Major Issues
What are the major issues that mark the field in the 20th century? If we look at the early decades of the 20th century we find the domination of German philosophical precepts. According to this viewpoint, language is not merely a means of communication, but it is the shaping force of external reality. In other words, language is the way in which we interpret the reality around us. Naturally translation becomes another way of interpretation of a reality that might be foreign to the reader. Here translation can have other functions than merely linguistic. It assumes the cultural function of becoming a pathway to other realities. Friedrich Schleiermacher, one of the influential figures of this period, believed that translation was another cognitive process and can help build language and literature.
This period also marks the beginning of modernism as a literary moveme nt in the west. This age was characterized by experimentation in the form and content of literature; translation too became the subject of experimentation. Translation was seen as a work in its own right with a life that was independent of the original. Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923) concedes that “a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife” (qtd in Venuti 16). But he states that the function of the original and the translation are different, and so are the tasks of the poet and the translator: “As translation is a mode of its own, the task of the translator, too, may be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet” (qtd in Venuti 19). Ultimately translation becomes an expression of what Benjamin terms the “central reciprocal relationship between languages” (17).But no literary work can be equated with information it can convey; according to Benjamin, “there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated, depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized” (Venuti, 22). This is what he terms the “nucleus of pure language” where the language “no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages” (Venuti, 22). The task of the translator is to “release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of the work” (Venuti, 22).
Translation was also seen as a way to bring in innovations of style and form, as Ezra Pound did with his Cathay that was inspired by Chinese poetry. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges viewed a translation as a variant interpretation of the same text; hence a translation became a different text altogether. The theoretical debates which were to inform the field of translation studies in the century were beginning to emerge in these decades. |
