Journal of Intercultural Studies

Vol. 28, No. 4, November 2007, pp. 381 !395

The Fiction of the Translator

Rita Wilson

Prompted by a reading of two novels by contemporary Italian writer Francesca Duranti,

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La casa sul lago della luna (1984) and Sogni mancini (1997), in which the experiences
of translators and writer-translators are explored in depth, this paper investigates
fictional treatments of the translator by a number of contemporary writers from different
cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The paper considers how fiction writers place the
translator centre stage, and emphasise both the function of translation as a form of
intercultural communication and the alterity implicit in the concept of translation. It is
argued that representations of translators in contemporary fiction reflect crucial issues of
(cultural) identity in a globalised society, in which displacement is a widespread
phenomenon.

Keywords: Displacement; Fiction; Identity; Narrative; Self; Translator

The problem of translating is really the same as that of writing, and at the heart of it
is the translator, perhaps even more so than the author. [. . .] The translator is
literature’s last, true knight errant.1

The translator’s visibility has been a much discussed issue in translation studies since
Lawrence Venuti used the term ‘‘invisibility’’ to describe the common practice by
translators of creating fluent and ‘‘transparent’’ target-language texts which read as
though they are not translations at all, thus creating an ‘‘illusion of authorial
presence’’ (The Translator’s Invisibility 7). Paradoxically it is the translator’s ability to
substitute the author’s discourse with his/her own that signals the translator’s
‘‘invisibility’’. The result is that, as a rule, the translator is banished from the domain
of co-authorship; relegated to the position of ‘‘the Other’’, and can thus be

Rita Wilson coordinates the postgraduate Translation Studies program in the School of Languages, Cultures and
Linguistics at Monash University. Her research interests include contemporary Italian literature, women’s
writing, translation and intercultural studies. She is the author of Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian
Women’s Narrative (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000) and co-editor of Spaces and Crossings. Essays on
Literature and Culture from Africa and Beyond (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001) and Across Genres, Generations, and
Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2004). Correspondence to: Rita
Wilson, School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics, Building 11, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia.
Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0725-6868 print/ISSN 1469-9540 online/07/04381-15

# 2007 Centre for Migrant and Intercultural Studies
DOI: 10.1080/07256860701591219
 382 R. Wilson

represented only indirectly as, for example, theorist or literary character. Susan
Bassnett (‘‘The Meek or the Mighty’’) contends that the increased interest in the role
of the translator has much to do with developments in literary theory which have
undermined traditional views of originality that were well served by the idea of
translation as an ancillary activity. It has also been widely noted that increasing
globalisation and internationalisation of the modern world make the translator more
and more necessary and the translating experience more and more common not only
for professional translators working across different languages but whenever people
have to translate themselves into another culture as, for example, in the case of
migration.
I wish to explore here fictional treatments of translation that place the translator
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centre stage, and show translation in the personal and emotive aspects which theory
inevitably plays down.2 In the works chosen for analysis, ‘‘translation’’ is not a
linguistic process, but a thematic issue: emphasis is given to translation as a form of
communication (specifically a dialogue) between two entities: individuals, texts and
cultures. In these texts, ‘‘translation’’ is a symbolic trope, evoking the concept of
a crossing of borders, an interaction between seemingly separate and disjunctive
cultural and linguistic entities. Translation is thus not just a specific theme, but is
integral to the plot as a whole, and comes to stand for the act of communication
between Self and Other, where the Other is evident in a number of different
contexts. All of these narratives emphasise the alterity implicit in the concept of
translation.

Translator or Fabulator?
Translation, both metaphorical and literal, and the manner in which it has been both
a literary and epistemological practice is a recurrent motif in the stories by
Argentinian author (and translator) Jorge Luı́s Borges. Many of Borges’ fictions
include actual or imagined translations, and some of his most important characters
are translators. One of his best known short stories, ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote’’ (1939), has frequently been read as an allegory of translation. George
Steiner cites this short story as ‘‘the most acute, most concentrated commentary
anyone has offered on the business of translation’’ (70). The character Pierre Menard
is a respected Symbolist poet, but also a translator, and the narrator insists that
Menard’s masterpiece ! his ‘‘invisible work’’ ! adds unsuspected layers of meaning to
Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Steiner points out that Menard’s ‘‘first approach to the task
of total translation or transubstantiation, was one of utter mimesis’’ (71). But is the
translator’s task really only one of repetition: to produce a text verbally identical to
the original? Steiner likens the realisation of such a task to passing into a ‘‘state of
mirrors’’ in which the translator lives on in the author, his ‘‘precedent shadow’’ (73).
For Borges, the chronological precedence of a source text with respect to a
translation does not guarantee its literary primacy, indeed when talking about
Henley’s translation of Beckford’s Vathek he goes so far as to say that ‘‘the original is
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 383

unfaithful to the translation’’ (Other Inquisitions 139). This apparently paradoxical

assertion, is not simply Borges’ way of redressing the balance of things in favour of
the translator: it is a reference to his firm conviction that translation provides a visible
image of the otherwise invisible process of interpretive drift, or what Walter Benjamin
calls the ‘‘Fortleben’’ (living on/after life) of a text:

For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of
world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their
translation marks their stage of continued life.3 (71)

Borges’ bold habits as translator and his views on translation had a decisive impact on
his creative process.4 In the story ‘‘La busca de Averroës’’ (‘‘Averroës’ Search’’), Borges’
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fictional translator alludes to the ‘‘Fortleben’’ effect in his long commentary on a verse
by the pre-Islamic Arab poet, Zuhayr ibn Abi (520!609):

At the time it was composed by him in Arabia, Zuhayr’s poetry served to bring
together two images ! that of the old camel and that of destiny; repeated today, it
serves to recall Zuhayr and to conflate our own tribulations with those of that dead
Arab. (‘‘Averroës’ Search’’ 240)

The verse in question compares destiny to a blind camel trampling men in the dust,
and Borges’ narrator concludes: ‘‘The figure had two terms; today it has four’’ (240).
The figure of doubling alerts us to the central theme of this story, which seems
composed of many disparate elements: all are united as forms of doubling, and
belong to the motif of the mirror which one encounters throughout Borges’ fiction,
and which is a recurring motif in all of the fictions using translators as protagonists,
as discussed in this paper. Translation thus produces a mirroring effect, a phantom
other, explicitly revealed in this story when the distinction between intertextual and
extratextual voice breaks down, that is, when the voice of the (external) author
replaces that of the (internal) narrator:

I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was
writing it and that, in order to write that story I had had to be that man and, in
order to be that man, I had had to write that story, and so on ad infinitum .
(‘‘Averroës’ Search’’ 241)

Averroës the translator is, then, another image of Borges the author, who is an image
of Borges the translator, and so on en abyme.
The theme of visibility reinforces the ambiguous role of the translator and is the
dominant motif in the metaphors used to represent the process of translation: from
Borges’ mirroring of author and translator to the acknowledgment by translation
scholar Maria Tymoczko of the effectiveness, as well as the ambivalence, of the mirror
as a metaphor for the relationship between writing and translation (‘‘Post-colonial
Writing’’).
 384 R. Wilson

Seductive Specularities
Indeed, Tymoczko’s ‘‘house of mirrors in which the reader and writer alike risk being
lost in the tangle, confusion and redundancy of reflections’’ (‘‘Post-colonial Writing’’
19) is a key figure in Francesca Duranti’s novels. Duranti, one of the few Italian
women writers to have been extensively translated into other languages, has herself
translated novels from French, German and English. The mirroring effect is most
evident in the 1984 novel, La casa sul lago della luna (The House on Moon Lake 1988)
in which a (fictional) Italian translator translates a novel entitled ‘‘Das Haus am
Mondsee’’ (‘‘The House on Moon Lake’’) by a (fictional) Austrian author. The
protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone, works as a literary translator while aspiring to be a
‘‘Germanist’’. He accidentally comes across a reference to a virtually unknown
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Viennese writer, Fritz Oberhofer, and decides that he can achieve the literary status he
desires by tracking down and translating Oberhofer’s obscure masterpiece. With
considerable difficulty, Fabrizio tracks down the last surviving copy of the novel and
translates it surprisingly easily:

Fritz Oberhofer came back to life with each new sentence [. . .] The German flowed
smoothly and naturally, settling into melodious parallel Italian. (House on Moon
Lake 77)

Fritz Oberhofer rinasceva frase dopo frase [. . .] La lingua tedesca si rovesciava con
naturalezza per fluire e assestarsi in un italiano parallelo e armonico. (La casa sul
lago 83)

Fabrizio’s translation so impresses his publisher that he is asked to write the

biography of the Austrian writer. Thus, in a reversal of traditional roles, the Fictional
Translator becomes the Fictional Author and acquires the higher social status
accorded to successful authors. In an enactment of Benjamin’s ‘‘Fortleben’’, Fritz
seems actively to assist Fabrizio ‘‘in his impassioned task of bringing him back to life’’
(House on Moon Lake 105), and the biography (like the translation) proceeds
effortlessly; indeed Fabrizio lets ‘‘himself be permeated and possessed by the Other’’
to the point where it seems that Fritz is ‘‘telling his own story’’ (105). All is well until
Fabrizio attempts to trace the events which relate to the last three years of Fritz’s life,
during which time the masterpiece was written, and is confronted by a blank wall.
Not wanting to admit defeat, he decides that ‘‘the only way to resolve the problem
was to invent everything’’ (110); this includes fabricating the woman who was Fritz’s
last great love and who inspired him to write ‘‘Das Haus am Mondsee’’. Fabrizio
‘‘naturally’’ chooses the name ‘‘Maria’’ (119) for his unattainable ideal of femininity.
The creation of Maria is achieved by an amalgamation of stereotypical female
characteristics drawn, with considerable irony, from the botanical domain, with
strong literary associations from the Petrarchan Laurus nobilus and the superlative
Angelica archangelica in the manner of Ariosto, to the Ovidian Narcissus poeticus
(119!20). Maria is created to establish the perfect, closed circle in which Fabrizio was
creator and worshiper, Maria creature and goddess (123). The Ovidian story of
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 385

Narcissus and Echo is explicitly alluded to in the reference to the Narcissus Poeticus
and more obliquely in the notion of the perfect closed circle which depicts the
absence of boundaries in the union between Fabrizio and Maria, indicating a failure
to distinguish between self and other.
In this novel, Duranti dramatises the consequences of thwarted desire, the
problem of identity, the double and mirror image, the interplay between self and
other. The boundary between imagination and reality becomes blurred both for
Fabrizio and the reader of La casa sul lago della luna. Fabrizio’s delirium5 begins ‘‘at
the point where translation becomes interpretation’’ (Wood 353, emphasis added).
In other words, when he ceases the activity of transferring meaning from one
language to another and indulges in what Kristeva would call a narcissistic
appropriation of the imaginary.6 The perfect circle, which had been formed by
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Fabrizio’s creation of his ideal woman ! the beloved who existed only in the pages
of his text ! is ruptured as she acquires an independent, separate identity: readers
of Fabrizio’s translation of Oberhofer write letters describing their memories of
Maria, some photographs even begin to appear. As Maria ‘‘comes to life’’, Fabrizio’s
identity begins to fade: indeed, he takes on that shadowy existence that translation
theorists like Venuti have defined as being the traditional role of the translator.7
The reflection of Maria in the figure of Petra Ebner, her supposed granddaughter,
completes the effect of a narrative hall of mirrors. Petra produces letters ostensibly
written by Fritz to Maria, writing confirms the reality of existence, and a
tautological interdependence of life and art is established:

The woman who had never existed had finished off the dead writer; now the
current extensions of both were in that house, face to face, two tentacles reaching all
the way into the present. (House on Moon Lake 175)

La donna che non era mai esistita aveva sistemato lo scrittore morto: nella casa
rimanevano faccia a faccia le due propaggini dell’una e dell’altro, i due tentacoli
protesi nel presente. (La casa sul lago 182)

As Fabrizio becomes ensnared in a sexual relationship with Petra which quite

literally drains the life out of him, Duranti draws freely on the gothic tradition in
literature as well as on the metaphor of translation as vampirisation. The novel is
inspired by the traditional ambiguity between the glorification and the damnation
of a literary vocation. The key to Fabrizio’s role is to be found when he compares
himself to an alchemist (179!80): Fabrizio, even if only as an interlocutor, still
manifests the illusion of controlling both the world of the living and that of ghosts,
of being a demiurge (that is, of having creative power) and not an ‘‘impotent
spectator’’ (182). Fabrizio-as-alchemist attempts to ascertain the means of the
discovery of the self through language and writing, and if in the end he fails, it is
because, as translation theorist Sherry Simon declares, there is ‘‘no escape from the
violence involved [. . .] in any attempt to use language to master the disorder of
what lies beyond language’’ (29).
 386 R. Wilson

Love in Translation
On one level at least, translation is all about seduction and attraction: the translator is
drawn to the language and attracted to the text. In love with words and the intricate
new worlds they create, she is seduced by the foreign language and this brings her
pleasure. This is the theme that emerges in John Crowley’s 2002 novel, The Translator,
in which, through the story of a troubled college student, Kit Malone, drawn to her
professor, Innokenti Isayevich Falin, an exiled Russian poet, he explores the
transformative beauty and power of words. The student learns to use poetry to
heal her wounds, and together they begin to translate the professor’s Russian poems
into English. In contemplating her translation of the poet’s work, the young woman
comes to understand the restorative power of words and the connection between love
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and language:

She thought, long after, that she had not then ever explored a lover’s body, learned
its folds and articulations, muscle under skin, bone under muscle, but that this was
really most like that: this slow probing and working in his language, taking it in or
taking hold of it; his words, his life, in her heart, in her mouth too. (183)

Falin, too, seems to be well aware of the association between love and language. When
Kit asks the exiled Russian poet why he should have to choose between writing in
English or writing in his native tongue, his reply is: ‘‘I don’t know. It may be that
languages are like lovers. You can have more than one at a time. But perhaps it is
possible to love only one at a time’’ (58). For Kit, the translation process itself is
steeped in yearning and aspiration; as Falin recites one of his poems to her, she longs
to understand, though she is able to recognise only a few words of Russian: ‘‘She bent
her soul toward his voice as though she might be able to translate what he said by will
alone, or by desire’’ (164). Translation in effect becomes an intimate absorption of the
author’s psyche into that of the translator.
Throughout both La casa sul lago della luna and The Translator, translation
functions as a metaphor or allegory for love. Duranti depicts this in a metafiction
based on a vampiristic seductive game of power. For Crowley, the process of
translation is a kind of lovemaking: each character is unsure of the other’s language;
only the tenderest solicitude can carry their meanings back and forth between them
to create something new and wondrous. In keeping with the theme of specularity
underlying this corpus of texts, the metaphor is reversible: love is also a metaphor for
translation. The reverse metaphor is often deployed in diasporic stories such as
Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Amour bilingue (1983, Love in Two Languages) and a second
book entitled The Translator (1999) by Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela. Aboulela’s
protagonist, Sammar, a young Sudanese widow and devout Muslim, works as an
Arabic translator at the University of Aberdeen. Her translation work provides her
both with an anonymous refuge, hiding identity, and a tool enabling the visibility of
the foreigner (the Other). Sammar lives a grey existence, longing for the colours of
her country, for warm temperatures and starry nights until she falls in love with Rae,
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 387

an agnostic Scottish academic. Aboulela’s characterisation of her translator suggests a

conceptualisation of the process of translation as one that, in order to be successful,
erases difference.8 As a plot device, the profession of translator is the formal
connection between the two protagonists of a love story who are united at the end
through mutual compromises and negotiations that transform each of them and
reconcile their cultural and religious differences: Rae abandons what appears to
Sammar as the incongruous secular humanist stance of defending Islam without
being a Muslim himself, and Sammar learns to rise above her egocentric demand for
his conversion so that they could be married, and to desire Rae’s ‘‘spiritual salvation’’
for his own sake, not hers. On this level the novel is, therefore, about the possibilities
and limits of translation as an avenue to cultural communication. On a deeper level,
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the translational aspects of the novel coalesce around the distinction between human
forms of translation (linguistic transfer, cultural mediation, and so on) and divine
translation (conversion). The Translator posits conversion as the ultimate, albeit
unattainable, goal of cultural translation, which may transmit ‘‘necessary’’ knowledge
(through human forms of translation) but not faith. Despite the emphasis on the
limits of translatability, The Translator does succeed in opening up a space of
‘‘transculturation’’ through the process of mutual transformation undergone by the
two main characters.
A more positive representation of the ‘‘third space’’ of translation as the point of
contact between the Self and the Other is provided by Khatibi’s Amour bilingue.
Khatibi’s text presents similar mirroring techniques as those in the metafictions by
Borges and Duranti. While for Aboulela’s translator loving the Other becomes
possible only in the erasure of (religious) difference, the narrator in Khatibi’s novel
sees the relationship between himself and his beloved as a process of ‘‘Translating the
Other’’, achievable through a program of constructing a ‘‘bilangue’’ (effectively an
‘‘interlanguage’’ whose frame of reference is not only her French culture but also his
Maghrebine culture). Khatibi allegorises the product of this ‘‘translation’’ as the
couple’s child, ‘‘as if your past had married mine and given birth to a child our love’’
(Love in Two Languages 18) ! ‘‘comme si ton passé avait épousé le mien, accouchant
d’un enfant notre amour’’ (Amour bilingue 24). This metaphor is analogous to
Borges’ anecdote concerning the camel: two terms have reproduced themselves and
now become four. Meaning is a child of the lover/reader and his beloved text.
Something which will exist but is as yet unknown, the language of the future,
transformed through a continual process of translation until it is able to convey their
(joint) experience.

Lost and Found in Translation

A more traditional portrayal of fictional translators, found in much diaspora fiction,
is that of wanderers between languages, countries and cultures, who adopt their
professional role as mediator as a consequence of their departure from their native
country. This is evident in the third novel bearing the title The Translator by
 388 R. Wilson

American writer Ward Just. The subject of this novel is the predicament ! ultimately
the tragedy ! of Sydney (anglicised from Siegried) Van Damm, a literary translator
suspended in the in-between world of expatriates living in Paris. Sydney’s flaw is an
inability to achieve perfect translation, or to ‘‘move a thing from one condition to
another’’ ! be it a literary text into his exceptional but ultimately non-native English,
or his relationships from dependency or distance to their more comfortable
opposites. Above all, he cannot translate himself from German to French, from
‘‘past imperfect’’ to ‘‘present progressive’’, from the contemplative to the active mode:
‘‘as a German who had lived among French for twenty years, the Vaterland sovereign
but invisible, la patrie in front of his eyes but immaterial’’ (65).
Just portrays a figure whose ability to express himself has been lost in the demands
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and mechanics of his work as translator. In an almost exact duplication of Fabrizio’s

experience, Sydney’s

days were devoted to rendering the words of others. He rarely thought about
making himself intelligent or even clear. That wasn’t the point. No one cared what
he thought. Why should they. He didn’t. He was as imprecise with himself as he was
exact with his manuscript , Joseph Kaus for example. When he was translating Kaus’s
novels he cared about Kaus and in a certain sense became Kaus. (65, emphasis
added)

The theme of lack/erasure of identity is also addressed once more: in an instance of

mistaken identity, Van Damm is shot by the police. The incident, a potential political
scandal, can be brushed under the carpet, because no state would claim responsibility
for the victim:

Sydney had no one to stand up for him. If he had been an American citizen, there
would have been an official inquiry. If he were French, the grapevine might produce
a cause célebre. Perhaps if he had lived in Germany and possessed a close circle of
concerned friends, there would be suspicions and unwholesome rumours that
would have to be dealt with. But he was an expatriate. He lived among foreigners.
No one owed him anything. (311)

The translator can be easily forgotten, because the failure to transculture himself
means that he doesn’t belong to any one of the countries and cultures between which
he is caught. The novel underscores how the translator’s lack of (national) identity,
coupled with a lack of a sense of self, leads almost inevitably to identification with the
author being translated.
Apart from providing another example of a translator figure who becomes a
metaphor of a sense of not belonging, Just’s novel also introduces a further motif
which is often associated with fictional translators and which Jon Thiem defines as
the intentional abuse of the translator’s position for ‘‘personal or ideological ends’’
(213). Again, the literary text takes up an element for its characterisation and plot
that has been much discussed in contemporary translation studies, namely, the
potential of the translator to distort and manipulate reality (Tymoczko ‘‘Ideology and
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 389

the Position of the Translator’’; Baker). As Delabastita and Grutman point out, the
central position occupied by translators in any multilingual communication confers a
great deal of power on them. The translator’s potential to ‘‘make a difference’’ seems
to attract writers of fiction to the translator figure, perhaps not least because, as well
as having ‘‘momentous, perhaps even heroic, and therefore potentially tragic
dimensions’’ (22), it provides ample material for both suspense and humour. An
engaging example of the latter is provided by the novel Corazón tan blanco (1991)
(A Heart so White 1995) by bestselling Spanish author and notable translator Javier
Marı́as, in which the narrator, a conference interpreter, expresses his bewilderment
that representatives of his profession are apparently trusted implicitly:

It’s odd because, in fact, no one can be sure that what the translator translated from
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his isolated cabin is correct or true, and I need hardly say that, on many occasions,
it’s neither one nor the other due to ignorance, laziness, distraction or malice on the
part of the interpreter doing the interpreting, or a bad hangover. (Heart so White 5)

This comment undermines any notion of the translator as mediator at the heart of
successful intercultural communication. The sceptical view of the translator’s
integrity is further emphasised by the episode in which the reader is told the story
of how he and his wife met. They were both interpreters for international diplomats,
and she was assigned to oversee his interpretation of a meeting between a ‘‘high-
ranking [male] Spanish politician’’ and an equally high-ranking British ‘‘lady
politician’’ (54!67). Only banalities are exchanged, so the bored interpreter starts
to invent questions and answers and inadvertently provokes both politicians into
admitting to their dictatorial aspirations. Ironically the interpreter’s manipulative
translation seems to uncover a truth of potentially significant political consequence.
Yet, in a blatant show of self-interest, he conspires with his co-interpreter to keep the
truth hidden to protect his breach of the code of professional conduct. While Marı́as
plays up the role of translator as arch-manipulator, his character is also portrayed as
an ‘‘obsessive listener’’ occupied in a relentless search for meaning and wholly
dedicated to understanding the act of communication. In effect, the translator is a
kind of double agent whose actions multiply the truthfulness of the message, thereby
creating new potential paths for meaning and opening new avenues for commu-
nication. In other words, the ‘‘third space’’ of translation and the ‘‘in-betweenness’’ of
the translator open up possibilities for bringing ambiguity to the production of
meaning and challenging cultural hegemony.

‘‘Only Connect’’
If successful communication equates to passing to the side of the Other, translation is
the process of making connections, of forging a passage between two domains, as an
act of invention brought about by combining and mixing varied elements or simply
as establishing communication. It is this concept of translation, derived from
information theory, that dominates Michel Serres’ early work.9 Serres studies patterns
 390 R. Wilson

of communication as equal mixtures of ‘‘signal and noise’’, or interference produced

in the course of transmission and concludes that in order for there to be any kind of
relationship between sender and receiver, some form of noise or interference, that is,
an injection of difference, is required. Recognising that in the contemporary world
knowledge is assembled from an infinite number of fragments, Serres argues that to
seek knowledge is to embark on the task of journeying between these fragments, and
in the course of so doing to weave connections between them. Serres is concerned
with the connections, the translations that occur as part of the distribution of
knowledge. He advances a view of wisdom as that which is garnered by occupying the
middle position, right in the midst of the confluences and mediations. We should
seek our instruction neither from science alone, nor the sacred, nor any singular form
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of understanding, but should rather seek to occupy the spaces of transformation

which lie between ! the ‘‘third space’’. Serres gives the name ‘‘third-instructed’’ (tiers-
instruit) to the people who are able to give up the comforts of disciplinary specialism
and risk putting themselves into perpetual translation.
A narrative that gives an exemplary account of the difficulty of being a successful
‘‘third-instructed’’ person, or of controlling the ‘‘third space’’, is the short story
‘‘Simultan’’ (1972), published in English as ‘‘Word for Word’’, by Austrian-born
Ingeborg Bachmann. The protagonist, Nadja, works for the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) in Rome as a successful simultaneous interpreter, her entire
existence devoted to the mechanical reproduction of someone else’s language: ‘‘What
a strange mechanism she was, she lived without a single thought of her own,
immersed in the sentences of others, like a sleepwalker, furnishing the same but
different-sounding sentences’’ (13). For this author, the technical ability to transform
words into their equivalent in foreign languages bars the interpreter’s access to their
meaning. The result is a character who is kept outside her own language, an exile and
mere manipulator of equal but empty phrases. Nadja reflects on the difference
between her activity as an interpreter and that of a translator: the interpreter is
forever trying to keep up with the flow of things, and works ‘‘live’’; it is a reflexive
process. The translator generally works in writing and has time to reflect on the
meaning of words. She concludes that, either way, what is real constantly eludes us.
However, the opening search for the name of the Nettuno Hotel triggers a productive
crisis in this conception of language:

Boze moj! were her feet cold, but this finally seemed to be Paestum, there’s an old
hotel here, I can’t understand how the name could have slipped my, it’ll occur to
me in a second, it’s on the tip of my tongue, but she couldn’t remember it, rolled
down the window and strained to see out to the side and ahead, she was looking
for the road that should branch off to the right, credimi, to lo giuro, dico a
destra. Ah there it was, yes, the Nettuno. As he slowed down at the intersection
and turned on the headlights she spotted the sign immediately, illuminated in the
darkness among a dozen hotel signs and arrows pointing the way to bars and
beach resorts [ . . .] (1)
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 391

Not a Joycean, virtuoso weaving together of diverse idioms into a common language,
Bachmann’s text offers a fragmented, stuttering diaspora of sound in which different
national languages function as inadequate, incidental means of communication.
Bachmann’s text conceals layers of meaning persistently grouped around a sacred
core. Boze moj means ‘‘my God’’ in Russian (one of Nadja’s diplomatic languages),
Paestum is the site of a Greek temple dedicated to Poseidon, the apparently offhand
Italian phrases contain the verbs ‘‘to believe’’ (credere) as well as ‘‘to swear’’ (giurare),
‘‘Nettuno’’ is the Italian spelling for the Roman sea god. The search for an old hotel,
late at night, is also the search for its proper name, for primeval and sacred origins in
language, for the one word that ‘‘lights up’’ in the dark among a welter of arrows and
meaningless signs. Beneath Nadja’s own ‘‘dead-tired’’ indifference, Bachmann’s story
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displays a metaphysical, even mystical longing for a utopian state of being: a pure,
primal language of origins.
The examples discussed above illustrate how the figure of the translator is used to
explore themes of displacement and loss of self, of image building and manipulation.
They also serve to draw attention to the convergence between the concerns of
contemporary writers and the theoretical approaches to translation as a complex
cultural process. In particular, they reflect a revaluation of translation itself as
a central experience in the modern world. Perhaps the most obvious example of the
centrality of translation as a ‘‘life-experience’’ is that of self-translation.

Translating the Self

Whatever may induce an author to begin and complete a process of self-translation has
to do with the possibility not so much of mere repetition, but of gaining perspective, of
adding meaning. This is clearly Duranti’s intention in re-writing Sogni mancini (1997)
in English. The protagonist of Left-handed Dreams (2000) is a ‘‘nomadic intellectual’’,
born and educated in Italy, working in New York (that is, a figuration of the author).
In this novel the fictional translator is a minor character: Jerry is presented
as inhabiting some twilight time in which day and night (or reality and dream) are
indistinguishable. He thinks ‘‘in a supranational language without words’’ and lives
‘‘encased in his armour of habits in which each element forever folds back into itself ’’
(64): an embodiment of the principle of infinite regression à la Borges. Jerry is entirely
self-sufficient in his ‘‘third space’’: his ability to manipulate words provides him with a
means to keep ‘‘a grip on things’’ (114). Jerry’s character validates the notion that
language is the basic building block of reality: words give us our sense of ‘‘I’’, words are
the tools with which we relate, narrate, tell stories, create memories, forge models of
identity. This is a rare example in fiction of the translator referred to by theory as the
embodiment of the transcultured self; of translation as a process of transculturation
and thus of enabling successful intercultural communication.
Is this positive figuration only possible when an author translates herself or
himself? A reading of Nicole Brossard’s novel, Le Désert mauve (1987) (Mauve Desert
1990) would appear to confirm that this is so. The novel is an almost unique instance
 392 R. Wilson

of self-translation en abyme. The book is divided into three parts, the first being
Laure Angestelle’s novel, Le Désert mauve, and the third Maude Laures’ translation of
the same, entitled Mauve l’horizon. The middle section is a kind of translator’s
notebook, in which Laure records notations on characters, settings, concepts and her
interview with the author. If in Duranti’s La casa sul lago della luna the reader is
confused by the mixing up of (fictional) author and (fictional) translator and the
resultant specular identities Duranti ascribes to her character, in Le Désert mauve, the
levels of communication are even more difficult to disentangle as the (fictional)
author becomes the (fictional) translator who becomes a (fictional) author who is the
first author’s mirror image. Like Borges, Brossard carries out an intra-lingual
translation. Unlike Borges, she is not concerned so much with providing a picture of
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the process of interpretive drift, as with attempting to photograph the translation

process itself:

For me, it meant translating myself from French to French. It’s the same story,
written with different words and sometimes written with mistakes because she
makes mistakes, as any translator does, by over-investing some passages, or going
too fast on some others, as we all do when we read and something speaks to us,
more intensely. This book is all about my fascination for translation [. . .]
In Mauve Desert , the fictional translator (me the author) makes mistakes so
that I can allow myself to make slight changes. When I wrote the first part, I was the
writer, but really when I did the third part I felt like a translator [ . . .] I felt like I was
working, not creating and even though I was creating, it felt like labor. I was saying
to myself, you’ve got to go on. If you quit, I’ll never talk to you anymore. I really
had to motivate myself because in the creation you provide all the excitement, but
in the fictional translation, I had to take a different posture. (Brossard quoted in
Durand)

Paradoxically, we are blinded to what is happening in most translations by the fact

that they take place almost exclusively between two languages. Linguistic difference
per se occupies our total attention, obscuring the fusion of horizons that occurs in
the translated text.
The middle section of Le Désert mauve presents us with various stages of the
translator’s quest for identification with the author. As in Benjamin’s view, translation
here functions as a complement to the original, rather than as its duplicate or
substitution. When ‘‘author’’ and ‘‘translator’’ come together for an interview, they
share a community of silence (which could be seen to correspond to the
‘‘supranational language without words’’ of Duranti’s fictional translator): ‘‘each
one here is looking to understand how death transits between fiction and reality’’
(Mauve Desert 131).

Conclusion
The fictional characters described above are united by what is missing from their
lives; all of them are inhabited and controlled by a language that is not their own.
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 393

All are users of words, ostensibly for the purposes of others, but in some way creating
an identity through the story they tell. The difficulty, but also the strength, of these
stories is thus the discrepancy between the ‘‘surface noise’’ of seemingly trivial,
incidental, subjective details and a deeper but by no means completed or successful
search for a more authentic language of experience.
The novels and stories I have used have several things in common. First, they
represent a discursive vehicle for highlighting the presence rather than the absence of
the translator: or, to put it another way, fictional translators could be seen as
embodiments of the ‘‘visible translator’’ theorised by Venuti. Second, unlike theorists
who view translators as incarnations of the theory of the successfully transcultured
self that is able to straddle the divide between linguistic and cultural boundaries and
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does so without any bias (Delisle and Woodward xiii), contemporary authors
associate the translator’s presence with a mental state of angst; a state ascribed to
the instability of the translator’s position between languages (in contrast to the
theoretical ideal of the translator as a self-confident and unbiased bridge builder
between cultures). Third, most authors construct a mise en abyme which makes their
translator figures function as images of themselves. This strategy suggests that
translation and writing are allied phenomena of re-inscription of the self. It is perhaps
no accident that all my fictional translators inhabit postmodern texts: as is most
evident in Brossard’s text, the author ‘‘dies’’, and finds her ‘‘Fortleben’’ in the
translator: Angestelle’s10 first name, ‘‘Laure’’, lives on in Maude’s last name.
Since the late 1970s, at the start of what was later called the ‘‘cultural turn’’
(Bassnett and Lefevere) in translation studies, there has been an increased awareness
that ‘‘translation [. . .] as a device in fictional texts does more than just draw the
reader’s attention to their texture and techniques [. . .] Crucially, it also provides a
comment about our socio-cultural values and the state of the world we live in’’
(Delabastita and Grutman 14). Translation has become an integral part in the
creation, embodiment, and voicing of meaning and identity. Contemporary literature
is interested in questions of identity, in characters whose fragmented identities are a
reflection of a fragmented modern world, in which displacement is a widespread
phenomenon. It seems that many contemporary writers of fiction view the translator
as the ideal figure to represent this displacement, and the ideal instrument through
which the literary text itself can translate the workings of the complex cultural process
of translation.

Notes
[1] My translation of: ‘‘Il problema del tradurre è in realtà il problema stesso dello scrivere e il
traduttore ne sta al centro, forse ancor più dell’autore. [. . .] Il traduttore è l’ultimo, vero
cavaliere errante della letteratura’’ (Fruttero and Lucentini 60).
[2] In a recent essay, Carol Maier argues that by ‘‘probing the often unsettling effect of
translation on translators, fiction writers might offer a contribution to translation theory
that has been overlooked in translation studies’’ (163).
 394 R. Wilson

[3] In this passage from Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, ‘‘The Task of the Translator’’,
‘‘Fortleben’’ points to an unbroken continuum in time where original and translation live
forever intertwined, a situation which, Benjamin adds, ‘‘should be regarded with an entirely
unmetaphorical objectivity’’ (71).
[4] See Kristal Invisible Work. Borges and Translation.
[5] Indeed, Fabrizio embodies the notion of the ‘‘discourse of delirium’’: ‘‘Delirium is a
discourse which has supposedly strayed from a presumed reality. The speaking subject is
presumed to have known an object, a relationship, an experience that he is henceforth
incapable of reconstituting accurately. Why? Because the knowing subject is also a desiring
subject, and the paths of desire snarl up the paths of knowledge [ . . .]. This dynamic of
delirium recalls the constitution of the dream or the phantasm’’ (Kristeva ‘‘Psychoanalysis
and the Polis’’ 307).
[6] ‘‘instead of having to create what will enable him to equal his ideal ! a work, or an idealized
object to love ! Narcissus will fabricate an ersatz’’ (Tales of Love 126).
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[7] Venuti argues that when Anglo-European culture promoted fluency ! the removal of all
traces of ‘‘foreignness’’ ! as the highest value to which a translation could aspire in the
nineteenth century, a necessary requirement for the production of such a ‘‘domesticated’’
text was for the translator to be ‘‘invisible’’ (see Translator’s Invisibility 61 and passim ).
[8] Venuti deals extensively with this topic in The Scandals of Translation (programmatically
subtitled Towards an Ethics of Difference ). He argues that the search for transparency, for the
‘‘fluent’’ text, expresses itself through strategies of familiarisation/domestication implying
processes of elision and of forced transformation that erase difference by imposing dominant
ideologies.
[9] Notably the five books which make up the Hermes series (see in particular Serres Hermès I ,
Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, and The Troubadour of Knowledge ).
[10] Laure Angestelle portrays a character caught between cultures, at a place Brossard alludes to
as the Angststelle or ‘‘place of anxiety’’.

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