Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/22

 done than what it is or how relevant it is to their other scholarly endeavors. Not that either of these two things are unimportant: it must have some value and must give them some sort of pleasure. But for these professors, that value and that pleasure lie in such things as the way the original is written, the freshness of the style, the cleverness of the structure, the wisdom of its ideas, the intelligence of the stringing together of words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, chapters, poems, the challenge involved in bringing all this into English.

This sort of professor, as well as similar non-professors, reads much more like a writer, analyzes much more like the person in the audience who wants to know how it’s done, and not so he can prove it isn’t really magic. This sort of reader is like that rare audience member who wants to know because it’s magic and he wants to be a magician, too. He wants to do to people what the magician does to them, wants to give them that sort of wonder; only he can’t pull it out of thin air. For this audience member, wonder is not about the magician surviving the swords thrust through the box, but about how realistically, or with how much panache, the magician does the trick. It’s all tricks, illusions, but there are tricks that are done conventionally and tricks that are done spectacularly and tricks that are just done so much differently they don’t look like the same trick anymore. This sort of reader loves this last kind of trick the best. And when he is also a writer— or translator—he wants to learn how it’s done so that he can do it with his own special twist. This sort of translator-reader is more like a great writer than most writers, because he’s not willing to settle for conventional writing. What he wants to translate, what he wants to share with people, are the one-of-a-kinds, what has not confirmed his view of the world, but rather has made him see the world differently. What he hopes will make readers see the world differently. These translators say, in effect, what professor-translator John Felstiner did at the beginning of a talk at Yale: “I’m brimming with things I want to share.”

These translators, when they are professors, are often not on tenure track, and they tend to produce more translations than the typical professor-translator. This, however, is slowly changing, as