Portraits of the Translator as an Artist
Authors: Curran Bev 
Published: October 2020

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue:

a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52)

The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English.
English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power.
The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself.
Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview).
Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through porno in his hotel room.
Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173).
The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending.
Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning.
The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction.
The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling.

References

Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990.
Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996.
Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73.
Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63.
Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16.
Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997.
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993.
Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.