have the opportunity either to improve on it or to try a different approach.
And while the translator is shouldering this responsibility and forcing literary works into forms they were never intended to take, no one can see his difficult performance. Except where he slips up. In fact, he is praised primarily for not being seen. Even when we listen to an album, we can imagine the musician bowing or blowing, but nothing comes to mind when we think of a translator translating, nothing more than what we imagine an author doing. Which isn’t much. The Czech writer Karel Capek wrote of what he did when he wrote, “even if I were to sit on the porch with my work, I don’t think a single boy would come and watch my fingers to see how a writer’s business is done. I don’t say that it is a bad or useless profession, but it is not one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort — you don’t even see it.”* But we don’t expect any more of writers. We expect to be excited by what a creator creates, not by the way in which he creates it. Unless he is also a performer, like a jazz musician.
With a performing artist, we do expect the doing to be exciting, because the creation has already been done. The performing artist doesn’t create, he interprets. But the translator’s interpretation not only takes the form of the original—ink—but it doesn’t even depart from the content, the way a literary critic’s interpretation does. Only now we can read the ink. The creator’s work looks like gibberish, or would if we ever saw it. Just like a musical score to someone who can’t read music. But the musician’s performance doesn’t look anything like a score; the two couldn’t be any more different. The translation is so similar, the result is a palimpsest, two works, one on top of the other, an original and a performance, difficult to tell apart.
Due to the literary translator’s odd situation, he is not very well respected. He is expected to submit to his authors and always be faithful to them, never make mistakes, work on a piecemeal basis, and accept bottom billing at best. He is not considered an artist at all, neither a creator nor a performer, but rather a craftsman. And he is generally considered a poor and unimportant one. His work is
scarcely mentioned in reviews, and almost never critiqued. His art is
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