It is often the case that poets translate poets they already know personally. This is less true with fiction writers, because fiction writers are less likely than poets to translate and because nearly all fiction translation is commissioned by publishers, whereas most poetry translation is not. When a translator is a fiction writer, he’s usually either young or not successful, that is, not an artistic equal. But fiction translators do often come to know their authors well. After all, they speak the same language.
Richard Sieburth has another way of looking at affinity: as “hospitality . . . receiving someone as a guest . . . with the full formality and etiquette that that entails.” Translation for Sieburth is a joyful thing, a greeting and a spending time together; in one essay he calls it “communion.” Author and translator are not quite equals, but the unspoken rules allow the meeting to go smoothly and pleasurably, presumably to the benefit of both parties.
More than any translator I spoke with, Sieburth was direct about the joys that accompany the more noble aspects of submission: “I enjoy — maybe that’s an old-fashioned part of me — I enjoy feeling useful, that I’m doing something useful. I enjoy serving something that I admire. I enjoy admiration as an emotion. . . . it’s at once an attitude of humility and an attitude of overweaning pride that you, on some level, can be the equal of the author.” Very succinctly, Sieburth goes through nearly all the aspects of submission I outlined above, including the paradox of translation as both humility and pride.
Sieburth sees submission less in the act of translation than in the way it is perceived. “I think you should look at translators the way you look at performers of music,” he told me. “Oddly enough, musicians have a certain status. We recognize a Rubenstein Chopin or a Glenn Gould Bach, but the translator is not seen this way. He is placed in a position of hiddenness or downright emasculation. The translator is always in an inferior, feminine relationship to a male original.” In other words, the translator’s submission, or service, is generally considered to be a sign of inferiority. The translator is seen not as a gifted performer of another’s written creation, but as an inferior servant, lacking something essential.
The feeling of affinity with an author can, however, lead a translator to feel that he is as singular as the author. As Hans Erich
30
