Notes, Gregory Rabassa, "The Many Faces of Treason"

• p. 3 What do you all think of the idea that the translator is a traitor?
• p. 3 Translator = treacherous knave
  • An unprincipled man, given to dishonorable and deceitful practices; a base and crafty rogue.
• p. 3, What do you think about translation being an art and not a craft? How do the two of these interplay in the translator's abilities?
  • Maybe teaching the 'art' can only go so far?
• p. 4, How is 'the word' a metaphor for all things we see, feel, and imagine?
• p. 4, 2nd par. "Can we ever feel what the author felt as they wrote the words we are transforming?"
• p. 4, 2nd par. "We will sacrifice our best hunches in favor of some pedestrian norm in fear of betraying the task we were set to do."
  • Sometimes in translation, intuitive leaps are important. Douglas Robinson speaks of this in his book, Becoming a Translator.
• p. 4, 2nd par. "The facelessness imposed on the translator,..."
  • In interpretation you are supposed to act as if you were not even there.
• p. 4, 3rd par. "Words are treacherous things,..."
  • In Gulliver's Travels, in Lagado, the visitors were to carry around all of their things, therefore eliminating the need for words. The words would no longer be used and therefore would not be metaphors for things.
  • Ferdinand de Saussure made an important designation between:
    • Signifier > signified
  • What Swift was intimating would be to essentially just have the signifier.
• p. 5, 2nd par. "If a word is a metaphor for a thing..."
  • Ursprach = original language
  • Welter = 3. A surging or confused mass: a. of material things, persons, etc.
• p. 5, 2nd par. "Since Flaubert would either say or think pierre when he picked one up does stone cover his thought when we translate him?"
  • Why does he mention 'Peter and the Papacy?'
    • Matthew 16:18: "I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.
      • Peter > Petros Rock > Petra
• p. 5, bottom, Why is a diamond "a stone to the jeweler but a rock to the jewel thief?"
  • Here we return to the signifier > signified distinction.
• p. 6, top "...a language will load down a word with cultural barnacles along the way." (Let's look at the etymology of silly.)
• p. 7 1st par. We cannot help but appropriate the message laid out for us in our native tongue (a message originally in a foreign one). It will have to be encoded into our own personal and cultural construct.
• p. 7, 2nd par. "He (the author) is a compendium of all these factors: language, culture, and individual words."
  • Every author or translator cannot help but bring their own knowledge, perspective, and world view to the translation.
  • "His free will and originality only exist within the bounds of his culture."
    • What do you all think of that? Is this true?
• p. 7 bottom paragraph
  • "Escribir bien consiste en hacer continuamente pequeñas erosiones a la gramática, al uso establecido, a la norma vigente de la lengua. Es un acto de rebeldía permanente contra el contorno social, una subversión." -José Ortega y Gasset
  • Counter to this, the translator has to marshall himself, limit himself.
• p. 8, par. 2, bottom "He (the translator) has to read the text closely to know what it's all about."
  • What do you think about this? The translator has to be the most ideal of all readers. He/she has to be the most objective of any reader.
    • 10,000 readers of the same book = 10,000 different books (in a sense)
  • Your translation is your 'reading' of that book.
• p. 8 bottom:
  • What did Alexander do to the Gordian knot? (The person who untied the knot would rule all of Asia.)
    • What is vital reason according to Gasset?
  • "To live," he maintained, "is to deal with the world, aim at it, act in it, be occupied with it"
• Top of page 9, Basically we need to be confident, precise, and logical. However, there is a balance in that we must also be very careful.
  • Auteur = author, hauteur = height, haughtiness
• p. 9, 2nd par. "If you ponder a word long enough..."
  • This is one of those indicators of how words are simply arbitrarily tied to the objects or ideas which they represent.
  • Have you all ever kept repeating the same word, and it comes to sound strange and seems to be meaningless?
• p. 9, bottom, The point he leaves us with is acquired instinct. What do you think about using instinct as a translator?