One of the most impressive and fascinating accounts of worldwide literary translation is To Be To Translated Or Not To Be, a rich report from International PEN/Instut Ramon Llull on the "international situation of literary translation" and edited by Esther Allen. Sure, it was released in 2007, but I only just read through it all. And it's too good for me to keep quiet -- or to paraphrase it. In a series of posts on Isak this week, I will share excerpts from the report. If you want to read the full report yourself (highly encouraged), click here for the PDF.
Let's start here, with the report's introduction by Allen, herself a translator of significant reputation and the founder of the PEN Translation Fund, and Carlos Torner of the humanities department of the IRL in Barcelona:
In Act I, Scene III of Richard II, the Duke of Norfolk is banished from England—sent into exile “never to return.” Curiously, his first thought on hearing this harsh sentence pronounced is not of family or friends but of the English language, the only language he has spoken in the forty years of his life. To leave England, in 1595, was to leave English. Norfolk contemplates going forth into a world where his speech will be unintelligible, his very words cast into a dark dungeon, his aging mind incapable of beginning anew with some other language:
Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,
Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips,
And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance
Is made my gaoler to attend on me.
I am too old to farn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now:
What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?*
In the 400-odd years since Shakespeare wrote these lines, the terms of Norfolk’s lament have been almost wholly reversed. Today, the speaker of English has a better chance of being understood in more places across the globe than the speaker of any other language. Today, it is the person who does not speak English who risks exclusion—not merely social exclusion but exclusion from the ability to survive in the global economy: “speechless death” indeed.
{…}
In a paper recently presented at an International PEN gathering, the Slovene writer Andrey Blatnick asked: “Where to export? In the UK, only 2% of the books on the market are translations, in the US 3%. But in Turkey it is 40%, in Slovenia 70%. Only when the voice of someone else is heard can ‘free choice’ begin. Who loses from these statistics? Those who do not have a choice or those who cannot be chosen?”
{…}
English’s indifference to translation is not merely a problem for native speakers of English who thus deprive themselves of contact with the non-English-speaking world. It is also a roadblock to global discourse that affects writers in every language, and serves as one more means by which English consolidates its power by imposing itself as the sole mode of globalization. For those of us who still care about literature, the threat thus posed is a fearsome one. If world literature, in Goethe’s sense of the term, comes to consist entirely, or even primarily, of literature written in English, then is there really such a thing as world literature anymore?
* Nicholas Ostler, who cites this passage in his study of the language history of world, Empires of the Word (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) points out that when Shakespeare wrote this speech, there was only a single British colony, the one founded by Sir Walter Raleigh in Roanoke, Virginia in 1586, the fate of which was unknown to anyone in England at this point (p. 477).
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