Translation’s Duende
Keijiro Suga
In translation one should make oneself as transparent as possible; one should not impose one’s self, should not overtly display one’s individuality; all one has to do is to serve unconditionally the original text----over years, I have heard these statements made by my fellow translators. It is very sensible of them to say so, I agree. But in practice, a work’s figure, body temperature, and colors, show dramatic variations depending on who translates it.
Garcia Lorca was talking about the duende (‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’ in Spanish) that resides in Andalucian flamenco music and dances. In any human activities, whatever the genre may be, there are cases in which one feels the strong presence of duende and others in which no such is felt. For those who advocate the credo of ‘transparent translators,’ I’d like to answer in the following manner: in translation, however one yearns to be transparent, one never succeeds in the act of willful disappearance. A shadow of one’s existence tenaciously remains, and one cannot drive away this cumbersome ghost called one’s individuality. For sure, one should serve the original; but at the same time, can one remain unaware that one is constantly destroying the original? If the original is something alive and vivaciously moving about, translation is but an attempt to sacrifice it, to burn it, then to seek another form of life beyond the heap of its ashes. Isn’t it too impudent if one claims one’s transparency, therefore innocence, in this clearly demarcated act?
I remember a curious ontology once told by Samuel Beckett. “I am not on one side, nor on the other, I am in-between, I am a partition, I have two faces and no thickness…” (The Unnamable [not verbatim----couldn’t check the original]). This bizarre image comes in very handy. A translator has a dual, Janus’s face surfacing on the wall. What one face reads and hears, the other on its reverse side, with an inevitable grimace, re-tells and re-inscribes. This ‘I’ who does not have thickness nor depth, just like the inhabitants of the Flatland, is ghostly from the beginning, and so condemned eternally. However this ‘I’ asserts its own existence, it cannot fully exist. Such a paper-thin ‘I’ kills the original text and transfers it to its after-life. Just like the ferryman who transfers the dead to the other side of the Lethe.
Considering this, it may only be natural that the work of translation has dismal, somber overtones. I am not tempted to listen to the words of those who have not noticed in translation such pale shades of death, dark surfaces of the water. One’s blood-soiled hands cannot be transparent. Knowing that, one makes an effort to build a fire. One tries to agitate life. One attempts many possible dances, then aims at gathering on a line, by the incessant trembling of a tight-rope walker, all the movements that are constantly deviating in all directions. In the trace of this flame-like fluctuation arises a little duende born between one language and another.
(First published in Japanese in Coyote Reading, 2003. Translated by the author)
