one of many forms of manipulating a text. Affinity has no place in this scheme, because how can one feel affinity with another manipulator of texts just because you happen to be manipulating the same text? Fellowship, perhaps, but affinity?
Since I happen to dislike the Romantizoic, biographical approach to literature in which I was educated and which seems to have placed the literary biography above the literary work, this view of authors is tempting to me. The fact that it is, essentially, true makes it even harder to resist. But it ignores one important fact: original authors do exist. There are just very few of them, and even most of these are unoriginal in many ways, or too difficult to appeal to anyone but readers of “texts.” It is also true that even authors who are not essentially original have original aspects: styles, voices, quirks. So, although most authors are little more than manipulators of cultural forms and icons, the authors who really matter rise above this, and it is to them that the translators who really matter turn.
The most intriguing relationship between translator and author that I’ve come across in my research and interviewing is one of great affinity and devotion, but not reverence. The author is both similar to and very different from the translator. It is this alloyed tension, I think, that makes the affinity so strong.
John Felstiner, a professor at Stanford University, has written two books about translating particular authors: Pablo Neruda and Paul Celan. To put this in perspective, nobody else, to my knowledge, has ever written a book in English about translating a particular author.
I will be focusing on Felstiner’s relationship with Paul Celan (whose real name, for the record, was Paul Antschel). Celan (19201970) was a great poet of the Holocaust. Although Celan grew up in Czernowitz, in Romanian-speaking Bukovina (a small, once very Jewish area on the edge of the Austrian Empire, Romania, and the Ukraine) lived most of his adult life in Paris, and was emotionally overwhelmed by the Holocaust, he wrote his poetry in German. Although not well known in English-speaking countries during his lifetime, he is now attracting translators like beebalm
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