Looking back at my work from
the MA in Literary Translation, it has been the role of the reader and of the
author that has continued to shape my idea of what it means to translate. To
what extent is an author responsible for their work? And how does this
influence the process of translation? To what extent is any reading of a text
possible? And how does this affect my role as a translator? These are the ideas
which have and continue to excite me.
During the first semester I focused
on the translation of landscape within Anton Chekhov’s short stories. Through
this work I discovered that a text, in itself, creates the potential for
profound effects on the reader, something which I argue is similar to standing
in a landscape; the topography, colours and situation all create a potential to
illicit certain responses from the reader. My main focus therefore remained on
the text itself, in considering, as Umberto Eco puts it, its ‘maze-like
structure’, and therefore my aim as a translator was to recreate this
particular structure in order to retain the same potential for effects.
During the second semester I
translated a children’s story that was written in Russia during the Stalinist
period. I found the translation of this particular children’s story to be
extremely complex, as the role of the reader (a child) and of the author (someone
bound by law to write for the purposes of communism) were closely bound by an
ideology that differed drastically from the prevailing ideology of the culture
into which I was translating the text; my focus was consequently shifted to the
reader, making sure that the subversive elements, already present in the text,
were visible in the translation. During this semester I also translated a
selection of microfiction by the Russian writer Daniil Kharms. I began the
project by reading the author’s notebooks alongside his microfiction, but soon
discovered that the voices within these texts were indistinguishable; the voice
in the notebooks was no closer to Daniil Kharms, as a once real, living person,
than the voice in his microfiction. This project transformed the way in which I
approach translation, decentring the role of the author, and thereby freeing up
my role as a translator; emphasis was on the text, and my reading of it.
Finally, my last project on
this course focuses on the translation of three short stories by the Russian
writer Tatyana Tolstaya, and in particular on the notion of ‘mind style’; a
notion which suggests that systematic linguistic choices reflect the workings
of an individual mind. Through this research I have come to understand the author
within the text is a hazy spectral figure created through concrete elements of
the text, something neither completely dead nor completely alive; something
which has the ability to shift and change, but which nevertheless has a felt
presence, allowing the text to work as an organic whole. I have so far
concluded that because a work of literature is both a concrete text which has
been organised by an individual mind, and because it requires a reading in
order for it to have any meaning, a translation is always inevitably both an
individual reading and a recreation of the work as constructed by an author; a
translator, in other words, is always to a greater or lesser degree, a
collaborator; neither working alone, nor at the mercy of authorial intention.
Hannah
Collins studied Russian and French at the University of Nottingham. She works
as a freelance translator and is currently studying on the Literary Translation
MA at the UEA. Her email address is Hannah.Collins@uea.ac.uk.
