J. Carpenter Readings (Bruce)

    I really enjoyed reading Carpenter's essay in the textbook. Her tone is so genuinely enthusiastic, it's hard not to get caught up in her passion. It also helped that I fully agree with many of her talking points, especially about translating the spirit of the text. I think it is pretty apparent from my previous writings and some of my discussion points in class that I tend to dislike purists when it comes to translation. The impossible is often demanded of the translator, without acknowledgement that sometimes two languages are simply incompatible in some ways. When it comes to colloquialisms and humor, which are representative of the history and culture more so than the language of the author, the translator needs to prioritize. I happen to agree with the take that the "spirit" of the text is often much more than the semantics of the text. There is no reason to keep a translation "technically" correct if it loses the charm of the original text as a cost. 
    One interesting declaration she made was "to be a good translator, you need to be a good reader." Just as interesting was the context in which she had made that declaration. She described how, in accordance to The Text Does Not Err: Novels and the Job of the Reader by Ishihara Chiaki, the reader should always hold the text to be absolute. If there is something that seems to be a mistake, assume that you do not understand. Correct me if I'm misinterpreting, but it seems to me that she is equating author and text here. After all, as a translator, she often deferred to the author as a reader defers to the text. Of course, I think she brings this up in context of perceived technical errors like miswriting a name, etc., especially since she often translates non fictional texts as well. However, because I have seen so often the reverence that many people have for the authors of a text, I would like to take this chance to challenge the absolutist statement with some literary references of my own. The post-modern essay The Death of the Author suggests that the text is a not an absolute entity as the author demands it to be. The author may very well claim to be the god of the world of their text, but we are the ones to experience it. Therefore, our experiential interactions with a text has as much to do with the author as the workings of our world does with Jesus. A book is not complete after being written. It is complete after being read. The late Toni Morrison had this to say:

"My writing expects, demands participatory reading. The reader supplies the emotions. Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience."

That is to say, the author supplies us with but a scaffold for us to flesh out. Now, in this paradigm, the translator's job seems much more daunting! Rather than simply conveying the meaning of the author, who is often one person, or at most a small group of people, a translator is expected to maintain this fragile scaffold in such a way that, across the boundaries of language, it retains the purity and pluripotency to encourage a reader to draw their own conclusions, with out being tainted by the suggestive filter of someone else's lens.