Last year I posted Kathleen Maris Paltrineri’s LARB interview with Damion Searls, the translator of Jon Fosse (see also this recent post); now the New Yorker has Max Norman’s take on Searls and his work (archived), from which I excerpt some bits I thought might be of interest:
Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation. More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is “something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” “There are no rules,” Searls writes, “only decisions.”
“Translation” wasn’t always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might “turn” (vertere) a text, or “render word for word” (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the “translation” of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like “to derive from.” The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true.
Norman goes into the history of translation in antiquity and the Renaissance, then continues:
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