Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/35

 this a step beyond sharing: proselytizing, pushing their own views or style in the name of an author or school of authors. An important example of the proselytizing translator is Ezra Pound. In the ancient, image-oriented poetry of China, he found something that fit his vision of poetry—or at least he saw it in that light—and he considered it part of his mission as an imagist poet to bring this poetry into English, to provide an ancient, foreign repertoire of imagist poetry to supplement what he and his circle were creating themselves. Although he was devoted to the poetry of China, it was actually his own poetic philosophy that he was proselytizing.

Another example is Stanislaw Baranczak, who has been translating into Polish the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. “The metaphysical poets are having an effect,” he told me. “They’re very modern. They’re used in literary debates.”

This is one of the things that is most wonderful about translation: that very old literature can be made modern, can be made to matter not as old literature, but as a way of changing the nature of current literature by introducing into it something totally new. Shakespeare was central to German Romanticism, and he remains a constantly modernized author all over the world. New is modern no matter how old the original is, especially if the translation is done in contemporary language, as is usually the case.

Affinity is controversial these days. It is a major critical stance to see poetry and fiction as consisting of “texts” that stand apart from their authors. Considering the increasingly biographical approach to authors in the popular media, including most book reviews, it is hard to notice that “the death of the author” is still alive. But in large parts of academia, authors are dinosaurs who, during the Romantizoic era, grew too big to survive. Or perhaps elephants stomping clumsily through life, valuable only for their tusks. In any event, the academics who believe in the death of the author see all literature as, in effect, “translation,” that is, making literature out of what is already there; after all, nothing is new under the sun. With the use of current cultural approaches, authors manipulate what’s out there into something that only seems original, but cannot possibly be. Such academics see actual literary translation as only