A kindred spirit will more likely enable you to understand yourself and your artistic vision and approach more deeply, but the less kindred another writer is, the more a close encounter can lead to growth, to new ways of seeing the world and of expressing what you see. “We translate to be translated,” Suzanne Jill Levine, a translator of Latin American prose, wrote in one of the most interesting books on translation, The Subversive Scribe.*
Finally, submission can be a form of domination itself. It can be a way of getting what one wants while seeming not to, doing something with great hubris while seeming humble and good. In the religious world there is proselytizing, that is, preaching not in one’s own name but in the name of God, the Author of Authors. Translators can be proselytizers, too, getting their views, vision, and interpretations across, but in the name of their author, in a way and to an extent they never could with their own work. Gregory Rabassa has referred to translation as “a priestly task.”* And many people are more comfortable promoting others than they are promoting themselves, that is, promoting what they love rather than what they create.
So, submission’s not that bad. In fact, it has its attractions. Which is good, because it’s so central to literary translation. In the rest of this chapter, I will look more closely at the various types and levels of submission that are involved in translation.
No one likes to refer to himself as submissive. “Devoted” perhaps, but “affinity,” the translator’s preferred term, is even better, because “affinity” connotes an equal relationship, a relationship between people with similar interests and similar ways of looking at the world. In some cases—for example, where a poet is translating a poet who is his contemporary—this is an accurate description of the relationship. When Richard Wilbur and André du Bouchet translated each other, this was definitely the case: both were young poets exploring each other’s verse and their own poetic abilities. They were literary lovers of the best sort. Their friendship allowed them to express an understanding of the other’s writing that strangers could not have had; it also probably blinded them to weaknesses
and other possibilities they’d rather not see in the other.
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