘transparency’ issemantically dubious for two reasons. The first resides in the perfectly obvious redundancy of theterm transparent if it is totally synonymous with invisible. The second is to be found in the stranger,
but just as crucial, possibility of the polar opposite. That is to say the pane of glass that goes unseen– and is thus functionally invisible – because it is entirely and convincingly reflective, like anillusionist’s mirror:“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.” Nabokov’s
waxwing – the Russian migrant redolant of Icarus – is killed not by absolute transparency but by aperfect reflection of the blue sky... later called the “feigned remoteness” (the illusion of the beyond).
This too is invisibility. So when Mounin congratulates Nazim Hikmet [p. 78] for producing acouplet in impeccable French (as impeccable as Nabokov’s in English) by saying: on ne distingue
plus quand la vitre du traducteur s’interpose entre le poète et nous, how can we distinguish between
perfect ‘transparency’ and perfect ‘reflection’ (and thus a total absence of transparency) in thistrompe l’œil of invisibility that slays the critical waxwing?
It is in precisely the same nullifying terms that Lawrence Venuti employs ‘transparency’ in The
Translator’s Invisibility. He doesn’t quote Gogol directly, but through the lens of Norman Shapiro:“I see translation (says Shapiro) as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does
not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it's
there when there are little imperfections - scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn't be any.”(Venuti: 1995, 1) [The actual source is Kratz, D. (1986) ‘An Interview with Norman
Shapiro’, Translation Review 19, 27-8. But Venuti does not provide this attribution.]
I certainly do not intend to counter Venuti’s cogent argument that such domestication poses serious
ethical concerns, However, the trope of transparency is clearly (‘opaquely’) auto-deconstructive in
Venuti’s explanation:
A translation is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers [...] when theabsence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving theappearance that it reflects [...] the essential meaning of the foreign text – the appearance, inother words, that the translation is not in fact a translation” (My emphases.)
Is this hypothetical (non-)translation ‘transparent’ or does it ‘reflect’? For which reason does it go
unnoticed? Were it to do both (as transparent media nearly always do) it would be invisible inneither of the senses mentioned above (it would neither dematerialize nor trick the viewer with aperfect reflection). Under such circumstances might these self-revealing reflections not have aforeignizing effect, drawing as much attention to what Mounin calls la vitre... qui s’interpose as his

Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)3

couleurs, or as Shaprio’s ‘scratches’ and ‘bubbles’?
Of course, there is an assumption here. Can we really say that Mounin’s transparent is exactly
synonymous with the cognate ‘transparent’ in Venuti’s English? The shared etymology is certainly
suggestive, but might transparent be a faux ami? There is a danger, here, of ignoring an alternativetranslation of the French transparent into English: namely ‘see-through’. It would take a good dealof time – time I don’t have – to explore all the semantic and socio-linguistic alterations caused bysuch a translation.
However, this is quibbling. By comparison, translation from German into both French and English,
throws up some genuinely troubling opacities. The first point to make is that the cognate term
Transparenz holds a rather more doubtful position in German philosophical discourses precisely,
one suspects, because it is etymologically French. For example, when Heidegger talks about theexperience of transparency in creative work characterized by Zuhandenheit rather thanVorhandenheit, he always employs the more commonplace term durchsichtig (see-through). As an
English reader, I can’t help feeling that this is because the frenchified Transparenz (with its
connotations of the abstract and aristocratic) feels too close to Vorhandenheit. However, one
German Translation theorist does use the term Transparenz in an approving way. Elmar Tophoven
employs it to refer to a methodology of procedural openness in a form of translation that seeks togrant the reader access to the processes of translation and thus to allow translators to question their
methods and their cultural influences as they work.
However, the most troubling usage of a transparency trope is to be found in Walter Benjamin’s The
Task of the Translator. The infamous statement introducing the concept of ‘pure language’ – aworryingly Platonic metaphysical metaphor – is couched in the following terms: [in Steven
Rendell’s translation] “True translation is transparent*, it does not obscure the original, does notstand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shineeven more fully on the original. This is made possible above all by conveying the syntax word-forword, and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is the original element of translation.
For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is
the arcade.
Read in this English translation, or the French translation by Gondillac and Rochlitz, the first thingthat stands out is the apparently paradoxical use of ‘transparent’ transparent. Where Mounin and
Venuti use it to name the cibliste ideal, Benjamin employs it to precisely the opposite effect. His‘transparent’ translation is radically, extremely sourcière. The original syntax is an opaque ‘wall’that is not to be rearranged but rendered a luminous arcade by word-for-word translation. But the
point, of course, is that he doesn’t use the German word transparent but durchscheinend... literally
through-shine-ly. If durchsichtig is equivalent to the English ‘see-through’ then durchscheinend is‘shine-through’, that is ‘translucent’ translucide. Except, not quite. In German there is also theword: lichtdurchlässig for translucent, which is less likely to be confused with ‘transparent’ in thisSamuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)4

way. Durchscheinend appears to occupy a slightly more ambiguous semantic field like
‘diaphanous’, which might refer to something that is either properly transparent or merelytranslucent... or both, depending on where it is placed in relation to an object or a source of light...
like a piece of tracing paper... un morceau de papier calque.
So durchscheinend translation is... Wörtlichkeit is... the arcade. Think back to the Passagen-Werk.
In fact, if you go back and look at Eiland and McLaughlin’s canonical English translation of theArcades Project, you’ll see no less than 6 different German terms all translated with the totalizing
signifiers ‘transparent’ and ‘transparency’. They are : Transparenz, durchsichtig, durchscheinend,
Durchschaubarkeit, lichtdurchlässig and Farblosigkeit.
It appears that the totalizing and semantically neutralizing signified of the philosophical‘transparent’, from the French transparent, has leaked into a totalizing and semanticallyneutralizing use of the signifier ‘transparent’ in translation.
It would be hard to imagine Benjamin accepting this kind of thing as ‘true’ durchscheinendtranslation. This is not Wörtlichkeit. But what actually is Wörtlichkeit? There is a thin line, a hair’s
breadth, between Benjamin’s Wörtlichkeit-Arkade and the calque.

Section 2. Calques and Creativity in Modernist Translation
The book I’m working on proposes a new theory and praxis of ‘creative transparency’ in literarytranslation. One of its key features is the concept of the ‘creative calque’.
What follows is one, very small, example of what I believe to be the creative critical value of thecalque:The Joycean epigraph to this presentation is also the epigraph to Jacques Derrida’s essay on
Foucault, “Cogito et histoire de la folie” collected in Écriture et différence:
N’importe, c’était terriblement risqué, ce livre. Une feuille transparente le sépare de la folie.
(J. JOYCE, à propos d’Ulysse)
I know of two published translations into English. The more recent is by Alan Bass in his translationof Writing and Difference.
In any event this book was terribly daring. A transparent sheet separates it from madness.

On the face of it, this seems quite a good translation, at least as far as one is able to discern in thisabstract context. In particular, Bass’s handling of the potential pitfall une feuille transparente as ‘a
Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)5

transparent sheet’ appears lucid. However, the immediate context renders the translation dubious.
It’s an English translation of a French quotation from a native English speaker; and it follows a(mis)quotation of Kierkegaard, originally given in an unsubtly foreignized form of French,
employing the Germanic capitalization of nouns:… L’Instant de la Décision est une Folie... (KIERKEGAARD)
Elsewhere in the collection, there is evidence that Bass, whenever possible, uses existing English
translations of secondary texts. When handling Derrida’s quotation of Freud’s note on the ‘Mystic
Writing Pad’, in the essay “Freud et la scène de l’écriture”, for example, Bass uses the canonicalJames Strachey translation. It is worth quoting some of the Strachey (alongside terms employed in
the Laplanche and Pontalis translation used by Derrida):
The Mystic Pad is a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab islaid a thin transparent sheet [durchscheinendes Blatt ; ‘feuille transparente’] […] Thistransparent sheet [feuille transparente] is the more interesting part of the little device. It
itself consists of two layers, which can be detached from each other except at their two ends.
The upper layer is a transparent [durchsichtige ; ‘transparent’] piece of celluloid; the lower
layer is made of thin translucent [durchscheindes ; ‘transparent’] waxed paper.
Again we see the totalizing, nullifying use of the French signifier : transparent to render thenuanced German terms durchsichtig and durchscheinend.
Derrida perfectly exemplifies the symbolic neutralization effected by this concept of transparency:
Le langage étant la rupture même avec la folie, [… il n’est] plus séparé que par la « feuilletransparente » dont parle Joyce, par soi-même, car cette diaphanéité n'est rien d'autre que le langage,le sens, la possibilité, et la discrétion élémentaire d'un rien qui neutralise tout. [Derrida 1967:85]

What we also see, of course, is an intertextual justification for Bass’s translation of Joyce’s feuilletransparente as ‘transparent sheet’. In fact, the effect on the reader, when encountering thiscorrespondence, is perhaps to experience a sense of retrospective illumination of the Joyce
epigraph... of course: Freud... madness... the transparent sheet. It’s all becoming clear. Joyce isthinking of Freud’s Wunderblock.
However, the reader with a sensitivity to the ethics of translation might also think: but where didthat Joyce quotation come from? Was it originally French? Is there an existing translation bysomeone who read it in context? Is this appropriation to the terms of the collection really justified?
In fact, it was indeed originally in French. It comes from Jacques Mercanton’s Les heures de James
Joyce, a mémoire of the Swiss writer’s meetings with Joyce during the period of composition ofwhat was to become Finnegans Wake. During one of their meetings, Mercanton describes the twomen discussing his belief in the fundamental importance of ‘transposition’ in art – by which hemeans something very similar to Jakobson’s ‘intersemiotic translation’ – and how this justified
Joyce’s own ‘translation’ of the visual content of dreams into the auditory and linguistic:
Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)6

Si j’avais mûri, je n’aurais pas fait cette folie d’écrire Work in Progress. [dit Joyce][…] Il se préoccupe de l’objection capitale qu’on peut lui faire : avoir traduit en impressions
auditives les images du rêve […] Ce genre de transposition, dis-je, est l’essence même del’art.
Joyce confirms that his technique of interior monologue, used in Ulysses, was just such a‘transposition’. But then he issues an irascible, bellicose dismissal of interior monologue as atechnique he has outgrown:
Je m’en moque aujourd’hui, maintenant que je m’en suis servi. Que le pont saute, pourvue
que j’aie fait passé mes régiments.
Then he says...
N’importe, c’était terriblement risqué, ce livre. Une feuille transparente le sépare de la folie.
Unlike Alan Bass, Mercanton’s translator, Lloyd C. Parks, had access to this (and far more)
contextual information. Here’s his translation:
Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.
On the face of it, this seems a pretty bad translation. ‘Nonetheless’ is excessively cohesive andformal ; ‘that book was a terrible risk’ is a rather po-faced transposition ; and ‘transparent leaf’ is aglaring calque.
It’s not exactly the kind of ‘creative calque’ that I’ve been hinting at. But it points us in the right
direction. If creative transparency, like Benjamin’s Wörtlichkeit, is supposed to open up the text to akind of multifocal illumination, then this leafy oddity does seem to have a certain translucency.
Looking back through it at Joyce’s original pairing of feuille and folie reveals a typically Joyceanplay on words. The formal similarity of the signifiers – especially with this particular group ofletters – should immediately draw the attention of anybody who has ever read even a few pages ofFinnegans Wake (the text Mercanton was working on with Joyce). Part 2, in particular, is full offolio after folio, of f/l words that foil and fold back the fallow semantic fields; those fool enough tofollow their flow, their floods, their flight might well fall foul of folly. A folly, of course, une folie –an extravagant maison de plaisance in the parkland of a rich estate – is supposedly initially derived
not from fou but from feuillée, as in abri de feuillage. Folie (not madness, but extravagance) has
influenced the word by false etymology. This architectural ‘folly’ is a loanword in English, and its
unlikely that an English speaker as sensitive to lexical slippages as Joyce would use the French
folie in such close proximity to feuille without bringing this to mind.
At the beginning of his book, Mercanton notes that Joyce had a ‘marked English accent’. So let’s
read that sentence again:

Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)7

Une foyll transpaREnte le say-par de la follyWith an English accent, only a transparent leaf separates feuille from folie... and, indeed, séparerfrom c’est pareilBut don’t take my word for it. Here’s that pun from the horse’s mouth. This is from the first part ofFinnegans Wake :Hence when the clouds roll by, jamey, a proudseye view is enjoyable of our mounding’s
mass, now Wallinstone national museum, with, in some greenish distance, the charmful
waterloose country and the two quitewhite villagettes who hear show of themselves so
gigglesomes minxt the follyages, the prettilees! Penetrators are permitted into themuseomound free.

That ‘follyages’ is at once ‘foliage’ (the greenwood... a focal area of both concealment andrevelation in a highly sexualised landscape... the site of the sight and sound of frisky ‘gigglesome’frolicking), and it’s the folly of the ages... the polar opposite of the wisdom of the ages that one
expects to find in the actual museum here, the ‘museomound’ to which penetrators are permitted free.
Running quickly through the three existing French translations. We see that Du Bouchet’s 1962,
feuillée etymologically digs up [fouiller] the architectural folly. Lavergne’s canonical translation has
folliages which seems a neat equivalent with a partially comparable double sense, and the latest(ongoing) translation by Hervé Michel, gives fouillages, which is my favourite, for its triple overlayof fou … fouiller … and feuillage especially coming after his folâterleau for ‘waterloose’.
So this extract reveals something of the subtextual fetishistic, sexualised quality of this pun on
feuille and folie. Not just the terms and their cultural associations... think feuille de vigne
think folies bergère – but also of the fetishistic nature of the pun itself for Joyce.
This then leads me to my concluding example of creative transparency in translation of the Joycean
epigraph. It consists of two ‘creative calques’, which when metaphorically ‘overlaid’ give a third‘creative metacalque’.
The first is rather camp, in keeping with the echoes of Finnegans Wake :Anyway, it was frightfully risqué, that book. A transparent figleaf separates it from sheer folly.
The figleaf, of course, is what would separate ‘penetrators into the museomound’ from the sexualorgans on the statues and paintings....
The second of my ‘creative calques’ focuses on the concrete reality of the book... what, it asks, is afeuille transparente in an actual book? Here’s the translation:
Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)8

In any case that book was terribly audacious. A see-through folio, a tissue paper insert, separates itfrom insanity.
This ‘see-through folio’ is what in French is called une serpente (a ‘tissue guard’ une feuilleintercalaire en papier de soie) in fact, French bibliophiles will refer to the hors-texte sous serpente(the plate covered with a tissue guard). In a material sense, this is what might separate Joyce’s bookfrom its hors-textual insanity. But, of course, this doesn’t lose its fetishistic nature. The tissue guard
is one of the most important fetishized features of high quality books from this period forcontemporary bibliophiles who have been known to sniff and stroke the objects of their chronic
diachronic desire.... or for Gide convoitise.
So, my final synthetic metacalque, my overlaid multifocal transparency, which will have to stand as
the implicitly synoptic conclusion to my paper, is this:In any case, that book was frightfully [f]risky. / A see-through folio separates it from [sheer] folly.

Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation.
Journée d’études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)9