Culture(s) and Authenticity

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz / Anna Warso (eds.)

Culture(s) and Authenticity

The Politics of Translation
and the Poetics of Imitation

About the editors

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz and Anna Warso are assistant professors at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland, where they teach literature and translation.

About the book

This book addresses epistemological and political aspects of the discursive pursuit of authenticity and various ways in which the inauthentic is devalued and marginalized. The essays critically analyze various means by which the authentic is searched for, staged, admired, dismissed, replicated or simply taken for granted. What is at work in such discursive practices is a poetics of imitation. This is seen as a paradoxical kind of poetics which renounces the authenticity of the created text for the sake of its semi-religious offering to the origin. Such a divination of the Authentic posits translation as an idolatrous act accompanied by a suspicion of its simultaneously being iconoclastic.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Foreword

Eriko Sato

Translation across Cultures: Domesticating/Foreignizing Cultural Transplantation

Said Faiq

Imitation, Representation… or the Master Discourse of Translation

Lada Kolomiyets

The Untranslatable Ethnic: Always an Outsider? A Brief Review of Ukrainian-to-English Literary Translation Practices

Wojciech Kozak

Authenticity Reexamined: Muriel Spark’s The Public Image

Piotr Skurowski

White-to-Black: Racechange and Authenticity, from John Howard Griffin to Rachel Dolezal

Jerzy Sobieraj

Inversion, Conversion, and Reversion in Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance

Agnieszka Podruczna

But Who Does Live? Postcolonial Identities, Authenticity, and Artificial Intelligence in Darryl A. Smith’s “The Pretended”

Jacek Wiśniewski

Editorial Revision and Recovery: Authenticity and Imitation in John Clare’s Early Poetry

Eliza Borkowska

The Birth of the Poet: The Role of S. T. Coleridge in the Making of “William Wordsworth”

Natalia Kamovnikova

Identity Blurred: The Use of Interlinear Trots for Translations of Poetry in the Soviet Union ←5 | 6→

Hanna C. Rückl

Imitation and Creativity: Ernst Jandl’s Writing in Translation and Completion

Joanna Gładyga

The Birth of the Editor: On Authenticity in Raymond Carver’s Writing and Editing

Nafize Sibel Güzel, Abdullah Küçük

A Non-Existent Source, A Successful Translation: Nihal Yeğinobalı’s Genç Kızlar

Yulia Nanyak

Language Personality: Problems and Opportunities in Translation (Based on the Characters from the Tragedy Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and its Ukrainian and Anglophone Translations)

Debora Biancheri

Representations of Identity in Italian Translations of Seamus Heaney: Rewriting Poetry “True to Life”

Mark Ó Fionnáin

“The Future’s Bright, the Future’s Orange!” On the Translation of the Colour Orange into Irish

Contributors’ Notes ←6 | 7→

Foreword

Textual production may be initiated and guided by the producer, but it puts to work various linguistic and cultural materials which make the text discontinuous, despite any appearance of unity, and which create an unconscious, a set of unacknowledged conditions that are both personal and social, psychological and ideological. (Venuti, 24)

Authenticity seems to be an unquestionably positive category. In his reading of Sartre and Heidegger as thinkers obsessively calling us to be authentic, Roger Waterhouse looks at authenticity both as an object for which we struggle, and as the struggle itself – an effort whose ardor is opposed to “the tempting surrender to inauthenticity” (22). In fact we struggle with ourselves against the temptation of passively, or perhaps, lazily, accept what we are. Authenticity, unlike inauthenticity, is not easy and it requires from us a certain renunciation of passivity which is also a gesture of accepting the given whose “givenness” is always susceptible to being imposed. The work of authentication is thus tantamount to being independent from others, to an absolute kind of individuality or uniqueness which is also absolutely self-centered, so absolutely, in fact, that any identification with others, is a denial of my autonomy and integrity: “I am both a subject and an object, but only my subjectivity is freedom: my objectivity is unfreedom, the vehicle of inauthenticity, the interference of society with my autonomy and my integrity” (26).

The papers included in this volume address not so much the vehicle of inauthenticity as its mirror image – the vehicle of authenticity – the vehicle which Waterhouse does not mention by the name in his critique of the pursuit of authenticity, though which he implicitly finds at work in the construction of the negativity of the inauthentic. This negativity, at least in absolute terms, has become strongly weakened in more recent critical approaches to the question of the authentic through bringing the inauthentic itself to the sphere of interest and critical care. The effect of weakening the positive power of the original has been achieved, at least partly, through the deconstructive acceptance of the other as constitutive of the center. The Derridean principle of constitutive outside in which the contamination of the authentic is the inevitable effect of any writing has brought attention to the workings of any inscription, including the inscription of the authentic “itself”, as a vehicle of constructing authenticity within the realm of iteration, of partial repetition which does not fully replicate, which does not duplicate, but allows for the entrance of others into the processes of produc←7 | 8→tion and creation. This weakening is also, an among others, the effect of bringing translation to the study of culture, of listening to it and seeing it with the ear of the other and noticing that translation, as Mark Wigley remarks in his essay on Babel and Derrida, “constitutes the original it is added to” (8), the addition, or surplus being the only possible and thinkable end or limit of the authentic. It is from the position of the other, the inauthentic “not-me,” that the “me” can be spoken, and, as Derrida phrases it in The Ear of the Other, “[t]he ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography” (51). The perception of the authentic seems to be a projection of my authenticity, of the kernel of me which, as in Sartre and Heidegger, must remain untouched, even untouchable – a phantasm which is reflected in the idea of translation in which “we must translate ourselves into [the other language] and not make it come into our language” (115). Hence the ideal of what Lawrence Venuti calls “fluent translation”, the translation in which the foreign does not speak – “the regime of fluent translating” in which “the translator works to make his or her work ‘invisible,’ producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems “natural,” i.e., not translated” (5).