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Notes on Heartland: My Work of Translation

(Remarks at the Launch of Heartland
PEN Conference, De La Salle University
22 November 2016)

    RANSLATION has always been denigrated and praised as a literary practice. It is denigrated as a second-class citizen of sorts in literature, a parasite of the original work, an imperfect art that is always in progress. Some of great writers had their share of bad words for it. Rumi said that “Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” Or as the poet Yevegeny Yevtushenko, who is not always politically correct, said: “Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.”

 

Praise is given grudgingly. “Translation is the art of failure,” the semiotician Umberto Eco said. There is the classic Italian adage, “Traduttore, traditore.” Translator, traitor—for betraying to us the meaning of a language we do not know or do not speak. On the other hand, the literary philosopher Walter Benjamin called it the “afterlife” or resurrection of the original work, its recreation in a new language, not necessarily the translating or target language but a greater or ideal language which I suspect used the universal grammar imagined by Noam Chomsky.

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Perhaps one of the most sober descriptions comes from the leading theorist of translation today. Lawrence Venuti says, “To read a translation as a translation, as a work in its own right, we need a more practical sense of what a translator does. I would describe it as an attempt to compensate for an irreparable loss by controlling an exorbitant gain.”

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When I look back on it, my own work of translation is almost as old as my writing: 30 years more or less since I went to Manila to work, joined writers’ organizations and made friends with many writers. Before long I was translating my friends who write in Filipino/Tagalog who either were being anthologized abroad or went to the Iowa Writers Workshop lugging my translations together with their manuscripts. Or my singer-songwriter friends who had to concertize in Europe and need my English translations for their subtitles or concert notes.

 

But I read translation theory only lately, after 30 years. Heartland is only my second full-book translation. I worked on it during a major transition in my life and provide me both challenge and solace, and much insight into my own writing itself. I’ve had translated many more since, but Heartland provides a milepost. I explain it in my long introduction. And  perhaps it affords me some shield from the stringent demands of Water Benjamin and the responsibility laid on my shoulder by Venuti. And again, perhaps, it gives the small privilege to joke, like Borges, that “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

 

Marne Kilates

22 November 2016

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