Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/76

 borne out not only by the poetry that is being written and published today, but also by what is not being written and published. And one kind of poetry not being written and published very much today is poetry in translation. Yes, I’ve gotten back to translation at last. The fact that our culture (though certainly not all writers, and certainly not the best) has turned its back on artistic form as a form of artifice, as something false, and gotten stuck in its own conventions, has had a serious effect on translation, limiting it both in terms of approach and in terms of how much interest there is in it. For if translation is a matter of working in form (since the content is a given), then a lack of interest in form means a lack of interest in translation. The formlessness of contemporary writing and the contemporary translator’s fidelity to content over form are related phenomena that have, I believe, together led to the serious decline of poetry translation in America over the last three decades. I deal later in this book with the recent decline in English-language translation, especially among the younger generations; the focus on content is far from the only element involved. Another factor contributing to the modern focus on fidelity to content over form is the rise of a scientific perspective. As translator and translation theorist Lawrence Venuti told me, our culture is “tied to science, to concepts of objectivity, but they’re ultimately very naive. . . I’m singling out science, but I think economic exchange, the rationalization of the capitalist economy and what that does for the work process, all this has a tremendous impact on language, so that it privileges what I call ‘instrumental’ concepts of language, which have developed from the Enlightenment on. . . The electronic media have only exacerbated this by evaporating any sense of form and just focusing on the function of language, the communication of meaning. . .” J. M. Cohen has noted a similar relationship between our scientific age and translation: “Twentiethcentury translators influenced by science-teaching and the growing importance attached to accuracy. . . have generally concentrated on prose meaning and interpretation, and neglected the imitation of form and manner.”* Ironically, the most controversial English translation of the twentieth century is one that abandoned fidelity for science: James 76