When reading Mary Jo Bang's Inferno, her preface speaks large volumes on what she finds translation to be. On page 10, she writes "Translation is a method of bringing the past back into the present--across geographies, across different time periods, and across cultural difference--and sharing what is common to all. That act is both homage and theft...Translation keeps a work of literature alive by simultaneously dismantling and reclaiming it. For the translator, there is an intense--and paradoxical--intellectual pleasure that comes from making a text that has already been made by someone else. It is a strange collaborative camaraderie."
While reading this, I immediately thought of the Ortega y Gasset article, where they say: "Translation is not a duplicate of the original text; it is not--it shouldn't try to be--the work itself with a different vocabulary...translation is a literary genre apart, different from the rest, with it's own norms and own ends...translation is not the work, but a path toward the work...no more than an apparatus, a technical device that brings us closer to the work without ever trying to repeat or replace it." (61)
I think this is what Mary Jo Bang is trying to get at when she says translation is both homage and theft. Because a translation cannot be exactly the same, inherently translation is an interpretation of the original text, it will be a refraction of the original. The extent is up to that translator. That is also what she means when she says that translation is about dismantling and reclaiming. She has dismantled the original Alighieri Inferno and in its wake is a reclaimed Bang Inferno. By bringing it over to the reader, she is doing what Schleiermacher calls "moving the reader toward [the writer]"
(49). She aids the readers by bringing Dante into the present, which she says, in another part of the preface, shows Hell as a never changing place. She shares references that are common to all so as to help the reader understand the original in a way that is relevant to the current age.
This also dates a piece, makes it its own relic, which Bang understands. I think this version of Dante has its own place in the record books of Dante translations because it offers something that the others do not: modernity.
Bang definitely brings Dante into modernity. As Davidson says, we don't need another translation of Dante that reads like the rest. I do think she moves Dante to the reader though. There is so much she changes that in some aspects her Inferno is unrecognizable from Dante's Inferno. I don't think Bang creates her Inferno for academic purposes, but so that the contemporary reader can understand why Dante created his Inferno and why he places certain people in Hell. I think it would be insulting for any translator to try and replace the source text instead of simply creating something another culture and language can understand an appreciate.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate Bang's take on translation, and I appreciate that she has a very well articulated theory of translation (whereas I feel like what Carson doesn't say reveals as much about his theories as what he does say). No matter what we think of her methods, it is clear that she has gone into this with eyes wide open, and yes, this is an extreme example of the "translation as refraction" that we discussed in class. I think you make an excellent point in saying that her "modernity," the thing that sets her apart now, is exactly what will be the downfall of this particular translation a few generations from now. In 50 or 100 years, this translation is likely to sound as antiquated as the Longfellow translation does to us now. I do, however, have to take issue with her phrase "sharing what is common to all." From what I've heard of her translation, it does not seem to be a sharing of universal truths and commonalities. It is much too American 21st Century for that.
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