Reaching Diversity through Artistic Property?

Both Luise von-Flotow and Rosemary Arrojo highlight both the existence and the importance of plurality in translation studies. According to Flotow, this plurality provides the productivity in the field. Translator scholars began referring to more personal examples derived from their lives and their cultures. With this influx of different perspectives into the field, the scope of translation studies would eventually be expanded to cover diverse cultures, identities, and thoughts.

Arrojo focuses on the relativity of the act of reading, thus interpreting. Every reader and translator as one of these readers have the liberty to interpret the meaning in a text. However, referring a source text, or any text for that matter, as the original, like Arrojo does, gives it a divine authority meaning that it is created for the first time and no one else has ever created a text like that before and maybe never will in the future. This perspective legitimates the inferior position of the translated text in comparison to the source text. Thus the author’s struggle, defined by Arrojo, for keeping the original as it were is also legitimatized. If we adapt this kind of an idea on literary text as the original then it would be more meaningful to associate literary product with Nietzsche’s concept of “longing for property”. As this original is the property of the author she has every right to protect it from any interventions from outside. And the translator would be the “mere copyist” (Arrojo, 2002 p. 75) in this situation. I am not sure whether it is convenient to consider artistic productions as properties or rather private properties. Of course they are created by someone, either by an author or a translator, but labelling this product as a property brings a capitalistic defence mechanism to own it, to protect it, and not share it with anyone. Therefore I found Arrojo’s effort to prove and defend “the impact of the translator’s task on the shaping history and culture” (Arrojo, 2002 p. 78) incoherent. And finally a perception of the artistic productions of writers and translators as their property may result in a more static and infertile literary creativity in which no one can even be close to other’s writings/meanings as opposed to what Arrojo supports.

REFERENCES

Arrojo, Rosemary. 2002. Writing, Interpreting, and the Power Struggle for the Control of Meaning: Scenes from Kafka, Borges, and Kosztolanyi. in Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko. Translation and Power. 2002.

von-Flotow, Luise. Dis-unity and Diversity: Feminist Approaches to Translation Studies. [Online] [Cited: January 23, 2010.] aix1.uottawa.ca/~vonfloto/_articles06/Unity_in_Diversity.pdf.