As a practitioner of literary translation, sometimes I wonder if translating such and such literary work has any meaning at all. Of course the work of translation offers, to myself, moments of joy----joy of discovery and enlightenment, of a surrogate creation, of the feeling of fulfillment when the work is finished and put into print. I can be content with all these alone, surely. But what about the translation's socio-historical, and linguistic scope? Is a translator's satisfaction enough raison d'etre for a translation to be produced? What actually happens when a translation is finished, materialized and circulated in search of its readers? We translators know that the translated versions do not resemble the original. This feeling of inadequacy may lure us to believe---could it be out of our guilt?---that there is something that survives translation. The work's "soul," we are tempted to say. Our faithfulness is nothing if not for an inexistent contract with such "soul" of the work. It's all the better for a translator to remain silent about what she has done.
One thing is certain, though. As I have said earlier, we empirically know that any language (langue) is constantly washed over by other languages. Given this consciousness, the minimalist answer to the question "What is translation for?" is that it serves to transform the body of a language, to let the language speak something that it has never spoken before, to inscribe the matters or emotions that have never been formulated on the visible surface of the language. If I, as a Japanese translator, can say that "This has never before been said in Japanese, nobody's seen a sentence like this in Japanese," then there should be no reason to doubt the translation's validity. But once you begin discussing in this manner, there would be no more distinction between "translation from an original" and "translation without the original," which is simply creation. A translator may aim at introducing a local transformation of his language through the act of translation. A poet aims at the same through the act of writing, which in fact is never a creatio ex nihilo. The boundary between the two cases is blurred. Literary creation is a revolution within a language. Translation, too, is a part of such creation but it flies with borrowed wings. The wings are borrowed from the original that inhabit another language. By transposing and transplanting the kind of expressions that originates in another language's words and phrases, a translation, while being nothing more than a metaphor for the original text, transforms the landscape on this side of the linguistic boundary.
