Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/27

 The Intimacy of Submission

In our present intellectual culture there is probably nothing as unacceptable as submission. Submission is a willful decision to let oneself be victimized, to not only admit to the superiority of the powerful, but also to admit the powerful into one's life and to serve it.

In terms of writing, to be a translator is to suppress your own voice in favor of another's, to admit to the other's superiority, to spend your time worrying over the other's problems, manipulating the other's images and characters, expressing the other's vision and ideas. It is to become nothing but a spokesperson for this other writer, when you could otherwise be creating your own fiction and poetry, expressing your own self.

Put this way, translation certainly sounds like something that should be avoided at all costs. But it doesn't have to be put this way. First of all, submission is not all or nothing. We can, for example, be both submissive and dominant. A good example is a pecking order, where we are submissive to those above and dominant over those below. Or we can be submissive in some ways and dominant in others, even with the same person. This is the case with most people, although you'd never know it from all the pointing fingers.

There can also be rewards from submission that offset its costs. You can submit to someone whom you feel does or expresses what you would like to do or express in a way you feel you never could yourself. It is such followers who make leaders what they are. Submission can satisfy needs: the need to take care of people, the need to be good and dutiful, not with the poor or ill (where taking care is an act of dominance), but with one’s equals or superiors. There is a reason codependence is so prevalent.