Making the ‘Invisible’ Visible?

The role of reviewers

Yet, according to Venuti (1995), the most significant manner in which the invisibility of the translator becomes most apparent is how translations are reviewed. In The Translator’s Invisibility, Venuti examines a sample of translated literature from a range of British and American periodicals, both literary and mass-audience, across a sixty-year period (1946–2005). He chooses examples with various kinds of narratives and from different genres, ranging from novels and short stories to philosophy and politics. Many of these translations were commercial successes in English; some were initially successful, but then became marginalised; yet others came to market with very little notice. Venuti discovers that reviewers very rarely address the translation in any meaningful way, but if they do, their comments usually ‘focus on its style, neglecting such other possible questions as its accuracy, its intended audience, its economic value in the current book market, its relation to literary trends in English, its place in the translator’s career’ (Venuti 1995: 2). Ultimately, the reviewers in question ‘have grown amazingly consistent in praising fluency while damning deviations from it, even when the most diverse range of foreign texts is considered’ (ibid.: 2). This assertion overlaps significantly with the findings of previous scholars, such as Christ (1984) and Maier (1990). Christ (1984: 8) describes how translations tended to be reviewed in the 1980s in his contribution to PEN American Center Newsletter: many newspapers ‘do not even list the translators in headnotes to reviews [and] reviewers often fail to mention that a book is a translation while quoting from the text as though it were written in English’. Maier (1990: 19), in a similar vein, discovered that North American reviewers of a translation in the late 1980s ‘focus almost exclusively on [its] potential role in English, comparing it to “similar” works in North American literature and evaluating the ease with which it can be read’. This certainly adds weight to Venuti’s argument that the work of the translator is very frequently concealed.

Venuti supports his central argument with a selection of excerpts from the reviews under investigation. The reviews commend translations which are elegant, flowing and fluid. West refers to Rabassa’s translation as ‘a triumph of fluent, gravid momentum, all stylishness and commonsensical virtuosity’ (Book World 1970, in Venuti 1995: 3). The Times Literary Supplement assesses a translation to be ‘pleasantly fluent’, so much so that ‘two chapters of it have already appeared in Playboy magazine’ (Times Literary Supplement 1969, in Venuti 1995: 3). On the other hand, those translations which are wooden, unidiomatic or clumsy are overwhelmingly castigated by reviewers. Anthony Burgess (New York Times Book Review 1990, in Venuti 1995: 3), for example, appears to criticise Helen Lane’s translation of the title of the book, as it is ‘faithful to Mario Vargas Llosa’s – “Elogio de la Madrasta” – but not quite idiomatic’. Balderston (New York Times Book Review 1992, in Venuti 1995: 3), on the other hand, assesses a translation to be ‘wooden’, ‘careless’ or ‘inaccurate’, claiming that it shows ‘all the signs of hurried work and inadequate revision’. Translations, therefore, do seem to have been judged acceptable when they read fluently and idiomatically.