Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/28

 Submission can also involve being a tourguide, taking people to a sight you've already seen and experiencing joy from knowing how much joy they are or, in the case of translation, will be taking in it. To translate does, after all, mean "to lead, to transport people somewhere."

The nicest side of submission involves the joys of devotion, admiration, service, humility. As the poet Ben Belitt put it, "there is a vast body of translation in which the enlightened disclosure of admiration is primary—a kind of substantive embodiment of praise." You know the feeling you get when you give a friend a book by a writer you admire, who's special to you? Imagine the feeling you'd get giving the book to your entire culture? Why "enlightened"? Because just liking a writer or book isn't enough; the giving has to be done in an enlightened manner, by someone who not only understands the work but has the skills to bring it effectively into English.

And the "substantive embodiment of praise"? This makes translation sound like a prayer. And it is. Think how readers relate to authors in a religious sort of way, that is, submitting to the author without the author's active participation. The translator is a very close reader, and there is no praise like spending a year or so translating an admired writer's novel or poetry collection.

Submission can also allow you to be intimate with someone who is, in some ways, superior—more talented, more experienced—someone who would not allow you to dominate him or even be his equal. The student-teacher relationship is the most typical example. This sort of submission allows you to grow both personally and professionally, to gain understanding, to find yourself and become something more. Some writers start out writing like Hemingway or Bishop; saxophonists play like Coltrane; painters try out a few of Picasso's periods. In most arts this is a conscious process, part of the education: copying and performing before painting and composing. Writing, however, emphasizes self-expression over copying, even if a great deal of copying goes on anyway. Translation allows a young writer to dispense with this expressive approach to the world and instead focus on form while expressing someone else. Why can't a writer, instead of writing like Woolf or Stevens, learn by writing Proust or Akhmatova?