The spirits of translation: Possession, literary laughter and other travesties (Vijai Dan Detha, Mannu Bhandari, Roland Barthes, India, France).

摘要

"The Spirits of Translation: Possession, Literary Laughter and Other Travesties" offers a critical language for discussing translated work by exploring the ways the humor of a faraway "author" is said to come alive in English and what part the translator has to play in that regeneration. Current scholarship has had trouble reconciling the image of the author's physical body (as identity) outside the text with the narrative authority within the text; the addition of a translator heightens the confusion in a way I find productive since it forces us to locate the various terms of the literary exchange and become aware of the implicit distance between them. "The Spirits of Translation" juxtaposes essays on the history and practice of translation in English (from George Chapman's Homer to Richard Howard's "The Death of the Author") with my own translations of playful, ironic short stories to formulate a language for distinguishing the translator's contribution to (and mediation in) a literary text, and the ways that ironic distance may become amplified or diminished in displacement. I suggest the Hindi word for translation, anuvad (a telling in turn), offers a more useful approach to translation studies since it conceives of literary re-creation as an act of storytelling, therefore multiple and performative.