AUTHORSHIP AND TRANSLATION

IN THE AGE OF POSTPRODUCTION

Arcadio Saldaa Puerto

Teora de la traduccin
Mster en Estudios de Traduccin
Universidad Pompeu Fabra
2015

CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................................... 3

1. Early criticism of source-oriented translation .................................................... 5

2. Proliferation of poststructuralist theories and practices of translation............ 9

3. Artistic authorship in the age of postproduction................................................ 15

Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 19

Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 21

[...] the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the "pathos" of his
predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of
necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly "elaborate" his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand,
detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin
or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any
origin.
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"1

Though it has been thoroughly contested, the traditional view of the concept of authorship still
reigns supreme in Western poetics. The author, understood as an individual with the almost divine
power of creation, is not dead as Barthes would have it, at least in what concerns the commonplace,
canonical discourse about authorship, writing and art. He is, indeed, alive and well, protected as
always by the scholarly and institutional powers: he is praised or scorned by critics, in specialized
and popular publications alike; the outline of his person is fixed, cast in bronze to preside public
spaces and written into biographies that explain the secret of his art; students still learn about
literature by tediously repeating the family trees in the genealogy of writing, where the author is
always a son to his age and a father to his work. The canonical view on authorship, which we have
inherited from the Romantic ideal of the artist as a creator and from capitalist positivism, prevails at
some rate in many fields of Western culture in all kinds of disciplines commonly considered as
artistic, but also in translation.
The implications that this myth of authorship has for translation studies have been thoroughly
denounced. They could be summarized in the following principles: 1) Translation is always oriented
towards the source text (ST from now on), whose stable (essential) meaning is originated by the
author. 2) The meaning of a ST must be transferred faithfully to the target language by the
translator, who must ensure that the target text (TT) maintains with the ST a relation of semantic
equivalence. 3) The TT is a secondary and derivative product that can never surpass the original;
translations are therefore inherently flawed, as they can never be more than an imperfect imitation
of the ST; the translator must strive to make his work invisible, for the practice of translation cannot
be seriously considered as creative or artistic, or even as having any place at all in high culture.
As you can see, in the traditional poetics of translation, the translator is nothing but a scribe, and
the TT can only hope to be a medium, not an end, a faded version of the original, forced to win its
legitimacy through deep respect to the author and his intentions.
1 Barthes, 1967:4.

However, in many ways thought and society have already moved on from this, and we see, more
and more since the past few decades, how a new myth of authorship is operative in full force
against the old one, not only in the more obscure academic publications, but in the cultural practices
of everyday life as well. A thriving DJ may not appreciate the finer points of poststructuralist
philosophy, but s/he is living proof that poststructuralism pointed in the right direction. The new
myth of authorship and creation is not a myth of the author it is a myth of the reader, or rather, of
the translator.
The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the main arguments for a radical reconsideration of
the roles of author, translator and reader, with a focus on the implications of this debate for
translation studies. In other words, I want to briefly expose how the new myth of authorship has
transformed the theory and practice of translation. Such aim needs a space that this paper cannot
possibly cover, so I do not intend to give a thorough account of the matter. Rather, I will give here a
broad perspective, by reviewing in a concise manner some of the main voices from various fields
(literature, translation studies, philosophy and art history) that, all through the 20th century, have
contested the traditional view on authorship, creating a new myth that is now operative in many
areas of culture, but that is especially relevant when considering the current outlook in translation
studies.
The paper is made up of three parts, a division that is partly chronological and partly thematic. In
the first part, I will focus on discourse about translation before the 90s; all through the 20th century,
the well-established myth of authorship began to shake though timidly under the inquiry of
several writers, translators and translation scholars who planted the seed for a new poetics through
the reorientation of translation theory towards the target pole. In the second part, I will review what
could be called the Derridean turn in translation studies: the rise in the 90s of translation theories
and practices which drew heavily from poststructuralist philosophy taking into account the
concepts of differance and the death of the author and that, incidentally, also called for a
politicization of translation, their common aim being a rebellion against the power of the author and
the violence he exerts, be it through patriarchy or colonialism. Finally, in the third part I will shift
the focus away from translation theory to consider the matter of authorship from the perspective of
art history; the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, with his interpretation of Western culture as a culture of
postproduction, will be valuable not only for a better understanding of the new myth of authorship,
but also for reflecting on translation as an art.

1. Early criticism of source-oriented translation

As stated above, this section examines early disagreement with the deep-rooted conception of
translation as a source-oriented activity that hence produces texts of a secondary order. Systematic
research on translation only started to develop in the 50s, with increasing interest for this discipline
on the part of linguists; thus, before that decade and even after most of the thinkers who wrote
about translation took for granted the elements of the traditional view on authorship. Widespread
examination of the old myth took flight with the foundation of the field of translation studies in the
70s; then, in the following decades, translation theories blossomed and expanded. In this section, I
want to review the writers whose work announced the subsequent blossoming of the discipline, and
that of a new poetics with a new role for the author.
Firstly, I must consider Walter Benjamin's theory of translation, as exposed in his essay "The Task
of the Translator". Benjamin himself a prolific translator and literary critic approached to
translation from the old poetics, and this shows in that he conceives translation as a source-oriented
activity2. His contribution, nonetheless, has proved to be highly influential in art and translation
studies.
In "The Task of the Translator" (Benjamin, 1923), which appeared as introduction to his German
version of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens, Benjamin puts into question the belief that translations
must faithfully reproduce the meaning of the original especially if meaning is to be understood as
information, and translation as a communication intended for a reader who cannot comprehend the
TT:
For what does a literary work "say"? What does it communicate? It "tells" very little to those who understand it.
Its essential quality is not communication or the imparting of information. Yet any translation that intends to perform
a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but communication hence, something inessential. This is the
hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard that which lies beyond communication in a literary
work and even a poor translator will admit that this is its essential substance as the unfathomable, the
mysterious, the "poetic"? And is this not something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet? 3

Benjamin argues that translations serve a higher purpose than expressing the ST's meaning in the
target language. This higher aim the true goal of the translator is to produce a TT that echos
the poetic form of the original in its language, not striving to imitate it or reproduce its meaning, but
2 "Translation is a form. To comprehend it as a form, one must go back to the original, for the laws governing the
translation lie within the original, contained in the issue of its translatability." Benjamin, 1923:254.
3 Benjamin, 1923:253.

rather supplementing it in a way that is unique to the target language. Translation would not be a
kind of pseudo-literature, but rather the only way humanity has to glimpse what Benjamin terms a
pure language. In every language as a whole, "one and the same thing is meant" 4; translation would
be the supplementation of a discourse in one language with a double in another language; even if
the new text has the original as its model, it does not say the same thing, but adds another
perspective, as it where, thus bringing languages together, in a relation that imperfectly resembles
the ideal of a pure language. In other words, according to Benjamin, translation is the means of
renovation of literary works, their afterlife:
For in its afterlife which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something
living the original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process. The
obvious tendentiousness of a writer's literary style may in time wither away, only to give rise to immanent
tendencies in the literary creation. What sounded fresh once may sound hackneyed later; what was once current may
someday sound archaic.5

As you can see, though Benjamin conceives translation as a source-oriented activity, and
proclaims the need for fidelity in translation (not imitative fidelity, but poetic fidelity), his theory
suggests that translation is not a secondary activity, but an art on its own right, and that TTs must
not be seen as pale versions of their original derivative products, but as the means for a
continuous renewal of literature and language.
Now that I have reviewed one of the earliest voices to question source-oriented, fidelity-driven
translation, I must leap forward to the 70s. Though translation was thoroughly studied as early as
the 50s by linguists, their approach was always source-oriented; they were obsessed with the
problem of untranslatability and equivalence which is another way of saying that they worried
much about fidelity to the source. It is in the 70s when translation studies is founded as a formal
field by James Holmes6, whose pioneering work fixed what he and other scholars of the time felt as
the proper aim and scope of a discourse about translation. Holmes and his group (which
prominently included Even-Zohar, Toury, Bassnett and Hermans, among others) were not only
concerned with identifying and naming their object of study their quest involved a radical new
approach to translation: a non-evaluative, non-aprioristic, target-oriented perspective: a descriptivist
turn, whose aim is to overthrow the source-orientated bias of the tradition. In the words of Gideon
Toury:
4 Benjamin, 1923:257.
5 Benjamin, 1923:256.
6 Holmes, 1972.

In the case of the traditional theories of translation (the ones which are essentially source-oriented) almost all
problems of teleology are excluded, at least in practice. The focus is, as it were, on the "origin" of translational
phenomena, while refusing to recognize that these phenomena are goal-directed. They study translation and
translations in "material terms", from the point of view of their production, but do not refer them to questions of how
they function to satisfy certain needs in the recipient pole, and how these needs and functions contribute to, or even
condition their mode of production, and, above all, their significance as distinct semiotic entities in themselves. 7

The originality of the descriptivists is that they incorporated the conceptual tools and impartial
spirit of structuralism to their discourse, all the while refraining from the sterile debates of
unstranslatability and the proper definition of translational equivalence, and ultimately calling for a
teleological reorientation of the discipline and a refusal of sentence-level analysis in favor of a
textual and even cultural anchorage of research. Thus, studying translations is no longer a matter of
comparing two utterances in different languages and determining to what extent the TT is a faithful
and equivalent rendering of the ST, rather it is about realizing the diverse forms, uses and status that
translations can have in different cultural systems:
When ones purpose is the descriptive study of literary translations in their environment, the initial question is
not whether a certain text is a translation (according to some preconceived criteria which are extrinsic to the system
under study), but whether it is regarded as a translation from the intrinsic point of view of the target literary
polysystem.8

Thus, thanks to the descriptivists, translation begins to be seen as an affair of the target pole; the
TT's use and reception in the target culture becomes more important than its origin; thinkers start to
look away from the original author's supposedly intended meaning to place at the center of their
reflection the relations between the translator and his audience, as well as the institutions and norms
that condition them.
To close this part of the paper, I want to consider Haroldo de Campos' cannibalistic approach to
translation, which represents an early proposal of what in the 90s would be a prominent tendency:
the rise of politicized theories of translation that put into examination colonialist ethnocentrism
between cultures, thus uniting the recently founded fields of translation studies and postcolonial
studies.
"Cannibalism" is a label that refers to a Brazilian movement in arts and literature, or rather to a
metaphor deployed by some prominent Brazilian thinkers to describe how a former colony such as
7 Toury, 1980.
8 Toury, 1980.

Brazil configures its cultural identity by a cannibalization of Western tradition. The origin of this
metaphor can be traced back to Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto Antropfago" (1928). In this
cryptic pamphlet, Andrade proposed the cannibalistic rituals of the Tupi people who ate an enemy
out of respect, eating only those warriors who had proved in battle to be brave and powerful as an
empowering image on which Brazilian culture might be framed and construed in its relations to
colonialist Europe.
In his latter works, Haroldo de Campos' theory of translation rejoins this concept of positive
cannibalism. His activity as translator and poet was intense since the 50s, when he founded with his
brother Augusto and other writers the concrete poetry movement. Even though he did not
incorporate cannibalism into his thinking until the 80s, de Campos had from the beginning a quite
unorthodox view, conceiving translation as a mode of rewriting, rather than a mechanical
reproduction of the original:
[...] la traduccin de textos creativos ser siempre recreacin, o creacin paralela, autnoma aunque recproca.
Cuanto ms repleto de dificultades, ms recreable, ms seductor en tanto posibilidad abierta de recreacin. 9

De Campos' most resonant ideas on translation are to be found in his short essay
"Mefistofaustian Transluciferation" (1982, the original Portuguese version was published in 1981),
where he discusses his own translation of an excerpt of Goethe's Faust. In this work, he draws
heavily on Benjamin's concept of translation as the articulator of a pure language. To Benjamin's
statement that translation has no muse10, de Campos adds that it has an angel a being not
Apollonian but Dionysian, a rebellious angel that does not strive for passive fidelity to the source's
content, but rather operates a complete transformation on its model, malevolently disrupting an
essentialist reading of the ST:
The goal [...] of any translation that refuses to serve a content submissively, that refuses to submit to the tyranny
of a pre-ordained Logos, is to break up the metaphysical enclosure of the presence (as Derrida would say): a
satanical enterprise.11

De Campos' interpretation of Benjamin announces both the poststructuralist and the postcolonial
turn of translation studies, for his approach to translation as transluciferation advocates a true
rebellion against the author who is to be cannibalized by the translator. This satanical revolt is
an attempt at decentering translation, thus freeing it from its anchorage in Western culture. Such is
9 From De Campos' "Da traduo como criao e como crtica", as cited in Lzaro, 2012:5.
10 Benjamin, 1923:259.
11 De Campos, 1982:2.

the innovative character of de Campos' proposal: as early as 1981 nine years after the constitution
of translation studies, and three years after Edward Said's Orientalism, the foundational work of
postcolonial studies, he weaved a discourse about translation that brought together both fields.
Moreover, the evident political aspect of his theory of transcreation the call for a liberating
cannibalization of Western culture contrasts with the descriptivist framework, which advocated a
more impartial approach.

2. Proliferation of poststructuralist theories and practices of translation

In the 60s and 70s, a new wave of thinkers from the fields of philosophy, psychology, linguistics,
social studies and literature, united in a common debt to structuralist concepts as well as in the
adoption of a critical stance towards structuralism, rose to prominence in the scholarly circles of
France and the United States, quickly gaining a reputation as the philosophical avant-garde of the
age. Poststructuralism, as represented by the works of Barthes, Derrida, Lacan or Foucault, was not
an organized school of thought but rather a general movement of writers with similar affinities,
whose

guiding spirit was to strip structuralism and other 20th century discourses of their

positivist/rationalist heritage.
In this section of the paper I will examine the boom of poststructuralist theories and practices of
translation in the 90s, and the relevance of this event in the shaping of a new myth of authorship. In
order to do so, I will first consider the concepts of differance and the death of the author, as put
forth in the works of Derrida and Barthes (respectively). Then, I will pass to review some of the
approaches that have stemmed from these concepts in translation studies; we will see that,
significantly, all these approaches are marked by a politicized attitude, advocating translation
practices that engage in a struggle against power be it the power of an old poetics, the power of a
colonizing culture or the power of patriarchy.
Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) has a central relevance in the debate that is
being examined in this paper, for it deals directly with the role of the author in traditional poetics
and sketches a new myth of creation to replace the old one. The death of the author is a metaphor
that Barthes uses not only to describe a historical event of modernity the realization that the
figure of the author must be discarded as source of meaning in a text, but also to point out what is
characteristic of the moment where a text is produced: the author dies, vanishes, and "writing
begins". In Barthes' words:
9

The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: [...] the Author is
supposed to feed the book that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same
relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born
simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in
no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text
is eternally written here and now.12

The refusal to accept the author as the origin of signification implies a denial of an essentialist
approach to meaning. Texts do not have a core meaning contained in them, but rather are spaces "of
many dimensions", where different systems and discourses intersect. As a text is only "a tissue of
citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture", we can never claim it to be original, or to
have a single, ultimate meaning. Thus, the death of the author is also the realization of the infinite
multiplicity of meanings in any text.
The natural consequence of adopting a non-essentialist approach to texts and rejecting
monolithic signification is the empowerment of the reader as a creator of meaning. Such an
empowerment is dangerous to well-established discourses:
Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world
as text) a "secret": that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological,
properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science,
the law.13

In translation studies, the delegitimation of the author means the end of source-orientation
altogether, along with its tenets of equivalence, imitative fidelity and invisibility. The roles of
author, reader and translator are blurred, so that all three are interchangeable in their functions and
equal in their "authority" over the text and its meaning no more authors or readers or translators,
for all of them are scriptors. If the death of the author is the birth of the reader, it is a fortiori the
birth of the translator, who is a privileged kind of reader: one that provides a possible reading of a
text and gives form to it.
Now we must consider Derrida's theory of differance, as proposed in his 1968 essay "La diffrance"
14

. As Derrida points out from the beginning of the paper, differance is neither a concept nor a word

rather, it is, on one hand, the very possibility of conceptuality, and on the other, a form where the
12 Barthes, 1967:4.
13 Barthes, 1967:5.
14 Here I cite the 1982 English version, translated by Alan Bass.

10

definition of word, "the calm, present, and self-referential unity of concept and phonic material", is
challenged. Differance is better understood as the strategy that Derrida deploys to argue in an
efficient and powerful way his view on the current state of philosophy. On a superficial level, it is a
response to Saussure's concept of difference, which is the foundational principle of modern
linguistics and structuralism namely, that all can be understood by way of structures or systems,
whose elements are functional, that is, defined in relation to the other elements of the system, thus
making the differences between elements the operative principle of the whole. On a deeper level,
differance serves to dismantle deconstruct the metaphysical language involved in ontology.
Differance is an assembled (non-)word, signifying in different modes and levels, in a way that
makes inoperative the opposition between signifier and signified. Discussing the Latin origin of the
root (differre), Derrida explains two of the possible senses of differance:
[...] one of the two motifs of the Latin differre, to wit, the action of putting off until later, of taking into account,
of taking account of time and of the forces of an operation that implies an economical calculation, a detour, a delay,
a relay, a reserve, a representation [...] Differer in this sense is to temporize, to take recourse consciously or
unconsciously, in the temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or
fulfillment of "desire" or "will" [...] The other sense of differre is the more common and identifiable one: to be not
identical, to be other, discernible, etc. [...] an interval, a distance, spacing, must be produced between the elements
other, and be produced with a certain perseverance in repetition.15

He also explains that the termination in -ance connotes, in French, the possibility of a present
participle diffrant suggesting a hesitation of the form between active and passive; furthermore,
the a in differance is not heard in oral speech, so that differance "belongs neither to the voice nor to
writing in the usual sense, [...] [it] is located between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil
familiarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they
are two". Derrida also underlines the fact that he does not privilege any of the senses and modes of
signifying that differance has, but rather wants to insist on its capacity to signify in all those modes
at the same time. Thus, differance represents, in a general way, a movement (though neither passive
or active) of temporal/spatial disjunction governing any language or system that, being intrinsic to
said systems, resists any reduction or systematization.
As you can see, differance, which comes to replace structuralist difference as the source of
meaning in a new poststructuralist epistemology, is very difficult to conceive of precisely because it
resists any opposition or systematization. By showing with one form to what degree the Saussurean
notions of opposition and difference are flawed, he also hints at a new whole aspect of reality
15 Derrida, 1982.

11

completely untouched by traditional epistemologies, or at least, only obscurely dealt with in some
of the works of Nietzsche, Freud and Hegel: the evasive character of differance as a principle not
only of human perception and knowledge, but of reality too, and the failure of philosophy to create
an ontological discourse that accounts for it.
But what are the specific implications of differance in translation studies? In the words of Karin
Littau:
[...] differance is the very term which signals not the opposition

between two terms, be it the opposition

between two languages, or two texts, but the shifting relations within each relation, and moreover, within "each
term". If a text is [...] a trace of other texts, itself a translation of other texts, [...] then a text cannot stand in a clear
relation of priority to any other, and a text and its translation cannot therefore stand in a clear opposition to each
other. [...] It follows therefore that the (non)relation between text and translation is never stable, since the shifting
relations, the tracery with other texts, refuse a simple static binary opposition, and therefore also defer the very
possibility of any clearly demarcated borders or distinctions between them. 16

Just as Barthes' death of the author puts the original writer and the translator at the same level,
delegitimating the author's claim to authority itself to any real power over the text, Derrida's
differance blurs the opposition between ST and TT, making them both equal in their status of links
in the infinite chain of discourse, where origin ceaselessly escapes from any determination, or in
other words, where meaning is constantly and inevitably deferred.
The poststructuralist contribution to translation studies does not end here, but this short review of
the ideas of differance and the death of the author must suffice as theoretical framework, as I do not
have much space here to develop on this topic.
As I said above, the approaches to translation that stemmed from poststructuralism are similar in
that they call for an active engagement in a political struggle against power the main difference
being what kind of power this struggle is aimed at: the power of an old poetics of translation, the
power of a colonizing culture, or the power of patriarchy.
Firstly, I must consider Lawrence Venuti's foreignizing translation, which he proposed in his
1995 book The Translator's Invisibility as a form of resistance against the old poetics of translation.
As the title indicates, this work deals with the well-established principle of invisibility in
translation: the idea that TTs have quality insofar as they read fluently in the target language and
conform to the values and norms of the receiving culture. In Venuti's words:
Anglo-American culture [...] has long been dominated by domesticating theories that recommend fluent
16 Littau, 1997:82.

12

translating. By producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence
when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to English-language values, reducing if
not simply excluding the very difference that translation is called on to convey. 17

Venuti recalls and develops Schleiermacher's opposition between domesticating and foreignizing
strategies in translation. A domesticating strategy produces TTs that read as if they were produced
by the target culture, all the while masquerading as an objective and equivalent rendering of the ST
and implicitly positing the universal character of the target culture's values. The domesticating
strategy privileges semantic equivalence, that is, the procedure of not following closely the ST's
literal form and syntax, but rather trying to reproduce the ST's supposed essential meaning through
forms idioms and phraseology that are proper to the target culture. On the contrary, a
foreignizing translation seeks to make evident the cultural difference of the ST through a literal
rendering of its syntax and lexical units, thus producing a TT that defies the target culture's forms
and values and that challenges an essentialist approach to the ST:
The "foreign" in foreignizing translation is not a transparent representation of an essence that resides in the
foreign text and is valuable in itself, but a strategic construction whose value is contingent on the current targetlanguage situation. Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the
cultural codes that prevail in the target language. In its effort to do right abroad, this translation method must do
wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience choosing to translate a
foreign text excluded by domestic literary canons, for instance, or using a marginal discourse to translate it. 18

Instead of erasing the cultural differences of the ST, a foreignizing strategy sets them forth in the
TT to enforce "an alien reading experience". Instead of producing a fluent TT where the translator's
work is invisible thus delivering to the reader the narcissistic experience of diluting what is
culturally other in familiar stereotypes, a foreignizing strategy loudly proclaims the inbetweenness of any translation, and the power the translator has to resist the old poetics by making
himself or herself visible.
A similar preference for literal translation as strategy of resistance is affirmed in the work and
activity as translator of Gayatri Spivak an Indian writer, best known for translating Derrida's Of
Grammatology into English. Spivak is regarded as one of the main postcolonial theorists, though
her approach and contribution cannot be reduced to postcolonial studies, as she can also be
considered a poststructuralist, marxist or feminist philosopher..
17 Venuti, 1995:21.
18 Venuti, 1995:20.

13

In "The Politics of Translation" (1992), Spivak denounces how Western translations of texts in
Third World languages are invariably translated using domesticating strategies; all the resulting TTs
sound and read the same, thus reducing the diversity of non-Western culture into a homogeneous,
orientalized text where the universality of Western values and forms are given legitimacy:
[...] all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a
woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan. The rhetoricity of
Chinese and Arabic! The cultural politics of high-growth, capitalist Asia-Pacific, and devastated West Asia! Gender
difference inscribed and inscribing these differences!19

Once again, what is here put into question is semantic equivalence as translating strategy
along with text essentialism and the need of fidelity. And once again, the suggested solution is
literal translation, much in Venuti's manner. For Spivak, literality in translation is a way of
surrendering to the ST's author not a surrender to the author as "intending subject", but rather a
surrender to that which is different in the author, the ST's "linguistic rhetoricity". This surrender
is only possible if the translator has a great knowledge of the source culture's literary landscape, so
that he or she may adopt a position of intimacy towards the ST. In Spivak's words:
[...] the task of the translator is to surrender herself to the linguistic rhetoricity of the original text. Although this
point has larger political implications, we can say that the not unimportant minimal consequence of ignoring this
task is the loss of "the literarity and textuality and sensuality of the writing" [...] I have worked my way to a second
point, that the translator must be able to discriminate on the terrain of the original. [...] The translator has to make
herself, in the case of Third World women writing, almost better equipped than the translator who is dealing with the
western European languages, because of the fact that there is so much of the old colonial attitude, slightly displaced,
at work in the translation racket.20

Finally, to close this section, I must consider Lori Chamberlain's feminist theory of translation. In
the past decades, gender studies has proved to be a fertile perspective from which to approach
translation, and Chamberlain's very influential "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" (1988)
is a good example of the feminist contribution. In this paper, she exposes how patriarchal gender
roles and the social norms that stem from them shape the metaphors deployed by traditional
discourses about translation. Chamberlain starts by evoking an idiom belles infidles where
this metaphoric conceptualization of translation is perfectly evident:

19 Spivak, 1992:400.
20 Spivak, 1992:405.

14

[...] like women, the adage goes, translations should be either beautiful or faithful. [...] For les belles infidles,
fidelity is defined by an implicit contract between translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or
author). [...] the "unfaithful" wife/translation is publicly tried for crimes the husband/original is by law incapable of
committing. This contract, in short, makes it impossible for the original to be guilty of infidelity. Such an attitude
betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity and translation; it mimics the patrilineal kinship system where
paternity not maternity legitimizes an offspring. 21

Commentating a wide array of texts from different moments of history, Chamberlain traces the
various manifestations of this gender metaphor, which, in the manner of cognitive theorists of
metaphor, could be named TRANSLATION as PATRIARCHAL MARRIAGE. Chamberlain finds
that there are, broadly speaking, two variations of the metaphor. In one of them, the ST is
conceptualized as a maiden whose chastity must be preserved or seduced, so that the translator
represents or replaces the original author as the legitimate father of the offspring (the TT). In the
other version of the metaphor, lawful paternity of the offspring (authorial legitimation of the TT) is
obtained by the translator through a profound respect to the wife as mother that is, the mother
tongue, the target language. This imperative need of protecting the mother's dignity at all costs
justifies the exertion of violence on the source culture and its language in other words, it justifies
the domesticating strategy.
In order to resist and dismantle the patriarchal poetics of translation, Chamberlain endorses the
subversive strategies proposed by feminist translators such as Suzanne Jill Levine, who, in her
translation of Cabrera Infante's La Habana para un infante difunto and its preface, explicitly
defends infidelity towards the original author's misogynistic bias. According to Chamberlain, such
strategies allow for a liberation of translation, which would cease to be a reproductive activity to
become an autonomous form of rewriting.

3. Artistic authorship in the age of postproduction

I have already showed that there are many translators and translation theorists that endorse a new
poetics of authorship and new strategies stemming from it visibilization and politicization of the
translator, foreignization (strategic literality) in translation, highlighting of cultural difference, and
unabashed infidelity to the original author. Now, I want to point out that these theories and
practices are part of a broader debate concerning not only a change in the poetics of literature and
translation, but also a change in the poetics of art and "creation" (though this word is barely
21 Chamberlain, 1988:315.

15

appropriate anymore) in a general sense. Therefore, let us now look away from the field of
translation studies to consider the matter of authorship from the perspective of the visual and
performing arts, so that we may gain a broader vision of the issue at hand.
In my discussion of contemporary art, I will follow Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction (2003),
where he describes an aesthetic turn that took place in the last decades of the 20th century: the end
of the artist as speaker (metteur), the end of the museum exhibition as the "happy ending" of
works, and the end of the audience as ecstatic consumer. In other words, the West has witnessed the
end of the Romantic aesthetics (announced by the avant-gardes nearly a century ago), according to
which the artist was necessarily a genius who contributed to the progress of art by out-doing
existing works, while the audience was left no other role in the process but to discriminate between
high and low art, and admire intensely the former. This aesthetics is now inoperative, in light of a
new way of "creating" art postproduction and a new morale of authorship the free usage of
forms.
In Postproduction, Bourriaud traces the origin of this aesthetic turn to Duchamp's readymades:
industrial or anodyne objects that became works of art by virtue of being selected by the artist,
altered (or not) and presented to the public; probably the most famous readymade by Duchamp is
Fountain (1917), a common urinal that was simply rotated and signed "R. Mutt". One of the
variations of the concept is what Duchamp called a reciprocal readymade: a work of art used as an
everyday object, for example, "un Rembrandt utilis comme planche repasser" 22. With the notion
of readymade, Duchamp is already advancing one of the main themes of 20th century art: the idea
that works do not have meaning in themselves, but only in their use and in the context of that use.
This idea was further developed by the Situationist International (active from 1957 to 1972), a
movement of artists and political theorists who advocated what Bourriaud terms "un usage politique
du readymade rciproque"23 in their marxist aesthetics of dtournement (which can be translated as
"highjacking"). In Mode d'emploi du dtournement (1956), Guy Debord explains this aesthetics:
Dans son ensemble, l'hritage littraire et artistique de l'humanit doit tre utilis des fins de propagande
partisane. [...] Tous les lments, pris n'importe o, peuvent faire l'objet de rapprochements nouveaux. [...] Tout peut
servir. Il va de soi que l'on peut non seulement corriger une uvre ou intgrer diffrents fragments d'uvres
primes dans une nouvelle, mais encore changer le sens de ces fragments et truquer de toutes les manires que l'on
jugera bonnes ce que les imbciles s'obstinent nommer des citations.24

This manipulation of the tradition was to serve the political goal of fighting capitalism and
22 Duchamp, as cited in Bourriaud, 2003:32.
23 Bourriaud, 2003:32.
24 Guy Debord, in Mode d'emploi du dtournement (1956), as cited by Bourriaud, 2003:31.

16

destroying its cultural institutions. Thus, there cannot be a situationist art, but a situationist use of
forms, aimed precisely at the abolition of all art.
According to Bourriaud, contemporary artists constantly use the techniques of readymade and
dtournement, although they do not necessarily give them a political meaning they do not aim at
the destruction of art. Moreover, dtournement is not just practiced by the most radical avant-garde
artists: it is the defining trait of much of today's music. As Bourriaud points out in the following
passage, the rise of sampling-based electronic music has used dtournement to the point of
banalizing it:
Alors que les rcentes tendances musicales ont banalis le dtournement, les uvres d'art ne sont plus perues
comme des obstacles, mais comme des matriaux de construction. N'importe quel DJ travaille aujourd'hui partir de
principes hrits de l'histoire des avant-gardes artistiques: dtournement, readymades rciproques ou aids,
dmatrialisation de l'activit.25

The DJ is seen by Bourriaud as the finest example of the postproductive turn of culture: an
individual who, wittingly or unwittingly, with militant intent or not, enacts the collapse of the old
morality of forms. By selecting existing works of music and unabashedly adapting them to suit their
specific needs, DJs act in accord with the notions of intertextuality and the death of the author
developed by the poststructuralists. For what is a DJ, someone who listens to music, or someone
who produces music? Both activities are indistinguishably intertwined in deejaying, effectively
dismantling the opposition between speaker and hearer, author and audience. And the same goes for
the opposition song-cover, or composition-interpretation (which is very much like the relation
between ST and TT). To illustrate this, let us consider a common occurrence: a musician edits
existing samples into a song; then, this song is remixed by a DJ, and then this DJ's version is further
remixed by another DJ, or assembled as part of a session. How can we claim that any of the
versions of the song is more original than the others, when the first version the "original" was
already made up of samples?
The DJ perfectly realizes, then, for Bourriaud, the strategies of dtournement that are
characteristic of contemporary art. This is especially evident in passages of Postproduction where
Bourriaud compares the techniques of some artists from the 90s to the procedures involved in
deejaying:
Lorsque le cross fader de la table de mixage est au milieu, les deux morceaux sont jous ensemble: Pierre
25 Bourriaud, 2003:33.

17

Huyghe prsente cte cte une interview avec John Giorno et un film d'Andy Warhol. Le pitcher permet de
contrler la vitesse du disque: 24 Hour Psycho de Douglas Gordon. Toasting, rap, talk over: Angela Bulloch double
la piste sonore du film Solaris d'Andrei Tarkovski. Cut: Alex Bag enregistre des pasages de programmes de
tlvision; Candice Breitz isole de courts fragments d'images et les met en boucle. Playlists: pour leur projet
commun Cinma Libert Bar Lounge (1996), Douglas Gordon proposait une slection de films censurs au moment
de leur sortie, tandis que Rirkrit Tiravanja construisait autour de cette programmation un cadre convivial. 26

This eloquent analogy between DJ culture and postmodern art is deployed by Bourriaud to insist
on the fact that the manipulation of existing material is not the rare whim of eccentric artists who do
not know what to do anymore, but the everyday practice of individuals who need not know
anything about art, high or low. The mass access to technology and culture that characterizes
postmodernity allows any individual (at least in the First World) to select, edit and reprogramme
contents and share them for free in the internet to a potential audience of millions. Memes are only
viralized collages, websites and blogs are nothing else than inter/hyper-textual repositories of links,
and YouTube videos are frequently not original clips, but mashups or compilations of existing
images and sounds. Today, anyone with a computer can record a song without knowing how to play
a single note of music, and anyone can make a movie without a film crew. Postproduction is not an
isolated cultural practice, but the underlying principle of much of today's culture. Thus the passive
contemplation of an art handed out by the author-genious has given way to the free usage of forms:
Le consommateur extatique des annes quatre-vingt s'efface au profit d'un consommateur intelligent et
potentiellement subversif: l'usager des formes. [...] Le producteur n'est pour le producteur suivant qu'un simple
metteur, et tout artiste volue dsormais dans un rseau de formes contigus qui s'embotent l'infini. Le produit
peut servir faire uvre, l'uvre peut redevenir un objet: une rotation s'instaure, dtermine par l'usage que l'on fait
des formes.27

If the aesthetics of the free use of forms is operative in the performing and visual arts, it is a fortiori
operative in the art of (re-)writing. Translation at least literary (or should I say non-mercenary)
translation must be understood as a form of postproduction, and as such, it must be fully
inscribed in the new aesthetic paradigm. Much like deejaying, translation exploits and displaces
existing material, thus tying meaning to context and not to origin/essence. Just like the DJ, the
translator is a medium that occupies a place of in-betweenness: neither an author nor a
reader/hearer, but both: not producing an original and definitive object nor a secondary and
derivative one, but merely providing a link in the infinite chain of language.
26 Bourriaud, 2003:34-35.
27 Bourriaud, 2003:35-36.

18

CONCLUSION
In these pages, I have given a short account of the main arguments for a dethronement of the author
as source of stable meaning, and of the implications that this dethronement has for translation
studies. Let me now retrace the line of my discourse from the beginning.
I started by reviewing some of the thinkers that pointed out, before the 90s, the faults of the old
poetics of translation, advancing the ideas that would shape the more recent translation theories and
practices: 1) TTs are not secondary nor derivative products, but an autonomous form of rewriting. 2)
The source-oriented conceptualization of translation masks the fact that all translation is a
transformation or manipulation that serves the needs of the target culture and conforms to its norms
and poetics. 3) The ideal of semantic equivalence is hindering for the translator-artist; s/he must
break free from the imperative of fidelity through an abusive and strategic infidelity.
With the popularization in the 80s and 90s of poststructuralist philosophy, along with the rise of
new cultural practices such as deejaying that enacted the avant-garde strategy of dtournement, a
new myth of "creation" became operative: the author died and the reader, or rather, the scriptor, was
born. The age of hypertextual postproduction began. This aesthetic/epistemological turn can be
summed up in the following notions: 1) Meaning is not stable, it is not contained intrinsically in the
text/form, it is not the essential expression of the author's soul; rather, meaning is multiple and
arises from each particular use or reading of the text/form, and from the context where this use takes
place. 2) A text/form is a space of many dimensions, and its tracery with other texts/forms blurs its
defining boundaries; thus texts/forms cannot be conceived of as stable, isolated entities, but rather
must be seen as nodes of an inter/hyper-text.
The practices of translation that originated from this new poetics all share a political goal: the
empowerment and visibilization of the translator, who must engage in an active struggle against the
silencing of difference (be it linguistic, cultural, or gender difference). As we saw, the strategies
upheld by these translators are foreignization (strategic literality) in translation, highlighting of
cultural difference, and infidelity to the original author. In short, these militant translators have
realized that they can and must freely manipulate STs in order to liberate translation from the old
poetics, from ethnocentrism, and from patriarchy.
Though this political turn is very promising and represents an effective first attempt at
incorporating the death of the author and the epistemological logic of differance into translation
studies, I would like to end this paper by suggesting that there is much to be done to fully develop a
19

theory and practice of translation that implements the aesthetics of postproduction. The political
emphasis or should I say obsession of the poststructuralist translators is for me reminiscent of
the situationist praxis of using dtournement to abolish capitalist art; much like the situationists,
Venuti,

Spivak

and

Chamberlain

advocate

highjacking

techniques

to

abolish

Western/capitalist/patriarchal translation. Their priority is to develop translation strategies that

might serve to resist power; they are only secondarily concerned with developing translation as an
art. I would say that this is because, as in the case of the situationists in the 50s, the old poetics of
translation is still too strong to refrain from fighting it.
If the aesthetics of our age is intertextual postproduction, the privileged mode of today's art is
rewriting: pastiche, parody, remake, readymade, collage, remix, etc. Translation, as the kind of
rewriting par excellence, has still to conquer the banal, non-political, everyday role that deejaying
holds in music; this will not strip the revolutionary potential out of translation, though it will I
believe dignify it as a mode of art, as a discourse that serves no one but itself. Translators must
not limit their potential as artists by assuming a political mission, but rather embrace the ethics of
postproduction the free usage of forms, beyond any ethics in order to discover and develop the
artistic nature of translation: that which may be done by the tools of this language in-between
languages that cannot be done in "original" writing. Only then may we see the art of translation
bloom in its full glory.

20

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