Translation Studies Forum: Translation and censorship

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Translation Studies

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Translation Studies Forum: Translation and censorship Brian James Baer , Beate Müller , Paul St-Pierre & Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin To cite this article: Brian James Baer , Beate Müller , Paul St-Pierre & Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (2012) Translation Studies Forum: Translation and censorship, Translation Studies, 5:1, 95-110, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2012.628819 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2012.628819

Published online: 05 Dec 2011.

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Translation Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2012, 95110

Translation Studies Forum: Translation and censorship The following is the second round of responses to the article ‘‘Translation and Censorship’’, by Piotr Kuhiwczak, published in Translation Studies 4, 2011, no. 3, 35873.

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Response Brian James Baer Institute for Applied Linguistics, Kent State University, USA In his insightful essay, Piotr Kuhiwczak complicates the rather simplistic model of censorship and translation born of Cold War politics that continues to organize much of the discussion of this topic in the West. In doing so, he points out the variety of players, or agents, involved in the phenomenon of censorship: [P]ublishers at home and abroad, literary agents selling and buying foreign rights, editors selecting foreign texts and commissioning translators, publishers and their complex links with the political establishment, cultural policy-makers and, last but not least, the translators who operate within a web of constraints and may have their own political and ideological allegiances.

Notably absent from this lengthy list, however, are readers, who under conditions of censorship often exercise an agency that is fraught with political implications and risk. Consider, for example, the Soviet phenomenon of samizdat, which relied on interested readers to reproduce and circulate forbidden texts, or the thriving black market in foreign literature that arose in response to the Russian reader’s demand for works of world literature. It is time, I believe, to study the reader as a full-fledged agent of translation. Ilan Stavans partly addresses Kuhiwczak’s omission by noting the Eurocentrism of Kuhiwczak’s views. To that end, Stavans focuses on cultures outside the developed West, specifically on Latin America, where subaltern polyglots adopted ‘‘a path of resistance’’ to the hegemonic control of European imperial languages and cultures (Spanish, English and French) through the use of their pre-Colombian aboriginal tongues. Stavans’s observations are an important corrective but, considered in isolation, they may tempt one to imagine this form of linguistic resistance as somehow unique to ‘‘Third World’’ (post-)colonial contexts. While acknowledging the historical, political and linguistic specificity of those contexts, I would like to make several comments concerning the reader of translations under censorship that may apply more broadly and may help to conceptualize the unique brand of agency exercised by the reader of translations, in general, and by the ‘‘minority reader’’, in particular. ISSN 1478-1700 print/ISSN 1751-2921 online # 2012, Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2012.628819 http://www.tandfonline.com

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96 Forum I use the term ‘‘minority reader’’ here in contrast to Evgeny Dobrenko’s ‘‘state reader’’ (1997), that is, the reader constructed by official government policies on literature, such as Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. Unlike state readers, minority readers  referring to political not statistical minorities  inhabit two worlds, that of the dominant culture and that of their subculture, and so can be characterized by what the classicist John J. Winkler calls a ‘‘double consciousness’’. This consciousness, Winkler (1993, 578) asserts, is ‘‘a kind of cultural bilingualism on our part, for we must be aware and fluent in using two systems of understanding’’. (This is a somewhat more empowering formulation than Stavans’s notion of the ‘‘divided life’’ of subalterns.) Winkler developed this notion of ‘‘double consciousness’’ in reference to the Greek poet Sappho, whose lyric verse is, he argues, imbued with the quality of poikilos, or ‘‘many-mindedness’’, making it maximally available to minority readers of her time. ‘‘Since all social codes can be manipulated and subverted as well as obeyed,’’ Winkler conjectures, ‘‘we would also expect to find that many women had effective strategies of resistance and false compliance by which they attained a working degree of freedom for their lives’’ (ibid.). Reading Sappho against the grain of official cultural policy was, Winkler suggests, one such strategy. A focus on readers, and on minority readers in particular, could reorient the discourse on translation and censorship in a number of important ways, which I will discuss below. I will begin by making what is perhaps the obvious point that the presence of censorship alters the entire literary polysystem. In Soviet Russia, for example, the fact that the xenophobic regime heavily censored foreign literature  in addition to imposing travel restrictions and even restrictions on interactions between Soviet citizens and foreign tourists  served to enhance greatly the prestige value, the cultural capital of that literature, as documented by Maurice Friedberg in his now classic work on Soviet readers. The preference of Soviet university students for foreign over Soviet literature is especially telling in this regard (Friedberg 1977, 71). With restrictions on travel to the West and interaction with Western tourists, even heavily censored literature in translation gave Soviet citizens access to otherwise forbidden worlds. The prestige of foreign literature  as well as restrictions on the publication of original work  in turn led many of the greatest literary talents of the time (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Daniel’ and Brodsky, to name but a few) to engage in translation; and their efforts only further increased the prestige of foreign, mostly Western, literature in translation. A copy of the first Russian volume of Kafka, published in 1965, was soon selling on the black market for more than 100 times its official price, more than the average weekly wage of a Soviet worker (ibid., 274). This leads to my second point. The heightened significance attributed to foreign literature led writers and translators to develop a system of screens and cues to shield ‘‘alternative’’ interpretations from the censor while encouraging sympathetic readers to uncover those very interpretations (Loseff 1984, 51). This involved drawing historical parallels, uncovering intertextual references, and interpreting absences, among other things. Moreover, the fact that many Soviet-era author-translators could not publish original writing and so were constrained to express themselves through translations led readers to seek out traces of the translator in the text; translations were often read as something akin to a palimpsest. This helps to explain why Marina Tsvetaeva’s translation of Baudelaire’s ‘‘Le Voyage’’, completed in a state of anguish shortly before her suicide, became one of the most popular

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Translation Studies 97 translations of Baudelaire in Russia  it bears the textual traces of Tsvetaeva’s suffering (Wanner 1996, 5). The meaning of foreign literature, as well as meaning in foreign literature, was, one might say, over-determined. Moreover, the interpretive possibilities open to the minority reader, already in possession of a double consciousness, are multiplied by literal, as opposed to Winkler’s metaphoric, bilingualism. This allows the reader to engage in a kind of ‘‘double readership’’, comparing target and source texts in order to expose the interventions of both the censor and the translator, a fact noted by Kuhiwczak. Knowledge of the other languages of the Soviet Union, too, had its advantages: the uneven application of censorship across the many republics of the Soviet Union meant that works of foreign literature that were suspect in Russia might appear in Polish or Estonian translations. This was one of the reasons Brodsky studied Polish. In view of these risks, it might have been expected that a regime like the Soviet Union would have censored all foreign literature. As the leader of the international communist movement, however, the regime had global cultural pretensions, which led it to sponsor translations of many of the great works of the European literary canon. Although the regime required lengthy introductions, with all the requisite citations from Marx and Lenin, which interpreted these works to reflect important stages in the evolution of communism, it proved ultimately impossible to exercise absolute control over the interpretation of the texts. This was true of the first Russian translation of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which appeared in the journal Inostrannaia Literatura in the late 1960s. The regime approved the translation and publication of the novel, seeing it as a damning critique of contemporary American society and its institutions (psychiatry, religion, education and the family). Intelligentsia readers, however, had little trouble applying that critique to Soviet institutions instead, and ‘‘the translation by Rita Rait-Kovoleva became a fixture in the library of virtually every Russian intellectual’’ (Kratsev 2010). More than 100 years before that, Russian Romantic poet and translator Vasilii Zhukovsky expressed an acute awareness of the Sisyphean task of the censor: ‘‘There is not a line, however simply it may be written, which could not be interpreted in the most ruinous manner [. . .]. There is no prayer which could not in this way be turned into sacrilege’’ (quoted in Monas 1961, 155). Censorship  and its evasion by the minority reader  reminds us of a simple truth, often obscured by the production-side focus in translation studies: that meaning is ultimately created in the mind of the reader and that without the reader, acts of resistance have no impact. Third, an unintended consequence of censorship is not only the emergence of the individual minority reader; censorship typically produces groups of readers, or what Stanley Fish (1980) refers to as ‘‘interpretive communities’’. Such communities, which arise in this case to facilitate the unofficial production, circulation and interpretation of censored works, lend a degree of political agency to reading that is unavailable to the individual or solitary reader. In other words, they give readers a social presence. Consider the significance of an alternative ‘‘gay’’ canon of Western literature in the formation of the modern homosexual rights movement. Homosexual-identified readers located and circulated  typically hand to hand  passages from canonical works of European literature that they felt acknowledged the existence of homosexuality (Mitchell and Leavitt 1997). To study minority readers, then, one must also take into consideration the networks  some officially sanctioned, others

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98 Forum quasi-official or even dissident  that organized them into interpretive communities. In the Soviet period, for example, state-sponsored translator workshops became important venues for the discussion of Western literature and of aesthetic values marginalized by the regime’s official policy, while in the age of Pushkin, the semiprivate genre of the album  an institution in the salon culture of the time  served as a privileged site for the circulation, in handwritten form, of censored foreign verse, both in the original language and in translation. The reader’s role in interpreting and disseminating translated texts under conditions of censorship should not be underestimated. For example, Gennadii Shmakov’s translation of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a work that was censored by the regime for its sexual thematics, nevertheless circulated as samizdat in late Soviet Russia. For the translation to assume a presence in Soviet society, the willingness of translators like Shmakov to undertake such a project ‘‘for the drawer’’, as the Russians say, that is, without any hope of getting it published, had to be met by the willingness of minority readers to reproduce, circulate and interpret the text. Including the reader in our consideration of censorship holds the potential to complicate our conceptual models in interesting and productive ways. Censorship is rarely a simple act of erasure that quietly removes a text from the reader’s purview. It often represents a very complex  and semi-covert  negotiation of meaning involving a host of state and minority readers in various official and unofficial capacities. Acknowledging the role of the minority reader brings into view the unofficial interpretive subcultures, the alternative canons, and the subversive hermeneutics that are an inevitable consequence of repressive censorship. But most importantly, it makes visible the agency of those who dare to read against the grain of official aesthetic policy and who have in our theoretical constructs lived, perhaps, too long in the shadow of the translator, for, as Vladimir Nabokov (1981, 11) noted in the essay ‘‘Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers’’: ‘‘It is he  the good, the excellent reader  who has saved the artist again and again from being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs’’. References Dobrenko, Evgeny. 1997. The making of the state reader: Social and aesthetic contexts of the reception of Soviet literature. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Interpreting the variorum. In Is there a text in this class?, 14774. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Friedberg, Maurice. 1977. A decade of euphoria: Western literature in post-Stalin Russia, 1954 64. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kratsev, Nikolai. 2010. Salinger’s Catcher in the rye resonated behind Iron Curtain as well. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (29 January), www.rferl.org/content/Salingers_Catcher_ In_The_Rye_Resonated_Behind_Iron_ Curtain_As_Well/1943025.html (accessed 2 May 2011). Loseff, Lev. 1984. On the beneficence of censorship. Aesopian language in modern Russian literature. Trans. Jane Bobko. Munich: Otto Sagner. Mitchell, Mark, and David Leavitt. 1997. Introduction. In Pages passed from hand to hand. The hidden tradition of homosexual literature in English from 17481914, ed. Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt, xiiixix. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Monas, Sidney. 1961. The third section. The police and society under Nicholas I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Translation Studies 99 Nabokov, Vladimir. 1981. Russian writers, censors, and readers. In Lectures on Russian literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, 113. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company. Wanner, Adrian. 1996. Baudelaire in Russia. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Winkler, John J. 1993. Double consciousness in Sappho’s lyrics. In The lesbian and gay studies reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Miche`le Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 57794. New York: Routledge.

Response Beate Mu¨ ller

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School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University, UK There is a weakness at the heart of Piotr Kuhiwczak’s article: the author argues for a reconceptualization of translation and censorship as being more closely related to each other than some might care to admit, but then fails to demonstrate in concrete terms how such a ‘‘terminological marriage between translating and censoring’’ might indeed deliver what he thinks it would, namely an enrichment of both translation and censorship studies. There is no question that translation as a necessarily selective activity can involve censorial processes, and that censorship can extend to the act of translating or to translated texts themselves. It is equally true that these phenomena merit more scholarly attention than they have attracted so far. But I fail to see how the observed potential proximity between translation and censorship would somehow prove to be crucial for advancing our understanding of either, let alone how it might occasion something approximating a paradigm shift in either translation or censorship studies. Kuhiwczak’s hypothesis, which credits the ‘‘emergence of translation studies as an academic discipline’’ as well as the ‘‘shift in the political configuration of the world’’ with ‘‘the rise of interest in the link between censorship and translation’’, is debatable on at least two counts. Firstly, the alleged epistemological development  attributed to disciplinary progress in one area (translation studies) and to political change in the other (censorship)  assumes that censorship studies moved forward mainly because of the collapse of socialist Europe. While this certainly increased interest in censorship, there were other major impulses, such as the revival of the canon as a field of enquiry (Assmann and Assmann 1987); the increasing popularity of systems theory beyond Niklas Luhmann’s sociologist followers; the widespread reception of Michel Foucault’s works on the relationship between power, discourse and knowledge; the debates around political correctness and free speech especially in the US (Fish 1992), leading to what has been termed the ‘‘New Censorship’’ (Post 1998); a growing interest in psychoanalytical approaches to self-censorship beyond Freud’s classic interpretation of dreams (1900/1913) that explained the distorted nature of dream language as the result of the super-ego’s censorial intervention (Levine 1994); and the occasional study on the formative impact of censorship on aesthetics (Loseff 1984). Secondly, Kuhiwczak’s view is not only Eurocentric, as Ilan Stavans rightly pointed out in his response, but also ideologically questionable. It is not only the fact that East European archives are now open to the scholar which has fuelled censorship research since 1990, but the fact that levels of access to comparable Western institutions remain deplorably and conspicuously low which has contributed

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100 Forum to researchers turning East, towards available data. The widespread assumption that censorship is largely confined to non-democratic societies is a prejudice, as the continuing existence of bodies such as the British Board of Film Classification illustrates.1 And the fact that in a US translation of Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster almost all the references to the Vietnam War were excised (Wolf 1980) surely indicates more than stylistic preferences.2 What Kuhiwczak calls the ‘‘close adjacency of translating and censoring’’ is a claim mainly based on the fact that both translators and censors engage in selection processes which take place in what Bourdieu has termed a ‘‘field’’, i.e., a system of specialized language produced by specialists who alter common language by forming a ‘‘compromise between an expressive interest and a censorship constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulates’’ (Bourdieu 1992, 137). According to Bourdieu, fields such as law, politics or literature allow certain things to be expressed while suppressing others, and the desire of all ‘‘players’’ in the field to contribute to the cultivation of the field is grounded in the symbolic capital (esteem, reputation, impact, etc.) bestowed upon those who successfully engage within the field  a mechanism that garners support for, and thus strengthens, the field as such. If one accepts Bourdieu’s theory, the discourses and unstable power relations characterizing interaction in individual fields assume centre stage; censorship becomes another term for describing the more repressive tendencies of the field, as opposed to its enabling, formative ones, while translation becomes merely one of many activities undertaken in the field of which it partakes. Bourdieu’s concept of the field has had a strong impact on more recent censorship studies, because it allows people’s actions in a censorial context to be analysed by focusing on the goals pursued by these actors in terms of their potential symbolic gain  cultural capital  rather than by reducing individuals to their official functions in the system, the more traditional, schematic approach that has proved to fail in cases where players’ actions seem to be incommensurate with their positions. The often glaring arbitrariness of censors’ decisions can thus be explained by pointing to unstable power relations affected (and effected) by the dynamics of the field. However, Bourdieu’s scenario of autonomous fields is implicitly premised on a modern, differentiated society in which such autonomy can emerge. By contrast, in socialist or totalitarian states many such ‘‘fields’’, from literature to the media, were ‘‘over-managed’’ by politics, so that some have questioned the usefulness of Bourdieu’s approach for non-democratic contexts (Mu¨ ller 2010, 3389; Wrage 2005, 57). Bourdieu’s concept of the field would seem to be more appropriate for the analysis of social and discursive control than for censorship proper. To come back to Kuhiwczak’s central tenet of the ‘‘adjacency of translating and censoring’’, let us now examine whether this is really the case. The relationship between translation and censorship is best illuminated by comparing their functions. It is true that both can be gainfully explored by turning to notions of power/ knowledge, the field, symbolic capital, cultural exchange. A further analogy between them is that both select ‘‘worthy’’ objects of engagement. Where Kuhiwczak sees a shift from the written word to electronic media as spelling a change in the ‘‘locus’’ of censorship, I would contend that censorship always tends to focus on the mass media of the day, as these attract the widest audience and hence cause more concern to censors than niche products. Both translation and censorship are involved in transmitting culture and in cultivating a canon, but where censorship is a gatekeeper,

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Translation Studies 101 translation is a catalyst. The scorn sometimes heaped on translators as being traitors merely betrays the high expectation people have of the art of translation; the ridicule the stereotypical bureaucratic censor has attracted over the centuries is grounded in an outright rejection of his activities. There are huge differences between the two: translation is a professional skill that is commonly understood as requiring foreignlanguage as well as intercultural competence, and in order for a translation to pay off its creator’s efforts, there needs to be a market for the translated work, which means that the commercial logic of publishing plays a key role for most translation projects aimed at a public audience. By Kuhiwczak’s own admission, with most translations the original text is still ‘‘out there’’, serving as a potential touchstone for the translator’s accuracy. By contrast, pre-publication censorship can suppress the artefact in question, and language barriers can help. Thus, writers in all but one East European communist country were dependent on readers on their national home ground because their languages were not widely spoken abroad, or at least there was no established market for their untranslated books beyond the borders of their own countries of origin. With the GDR, this was of course different, as German was also the official language in West Germany, Switzerland and Austria. This gave East German writers an edge over other writers in the Soviet bloc, and it facilitated their reception abroad while weakening the power of the censors at home to suppress manuscripts for good. Unless one regards censorship as an all-pervading presence informing a host of social and communicative encounters aimed at curbing or channelling unwanted communication  thus, for example, including in the term’s remit a parent asking their child to shut up  censorship is usually associated with policymaking, with a somehow institutionalized practice pursuing political, moral or religious goals which are often legitimized by taking recourse to discourses of protection, education or prevention. This is not generally the case with translation. As I see it, we can gainfully engage with censorial translation and translationrelated censorship without trying to force translation and censorship studies into an unhappy partnership. What censorship studies needs, above all else, is a methodological solution to the fundamental problem of how to wed historical specifics of individual censorship cases from very different historical, political and cultural contexts to more theoretical, general analyses and concepts of censorial mechanisms, and how to make such theoretical contributions productive for specific case studies. I have elsewhere suggested using the communication model as a basis for such an undertaking, as censorship itself is ultimately a communicative process involving the model’s six factors  the sender of a message (author, film-maker, etc.), its receiver (audience, censor), the message itself (manuscript, film), the code employed (style, language), the channel (or medium, i.e., the genre), and the context (political and legal system, country, time, etc.). This model enables us to map censorial actions and reactions in a systematic fashion, thus providing orientation and a framework for analysing the dynamics and interdependencies between the model’s individual constituents (Mu¨ ller 2003, 1630; 2004, 1425). Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘‘family resemblance’’ can be adapted for analyses of cultural regulation in order to distinguish flexibly between more or less intensive acts of censorship and to integrate changes in censorial engagement, just as the appearance of family members, while retaining some basic similarities, changes over time. Whether this two-pronged approach  using the communication model and the concept of family resemblance  would be useful for analysing translation is a question I leave to experts in translation studies.

102 Forum Notes 1. The BBFC’s website (2011) contains a statistics tab which lists the number of films classified each year and the percentage of cuts executed, but there is no information on what has been cut from which film. In fact, the reader learns that ‘‘figures are extracted from the classified area of the website’’. 2. I would like to thank Georgina Paul of Oxford University for alerting me to this case.

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References Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann. 1987. Kanon und Zensur als kultursoziologische Kategorien. In Kanon und Zensur. Archa¨ ologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, 727. Munich: Fink. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Language and symbolic power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). 2011. Statistics, www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/ statistics (accessed 15 May 2011). Fish, Stanley. 1992. There’s no such thing as free speech and it’s a good thing, too. In Debating P.C. The controversy over political correctness on college campuses, ed. Paul Berman, 23145. New York: Bantam. Freud, Sigmund. 1900/1913. The interpretation of dreams. Trans. A.A. Brill. New York: The Macmillan Company. Levine, Michael G. 1994. Writing through repression. Literature, censorship, psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Loseff, Lev. 1984. On the beneficence of censorship. Aesopian language in modern Russian literature. Trans. Jane Bobko. Munich: Otto Sagner. ¨ ffentlichkeit und Macht. In Zensur im modernen ¨ ber Zensur. Wort, O Mu¨ ller, Beate. 2003. U deutschen Kulturraum, ed. Beate Mu¨ ller, 130. Tu¨ bingen: Niemeyer. ***. 2004. Censorship and cultural regulation: Mapping the territory. In Censorship and cultural regulation in the modern age, ed. Beate Mu¨ ller, 131. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ***. 2010. Zensurforschung. Paradigmen, Konzepte, Theorien. In Theorie und Forschung, ed. Ursula Rautenberg, 32160. Vol. 1 of Buchwissenschaft in Deutschland. Ein Handbuch. Berlin: de Gruyter Saur. Post, Robert C. 1998. Censorship and silencing. In Censorship and silencing. Practices of cultural regulation, ed. Robert C. Post, 112. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Wolf, Christa. 1980. A model childhood. Trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wrage, Henning. 2005. Feld, System, Ordnung. Zur Anwendbarkeit soziologischer Modelle auf die DDR-Kultur. In Literarisches Feld DDR. Bedingungen und Formen literarischer Produktion in der DDR, ed. Ute Wo¨ lfel, 5373. Wu¨ rzburg: Ko¨ nigshausen & Neumann.

Response Paul St-Pierre De´ partement de linguistique et de traduction, Universite´ de Montre´ al, Canada Piotr Kuhiwczak’s paper raises a certain number of issues relating to translation and censorship. Here, I will focus on only one: his distinction between two ‘‘major conceptual frameworks’’. In the first, ‘‘censorship is always a deliberate and conscious policy’’; in the second, ‘‘censorship has a constant discursive presence

Translation Studies 103

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associated with power relations’’. He points out that both approaches have drawbacks but opts for the second, which is based on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Examining censorship from the vantage point of the translation of children’s literature, he concludes that translation is ‘‘an important sifting, or  let’s be honest  censoring mechanism’’, in ‘‘close adjacency’’ to censorship. He writes: ‘‘Why not admit that by its very nature translation lends itself to either conscious or unconscious acts that bring it extremely close to what we understand as censorship?’’ (emphasis added), noting that various terms used in translation studies  ‘‘manipulation’’, ‘‘rewriting’’, ‘‘foreignization’’, ‘‘domestication’’, ‘‘localization’’  are all ways of avoiding the term ‘‘censorship’’. In the following I will attempt to demonstrate the implications of Kuhiwczak’s position while at the same time arguing for the value of an approach based on the writings of Bourdieu and Foucault. 1. There is a definite ambiguity in Piotr Kuhiwczak’s approach. Is the practice of translation always implicated in censorship, as would seem to be indicated by the characterization of translation as a ‘‘censoring mechanism’’, or is translation a tool that lends itself to certain acts that are close to censorship? These are two quite distinct positions. In the first case, to translate is to censor; in the second, it is possible that translation may participate in acts of censorship. This question is important in that it speaks to the very nature of translation, a question Kuhiwczak is explicitly addressing, and it is unfortunate that he at times hedges his bets since that merely results in undermining the initial distinction between the two frameworks. 2. But before examining the position Kuhiwczak adopts, the validity of the distinction between the two ‘‘major conceptual frameworks’’ needs to be considered. The manner in which the first framework is enunciated is most certainly an overstatement, with its use of ‘‘always’’, ‘‘deliberate and conscious’’ and ‘‘policy’’, since many cases of censorship have been studied by translation scholars that do not result from a general policy as such (for example a son’s bowdlerization of his father’s autobiography  ostensibly to protect the latter’s reputation  as in the case of Mohinimohan Senapati)1 nor are they always deliberate or conscious (such as the early translations of Dostoevsky into French, which eliminated the author’s obsessive repetitions and turned a non-standard Russian text into one that in French translation conformed to canonical forms; Markowicz [n.d.], or the American translation by Howard Parshley of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxie`me sexe, which deleted more than 10% of the original text; von Flotow 1997, 10). A more nuanced enunciation of the first conceptual framework is needed, one that would embrace the wide range of practices studied by translation studies specialists. 3. The second framework, adopted here by Piotr Kuhiwczak, requires further exploration. There is indeed a similarity in the approaches of Bourdieu and Foucault to social formations and their restrictive power in terms of what can be said, of the way it can be said, of who can say it, and so on. This restrictive power of the ‘‘field’’, of discourse, can be considered censorship; indeed, Bourdieu explicitly does consider it as such. At the beginning of ‘‘Censorship and the Imposition of Form’’, Bourdieu clearly situates all discursive practices within a context of censorship:

104 Forum

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The specialized languages that schools of specialists produce and reproduce through the systematic alteration of the common language are, as with all discourses, the product of a compromise between an expressive interest and a censorship constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulates. (Bourdieu 1991, 137)

While pointing to the censorship exerted upon discourses, this passage also underlines the fact that discourses do not simply reproduce the ‘‘structure of the field’’ but are the result of a compromise with the censorship it institutes. The distance between the two  the field and the discourse produced  is obliterated in Kuhiwczak’s paper. According to Bourdieu, all social practices  all discourses  take place within this context of ‘‘structural’’ censorship.2 However, Kuhiwczak’s failure to distinguish between the context and the discourse, his failure to ‘‘compromise’’, further blurs the not always easily perceptible differences between socially constitutive forms of censorship (the forms we select and reproduce, often unconsciously, as members of a society) and repressive acts of censorship, verifiable to varying degrees and ranging from the unwitting to the unquestionably brutal. 4. An approach to translation based on the discursive formations analysed and theorized by Bourdieu and Foucault can nevertheless be productive, insofar as it maintains the possibility that translations are always compromises. However, such an approach should not eliminate differences like those between socially constitutive acts  whose repressive effect is certain, but which are also an inevitable part of belonging to a society  and acts of repression which are carried out in the name of the defence of society, perhaps, but which are also discrete acts: in the case of translations, acts of intervention, blocking, manipulating and controlling the establishment of cross-cultural communication (Billiani 2007, 3). Nor should it erase differences between conceptual frameworks and practices that have been elaborated precisely with the goal of differentiating between a variety of practices (‘‘domestication’’, ‘‘foreignization’’, ‘‘localization’’). Through such a reduction, distinctions and clarity are lost. 5. My 1993 article ‘‘Translation as a Discourse of History’’ attempted to develop a discursive approach to translation. In it, I consider translation as a ‘‘form of cultural practice’’; as the ‘‘regulated transformation’’ of an original text; as a discourse ‘‘in the sense that it is a linguistic event produced by a subject within a specific historic context, [. . .] dependent upon laws and rules which determine not only what can be said but also the way in which it can be expressed’’ (St-Pierre 1993, 62), a definition based on the writings of Michel Foucault. However, rather than reducing translation and translations to censorship  independently of the form they take and independently of the function they are given in the target system  this approach focuses on the specific nature of the transformation that the original text undergoes in the process of translation. 6. In a sense, the question in the end comes down to whether there is anything to be gained by an approach that equates translation with censorship  an approach that would equate all practices involving choice and selection (are there any practices that

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do not?) with censorship, defining them by what they do not choose rather than in terms of what they make possible; an approach that fails to distinguish between the context in which the discourse is produced and the discourse as produced. What is lost in such an approach is that censorship is made banal, omnipresent, a characteristic of all intellectual, sentient and emotional activities. Because of this vagueness and generality, it becomes impossible to determine the precise nature and import of censorship except through the examination of ‘‘deliberate and conscious’’ acts, which has the effect of bringing us back to the first of the two ‘‘major conceptual frameworks’’ and of eliminating the need for  and the value of  the second. Somewhat paradoxically, then, an approach that equates translation with censorship ends up falling back on the study of particular, documented cases of repression. 7. It is indeed necessary to examine particular acts of censorship, and not merely those that are conscious and deliberate, but it is also necessary to determine the specific way that they relate to the social and historical context in which they are produced. That presupposes, however, that a distinction is made between the two dimensions. Acts of censorship take place within contexts of structural censorship, but not all acts that take place within such contexts can be reduced to acts of censorship. Translations are ‘‘compromise’’ formations, involving selection, manipulation and rewriting, and as such they can be used to censor. It is rare, however, that even acts of translation that are used for such a purpose are confined to this role alone. Six separate translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in Odia  one of India’s official languages  between 1934 and 1985. Certain of these were abridged versions; others retold the story for different audiences. Taking Piotr Kuhiwczak’s censorship-oriented framework to its logical conclusion would mean failing to acknowledge the variety of functions these translations have had in the development of the Odia episteme. Within the target system translations often act as agents that introduce novel themes and forms; that contribute to the development of the target language, literature and culture; that act against repression and censorship. Although Piotr Kuhiwczak at times remembers this fact (as in his example of twentieth-century Russian and East European poetry), by reducing translation to censorship he in fact ends up deflecting attention from it.

Notes 1. The choice here of an Indian text  the autobiography of Phakirmohan Senapati (1927)  is deliberate, given the Eurocentric tendency of Piotr Kuhiwczak’s text (see Ilan Stavans’s response). The well-studied example of Rabindranath Tagore’s self-censorship in his translations of his own works into English could also be cited (see, for example, chapter 8, ‘‘Translation as Perjury’’, in Mukherjee 1994). 2. ‘‘The metaphor of censorship should not mislead: it is the structure of the field itself which governs expression, and not some legal proceeding which has been specially adapted to designate and repress the transgression of a kind of linguistic code. This structural censorship is exercised through the medium of the sanctions of the field’’ (Bourdieu 1991, 138).

106 Forum References

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Billiani, Francesca, ed. 2007. Modes of censorship and translation. National contexts and diverse media. Manchester: St Jerome. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Markowicz, Andre´. [N.d.] Entretien, www.carlabrunisarkozy.org/fr/fondation-carla-brunisarkozy/entretiens/andre-markowicz-le-metier-de-traducteur (accessed 19 August 2011). Mukherjee, Sujit. 1994. Translation as discovery and other essays on Indian literature in English translation. 2nd ed. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Senapati, Phakirmohan. 1927. Phakirmohan Senapatinka Atmajivanacharita. Cuttack: Mohinimohan Senapati Publisher. St-Pierre, Paul. 1993. Translation as a discourse of history. TTR 6, no. 1: 6182. von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and gender. Translating in the ‘‘era of feminism’’. Manchester: St Jerome.

Response ´ Cuilleana´ in Cormac O Department of Italian, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Piotr Kuhiwczak draws on broad conceptual frameworks to explore and question our theoretical understanding of translation and censorship. Equally valuable is his fine grasp of historical practice: the interplay between agents, roles, media, ideologies and fashions shaping the lives of entire populations, especially in twentieth-century Europe. Conveying the texture of the European experience, he identifies elements that deserve wider investigation. Rather than following a single line of argument, the present contribution will echo some points from Kuhiwczak’s piece, scattering some ideas that might lead to fresh twists in existing research strands  or, more likely, might pick up some older threads. Images of twisting and weaving may be preferable to the notion of linear progress, which is sometimes inappropriate within humanities research, even when that research is as innovative and groundbreaking as translation studies, as rife with extraneous analogies and agendas, as prone to find its raison d’eˆ tre in places where predictable practice breaks down and ‘‘translated’’ texts deviate from their ‘‘originals’’. Translation scholarship is often most productive when considering fractures and contradictions. Capturing new knowledge through gaps in existing paradigms may remind us of progress in the natural sciences, where discoveries made in areas outside our normal span of observation force us to alter our conscious relationship with reality. The humanities do this differently, negotiating pathways of understanding between our consciousness and the visible materials that we study. These pathways, once discovered, are amenable to experiential observation. Many of them revisit ancient questions. The context remains set by products and processes of human consciousness. Simple ideas of ‘‘progress’’ are therefore problematic; every new discovery is balanced by potential losses of existing knowledge and sensibility. Humanities research has been revolutionized by communications technology, triggering avalanches of materials and formats that allow new questions to be asked,

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Translation Studies 107 and sometimes answered. To navigate this brave new world, we must maintain a proper sense of relativity. Aristotle (1969), speaking through his translator J.A.K. Thomson, argued that it is a mark of the educated man and a proof of his culture that in every subject he looks only for so much precision as its nature permits. If we nowadays feel a propensity to reword  even censor  certain elements within Professor Thomson’s translation, that merely proves the point. What can new technology contribute to translation and censorship research? It can certainly revitalize old technologies. Corpora such as Google Books enable unprecedented access to printed materials. Collating translated books with their originals, using automatic translation software and other tools of computational linguistics, one could readily identify and ‘‘restore’’ excised passages. The reasons for those excisions would, however, remain to be investigated using older methodologies  literary, cultural, historical, linguistic. Some cuts might have been made by censorious regimes, but texts also get filleted for the translator’s personal convenience, or for technical or commercial reasons (how many pages was the publisher willing to print?). Scholarly interpretation must be the judge of that. Technology offers several different starting points. Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/) rifles through prodigious corpora, identifying first occurrences and subsequent frequencies of words. The relevance of such data in analysing translation choices is incontestable, but must be modulated through a shrewd understanding of the meaning and force of the words used, which requires old-fashioned philology and horse sense. For example, the word ‘‘bollixed’’, first attested by Ngram around 1900, has enjoyed increasing popularity since 1940, but has two radically different meanings: its innocent use in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation should not be confused with the cruder connotations found in HibernoEnglish (Hoffman 1989, 250; Dolan 2004, 29). In a recent public lecture Dr Geoff Kemp, distinguished historian of censorship and toleration, observed that the word ‘‘censor’’ can be traced through Ngram to an early peak around 1640, followed by a second resurgence at the end of the 1790s  but the word has held sharply differentiated meanings, and we cannot assume that we are looking at our contemporary notion of censorship. Technology, carefully handled, will bring true discoveries in conjunction with other approaches. Although rapid advances in our historicized macrodiscipline may be hard to achieve, genuine progress remains possible. Find the right questions to ask, and the fertile field of translation will yield new insights. Progress may occur through a change of frame, or by analogy, or by playing with implicit assumptions. As Kuhiwczak argues, we should avoid ‘‘limiting the subject of research to self-evident and obvious cases’’. Pure censorship is easily spotted when we find gatekeepers suppressing unwanted material in a deliberate attempt to keep weak fellow citizens safe from temptation or to choke off sources of unwelcome expression. But in cultural matters, specifically when identifying significant cases of translation censorship, more ambiguous questions of definition arise. An example: if some interpretation or adaptation is unavoidable when translating, where does this process shade into justified or unjustified censorship? Another (more provocative) example: while allowing only one authorized translation of a classic text would certainly count as censorship, does the same apply to exclusively licensed translations of works still in copyright? How is censorship in translation affected by the USA’s theoretical devotion to free speech? If a translation adds something to its original, is

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108 Forum that as bad as cutting? On this latter question, Juliane House (2003, 256; 2009, 48 50) cites Mrs Christmas, in which the English author Penny Ives showed her heroine anonymously replacing her sick husband, Father Christmas, in distributing the annual gifts, knowing she would not be recognized in his trademark red coat and hat, whereas the German translation shows a more assertive Weihnachtsfrau taking control without bothering to conceal herself. Can this creative enhancement be justified on the grounds that the host culture required more forthright female action? Or is it just censorship? Another question: which of us genuinely believes in having no censorship at all? When Salman Rushdie, free speech martyr (although the actual violence had been visited vicariously on his all-too-visible translators) spoke in Dublin while under a ‘‘death sentence’’, his audience included many free speech enthusiasts, but a sceptical newspaper columnist opined that few among them would have supported the free publication of the address where Rushdie was staying that night. Where should the dividing lines be drawn when analysing the intersection of censorship, free speech, artistic expression and translation? If one believes that artistic expression deserves protection because its utterances, like those of religion, are symbolic rather than purely informational, and also because an author can justly claim superior rights of imaginative expression, would that same protection apply to an accurate professional translation, by a disinterested translator, of content originally expressed by another person, the author? Should all translators be drafted as willing activists, and praised or punished accordingly? Kuhiwczak notes several sub-topics that add welcome complexity to the simplistic triad of virtuous writer, innocent translator, evil censor; these complicating factors include self-censorship by writers and translators and the figure of the collusive translator reluctantly censoring a foreign text to enable it to enter the host culture. (Translators can be victims as well as perpetrators of censorship; one does not have to be innocent to qualify as a bona fide victim.) And if translators are censors, the list can be extended to include editors, sub-editors, publishers’ legal departments, even thesis advisors. In this perspective, translation, publication, validation and censorship can be seen as continuous components of the same system. But here’s another paradox: non-censorship can be a peculiarly effective form of censorship. The uncensored importation of translated texts, including high-quality texts, may constitute the most ironic triumph of censorship when seen through what Kuhiwczak calls the ‘‘constitutive model’’, the ‘‘second way of looking at censorship’’ within wider social discourses of power relations. This ‘‘constitutive model’’, when combined with polysystem theory (Even-Zohar 1978), allows us to study censorious translation practice not through the elimination of translated materials but through the propagation of acceptable translated materials that effectively block out the unacceptable kind, following the displacement principle that John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends (1982, 4), prophetically identified in his ‘‘content analysis’’ of the media: The news hole in a newspaper is a closed system. [. . .] When something new is introduced, something else or a combination of things must be omitted. You cannot add unless you subtract. It is the principle of forced choice in a closed system. [. . .] Evidently,

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societies are like human beings. A person can keep only so many problems and concerns in his or her head or heart at any one time.

Our mental map has limited space; one topic displaces another. By populating that map with acceptable models of politics or culture, the system satisfies the public’s need for a pseudo-inclusive view. The raw materials used may be of good quality, but the process itself is entirely malignant. Translation can form part of such a deliberate displacement process. Arthur Koestler (1949, 57) ruefully describes how, as a young communist author touring the Soviet Union to research a forthcoming book, he would everywhere be invited to have his works published in local literary magazines: ‘‘I thus sold the same short story to eight or ten different literary magazines from Leningrad to Tashkent, and sold the Russian, German, Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian rights of my unwritten book against advance payments which amounted to a small fortune’’. Koestler mocks himself as a vain young man thoughtlessly accepting bribes, but in fact he really was a talented writer, and his translated writings, if published, might have been worth reading. Supplying high-quality translated literature would thus have reassured discerning Soviet readers that one can enjoy cosmopolitan literature and still remain a faithful communist, while also crowding out the need to cultivate other, less reliable, foreign authors. Selection and suppression are two sides of the same cultural coin. A similar principle underlies the insidious mechanism of news control that operates today under the badge of ‘‘balance’’, serving special interests. In large parts of the media, journalists are forced to abdicate their personal responsibility of judgement, ensuring instead that their discussions give equal space, and equal respect, to honest and dishonest positions, thereby ‘‘drowning out competing voices’’ (Brock 2004, 3). Repression masquerades as even-handed inclusiveness. Despite these depressing considerations, we must not underestimate the creative power of viewers and readers to derive unintended meanings even from carefully selected texts. As Denise Merkle points out in her perceptive response to Kuhiwczak, ‘‘repression invariably invites subversion’’. Similarly Gentzler (1996, 1234), drawing on Michel de Certeau, reminds us that the consumer is also ‘‘an unrecognized producer’’, while the translator (visible or invisible) is also a maker, a master of indeterminate procedures which tend to transgress rules. Kuhiwczak identifies a number of processes through which translations can be censored; there is room for theoretical research and worthwhile case studies on how exactly such constraints differ from everyday restrictions of access to foreign texts. Exclusion, selection, marginalization can occur for innocently commercial reasons. But Kuhiwczak (‘‘let’s be honest’’) challenges us to recognize censorship when we see it, and his clear-eyed vision represents one of the best characteristics of the inquisitive, comparative, interdisciplinary project of translation research. Merkle warns against conflating censorship with similar practices such as manipulation, rewriting, foreignization, domestication  but are there not also some interesting and important continuities among these categories? Studying censorship in translation provides an excellent gateway to understanding the paradoxical need to strengthen one’s own culture by contamination, while simultaneously pasteurizing the imported elements. The censor is often the importer. Michael Cronin (2011) quotes an Irish-language translator calling (in 1915)

110 Forum for the exciting influence of the foreign to revive the flagging vitality of the native tongue, but also warning that ‘‘if the foreign is a good thing, it is essential to be careful about it and to filter it clean before it is used’’. Where would we be without these trepid explorers? Acknowledgements My thanks to Gabriel Moyal and Mary O’Connor, both at McMaster University, for their comments and suggestions.

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References Aristotle. 1969. The ethics of Aristotle. ed. J.A.K. Thomson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brock, David. 2004. The Republican noise machine: Right-wing media and how it corrupts democracy. New York: Crown Publishing. Cronin, Michael. 2011. A dash of the foreign: The mixed emotions of difference. In Translating emotion: Studies in transformation and renewal between languages, ed. Kathleen Shields and Michael Clarke, 10723. Berne: Peter Lang. Dolan, Terence Patrick, ed. 2004. A dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish use of English. 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1978. The position of translated literature within the literary polysystem. In Literature and translation: New perspectives in literary studies, ed. James S. Holmes, Jose´ Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck, 11727. Leuven: Acco. Gentzler, Edwin. 1996. Translation, counter-culture, and The fifties in the USA. In ´ lvarez and M. Carmen-A ´ frica Vidal, 11637. Translation, power, subversion, ed. Roma´ n A Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hoffman, Eva. 1989. Lost in translation: A life in a new language. London: Heinemann. House, Juliane. 2003. English as a global lingua franca: Conquest or dialogue? In Speaking in tongues: Language across contexts and users, ed. Luis Pe´ rez Gonza´ lez, 1946. Valencia: Universitat de Vale`ncia. ***. 2009. Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koestler, Arthur. 1949. The initiates. In The God that failed, ed. Richard Crossman, 1575. New York: Harper. Naisbitt, John. 1982. Megatrends: Ten new directions transforming our lives. London: Macdonald.