response paper on venuti

In considering Laurence Venuti’s fascinating notion of the translator’s invisibility, it’s worth taking into account the compelling socioeconomic and political ideas he puts forward in the essay. Venuti makes a case for the translator into English as a de facto disadvantaged figure, legally deprived of his intellectual labors, underpaid and severely circumscribed by cultural prejudices. These cultural prejudices towards the standardization and ‘Englishization’ of foreign texts, in addition to proscribing the self-differentiation of the translator, also amount, in Venuti’s eyes, to an ethnocentric cultural violence. As a translator attempting to render a text whose linguistic innovation—indeed, very choice of language—is charged with political meaning, I find myself troubled by the notion that a translator’s goal must always be linguistic transparency. Although I find myself unable to fully carry over the array of neologisms and the complex web of Biblical and Talmudic allusions that characterize Tschernichovsky’s remarkable text, I am certain that I would be doing an unthinkable disservice to his intent were I to attempt to create a smooth, glossy translation. While I don’t want to necessarily draw undue attention to myself, there is also a considerable amount of research and labor that translating such a complex text demands—not to mention interpretation (in the case of more abstruse formations) and a certain measure of art in choosing between English synonyms. I routinely attempt to reproduce alliteration, consonance, dissonance and other sonic textual effects in my translation—not necessarily the most conducive to characterless translation. All told, I find my text so lumpy, new, and linguistically innovative—itself a hapax legomenon in the history of Hebrew literature—that to translate it without attention to the non-instrumental dimensions of language seems to me essential.