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METATRANSLATION

Metatranslation presents a selection of 14 key essays by leading theorist, Theo

Hermans, covering a span of almost 40 years. The essays trace Hermans’ work
and demonstrate how translation studies has evolved from the 1980s into the
much more diverse and self-reflexive discipline it is today.
The book is divided into three main sections: the first section explores the
status and central concerns of translation studies, including the growing interest in
sociological, ideological and ethical approaches to translation; the second section
investigates the key concepts of translation norms and of the translator’s presence,
or positioning, in translated texts; the historical essays in the final section are
concerned with both modern and early modern discourses on translation and
with the use of translation as an instrument of war and propaganda.
This synthesis of the work of a highly influential pioneer in translation studies
is essential reading for researchers, scholars and advanced students of translation
studies, intercultural studies and comparative literature.

Theo Hermans is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Translation Studies at

University College London (UCL). His monographs include Translation in Systems
(1999; reissued as a Routledge Translation classic in 2020), The Conference of the
Tongues (2007) and Translation and History (2022).
Key Thinkers on Translation

This series presents the essential selected works – journal articles and book
extracts – of the leading figures in the field of translation studies in a single
manageable volume. With a general introduction and section introductions
contextualising the work, readers can follow the themes and strands of their
work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the
development of the field itself.

Researching Translation in the Age of Technology and Global Conflict

Selected Works of Mona Baker
Edited by Kyung Hye Kim and Yifan Zhu

Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism

Selected Writings of Barbara Godard
Edited by Eva C. Karpinski and Elena Basile

Metatranslation
Essays on Translation and Translation Studies
Theo Hermans

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​.com​

/Key​-Thinkers​-on​-Translation​/book​-series​/KTOT
METATRANSLATION
Essays on Translation and
Translation Studies

Theo Hermans
Designed cover image: © ‘Lines of Communication’ by Sandra Lynn
(Dacorum Creatives)
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Theo Hermans
The right of Theo Hermans to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hermans, Theo, author.
Title: Metatranslation: essays on translation and translation studies/Theo
Hermans. Description: First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York,
NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Key thinkers on translation | Includes
bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055600 |
ISBN 9780367819583 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367819590 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003011033 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. |
LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P306 .H436 2023 |
DDC 418/.02—dc23/eng/20230307
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055600
ISBN: 978-0-367-81958-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-81959-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01103-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
CONTENTS

Sources and Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

PART 1
APPROACHES 13

1 Translation’s Other [1996] 15

2 Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation

Studies [2002] 35

3 Translation, Irritation and Resonance [2007] 48

4 What is Translation? [2013] 65

5 Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding [2019] 81

PART 2
CONCEPTS 95

6 Translational Norms and Correct Translations [1991] 97

7 Translation and Normativity [1998] 109


vi Contents

8 The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative [1996] 129

9 The Translator as Evaluator [2010] 150

10 Positioning Translators: Voices, Views and Values in

Translation [2014] 163

PART 3
HISTORIES 181

11 Images of Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the

Renaissance Discourse on Translation [1985] 183

12 The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance:

Explorations in a Discursive Field [1997] 210

13 Miracles in Translation: Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle

and Two Dutch Translations [2015] 232

14 Schleiermacher [2019] 253

Index 273
SOURCES AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Translation’s Other’ was delivered as an inaugural lecture at University College

London (UCL) on 19 March 1996. An Open Access version is available online
via the UCL Discovery site: https://discovery​.ucl​.ac​.uk​/id​/eprint​/198.

‘Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies’ was first published
in Translation Studies. Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, edited by Alessandra
Riccardi, 10–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 521
81731 5. Reprinted by kind permission of Cambridge University Press.

‘Translation, Irritation and Resonance’ was first published in Constructing a

Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, 57–75.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. ISBN 978 90 272 1682 3.
Reprinted by kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company.

‘What Is Translation?’ was first published as ‘What Is (Not) Translation?’ in The

Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Carmen Millán and Francesca
Bartrina, 75–87. London & New York: Routledge, 2013. ISBN 978 0 415 55967
6 (hbk), 978 0 203 10289 3 (ebk). Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge.

‘Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding’ was first published in

Untranslatability. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Duncan Large, Motoko
Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska and Emily Rose, 27–40. New York & London:
Routledge. ISBN 978 1 138 08257. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge.

‘Translational Norms and Correct Translations’ was first published in Translation

Studies. The State of the Art, edited by Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens,
155–169. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991. ISBN 90 5183 257 5. Reprinted
by kind permission of Brill Publishers.


viii Sources and Acknowledgements

‘Translation and Normativity’ was first published in Current Issues in Language and
Society 5 (1998), 1–2, 51–72. ISSN 13520520. It also appeared in Translation and
Norms, edited by Christina Schäffner, 50–71. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters,
1999. ISBN 1 85359 438 5. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge.

‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’ was first published in Target

8 (1996), 1, 23–48. ISSN 0924 1884. It was reprinted in Critical Readings in
Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 193–212. London & New York:
Routledge, 2010. ISBN 978 0 415 46955 5. Reprinted by kind permission of
John Benjamins Publishing Company.

‘The Translator as Evaluator’ was first published in Text and Context. Essays on
Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason, edited by Mona Baker, Maeve
Olohan and María Calzada Pérez, 63–76. Manchester & Kinderhook (NY): St
Jerome Publishing, 2010. ISBN 978 1 905763 25 2. Reprinted by kind permis-
sion of Routledge.

‘Positioning Translators. Voices, Views and Values in Translation’ was

first published in Language and Literature 23 (2014), 3, 285–301. DOI:
10.1177/0963947014536508. Reprinted by kind permission of Sage Publishers.

‘Images of Translation. Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on

Translation’ was first published in The Manipulation of Literature, edited by Theo
Hermans, 103–135. London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985. ISBN 0 7099 1276
5. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge.

‘The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance. Explorations in a

Discursive Field’ was first published in Translating Literature. Essays and Studies,
edited by Susan Bassnett, 14–40. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ISBN 0 85991
522 0. Essays and Studies is a publication of the English Association (www​.engli-
shassociation​.ac​.uk). © The English Association 1997. All rights reserved.

‘Miracles in Translation. Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch
Translations’ was first published as ‘Miracles in Translation. Lipsius, Our Lady
of Halle and Two Dutch Translations’ in the theme issue ‘Translation and Print
Culture in Early Modern Europe’, edited by Brenda Hosington, of Renaissance
Studies 29 (2015), 1, 125–142. DOI: 10.1111/rest. 12117. Reprinted by kind per-
mission of John Wiley & Sons.

‘Schleiermacher’ was first published in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and

Philosophy, edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson, 17–33. London & New
York: Routledge, 2019. ISBN 978 1 138 93355 2 (hbk), 978 1 3156 7848 1 (ebk).
Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge.

I want to thank Kathryn Batchelor for gently urging this collection on me,
Lucelle Pardoe for kindly converting files, and Talitha Duncan-Todd for emi-
nently useful advice on copyright issues.
INTRODUCTION

It’s what we take for granted that gives us away. Like most of those who elabo-
rated or adopted the descriptive paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, I came to
translation studies via literary studies, more especially comparative literature. A
great deal of comparative literary study at the time was concerned with abstract
questions of influence or typological similarities. The study of translation, it
seemed to me, offered the prospect of concrete comparisons of individual texts
– a definite bonus. The first essay I ever published (1979; not in this collection),
composed when I was finishing my PhD, explored the convergence between
poetry translations and principles of poetic writing in European Modernism
around the First World War. Several other essays written in the 1980s (including
two reprinted here: the historical ‘Images of Translation’, 1985, and the more
theoretical ‘Translational Norms and Correct Translations’, 1991) were wholly
in line with the descriptivist paradigm that was gaining currency at the time.
In hindsight, the presuppositions underpinning these early pieces are clear
enough. Translation meant, almost exclusively, literary translation. Languages
were discrete and homogenous entities tied to national traditions, and different
national traditions existed alongside each other. The material and social condi-
tions of cultural production were of marginal interest. Translation, as such, was
not a problem; it was a matter of documenting how it was done and what was said
about it. Research was of the order of an inventory. The standpoint from which
translation was viewed remained external to the world of translation itself; as
observers, we regarded what translators did as ‘behaviour’, in the way biologists
might study animal behaviour.
This is not to diminish the novelty or the achievements of the descriptive
paradigm. Its diagnostic stance broke decisively with prescriptive approaches. Its
relaxed understanding of translation, as that which happens to be called transla-
tion, sidestepped problems of definition. Its privileging of the target text made

DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-1
2 Introduction

the relation with the original just one among several factors to be considered in
explaining the shape of individual translations. It pushed concepts such as norms
and systems so as to situate translations in wider cultural environments.
It took researchers coming from other directions or working in other tradi-
tions to bring to light the blind spots that we descriptivists did not see. Feminist
and postcolonial scholars, for instance, highlighted the descriptivist myopia
regarding power differentials. Lawrence Venuti insisted on writing as both a
translator and an academic, and he wanted to change the way literary transla-
tion (into English) was done. Ethnography in the 1980s was shaken up by the
‘Writing Culture’ debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986).
It questioned the role of the ethnographer who went to live in a local community
as a ‘participant observer’ but who would eventually translate his or her findings
into a metropolitan disciplinary idiom. The debate turned on issues of represen-
tation and objectivity, and it trailed conceptual, political and ethical aspects in
its wake.
Most disturbing, in my own case, was a criticism launched from a decon-
structive angle that dislodged a central plank in the descriptive edifice. In a
couple of essays, Matthijs Bakker showed how the study of translation cannot
avoid translating into its own terms that which it studies (Bakker and Naaijkens
1991; Bakker 1995). This entanglement meant that the observer could not stand
outside the thing being observed and that the neat separation between object-
level and meta-level, which the descriptivist paradigm had taken for granted,
was untenable. As a consequence, a more circumspect and self-reflexive way of
speaking about translation would need to be found.
The first two essays in Part 1 of the present collection bear witness to the
shift in orientation from the relative certainties of the descriptive paradigm to a
more unsettled view of translation. From then onward, translation has continued
to grow in complexity.
‘Translation’s Other’ (1996) is the text of the inaugural lecture I delivered
on 19 March 1996, shortly after University College London (UCL) made me
professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature. It speaks to two constituencies:
students of translation and students of Dutch. The main issues at stake concern
translation, especially the untidy ‘other’ of translation.
The lecture opens with the common metaphorical descriptions of translation.
One set of images (translation as bridge-building, as ferrying across, as providing
access) points to the function of translation as a problem-solving device, enabling
understanding across an intelligibility barrier. This is the why of translation. A
second set of metaphors indicates how this enabling is done: by providing a rep-
lica, a transparent likeness, a simulation that makes the translation ‘as good as’
the original. The argument presented in the lecture is that this conceptualisation
conceals an ‘other’, a messier side that has to do with hybridity and plurality. For
a start, the common conceptualisation of translation has no room for the transla-
tor. It requires the translator’s non-interference, effectively his or her erasure as
an active agent in the process. Once the translator is written into the equation,
 Introduction 3

the presumed equivalence between translation and original becomes strained

because additional values enter the picture.
The lecture looks for situations that oblige translators to make their presence
felt in their translations, preventing us from reading the translated texts as diaph-
anous representations. Cases like these show that translation is more complex
than the standard metaphors would have us believe. They lead to the recogni-
tion that the concept of translation is not an immanent given but a historical and
culture-bound construct. In addition, they suggest that translation may be seen
as symptomatic of the way a community positions itself with respect to the world
around it and, hence, as an index of cultural self-reference and self-definition.
Like its predecessor, ‘Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and
Translation Studies’ (2002) questions the common perception of translation,
but it musters different arguments to demonstrate the complexity of translation.
It points to retranslations as activating intertextual links not just with an original
but also, often polemically, with one or more previous translations, generating
translation-specific intertextual chains. It argues that translation norms can be
seen as cultural filters that aid a historical and cross-cultural understanding of
translation. At the same time, the realisation that in describing translation we
are also translating translation invites a look at how historians and ethnographers
are entangled in their respective objects of study and engage with translation
as they render alien beliefs and practices into their own language and discipli-
nary concepts. Historians and ethnographers have developed an acute awareness
of their procedures and methodologies, and this could benefit the critical self-
reflexiveness of translation studies.
‘Translation, Irritation and Resonance’ (2007) was written at the time
when I was also preparing The Conference of the Tongues (2007) and echoes some
of the chapters in that book. It begins by suggesting that the translation-specific
kind of intertextuality mentioned in the previous essay can be understood more
broadly as stretching into the future as well as the past. Because a translation is
never the definitive or the only possible rendering of the original it represents, it
echoes existing ways of rendering that original or others like it. And because a
translation can always be attempted again, each individual translation potential-
ises alternative renderings and temporalises available choices that were excluded
on this occasion.
An approach along these lines invites a description of translation in terms
of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. This may seem like a long shot.
Luhmann’s sociological theory is grand and abstract; it is not primarily concerned
with cultural things and refuses to put human agents at its centre. Still, there are
obvious points of entry. Luhmann’s key term throughout his work is commu-
nication, and translation is eminently about communication. His understanding
of social norms as shared expectations chimed with the way several translation
researchers, including myself, had come to view translation norms. His notion
of second-order observation fed into the questioning of presuppositions that the
cross-cultural study of translation had been promoting. And Luhmann built,
4 Introduction

at least in part, on the general systems theory that a translation scholar such as
André Lefevere had also been exploring in the 1980s (Lefevere 1992, 11–12;
Hermans 1999, 125). There was also the sheer challenge of making Luhmann’s
imposing theoretical edifice serviceable for the world of translation. The benefit
of the exercise, I suppose, is that, at a time when many translation scholars opted
for Pierre Bourdieu and, soon after that, for actor-network theory, Luhmann
provided an alternative way to think about translation as a social and historical
phenomenon. If nothing else, the social systems perspective adds depth to our
understanding of what translation is and does.
Probably the most general essay in the present collection, ‘What Is
Translation?’ (2013), amounts to a summing up. It recognises that a formal
definition of translation remains out of reach but that it may be possible to under-
stand translation, in a broad sense, as mediating difference by means of similarity.
Any more concrete assumptions, of the kind proposed by a descriptivist such as
Gideon Toury, turn out to be questionable. Another possible approach takes its
cue form literary studies, in which ‘literature’ is regarded as a mere label around
which historically and culturally contingent features have accrued. Prototype
theory, as proposed by Sandra Halverson, offers another possibility. It has, in
turn, been criticised by Maria Tymoczko, who has suggested treating translation
as a cluster concept – a movable feast that sends the researcher on an open-ended
quest for family resemblances across cultural borders. The upshot of the essay
is that we cannot define translation and neither do we have reliable means to
negotiate the limits of whatever we mean by ‘translation’ or a term in another
language that we may want to translate as ‘translation’. This indeterminacy is
not a bad thing at all. It shows that studying translation generally, historically or
in cross-cultural contexts, requires methodological caution and an open mind.
‘Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding’ (2019) addresses
what may be thought of as translation’s shadow. The issue of untranslatability had
come to the fore in the wake of the debates surrounding the concept of world
literature (Prendergast 2004; Apter 2013) and the appearance of Barbara Cassin’s
Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014). In these debates, the untranslatable was under-
stood as that which resists translation because successive attempts continue to fall
short of the mark. The Dictionary of Untranslatables, despite its volume and detail,
perpetuated the old rhetoric about the insufficiencies of translation. Lawrence
Venuti voiced searing criticism of it (2016; 2019, 54–65), and I can only agree.
My essay argues that translations are conditioned by circumstances and that,
in generating correspondences, translators produce interpretations and render-
ings that are valid within the context in which they are produced. There is
no external, detached position from which to assess what a text means or how
it should be rendered into another tongue. Translations remain provisional,
however, because they are not definitive and can always be done again differ-
ently. Where Barbara Cassin takes the untranslatable to be that which ‘one keeps
on (not) translating’ (2014, xvii), I would discard the negative and assert that
untranslatability is merely the repeatability of translation.
 Introduction 5

That does not mean translation is easy. The more we view individual lan-
guages as particular ways of conceptualising and articulating the world, the
less we will be inclined to assume the possibility of synonymy across languages
and the harder translation will be. In his 1813 lecture on translation, Friedrich
Schleiermacher went a long way in this direction, even though he shied away
from confronting untranslatability head-on. Still, it stalks his lecture, just as it
continues to affect contemporary thinking about translation.
The five essays in Part 2 are centred on two concepts. The first two essays in
this part deal with the concept of norms of translation; the next three all concern
the idea of the discursive presence of translators in their translations. Both con-
cepts can be seen to grow in complexity as they are explored in greater depth.
‘Translational Norms and Correct Translations’ (1991), a paper pre-
sented at the First James S Holmes Symposium in Amsterdam in December 1990,
sought to strengthen the theoretical underpinning of the concept of transla-
tion norms that Gideon Toury, building on structuralist thinkers before him,
had introduced into translation studies. The essay still adheres to descriptivist
tenets. The basic idea is that, if norms offer a useful tool to analyse the produc-
tion and reception of translations, it is worth delving deeper into the concept.
The theoretical elaboration draws on the philosopher David Lewis’s understand-
ing of conventions and on the notion of self-regulating systems. Distinguishing
between a norm’s regulatory force and the notion of correctness that makes up its
content means that the cultural and ideological values held in place by norms can
be made visible. This, in turn, anchors translation as a social practice.
The essay reaches a relativistic conclusion: correct translations are translations
accepted as correct because they comply with the norms prevalent in a certain
community at a certain time. For all that, the insistence on separating the norms
that apply to translators from those that apply to academic researchers reveals the
essay’s descriptive and empirical bias. That stance became problematic when,
soon after the paper appeared in print, I had to come to terms with the realisation
that, in studying translation, we are also translating translation, and if translation
is governed by norms, then the study of translation is norm-governed as well.
This uneasy change of perspective is reflected in the second essay on norms.
A good deal of work on translation norms was done in the 1990s by research-
ers such as Dirk de Geest (1992), Andreas Poltermann (1992) and Andrew
Chesterman (1993, 1997). It brought into focus the combination of psychological
and social aspects of norms, their positive and negative loads ranging from rewards
and obligations to sanctions and prohibitions and the interplay between personal
alignments and shared expectations. ‘Translation and Normativity’ (1998)
takes these developments into account. It finds succour in Niklas Luhmann’s
notion of mutual expectations as forming the structure of social systems and his
treatment of choices as selections that potentialise the options that are excluded
but remain available. The essay applies these ideas to a single historical case. This
runs a risk: the approach to an isolated translation by means of the concept of
norms has trouble figuring out whether the translator’s decisions resulted from
6 Introduction

the pressure of norms, from goal-oriented calculation or a mixture of both. Still,

the key insight that norms secure values implies the recognition that translation
cannot be value-free. This, in turn, prompts a view of translation as an index
of cultural self-definition, an unwillingness to accept that translation establishes
relations of equivalence and curiosity as to why equivalence has played such
a large part in Western understandings of translation. The essay’s conclusion
returns to the vexed notion of translation studies being entangled in their own
object of study because they have to perform the very action they are meant to
analyse. We cannot escape this entanglement, but we may be able to learn from
disciplines such as ethnography and historiography that likewise have to translate
their object of study into their own disciplinary language.
Thinking about translation through the prism of the norms concept fore-
grounds the translator as a decision-making agent. In one of his essays, the
sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne spoke of ‘les erreurs de
Wyclef ’ (Wycliffe’s errors), which his first English translator, John Florio, toned
down to ‘Wickliff’s opinions’, a deliberate choice revealing the translator’s value
judgement, but one that is detectable only by a reader with access to Montaigne’s
French. When, in another essay, Montaigne referred to ‘le Louvre’, and Florio
helpfully expanded the reference to ‘the Louvre, the palace of our Kings’, some-
thing else happened, a sudden anomaly opening up: if this was Montaigne speak-
ing, the addition was pointless because he was a French writer and his French
readers knew perfectly well that the Louvre was the royal palace. If it was the
English translator uttering the explanatory phrase, calling the French king ‘our’
king was annoying as well as incorrect (Matthiessen 1931, 135, 139). Or was the
translator asking English readers to imagine a French author addressing them in
English while remaining French? Exactly who was speaking to whom when the
translation said that the Louvre was ‘the palace of our Kings’?
‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’ (1996) is based on the
assumption that the translator redirects an original to a new audience in another
language and that this intervention is bound to leave traces in the translated text.
Often, the traces are covered up. But every now and then, they can be identi-
fied, allowing us to detect the translator’s subject-position, or voice, in translated
texts. The essay restricts itself to narrative texts because narratological models
have invested heavily in distinguishing voices and viewpoints, albeit without
differentiating between originals and translations.
My own piece in 1996 was written alongside an article by Giuliana Schiavi,
who explored the same issue from a theoretical angle. She took on the more dif-
ficult and unrewarding task of engaging with structuralist mappings of narrative
and devising a way to give the translator a place in them. I focused on a practi-
cal case study that highlighted instances of translators being obliged to inter-
vene directly in their texts, interrupting the flow of the narrative. I identified
three kinds of instances requiring paratextual intervention: when the displace-
ment that translation brings about threatens effective communication, when the
narrative thematises its own linguistic medium of expression and when specific
 Introduction 7

textual choices are so overdetermined as to defy translation or transposition. The

broader claim is that, if there are individual cases forcing translators to show their
hand in their translations, all translations can be said to contain the translator as a
co-producer of the discourse we are reading. Translators may make themselves so
discreet as to be practically untraceable, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
In ‘The Translator as Evaluator’ (2010), I tried to take the matter further
by exploring several different ways to discern, or tease out, the translator’s pres-
ence in translated texts. The question was: how can we, as recipients, become
aware of this presence without falling back on a comparison between transla-
tion and original? Most translations are meant to be read by themselves. What
we read are the translator’s words. It must be possible to devise ways that enable
us to spot that translator’s footprint, fingerprint or signature in the text. The
form itself of a translation, as the deliberate choice of one mode of representa-
tion against the background of alternative options, might be one way, espe-
cially as different renderings of the same original can exist side by side, and new
translations may echo or disown older versions. Viewing translation as reported
speech is another because the reporting speech affects the words being reported.
Modality or modulation is yet another way, equally reliant on the interaction
between a translation and the paratexts surrounding it.
The issue is taken up again, from a different angle and using a somewhat dif-
ferent model, in ‘Positioning Translators’ (2014). The model conceives of
translation as a form of reported speech, typically direct speech or quotation,
and had been explored initially in The Conference of the Tongues (Hermans 2007,
52–85). ‘Positioning Translators’ starts from translations that are accompanied
by paratexts in which translators express reservations about the works they are
translating. Because the paratextual frame affects our reading of the translation
itself, the communication between translator and audience becomes multilay-
ered. The translation does more than represent the original; it has the translator’s
attitude inscribed in it as well.
Dorrit Cohn’s notion of discordant narration proves helpful here. A discord-
ant narration is a story in which an author fields a narrator who articulates ideas
and values that the author evidently does not share. Although the only words
reaching the audience are the narrator’s, the discrepancy between the views
expressed by the narrator and those we attribute to the author invites a sceptical
or ironic reading of the narrator’s words. Discordant translation shows the same
structure as discordant narration, with the difference that in discordant narration
only the narrator is heard but in discordant translation the translator’s views are
voiced in the paratexts framing the translation.
Most translations, of course, are not discordant. Translators may signal enthu-
siasm about the texts they translate, or studied neutrality, or they may not signal
anything in particular. Viewing translation as reported speech, however, lets
us appreciate that translation is necessarily framed. Reported speech requires a
reporting speech. This is the translation’s paratextual frame, in which the trans-
lator communicates with the recipient about the translated words. Even if the
8 Introduction

frame is reduced to the point of being merely implied, it is still there, and it
carries values inasmuch as it contains, or implies, the translator’s attitude toward
what is being translated. It is up to the audience to recognise the attitude and
make it relevant to the translation itself. In this respect, the model of translation
presented here is in line with postclassic approaches to narrative, which have
largely replaced the neat diagrams of old with an emphasis on the active role of
the reader.
The four essays in Part 3 may appear different because they deal with histori-
cal topics, but they follow the same pattern as the previous two parts in moving
from the relative comfort of the descriptive paradigm to increased complexity.
The first two essays in this part concern the early modern discourse on transla-
tion in Western Europe. The third, also located in early modern times, is about
two near-identical translations on opposite sides of a violent conflict. The fourth
and final essay proposes a revisionist reading of a text often regarded as ushering
in modern translation theory.
If the central argument in ‘Images of Translation’ (1985) remains under-
stated, this is in line with a descriptive outlook that favoured the accumulation
of data over interpretation and debate. But there is a central argument. It claims
that the early modern theory of translation, dispersed across an array of liminary
texts, is comprised of the imagery and metaphors deployed in these prefaces,
dedications and commendatory verses. The metaphors are the theory. As a result,
the essay is intent on discerning patterns, clusters of metaphors and their positive
or negative loads.
The liminary texts display a rhetoric of their own, marked by self-deprecation
in the translator’s own statements and hyperbolic praise in the laudatory verses
contributed by friends. The images and metaphors are varied and colourful, and
they serve a multiplicity of purposes, from the inferiority of a translation vis-à-
vis its original to the proud legitimation of the translator’s undertaking. In hind-
sight, the essay would have benefited from a more adequate appreciation of the
overarching concept of imitation (in this respect, for me, Jansen 2008 remains
the authoritative study) and, perhaps, from broader contextualisation of indi-
vidual statements, but overall, the inventory, and the patterns it reveals, still seem
relevant. In addition, an encounter with the historical metalanguage of transla-
tion may trigger reflection on contemporary disciplinary jargons.
‘The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance’ (1997) is in
the same vein as the previous essay. Tracking a cluster of terms and concepts cen-
tred on what constitutes the task, the office, the responsibility or the duty of the
translator or the law of translation in the sixteenth century, it finds that literalism
made up the utopian core of the concept of translation at the time. The essay
explores the practical and conceptual ramifications of this idea. While linguistic
differences militate against strict literalism, the word-for-word principle offers
protection against charges of distortion or misinterpretation. The picture is not
uniform, and the literalist temper did not go unchallenged. Humanist circles
insisted on the need for stylistic quality over and above linguistic accuracy. There
 Introduction 9

were temporal and social dimensions, too. The seventeenth-century ‘libertine’

translators, who hailed mostly from elite circles, adopted the humanist insistence
on style in their own vernacular translations. As they gained prominence, literal-
ism was pushed to the margins.
In a sense, ‘Miracles in Translation’ (2015) is about the margins as well: a
decidedly minor Latin original flanked by two unremarkable Dutch translations
published in the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century. But appear-
ances are deceptive. The case acquires significance due to the military, political
and ideological conflict surrounding it. All the documents involved, from the
partisan original to its two mutually hostile translations and the further polemics
that flared up in their wake, were intended as interventions in a propaganda war
that was, in a very literal sense, tearing the region apart and, beyond that, pitted
Catholic against Protestant Europe. That conflict takes centre stage, and the job
consists in figuring out, as accurately as the historical record permits, how the
primary texts relate to it. The paratexts accompanying the translations, it turns
out, do most of the heavy lifting.
As it happens, the primary texts also afford the occasional peek into the pri-
vate world of both the original author and of his translators across the centuries.
These glimpses are fortuitous, and in other respects, we have to reckon with the
vagaries of the historical record. But they are a reminder that, every so often,
historical research has surprises in store.
Context is also what enables the revisionist approach in ‘Schleiermacher’
(2019), a rereading of his 1813 lecture on the different methods of translating.
I had outlined this approach a few years earlier in an essay that highlighted
Schleiermacher’s translation of Plato alongside his writings on hermeneutics
(Hermans 2015). The present essay is more comprehensive in that it draws on
Schleiermacher’s writings on ethics, dialectics and psychology as well as those on
theology and hermeneutics. The argument remains the same. To my mind, and
contrary to the common perception, Schleiermacher’s lecture does not present
a choice between two equally valid ways of translating, and when he speaks
of bringing the reader to the author, all he means is that the reader is made to
occupy the same position as the translator who has moved toward the outer edge
of the translating language but not beyond it. In bringing Schleiermacher’s Plato
translation as well as his voluminous writings on other subjects to bear on this
reading, the essay seeks to demonstrate the value of a contextualised reading
of historical documents about translation, as recommended in Translation and
History (Hermans 2022).
A few final remarks: the 14 essays in this book were originally published
between 1985 and 2019, a period of some 35 years. If I am right in thinking
that, collectively, they show a steady increase in complexity, then this trajec-
tory would seem to mirror the growth in complexity of translation studies more
generally. It is not just that new forms of translation in an interconnected, digital
and multimedia world have called for new approaches, concepts and research
methods but that the questions themselves have become both more diverse and
10 Introduction

more sophisticated. While translation studies have always, of necessity, crossed

cultural boundaries, the global context of contemporary research has intensified
the transcultural dimension. This global span remains largely absent from the
present collection because, for better or worse, my knowledge base is rooted in
Western Europe. That does not mean I am unaware of the wider world, and I
hope that the range and detail of the two-volume collection Translating Others
(Hermans 2006) can testify to this. I like to believe that, as regards my own
itinerary, such as it is, the key passage has been that from ‘Translation’s Other’
to Translating Others, the rest of the journey being primarily a matter of looking
out and digging in.
As for the texts in the following pages, I have occasionally tinkered with the
phrasing for stylistic reasons or to bring greater clarity. These minor adjust-
ments have not affected the structure, tone or argument of the original pieces.
There are several repetitions and overlaps across essays, reflecting my tendency
to fall back on key ideas and examples in different contexts. The repetitions
will annoy some, but I trust not many will set out to read the book from cover
to cover.

Bibliography
Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London &
New York: Verso.
Bakker, Matthijs. 1995. ‘Metasprong en wetenschap: Een kwestie van discipline’. In
Vertalen historisch bezien. Tekst, metatekst, theorie, edited by Dirk Delabastita & Theo
Hermans, 141–62. The Hague: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica.
Bakker, Matthijs and Ton Naaijkens. 1991. ‘A Postscript: Fans of Holmes’. In Translation
Studies: The State of the Art, edited by Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens,
193–208. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1993. ‘From “Is” to “Ought”: Laws, Norms and Strategies in
Translation Studies’. Target 5, 1–20.
Clifford, James and George Marcus, ed. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Representation. Berkeley & London: University of California Press.
De Geest, Dirk. 1992. ‘The Notion of “System”: Its Theoretical Importance and its
Methodological Implications for a Functionalist Translation Theory’. In Geschichte,
System, Literarische Übersetzung. Histories, Systems, Literary Translations, edited by Harald
Kittel, 32–45. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
Hermans, Theo. 1979. ‘Translation, Comparison, Diachrony’. Comparison 9, 58–91.
Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained.
London & New York: Routledge.
Hermans, Theo, ed. 2006. Translating Others. 2 vols. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.
Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.
Hermans, Theo. 2015. ‘Schleiermacher and Plato, Hermeneutics and Translation’.
In Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Problem of Translation, edited by Larisa Cercel and
Adriana Şerban, 77–106. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
 Introduction 11

Hermans, Theo. 2022. Translation and History: A Textbook. London & New York:
Routledge.
Jansen, Jeroen. 2008. Imitatio. Literaire navolging (imitatio auctorum) in the Europese letterkunde
van de renaissance (1500–1700). Hilversum: Verloren.
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London
& New York: Routledge.
Marcus, George and Michael Fischer, ed. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago & London: University of Chicago
Press.
Matthiessen, F.O. 1931. Translation: An Elizabethan Art. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Poltermann, Andreas. 1992. ‘Normen des literarischen Übersetzens im System der
Literatur’. In Geschichte, System, Literarische Übersetzung. Histories, Systems, Literary
Translations, edited by Harald Kittel, 5–31. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. London & New York:
Verso.
Schiavi, Giuliana. 1996. ‘There is Always a Teller in a Tale’. Target 8, 1–22.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2016. ‘Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress
Translated Texts’. Boundary 2 42, 179–204.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2019. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press.
PART 1

Approaches



1
TRANSLATION’S OTHER [1996]

1.1
If it is true that in the beginning was the word, then almost from the beginning
there was a problem of translation. Or rather, there is, in that beginning, a prob-
lem of translation; it is still here, in this beginning, in the very word which was
there when I began. I am, of course, referring to the Biblical word, the notorious
crux in the opening sentence of the Gospel according to John, ‘In the beginning
was the Word’ – although, in fact, the word that was there in the beginning was
logos, as the text was in Greek. A facile remark, I know, but useful as a reminder.
We are only too ready to overlook translation, even when it is staring us in the
face. We easily forget just how much translation has gone into the making of
our culture.
Perhaps, though, logos was not, at first, such a problem, at least not for the early
Bible translators. Saint Jerome, after all, gave us the straight verbum in the Latin
version that became known as the Vulgate, and in the Latin-speaking Western
church, the Vulgate remained unchallenged for a thousand years. Until Erasmus,
that is. Erasmus – probably the most famous Dutchman ever, perhaps because he
never wrote a word of Dutch – pulled the rug from under Jerome’s feet by argu-
ing, at great and persuasive length, that the Latin sermo, ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’,
translated the Greek logos more adequately than Jerome’s verbum. And because
Erasmus’s castigatio, as he called it, faulted Jerome on a substantial number of such
translation choices, his edition and profusely annotated translation of the New
Testament in 1516 decisively undermined the authority of the Vulgate in the
Western church. Luther, as we know, would be the first to make use of Erasmus’s
New Testament for his own, German version.
But there is another beginning that draws on logos and is, thereby, drawn
into the problem of translation. This takes us back to Aristotle but let me make

DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-3
16 Approaches

my approach with the help of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Being a hermeneuticist,

Gadamer is very much alive to questions of meaning and interpretation. In an
essay from 1966, ‘Man and Language’ – an essay which, appropriately, in view of
its title, begins and ends with issues of translation – Gadamer takes up Aristotle’s
classic definition of a human person as a being endowed with logos. Rather than
the usual rendering which defines humans as ‘rational beings’, translating logos as
‘reason’ or ‘thought’, Gadamer prefers to understand – and, therefore, to translate
– logos as ‘language’. A person is not only a rational being but also, perhaps even
primarily, a language animal. Gadamer’s point is that humanity’s distinguish-
ing feature consists in the capacity to communicate beyond the sphere of the
immediately given, for example, by referring to general or abstract concepts or
to the future. Through language, humans can make manifest that which is not
immediately present to the senses. This allows complex social organisation and
culture so that logos extends into notions such as ‘concept’ and ‘law’ (Gadamer
1977, 59–68).
Hermeneutics and, with it, translation, are now just around the corner. To
the extent that language facilitates human interaction and fixes forms of cul-
tural expression more or less permanently, it requires interpretation, time and
again. And as Gadamer reminds us in a couple of other essays from the 1960s,
‘[h]ermeneutics operates wherever what is said is not immediately intelligible’
(Gadamer 1977, 18, 98). This operation takes place in the first instance within
the same tradition, when the accidents of time and change have erected obsta-
cles to the transmission of linguistic meaning in written texts that have come to
look distant, alien. Crucially, the process involves a form of translation. Hence,
as Gadamer puts it, ‘[f ]rom the structure of translation was indicated the general
problem of making what is alien our own’ (Gadamer 1977, 19). How this process
works in practice within one and the same linguistic and cultural tradition is
illustrated in the opening chapter of George Steiner’s After Babel. The chapter,
which deals with the kind of deciphering required in making sense of the lan-
guage of English writers from Shakespeare to Noel Coward, is suitably entitled
’Understanding as Translation’ (Steiner 1992, 1–50).
When we have reached this point – the point where we understand ‘under-
standing’ as ‘translation’ – we can broaden our scope. In fact, we can broaden
it so much that it is hard to see where the end might be. Translation, then, very
nearly becomes the human condition. Every act of understanding involves an act
of translation of one kind or another. It is tempting to call, here, on a philosopher
such as Jacques Derrida, speaking about ‘the redoubtable, irreducible difficulty
of translation’: ‘With the problem of translation we will be dealing with nothing
less than the problem of the passage into philosophy’ (Derrida 1981, 72). This
is not the road I want to take, if only because I am not a philosopher, nor even
much of a hermeneuticist, come to that.
Yet, I want to stay with Gadamer for just a bit longer. Hermeneutics may,
initially, have envisaged its endeavours as taking place within one and the same
cultural and linguistic tradition, but to the extent that its general thrust – its
 Translation’s Other [1996] 17

‘problem of making what is alien our own’ – resembles the structure of transla-
tion, it is not confined to monolingual operations. The alien is alien because it
is, for all practical purposes, part of an alien world – a foreign language. Here
is Gadamer again, speaking about hermeneutics as the transmission, the transla-
tion, of lost or inaccessible meaning:

As the art of conveying what is said in a foreign language to the under-

standing of another person, hermeneutics is not without reason named
after Hermes, the interpreter of the divine message to mankind. If we
recall the origin of the name hermeneutics, it becomes clear that we are
dealing here with a language event, with a translation from one language
to another, and therefore with the relation of two languages.
(Gadamer 1977, 98–99)

The model of hermeneutics is translation in its conventional sense, as transla-

tion between languages. The gods speak a language that is different from ours;
therefore, Hermes has to mediate and interpret between them and us. Human
communities, too, speak in mutually unintelligible tongues. In the end, it does
not really matter whether we think of this unintelligibility as extending dia-
chronically within one tradition, with language change erecting the barrier over
time, or as being spread, synchronically, over a certain geographical space, with
different languages being spoken side by side. Humans may be language animals,
but they are never language animals in a general or abstract sense. We always
inhabit a specific language. More than that, unless we find ways of overcoming
the limits of our particular language, we remain imprisoned in it.
The shadow that falls over a statement like this is, of course, that of Babel,
of the multiplicity and confusion of tongues. And it is entirely appropriate, as
indeed Derrida has exquisitely reminded us, that Babel itself, like logos, is a word
that defies translation. If Babel spread linguistic confusion and, thereby, neces-
sitated translation, it also rendered translation profoundly problematical, begin-
ning with the word Babel itself, which is both a proper name and a common
noun meaning ‘confusion’ – even though there appears to be some confusion
as to whether, or to what extent, it really does mean ‘confusion’ (Derrida 1985,
166–73). And if understanding is translation, surely Babel confounds not only the
translator but the hermeneuticist as well.
Be that as it may, and before leaving hermeneutics to sort out its own prob-
lems with Babel, let me retrieve from the hermeneutic endeavour two aspects
that are of direct relevance to translation, or at least to translation as we com-
monly perceive it. The first is that of cultural transmission and retrieval; the
second that of interpretation as making something intelligible to others by means
of verbal explanation and gloss.
The first, transmission and retrieval, points to the translator as enabler, as one
who provides access by removing barriers, by leading across the chasms that pre-
vent understanding. The second, making intelligible, points to how the enabling
18 Approaches

and the provision of access is achieved: by offering a mirror image of that which
itself remains beyond reach, by presenting a reproduction, a replica, a represen-
tation. The first generates the metaphor of translation as building bridges, or
as ferrying or carrying across, as translatio, as ‘metaphor’. The second appeals to
translation as resemblance, as likeness, as imitation, as mimesis, not of the world
of extralinguistic phenomena but of another text, another entity of a linguistic
order.
The two metaphors are connected because the trust that we, on this side of the
language barrier, place in the translator as mediator and enabler depends on the
quality, or the presumed quality, of the translation as likeness, as resemblance, as
a truthful portrait. A translation, being a derived product, may be secondary and,
therefore, second-best, but because we trust the mediator’s integrity and good
faith, we assume that the replica is ‘as good as’ the real thing. The last thing we
want to do is to bank on a forger or a counterfeiter.
Yet this is exactly what we are doing. It is in the nature of translation. It is also
what makes translation worth studying. The rather smooth, unruffled picture of
translation that I have just painted has an ‘other’ to it – a more unsettling but also
a much more interesting and intriguing side. The smooth, unruffled picture may
be part of the conventional perception and self-presentation of translation, but
it papers over the cracks. I want to try and poke my finger into at least some of
these cracks. And the reason for doing so lies in the recognition that translation,
for all its presumed secondariness, derives its force from the fact that it is still our
only answer to, and our only escape from, Babel.
‘Translation’s Other’, then, comprises, among other things, the ambivalences
and paradoxes, the hybridity and plurality of translation, its ‘otherness’ as ‘awk-
wardness’, if you like, in contrast to the perception of translation as replica or
reproduction, as referring simply and unproblematically (if always from an infe-
rior position) to an original. But it also means the significance of translation as
a cultural force, which belies the common view of it as mechanical and merely
derivative, secondary, second-hand, second-rate.

1.2
Let me return, for a moment, to what I called the self-presentation of translation.
This is the kind of self-promotional – and widely accepted – image that resides
in telling metaphors such as ‘Speaking through an interpreter, President Yeltsin
declared that …’. What does it mean to say: ‘speaking through an interpreter’?
Or take a variant: we all blithely claim that we have read Dostoevsky, Dante,
Douwes Dekker, Kazantzakis, Kaf ka and Kundera. Hardly anyone will have
read all of these in the original languages. We have read some or most of them
in translation, in the standard sense of interlingual translation. To the extent that
translation successfully manages to produce, or to project, a sense of equivalence,
a sense of transparency and trustworthiness entitling the translation to function
as a full-scale representation and, hence, as a reliable substitute for a source text,
 Translation’s Other [1996] 19

statements such as ‘I have read Dostoevsky’ are a legitimate shorthand for saying
‘I have actually read a translation of Dostoevsky’, which then amounts to say-
ing ‘and this is practically as good as reading the original’. But note, only to the
extent that a ‘sense’ of equivalence, of equality in practical use value, has been
produced. And we tend to believe that this ‘sense’ of equivalence results from the
very transparency of the translation as resemblance. A translation, we say, is at its
most successful when its being a translation goes unnoticed, when it manages not
to remind us that it is a translation. A translation most coincides with its original
when it is most transparent, when it approximates pure resemblance.
This requires that the translator’s labour be, as it were, negated, or sublimated,
that all traces of the translator’s intervention in the text be erased. The irony is
that those traces, those words, are all we have; they are all we have access to on
this side of the language barrier. The Russian president may well speak right
through his interpreter, but all we have to make sense of are the interpreter’s
words. Nevertheless, we say that Yeltsin stated so-and-so and that we have read
Dostoevsky. Even though, in the translation, this presumed authoritative origi-
nary voice is absent, we casually state it is the only one that presents itself to us.
We feel entitled to be casual about this because we construe translation as a
form of delegated speech, a kind of speaking by proxy. This implies not only a
consonance of voices but also a hierarchical relationship between them, as well
as a clear moral – often even legal – imperative, that of the translator’s non-
interference. The imperative has been formulated as the ‘honest spokesperson’ or
the ‘true interpreter’ norm, which calls on the translator simply and accurately
to restate the original, the whole original and nothing but the original (Harris
1990). In this view, the model of translation is direct quotation – nothing omit-
ted, nothing added, nothing changed, except, of course, the language, which is
to say, every word.
The moment we stop to think about this, we realise we are entertaining an
illusion. Even without invoking the problematics of a separation of signifier and
signified or of a metaphysics of presence, we can appreciate that a translation will
never coincide with its source. Languages and cultures are not symmetrical or
isomorphic systems. For every instance of consonance, however measured, there
is also dissonance. Not only the language changes with translation; so does the
context, the intent, the function, the entire communicative situation. Because
the translator’s intervention in this process cannot simply be neutralised or erased
without trace, a more appropriate model of translated discourse might be indi-
rect speech rather than direct quotation, if only because indirect speech increases
distance and difference, acknowledges the likelihood of manipulation and misuse
and is generally messier in the way it superimposes and intermingles the various
voices that make up its re-enunciation (Folkart 1991). It is difference and, there-
fore, opaqueness and untidiness that are inscribed in the operations of translation,
not coincidence or transparency or equivalence in any formal sense. Speaking of
translation in terms of equivalence means engaging in an elaborate – if socially
necessary – act of make-believe.
20 Approaches

1.3
Various more or less philosophical and poststructuralist avenues open up here,
but let me focus on a more immediately obvious aspect: the question of the
translator’s supposed non-interference, which translates as the translator’s invis-
ibility in the translated text. My point is that translated texts – like other texts,
only more so – are always, inherently, plural, unstable, decentred, hybrid. The
‘other’ voice, the translator’s voice, is always there. But because of the way we
have conventionally construed translation, we prefer – we even require – this
voice to remain discreet. In practice, many translations try hard to comply with
this requirement. Sometimes, however, translations run into what we might
call ‘performative self-contradiction’. The resulting incongruities in the text
remind us that, while we generally accept that translated texts are reoriented
toward a different type of reader in a different linguistic and cultural environ-
ment, we expect the agent, and, hence, the voice, that effected this reorienta-
tion to remain so discreet as to vanish altogether. That is not always possible,
and then the translation may be caught blatantly contradicting its own per-
formance. And if we can demonstrate the translator’s discursive presence in
those cases, we can postulate a translator’s voice, however indistinct, in all
translations.
Let me illustrate the point with a couple of instances in which we can clearly
discern other voices intruding into a discourse in which they were not meant to
be heard. The first and pretty obvious example bears on what Roman Jakobson
calls the metalinguistic function of language; Derrida speaks of language ‘re-
marking’ itself in a text which declares that it is in a certain language. In trans-
lation, this causes problems, as, indeed, Derrida has shown with reference to
the final chapter of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode of 1637. There, Descartes
confirms, in French, that he has written his book not in Latin but in French.
The Latin translation of the Discours omits this embarrassing sentence to avoid
the self-contradiction of a statement declaring in Latin that it is not in Latin but
in French. Derrida regards this as an instance of institutional untranslatability,
which is a perfectly valid observation, as, indeed, in the Latin version, the sen-
tence was omitted (1992, 257). For the reader of the Latin Dissertatio de methodo
(Descartes 1644), however, the omission is not readily detectable because the
statement is simply not there. In translations into languages other than Latin,
where the sentence is translated, the self-contradiction may be less glaring but it
is still obvious enough. The Penguin version, for example, has: ‘And if I write
in French [...] rather than in Latin [...] it is because [...]’ (Descartes 1968, 91).
The anomaly of reading an English sentence which declares in English that it
is actually in French creates a credibility gap which readers can overcome only
be reminding themselves that this is, of course, a translation. But in so doing,
the reader also realises that the voice producing the statement cannot possibly
belong to Descartes or to Descartes only. There is, clearly, another voice at
work, a voice we are not meant to hear, which echoes and mimes the first voice
 Translation’s Other [1996] 21

but never fully coincides with it. And that other voice is there in the text itself,
in every word of it.
Derrida himself has exploited this paradox of translation more than once in
his own writings, sometimes openly challenging his translators to find solu-
tions to his insistent wordplay. When solutions are found, they are so charged
with irony that they cannot be read without the awareness that the text contains
another, intermittently audible voice that cannot be reduced to Derrida’s. And
when no solution is found, the translated text’s manifest helplessness is no less
revealing. In all these cases, we can ask: whose words are we, in fact, reading?
Exactly who is speaking? And if we are dealing with more voices than one,
where do we locate them?
My other example concerns an instance of structural overdetermination in
literary fiction. It comes from the Dutch novel Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli,
an extraordinary novel in several respects. I want to pick out just a single short
sentence from it, but one that involves the book’s entire structure. In its barest
narrative essence, Max Havelaar tells the story of a character called Max Havelaar
and his wife, Tine. Havelaar is a Dutch civil servant in the colonial administra-
tion of the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s. Witnessing the exploitation of the
local population by the native élite, he protests in vain to his immediate superior.
When he ignores the administrative hierarchy and brings a charge against the
corrupt local ruler, he is relieved of his post and resigns in disgust.
This story is told as a novel within a novel. The Havelaar story is embedded
in a framing story, which is set in Amsterdam and concerns a penny-pinching,
narrow-minded, self-righteous Dutch coffee broker. He has in his firm a young
German trainee, who eventually becomes the main narrator of the Havelaar
story. In the book’s final pages, both the Havelaar story and its frame are swept
aside when a third narrator, Multatuli himself, intervenes with an openly politi-
cal message in the form of an appeal to the Dutch king to stop the exploitation
of the natives in the Dutch East Indies. With this appeal, Multatuli effectively
transforms what had, up to this point, presented itself to us as a novel into a pam-
phlet. When he first introduces himself to the reader, Multatuli also translates his
own name, multa tuli, ‘I have borne (or suffered) much’, which suggests that the
name on the title page is a pseudonym. To complicate matters further, the book’s
dedication (in the manuscript and the first three editions) is to ‘E.H.v.W.’, which
is later (in the fourth edition) expanded to ‘Everdine Huberte Baronness van
Wynbergen, loyal wife etc.’ (Multatuli 1992). Taking into account nineteenth-
century literary conventions, this leaves little doubt that the dedicatee is the wife
of – well, not of a pseudonym, but presumably of the real-life author behind
the pseudonym. This is, indeed, the case. The real-life writer of Max Havelaar
is Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–87), who went through an experience in the
Dutch East Indies not unlike that of the fictional character Max Havelaar.
Now, in the Havelaar story there is, at one point, a conversation between
Havelaar and his wife, Tine. During this conversation, Tine asks her husband
if he remembers how he once translated her initials. In the English version, in
22 Approaches

which everything obviously happens in English, Havelaar replies: ‘E.H.V.W.:

eigen haard veel waard’. To the English reader, these last four words make no sense.
More importantly, the incongruity of suddenly reverting to Dutch in the middle
of a book that is meant to be in English, jolts us out of any willing suspension of
disbelief, reminding us not only that we are reading a translation but also that
there is another voice speaking here, a voice that cannot possibly be identical to
any one of the various narrators deployed in the book.
The reason for the lapse into Dutch in the English translation is a matter of
overdetermination. The initials of Havelaar’s wife, E.H.V.W., are identical to
those of the book’s dedicatee, who, beyond the pseudonym, is the real author’s
real wife. Just as, in transforming itself from novel into pamphlet, the book, as a
whole, ‘leaps out of literature into the real world’ (Oversteegen 1983, 103), so the
initials of a fictional character in the novel are tied to those of a real-life person.
That is why they cannot be changed. And because, in translating those initials,
Havelaar makes them into a preformed, fixed phrase – a common proverb – in
which the first letters of each word repeat the initials (E.H.V.W.: ‘eigen haard
veel waard’, meaning something like ‘there’s no place like home’), the translation
short-circuits and reverts back to Dutch. In so doing, it explodes its own make-
believe and exposes this ‘other’ voice that has been superimposed on the voices of
the various fictional narrators – and that we, as readers, were supposed to ignore.

1.4
What is at stake in texts like these is more than a matter of plural, unstable and
decentred narrative voices. The question of voice points to a much broader issue,
that of translation as a cultural and ideological construct. We see this construct
reflected in the standard perception of translation as transparency and duplica-
tion, as not only consonant but as coinciding with its original, requiring that
translators, too, become transparent – that they spirit themselves away in the
interests of the original’s integrity and status. Only the translator who operates
with self-effacing discretion and deference can be trusted not to violate the origi-
nal. The loyal self-abnegation of the one guarantees the primacy of the other.
Historically, the hierarchical positioning of originals versus translations has
been expressed in terms of stereotyped oppositions such as those between crea-
tive versus derivative work, primary versus secondary, art versus craft, authority
versus obedience, freedom versus constraint and speaking in one’s own name
versus speaking for someone else. In each instance, it is translation which is
circumscribed, subordinated, contained and controlled. And in case we should
imagine that these are natural and necessary hierarchies, it will be useful to
remember that our culture has often construed gender distinctions in terms
of strikingly similar oppositions of creative versus reproductive, original ver-
sus derivative, active versus passive and dominant versus subservient. The point
here is not just that the historical discourse about translation is sexist in casting
translation in the role of maidservant or faithful and obedient wife but also that
 Translation’s Other [1996] 23

translation has been hedged in by means of ideological hierarchies reminiscent of

those employed to maintain sexual power relations.
There’s more. Ever since literary theory began to emphasise the role of the
reader in investing texts with meaning, and the role of convention and the play
of intertextuality in the production of texts that are but variations on existing
patterns and texts, we have come to appreciate, on the one hand, the inexhaust-
ibility and irrepressibility of meaning-making and, on the other, the various
mechanisms by which our culture, nevertheless, attempts to control meaning.
In Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘author function’, as he explains it in the
essay ‘What is an Author?’, these two come together: the ‘author function’ is
the ideological figure that we devise to keep the free circulation of meaning
within bounds (Foucault 1980). We do this primarily by positing a single uni-
fying subject, with a single voice, behind the text. We, thus, suppress the more
uncontrollable aspects of texts, their loose ends, their gaps, their unintended
or unattributable features, their plurality and heterogeneity. Translation further
compounds and intensifies this refractory growth (Littau 1993, forthcoming).
Translations temporarily fix interpretations which, as verbal constructs, are
themselves open to interpretation. They transform ‘originals’ which are them-
selves transformations of texts which are themselves transformations, etcetera.
They increase the plurivocality of already plural texts. If, therefore, our culture
needs an ‘author function’ to circumscribe the semantic potential and plurality of
texts, it is not hard to see why it has also, emphatically, created a ‘translator func-
tion’ to contain the exponential increase in signification and plurivocality which
translation brings about. As an ideological and historical construct, the ‘transla-
tor function’ serves to keep translation in a safe place – in a hierarchical order.
The metaphors and oppositions that put translation in its place, the expectations
and attitudes we bring to translated texts and the legal constraints under which
translation operates all accord with this function. It enables the shorthand of my
stating that I have read Dostoevsky when I have read a translation of Dostoevsky.
By the same token, we accept that the safest translation is an ‘authorised’ transla-
tion as one formally and legally approved by the author. The term itself confirms
the singularity of intent, the coincidence of voice, the illusion of equivalence
and, of course, the unmistakable relation of power and authority.
This line of thought has far-reaching consequences, which current approaches
to translation are only beginning to explore. Let me, therefore, take a step back
and return to the notion of translation as transmission and mediation. Here, too,
it is a matter of discerning other aspects of translation than those displayed in
translation’s traditional self-image. What I want to focus on is the element of
disjunction and difference, not just in actual translations but also in ideas about
translation and the use made of translation in a social and historical context.
All texts require some frame of reference shared between source and receiver
to be able to function as vehicles for communication. The various forms of lin-
guistic, temporal and geographical displacement that translation brings about
also dislocate this shared environment. We all recognise that in translating, in
24 Approaches

recasting and repackaging a source text for a new recipient in a different cultural
circuit, a degree of alteration, adjustment and manipulation must take place. It is
not only the fact itself of this dislocation that is of interest. At least as interesting
is its social and historical conditioning – the ways in which translation, as dif-
ferent communities have construed it at different times, transforms its primary
material. In the study of translation, the interesting question is not whether a
text has been transmitted more or less intact. What is of interest is the nature of
the changes that have been wrought and why certain changes were wrought and
not others.
What I mean is this: in translating, rewriting, transforming, appropriating
and relocating a given source text, the translator attunes the emergent entity
to a new communicative situation. Just how much and what kind of attuning
and adaptation is permitted or acceptable will depend on prevailing concepts
of translation in the host culture and on who has the power to impose them.
To the extent that translation, or the ‘translator function’, is construed as a re-
enunciation of an existing text, the practice of translation inevitably results in
all manner of tensions within the translated text quite apart from the fact that
it makes translations into hybrid things which ‘signify’ much in the way other
texts signify but, in addition, entertain an emphatic relation to another text in
another language.
At the same time, translations cannot help being enmeshed in the discur-
sive forms of the recipient culture, including the whole array of modes which
a culture may have developed to represent anterior and differently coded dis-
courses. Translation – like adaptation, pastiche, commentary, remake, parody
or plagiarism – is one mode of textual recycling among others. The specific and
always historically determinate way in which a cultural community construes
translation, therefore, also determines the way in which translation, as a cultural
product, refers to its donor text – the kind of image of the original which the
translation projects or holds up. In other words, the ‘other’ to which a translated
text refers is never simply the source text, even though that is the claim which
translations commonly make. It is, at best, an image of it – a mirror image, per-
haps, provided we think of it as an image reflected in a kaleidoscopic, distorting
mirror. Because the image is always distorted, never innocent, we can say that
translation constructs or produces or – one step further – ‘invents’ its original
(Niranjana 1992, 81).
It is reasonable to assume, moreover, that translations are made in response to
or in anticipation of demands and needs of the recipient culture. If this is the case,
then the selection of texts to be translated, the mode that is chosen to (re)present
or project or invent the source text, the manner in which translation generally
is circumscribed and regulated at a particular historical moment and the way in
which individual translations are received tells us a great deal about that cultural
community. What exactly does it tell us? To my mind, translation provides a
privileged index of cultural self-reference or, if you prefer, self-definition. In
reflecting about itself, a culture, or a section of it, tends to define its own identity
 Translation’s Other [1996] 25

in terms of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ – that is, in relation to that which it perceives as
different from itself, that which lies outside the boundary of its own sphere of
operations or is outside its own ‘system’. Translation offers a window on cultural
self-definition because it involves not only the selection and importation of cul-
tural goods from the outside world but at the same time – in the same breath, as it
were – their transformation into terms which the recipient culture recognises, to
some extent at least, as its own. And because the history of translation leaves in its
wake a large number of dual texts as well as countless retranslations and rework-
ings of existing translations, it provides us with a uniquely accessible series of
cultural constructions of the ‘other’ and, therefore, with first-hand evidence of
the workings of cultural self-definition. In this perspective, resistance or indiffer-
ence to translation, even the absence of translation, can be as informative as the
pursuit of this or that type of translation; and it is important to remember that
when translation occurs, it is always a particular type of translation. Translators
never ‘just translate’. They translate in the context of certain conceptions of and
expectations about translation. Within this context, they make choices and take
up positions because they have goals to reach, interests to pursue, material and
symbolic stakes to defend. Both the context and the actions of individuals and
groups are socially determined. Translators, too, are social agents.

1.5
In short, where a culture feels the need or sees an opportunity to import texts
from beyond a language barrier, and to do so by means of translation, we can
learn a great deal from looking closely at such things as what is selected for trans-
lation from the range of potentially available texts, and who makes the relevant
decisions; who produces the translations, under what conditions, for whom and
with what effect or impact; what form do the translations take, i.e., what choices
have been made in relation to existing expectations and practices in the same
discursive field and in comparable fields; and who speaks about translation, in
what terms and with what authority.
This obviously involves much more than can be illustrated here. Let me pick
up just a couple of points bearing on translation in a particular historical con-
figuration: the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This
is the period which sees not only the breakthrough of the Reformation and
Renaissance but also, in the seventeenth century, the rise, greatness and impend-
ing fall of the Dutch Republic. The manner in which translation is viewed, the
character of the translations themselves and the uses made of them, take us right
into the cultural self-perception of the period.
A few historical moments will have to suffice (in what follows I draw on
the material in Hermans 1996). We may begin in Antwerp, the economic and
cultural heart of the Low Countries around the mid-sixteenth century. Here
the rhetorician Cornelis van Ghistele, who gave Dutch Renaissance writing its
first substantial boost with a series of renderings from the Classics, translated for
26 Approaches

a specific audience, with a specific aim and, therefore, in a specific mode. His
readership consisted of those merchants and patricians who had, perhaps, only
limited school Latin but an active interest in the new prestige culture and the
money to buy expensive books. For them, Van Ghistele translated the canoni-
cal names known from the Latin schools: Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Terence. In his
prefaces and in his practice as a translator, he did everything he could to bring
the foreign authors to his audience, employing a common verse form, using the
prestige of the Ancients to enhance the status of modern dramatic forms and
writing his own sequels to demonstrate the potential of the classical genres. The
one translation in which he did not steer this course proved to be a commercial
failure. Van Ghistele appealed to his readers’ self-esteem by writing disdainfully
about popular chapbooks that contained mere entertainment, trivialised Ovid as
no more than a teller of fantastic tales or still presented Virgil in the medieval
manner as a sorcerer, while also, at the other end of the cultural spectrum, voic-
ing disapproval of the elitism of those intellectually highbrow Humanist circles
who wrote exclusively in Latin. Van Ghistele’s vernacular translations consist-
ently carried cross-references to the Latin texts, and he produced literary work
in both Dutch and Latin himself.
Whereas Van Ghistele provided his readers with the means to increase what
Pierre Bourdieu would call their cultural capital by supplying them with fashion-
able prestige goods, the other major translator of the period, Dirck Volckertszoon
Coornhert, who lived mostly in Holland, took up writers like Boethius, Cicero
and Seneca in the context of a conception of poetry as moral instruction, with
the help of classical rhetoric and a keen regard for the quality of the vernacular.
When he was in his thirties and before he knew any Latin, Coornhert rewrote an
existing Flemish version of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, adapting it to
Northern Dutch usage. In this exercise, the accuracy of the translation as trans-
lation was not his main concern, although he was to translate Boethius ‘prop-
erly’ 30 years later. When Coornhert picked up Seneca, he characteristically
chose De beneficiis for translation; from Cicero’s works, he selected De officiis.
Coornhert, an intellectual streetfighter to whom Calvin once referred as a ‘rav-
ing dog’ because of his relentless advocacy of religious tolerance at a time when
this was not a universally popular line to take, also emerged in the 1580s as the
author of the first book on ethics written in Dutch, and he was closely associated
with the first Dutch handbooks on the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric).
Because these subjects, and, for that matter, subjects such as mathematics, law and
medicine, had traditionally been dealt with in Latin, vernacular writing covering
these domains employed a systematic policy of translating technical terms from
the Latin. Coornhert’s translations play a formative part in this wide-ranging and
self-conscious project of cultural politics.
Just how central a part was assigned to translation in the formation of a Dutch
national culture around the turn of the seventeenth century may be gleaned
from some poems by the well-known painter, poet and art historian Karel
van Mander. Among other things, Van Mander translated Virgil’s Bucolics and
 Translation’s Other [1996] 27

Georgics ‘in the French manner’ – that is, in metrical verse. The book appeared in
Haarlem in 1597. There is a unique copy of this edition (now in the University
Library in Ghent) which has an extra quire at the back, containing nine poems
by Van Mander in which he calls on prominent literary and public figures to fol-
low his example and translate the Classics as a service to the nation and as proof
of cultural proficiency, in the firm belief that painters, as well as poets, need to
be familiar with the Ancients (he went on to write an extensive interpretation
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the relevant iconography attached, and to translate
the Iliad into alexandrines, via a French version) and in a language, incidentally,
which Van Mander, being a Flemish refugee, wanted to be known as ‘Flemish’;
but that, as we know, was a lost cause.
Van Mander’s programme would actually be carried out in the follow-
ing decades, most notably by Joost van den Vondel, the ‘prince of poets’ and
the major tragic playwright of the Dutch seventeenth century. Vondel trans-
lated prodigiously from a range of languages in a lifelong search for literary
examples and models. For him, translatio began as personal exercitatio, matured
into imitatio and aemulatio and, at every stage, informed a type of inventio that
sought to extend and enrich both a national and a supranational tradition in the
vernacular.
That this is true not just of Vondel’s own production but also of the increas-
ingly self-confident literary culture of the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch
Republic generally, may be illustrated ex negativo with reference to the West
Flemish Catholic priest Adrianus de Buck, a now forgotten figure whose trans-
lation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy appeared in Bruges, i.e., in the
Southern Netherlands then still under Spanish rule, in 1653. The book has come
down to us in a mere two copies. De Buck’s preface leaves the reader in no
doubt that he is green with envy at the miracle of Dutch culture in the Northern
Netherlands, not least because, he observes, they have appropriated the learn-
ing of every language in the world, including Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic. De
Buck is acutely aware of living in what, by comparison to the Republic in the
north, is rapidly becoming a cultural backwater and one which has already felt
the effects of France’s expansionism (the town of Veurne, where De Buck was
living, had been overrun by French troops a few years earlier). So, he translates
Boethius, partly to offer consolation to his compatriots who have suffered at the
hands of the French, partly because he thinks (mistakenly, as it happens) that
the Protestant heretics in the North had left Boethius untranslated on account
of the references to free will and purgatory in the Consolation and partly because
he wants to prove that, as he puts it, ‘the sun also shines on our West Flemish
land and that there is fire in our souls too’. This is presumably the reason why,
in his translation, he renders every one of the poems in Boethius twice, in two
different metres. Through his decision to translate, through his selection of a
particular text to translate and through opting for a particular mode of translat-
ing, De Buck offers us a cultural self-definition, a positioning which is religious
and political as well as cultural and, more narrowly, literary.
28 Approaches

By the mid-century, the cultural self-confidence of the Dutch Republic had

reached a point where the beneficial role of translation was no longer taken for
granted. In the 1650s and 1660s, dissonant views regarding the need for and
the value of translation began to be voiced. But the denigration of translation
typically came from individuals or circles not directly associated with the more
canonical, classicising genres. They asserted the primacy of inventio over imitatio,
but they could not capture the centre ground of cultural politics. It may even
be symptomatic that, for all its apparent self-confidence, the Republic did not
simultaneously develop an equivalent to the so-called belles infidèles translations
which were appearing in France from the 1630s onward and which were marked
by the kind of sovereign appropriation of the ‘other’ which invites comparison
with the expansionist policies France would adopt in other domains in the age of
Louis XIV. Some Dutch writers were perfectly aware of how high-prestige cul-
tural translation was developing in France. The very first occurrence of the term
belles infidèles in writing, anywhere, is in a letter of 12 March 1666 by Constantijn
Huygens – a Latin letter, so the term is, appropriately, first attested in translation
(pulcherrima nimirum, sed infida) (Worp 1917, 183). Yet for all his polyglot virtu-
osity, Huygens himself subscribed to a much stricter view of translation, as did
Vondel. The views and example of these two prominent men of letters served
as a point of reference for most other translators, as, by now, a local translation
tradition had established itself.
As French cultural hegemony began to assert itself all over Europe, the
Republic’s international power and prestige also began to wane and the calls
for originality in Dutch letters were drowned. At the end of the 1660s, we
encounter sharply opposing views on translation. On one side were playwrights
such as Jan Vos, Joan Blasius and Thomas Asselijn, who wrote non-Classicis-
ing, action-filled, often politically motivated cloak-and-dagger plays, and who
loudly declared that no amount of translating or imitating can bestow lasting
fame. They were opposed by the newly formed French-Classicist society Nil
Volentibus Arduum, whose members imported French models and, fine-tuning
these, whenever necessary, to the immutable rules of reason and art, subjected
existing translations to ruthless criticism and revision and even deliberately pro-
duced rival translations to challenge other people’s versions. One of the leading
lights of this society, Andries Pels, criticised Rembrandt for following nature and
his own inclination rather than the rules of art and reason. In their translations,
too, the Nil members put into practice their idea that ‘there is greater achieve-
ment in improving a poorly written play while translating it than in writing a
completely new one’ (Meijer Drees 1989, 129). There was, in other words, a
fierce struggle for cultural power and legitimacy going on, and translation – a
certain kind of translation of certain kinds of source texts – was one of the main
stakes as well as the principal weapon.
The French-Classicists won the day and went on to control the Amsterdam
theatre for decades to come. Of the ten new plays staged in Amsterdam during
the 1678 season, six issued from the Nil circle; four of these were translations
 Translation’s Other [1996] 29

produced by Nil with the express aim of combating other versions. Translated
plays continued to outnumber original Dutch works in the Amsterdam theatre
until the 1770s. In the eighteenth century, a similar situation prevailed with
respect to prose fiction and especially popular prose. This helps us to understand
how it came about that when, in 1782, there appeared the epistolary novel Sara
Burgerhart by Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, now generally regarded as the first
modern novel in Dutch, its title page bore the proud inscription ‘Not Translated’
– an extraordinary statement, the significance of which has hardly been appreci-
ated in Dutch literary historiography (Buijnsters 1984 being the exception).

1.6
Different but not fundamentally dissimilar pictures could be painted for other
periods and for cultures other than Dutch – in fact, for all periods and all cul-
tures. Even when contemporary Anglo-American culture translates notoriously
little from foreign languages, historically it owes as much to translation as any
other. Moreover, as I indicated earlier, resistance or hostility or indifference to
translation in certain periods has its own significance for cultural self-definition.
If we reckon, then, that translation, together with the various practices lying in
its immediate vicinity, is worth serious and sustained attention, both on account
of the complexity of the phenomenon itself and in view of its cultural interest,
it is also worth assessing the weight and import of the concepts that govern this
practice and exploring its modalities and parameters. This involves delving into
the question of what exactly, in different periods and contexts, is covered by the
terms and concepts, the images and metaphors used to conceptualise and locate
translation. It means, more broadly, investigating not only the practice of transla-
tion and the various factors that govern it but also the discourse about translation,
its historical and historically unstable self-description.
A single, brief illustration will have to do here. The characterisation of trans-
lation in pictorial terms is one instance which involves reading the historical
metaphors. Comparing translation to the activity of apprentice painters copying
the works of the masters, for example, has been a means of highlighting vari-
ous aspects of translation, including its role as an exercise for the aspiring poet;
its social usefulness as the provision of a readily accessible, if imperfect, copy
of an inaccessible original (and a poor copy is better than none); its qualitative
inferiority vis-à-vis the model because, as Quintilian says, the copy is necessarily
inferior to that which it copies; its affinity with imitation, both being forms of
homage to an acknowledged master; its nature as a form of secondary mimesis,
an imitation of a work which is, itself, thought of as an imitation of nature; its
difficulty, as the translator’s palette of words is necessarily different from that of
his or her model; and its double referentiality, as a statement in its own right and
as a restatement of an existing utterance (Korpel 1995). Which of these senses is
activated or exploited, when, by whom, in preference to which other available
metaphors and for what purpose?
30 Approaches

The patient tracing and detailing of these self-descriptions is often our only
way of assessing how translation was conceptualised in the past. It also provides
an insight into our current discourse about translation, which, after all, translates
‘translation’ by means of comparable concepts and metaphors. Are not all our
theories of an essentially metaphorical nature?
There is much to be unearthed, pieced together and interpreted here, partly,
at least, because, traditionally, the material – actual translations as well as the
poetics of translation – has received scant attention in literary and cultural histo-
ries written mostly along monolingual lines, inspired by a post-Romantic con-
cept of originality and centred on canonical works and authors. But the climate is
changing. The renewed emphasis in literary historiography on the social context
and the institutional structures in which literature operates has created room
for the study of hitherto marginalised but socially as well as intellectually rel-
evant phenomena such as translation. At least as important has been the ceaseless
questioning of just about all the traditional key concepts of literary study by one
branch or another of recent literary theory. As such, seemingly homogenous
notions like the ‘author’ or the ‘original’ were dismantled, and the interest in
hybrid, self-referential, ironic and intertextual forms grew. And finally, there
is the fact that, in recent decades, the study of translation itself has significantly
broadened its scope by breaking out of its applied, prescriptive, ancillary mould
to engage in various kinds of theoretical, empirical and historical research.
Instead of contributing to the containment of translation in the straitjacket of
identity and reproduction, these bolder experiments have brought to the fore the
plurality of translation in all its weird and wonderful manifestations. For my own
approach over the years, both the theoretical speculation and the descriptive and
historicising work of researchers such as Gideon Toury, José Lambert and André
Lefevere, to name only these, proved particularly inspiring.
The kind of work I do, then, is intended to contribute to a renewed under-
standing of translation, both as a historical phenomenon and a cultural construct.
That, even on those occasions when the focus is on Dutch-language texts, this
is done from an essentially comparative perspective seems not only inevitable,
given the nature of the material, but also appropriate in view of what George
Steiner, speaking in Oxford just 18 months or so ago, called the ‘primacy of the
matter of translation’ in comparative literary studies (Steiner 1995, 11).
Recognising the primacy of the matter of translation is one thing, the meth-
odology of studying translation is something else. Considering the complexity
and the hybrid, plural, untidy nature of translation, it is not surprising that,
currently, a wide range of methodologies is being applied. My own attempts to
understand translation as a communicative act and, hence, as a form of social
behaviour, as a historical and culture-specific construct and as a cross-border
activity involving different communities, have prompted personally rewarding
forays into sociology and cultural anthropology as well as literary theory and
modern systems theory – the distinctions between these various disciplines are
often, mercifully, blurred. Translation, as an intellectual category and a socially
 Translation’s Other [1996] 31

active force, is not the kind of subject that can be reduced to or captured by a
single disciplinary approach.
But I should not end this lecture with a methodological disquisition that can
be of interest to devotees only. Something more paradoxical, another untidy
‘other’, this time at the metalevel of translation, will be more appropriate by way
of conclusion.
To appreciate it, we need to go back for a moment to Roman Jakobson’s
short but influential essay ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ of 1959. Here,
Jakobson, having explained that grasping the meaning of a word involves being
able to translate it, famously distinguished between three kinds of translation.
They were, first, ‘intralingual translation, or rewording’, defined as the inter-
pretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language; second,
‘interlingual translation, or translation proper’ – the interpretation of verbal signs
by means of some other language; and third, ‘intersemiotic translation, or trans-
mutation’ – the interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal sign systems
( Jakobson 1959, 233).
Derrida has astutely commented on this tripartite division, pointing out that,
if, for Jakobson, intralingual translation is a form of translation, then, in the essay
itself, the term ‘rewording’ is a translation of the term ‘intralingual translation’.
In this way, the first and the third term in the list are both translated intralin-
gually; ‘intralingual translation’ is rendered as ‘rewording’ and ‘intersemiotic
translation’ is reworded as ‘transmutation’. But in the middle term, ‘interlin-
gual translation, or translation proper’, the word ‘translation’ is not reworded
or intralingually translated. It is merely repeated, tautologically restated. This
form of translation is translation; ‘interlingual translation’ is ‘translation proper’.
The addition of the qualifier ‘proper’ suggests, moreover, that the other two
are somehow not ‘properly’ translation. This undermines the whole exercise of
ranging them all three together as kinds of translation (Derrida 1985, 173–4).
Derrida went on to question the apparent transparency and homogeneity of
notions such as translation and language. For my part, I am interested in the more
pedestrian question of why the paradox is there in the first place. The answer, it
seems to me, lies in the recognition that Jakobson’s essay is anchored in at least
two different fields. As a linguistic or, more properly, a semiotic statement, the
claim that ‘rewording’ and ‘transmutation’ constitute forms of translation is per-
fectly acceptable. From the point of view of someone professionally engaged in
the study of sign systems, there is no good reason to restrict the study of trans-
lational phenomena to interlingual translation, to the exclusion of intralingual,
intersemiotic or, for that matter, intrasemiotic forms. But seen from the vantage
point of translation as it is commonly understood, or better, as it is socially con-
strued, legitimated and institutionalised, the move is not permissible because
there translation is translation proper and only that. The unease in Jakobson’s
formulation stems from ambivalence and transgression in declaring both that
translation properly understood means interlingual translation only and that
translation encompasses other, comparable operations not conventionally, or
32 Approaches

normally, covered by the term ‘translation’. Looking at the essay from today’s
vantage point, we can also appreciate it both as being part of the self-description
and self-reflexiveness of translation in questioning the boundaries of the field
and, thus, engaging in the discussion about what is and what is not translation
– what falls inside or outside – and as being part of an emerging academic disci-
pline of translation studies.
What the example shows, above all, is that, like other branches of the human
sciences which cannot escape entanglement in the object they describe, the dis-
course about translation – including the academic discourse and the present dis-
course – also translates concepts and practices of ‘translation’ into its own terms.
And it necessarily does so on the basis of a certain concept of translation (Bakker
1995; Lotman 1990, 269–71). In thus performing the very operations it attempts
to describe, it is implicated in the self-description of translation as a cultural con-
struct, a social institution. In that sense, the historical reflection on translation by
practitioners and critics in the field, from Jerome to the present, cannot be sepa-
rated from the modern metalanguage employed in research on translation. Even
though some translation scholars today may want to mark the distance between
object-level and metalevel, the complicity is always there, and it contributes, in
its turn, to the social and cultural construction of translation as well as to the
elaboration of an academic discipline.
In a way, this is merely to confirm that our knowledge about translation is
itself culture-bound. This, of course, we knew all along. The issue becomes
acute as soon as we move beyond our immediate horizon – a move hard to avoid
when dealing with translation. The problem surfaces whenever we wish to speak
about ‘translation’ generally, as a transcultural, immanent or universal given or
when we attempt to grasp what another culture, distant from us in time or place,
means by whatever terms they use to denote an activity or a product that appears
to translate as our ‘translation’, which implies that we translate according to our
concept of translation and into our concept of translation. If this is the case, then
the ‘other’ which our terms, as translations of the ‘other’, hold up to our view
will definitely not constitute a transparent image or a faithful representation. As
we saw, translation is never diaphanous, innocent or pure, never without its own
distinct or indistinct voices and discursive resonances. To the extent that our
understanding of another culture’s concept of translation amounts to a transla-
tion of that concept, it is subject to all the dislocations and the untidy pluralisa-
tion that come with translation. And as we also saw, the dislocations themselves
are socially conditioned and, hence, significant for what they tell us about the
individuals and the communities engaging in translation and, therefore, also
about ourselves as students of translation. The study of translation rebounds on
our own categories and assumptions, our own modes of translating translation.
For those of us who want to take the study of translation seriously, there is no
easy way out of these predicaments. But we can learn from them. The aware-
ness of the pitfalls and the self-reflexiveness of ‘cultural translation’, as some
­ethnographers and cultural anthropologists call it (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus
 Translation’s Other [1996] 33

and Fischer 1986; Tambiah 1990), will not make the problems go away, but it can
guard against a form of rashness that ignores its own ethnocentricity and simply,
reductively, translates all translation into ‘our’ translation instead of patiently, delib-
erately, laboriously negotiating the other’s terrain while simultaneously trying to
reconceptualise our own modes of representation through translation.
Translation’s other, then, is not only the hybridity and awkwardness of trans-
lation as a discursive and representational form. It is not only the significance of
translation as a force in cultural history and as an index of cultural self-definition.
It is also the untidiness of our disciplinary translation of translation. But, pro-
vided we approach these various transgressions cautiously, critically and self-crit-
ically, we may still, with luck, gain some insight into the perplexing otherness
of translation itself as well as of the attempts, historical and contemporary, to
account for it.

Bibliography
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Vertalen historisch bezien. Tekst, metatekst, theorie, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Theo
Hermans, 141–62. ‘s-Gravenhage: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica.
Buijnsters, P.J. 1984. Nederlandse literatuur van de achttiende eeuw. Veertien verkenningen.
Utrecht: HES.
Clifford, James and George Marcus, ed. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. ‘Des tours de Babel’. Translated by Joseph Graham. In Difference
in Translation, edited by Joseph Graham, 165–248. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. ‘Ulysse Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’. Translated by Tina
Kendall and Shari Benstock. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 253–309.
New York & London: Routledge.
Descartes, René. 1644. Specimina philosophiae: seu dissertatio de methodo … Ex Gallico
translata, & ab auctore perlecta. Translated by Etienne de Courcelles. Amsterdam:
Lodewijk Elzevier.
Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by F.E. Sutcliffe.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Folkart, Barbara. 1991. Le conflit des énonciations. Traduction et discours rapporté. Candiac:
Editions Balzac.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. ‘What Is an Author?’ Translated by Josué Harari. In Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, edited by Josué Harari, 141–60.
London: Methuen.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David Linge.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Harris, Brian. 1990. ‘Norms in Interpretation’. Target 2, 115–19.
Hermans, Theo. 1996. Door eenen engen hals. Nederlandse beschouwingen over vertalen 1550–
1670. ‘s-Gravenhage: Stichting Bibiliographia Neerlandica.
Jakobson, Roman. 1959. ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’. In On Translation, edited
by Reuben Brower, 232–9. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Korpel,Luc. 1995. ‘De schilders-metafoor in de vertaalreflectie en de veranderingen in

het denken over de relatie tussen dichten, schilderen en vertalen in Nederland (1770–
1820)’. In Dans der muzen. De relatie tussen de kunsten gethematiseerd, edited by A.C.G.
Fleurkens, L. Korpel, and K. Meerhoff, 141–56. Hilversum: Verloren.
Littau, Karin. 1993. ‘Intertextuality and Translation: The Waste Land in French and
German’. In Translation: The Vital Link, edited by Catriona Picken, 63–69. London:
Chameleon Press.
Littau, Karin. Forthcoming. ‘Translation in the Age of Postmodern Production. From
Text to Intertext to Hypertext’. Forum for Modern Language Studies.
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Shukman. London: I.B. Tauris.
Marcus, George and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: The
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago & London: University of Chicago
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[1860]. Edited by A. Kets-Vree. 2 vols. Assen & Maastricht: Van Gorcum.
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Martinus Nijhoff.
2
PARADOXES AND APORIAS
IN TRANSLATION AND
TRANSLATION STUDIES [2002]

Many of us make use of translation, in one form or another, on a daily basis. We

also talk about it, informally, perhaps not quite every day, but regularly. The
terms in which we speak about translation are familiar to all concerned. We find
ourselves perfectly at home in the standard images and metaphors we employ to
characterise translation. Consciously or subconsciously, we are all profoundly
influenced by the way in which our culture denotes, delineates and, ultimately,
constructs translation through various kinds of figurative usage. We take those
ways of speaking for granted.
We recognise what is happening, for instance, when translation is described
by means of such metaphors as building bridges, as ferrying or carrying across, as
transmission, transference, ‘Übersetzung’, or ‘translatio’. Further, similar metaphors
could effortlessly extend the series. All convey the enabling function of transla-
tion. The enabling which translation brings about is to be achieved by a product,
a finished translation, which is deemed to offer the user a reliable image of its
parent text because it bears a close and pertinent resemblance to that which itself
remains beyond reach. This is where we encounter the metaphors of translation
as likeness, replica, duplicate, copy, portrait, reflection, reproduction, imitation,
mimesis, mirror image or transparent pane of glass.
Perhaps it is because these ways of speaking about translation look so familiar
or even hackneyed to us that we are hardly aware of the metaphor hiding in a
phrase such as ‘speaking through an interpreter’. What does it mean to speak
through an interpreter? Or take the shorthand of a statement like ‘I have read
Dostoevsky’, which means: what I read was a translation of Dostoevsky, but
because it was a sound translation, it was, to all intents and purposes, practically
the same as reading the original.
One curious aspect of casual statements like these is their tendency to elide
the translator’s intervention. Someone speaks right through an apparently

DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-4
36 Approaches

disembodied interpreter, and like most other readers, I cannot remember the
names of Dostoevsky’s translators. We feel we can be so casual about these state-
ments, I suggest, because we construe translation as a form of delegated speech
governed by the assumption of equivalence. Translators do not speak in their
own name, they speak someone else’s words. The consonance of voices, but also
the hierarchical relationship between them, is expressed in the ethical and often
the legal imperative of the translator’s discretion and non-interference.
Brian Harris once formulated this requirement as the ‘honest spokesperson’ or
the ‘true interpreter’ norm (Harris 1990, 118). It calls on the translator to restate
the original in another tongue, without addition, omission or distortion. The
translator’s words appear, as it were, between inverted commas. Although the
translator speaks the words, it is not the translator who speaks. The words of the
original speaker are supposedly relayed to us with minimal, and ideally with-
out mediation, by a wholly discreet, transparent, disenfranchised mediator. Two
voices are telescoped into one. They are not fused; rather, one is subsumed into
the other. Discretion and transparency, and the disenfranchisement they bring
about, underwrite equivalence.
Of course, we know that when we discuss translation in these terms, we are
entertaining a fiction. A translation cannot double up with its donor text. It uses
different words, which issue from a different source, in a different environment.
A translation cannot, therefore, be equivalent with its original; it can only be
declared equivalent by means of a performative speech act. Moreover, because the
translator’s manual intervention cannot simply be neutralised or erased without
trace, we shall have to come to terms with those traces.
In what follows, I should like to illustrate this point by recalling, first, the
presence of the translator’s ‘differential voice’ (the term is Barbara Folkart’s; 1991,
394) in translations, and, next, the implications of a norms-based approach to
translation. This will provide the groundwork for suggesting that translations
are untidy and partial rather than transparent representations of their base texts.
I will then use that plank to address the paradoxes and aporias of our representa-
tions of translation. My argument will be that those representations are them-
selves translations and, therefore, also untidy and partial.

2.1
In contrast to the common requirement of the translator’s supposed discretion
and non-interference, which demands that the translator remain invisible as a
speaking subject, I want to maintain that translated texts, like other texts but
more emphatically so, are necessarily plural, decentred, hybrid and polyphonic.
The translator’s discursive presence, as a distinct voice and speaking position,
hence, as what Folkart calls a ‘differential voice’, is always there, in the text itself.
Many translations keep this voice well covered up and, hence, impossible to
detect as a differential voice in the translated text itself. The resulting impres-
sion of homogeneity is what allows us to say that we have read Dostoevsky and
Another random document with
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would have served to strengthen and rest him. But how to come by
so much now? How?
The character of the places frequented by the coolies, bhisties
(water-carriers), hadjis and even beggars like Ibn, while without any
of the so-called luxuries of these others, and to the frequenters of
which the frequenters of these were less than the dust under their
feet, were still, to these latter, excellent enough. Yea, despised as
they were, they contained charpoys on which each could sit with his
little water-chatty beside him, and in the centre of the circle one such
as even the lowly Ibn, a beggar, singing his loudest or reciting some
tale—for such as they. It was in such places as these, before his
voice had wholly deserted him, that Ibn had told his tales. Here,
then, for the price of a few anna, they could munch the leavings of
the khat market, drink kishr and discuss the state of the world and
their respective fortunes. Compared to Ibn in his present state, they
were indeed as lords, even princes.
But, by Allah, although having been a carrier and a vendor himself
in his day, and although born above them, yet having now no voice
nor any tales worth the telling, he was not even now looked upon as
one who could stand up and tell of the wonders of the Jinn and
demons and the great kings and queens who had reigned of old.
Indeed, so low had he fallen that he could not even interest this
despised caste. His only gift now was listening, or to make a pathetic
picture, or recite the ills that were his.
Nevertheless necessity, a stern master, compelled him to think
better of his quondam tale-telling art. Only, being, as he knew, wholly
unsuited to recite any tale now, he also knew that the best he could
do would be to make the effort, a pretense, in the hope that those
present, realizing his age and unfitness, would spare him the
spectacle he would make of himself and give him a few anna
wherewith to ease himself then and there. Accordingly, the hour
having come when the proffered services of a singer or story-teller
would be welcomed in any mabraz, he made his way to this region of
many of them and where beggars were so common. Only, glancing
through the door of the first one, he discovered that there were far
too few patrons for his mood. They would be in nowise gay, hence
neither kind nor generous as yet, and the keeper would be cold. In a
second, a little farther on, a tom-tom was beginning, but the guests
were only seven in number and but newly settled in their pleasure. In
a third, when the diaphanous sky without was beginning to pale to a
deep steel and the evening star was hanging like a solitaire from the
pure breast of the western firmament, he pushed aside the veiling
cords of beads of one and entered, for here was a large company
resting upon their pillows and charpoys, their chatties and hubbuks
beside them, but no singer or beater of a tom-tom or teller of tales as
yet before them.
“O friends,” he began with some diffidence and imaginings, for well
he knew how harsh were the moods and cynical the judgments of
some of these lowest of life’s offerings, “be generous and hearken to
the tale of one whose life has been long and full of many unfortunate
adventures, one who although he is known to you—”
“What!” called Hussein, the peddler of firewood, reclining at his
ease in his corner, a spray of all but wilted khat in his hand. “Is it not
even Ibn Abdullah? And has he turned tale-teller once more? By
Allah, a great teller of tales—one of rare voice! The camels and
jackals will be singing in Hodeidah next!”
“An my eyes deceive me not,” cried Waidi, the water-carrier, at his
ease also, a cup of kishr in his hands, “this is not Ibn Abdullah, but
Sindbad, fresh from a voyage!”
“Or Ali Baba himself,” cried Yussuf, the carrier, hoarsely. “Thou
hast a bag of jewels somewhere about thee? Now indeed we shall
hear things!”
“And in what a voice!” added Haifa the tobacco-tramp, noting the
husky, wheezy tones with which Ibn opened his plea. “This is to be a
treat, truly. And now we may rest and have wonders upon wonders.
Ibn of Mecca and Jiddah, and even of marvelous Hodeidah itself, will
now tell us much. A cup of kishr, ho! This must be listened to!”
But now Bab-al Oman, the keeper, a stout and cumbrous soul,
coming forth from his storeroom, gazed upon Ibn with mingled
astonishment and no little disfavor, for it was not customary to permit
any of his customers of the past to beg in here, and as for a singer or
story-teller he had never thought of Ibn in that light these many
years. He was too old, without the slightest power to do aught but
begin in a wheezy voice.
“Hearken,” he called, coming over and laying a hand on him, the
while the audience gazed and grinned, “hast thou either anna or
rupee wherewith to fulfill thy account in case thou hast either khat or
kishr?” The rags and the mummy-like pallor of the old man offended
him.
“Do but let him speak,” insisted Hussein the peddler gaily, “or
sing,” for he was already feeling the effects of his ease and the
restorative power of the plant. “This will be wonderful. By the voices
of eleven hundred elephants!”
“Yea, a story,” called Waidi, “or perhaps that of the good Cadi of
Taiz and the sacred waters of Jezer!”
“Or of the Cadi of Mecca and the tobacco that was too pure!”
Ibn heard full well and knew the spectacle he was making of
himself. The references were all too plain. Only age and want and a
depressing feebleness, which had been growing for days, caused
him to forget, or prevented, rather, his generating a natural rage and
replying in kind. These wretched enemies of his, dogs lower than
himself, had never forgiven him that he had been born out of their
caste, or, having been so, that he had permitted himself to sink to
labor and beg with them. But now his age and weakness were too
great. He was too weary to contend.
“O most generous Oman, best of keepers of a mabraz—and thou,
O comfortable and honorable guests,” he insisted wheezily, “I have
here but one pice, the reward of all my seekings this day. It is true
that I am a beggar and that my coverings are rags, yet do but
consider that I am old and feeble. This day and the day before and
the day before that—”
“Come, come!” said Oman restlessly and feeling that the custom
and trade of his mabraz were being injured, “out! Thou canst not sing
and thou canst not tell a tale, as thou well knowest. Why come here
when thou hast but a single pice wherewith to pay thy way? Beg
more, but not here! Bring but so much as half a rupee, and thou shalt
have service in plenty!”
“But the pice I have here—may not I—O good sons of the Prophet,
a spray of khat, a cup of kishr—suffer me not thus be cast forth! ‘—
and the poor and the son of the road!’ Alms—alms—in the name of
Allah!”
“Out, out!” insisted Oman gently but firmly. “So much as ten anna,
and thou mayst rest here; not otherwise.”
He turned him forth into the night.
And now, weak and fumbling, Ibn stood there for a time,
wondering where else to turn. He was so weak that at last even the
zest for search or to satisfy himself was departing. For a moment, a
part of his old rage and courage returning, he threw away the pice
that had been given him, then turned back, but not along the street
of the bazaars. He was too distrait and disconsolate. Rather, by a
path which he well knew, he circled now to the south of the town,
passing via the Bet-el-Fakin gate to the desert beyond the walls,
where, ever since his days as a pack servant with the Bedouins, he
had thought to come in such an hour. Overhead were the stars in
that glorious æther, lit with a light which never shines on other soils
or seas. The evening star had disappeared, but the moon was now
in the west, a thin feather, yet transfiguring and transforming as by
magic the homely and bare features of the sands. Out here was
something of that beauty which as a herdsman among the Bedouins
he had known, the scent of camels and of goats’ milk, the memory of
low black woolen tents, dotting the lion-tawny sands and gazelle-
brown gravels with a warm and human note, and the camp-fire that,
like a glowworm, had denoted the village centre. Now, as in a dream,
the wild weird songs of the boys and girls of the desert came back,
the bleating of their sheep and goats in the gloaming. And the
measured chant of the spearsmen, gravely stalking behind their
charges, the camels, their song mingling with the bellowing of their
humpy herds.
 “It is finished,” he said, once he was free of the city and far into the
desert itself. “I have no more either the skill nor the strength
wherewith to endure or make my way. And without khat one cannot
endure. What will be will be, and I am too old. Let them find me so. I
shall not move. It is better than the other.”
Then upon the dry, warm sands he laid himself, his head toward
Mecca, while overhead the reremouse circled and cried, its tiny
shriek acknowledging its zest for life; and the rave of a jackal,
resounding through the illuminated shade beyond, bespoke its desire
to live also. Most musical of all music, the palm trees now answered
the whispers of the night breeze with the softest tones of falling
water.
“It is done,” sighed Ibn Abdullah, as he lay and wearily rested.
“Worthless I came, O Allah, and worthless I return. It is well.”
 VII
TYPHOON

I NTO a singularly restricted and indifferent environment Ida Zobel

was born. Her mother, a severe, prim German woman, died when
she was only three, leaving her to the care of her father and his
sister, both extremely reserved and orderly persons. Later, after Ida
had reached the age of ten, William Zobel took unto himself a
second wife, who resembled Zobel and his first wife in their respect
for labor and order.
Both were at odds with the brash gayety and looseness of the
American world in which they found themselves. Being narrow,
sober, workaday Germans, they were annoyed by the groups of
restless, seeking, eager, and as Zobel saw it, rather scandalous
young men and women who paraded the neighborhood streets of an
evening without a single thought apparently other than pleasure. And
these young scamps and their girl friends who sped about in
automobiles. The loose, indifferent parents. The loose, free ways of
all these children. What was to become of such a nation? Were not
the daily newspapers, which he would scarcely tolerate in his home
longer, full of these wretched doings? The pictures of almost naked
women that filled them all! Jazz! Petting parties! High school boys
with flasks on their hips! Girls with skirts to their knees, rolled-down
stockings, rolled-down neck-bands, bare arms, bobbed hair, no
decent concealing underwear!
“What—a daughter of his grow up like that! Be permitted to join in
this prancing route to perdition! Never!” And in consequence, the
strictest of rules with regard to Ida’s upbringing. Her hair was to grow
its natural length, of course. Her lips and cheeks were never to know
the blush of false, suggestive paint. Plain dresses. Plain underwear
and stockings and shoes and hats. No crazy, idiotic finery, but
substantial, respectable clothing. Work at home and, when not
otherwise employed with her studies at school, in the small paint and
color store which her father owned in the immediate vicinity of their
home. And last, but not least, a schooling of such proper and definite
character as would serve to keep her mind from the innumerable
current follies which were apparently pulling at the foundations of
decent society.
For this purpose Zobel chose a private and somewhat religious
school conducted by an aged German spinster of the name of
Elizabeth Hohstauffer, who had succeeded after years and years of
teaching in impressing her merits as a mentor on perhaps as many
as a hundred German families of the area. No contact with the
careless and shameless public school here. And once the child had
been inducted into that, there followed a series of daily inquiries and
directions intended to guide her in the path she was to follow.
“Hurry! You have only ten minutes now in which to get to school.
There is no time to lose!”... “How comes it that you are five minutes
late to-night? What were you doing?”... “Your teacher made you
stay? You had to stop and look for a blank book?”... “Why didn’t you
come home first and let me look for it with you afterwards?” (It was
her stepmother talking.) “You know your father doesn’t want you to
stay after school.”... “And just what were you doing on Warren
Avenue between twelve and one to-day? Your father said you were
with some girl.”... “Vilma Balet? And who is Vilma Balet? Where does
she live? And how long has it been that you have been going with
her? Why is it that you have not mentioned her before? You know
what your father’s rule is. And now I shall have to tell him. He will be
angry. You must obey his rules. You are by no means old enough to
decide for yourself. You have heard him say that.”
Notwithstanding all this, Ida, though none too daring or aggressive
mentally, was being imaginatively drawn to the very gayeties and
pleasures that require courage and daring. She lived in a mental
world made up of the bright lights of Warren Avenue, of which she
caught an occasional glimpse. The numerous cars speeding by! The
movies and her favorite photographs of actors and actresses, some
of the mannerisms of whom the girls imitated at school. The voices,
the laughter of the boys and girls as they walked to and fro along the
commonplace thoroughfare with its street-cars and endless stores
side by side! And what triumphs or prospective joys they planned
and palavered over as they strolled along in their easy manner—
arms linked and bodies swaying—up the street and around the
corner and back into the main street again, gazing at their graceful
ankles and bodies in the mirrors and windows as they passed, or
casting shy glances at the boys.
But as for Ida—despite her budding sensitivity—at ten, eleven,
twelve, thirteen, fourteen—there was no escape from the severe
regimen she was compelled to follow. Breakfast at seven-thirty sharp
because the store had to be opened by her father at eight; luncheon
at twelve-thirty, on the dot to satisfy her father; dinner invariably at
six-thirty, because there were many things commercial and social
which fell upon the shoulders of William Zobel at night. And between
whiles, from four to six on weekdays and later from seven to ten at
night, as well as all day Saturdays, store duty in her father’s store.
No parties, no welcome home atmosphere for the friends of her
choice. Those she really liked were always picked to pieces by her
stepmother, and of course this somewhat influenced the opinion of
her father. It was common gossip of the neighborhood that her
parents were very strict and that they permitted her scarcely any
liberties. A trip to a movie, the choice of which was properly
supervised by her parents; an occasional ride in an automobile with
her parents, since by the time she had attained her fifteenth year he
had purchased one of the cheaper cars.
But all the time the rout of youthful life before her eyes. And in so
far as her home life and the emotional significance of her parents
were concerned, a sort of depressing grayness. For William Zobel,
with his gray-blue eyes gleaming behind gilt-rimmed glasses, was
scarcely the person to whom a girl of Ida’s temperament would be
drawn. Nor was her stepmother, with her long, narrow face, brown
eyes and black hair. Indeed, Zobel was a father who by the very
solemnity of his demeanor, as well as the soberness and
practicability of his thoughts and rules, was constantly evoking a
sense of dictatorship which was by no means conducive to
sympathetic approach. To be sure, there were greetings,
acknowledgments, respectful and careful explanations as to this, that
and the other. Occasionally they would go to a friend’s house or a
public restaurant, but there existed no understanding on the part of
either Zobel or his wife—he never having wanted a daughter of his
own and she not being particularly drawn to the child of another—of
the growing problems of adolescence that might be confronting her,
and hence none of that possible harmony and enlightenment which
might have endeared each to the other.
Instead, repression, and even fear at times, which in the course of
years took on an aspect of careful courtesy supplemented by
accurate obedience. But within herself a growing sense of her own
increasing charm, which, in her father’s eyes, if not in her
stepmother’s, seemed to be identified always with danger—either
present or prospective. Her very light and silky hair—light, grayish-
blue eyes—a rounded and intriguing figure which even the other girls
at Miss Hohstauffer’s school noticed and commented on. And in
addition a small straight nose and a full and yet small and almost
pouting mouth and rounded chin. Had she not a mirror and were
there not boys from her seventh year on who looked at her and
sought to attract her attention? Her father could see this as well as
his second wife. But she dared not loiter here and there as others
did, for those vigorous, bantering, seeking, intriguing contacts. She
must hurry home—to store or house duty or more study in such
fields as Zobel and his wife thought best for her. If it was to run
errands she was always timed to the minute.
And yet, in spite of all these precautions, the swift telegraphy of
eyes and blood. The haunting, seeking moods of youth, which
speaks a language of its own. In the drugstore at the corner of
Warren and Tracy, but a half-block from her home, there was at one
time in her twelfth year Lawrence Sullivan, a soda clerk. He seemed
to her the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The dark, smooth
hair lying glossed and parted above a perfect white forehead; slim,
graceful hands—or so she thought—a care and smartness in the
matter of dress which even the clothing of the scores of public school
boys passing this way seemed scarcely to match. And such a way
where girls were concerned—so smiling and at his ease. And always
a word for them as they stopped in on their way home from school.
 “Why, hello, Della! How’s Miss McGinnis to-day? I bet I know what
you’re going to have. I think pretty blonde girls must like chocolate
sundaes—they contrast with their complexions.” And then smiling
serenely while Miss McGinnis panted and smiled: “A lot you know
about what blonde girls like.”
And Ida Zobel, present on occasion by permission for a soda or a
sundae, looking on and listening most eagerly. Such a handsome
youth. All of sixteen. He would as yet pay no attention to so young a
girl as she, of course, but when she was older! Would she be as
pretty as this Miss McGinnis? Could she be as assured? How
wonderful to be attractive to such a youth! And what would he say to
her, if he said anything at all? And what would she say in return?
Many times she imitated these girls mentally and held imaginary
conversations with herself. Yes, despite this passive admiration, Mr.
Sullivan went the way of all soda-clerks, changing eventually to
another job in another neighborhood.
But in the course of time there were others who took her eye and
for a time held her mind—around whose differing charms she
erected fancies which had nothing to do with reality. One of these
was Merton Webster, the brisk, showy, vain and none too ambitious
son of a local state senator, who lived in the same block she did and
attended Watkins High School, which she was not permitted to
attend. So handsome was he—so debonair. “Hello, kid! Gee, you
look cute, all right. One of these days I’ll take you to a dance if you
want to go.” Yet, because of her years and the strict family
espionage, blushes, her head down, but a smile none the less.
And she was troubled by thoughts of him until Walter Stour, whose
father conducted a realty and insurance business only a little way
west of her father’s store, took her attention—a year later. Walter
was a tall, fair complexioned youth, with gay eyes and a big,
laughing mouth, who, occasionally with Merton Webster, Lawrence
Cross, a grocer’s son, Sven Volberg, the dry-cleaner’s son, and
some others, hung about the favorite moving-picture theatre or the
drugstore on the main corner and flirted with the girls as they passed
by. As restricted as she was still, because of her trips to and fro
between home and school and her service as a clerk in her father’s
store, she was not unfamiliar with these several figures or their
names. They came into the store occasionally and even commented
on her looks: “Oh, getting to be a pretty girl, isn’t she?” Whereupon
she would flush with excitement and nervously busy herself about
filling a customer’s order.
It was through Etelka Shomel, the daughter of a German neighbor
who was also a friend of William Zobel, that she learned much of
these boys and girls. Her father thought Etelka a safe character for
Ida to chum with, chiefly on account of her unattractiveness. But
through her, as well as their joint pilgrimages here and there, she
came to hear much gossip about the doings of these same. Walter
Stour, whom she now greatly admired, was going with a girl by the
name of Edna Strong, who was the daughter of a milk-dealer.
Stour’s father was not as stingy as some fathers. He had a good car
and occasionally let his son use it. Stour often took Edna and some
of her friends to boathouse resorts on the Little Shark River. A girl
friend of Etelka’s told her what a wonderful mimic and dancer he
was. She had been on a party with him. And, of course, Ida lent a
willing and eager ear to all this. Oh, the gayety of such a life! Its
wonders! Beauties!
And then one night, as Ida was coming around the corner to go to
her father’s store at about seven-thirty and Stour was on his favorite
corner with several other boys, he called: “I know who’s a sweet kid,
but her daddy won’t let her look at a guy. Will he?” This last aimed
directly at her as she passed, while she, knowing full well who was
meant and how true it was, hurried on all the faster. If her father had
heard that! Oh, my! But it thrilled her as she walked. “Sweet kid.”
“Sweet kid”—kept ringing in her ears.
And then at last, in her sixteenth year, Edward Hauptwanger
moved into a large house in Grey Street. His father, Jacob
Hauptwanger, was a well-to-do coal-dealer who had recently
purchased a yard on the Absecon. It was about this time that Ida
became keenly aware that her normal girlhood, with its so necessary
social contacts, was being set at naught and that she was being
completely frustrated by the stern and repressive attitude of her
father and stepmother. The wonder and pain, for instance, of spring
and summer evenings just then, when she would stand gazing at the
moon above her own commonplace home—shining down into the
narrow, commonplace garden at the back, where still were tulips,
hyacinths, honeysuckle and roses. And the stars shining above
Warren Avenue, where were the cars, the crowds, the moving-
picture theatres and restaurants which held such charm for her.
There was a kind of madness, an ache, in it all. Oh, for pleasure—
pleasure! To go, run, dance, play, kiss with some one—almost any
one, really, if he were only young and handsome. Was she going to
know no one—no one? And, worse, the young men of the
neighborhood calling to her as she passed: “Oh, look who’s here!
Shame her daddy won’t let her out.” “Why don’t you bob your hair,
Ida? You’d be cute.” Even though she was out of school now, she
was clerking as before and dressing as before. No short skirts,
bobbed hair, rolled-down stockings, rouge.
But with the arrival of this Edward Hauptwanger, there came a
change. For here was a youth of definite and drastic impulses—a
beau, a fighter, a fellow of infinite guile where girls of all sorts were
concerned—and, too, a youth of taste in the matter of dress and
manner—one who stood out as a kind of hero to the type of youthful
male companions with whom he chose to associate. Did he not live
in a really large, separate house on Grey Street? And were not his
father’s coal-pockets and trucks conspicuously labelled outstanding
features of the district? And, in addition, Hauptwanger, owing to the
foolish and doting favor of his mother (by no means shared by his
father), always supplied with pocket money sufficient to meet all
required expenditures of such a world as this. The shows to which
he could take his “flames”; the restaurants, downtown as well as
here. And the boat club on the Little Shark which at once became a
rendezvous of his. He had a canoe of his own, so it was said. He
was an expert swimmer and diver. He was allowed the use of his
father’s car and would often gather up his friends on a Saturday or
Sunday and go to the boat club.
More interesting still, after nearly a year’s residence here, in which
he had had time to establish himself socially after this fashion, he
had his first sight of Ida Zobel passing one evening from her home to
the store. Her youthful if repressed beauty was at its zenith. And
some remarks concerning her and her restricted life by youths who
had neither the skill nor the daring to invade it at once set him
thinking. She was beautiful, you bet! Hauptwanger, because of a
certain adventurous fighting strain in his blood, was at once intrigued
by the difficulties which thus so definitely set this girl apart. “These
old-fashioned, dictatorial Germans! And not a fellow in the
neighborhood to step up and do anything about it! Well, whaddya
know?”
And forthwith an intensive study of the situation as well as of the
sensitive, alluring Ida Zobel. And with the result that he was soon
finding himself irresistibly attracted to her. That pretty face! That
graceful, rounded figure! Those large, blue-gray, shy and evasive
eyes! Yet with yearning in them, too.
And in consequence various brazen parades past the very paint
store of Zobel, with the fair Ida within. And this despite the fact that
Zobel himself was there—morning, noon and night—bent over his
cash register or his books or doing up something for a customer. And
Ida, by reason of her repressed desires and sudden strong
consciousness of his interest in her as thus expressed, more and
more attracted to him. And he, because of this or his own interest,
coming to note the hours when she was most likely to be alone.
These were, as a rule, Wednesdays and Fridays, when because of a
singing society as well as a German social and commercial club her
father was absent from eight-thirty on. And although occasionally
assisted by her stepmother she was there alone on these nights.
And so a campaign which was to break the spell which held the
sleeping beauty. At first, however, only a smile in the direction of Ida
whenever he passed or she passed him, together with boasts to his
friends to the effect that he would “win that kid yet, wait and see.”
And then, one evening, in the absence of Zobel, a visit to the store.
She was behind the counter and between the business of waiting on
customers was dreaming as usual of the life outside. For during the
past few weeks she had become most sharply conscious of the
smiling interest of Hauptwanger. His straight, lithe body—his quick,
aggressive manner—his assertive, seeking eyes! Oh, my! Like the
others who had gone before him and who had attracted her
emotional interest, he was exactly of that fastidious, self-assured and
self-admiring type toward which one so shy as herself would yearn.
No hesitancy on his part. Even for this occasion he had scarcely
troubled to think of a story. What difference? Any old story would do.
He wanted to see some paints. They might be going to repaint the
house soon—and in the meantime he could engage her in
conversation, and if the “old man” came back, well, he would talk
paints to him.
And so, on this particularly warm and enticing night in May, he
walked briskly in, a new gray suit, light tan fedora hat and tan shoes
and tie completing an ensemble which won the admiration of the
neighborhood. “Oh, hello. Pretty tough to have to work inside on a
night like this, ain’t it?” (A most irresistible smile going with this.) “I
want to see some paints—the colors of ’em, I mean. The old man is
thinking of repainting the house.”
And at once Ida, excited and flushing to the roots of her hair,
turning to look for a color card—as much to conceal her flushing face
as anything else. And yet intrigued as much as she was affrighted.
The daring of him! Suppose her father should return—or her
stepmother enter? Still, wasn’t he as much of a customer as any one
else—although she well knew by his manner that it was not paint
that had brought him. For over the way, as she herself could and did
see, were three of his admiring companions ranged in a row to watch
him, the while he leaned genially and familiarly against the counter
and continued: “Gee, I’ve seen you often enough, going back and
forth between your school and this store and your home. I’ve been
around here nearly a year now, but I’ve never seen you around much
with the rest of the girls. Too bad! Otherwise we mighta met. I’ve met
all the rest of ’em so far,” and at the same time by troubling to touch
his tie he managed to bring into action one hand on which was an
opal ring, his wrist smartly framed in a striped pink cuff. “I heard your
father wouldn’t even let you go to Warren High. Pretty strict, eh?”
And he beamed into the blue-gray eyes of the budding girl before
him, noted the rounded pink cheeks, the full mouth, the silky hair, the
while she trembled and thrilled.
 “Yes, he is pretty strict.”
“Still, you can’t just go nowhere all the time, can you?” And by now
the color card, taken into his own hand, was lying flat on the counter.
“You gotta have a little fun once in a while, eh? If I’da thought you’da
stood for it, I’da introduced myself before this. My father has the big
coal-dock down here on the river. He knows your father, I’m sure. I
gotta car, or at least my dad has, and that’s as good as mine. Do you
think your father’d letcha take a run out in the country some
Saturday or Sunday—down to Little Shark River, say, or Peck’s
Beach? Lots of the fellows and girls from around here go down
there.”
By now it was obvious that Hauptwanger was achieving a
conquest of sorts and his companions over the way were
abandoning their advantageous position, no longer hopefully
interested by the possibility of defeat. But the nervous Ida, intrigued
though terrified, was thinking how wonderful it was to at last interest
so handsome a youth as this. Even though her father might not
approve, still might not all that be overcome by such a gallant as
this? But her hair was not bobbed, her skirts not short, her lips not
rouged. Could it really be that he was attracted by her physical
charms? His dark brown and yet hard and eager eyes—his
handsome hands. The smart way in which he dressed. She was
becoming conscious of her severely plain blue dress with white
trimmings, her unmodish slippers and stockings. At the same time
she found herself most definitely replying: “Oh, now, I couldn’t ever
do anything like that, you know. You see, my father doesn’t know
you. He wouldn’t let me go with any one he doesn’t know or to whom
I haven’t been properly introduced. You know how it is.”
“Well, couldn’t I introduce myself then? My father knows your
father, I’m sure. I could just tell him that I want to call on you, couldn’t
I? I’m not afraid of him, and there’s sure no harm in that, is there?”
“Well, that might be all right, only he’s very strict—and he might
not want me to go, anyhow.”
“Oh, pshaw! But you would like to go, wouldn’t you? Or to a picture
show? He couldn’t kick against that, could he?”
 He looked her in the eye, smiling, and in doing so drew the lids of
his own eyes together in a sensuous, intriguing way which he had
found effective with others. And in the budding Ida were born
impulses of which she had no consciousness and over which she
had no control. She merely looked at him weakly. The wonder of
him! The beauty of love! Her desire toward him! And so finding heart
to say: “No, maybe not. I don’t know. You see I’ve never had a beau
yet.”
She looked at him in such a way as to convince him of his
conquest. “Easy! A cinch!” was his thought. “Nothing to it at all.” He
would see Zobel and get his permission or meet her clandestinely.
Gee, a father like that had no right to keep his daughter from having
any fun at all. These narrow, hard-boiled German parents—they
ought to be shown—awakened—made to come to life.
And so, within two days brazenly presenting himself to Zobel in his
store in order to test whether he could not induce him to accept him
as presumably at least a candidate for his daughter’s favor.
Supposing the affair did not prove as appealing as he thought, he
could drop the contact, couldn’t he? Hadn’t he dropped others?
Zobel knew of his father, of course. And while listening to
Hauptwanger’s brisk and confident explanation he was quite
consciously evaluating the smart suit, new tan shoes and gathering,
all in all, a favorable impression.
“You say you spoke to her already?”
“I asked her if I might call on her, yes, sir.”
“Uh-uh! When was this?”
“Just two days ago. In the evening here.”
“Uh-uh!”
At the same time a certain nervous, critical attitude toward
everything, which had produced many fine lines about the eyes and
above the nose of Mr. Zobel, again taking hold of him: “Well, well—
this is something I will have to talk over with my daughter. I must see
about this. I am very careful of my daughter and who she goes with,
you know.” Nevertheless, he was thinking of the many coal trucks
delivering coal in the neighborhood, the German name of this youth
and his probable German and hence conservative upbringing. “I will
let you know about it later. You come in some other time.”
And so later a conference with his daughter, resulting finally in the
conclusion that it might be advisable for her to have at least one
male contact. For she was sixteen years old and up to the present
time he had been pretty strict with her. Perhaps she was over the
worst period. At any rate, most other girls of her age were permitted
to go out some. At least one beau of the right kind might be
essential, and somehow he liked this youth who had approached him
in this frank, fearless manner.
And so, for the time being, a call permitted once or twice a week,
with Hauptwanger from the first dreaming most daring and
aggressive dreams. And after a time, having conducted himself most
circumspectly, it followed that an evening at one of the neighborhood
picture houses was suggested and achieved. And once this was
accomplished it became a regularity for him to spend either
Wednesday or Friday evening with Ida, it depending on her work in
the store. Later, his courage and skill never deserting him, a
suggestion to Mr. Zobel that he permit Ida to go out with him on a
Saturday afternoon to visit Peck’s Beach nine miles below the city,
on the Little Shark. It was very nice there, and a popular Saturday
and Sunday resort for most of the residents of this area. After a time,
having by degrees gained the complete confidence of Zobel, he was
granted permission to take Ida to one or another of the theatres
downtown, or to a restaurant, or to the house of a boy friend who
had a sister and who lived in the next block.
Despite his stern, infiltrating supervision, Zobel could not prevent
the progressive familiarities based on youth, desire, romance. For
with Edward Hauptwanger, to contact was to intrigue and eventually
demand and compel. And so by degrees hand pressures, stolen or
enforced kisses. Yet, none the less, Ida, still fully dominated by the
mood and conviction of her father, persisting in a nervous
evasiveness which was all too trying to her lover.
 “Ah, you don’t know my father. No, I couldn’t do that. No, I can’t
stay out so late. Oh, no—I wouldn’t dare go there—I wouldn’t dare
to. I don’t know what he would do to me.”
This, or such as this, to all of his overtures which hinted at later
hours, a trip to that mysterious and fascinating boat club on the Little
Shark twenty-five miles out, where, as he so glibly explained, were to
be enjoyed dancing, swimming, boating, music, feasting. But as Ida
who had never done any of these things soon discovered for herself,
this would require an unheard-of period of time—from noon until
midnight—or later Saturday, whereas her father had fixed the hour of
eleven-thirty for her return to the parental roof.
“Ah, don’t you want to have any fun at all? Gee! He don’t want you
to do a thing and you let him get away with it. Look at all the other
girls and fellows around here. There’s not one that’s as scary as you
are. Besides, what harm is there? Supposing we don’t get back on
time? Couldn’t we say the car broke down? He couldn’t say anything
to that. Besides, no one punches a time clock any more.” But Ida
nervous and still resisting, and Hauptwanger, because of this very
resistance, determined to win her to his mood and to outwit her
father at the same time.
And then the lure of summer nights—Corybantic—dithyrambic—
with kisses, kisses, kisses—under the shadow of the trees in King
Lake Park, or in one of the little boats of its lake which nosed the
roots of those same trees on the shore. And with the sensitive and
sensual, and yet restricted and inexperienced Ida, growing more and
more lost in the spell which youth, summer, love, had generated. The
beauty of the face of this, her grand cavalier! His clothes, his brisk,
athletic energy and daring! And with him perpetually twittering of this
and that, here and there, that if she only truly loved him and had the
nerve, what wouldn’t they do? All the pleasures of the world before
them, really. And then at last, on this same lake—with her lying in his
arms—himself attempting familiarities which scarcely seemed
possible in her dreams before this, and which caused her to jump up
and demand to be put ashore, the while he merely laughed.
 “Oh, what had he done that was so terrible? Say, did she really
care for him? Didn’t she? Then, why so uppish? Why cry? Oh, gee,
this was a scream, this was. Oh, all right, if that was the way she
was going to feel about it.” And once ashore, walking briskly off in
the gayest and most self-sufficient manner while she, alone and
tortured by her sudden ejection from paradise, slipped home and into
her room, there to bury her face in her pillow and to whisper to it and
herself of the danger—almost the horror—that had befallen her. Yet
in her eyes and mind the while the perfect Hauptwanger. And in her
heart his face, hands, hair. His daring. His kisses. And so brooding
even here and now as to the wisdom of her course—her anger—and
in a dreary and hopeless mood even, dragging herself to her father’s
store the next day, merely to wait and dream that he was not as evil
as he had seemed—that he could not have seriously contemplated
the familiarities that he had attempted; that he had been merely
obsessed, bewitched, as she herself had been.
Oh, love, love! Edward! Edward! Edward! Oh, he would not, could
not remain away. She must see him—give him a chance to explain.
She must make him understand that it was not want of love but fear
of life—her father, everything, everybody—that kept her so sensitive,
aloof, remote.
And Hauptwanger himself, for all of his bravado and craft, now
nervous lest he had been too hasty. For, after all, what a beauty! The
lure! He couldn’t let her go this way. It was a little too delicious and
wonderful to have her so infatuated—and with a little more attention,
who knew? And so conspicuously placing himself where she must
pass on her way home in the evening, at the corner of Warren and
High—yet with no sign on his part of seeing her. And Ida, with
yearning and white-faced misery, seeing him as she passed.
Monday night! Tuesday night! And worse, to see him pass the store
early Wednesday evening without so much as turning his head. And
then the next day a note handed the negro errand boy of her father’s
store to be given to him later, about seven, at the corner where he
would most surely be.
And then later, with the same Edward taking it most casually and
grandly and reading it. So she had been compelled to write him, had
she? Oh, these dames! Yet with a definite thrill from the contents for
all of that, for it read: “Oh, Edward, darling, you can’t be so cruel to
me. How can you? I love you so. You didn’t mean what you said. Tell
me you didn’t. I didn’t. Oh, please come to the house at eight. I want
to see you.”
And Edward Hauptwanger, quite triumphant now, saying to the
messenger before four cronies who knew of his present pursuit of
Ida: “Oh, that’s all right. Just tell her I’ll be over after a while.” And
then as eight o’clock neared, ambling off in the direction of the Zobel
home. And as he left one of his companions remarking: “Say,
whaddya know? He’s got that Zobel girl on the run now. She’s writing
him notes now. Didn’t ya see the coon bring it up? Don’t it beat hell?”
And the others as enviously, amazedly and contemptuously
inquiring: “Whaddya know?”
And so, under June trees in King Lake Park, once more another
conference. “Oh, darling, how could you treat me so, how could you?
Oh, my dear, dear darling.” And he replying—“Oh, sure, sure, it was
all right, only what do you think I’m made of? Say, have a heart, I’m
human, ain’t I? I’ve got some feelings same as anybody else. Ain’t I
crazy about you and ain’t you crazy about me? Well, then—besides
—well, say....” A long pharisaical and deluding argument as one
might guess, with all the miseries and difficulties of restrained and
evaded desire most artfully suggested—yet with no harm meant, of
course. Oh, no.
But again, on her part, the old foolish, terrorized love plea. And the
firm assurance on his part that if anything went wrong—why, of
course. But why worry about that now? Gee, she was the only girl he
knew who worried about anything like that. And finally a rendezvous
at Little Shark River, with his father’s car as the conveyance. And
later others and others. And she—because of her weak, fearsome
yielding in the first instance—and then her terrorized contemplation
of possible consequences in the second—clinging to him in all too
eager and hence cloying fashion. She was his now—all his. Oh, he
would never, never desert her, now, would he?