Who Does a Translated Text Belong To?

Abstract

What is a translated text and who does it belong to? What does a translation do with the “What” of the source language, when it is shifted into the “How” of the target language? Can the “What” of a text even be separated from its respective linguistic expression? These questions have been of interest to me since I began translating, which, aside from a few earlier incidental encounters, was about fifteen years ago. What do literary translators do before they translate? “They read the original,” we are inclined to answer. But am I not already translating a foreign-language original as I read it? Where does the appropriation begin that constitutes not just every translation but every reading? It might begin with opening the book, with the process of selecting it, or even with all the historical and cultural background knowledge one has to assemble to end up with this exact book. (This is part of what is known as the “hermeneutic circle,” and determines not only our reading choices, but also the “paratexts” we read before we get to the actual corpus.) So, the “Before” is already part of the process. And for translators, this “Before” rather frequently results in the discovery of a literary, emotional, intellectual, or even biographical closeness to the author, which then prompts them to find a publishing house because they are convinced that this work has to be available to read in one’s own language. Let us assume all these steps have been completed and the translator sits (or lies) before the original to be translated. In addition to the desire for an aesthetic or emotional experience, we read with the impulse to understand. What we are able and willing to understand, however, differs among individuals. Everyone reads their own book. Beyond that, the “How” of a text appears more important in the case of literature than the “What” I have to somehow extract from within the “How.” (“Everything has been said, just not by everybody,” Karl Valentin said of the “How” overhanging the “What.”) Once I, the translator, have constructed the “What” bound in the “How” of the other language, based on the horizon of my own comprehension, I can look for a linguistic form in German that organizes the linguistic material of my mother tongue in such a way that it achieves even close to the same effect the original had on me—one would think. But is that right? In translation circles there is much talk of the “equivalent effect” as the aim of translating wherein one attempts to infer, sense, analyze the kind of impression the original leaves in the source language in order to reconstruct it in one’s own. After considering the aforementioned hermeneutic circle and everything that it