What do we mean when we say that translation doesn't 'reflect' but 'refract'?
"Lefevere argued, very cogently, that translations never genuinely 'reflect' their original, whether faithfully or not; instead, they refract their originals. Every translation is a negotiation between 'source' and 'target' cultures, and as a result all are evidence for shifting literary values. Elsewhere Lefevere criticizes what he sees as a Romantic obsession with fidelity to a quasi-sacred original, 'which is not to be tampered with--hence the horror with which 'bad' translations are rejected' (see Lefevere this volume: 204)" (Damrosch).
Though I agree with Lefevere in that translations cannot truly 'reflect' the original work, I question his use of 'refract' as a substitute. Refraction certainly acknowledges and highlights this act of
transposition--both the literal transposition of one language into another and the literary abstract transposition (the act more concerned with questions of temporal transfer, of socio-anthropologic and geographic exchange out of a particular time and space into one separate, one outside of the originals time and space). Yet, I wonder if translation can both 'refract' and 'reflect' simultaneously. That is, it seems to me translation just as much attempts to emulate its original as it does contort and bend for relational, relative purposes. Arguably, part of the reason we translate and transpose is to reflect. Reflection serves as type of bartering tool, a means of universal commerce--through which we are able to preserve time and space (e.g., historical and geographic contexts), as well as sustain the dynamics of diversity. Nonetheless, the act of refraction is undoubtedly both perverse and pure in its intention(s); it's equally brutal and delicate; an imposition, as well as an adulation.
True enough. Refraction does not necessarily exclude reflection, at least in the figurative world of translation theory. The idea of reflection, though, assumes that the translator herself is invisible, that--by peering THROUGH her--we see an accurate reflection of the source text. I'm not sure that part of reflection is possible. Your point, though, that we translate (and read translations) in order to reflect is well taken. That's why in some ways we read any literature. And translations--even those that offer a refracted version of the original--still often maintain a sense of the source text's peculiarities. As Goethe said, translation is "impossible but necessary."
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