The original and its translation from the reader's perspective

Abstract

To claim that the readers' experience of a literary work in translation is different from their experience of the original at first seems very paradoxical and even heretical. Such a statement is so unexpected simply because we always think of the original and its translation as being the same literary work without paying any attention to their different concre­ tizations on the part of their readers due to textual differences. This tacit assumption of their sameness seems totally unaffected by the fact that we never think of the original and its translation as representing the same text; on the contrary, we always take it for granted that they are two different texts in two different languages. The differences between the two texts and the differentness of the translation are never lost sight of in the discussion of the qualities and adequacy of the translation. When it comes to criticizing the literary work or teaching it, however, the translation is tacitly assumed to be identical with the original and approached as if it were the original, with little or no critical awareness of the fundamental textual and other possible differences. This critical and pedagogical approach to literary translation seems to be almost immune to the growing awareness of the importance of the textual elements, to an increasing body of research concerning their impact on the reader, and to the ample evidence about various inadequacies of literary translations, revealed especially by the processes of retranslation and thus visible in all works that exist in several translations. This approach also takes little if any notice of the overall tendency of the translation to assimilate the original to the receptor culture, to simplify and sometimes also to reduce the original.