Translating Fictions: The Messenger Was a Medium

Authors

  • Lazer Lederhendler Concordia University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21992/T9105G

Keywords:

Translation, literature, ethics

Abstract

In this article I will examine the ways in which the ethical gestures available to translators are inscribed in the etymologies of key terms and cognate pairs (especially in English and French) within the semantic field marked out by the category of translation: trade, transfer, transgress. translate / translater, traduire / traduce, betray / trahir. What emerges is a pattern dominated by themes of give and take, loss and gain, and above all, faithfulness and betrayal. Betrayal (like the French verb trahir) holds a pivotal position within this set, due to its two-faced character, given to both deceit and revelation. Juxtaposed on and rooted in these themes are the timeworn types in which translators have been chronically cast (when not simply ignored): the loser (mainly in the sense of the agent of loss) and the traitor. Such associations throw into stark relief the intrinsically political and ethical nature of the act of translation, which Lawrence Venuti and others have forcefully theorized and which the fate of translators in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, have brutally embodied in recent times. Drawing in part on my own thirty odd years as a translator of literary and non-literary texts, I will consider the implications of the figure of the translator as “double-agent” in the Canadian context, where a translation economy has grown against a backdrop of conflicts over loyalties and faithlessness. Furthermore, by way of dialoguing with Venuti’s project of “minoritizing translation,” I hypothesize a strategy of translators voluntarily affirming their “double-agency” or “traitorhood” as an additional challenge to prevailing textual and cultural assumptions and regimes.

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Author Biography

Lazer Lederhendler, Concordia University

Lazer Lederhendler has been translating professionally for over 30 years. He was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 1999 for The Sparrow Has Cut the Day in Half by Claire Dé, in 2002 for Larry Volt by Pierre Tourangeau, and in 2006 for Gaétan Soucy’s The Immaculate Conception, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the 2007 Quebec Writers’ Federation award for translation. He has also published poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in various Canadian and Québecois journals. He holds Arts degrees from the University of Ottawa and Concordia University (Montreal) and is currently an instructor in translation at the Université de Sherbrooke (Québec). He is presently on sabbatical leave from the Collège international des Marcellines in Westmount, Québec, where he has taught English for many years. Mr. Lederhendler lives in Montreal with his wife Pierrette and his son David.

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Published

2009-07-22

Issue

Section

TRANSLATION STUDIES