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Monitoring the interliminal. Translation theory and postmodern taste

Marilyn Gaddis Rose
MG

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Marilyn Gaddis Rose

Résumé du colloque

The notion of the interliminal in translation theory seems to have come into currency slightly before cross-reading, thus giving us an example of theory preceding taste. Thus, postmodern reading and translation theory are mutually reenforcing. It is gratifying to read that translation theory can never reach closure (Lamy 1995). It is exhilarating also, for that move liberates translation criticism and by extension literary interpretation. Every attempt to regularize theory in translation studies depends upon making meaning stay put (Garcia-Landa 1995). If meaning stayed put, exegesis would be the only valid critical strategy. Not that exegesis is flawed, but its chief value is archival. And while polysystem descriptions guide us in data collecting (Toury 1995), their focus on the translation text obscures not only the interliminal gap between the first text and its translation(s) but also the veritable landfill the gap may have become. Exegesis aims to uncover how a text was read. Exegesis never changes reading. In translation criticism, exegesis takes no account of interliminal accrual. Old translations may still read acceptably, but the interliminal has inevitably changed. Our reading will be richer if we engage in a hermeneutic motion of our own to assess what the dynamic of language has changed in the interim. Even more revealing is that probing the interliminal, made more perceptible by translation, induces postmodern expansion in even the most controlled rhetoric. Take Flaubert whose agonies of composition led to excision. Looking for the interliminal restores plenitude: first in recognizing the gap; second in marking translation choices no longer justes, or third, in finding errors that have left a trace. Indeed, the obsolete and erroneous function as analogues to the parts of the text Flaubert discarded. The plenitude, in turn, displaces the subject, making the text amenable to postmodern taste. Translation theory has given reading a mechanism for updating texts. No matter how dated a text in time and/or translation, our reading now only begins with the text as presented. We can elicit the interliminal and make it new. A few examples from Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale and its English translations will suffice. Presentation in English; a French text furnished to give all listeners the opportunity to uncover an interliminal.

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Section :
La traduction dans le champ des sciences humaines
news icon Thème du colloque :
La traduction dans le champ des sciences humaines
host icon Hôte : Université McGill

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Titre du colloque :

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Thème du colloque :

La traduction dans le champ des sciences humaines
Monitoring the interliminal. Translation theory and postmodern taste
Marilyn Gaddis Rose