Казакова Т. А. Практические основы перевода. English <=> Russian.-- СПб.: «Издательство Союз», -- 2001, -- 320 с.

Учебное пособие предназначается изучающим английский язык и входит в систему предметов, обучающих теории и практике перевода. Материал пособия направлен па освоение и развитие практических навыков перевода с английского языка на русский и наоборот. Основным принципом построения пособия, отбора и расположения учебного материала является создание систематического представления о способах, средствах и приемах преобразования языковых единиц в процессе двустороннего перевода. Пособие может быть использовано в рамках учебного процесса на факультетах иностранных языков, для обучения переводчиков, а также для самостоятельных занятий студентов, аспирантов, преподавателей английского языка и начинающих переводчиков.

ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ

Часть 1. Стратегии и единицы перевода

Глава 1. Способы перевода. скачать pdf

Глава 2. Единицы перевода и членение текста скачать pdf

Глава 3. Виды преобразования при переводе скачать pdf

Часть 2. Лексические приемы перевода

Глава 1. Переводческая транскрипция скачать pdf

Глава 2. Калькирование скачать pdf

Глава 3. Лексико-семантические модификации скачать pdf

Глава 4. Приемы перевода фразеологизмов скачать pdf

Часть 3. Грамматические приемы перевода

Глава 1. Морфологические преобразования в условиях сходства форм скачать pdf

Глава 2. Морфологические преобразования в условиях различия форм скачать pdf

Глава 3. Синтаксические преобразования на уровне словосочетаний скачать pdf

Глава 4. Синтаксические преобразования на уровне предложений скачать pdf

Часть 4. Стилистические приемы перевода

Глава 1. Приемы перевода метафорических единиц скачать pdf

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Альманах переводчика. Сост. Н.М. Демурова, Л.И. Володарская. Отв. ред. МЛ. Гаспаров. М.: РГГУ, 2001 (II). 325 с.

Три части "Альманаха" озаглавлены: "Теория перевода", "История перевода", "Практика перевода". Среди авторов — И. Бернштейн, автор классического перевода "Моби Дика", и Н.Демурова, автор не менее классического перевода двух "Алис" Льюиса Кэрролла. Среди героев — В. Набоков как переводчик той же "Алисы", М. Зенкевич как переводчик Эзры Паунда, А. Штейнберг как переводчик "Потерянного рая". Откликом на современную ситуацию в переводческом деле является сравнительный анализ пяти (!) переводов недавно еще не существовавшего Дж.Р. Толкина. Забытые страницы истории перевода раскрывают статьи Л. Володарской об архиве горьковской "Всемирной литературы" и о переводчике И.Б. Мандельштаме. В разделе "Практика перевода" помещены несколько экспериментальных переводов, представляющих теоретический интерес, - и не только на русский язык, но и с русского на английский (малоизвестная пьеса А.М. Ремизова). Для литературоведов, преподавателей, студентов и всех интересующихся теорией и историей перевода.

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ Теория перевода М. Гейм (Лос-Анджелес, США) О переводе дословном и вольном. Прагматический подход к теории перевода........... 9 скачать zip И. Бернштейн. Английские имена в русских переводах. Заметки переводчика ..... 20 скачать rar Н. Демурова. О степенях свободы. Перевод имен в поэме Льюиса Кэрролла "Охота на Снарка" ...................... 29 скачать rar А. Флоря (Орск). "Ангельский язык" В. Сирина. "Алиса и стране чудес" в интерпретации В.В. Набокова ............... 50 скачать rar A. Борисенко. Преемственность в переводе. Поэзия нонсенса: усвоение литературной формы ....................... 55 Г. Орлов. Попытка использования компьютерных программ в практике художественного перевода .................. 75 скачать pdf (64 K) К. Уиндл (Канберра, Австралия). Сенкевич за рубежом. Ранние переводы одного рассказа Генрика Сенкевича на английский, русский и испанский языки.......... 78 История перевода Л. Володарская. "Всемирная литература": переводчики и переводы (Приложение: Н.С. Гумилев. Переводы стихотворные) скачать pdf (144 K) С. Зенкевич. "Я почуял бурю..." Михаил Зенкевич - переводчик Эзры Паунда (Приложение: Эзра Паунд. Стихотворения)........... 109 Л. Володарская. Эскиз к портрету переводчика (Приложение: Мандельштам И.Б. Материалы к библиографии)........... 122 B. Перельмутер. Контуры "Потерянного рая" (Материалы к истории перевода) .... 137 Н. Семенова. Пять переводов "Властелина Колец Дж. P.P. Толкина ............ 159 скачать pdf (259 K) Практика перевода М. Гаспаров. Вопреки размеру подлинника (Мильтон, Донн, Томпсон)................. 201 А. Шарапова. Размером подлинника. Перевод поэмы Джеффри Чосера "Троил и Крисеида". Книга пятая (Вступительная статья Л. Володарской) ................. 222 К. Триббл (Оклахома, США). Перевод пьесы "Ясня" А. Ремизова (Вступительная статья К. Триббла)................. 297 Памяти Элизбара Ананиашвили...................... 321

Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Contributors: Lydia H. Liu - editor. Publisher: Duke University Press. Place of Publication: Durham, NC. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 165. 458

Alexis Dudden

Japan's Engagement with International Terms

The vast number of new terms in Japanese in the early Meiji period ( 1868-1912) invigorated dictionary crafters. Debates whirled over the viability of Japanese, and several thinkers suggested doing away with the language altogether. In 1872, educational reformer Mori Arinori pleaded with Yale professor William Whitney to help him create a new language for Japan because, as Mori saw it, Japanese was a "deranged Chinese" that was unusable in a modern nation. ¹ The inaugural journal in 1874 of the Meiji Six Society (Meirokusha) featured a lead article by the progressivist Nishi Amane in which he, too, advocated writing Japanese in "Western letters" (yōji).² Even nativist Kurokawa Mayori argued for a contemporary resurrection of romaji (the practice of writing phonetic Japanese in the Roman alphabet) from its sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary roots to make Japanese more accessible to foreigners.³

Other linguistic convulsions, though seemingly less extreme, obscured the energy involved in their creation and mediation. Political and legal draftsmen, for example, concerned with a new place for Japan in the world, translated the terms of international law into Japanese, formulating the substantive terms necessary to engage Japan in the politics of colonial control. ⁴ Writing treaties and conducting diplomacy was not a new practice in Japan, but performing these transactions in the terms of international law inscribed a definitive change. By making the terms normative in Japanese, translators and diplomats articulated a new method of intercourse with the United States and Europe while simultaneously reordering the vocabulary of power in Asia.

As part of the process of creating a new terminology of exchange, notice-

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able verbal incursions frequently displayed themselves in Japanese diplomatic texts. Many of these invasions stemmed from the Meiji regime's numerous new diplomatic relations with the non-Chinese-character (kanji) world. French and English were the languages of international diplomacy, and the Japanese government often conducted its relations in these languages because it wanted to participate equally with "the Powers."⁵ Such graphically apparent textual permutations intertwined with an even more jarring but less blatant transformation: the epistemological shift to the terminology of a sovereignty-based system of law. The Meiji refractors of international law exposed the inseparability of words and power. They created a lexicon that fluently enabled state aggrandizers to describe Japan's imperialist policies and wars as internationally legitimate.

When Dutch studies scholars Maeno Ryoka and Sugita Genpaku secretly dissected a corpse in 1771, they searched in Dutch texts for what they found lacking in Chinese books to aid in their experiment. ⁶ Understanding language as a technique for conducting scholarship was very much a part of the Tokugawa ( 16031868) intellectual environment. Several decades after their autopsy, however, quests for knowledge outside thekanjiworld gained a new dimension: to know those foreign regimes' mechanisms of power. Increasingly, Russians in the northern seas and lands challenged the Tokugawa regime's desire to harness Ezo into the shogunal realm.⁷ In the early 1800s, a Russian ship returned several Japanese castaways who brought a Russian world map home with them. The moment catalyzed the Tokugawa government's interest in knowing the "manynationed" world. "The West" was officially visible again, and the primary concern of many scholars became to describe the West-- particularly military and governmental structures-- as fully and as quickly as possible.

Beginning in the 1850s, Americans and Europeans demanded with threats of violence that the Tokugawa government sign treaties written in the vocabulary of international law. Terms such as "sovereignty" and "extraterritorial rights" appeared in the documents that representatives of the so-called firstrank nations brought with their gunboats. Almost a century earlier in the Enlightenment's wake, various European and American political theorists had begun reworking theories of jus gentium(law of nations) into a measurable discipline of positive law. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham renamed ideas of law and ambassadorial protocol previously explicated by thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Puffendorf, and François de Callières: "The word international, it must be acknowledged, is a new one; though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible. It is calculated to express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of thelaw of nations."⁸

Its explicators postulated international law as a science, an unattached body of knowledge that could be studied, taught, and expanded upon. In his 1836 tome Elements of International Law with a Sketch of the History of the Science, Brown University legal scholar and American diplomat Henry Wheaton asserted, "International law, as understood among civilized nations, may be defined as consisting of those rules of conduct which reason deduces, as consonant to justice, from the nature of the society existing among independent nations."⁹ Legal draftsmen conceived of the terms of international law in a discourse integrally woven into prevailing European and American theories of civilization, theories that posited the independent nation as the perfect form of political achievement. Although the authors of international law envisioned a limited field of practitioners-- independent nations constituted the legal protagonists-- they did not, by definition, render the field an already closed system. In his 1866 edited version of Wheaton's text, Richard Dana included a footnote articulating the ideal flow of this knowledge: "Already the most remarkable proof of the advance of Western civilization in the East, is the adoption of this work of Mr. Wheaton, by the Chinese government, as a text-book for its officials."¹⁰ The prevailing racialist worldview that informed ideas of "Western" superiority undergirded how the authors of an international legal system envisioned its discursive unfolding.

When American and European commodores and merchants brought their documents of legal exchange ashore in Japan in the 1850s, Western studies scholars (yōgakusha) working for the Tokugawa regime investigated the meaning of the terms embedded in these texts. As revolutionary forces seeking to overthrow the shogunate were decrying as treacherous the government's negotiations with "the barbarians," scholars rendered preliminary definitions in Japanese for terms such as "independence." They ascribed new meanings to extantkanjiand devised new compounds. Despite the revolutionaries' rallying call to "expel the barbarians," after the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate one of the first edicts by the new Meiji Council of State declared the nascent government's intention to conduct itself "according to international law" (bankoku kōhō).¹¹

For centuries, rulers of countries of what is now East and Southeast Asia had manipulated the influence of Chinese emperors either by sending envoys to engage in subordinate exchanges with them or, like the Tokugawa shogun, by actively degrading them to elevate the claims of their own rule. In the early eighteenth century, historian and shogunal advisor Arai Hakuseki's concern for the terminology in naming the shogun vis-à-vis the Korean king revealed a desire to place Japan on a par with China by negating reference to China. ¹² Nonethe-

less, whichever method of self-legitimation they performed, rulers conducted written legal exchanges with other foreign regimes in the region through the common currency of mutually intelligible kanji terms. The diplomatic agreements of harmony and friendship (washin kyōyaku) that defined centuries of protocol between Tokugawa and Yi rulers derived meaning from a shared formula of diplomatic discourse, the terms of which referenced a mutually comprehensible Chinese lexicon. Whether these contracts mentioned China or not, China's intellectual authority in the region was manifested through the continued use of legal terms derived from continental practice.

As part of the Meiji government's plan to describe anew Japan's place in the world, state aggrandizers decided to use a different legal discourse, a decision that intersected with the regime's overall aims. Japanese thinkers at the time reacted to what "the Powers" proclaimed as a "universal" form of mediation embodied in the treaties their envoys brought to Japan, and they determined that Japan would make use of these very forms. Self-determined universalistic ideas, including the concept of a sovereign state acting independently, were historically generated within the emerging dynamic of capitalist political economy. ¹³ The vocabulary of international law could not be separated, therefore, from the material conditions of industrializing capitalism. Nor, for that matter, were its terms meant to be distinct from such conditions. This discourse, like others generated within the capitalist dynamic, worked to render the new conditions of the social order normative and legal. In Japan, too, the Meiji internationalists rendered terms such as "sovereignty" and "independence" commonplace. By doing so, they reordered the intranation machinations of power in Asia for the twentieth century. Writing international law into Japanese was not simply an instrumentally responsive means to prevent Japan itself from being described in colonial terms. Rather, rendering the terminology of international engagement in Japanese reveals how the Meiji regime envisioned itself as a full participant in the industrializing, mass militarizing, nationalizing world.

Significantly, although the Japanese government made the terms of international law the new vocabulary of power within Asia, the science was first introduced to the kanjiworld in China. In 1862, bureaucrats at theZongli yamen, the office established by the Qing court to cope with the dramatic incursion of Europeans and Americans in China, began to read parts of Henry WheatonElements of International Law. The following year, Anson Burlingame, the American minister to China, introduced his missionary friend William Martin to members of theZongli yamenbecause Martin had been working on a Chinese translation of Wheaton's text. William Alexander Parsons Martin, a missionary from Indiana, later recorded this moment: "The Chinese ministers expressed

much pleasure when I laid on the table my unfinished version of Wheaton, though they knew little of its nature or contents." ¹⁴ Overall there was mild interest in the book among the Qing officials who were on good terms with Americans and Europeans, but they did not suggest using these different laws with their different terms for relations with other Asian governments. A copy of Martin's Chinese translation first reached Japan in 1865 and was republished several times there in different synopses and translations. In 1871, the Meiji government adopted the text that Shigeno Yasutsugu rendered into Japanese from the first parts of Martin's Chinese version of Wheaton as the official reference on the science. Similar to organizing an industrial fiscal policy and devising a conscript army, incorporating international law into its worldview meshed with the Meiji leaders' aspirations to remake society and Japan's place in the world.

Whether the scholars and theorists who fashioned Japanese terms for the vocabulary of international law redefined existing kanjior coined new combinations, they did not throttle their initial efforts by worrying if the Japanese renderings fully captured the original French or English or German. My inquiry is, therefore, fundamentally not concerned with origins. I am not proposing to discover singular moments when specific terms of European political thought were finally translated into Japanese in order to rectify the work of these translators and scholars.¹⁵ Approaching translation from such a perspective often leads to discussions of mistranslation. And, although departures along these lines can produce rich essays about a particular language's past, they run the risk of doing battle with a universal language-- a pre-Babelian ur-lexicon.¹⁶ The mistranslation approach assumes an eventual correct translation, and it also effaces the productivity of meaning that preliminary renderings wrought. I am concerned instead, therefore, with how a particular vocabulary of power became "legitimate speech."¹⁷

Debates about Japanese renderings for abstract conceptual terms emerged as Western studies developed into a discipline and original texts became increasingly available. The renowned legal scholar Mitsukuri Rinsho alluded to this moment when he spoke at the opening ceremony of the fall term at the Meiji School of Law in Tokyo in 1887, particularly recalling his frustration at not having a book for his studies:

My grandfather was the Dutch studies scholar Mitsukuri Genpo, and ever since I was a little boy I also did Dutch studies. . . . Towards the end of the bakufu rule, however, when English studies came into fashion, I switched from Dutch to English studies. I worked diligently at English, but because

I didn't have [a textbook]-- my school didn't have one either-- I did it very haphazardly. . . . I wanted to go to the West very much. ¹⁸

Mitsukuri described how he had accompanied the shogun's brother, Tokugawa Akitake, to the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867 and how that experience had qualified him as a French-language specialist to the new Meiji government:

I went to France. I became proficient at reading some French, and after a year I returned to Japan. The Meiji Ishinoccurred very shortly after that. I didn't have even a smattering of knowledge about original legal texts, but in the second year of Meiji ( 1869), the government ordered me to translate the French criminal codes. . . . I didn't understand them. . . . There were no annotations, no glossaries, no instructors.¹⁹

He spoke at length about his translating efforts and humorously admitted his confusion to the students in the audience:

There were, in fact, many parts which I didn't understand. And even when I did understand, I was at a loss because there were no words to translate the terms. The words right (kenri) and obligation (gimu)-- today you use these words with ease-- but it was a great strain for me to use them in translation. I didn't claim to have invented anything, however, so I wasn't able to get a patent. (Laughter. Applause.) Because the wordsraito(right) andoburigeshyon(obligation) were translated askenri gimuin the Chinese version ofInternational LawI took them, but I wasn't stealing anything.²⁰

Above all, Mitsukuri passionately remembered the activity of translating:

The following year ( 1870), a man named Eto Shinpei was working as a commissioner at the Council of State's Institutional Bureau. As soon as I translated two or three sheets of the civil code, he rushed them off. . . . Debates about words and phrases were all there was. There were no debates about any other matters. ²¹

Of course, Mitsukuri could be accused of hyperbole. The violent Conquer Korea Debates(Seikanron) of the early 1870s arose over a perceived terminological affront, making it a debate about words as well, but ultimately the arguments revolved around the dispossession of the former warrior class.²² Mitsukuri's reminiscence of the early Meiji period was concerned with an equally crucial dispossession: the dispossession of legal terms. His speech illuminated a moment in the creation of new terms, a vital aspect of Meiji intellectual activity. Mitsukuri's self-deprecating admonition to the young students who "use[d]

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these words with ease" brings into relief a landscape in which terms that totally transformed political interaction in Japan had become customary within the space of twenty years. Recently radical concepts such as "right" and "obligation" had fallen asleep in the language; they had become normative terms. ²³

Significantly, the first books in Japan concerning the practice of international law-- "the epitome of Western political thought at the end of the Tokugawa regime"-- appeared at this very time of "haphazard" language studies. ²⁴ In 1862, the Tokugawa government sent Nishi Amane and Tsuda Mamichi to Leiden University, hoping that the knowledge they gained there would help resurrect the fraying regime. Nishi returned to Japan in 1866, and the notes he took during Simon Vissering's tutorials on international law formed the basis for the compilation of hisInternational Law (Bankoku Kōhō), published by thebakufu's Bureau of Translation and Foreign Affairs (Kaiseijo) inkanbunin 1868.²⁵ William Martin's Chinese translation of WheatonInternational Lawhad, however, reached Japan in 1865. At the same time that Nishi Amane's text was printed, Tsutsumi Koshiji published a synopsis of William Martin,A Translation of International Law (Bankoku Kōhō Yakugi), the first fully Japanese-language description of the science.²⁶

Both Nishi and Tsutsumi understood the power involved in rendering alien terms meaningful. In the late 1850s, Nishi had worked as the bakufu's interpreter during the treaty talks with Townsend Harris, negotiating in Dutch with Harris's interpreter, Harry Heuskins. Tsutsumi, in the opening statements to his book, introspectively noted that "a translator earnestly searches for the spirit" of the teXt.²⁷ Nishi and Tsutsumi wrote general descriptions of international law, a standard genre in Western studies. Neither explained how to use the terms of international law in practice.

At the time, the shogunate's hold on power had weakened drastically, and envoys from several of the "first-rank" nations tried to align themselves with various regional daimyo, particularly those critical of thebakufu. The lords, in turn, wanted to learn for themselves the terms of international law that the envoys used. In particular, after British ships firebombed Kagoshima in 1863 to avenge Charles Richardson's death, the SatsumadaimyoShimazu Hisamitsu ordered Shigeno Yasutsugu, a teacher in thehanConfucian academy, to negotiate with British representatives. When the talks ended, Shimazu (an outspoken advocate of "expelling the barbarian") ordered Shigeno to translate a complete Japanese version of Martin Chinese rendering ofInternational Law.²⁸ Shigeno was a Chinese studies scholar by training. In response to Shimazu's order, in 1869 he produced a facing-page publication juxtaposing his Japanese translation with the Chinese version to which he added Japanese readings for some

characters as well as occasional sentence markers. Unlike Nishi and Tsutsumi, however, Shigeno did not attempt to describe the general features of international law nor its historical place in European thought. Rather, he offered working definitions in Japanese of the fundamental terms of international law. Shigeno's book elaborated how the terms of this law operated by explaining them with linguistic assistance from what had been the legal reference language in the region until that time. He did not include the Chinese version to imply that the new legal terms emanated from the continent. Shigeno made the terms practicable in Japanese by providing ready comparative explanations that were comprehensible to most educated members of his domain.

Factoring Legal Terms

In December 1905, during a discussion about privileges in Manchuria between Japanese envoys Komura Jutaro and Uchida Yasutoshi and Qing representatives led by Yuan Shikai, the Chinese officials raised concern over phrasing in a Japanese proposal. According to the Japanese minutes of the conversation, Yuan asked for clarification of the term "protest" (kōgi), as it was a term that "was not usually used" in China.²⁹ His interpreter Tang asked Uchida, "What is the meaning ofkōgi?" Uchida responded in English, "Protest." Tang replied in English, "Have you this word?""Yes," said Uchida. Tang inquired further, "Legally?""Yes," said Uchida, "legally and diplomatically." Tang responded, "We have not had it. This is a new word." Returning to interpreted Japanese, another Chinese minister ruminated, "The British Ambassador Mr. Satow likes this term." Yuan Shikai added, "I learned this term from Mr. Satow." Komura Jutaro mused, "It puzzles me to learn that you do not like this term." The minutes noted general laughter.³⁰ By the early twentieth century, the Japanese government conducted foreign relations with all governments, including China, in terms that Japan formulated in practice not only with European and American countries but within and for thekanjiworld as well.

Meiji state aggrandizers, legal theorists, and translators not only created a new Japanese terminology, they also put that vocabulary into practice. According to the theory of international law that the Meiji draftsmen were writing into practice for Japan, only perfectly "sovereign" entities governed themselves "independently" of foreign power. The taxonomy of political descriptions in international law also included "semisovereign," "dependent," "principality under the suzeraineté," "protectorate," "vassal," and "tributary" to classify states that could enter into a variety of treaty relations with other states. Most of the concepts had been rendered into a variety of terms in Japanese, but for Japan to

make treaties legally according to international terms, these words needed to exist outside dictionary encodings.

Japan's leaders created the opening for a new lexicon to accommodate new concepts. The Meiji government sanctioned Shigeno Yasutsugu version of Bankoku Kōkō, adopting it in 1871 after Shigeno had become a member of the Bureau of Education. Both Shigeno's bitextual version and Tsutsumi Koshiji's initial Japanese-only version ( 1868) used Martin's Chinese translation of Wheaton'sElements of International Law. English studies developed to the extent that other versions such as Uryu MitoraKōdō Kigen-- Ichimei Bankoku Kōhō Zensho( 1868) directly translated Wheaton's English original.

As early as the 1930s beginning with OsatakeTakeki, linguists and historians have compared the terms used in the Chinese and the Japanese translations. ³¹ Scholars generally have distinguished among the Japanese versions those authors who adopted the Chinese government's choice for the compounds and those who did not. Osatake, for example, drew notice to the "Confucian theoretical stance" in Uryu's use ofkōdō("official way") for "international law," differentiating it from Shigeno's reliance onkōhō. Analyses such as Osatake's offer insightful details of the various schools of thought participating on the discursive plane in which international law became Japanese. Unlike Osatake and others, however, I am focusing not on the degree to which several terms differed but instead on the act of rendering the terms into Japanese and putting them into practice. In the 1860s, the Qing regime chose not to make use of international law to write its policy with other Asian nations. Qing diplomats saw no need to so drastically rework the political order that continued to sustain the continental regime at the center of thekanjiworld. Conversely, the new Meiji government wanted to align its existing and not yet existing political relations according to these new legal concepts. As state theorists decided to use these terms for Japan's policies, Japanese policy writers and legal scholars created a new lexicon that displaced the norms that had long held. Ultimately, their collective action displaced the continent as the arbiter of power, determining in practice through revision and neologism what would eventually become a new political vocabulary in thekanjiworld.

On the plane of diplomatic technique, the purpose of Kuroda Kiyotaka's 1876 mission to Korea was to establish trade relations-- to wage war. Accompanying the sailors and soldiers, therefore, were numerous men of various ranks and functions from both the Foreign Ministry and the Bureau of Development (Kaitakushi). One of these men, Inoue Kaoru, appears in most discussions of the Meiji pantheon. Others, for example Moriyama Shigeru, are listed in histories as functionaries in the modern period.³² Some, like Urase Hiroshi,

appear only by happenstance: they were the scribes and translators. As Kuroda and his entourage waited to learn if they would be received in Seoul to establish new treaty relations, some of Japan's lesser emissaries had occasion to discuss aspects of the treaty the Japanese government sought with their Korean counterparts. On 2 February, Moriyama Shigeru, a secretary from the Foreign Ministry, wrote out the minutes of a conversation he had had that afternoon in Inchon with Yun Chasung, aide to the Yi court representative Sin Hon. ³³ Moriyama noted that Urase Hiroshi was present as interpreter.³⁴ In the full dialogue he remembered when he transcribed it, Moriyama wrote that he had stressed to Yun that Korea would surely incur the enmity of the "nations" (bankoku) should its government refuse to trade, and then he threatened Yun specifically with the wrath of Russia, America, and France.³⁵ Moriyama explained that only by establishing this treaty as an "independent" and "sovereign" country could Korea survive.³⁶

The confidence with which Moriyama recalled his words suggests the surety with which he might have uttered these new expressions of Japanese political practice. He wrote that he had said, "More than a fixed term 'emperor' (ko) or 'king' (ō), he is the sovereign (kunshu) of a country. The sovereign a country namely makes that an independent [country]. And when you call [the country] independent, both emperor and king have comparably equal rights (dōtōhiken)."³⁷ Moriyama wrote that Yun then asked how that concept would be written into formal state correspondence, and that Moriyama obliged by writing out the following equivalences for him:

	DaiNihonKokuKoteiChisho	ChōsenKokuōKeifuku
	ChōsenKokuōDenka	DaiNihonKokuKoteiHeika

According to the legal theory that the Meiji men were beginning to practice, only "sovereign States" [defined by Wheaton and made Japanese by Shigeno as entities that "govern [themselves] independently of foreign powers" ³⁸ ) could freely make treaties with each other. On the one hand, this moment between Moriyama and Yun reveals one informal way that the new terms were written into legal form. It also reveals the Meiji government's new objective of extracting Chōsen from itssadae(literally, "serving the greater") relations with the Qing court. The ongoing debate about whether the Meiji government wanted Chōsen to be "independent" for the fictitiously altruistic equation that measured "all sovereign States [as] equal in the eye of international law"³⁹ or whether it was for the sheer power politics goal of displacing the Qing as the dominant force in the region will remain trapped in its internal logic of

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nationalist pride and hatred. Members of the Meiji government formulated Japan's new state relations with the Korean government from their inception at these treaty negotiations in an entirely new vocabulary. Mirroring the terms the United States and other "Powers" imposed on Japan two decades before, the Meiji government legitimated whatever subsequent course of action it wanted to pursue in Korea according to the accountable mean to which the "Powers" subscribed.

During the more formal negotiations over the KanghwaTreaty, the Japanese negotiators inscribed Japan's new lexicon into official practice. The Meiji emperor's envoy Inoue Kaoru explained to Sin and Yun that the proposed treaty accorded with the larger international order, and although the terms were new to them, the treaty derived its legitimacy from this greater mean. According to the recorded minutes, when Yun asked to see the treaty, Inoue responded that the treaty he had was written in Japanese (kokubun) and that he would request a translation from the Bureau of Translation (Yakkan).⁴⁰ Inoue assured Yun that "this treaty makes your country independent [jishu] as well. It relies on the precedent of customary exchange among nations and is based on the just way of the world [tenchi no kōdō]." Next, the transcript credits the translator Urase Hiroshi with explaining the treaty "point by point," but Sin Hon responded by specifically requesting a kanbun text of the treaty.⁴¹ Quibbling began about whether it would be sufficient merely to attach a translation of the treaty to the final version, until Kuroda interrupted, reiterating Inoue's claim of the "precedent" of international law and "the just way of the world."⁴² Both Inoue and Kuroda's remarks may seem mechanistic, but their claims offer an indication that the Meiji men had located a new way to order their world that allowed them to define what they were doing as a departure from past practices.

The Meiji delegates explained the treaty's terms to the Yi representatives before and as they sealed the treaty. Sin Hon responded to Kuroda's assurance of the legality of the proposed treaty by saying, "Until now, our country has conducted exchange only with your country. We had no trade with foreign countries, and for this reason we are unfamiliar with the laws of exchange among nations [bankoku kōsai no hō]."⁴³ Despite whatever remained "unfamiliar" to the Korean men, two weeks later, on 26 February 1876, the representatives of the Meiji government Kuroda and Inoue sealed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with the Yi delegates Sin and Yun.⁴⁴ As only "independent" governments could initiate and conclude treaties with each other according to international law, the first clause of the treaty announced that "Chosen being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as Japan" (Chōsenkoku wa jishu no ho ni

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shite Nihonkoku to byōdō no ken wo hoyũ sire). I have quoted the official translation to show that the Japanese expressionsjishuandken wo hoyũwere used here to embody the concepts of "independence" and "sovereignty."⁴⁵

The terms with which the Japanese government declared Korea "independent" reveal contradictory tensions pulling at Japan's desire for power. Linguistically, the terms also reveal the hazards of using redefined kanjiwords to express the new concepts. The literal translation of the compound the Japanese government chose for the Kanghwa Treaty--jishu-- is "self-rule." The term in Korean (chaju) made sense in maintaining Korea within its sadae relations with the Qing, not the meaning the Meiji negotiators were trying to convey.⁴⁶ Japan designated Korea an "independent nation" because the Meiji regime was committed to writing all its foreign relations according to international law and only independent entities could contract legally.

Within the treaty that theoretically enabled Korea's "independence," however, the Japanese government impinged on that country's spatial boundaries. Korea's newly proclaimed independence enabled Japan to establish a colonial outpost on Korean soil. Article 10 of the Kanghwa Treaty introduced the even more "unfamiliar" international technique of extraterritoriality (jigaihō) to the Korean peninsula. Article 5 designated two new spaces (the treaty ports at Chemulpo [Inchon] and Mokpo) in addition to the area around the Sōryōkan in Pusan where Japan's domestic laws could be practiced legally inside Korea. In contrast to Japan's assertion of power, Article 3 of the treaty designated that for ten more years "official correspondence" from Japan to Korea would be written in Japanese with a Chinese translation attached, while Korea's communication to Japan would be written in Chinese. The Meiji internationalists were prepared to put the new terms of diplomatic exchange into practice within thekanjiworld. The Japanese government did not expect these terms to have currency in that region, however, until the Qing government acknowledged that the vocabulary had meaning in relations among countries within the region that had participated in its tribute order.

In 1882, after disgruntled and hungry Korean troops in Seoul killed about thirty Japanese soldiers and burned the Japanese legation building, Ito Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru consulted the French legal scholar Gustave Boissonade on how to respond according to the principles of international law. ⁴⁷ A decade earlier, the Japanese minister in Paris, Samejima Naonobu, had invited Boissonade to Tokyo to advise the Meiji government in drafting new legal codes for the new government.⁴⁸ Soon after his arrival, however, Boissonade's role broadened, and politicians and law students alike relied on him as an encyclopedia of

civilized and modern European legal practices. Boissonade re-

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sponded to Ito and Inoue's questions with a series of explanatory memos that elaborated the nature of relations between what were called unequal states. Ukawa Morisaburo, a student of French law, translated these essays, and his efforts offer glimpses at the lexical layers yielded by writing with the terms of the new legal vocabulary in the very documents that explicated the practices the words named. In his "Opinion Concerning the Chōsen Incident," Boissonade explained the rules of contracting with "semi-tributary states" (han zokkoku). In his translation, Ukawa juxtaposed akatakanaword spelling,shusurenti(transliterating the Frenchsuzeraintéfrom Boissonade's original), next to thekanjicompound,kankatsuken, to equate the term. In a separate essay of Boissonade's dated three months later, however,suzeraintéwas written intokatakanaasshũzurenute, andkankatsukenhad becomejōkuni no kankei(relations with a higher/superior country).⁴⁹ Other French words such as violation, réparation, andannexation, also were transliterated intokatakanaand printed parallel to thekanjicompounds that equated them. That there was not yet a "standard" term for "international" (still most oftenbankokuand occasionally the contemporarily preferredkokusai) underscores the newness of the concepts being used.

One of the reasons both Boissonade and his translator may have wavered in precisely naming Korea's place was that the concept of suzerainty was being used in a relatively new way among the "first-rank" nations at that time as well. In legal tracts throughout Europe and America, the term almost always appeared in its French form. Ito Hirobumi noted in his 1904 English-language memoirs that he had taken Hori Tatsunosuke's English-Japanese dictionary with him on his adventure to Europe in 1862: "We had only an English dictionary translated by Tatsunosuke Hori, before we went abroad. As there were very few who could understand English well at that time, many mistakes naturally found their way into this rare and costly book." ⁵⁰ Although Hori's splendid dictionary included equivalents for a variety of "sovereign" and "sovereignty" words, there were no entries for "suzerain" or "suzerainty." More significantly, perhaps, Inoue Tetsujiro, Wadagaki Kenzo, Kodera Shinsaku, and Ariga Nagao's 1881Tetsugaku Jii(Dictionary of philosophical terms), did not include the concept of suzerainty.⁵¹ Their dictionary translated a variety of names of political organizations and relationships including "ochlocracy" into Japanese and included "international law" asbankoku kōhō, but it left blank the suzerain relationship encoded in that law. These reference books, along with the jumble of scripts in the translations of Boissonade's 1882 notes, suggest the arena of possibilities-- even though several texts of international law had already been published-- for creating and using new words in something as seemingly normative as intranation legal vocabulary. The translators remain largely unknown,

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but the terms they factored and used precisely captured one of the intellectual fields that Meiji aggrandizers had chosen to order Japan's new government in the world.

Universal Referents

In a remarkable maneuver of what Ito Hirobumi liked to call "diplomatic technique" (gaikōjutsu), one that indicated a clear break from past methods, Ito formally negotiated the terms of the Tientsin Convention ( 1885) with Qing representatives in English. Ito spoke in a language radically different not only from what the history of contact between Japan and the continent preconditioned, but also one with which the governments of both countries contended to prevent exploitative commercial invasions of their respective polities. In short, English was not a comfortable choice for Ito to have made. However, English was the European language he best knew. By speaking English, the Meiji emperor's ambassador plenipotentiary resolutely displayed the Japanese government's desire to transform how power was defined in Asia. Had Ito negotiated the Treaty of Tientsin in Japanese and attempted to use the newkanjiexpressions for "independence" or "sovereignty," for example, the Qing negotiators could have challenged the terms as meaningless misinterpretations of thekanji's intended meaning-- as defined by the Qing. Articulating the same words in a wholly alien language allowed the terms of international law to retain their authority. From a power politics perspective, English wielded a weighty force. More important, Ito made it clear that the language in which the new terms were articulated did not matter so much as whether the negotiated treaty spoke the terms of international technique.

In the Treaty of Kanghwa with Korea in 1876, the Meiji policy writers had indicated that Japan's government intended to use legal concepts new to the tōyōworld (the "Orient") fortōyōpractice. Japan would continue, though, as Article 3 of the treaty stipulated, to attach Chinese translations to its correspondence to make its interactions comprehensible in that world. In the spring of 1885 at Tientsin, however, Meiji envoys mouthed these legal concepts to Chinese representatives in terms that further attempted to dislodge a larger lexical order. The need for the meetings arose from a diplomatic impasse over attempts to resolve what both the Meiji and Qing representatives repeatedly euphemized as "the latest disturbance" in Korea.⁵² Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru had failed to reach an agreement with the Korean king over the stationing of Japanese and Qing forces in Seoul, and, in late February 1885, Sanjos cabinet chose Ito Hirobumi as ambassador extraordinary to travel to the continent to negotiate what was arguably modern Japan's first disarmament treaty.⁵³ These negotiations resulted in a rare text prepared for the Meiji emperor. Ito Hirobumi'sReport (Fuku Meisho)was unusual not merely because it was a bilingual text (Japanese/English), but because it was largely the Japanese half of the report that was the translated material.⁵⁴ The author of this manuscript (most likely Ito Miyoji) created a playbook-like effect to the official report, transcribing the minutes of Ito Hirobumi's meetings as fluid dialogue and noting each meeting's end almost in a curtain cue with descriptions of how, for example, the men adjourned to a dinner party.

Between 3 and 15 April 1885, Ito and Li Hongzhang held six meetings in Tientsin in a variety of spaces including Li's official residence, the Japanese consulate, and at the Qing government's marine office in the foreign settlement. The report noted Ito's daring diplomatic technique in a single sentence at the beginning of the first day's script: "The Minutes of the Conversation that follows, as well as those of subsequent ones, were taken down in English and afterwards translated into Japanese by Mr. Ito Miyoji." ⁵⁵ Next, the men's words were recorded:

The Ambassador: (He spoke in English) . . .

The Vice-Roy: (He spoke in Chinese and his remarks were interpreted by Mr. Rahoroku in English.) . . .⁵⁶

Only on the first day (and the only time in the recorded proceedings) was there any indication that the Qing representatives had even acknowledged the Meiji envoy's maneuver. The text read:

Tht Vice-Roy: . . . I must ask Your Excellency to be patient and conciliatory, and not to cast upon me too much difficulty (smiling).

The Ambassador (to Rahoroku, the interpretet): I will proceed to make a general statement of the points of my negotiation, through my Chinese interpreter and so I will not trouble you for the moment.The Ambassador then spoke in Japanese and his words are rendered into English as follows . . .⁵⁷

Ito's action did not completely surprise the Chinese negotiators. They had been notified and brought along their own English-language interpreter. On the other hand, before this meeting, Chinese diplomats had not included English interpreters in negotiations with the Japanese; they either brought Japanese interpreters or no interpreter at all. The ingenuity of Ito's technique was further naturalized in this instance by his not dwelling on it, that is, by simply performing the negotiations in English and writing his action into practice. ⁵⁸

Ito Hirobumi clearly intended to conclude a treaty with Li that would

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read fluently with the Meiji government's new practice of international law. Throughout the negotiations, Ito invoked the term "law of nations" as a guiding referent in response to various points of contention. (Despite Bentham's efforts, this appellation continued to be used in English interchangeably with "international law" throughout the late nineteenth century.) Explaining the meaning of the second article in a draft of the treaty, for example, Ito said to Li: "It means simply the right of war which every independent nation enjoys. . . . Thus the present arrangement cannot affect in any way our right of waging war according to the Law of Nations. That clause may be modified thus: 'It is understood that the right of warfare according to the Law of Nations, shall not be affected.'" ⁵⁹ Unlike the representatives of the Yi court at the Kanghwa Treaty negotiations, the Qing negotiators could not and did not plead ignorance of these rules. After all, Shigeno Yasutsugu had composed what became the Japanese government's new textbook standard from the Zongli yamen's version of theElements of International Law. Throughout the negotiations, however, the Qing diplomats were insistent that the Japanese government recognize the Qing court's long-standing relations with the Yi regime. Li stated, for example: "There is a striking difference between the position of Japan and that of China towards Corea. To China, Corea is a tributary state and has the obligation to report to her every matter that takes place in her country. But Corea has nothing more than a treaty obligation towards Japan."⁶⁰ At Kanghwa, the Japanese delegates named Korea "independent," but at Tientsin the diplomats had not traveled with warships and had no stark displays of power politics with which to counter the Qing claims. The new legal terms that Ito wanted to write into practice inkanjito equate "Japan" and "China" in "independent" state relations with "Corea" had to be ignored or designated differently.

One of the very few discrepancies between the English and the Japanese texts of the Reportis telling, considering Ito's dilemma. The Japanese words equate the English expressions, but in the Japanese text, the author included the following parenthetical note: "The modifications in wording [included] changing 'Dai Shin Koku' (The Great Qing Realm) to 'Chũgoku' (The Middle Kingdom [China]) and deleting the 'Dai' (Great) from 'Dai Nippon Koku' (The Great Japanese Realm) in the first clause. . . . As there was no difference in meaning, this does not appear in the English written text."⁶¹ The author of this note was not devious. There is no substantial difference in the English meaning, and throughout the English version of the scripted dialogue "China" and "Japan" were used to designate the country names. Chũgoku is a different appellation for the entity of the continent, one that transcends dynastic labels without becoming entangled in the specific dimensions and relations of a legally diffuse

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but particular empire. The name, however, posits the centrality of the country vis-à-visrealms around it in its particular worldview. The term the Japanese wanted to use merely designated the regime's reign. Nonetheless, as a sovereign regime in the alien terms of international law, Chũgoku named an entity of similar composition to Nipponkoku.

The final treaty reads awkwardly in kanji. In both the Japanese- and Chineselanguage versions, representatives of the twodaikoku(great realms) sealed a treaty dated in the respective imperial calendars of each court, legalizing troop withdrawal between Chũgoku ( China) and Nipponkoku ( Japan) in Chōsen ( Korea).⁶² Noticeably, unlike the Kanghwa Treaty, in the Japanese and Chinese final versions of the Tientsin Treaty any attempt to name Chōsen as "sovereign" or "independent" was absent. In the English version, however, the version that Japanese diplomats might have hoped would be read by "Great Power" officials along with the English-language report of the negotiations, Ito and Li agreed to a treaty between the distinct "two Great Empires" of "Japan" and "China" with respect to a distinct "Corea" according to international law. No mention of "Corea's" independence was made, but neither was there any allusion to the still murky point of the Yi court's tributary relations with the Qing.

From a balance-of-power perspective, the treaty negotiations in Tientsin were not about words but about the net reduction of the number of troops in Seoul. Even so, Michel Foucault's insistence that the dispositifsof power-- those machinations of the elusive notion called power that make that notion productive rather than wholly repressive-- is vital here.⁶³ Ito Hirobumi's decision to negotiate the treaty at Tientsin in English in order to articulate the terms of international law indicates that the Meiji government was determined to define power in a way that broke radically with continentally ordered terms.

A decade later, the truce meetings at the close of the Japan-Qing War (18941895) revealed how the lexical maneuvering at Tientsin ( 1885) was transforming negotiations of power within the kanjiworld.⁶⁴ Not only were the meetings conducted in English again, but also each piece of correspondence Li Hongzhang wrote to the Japanese negotiators during the talks at Shimonoseki included an English-language translation. Mutsu Munemitsu's son, Horikichi, worked as an English-language translator in the Foreign Ministry and transcribed the minutes of the meetings between Ito Hirobumi and Li Hongzhang just as Ito Miyoji had done a decade earlier at Tientsin. Introducing the proceedings Mutsu wrote:

I was instructed by the Count to attend the meetings to take down the minutes of the proceedings which were conducted in the English language. Each

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day when the meeting terminated it was my duty to transcribe the notes I had made at the conference and submit them to the inspection of our Plenipotentiaries . . . the faithful reproduction of what occurred was my essential aim and I have endeavored to place on record all such words and phrases as were actually employed by the representative negotiators without paraphrasing them into a more literary form. In view, however, of the fact that the present work is the only authentic record in existence of these memorable negotiations I venture to hope that it will not fail to attach to itself some historical value and will also serve as a book of future reference for the Department. ⁶⁵

Perhaps because the peace treaty itself was the victorious document, different from the negotiations at Tientsin, Mutsu Hirokichi's labors were not bound into a report to the emperor.

According to the Reportfrom Tientsin, at the final meeting between Li Hongzhang and Ito Hirobumi, Li maintained that it was "customary with [his] Government that the Chinese text [was] prepared by [their] hands, leaving the preparation of the other text to the Plenipotentiary of the foreign Powers." Ten years later, on 30 March 1895 in Shimonoseki, however, Li and Ito sealed three different texts of a temporary armistice: Japanese, Chinese, and English. When a young Japanese man attacked and wounded Li later that same day and Li sent a note explaining that he would be absent from subsequent negotiations, he even included an English translation to that note.⁶⁶ Most noticeably, the Qing ambassador attached a complete English-language translation to his "vermilion paper" (shusho, i.e., official) response to the Japanese government's draft of the peace treaty.⁶⁷

An English text encoding the terms of international law became the legal referent for the peace between Japan and the continent. On 17 April 1895, as ambassadors plenipotentiary of their respective emperors, Ito Hirobumi, Mutsu Munemitsu, Li Hongzhang, and Li Qingfang sealed the protocol note attached to the final peace treaty between Japan and China. In doing so they confirmed a radical departure from centuries of legal contract in the kanjiworld. Article 1 stipulated that an English translation be attached to the final Japanese and Chinese versions of the treaty; Article 2 further impressed the import of that translation, announcing that "should any differences in interpretation arise between the Japanese and Chinese texts, we agree to sanction the aforementioned English version."⁶⁸ That the Qing government concluded treaties by the end of the nineteenth century with delegates from London or Washington (or any European capital, for that matter) in English could be argued (somewhat

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Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

1.	Mori Arinori letter to William Whitney, 21 May 1872, collected in Kato Shuichi and Maruyama Masao, eds.,Honyaku no Shisō;Nihon Kindai Shisō Thaikei, 317. In 1798, Honda Toshiaki bemoaned the impenetrability of Japanese because kanji were too difficult to use in foreign exchange. At the time, Honda still envisioned a double order of diplomacy: one within the kanji world and one without. The Meiji decision to reorder Japan's relations with foreign countries according to international law lexically collapsed Honda's distinction. See HondaToshiaki, "Kaihō Seiryō," in Tsukatani Akihiro,Nihon Shisō Taikei, vol. 44.
2.	Nishi Amane, "Yōji wo motte Kokugo o Kaku Suru Ron,"Meiroku Zasshi, no. 1 ( March 1874).
3.	See Kurokawa Mayori's grade-school primer Yokobunji Hyakunin Isshu. For a lavishly photographed and detailed, albeit cultural essentialist view (Nihonjinron), of these issues, see Kida Junichiro,Nihongo Daihoku Butsukan, Akuma no Bunji to Tatakatta Hitobito.
4.	See Timothy Mitchell's lucid analysis of colonial politics in Colonising Egypt.
5.	In 1874, the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Meiji government published its first English-language compilation of treaties signed between Japan and "the Powers." The preface to the fourth edition ( 1899) recorded the following printing history: "In order to afford an easy opportunity to consult the Conventional Arrangements regulating foreign intercourse of this Empire, a volume containing the Treaties and Conventions concluded between Japan and other Powers was first published by this Department in 1874; a revised edition was issued in 1884, with the addition of such Compacts

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as had been newly concluded or had undergone modifications during the interval, and the later publication was followed by a supplementary volume in 1889" ( Foreign Office, Treaties and Conventions between the Empire of Japan and Other Powers). I italicize the word "other" to emphasize that by 1899, the Meiji government considered Japan one of "the Powers." The texts were distributed to foreign legations in Tokyo, archiving the Meiji effort to render its foreign policy fluent in international terms.

6. The men referred to Gerard Dicten Ontleekundige tafelen( 1734), a Dutch rendering of Johann Adam Kulmus "Anatomiche tabellen" ( 1722).

7. See Brett Walker, "Reappraising the Sakoku Paradigm: The EzoTrade and the Extension of Tokugawa Political Space into Hokkaido."

8. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 326 n. 1.

9. Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of the Science. Throughout I refer to the Carnegie Endowment's 1936 reprint of Wheaton's text. Edited by George Grafton Wilson, it fully replicates the original as well as the highly valued notes Richard Henry Dana added to the eighth edition ( 1866), and it is also available in most university libraries. See Dana, ed.,Elements of International Law, 20.

10. See Dana, Elements of international Law, 19 n. 8.

11. Ordinance No. 98. 17 February 1868, collected in Naikaku Kanpōkyoku, ed.,Hōorei Zensho, 1:45.

12. See Ronald Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu, especially chap. 5, "Through the Looking-Glass World of Protocol: Mirror to an Ideal World,"168-230.

13. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory, 366-67.

14. W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay, 233-34. See also Ralph Covell,W. A. P. Martin: Pioneer of Progress in China.

15. Evoking Jorge Luis Borges's notion of the "hypothesis" of a dictionary, Lydia Liu has beautifully critiqued the very assumption that there ought to be "equivalents" waiting to explain alien terms. See Liu, Translingual Practice.

16. For example, see Yanabu Akira, HonVakugo Seiritsu Jijō and Honyaku no Shisō-- Shizen to Nature.

17. Pierre Bourdieu points out the futility of trying to understand "the power of linguistic manifestation linguistically." Doing so makes "one forget that authority comes to language from outside. . . . Language at most represents this authority, manifests and symbolizes it." By focusing on the translating and writing of a particular vocabulary, I hope to show how a specific use of terms describes the power of what Bourdieu calls "legitimate speech." See Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 109.

18. Quoted in Kato and Maruyama, 303-6. In his 1907 biography of Mitsukuri, linguist Otsuki Fumihiko

( 1847-1928), a descendant of the great scholar and adventurer Gentaku, quoted Mitsukuri's classmate Fujikura Kentatsu to describe the books the students brought to school: "The students brought whatever books they had to school. When one brought a book on physics, another brought an economics text. If one brought a geography, someone else brought a book on law. Military texts, histories-students brought these various books, and we would ask the teacher to instruct them" ( Otsuki Fumihiko, Mitsukuri Rinshō Kunden, 32).

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19. In Kato and Maruyama, 304-5.

20. Ibid., 305-6.

21. Ibid., 306.

22. See Harry Harootunian, "The Samurai Class During the EarlyYears of the Meiji Period in Japan, 1868-1882,"77-82.

23. Michel Foucault elegantly described "existing discourses" as "slumbering in a sleep towards which they have never ceased to glide since the day they were pronounced" ( The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 123).

24. Seiyōbunmei no Yunyũ Kenkyũkai, ed., Yōgaku Jishi, by Sawa Omi, 65.

25. Okubo Toshiaki ed., Nishi Amane Zenshũ, 2:3-102. Thomas Havens mentions NishiBankoku Kōhōin his biography of Amane,Nishi Amane and Modern JapaneseThought, 51-52.

26. Tsutsumi Koshiji, Bankoku Kōhō Yakugi, collected at the University of Tokyo.

27. Ibid., preface.

28. Shigeno Yasutsugu, Bankoku Kōhō, at Rikkyo University's Okubo Toshiaki Collection; a short segment of the second section is included in Kato and Maruyama. See also Yasuoka Akio,Nihon Kindaishi, 52-53; Numata Jiro comments briefly on this too, in "Shigeno Yasutsugu and the Modern Tokyo Tradition of Historical Writing," in W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleybank, eds.,Historians of China and Japan, 264-87.

29. Gaimusho, ed., Nihon Gaikō Monjo 38, no. 1 ( 1936):371. (HereafterNGM).

30. Ibid., 371-72.

31. Osatake Takeki, Kinsei Nihon no Kokusai Kannen no Hattatsu, 40-41.

32. See, for example, Yasuoka Akio.

33. NGM( 1936) 9:44-49.

34. On 14 January 1876, Kuroda mentioned three Korean-language students from the Foreign Ministry who accompanied the mission: Urase Hiroshi, Arakawa Norimasu, and Nakano Kyotaro (ibid., 9:7).

35. Ibid., 47.

36. Ibid., 48.

37. Ibid.

38. Dana, 44.

39. Ibid.

40. NGM 9:87-92. Inoue's comments mentioned here are on 89.

41. Ibid., 90.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 91.

44. Ibid., 114-20.

45. Ibid., 115; see also Foreign Office, 1. A variety of terms for "independence" and "sovereignty" were used until the vocabulary became more standardized. Since the early twentieth centurydokuritsuandshukenhave been the preferred terms.

46. My thanks to Andre Schmid for stressing this to me.

47. Ito Hirobumi and Hiratsuka Atsushi, eds., Hisho Ruisan: Chōsen Kōshō Shiryō, 2: 182-241 (HereafterHRCKS).

48. Okubo Yasuo, Nihon Kindaihō no Chichi-- Bowasonaado, 77.

49. HRCKS, vol. 2, esp. 213-20.

50. Ito Hirobumi, Marquis Ito's Experience, 2-3.

51.	Inoue Tetsujiro et. al., Tetsugaku Jii. I am indebted to James Ketelaar for showing me this book.
52.	On the evening of 4 December 1884, Kim Okkyun, Pak Yongho, and Hong Yongsik led members of their "progressive faction" (the Kaehwa'pa, also referred to as the "proJapan faction") in a coup attempt against the Min faction. Takezoe Shinichiro, the Meiji representative in Seoul, had promised Kim that should Kim's men go forward with their attempt to rout the pro-Qing Min faction from power, the two hundred Japanese troops in Seoul would assist. After the coup (known as the Kapsin Chongbyon) began, Takezoe forgot his promise. The coup failed drastically. In the subsequent three-day mayhem during which Takezoe not only fled for Japan with his "progressives" but even set fire to the Japanese legation building in Seoul, Qing, Yi, and Meiji soldiers confusedly volleyed bullets, causing casualties on all fronts. The Yi regime (with Qing backing) denounced Takezoe and accused Japan of trying to overthrow the legitimate Korean government. Inoue Kaoru, then foreign minister, initiated negotiations, but eventually the Meiji government decided it would have to send an imperial delegation to the Qing court.
53.	NGM 18( 1936): 196-200.
54.	Report of Count Ito Hirobumi, Ambassador Extraordinary to His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan of His Mission to the Court of China, 18th Year of Meiji/Ito Tokuha Zenken Taishi, Fuku Meisho.
55.	Ito Hirobumi, Fuku Meisho, 3 April 1885, 1.
56.	Ibid., 1-2.
57.	Ibid., 5-6, 12.
58.	Telegrams were often sent between Japanese officials in a non-kanjilanguage. Enomoto Takeaki, for example, dispatched a telegram to the Foreign Ministry detailing the proceedings of the first day's meeting. He wrote in English: "Negotiation was commenced yesterday at Li's office. On our side, Ambassador, myself and interpreter. On Chinese side, Li-Hung-Chang, Gotaicho and Zokusho" (NGM 18:237). Enomoto did not call any attention to the language used in the negotiations, mentioning only an "interpreter."
59.	Ito, Fuku Meisho, 12 April 1885, 3.
60.	Ibid., 4; the Japanese translation here when Li speaks is wagakuni(our country) for "China."
61.	Ibid., 15 April 1885, 8.
62.	I use the English names for the countries the way they appear in the Report.
63.	Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, 109-33.
64.	This war is commonly referred to in English as the Sino-Japanese War, but I am purposefully skewing the translation to show how it was (and still is) perceived by the victors. I do the same for the Japan-Russia War (1904-1905). Notably, even though both wars engendered great suffering on the people of the Korean peninsula, as many battles of both wars were fought there, the place of Korea and its people continue to be effaced by the wars' labels.
65.	The English-language transcript is in the archives of the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and is also published in Morinosuke Kajima, The Diplomacy of Japan 1894-1922, Volume

What Is Translation?Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions. Contributors: Douglas Robinson - author. Publisher: Kent State University Press. Place of Publication: Kent, OH. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: iii. 222

Editor's Foreword vii

Foreword ix

Preface xix

PART 1: REMAPPING RHETORIC AND GRAMMAR 1

1. The Renaissance: FREDERICK M. RENER, Interpretatio 3

2. The Middle Ages: RITA COPELAND, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages 11

3. The Colonial Impulse: ERIC CHEYFITZ, The Poetics of Imperialism 18

PART 2: INSIDE SYSTEMS 23

4. Many Systems: ANDRÉ LEFEVERE, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame 25

5. Personalizing Process: ANTHONY PYM, Epistemological Problems in Translation and Its Teaching 43

6. Pain and Playfulness: SUZANNE JILL LEVINE, The Subversive Scribe 56

7. The Translator-Function: MYRIAM DÍAZ-DIOCARETZ, Translating Poetic Discourse 61

PART 3: EMBRACING THE FOREIGN 79

8. Foreignizing Experience: ANTOINE BERMAN, The Experience of the Foreign 81

9. Foreignizing Fluency: LAWRENCE VENUTI, The Translator's Invisibility 97

10. Foreignism and the Phantom Limb 113

11.(Dis) Abusing Translation: PHILIP E. LEWIS, "The Measure of Translation Effects" 132

Conclusion: Neural Networks, Synchronicity, and Freedom 179

Notes 193

References 203

NINE Foreignizing Fluency Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility

FOREIGNISM

Since the 1986 publication of "The Translator's Invisibility," Lawrence Venuti has been one of the major figures in contemporary U.S. translation theory. Not only have his publications broken new ground theoretically, building powerful historical and ideological cases against what he calls the forced "invisibility" or "transparency" of "fluent" or "domesticating" translation and in favor of what he calls the resistant dissidence of "foreignizing" translation; he has also worked institutionally to win translation studies a more prominent place in the academy, most recently workingwith several other translation scholars to squeeze a single discussion group on translation out of the serenely antitranslational Modern Language Association. Professor of English at Temple University and a literary translator from the Italian, he has published numerous book-length translations that have received a good deal of favorable attention, even from critics who disagree in principle with his foreignizing approach-evidence perhaps that foreignism isn't intrinsically the pillowcase full of concrete blocks it is often taken to be, that in the hands of a translator like Venuti it can win over even the staunchest domesticators.

Theoretically Venuti's range is narrow but intense. He only has the one issue, really, this opposition between domestication or fluency and the normative disappearance of the translator that it requires, and foreignism as a channel of dissidence or resistance to hegemonic norms; but with his restless intelligence and penetrating historical and political insight, he manages to find such endless variety in the historical and ideological exfoliation of that opposition that it rarely sounds as if he is playing on a single string. Here is how he formulates his thesis in his most recent book, The Translator's Invisibility:

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Foreignizing translation is a dissident cultural practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developing affiliations with marginal linguistic and literary values at home, including foreign cultures that have been excluded because of their own resistance to dominant values. On the one hand, foreignizing translation enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text by enlisting it in a domestic cultural political agenda, like dissidence; on the other hand, it is precisely this dissident stance that enables foreignizing translation to signal the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text and perform a work of cultural restoration, admitting the ethnodeviant and potentially revising domestic literary canons. ( 148 )

This thesis has changed very little in the years he has been arguing it; but Venuti has the intellectual range to bring constant surprises, even to readers who have read a great deal of his work and think they know what he's going to say next. The attack on fluency is always there, of course; so is the strategic attack on the elitism of the foreignizers and the insistence that foreignism should become a mode of dissident resistance, that "the contemporary English-language translator [should seek] forms of resistance against the regime of fluent domestication" ( 184 ). But he pays such close attention to the details along the way, sees and remembers and theorizes so many things that no one else has even noticed, that I always learn from him--always find myself pushed more or less uncomfortably into new perceptions of things I thought I understood.

Venuti's dissident politics has allied him with a number of new feminist and postcolonial students of translation, such as Jill Levine, Lori Chamberlain, Sherry Simon, Samia Mehrez, and Richard Jacquemond, all of whom he published in his influential 1992 collection Rethinking Translation; also, more loosely, with Vicente RafaelContracting Colonialism, Eric Cheyfitz'sPoetics of Imperialism( 1991), and Tejaswini NiranjanaSiting Translation( 1992), especially perhaps the last, which draws on Walter Benjamin's literalism as a resistant channel of postcolonial retranslation. Like Niranjana's celebration of Benjamin's literalism, however, Venuti's advocacy of foreignism also rather uneasily allies him with a number of cultural elitists whose theories he admires but whose politics he dislikes, especially Friedrich Schleiermacher and Antoine Berman. As I want to suggest in some detail here, this conflict is the bind in the swing of Venuti's ideological gate: how to distance himself from the aristocratic or hautebourgeois elitism of the vast majority of foreignizers through the ages and transform their preferred method--for so long a channel of contempt for the great unwashed, a means of regulating or even completely blocking popular access to various sacred and classical texts--into a form

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of grass-roots dissidence, the oppositional translator's resistance to assimilative capitalist culture.

The Translator's Invisibility, which I propose to take as my text here, is in this sense no surprise: it continues the battle Venuti engaged back in the mid-eighties with the article of the same name and has been fighting indefatigably ever since, and it does so with most of the same weapons. Much of the book is in fact familiar from previous publications, reworked material from articles and conference papers, most of it substantially rewritten for argumentative continuity, moving now from a history of normativefluency through several salutary foreignizing projects ( John Nott's, Francis Newman's, Ezra Pound's, Celia and Louis Zukovsky's, Paul Blackburn's) to a critique of the dominant notion that a translator must work with an author who feels simpatico. He has also done, and drawn on heavily throughout, a massive amount of archival research in the history of translation, beginning with two chapters on the evolution of normative translational fluency in English translation since the early seventeenth century; he says in a note that the roots of this thinking of course go much deeper, citing my rather cursory attempt inThe Translator's Turnto trace congruent norms back to Augustine and Frederick Rener's more exhaustive history of translation norms inInterpretatio(316). But Venuti doesn't seem to be interested in exploring where the ethos of fluency came from, what social needs might have motivated its formation and given it ideological pride of place. It is enough for him that "fluency emerges" (43 ). I must ask the question, emerges out of what? In the early modern period and by the end of the seventeenth century fluency has become normative, and he establishes that fact beyond a doubt through close readings not only of translations but of translators' letters and other private documents and contemporary reviews, always read carefully and closely against the backdrop of the social and political history of the era in question. As a history of English translation over the past three or four centuries it is truly an impressive piece of scholarship--one that will make it difficult in the future to universalize translational fluency by repressing its historical evolution. This is Venuti's "big book," a work that translation theorists who have admired his shorter work have been waiting for since the late eighties--and without question it was worth the wait.

ELITISM

What has always troubled me about Venuti's work continues to trouble me about this book, however: its uncomfortable rapprochements with elitism. Venuti says, for example, that he will concern himself exclusively

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with literary translation, partly because, unlike the scientific-technical translator, the literary translator is relatively free to challenge the hegemonic norms of assimilative capitalism and still make a living--ignoring, of course, the telling fact that in Anglophone countries the literary translator's living by and large comes from universities, not from publishers, so that rebellious translators aren't really taking great economic risks-and partly because innovative theories of translation have always arisen out of literary translation ( 41 ). I'm not sure how fair this is, but I can't help hearing a kind of displaced class contempt, here, the upper-middleclass literary translator who lives comfortably on an academic salary looking down on the lower-middle-class technical translator who has to translate, in order to go on paying the rent, whatever instruction manual or technical documentation the fax machine spits out. When he says, late in the book, "A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other" (306), I assume he means a translated literary text, and that his generalizations about the desirability (should be) of foreignizing translation don't refer carte blanche to all translated texts. But I'm not even sure he really wants to extend his foreignizing principle to all literary translation: what about mass-market genre fiction, or, even more interesting, advertising translations, which are typically quite literary but almost exclusively controlled by target-cultural norms (often as determined by extensive market surveys)? Should target-language "fluency" and "transparency" not be opposed here also? How? Under what conditions? And what (if any) conclusions should we draw from Venuti's book regarding technical translation? Are Venuti's comments applicable only to the highest of high culture, the most elite of elite literature? Can (or should) so-called utilitarian translations ever be sites of cultural emergence? Is technical translation Venuti's masscult supplement, to put it in Derridean terms, whose exclusion makes it possible (and thus also problematic) to define the elitist main set? If so, it may be necessary for Venuti, at some infinitely deferrable point in time, to tackle the question of technical translation and its possible role in a dissident politics of foreignizing translation.

I don't want to wax self-righteous about this attitude, however, because I am guilty of it myself; in fact, a lot of my criticisms of Venuti's elitism in what follows are as much self-criticisms as anything else, attempts to explore my own complicity in the tendencies that bother me in Venuti. But I see in Venuti's work very little willingness to inhabit the scorned subject position of the lower-class Other, whether by actually translating technical and other despised utilitarian texts himself or by exploring that position imaginatively--by theorizing technical translation, for example, as

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precisely that area where translators are most hegemonically controlled by the domesticating institution.

Not that it's easy: feeling guilty about my own elitism, my own preference for the heady problems raised by the translation of lyric poetry and other difficult texts, in The Translator's TurnI worked hard to theorize less glamorous forms of translation as well, including pedagogical, commercial, and technical translation (which I had been doing for fifteen years before my first literary translation was published)--and still several reviewers read right through those attempts to my not-so-subliminal preference for literary translation and high-falutin theory, calling the whole book a theory of literary translation. Some of the theorists I currently admire most, especially Anthony Pym, have been working to bridge the theoretical gaps between literary translators who earn a regular salary teaching at universities and translate on the side, for the love of it, and free-lance or corporate translators who must translate to live; these theorists are typically academics who do not love academia and are constantly torn between the easy but often narrow and petty life of the university teacher and the more nomadic but insecure life of the free-lance translator.

ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

But judging from the rhetoric of his book, and of his work in general-which is rhetorically very much of a piece--Venuti seems to have very little ambivalence about the academy, or about his social role as a privileged literary translator and translation theorist. This rhetorical stance is problematic in at least two ways: it is, as I've been saying, implicitly elitist, aimed at a small group of scholars; and it is also, even more problematically, complicit in the very fluency Venuti attacks. For as both a speaker and a writer Venuti is remarkably fluent, and unconflictedly devoted to fluency. In his introduction to Rethinking Translation, for example, he attacked the American Literary Translators Association for insisting that presenters at the annual conference not read their papers, calling it a deprofessionalization of translation studies--a shock to me, because I had always sort of assumed that no one really liked listening to read papers, and only read papers at conferences themselves (as opposed to "just talking" them) out of a craven fear of sounding stupid. ALTA's policy was always one of the things that I liked best about the organization; it's a policy that I've always adhered to anyway, preferring to address the people present and the issues currently on the table rather than read something I wrote weeks or even months ago, even if that means stumbling and stammering and hunting for the right words. But when Larry and I both

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spoke in the same session at the MLA one year, he commented over coffee afterward that he doesn't usually like nonread papers, but mine was good: he did, in other words, I suppose still does, truly believe in the academic ritual of reading papers.

But for me, in his terms, not reading conference papers is a foreignizing move: in my ears all read papers sound pretty much alike, smoothly monologic, academically fluent, so univocal and monotonous that I have a very hard time listening, paying attention, staying alert. The verbal current flows over me, soothing me, lulling me to sleep. The only thing that occasionally breaks the monotony is when the presenter interrupts her or his reading to comment marginally, introducing a little metadiscourse ("What I'm trying to do here is . . ."), adding a second voice to the monotony. Some academic presenters read much too fast--they're nervous, or they're afraid they won't have enough time, so they rush through. This can be kind of interesting, too, though not in terms of content--mostly in terms of spectacle. But Larry isn't like that. He has a very strong, deep, measured voice, a radio announcer's voice, a voice full of masculine authority, and when he reads a paper it sounds extremely fluent. His whole being resonates with authority: not just the manifest fact that he is an experienced translator who clearly knows what translators do and why and how they feel while they're doing it; nor just the fact, equally manifest in his discourse, that he is a thoroughly reliable scholar who always researches his claims meticulously; but also the calm fluency of his discourse, whether read aloud or spoken spontaneously: the impression that he doesn't have to hunt for words, even esoteric words--words just trip off his tongue, one after the other, in reassuring periodic sentences. So do the individual stages of his argument. He gives the impression of always reasoning syllogistically, never overstating his case, never fudging a premise, never even constructing his argument anticlimactically, letting a strong discussion collapse into a weak conclusion.

This is, I know, a strange (I would want Venuti to say "foreignizing") tack to take in an essay, one that is probably making you a little uneasy. I'm supposed to be writing about his book, and instead I'm talking about his oratorical behavior. (I want to get back to his writing in a moment.) It's probably also not clear what I'm trying to say here: I am describing him as a successful academic orator, someone whose public speaking meets all implicit standards for academic success; but I seem to be using it against him. What I'm trying to do, in fact, is work out my vague sense that there is a serious conflict between Venuti's theory and his theorizing, between his antifluency resistance to hegemonic discursive norms for translation and his fluent nonresistance to hegemonic norms for academic writing.

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Shouldn't someone opposed to a hegemonic fluency in one discursive realm be at least suspicious of his own hegemonic fluency in another?

As I say, he also writes fluently--so fluently as virtually to smooth over his polemics in favor of foreignism and the left-leaning regimen of cultural/political resistance that he attaches to it. Academics are traditionally not supposed to write polemically, because polemics imply interest, bias, hence distortion; even as those norms begin to erode, as academic writing (at least in some disciplines) becomes at once more personal and more political, the rhetorical ideal mandates letting the evidence speak for itself, never becoming demagogic. And Venuti never does. He has been waging this battle against fluency for over a decade, now, and he never allows himself the slightest rhetorical heat, the slightest public sign that he is angry or frustrated or fed up. His writing remains as implacably and inexorably fluid or fluent as a freight ship in the middle of its channel.

HISTORICISM

Venuti says early on in his book that he plans to historicize translation, especially the hegemonic practice of fluent translation, along Foucauldian lines: "Genealogy is a form of historical representation that depicts, not a continuous progression from a unified origin, an inevitable development in which the past fixes the meaning of the present, but a discontinuous succession of division and hierarchy, domination and exclusion, which destabilize the seeming unity of the present by constituting a past with plural, heterogeneous meanings" ( 39 ).

And it is true that Venuti has built some discontinuities into his historical narrative; certainly after the second chapter the narrative is not seamless. Part of the problem, however, is that Venuti does seem to want to make a more or less traditional historicist argument, to the effect that norms of translational fluency were introduced into Anglo-American culture at some determinate point in the past ( early seventeenth century), subsequently became established as the only acceptable approach to foreign texts, and continue to dominate the field today--not a particularly destabilized or heterogenized image of the present.

An even bigger problem is that Venuti's historicizing discourse is so fluent that it is extremely difficult to remember his intended heterogeneity. The book is argumentatively counterhegemonic, tracing the suppression of dissident voices under the dominant regime of fluency, but rhetorically quite hegemonic, undermining dissident claims by suppressing its own centrifugal impulses, its own polyvocity, its own stammers and stutters and lost trains of thought.

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At one point Venuti cites Deleuze and Guattari approvingly on major and minor languages, calling Ugo Tarchetti's literary project "a minor utilization of a major language" ( 160 ). If Venuti's foreignizing project is in Deleuze and Guattari's terms a minoritarian one, an explorationand resistant exploitation of the marginalized or minoritized ethos of nonfluent translation, then it might well be characterized as the exact opposite of Tarchetti's: a major utilization of a minor language, a majoritarian plea for minoritarian translation. Francis Newman and William Morris do archaic renditions and get forgotten as minor talents, but Matthew Arnold calls for fluent translations and wins eternal fame as a major theorist of translation. Fake archaism, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, is a minoritarian device for "send[ing] the major language racing" (105 ). But Venuti is too much the major(itarian) theorist to celebrate marginality, as Deleuze and Guattari do; he wants foreignism to be majoritarian.

Or does he? I guess I don't really know. Maybe it's just that (what I take to be) his majoritarian fluency makes it sound as if he does. He says throughout that he wants to transform foreignism, which has long been an elitist channel for the rejection of dominant populist discourses, into a form of multicultural or "ethnodeviant" resistance to ethnocentrism; but his own discourse remains so hegemonic, so majoritarian, so academically fluent that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the elitism of previous foreignizers doesn't really bother him that much. Just how "radical" or "oppositional" a subject position does he want to inhabit? Proletarian, feminine, subaltern? Popular, populist, lay? Crazy, delirious, schizzed? How much hegemonic authority does he want to retain while adopting this "resistant" or oppositional position?

BEYOND ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

I certainly have a personal stake in this, as much of my academic writing since the mid-eighties has constituted an assault on the hegemonic reductionism--what Venuti would call the fluency--of academic discourse, which universalizes truth by depersonalizing voice and syllogizing argument. I started by writing dialogues and epistolary pieces and Wittgensteinian numbered notes, and at first my experiments remained tame enough to be publishable. But in 1985--the year my dissertation was published, the year that, sick of reading my own arrogant elitist discourse in page proof, I began to rebel against academic fluency--I wrote ten different experimental pieces and only the first four or five were published. The others had moved beyond the pale. For the next few years I kept pushing and pushing, writing stranger and stranger things that were

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still academic but never "fluent" (and never published)--fragments of my verbal imagination that kept spinning out of control, that I wanted to keep spinning out of control, precisely in order to escape the deadening straitjacket of discursive regulation, hegemonic fluency. By the fall of 1987 I decided I had gone far enough--and gone unpublished long enough-to have discovered what I wanted to know about myself as an academic and about the social and cultural institution that gave me my spending money and a good deal of my identity. And so I set about trying to reassimilate my "academic" voice to the norms of academic writing, and that semester wrote The Translator's Turn, which didn't appear until late 1990, three years later. I even used a taxonomy--which, even ringed round as it was there by self-undermining metacommentary, would have been unthinkable for me a year or two before--and of course was praised by academic translation theorists for the taxonomic chapters, which they called "the most valuable part of the book," while being lambasted (at least by theorists; translators loved it) for my slangy, conversational style and my radically mixed registers, which I thought of as a kind of discursive nomadism: never stay in one place rhetorically for more than a page or two lest the mental straitjacket of "truth" slip into place. In fact, the book as published was much more controlled, much more academic-much more "fluent"--than the book I wrote, which I had toned down twice in response to negative criticisms from otherwise favorable referees, and which the copy editor had further brought into line with traditional academic discourse.

With this history behind me, then, Venuti's massively fluent assault on fluency arouses all my suspicions. Is it possible that the congruence between the fluency of his academic discourse and the fluency of the translations he attacks is all in my head--or that the congruence is there but somehow tremendously irrelevant? Could I be exaggerating the significance of what I take to be Venuti's uncritical complicity in the very thing he attacks? Is there some plausible explanation that will allow him to retain both his desired image as a rebel and his dignity and authority as a privileged academic translator and theorist?

BLINDNESS AND HYPOGRISY

I don't know. I have no desire to dismiss his work, or even to dislike or disrespect it; I think it is enormously important and admire it greatly. But I remain troubled in it by what seems like either a debilitating blindness or a damning hypocrisy--and I wish I knew what to make of it. Is he really, deep down, an academic elitist who likes foreignism because it has long been the method of choice among cultural elites--because it

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excludes the hoi polloi who buy their translations (if at all) in the literature section at Waldenbooks--and who dresses his elitism up as a resistant or dissident challenge to authority from below rather than from above, from the populace or the masses rather than from the intellectual andartistic elite, only because rebellion from above is implicitly fascist?

Or, alternatively, is his commitment to foreignismactually weaker than he claims? His translations of Tarchetti all through the dissidence chapter (4 ) seem only sporadically foreignizing to me (but then maybe I'm not quite clear on what foreignism is, exactly?): there isno modernist freeplay of signifiers, a Derridean (non)concept that Venuti associates with foreignism; there are no popular or folk forms; there is no "violent disruption of domestic values that challenges cultural forms of domination" (146 -47); there is certainly no "social delirium which proliferates psychological states and confounds temporal and spatial coordinates" (155 ). In fact, Venuti's translations read pretty fluently to me. There is the occasional foreignizing moment, as when Tarchetti says of French books in Italy that "la loro speculazione si é tuttor rivolta alla diffusione di romanzi osceni," and Venuti translates: "their investment is alwaysaimed at the circulation of obscene novels" ( 157 ). Is this enough to render a translation foreignizing, the use of a word like "investment" for "speculazione"--a word that doesn't quite work idiomatically in English? I suppose it would be; but why are there so few of these moments in Venuti's ample translations from Tarchetti? Wouldn't this be the perfect place to showcase a foreignizingtranslation method? Certainly Venuti indulges in no radical in-your-face foreignizing, no aggressively minoritarian foreignizing, whether through strict literalism or delirium or archaism or regional dialect or mixed registers or whatever else--and why not? Because it would have been inappropriate in a scholarly book? Because Venuti is leery of committing the imitative fallacy? Or because he has a rhetorical commitment to fluency that tends to override his theoretical commitment to nonfluency?

FLUENCY REIFIED

At the same time, while I'm busy hurling Venuti's accusations of fluency back at him, my reader-response sympathies make me wonder whether there even is such a thing as fluency--whether fluency isn't just a reification of someone's response, a reification that may only work for that one reader. Maybe for other readers Venuti's academic discourse, including that in his translations from Tarchetti, isn't fluent? He tells a couple of personal anecdotes in the book; could some readers construe that as a foreignizing breach of academic decorum? He writes in his sixth chapter that "trans-

parency occurs only when the translation reads fluently, when there are no awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings, when clear syntactical connections and consistent pronouns create intelligibility for the reader" (287)--but for what reader? Syntactic connections that seem clear to me often confuse my students, who sometimes take a passage's meaning for the exact opposite of what I see. Do we have to say that clear syntactical connections only create intelligibility, (and thus by definition are to be regarded as clear) for an ideal reader, a normal or normative reader--someone, in fact, who looks uncannily like me (or Venuti, or whoever is doing the reifying)?

Because Venuti needs to distinguish "fluent" from "nonfluent" translations in some stable way (and of course he isn't alone in this--this reification is at least as old as Western rationalism, indeed is a key to rationalist hegemony), he needs to reify black marks on white paper as agents that impose their meanings, their intelligibility, even their "readings," on readers conceived as the passive recipients or recorders of those effects: "when the translation reads fluently," "when clear syntactical connections . . . create intelligibility for the reader" (287). I wonder: would Venuti's concept of fluency survive a rigorous reader-response critique? And what would survive? Let me try to answer that question in two takes, the first following the more individualistic or idiosyncratic lines laid down by Norman Holland and David Bleich and others, the second moving past that into a more socially oriented reader-response theory.

(a) Clearly, if radically individualistic reader-response theorists like Holland and Bleich are right, fluency is a reified fiction and Venuti's claims about it depend on the (repressed) construction of an ideal reader not unlike himself. Whatever is fluent for Venuti, whatever flows in his mind's ear, is essentialized as fluent, period--not only fluent for everyone but fluent in itself. A text that Venuti or some other hegemonic academic reader is willing to call fluent (because that's how it feels) is treated as if "its" fluency were an intrinsic characteristic, a property of the text. If there is someone else, even one person (and a fortioriif there are thousands, even millions), who finds the text nonfluent, difficult, strange, odd, foreign, that person is simply not a good reader-lacks the requisite education or reading skills to discern the intrinsic fluency of the text, which is there, always, just waiting to be perceived. Undo those repressions a little and it becomes evident that these "bad" readers are "bad" because they deviate from the implied reader-ideal; undo them a little more and it becomes evident that those readers' inadequacy stems from their deviance from the reifier him- or herself. Keep on undoing the repressions that motor this reification, as Holland and Bleich and others do, and you will end up insisting that it is impossible,

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essentially speaking, to domesticate or foreignize a translation, because domesticity and foreignism, or fluency and nonfluency, or invisibility and visibility, are reader-generated effects that the translator cannot reliably or predictably control. I said that Venuti's own translations of Tarchetti sound fluent to me; Venuti presumably intended them to be read differently, as examples of foreignism, but like all authors (indeed, like all utterers) he is incapable of controlling the way I interpret his words. Someone else may agree with Venuti and call those translations foreignizing; as the author of this book I can't control the way you read Venuti, or the way you read me.

What can we salvage from Venuti's theory through this approach? To put it in the terms of The Translator's Turn, domestication and foreignism are turns the translator makes away from the source-language text toward the target-language reader, with no guarantee that the reader will follow the turn, or read it as the translator intended. Domestication and foreignism are the translator's heuristics, useful as ways of organizing or prestructuring a turning; they are not (or shouldn't be, and ultimately can't be, at least without a repressive naturalization of reificatory fictions) standards for judging the relative success or failure of the target-language text.

(b) But this individualistic approach ignores the extent to which the users of a specific language are regulated by hegemonic forces within the language community, shaped or programmed in such a way as to take reifications for reality--in this case to take reader response for intrinsic textual property. This is the collective control of language that I called "ideosomatics" in The Translator's Turn--and it is indicative of Venuti's attitude toward such a perspective, I think, that in his review ofThe Translator's Turnhe called it "mystical biologism." I presented it specifically as a highly politicized form of social psychology, a way of exploring the collective regulation of individual responses to language and the ideological repression and naturalization of that regulation so that language, any text, seems to be the active party and the human respondent or interpreter its passive recipient. But because I claimed that ideology is stored in each individual body (where else could it be stored and still have an impact on behavior?), Venuti derogated it as "biologism"; because I showed how ideosomatics is channeled intuitively, subliminally, he called it "mystical."

In any case, whether we theorize it somatically or otherwise, this social psychology casts a rather different light on the reification of response as fluency or domestication than the individualistic reader-response approach I outlined above. It should be obvious, for example, that Venuti's implied (or repressed) ideal reader is modeled not simply on himself but

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or attitude of moral superiority from which both to intervene and to justify the necessity of that intervention. And despite the solidarity I (want to) feel with the oppressed, I feel silly trying to portray myself, a successful, white, middle-class American male with a Ph.D., as some kind of honorary postcolonial subject. I don't know what to do about this, except to live with the discomfort it causes and to be as aware as possible of the debilitating contradictions in my own position; certainly the alternative offered me by hegemonic society, becoming Matthew Arnold (say, E. D. Hirsch), is not a viable one.

And I suppose that what troubles me most about Larry Venuti's work, finally, is that he seems less troubled by those contradictions than I am-a personal confession that probably, according to the norms of academic fluency, has the effect of vitiating my claims. But then those claims were vitiated by my own doubts long before I failed to articulate them with proper academic rigor and decorum. As I hope I've made clear (but how will I ever know?), my aim here has not been to build an airtight case against Larry Venuti, whom I like personally and admire professionally, but to muddy some waters whose clarity has been artificially maintained with chemicals--to undo some theoretical repressions in order to explore some of the concealed and conflicting determinants of our theorizing about translation today.

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FOUR Many Systems André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame

THEORIZING THE SOCIAL

One of the most gratifying turns translation theory has taken over the past two or three decades is the turn into the social: the increasing awareness that translation is not an abstract equivalence game, divorced from real people's actions in a social context, but a richly social process involving not only telephone, fax, and modern contact with a wide variety of employers and clients and other commissioners as well as friends and acquaintances who might know some word or phrase you can't find in your dictionaries--this is the territory explored so brilliantly and systematically by Justa Holz-Mänttäri in Translatorisches Handeln( 1984) and a dozen articles--but also large-scale sociopolitical forces such as ideology and power. Translation has been mystified for so long as a set of technical transfer processes performed on texts, on words and phrases, that the veritable explosion of socially attuned translation theory has felt like a release from prison, a liberation of theory to explore the fullest implications of translation, without fear of transgressing some taboo. There are, of course, still people who consider translation studies exclusively a branch of contrastive linguistics, and derogate any approach to translation that exceeds the purview of linguistic equivalence studies as "not really about translation at all"; but those people are increasingly finding themselves in the minority, and many of them, in order to go on being heard in the translation studies community, have been expanding their theoretical frameworks to include the social and the ideological.⁸

The difficulty in moving from the linguistic to the social, of course, is that the relevant data multiplies exponentially and becomes enormously more complex--thus creating numerous methodological crises in the field, which have been negotiated by individual social theorists of translation in a variety of ways. How do you bring the vast social realm in which

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translation takes place into the relatively narrow confines of a single book or article? By what method or methods do you impose order--patterns, regularities, structures--on a field that seems to defy such reductions at every turn? Even linguistic methodologies are constantly thwarted by the complexity of actual spoken and written language; how much greater the power to thwart translation scholars, then, do the complexities of whole societies have, whole cultures, whole civilizations over hundreds and even thousands of years?

What I want to do here in part two is explore some general trends in the methodological management of this complexity, through close methodological readings of four recent books that I believe illustrate those trends in exemplary ways. The books are André Lefevere Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame( 1992a), Anthony PymEpistemological Problems in Translation and Its Teaching: A Seminar for Thinking Students( 1992), Suzanne Jill LevineThe Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction( 1991), and Myriam Díaz-DiocaretzTranslating Poetic Discourse( 1985). The four pair up tidily, but also complexly: Lefevere is as intent upon stabilizing systems structurally as Pym is on unraveling them semiotically; Levine and Díaz-Diocaretz both theorize (from) their own practice as translators, Levine as a North American translator-intoEnglish of Latin American texts, Díaz-Diocaretz as a Latin American translator-into-Spanish of North American texts, Levine translating sexist males, Díaz-Diocaretz the radical lesbian feminist work of Adrienne Rich; Lefevere and Díaz-Diocaretz are the more systematic thinkers, Pym and Levine the more personal and anecdotal.

(POLY) SYSTEMS THEORY

I'm noticing that polysystems theorists aren't using that term much any more; it seems to be losing its currency, modulating into the broader and better established field of systems theory--quite rightly, I think, because systems theory accounts for that multiplicity of systems signaled by the "poly" that Itamar Even-Zohar stuck on the approach and the school that has followed it since the mid-seventies. Systems theory is a striking application of the Kantian notion that we can never know the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, raw reality, and that we only think we know it because we are so adept at imposing representational systems on it, psychosocial systems that condition or constitute virtually every aspect of our perception and understanding. Kant thought that the understanding (Verständnis) constituted "reality" through operations with four innate "categories," quality, quantity, manner, and relation; radical systems theory would call

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those categories just another system imposed on human behavior, which the categorist then claims to "know."

Systems theory also has an Achilles' heel, however: the survival within it of a pre-Kantian objectivism, aspiring to the status of empirical science, which leads systems theorists to believe precisely what Kant did, that the one Ding an sichthat can be truly known is the object of their own theorizing--in this case, systems. What most people think of as realities are in fact all socially generated systems--all except that system called systems theory, which is a science, an accurate representation of the systematicity of external reality.

That Lefevere's argumentative heel is vulnerable to this accusation as well shouldn't be held against him; the tendency to reify one's own beliefs, opinions, perceptions as reality is one of the oldest impulses in Western thought, or what Lefevere would call "the Western system," and is incredibly hard to shake. I don't know anyone, regardless of his or her radical philosophical pretensions, who isn't constantly falling into the objectivist trap--and I'm not excluding myself, either. In fact, to claim immunity to the trap is to fall into it. The instant you think you're out of it and are never going to fall in it--you're in it. (As Anthony Pym pointed out when I sent an earlier draft of this chapter and the next to him, in grouping people such as Lefevere, Even-Zohar, and Toury together as "polysystems theorists," I am myself falling into the trap of systemic reification.) For Westerners (and, nowadays, anyone who has been significantly influenced by Western thought, which is just about everyone), reification is one of the cognitive tics that make cognition possible.

But none of that makes it any less useful to explore the many ways in which we continue to reify our perceptions as reality, our opinions as truth, our feelings as atmosphere or mood. One of the great things about Lefevere Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame--as about most systems theories of translation and related phenomena--is its insistence on prying back the covers behind which we repress the process of "naturalization," the process of making the artificial (seem) natural, the imagined (seem) real. Lefevere's concept of rewriting not only brings together social activities that have been kept separate and variously respected or neglected--translating, criticizing, editing, anthologizing, writing histories, and so on--but also shows patiently, painstakingly, with abundant closely examined examples, the extent to which our literary universe is the ever-shifting product of such activities.

Constructivist theories of canon formation--the insistence that qualities of literary greatness or ephemeral trash reside not inside individual texts (where critics simply recognize them and point them out) but in

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social acts of construction, of system building--are not exactly new, of course. They have been in the air at least since the late sixties, fed by Derridean deconstruction, Michel Foucault and the New Historicism, various poststructuralist Marxisms ( Louis Althusser's, for example) and psychoanalyticisms ( Jacques Lacan's), and the linked differences of German Rezeptionsästhetikand American reader-response theory. But Lefevere is one of a fairly small but well-placed group of theorists who have been working to articulate the full implications of constructivist systems theory for translation studies, which they tend to imagine as a branch of comparative literary and cultural studies; and the implication that he explores most fully here is the profound functional similarity between translation and the other acts of rewriting by which cultural systems are created, maintained, and changed. In so doing he places rewriting at the very constructivist heart of system building, at the source of systems--an exciting and flattering place for translators and other socially ignored or neglected rewriters to find themselves.

Moreover, he illustrates his theoretical points with rich excursions into literary and cultural encounters not often experienced by Eurocentric translation scholars, especially "the Arabic system"--especially the preIslamic poetic form of the qasidah--and "the African system," but also, in passing, various other non-Western and often nonliterate literatures. That there are serious problems with this Western claim to know the non-Western other should be clear, of course, from recent postcolonial or subaltern studies (including those dealing with translation, by Cheyfitz, Niranjana, and others). In seeking to provide "a neutral, non-ethnocentric framework for the discussion of power and relationships shaped by power" ( 1992 a, 10), Lefevere can really only seek to neutralize his ethnocentrismrhetoricallyas much as possible through self-awareness and study of the other--can never actually eradicate that ethnocentrism, which, as Hans-Georg Gadamer ( 1989, 2.2.2.1B) says of prejudice, is the condition of his (or anyone's) seeing anything at all; and his attempt "to make this book free from the symptoms of literary provincialism" ( Lefevere 1992a, 10) isn't exactly the same thing as finding a cure for that dread disease. But at least Lefevere is making gestures of goodwill--gestures that have required enormous research efforts, far beyond what most of us are typically willing to undertake for a 160-page book.

CONCEPTUALIZING SYSTEM

What I want to focus most closely on in Lefevere's book, though, is system, his systemic conception of system, specifically as an inroad into the systemic approach to social translation studies today. This seems like a

heavy burden for a single book to bear, and of course it is; but like a good rewriter--like Augustine in one of Lefevere's more sardonic examples ( 7 )--I'm planning to allegorize it, to treat it as a sign or symptom of an entire set of assumptions and approaches in recent translation theory, and thus to make it signify beyond its author's intentions. In the spirit of Lefevere's book, I'm going to undertake this rewriting as neutrally as I can manage, without holding either the book or its (rewritten) allegorical significance up for praise or blame. Like Lefevere, I'm interested in exploring the systematicity of what I study--which in this case is the rewriting performed not by translators (editors, anthologists, etc.) but by translation theorists--not in evaluating it.

But this immediately raises a problem, which Lefevere helps me put my finger on: "It is not my intention here," he writes at one point, "to evaluate the different translations. Nor is it my task to do so: evaluation would simply reveal the hidden prescriptive assumptions with which I approach the translations. Since I have tried to describe, not prescribe, there is no reason why I should evaluate. That task is better left to the reader" ( 109 ). This signals a fairly representative turn among systemic theories of translation as a social act or process, away from the prescriptive and evaluative bias of most earlier translation theories, which were centrally concerned to determine the ideal translation or translation model and to evaluate existing or possible translations by reference to that ideal. Typical of the newer social approaches (as well as some newer linguistic and literary approaches) is a refusal to normatize translation, an insistence on describing the processes by which translations come to be commissioned, made, and disseminated with complete indifference to the question of which translations are better or worse than others. (The significant exceptions to this are the explicitly political theorists in the foreignist/postcolonial camp, who fiercely attack translations that seem to be complicit with or overt instruments of various sociopolitical hegemonies, especially patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism.)

But I wonder: "evaluation would simplyreveal the hidden prescriptive assumptions with which I approach the translations" (109 )? Lefevere's hidden polemic is directed specifically against the essentialist notion that evaluation is an objective representation of quality or value residing somehow intrinsically within a translation, and with that much I agree wholeheartedly. But his choice of the word "simply"--as opposed, say, to "merely" or "only"--makes me wonder whether the revelation of hidden assumptions is ever simple. The revelation of hidden assumptions, along with the systemic explanation of the origin and nature of those assumptions, is one of Lefevere's most significant tasks in the book. In fact this is by and large what constructivists do: explain behavior that the behaver

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thinks of as autonomous ("I wanted to do it!") by reference to a higher level of control or constraint, which is systemic. Is he suggesting here, then, that the only hidden assumptions that should not be revealed are his own?

If he is--and I can't imagine what else he could be implying--he is pointing tacitly toward a major area of disagreement between systematizers of his stripe and more personal theorists such as Anthony Pym and Jill Levine, who, believing that it is impossible ever to conceal (let alone eradicate) personal biases and prejudices, would rather be as up-front as possible with them. For the "personalizers," this is a question of honesty, and ultimately of self-awareness, which the theorist develops in her/himself and encourages in others. For the systematizers it is another kind of issue altogether, one controlled by "the theoretical system" to which Lefevere and most other systems theorists "belong," or attach themselves, the ethos of neutral, unbiased, objective, empirical science, an ethos that seeks to convince readers by repressing personal bias. "I have constructed the argument of this book," Lefevere writes, "on the basis of evidence that can be documented, and is" ( 10 ): he isn't just making this up, it's an accurate representation of the systemic nature of social reality. To support this evidentiality he has also "had liberal recourse to quotations from sources generally regarded as authoritative" (10 ). Lefevere is just as honest in his empiricist rewriting of translation (and other forms of rewriting) as the translators he discusses in their moralist (etc.) rewriting of the texts they translate: just as the literary system of pre-World War II Anglo-American culture did not allow translators of Aristophanes even to consider calling a penis a penis, a vulva a vulva, so too will the theoretical system of empirical science not allow Lefevere to reveal (let alone explore) his own hidden assumptions in rewriting the translations he reads. It is simply inconceivable. To become self-reflexive would be to step outside of the system that enables him to perceive what he perceives; in that sense self-reflexivity would be almost literally blinding.

Most helpful of all in Lefevere's book, it seems to me, is the openness and comprehensiveness with which he defines his conception of system-largely because few systems theorists of translation outside the polysystems group have ever foregrounded their implicit systems model as articulately as they. This is one reason, in fact, for choosing Lefevere's book for close analysis here: it not only exemplifies but also explicitly theorizes system, systematization, a systemic approach to the field. Lefevere's first definitional task is negative, in fact, doubly negative in that he must negate the negative connotation "the system" has picked up in ordinary nontechnical English: "When I use the word 'system' in these pages," he writes, "the

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term has nothing to do with 'the System' (usually spelled with a capital S) as it increasingly occurs in colloquial usage to refer to the more sinister aspects of the powers that be, and against which there is no recourse. Within systems thinking the term 'system' has no such Kafkaesque overtones. It is rather intended to be a neutral, descriptive term, used to designate a set of interrelated elements that happen to share certain characteristics that set them apart from other elements perceived as not belonging to the system" ( 12 ). One doesn't have to have read very much Freud to suspect that something is going on here that Lefevere isn't telling us about, perhaps that he isn't exactly aware of himself: we have a nightmarish Kafkaesque scene, which we are to banish from our imaginations ("the jury," to quote a similar impossible request, "will please disregard the witness's last remark"), and a reassuringly neutral scientific scene, which we are to embrace.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this negation (Verneinung), except that its significance is probably nothing so simplistic as the exact opposite of what Lefevere says it is--that is, he says it's not Kafkaesque, so that's precisely what it is. No, it's more complicated than that. Like the foreignists and the postcolonialists, Lefevere is concerned throughout with power; unlike them, he is concerned here to distinguish his analysis of power rhetorically from Kafkaesque nightmares: he wants to analyze the systemic functioning of power, but he doesn't want his analysis to be (mis)taken for an indictment, so he scientizes it, descriptivizes it, portrays it as valuefree inquiry. To give that impression he must here, in the early definitional stages of his book, euphemize systems far more than his actual analysis would warrant: "a set of interrelated elements that happen to share certain characteristics that set them apart from other elements perceived as not belonging to the system" (12 ). No power? Just interrelated elements sharing characteristics?

"Literature is not a deterministic system," he goes on, "not 'something' that will 'take over' and 'run things,' destroying the freedom of the individual reader, writer, and rewriter. This type of misconception can be traced back to the colloquial use of the term and must be dismissed as irrelevant. Rather, the system acts as a series of 'constraints'" ( 12 ). As Lefevere portrays it, "the" literary system does determine, control, regulate a good deal of what most readers and rereaders, writers and rewriters like to think of as their personal autonomy, and in that sense it is deterministic; it is just not deterministic in an absolute sense, leaving no room at all for freedom. His conception of system is bureaucratized, steeped in what Nietzsche called the internalization of mastery, what I, inThe Translator's Turn( Robinson 1991c), called ideosomatics: it lacks a

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despot, no one tells you what to do, but it does regulate nearly every aspect of social life; it does condition the actions we like to think of as our own, even though it can never control our behavior perfectly. It is also bureaucratized rhetorically, in Lefevere's determination not to rail against it (or sing its praises), to remain perfectly neutral, descriptive, scientific about it.

On the other hand, the bureaucratized or systemically internalized "constraints" repeatedly fight their way back up to the surface in Lefevere's own rhetoric, as here when he declares a certain understanding of system a "misconception" that "must be dismissed as irrelevant." More effectively repressed, this "constraint" would have been less personal, less obviously the product of individual insistence: not must be dismissed asirrelevant, is irrelevant. Even in the strongest bureaucratic regimen the rules keep embodying themselves in individual despots who lay them down andtellpeople what to do, what to dismiss, what to accept.

Less effectively repressed, of course--for example, more insistently personalized--this constraint would have told us more about Lefevere's own ideological agenda, the origins of his systematism not only in desire, will, and need, but also in the collective inclinations of his group and background as well.

Implicit in Lefevere's conception of literary systems (probably of other systems also) is that they have coherent and well-marked beginnings. This is, in fact, an important component of most systems theory: without a clear beginning, and presumably a clear end as well, it is difficult to pace off any sort of boundaries, to distinguish one system from others, or from the nonsystemic swirl surrounding it (if, indeed, there is such a swirl). This is an interesting paradox at the heart of systems theory: in order to set the stage for the dynamic study of change withina system, the theorist has to build static walls around the system, saying, in effect, all I'm really interested in is what happens inside these four walls, and I'd rather not think of the walls at all, except to posit their presence and their relative permanence. Needless to say, a systems theory of translation is forced to deal also with incursions from one system into another, and this forces Lefevere to focus more attention on the problem of systemic boundaries, interfaces, permeabilities than systems theorists in many other fields; but like other systems theorists, Lefevere still, despite the transformations wrought by translation, retains a primary belief in the stability of systemic boundaries.

This is particularly clear in his repeated references to the beginnings of literary systems: "Once a poetics is codified . . ." ( 26 ), "Codification takes place at a certain time, and once it has taken place . . ." (38 ), "Once a literary system is established . . ." (38 ), "Once a culture has arrived at a

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canonized image of its past . . ." ( 112 ), and so on. The cumulative impact of these remarks is strong: systems start at specific moments in time, and once they have started, once they are in place, certain laws apply, certain patterns derived from systems theory can be discerned. This assumption at least loosely ties our interpretive hands in the strangest of these remarks, in which Lefevere tells us that "practice precedes theory when the poetics of a literary system is codified. Codification occurs at a certain time . . ." (27 ): here, but for Lefevere's repeated emphasis on "at the moment that," we might be tempted to read "when" to mean "if" or "whenever," that is, "in all cases in which the poetics of a literary system is codified," allowing for a greater temporal diffusion of codifications. The strange thing about the remark is that it seems to be saying that "practice precedes theory"at the historical momentwhen the system begins. Is there some mystical instantaneity here, some massive convergence of energies into the moment at which a system is born, a systemic poetics is codified, so that at that moment practice is given precedence or priority over theory?

The real problem that I see from Lefevere's own point of view is that it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish codification (and thus systematicity) from theorization, which places practice in an uncomfortable middle ground between system and nonsystem, order and chaos. If theory is the codification of practice, which precedes theory at the moment of codification, what is the systemic nature of practice? Is practice a presystemic directionality that is then theoretically codified at a certain moment? If so, does "presystem" belong proleptically (or, less insistently idealized, retroactively) to system? Can a system, once theoretically codified and thus officially in place, be expanded backward to cover the loose (chaotic or disordered) odds and ends that preceded and in some sense also preformed it? We speak of the "preromantics," the "premoderns"--does the retroactive codification of their presystematic directionality in effect incorporate them into the system, extend the system to cover them too?

The other temporal problem I see in this conception of a literary system as bounded by theoretical codification is that there are numerous horizons of theoretical codification--in fact, an endless series of them, beginning, theoretically, with the theoretical beginning of the system (though it could also be argued that Herder is a preromantic theorist who helps to theorize romanticism, Henry James is a premodern theorist who helps to theorize modernism, etc.) and continuing long past the official or unofficial end of the system. (Is romanticism over? Is modernism over? These are favored topics of debate among literary historians.) Ironically enough, it seems likely that the official beginning of a literary system is something that can only be codified or theorized after the system is officially codified (often, in fact, when it is in decline or

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officially over). The system-beginning act of codification can't codify its own originary moment. That is left to later codifications, theorists who come along and say, "Look, folks, right therewas the place this or that all started."

And then, of course, other theorists will argue that some other moment was in fact the originary one. There must be a clear boundary in order for the thing to be thematized as a system, but clear boundaries in human events are notoriously hard to come by; usually they have to be declared by fiat, usually by a group of theorists powerful enough to enforce the fiat, usually by denying various institutional goodies (recognition, publication, hence also directly or indirectly promotion and tenure) to dissident theorists who refuse to toe the party line. (This is a nascent systems theory of systems theory--something I want to do more of in a moment.)

A corollary of this is that systems typically overflow their codifications, contain far greater complexity and diversity than any of the successive theories that purport to codify them. A systems analysis might show that some systems theorists operate within a pre-Freudian system that coaches them implicitly or metaphorically to conceive systems as rational beings (or forces) that know exactly what they're doing and articulate that knowledge as a theory or code that leaves no unconscious or other irrational residue, whereas others operate within a Freudian system for which the code is only the rational tip of a monstrous unconscious iceberg. How conscious does a system have to be, how thoroughly or exhaustively codified, in order to be called a system? It depends on the theoretical system the systems theorist works in. Compared to the work of Foucault, for example, Lefevere seems to be working in a pre-Freudian system, implicitly believing as he seems to that every detail in a literary system is available to systematic articulation by a properly objective scientific thinker like himself.

It is, in any case, highly likely that the literary system of a given period overflows the bounds of the contemporary codification, so that the system someone such as Lefevere identifies today is significantly different from the system codified by those who lived in it. The next systemic step beyond that formulation is to say that there is a significant difference between all collective regularities, hegemonic social patterns, which exert a largely unconscious or ideosomatic power over the people who live in and through them, and systemic or theoretical codifications of those patterns, which are usually ex post facto attempts to generalize the patterns they discern to cover all variability. In other words, codification occurs not at a single but at a never-ending succession of "certain times," whenever someone such as Lefevere (i.e., any theorist) decides to collate regularities and impose some sort of overarching explanation on them.

But this is essentially the duplicity in systems theory that I mentioned earlier: the systemic tendency to see all systems but one's own as social fictions. Like most systems theorists, Lefevere ( 32 ) wants the systems he identifies to exist in reality, beginning at a specific point (when they are codified) and continuing, with minor variations ("There are local variations in both cases, to be sure, but the general picture is clear"), until they are superseded by new systems; he wants his description of those systems to be objective in the sense of merely representing a stable object outside his imagination. Hence the importance to Lefevere of differentiating the process of "rewriters creat[ing] images of a writer" (5 ) from the realities they represent: "These images existed side by side with the realities they competed with" (5 ). You have systems, codified at specific historical moments and susceptible to stable objective description, and you have representations of those systems.

Hence also the importance of referring to these systems with the definite article: "The situation is different in Egypt and the Maghreb because they belong to the Islamic rather than the African system," "This last statement points to a similarity with the Western system that is not easy to overlook" ( 31 -32 ), etc. There is one whole coherent literary system whose geographic boundaries roughly coincide with those of the Roman church around 1000 A.D.; another whose boundaries coincide with the Islamic countries; a third that more or less covers the African continent, with the exception of those northern countries that belong to "the Islamic rather than the African system." These are enormously complex geopolitical entities to be subsuming under the concept of a single system.

And Lefevere generally recognizes that complexity: "A poetics, any poetics, is a historical variable: it is not absolute. In a literary system the poetics dominant today is quite different from the poetics dominant at the inception of the system" ( 35 ). The problem, of course, is how you can ever tell when two historical horizons dominated by quite different poetics are part of the same system. If the poetics change dramatically, is the system still the same? How can you tell? Or do you just assume it from the continuity of other systems within the same geographical area, such as language? In Lefevere's formulation the extension of literary systems is in fact controlled more by linguistic than by political boundaries; does this mean that every Anglophone country is part of the same system for as long as it goes on speaking English? Well, no, because literary periods are systems too: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, romanticism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and so on. Also, every Anglophone country has tended to develop in quite different ways and directions; so have different regions in each country, different groups (the "professional"

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and "non-professional" readers Lefevere talks about), and so on. There is a good deal of slippage among language families as well, as Lefevere unconsciously signals when he refers to "Turkish, a Finno-Ugrian language" ( 31 )--most scholars would say that Turkish is a Turkic-Altaic language, but then there are Finnish scholars who claim that Finnish itself is more Indo-European than Finno-Ugric. The whole notion of language families was the German romantics' systemic projection, the construction of enormous historical and geographical and linguistic systems to fit and support their self-image--a projection whose dangerous political implications, made all too clear in the Nazi era, were present from the start: the German association of the imaginary Indo-Europeans with blond Scandinavians was explicit in Indo-European philology from near the beginning of the nineteenth century.

How big or small can a system be? Could we imagine all the literature ever produced by human beings as part of the same system? I don't see why not, although it would probably only be useful by contrast with "the literary system" of some other planetary race. Could we imagine, with the formalists, that a single literary work forms its own coherent system (especially encyclopedic works such as Sakuntala, La divina commedia, Paradise Lost, Faust, A la recherche du temps perdu,Finnegans Wake)? Critics often speak of the "system" of William Blake or William Butler Yeats--is that enough? Or would Lefevere resist that sort of atomization of systems theory?

A more radically constructivist systems theory would insist that in all these cases "system" is mainly a useful way of thinking about, and thus retroactively organizing, certain lines of force we see flowing through various thens and nows, heres and theres--and that a system can be as big or as small as the systems theorist needs it to be for specific contextual explanatory purposes. If we want to explain certain regularities we perceive in, say, literary works written (down) in several African nations or linguistic areas or periods, it may prove useful to posit not only "the African system" but also "the Islamic system" and "the Western system"; if we discover a Martian literature and want to explore its regularities, it may be useful to posit "the Martian system" and "the Earth system." Or we may be more interested in smaller systems, "the literary system" of a certain café in Paris or New York in 1936, for instance. Depending on how attached we are to descriptive stability, we may or may not want to go on and draw up rigid boundaries for the systems we posit, beginnings and ends in time, geographic limits--but in a constructivist context these are all calculi, useful explanatory fictions, not accurate representations of external reality.

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A SYSTEMS THEORY OF SYSTEMS THEORY

That Lefevere never makes this leap into radical constructivism is almost certainly due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, he himself as rewriter stands within a system, the academic system of (poly) systems theory; that theoretical system enables him to see many things that other theorists outside that system can't see, and also blinds him to certain other things that outsiders can often see better. This is, again, not an accusation; it's a neutral fact of systems theory, which I have promised to follow as closely as possible. Systems are powerful lenses for seeing and experiencing the things that they recognize (or project) as real, but extremely ineffective lenses for seeing and experiencing things that lie beyond their purview. Systems naturalize their own belief structures as the sum total of reality and expect people to enter wholeheartedly into their projections in order to see what they see; to outsiders it often looks like mumbojumbo, largely because they have been conditioned by other systems to see things in other ways. In chapter 5 we'll see Anthony Pym arguing that translators, who live between systems, are the people best situated to break down those barriers; Lefevere, on the other hand, seeing things through the lenses of systems theory, tends to see translators as more or less entirely in the service of a single system, specifically the target-language literary system.

But more of that in a moment. I think it's interesting to note that Lefevere too seems to conceive polysystems theory as a kind of closed system, with insiders who are in the know and outsiders who are not, but should be. I get this impression from his tendency throughout the book to assume familiarity with the categories by which polysystems theory organizes or systematizes the translational world--in fact, one of those categories is a thing called "the categories," a kind of Kantian operating system that enables polysystems theorists to make taxonomic sense of the cultural field they study. "The categories" also provided Lefevere with his thematic units in Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook( 1992b), his anthological companion volume toTranslation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame; in the latter they appear (without explanation of their significance or origin) in his chapter titles after the colons: patronage, poetics, the categories (which is, as I say, itself one of the categories), ideology, Universe of Discourse, and language. Later he calls "the personal" a category also, though I have never seen that in a chapter title: "These can be said to belong to three categories: some changes are of a personal nature, some are ideological, and some belong in the

sphere of patronage" ( 1992a, 61 ). The categories are systemic calculi, the polysystems conceptual lenses that impose systemic regularities of various sorts

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not only on the social field but also on all polysystems thinking about that field--and Lefevere's use of the word "belong" suggests that they do so specifically by assigning the phenomena they "observe," and can only observe through the categories, to separate categories.

"Universe of Discourse" is apparently like the categories in not needing to be defined: it appears for the first time in this book on page forty-eight, without comment, and forty pages later gets its own chapter, but again without definition, almost certainly because it has been defined a hundred times before in previous polysystems books and articles. I'm not quite sure why Universe of Discourse (which is usually referred to without a definite or indefinite article, like God) is capitalized and the other key words are not--why don't polysystems theorists refer to Patronage, Ideology, Poetics, and so on? In any case it is clear that it forms part of polysystems theory's liturgical ritual, which is not mere ornamentation, as the Calvinists claimed about Catholic rituals, as grammarians claimed about rhetoric, but a virtually subliminal shaper of perception, an inverted retinal image that precedes and informs the act of seeing (or else, as Eric Cheyfitz suggests, that's what ornamentation is). With many of the other polysystems categories, notably ideology and poetics, Lefevere works hard to bring newcomers up to speed; the categories and Universe of Discourse, for some reason, remain subliminal.

A systems theory approach to Lefevere's book, and thus more generally to systems theories of the social act of translation, requires one to see it (and them) too through the lenses of these categories: to ask what ideology lies behind it, what patronage systems support and maintain it, what poetics and Universe of Discourse inform it. Here it is necessary to tread carefully, or risk giving the impression that I am attacking the book, or the systems theory that drives it. I hope I have made it clear how impressed I am by the book, how convinced I am that the questions I have been asking about it are evidence of its productivity, its fruitfulness as an approach. But I want very much to explore the significance of Lefevere's approach in the spirit of that approach, and that requires asking some tough questions, questions that are often perceived as demystificatory and thus as debunking. I do believe there are mystifications in polysystems theory, as in all theories, my own included; but I don't consider it bunk, and hence have no need to debunk it.

The easiest categories to cover concern the poetics and Universe of Discourse of polysystems theory: the poetics are roughly constructivist, grounded in the belief that "value" is never something that lies in a poetic or theoretical text but is always something that is assigned to it or constructed for it by an institution, a system, an ideologically saturated power structure; the Universe of Discourse is roughly scientistic, grounded

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in the belief that "reality" lies outside the individual and his or her experiences and is best described in a rhetorically cool, neutral, objective way. I have discussed the obvious clash between these two categories above; no need to pursue them further here, except to note that the clash between them is precisely why polysystems theorists are not given to doing systems analyses of their own systems analyses, and why my insistence on doing one might well (though falsely) be considered a hostile act.

The question of ideology is a more difficult one, though it is clearly tied in here. Lefevere himself notes that "even such bastions of 'objectivity' as dictionaries might have some kind of ideology behind them" ( 52 ), and it should go without saying that such bastions of objectivity as polysystems theory do as well--though the rhetorical dominance of a scientistic Universe of Discourse makes it go without saying, unsaid. But what ideology? I suppose it would depend on the extent to which we take the demystificatory impulse behind systems theory to be repressed or disguised hostility: the more hostility toward systems that Lefevere and other polysystems theorists feel but repress or rhetorically suppress or displace in their work, the more strongly their ideology would lean toward the oppositional, the antinomic, the counterhegemonic (and thus toward solidarity with the foreignists and the postcolonialists); the less hostility they feel, the less hostility they need to repress in order to remain within their scientistic Universe of Discourse, the more strongly their ideology would lean toward the authoritarian, the idealized defense of state and other systemic power (and thus more solidarity with the hegemonic systems the foreignists and postcolonialists attack). I have no firm evidence one way or the other, though Lefevere occasionally allows his biases to surface rhetorically, as when he claims that "the rhyme and meter rule . . . has been responsible for the failure of many a translation to carry its original across into the Western system. This situation, in turn, greatly obstructed the process of assimilation" (36 ). This still has the patina of neutrality, but the dualisms implied by "failure" (as opposed to success) and "obstructed" (as opposed to facilitated) suggest here that Lefevere is on the side of assimilation, and thus, if Lawrence Venuti is right, of state power, systemic authority, capitalism, and so on. Elsewhere, as in his discussions of Aristophanes and Anne Frank, he is clearly disgusted with assimilative translations. So I don't know. Set side by side with the overt political (left-leaning) polemics of Venuti, Lefevere's neutrality looks unmistakably like a whitewash of systemic hegemony, a refusal to indict political power wherever it appears; set next to the work of Eugene Nida or Peter Newmark, it looks more like Venuti. Again, like Lefevere, I pass the evaluative buck on to the reader--and rhetorically suppress my own take on these matters.

The question of patronage is a much more involved matter, one that would properly require a massive and daunting research effort that I am not inclined to undertake, but that might make a good dissertation topic for some ambitious graduate student: who (or what) supports polysystems theory (or any given systems theory of the social act of translation) institutionally? The easy answer is "academia": all of the polysystems theorists are entrenched in university jobs, are paid not only a salary but also various forms of research support (including travel to conferences and archives) by their academic employers, and their access to those monies is partly determined by objective assessments of their publication records, which is to say by their success in disseminating polysystems theory. But virtually every translation theorist, indeed virtually every theorist period, is employed by some university that "patronizes" or supports financially a wide variety of theoretical approaches; is there any sense in which the institutional patronage of polysystems theory is "undifferentiated," which according to Lefevere means that economic success follows directly from the propagation of a specific ideology? Or is it "differentiated," so that the economic success of the various theorists is independent of the ideology they support?

I just got through saying, of course, that polysystems theorists work hard not to propagate any ideology--their public ideology, as their more overtly political colleagues in the postcolonial camp would insist, is that scholars shouldn't have a public ideology, that true scholarship is valuefree--so it may be difficult in this case to differentiate "differentiated" from "undifferentiated" patronage. What's more, "value-free inquiry" is such a widespread academic ideology that it would be extremely difficult to talk about its interrelations with economic success (jobs, promotions, raises, teaching loads, travel money, etc.) in the specific case of polysystems theory, or even of systemic theories of social translation in general--to differentiate its patronage status from that of other theories. In addressing this issue fully, therefore, one would need to look closely at the specific power relationships between various polysystems theorists and their departments, their deans, and so on; but one would also want to explore other forms of patronage, such as publishing and translator organizations. What journals support polysystems theory, to what extent do they mainly or exclusively support polysystems theory? Until recently, Lefevere and Susan Bassnett were general editors of one of "the English-speaking system's" most prestigious book series in translation studies, at Routledge, the publisher of the two Lefevere books I have mentioned here. One would want to study the list of books published in that series, the extent to which it is exclusively or mainly or even loosely a polysystems series-also the relationship between the general editors and the Routledge edi-

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torial office, which had, presumably, ultimate say over what got published. How much autonomy did Lefevere and Bassnett have? If they said "publish this," would Routledge obey? Did they have to persuade the Routledge acquisitions editor and editorial board to publish the books they liked? If so (and that is likely), what form did that persuasion take? A description, written by Lefevere and/or Bassnett, of the book's virtues? One external evaluation, two external evaluations, three?

An even more difficult question concerns the extent to which polysystems theory, in accordance with its scientistic Universe of Discourse, attempts to build a patronage system in less overt ways, to encourage in readers and students the internalization and thus bureaucratization of their authority, so that the school's systemic success doesn't depend on, say, the capricious favor of a powerful dean or editor. In what ways, for example, is polysystems theory presented to the translation theory community as the fullest or most comprehensive approach to the topic, or the most scientific, or the most pedagogically sound or effective? Patronage, as Lefevere hints throughout Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, can come from above or below: from an elite group of professional readers (the precapitalist model) or from the large bookbuying public (the capitalist model). If translators and translation instructors, and thus translator training programs in general, around the world declared fealty to polysystems theory, that would constitute a powerful form of patronage: look, translators need us! Translation studies programs need us! One would also want to study polysystems theorists' institutional behavior in terms of the more negative forms of academic empire building: convincing students to take classes from you and your allies rather than those other professors, whose thinking is not as progressive as yours; ostracizing or otherwise punishing in-group members who stray from the fold; disparaging theorists from rival groups at conferences (both in sessions and at the bar or over dinner) and in various printed remarks, and so on. Without undertaking the massive research effort this would require I can't say which if any of these practices (which all academics see around them every day and often participate in themselves) are found within the system of (poly) systems theory, and I certainly don't want to be understood as merely insinuating unsavory activities without evidence; all I'm saying is that these are some of the directions systems-theoretical research into the polysystems school would have to take in order to establish patronage.

OUTSIDE SYSTEMS

Systems thinking is attractive largely because it promises a universal key to understanding, and thus mentally controlling, large quantities of external

data. Part of this, too, is the hegemonic status of systemic thinking in the West, where systemic thinking is in fact a kind of tautology: presystematic or unsystematic thinkers are often portrayed as people who don't think at all, because thinking is either system (at) ic or no thinking at all, blind uncritical practice. As I noted earlier, feminists have underscored the ways in which this narrow systemic conception of thought arises out of, and helps maintain, patriarchal norms of masculinity in the West, where men are supposed to be more spiritual, more intellectual, more abstract thinkers-closer to God the Systemic Father, God the Creator of Paternal Logic through his Son, the Logos--than carnal, emotional women.

On the other hand, systemic thinking is more than just a male fantasy of mental control; it is also a powerful tool for analyzing (and indicting) recurring social patterns that bind not only our ability to act as freely as we'd like but also our ability to analyze and indict them. In a theoretical system shaped by Marx and Freud and their many brilliant followers, it is difficult not to believe in systemic collective forces, partly conscious but largely unconscious, working through both institutions and individuals to control our lives in fine detail--and partly failing, due to the complexity of the human nervous system, but largely succeeding. Systems thinking has proved invaluable not only to Marxists and other leftists analyzing and indicting capitalism and postcolonial subjects analyzing and indicting colonialism, but also to feminists analyzing and indicting patriarchy. Mary Field Belenky ( 1986) and other personalizing feminists to the contrary, systems theory has been an essential rung on the feminist ladder to liberation.

Systems theory has many serious flaws, of course, and I have covered some of them above: the need to invent and stabilize boundaries around systems in order to account for dynamic change within them; the high level of abstraction, which necessarily neglects the variety and creativity of personal experience; the illusion that the systems a theorist "sees" actually exist and function in the way the systems theorist imagines. But the many methodological benefits may make it worth the candle. What does a translator do in the day-to-day process of accepting, researching, completing, and sending off translation jobs? What implications does this process have for translation pedagogy? What are the social forces that control the selection of texts for translation, translators to translate them, methods to translate them by, publishers to publish them, readers to read them, and so on? It is difficult to imagine any answers at all to these questions without systems thinking--partly, perhaps, because systems thinking is so endemic to "the" Western philosophical tradition, partly also because it is so incredibly useful, such a powerful method for tracing (maybe partly inventing) large-scale patterns in the midst of the confusions of everyday living.

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8 This is true of some recent linguistic approaches. Hatim and MasonDiscourse and the Translator, for instance, doesn't explicitly mention ideology, but the authors' discussion of intertextuality and semiosis is steeped in an awareness of the impact various socioideological pressures have on translation. I used to shake my head at Noam Chomsky, with his two illustrious but strictly separate careers as a linguist and a political theorist; it is gratifying to see a few linguistic theorists beginning to integrate the two.

The Craft & context of Translation: A Symposium. Contributors: William Arrowsmith - author, Roger Shattuck - author. Publisher: Published by University of Texas Press f. Place of Publication: Austin. Publication Year: 1961. Page Number: 3. 210p

D. S. CARNE-ROSS

Translation and Transposition

I suppose that the broadest distinction one draws between ways of transferring literary matter from one language to another is the distinction between translation and crib. And the broadest account of that distinction is that where a crib proposes to take care of the letter of the original, a translation must attend to its spirit. But that is broad indeed, an Asian landmass of a distinction, and for the purposes of this paper I intend to insert a middle term between translation and crib. The term I propose is 'transposition'. Transposition, in the sense I choose to give it, occurs when the language of the matter to be translated stands close enough to the language of the translator-- in age, idiom, cultural habits and so on-- for him to be able to follow the letter with a fair hope of keeping faith with the spirit. Turning a modern French novel into English is thus mainly a matter of transposition. Poetry is more difficult, because its verbal organisation is usually more concentrated and more personal; nonetheless a good deal of modern verse can usefully be transposed. Take the English version of the poems of Cavafy by Professor Mavrogordato. It is, in a perfectly honorable sense, essentially a first rendering; yet as an account of the matter (and metre) of Cavafy it is very serviceable and will stand until such time as someone is moved-- and of course permitted by the laws of copyright-- to attempt a poetic recreation; or, in other words, a translation. A somewhat more ambitious example of transposition is the version of Rilke Duino Elegies by Leishman and Spender. It reads like poetry, of a sort, it seems to reproduce something of the spirit of Rilke's poem, and yet it is close enough to the letter of the original to help the reader with next to no German to decipher Rilke's German words.

The further one moves back in time, the more transposition must approximate to translation. There is nonetheless a definite element of what I am calling transposition even in the finest modern rendering of a poem relatively as distant as the Divine Comedy . In the sense that Laurence Binyon worked out a modern English equivalent for Dante's medieval Italian, this is true translation. But since Dante's language and the procedures of his poetry are still just within hailing distance, Binyon was also able to transpose. He could for example take over Dante'sterza rima metre; English allowed him to reproduce, though to a lesser extent, the elision which helps to give Dante's line its peculiar concentration; he was often able to follow the contour of the syntax and even the patterning of the stresses. Let me quote a single tercet:

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WERNER WINTER