Response Paper on Translation and The Trials of the Foreign by Anton Berman

In his article, Translation and The Trials of the Foreign, Antoine Berman is mainly concerned with what he calls “textual deformation” embedded in the nature of translation that results in prevention of the reader from experiencing the foreign, in other words “trial of the foreign”. His departure point for this analytic of translation is mainly the domain of literary prose, the novel and the essay. However, he sets out from a somewhat negative point of view as regards to prose, stating that it had been traditional to deem prose writing “shapeless” in the sense that it “mobilizes and activates the totality of languages that coexist in any language”, thus creating a huge linguistic mass, which leaves the author helpless to control its texture. Though he likens masterworks of prose to examples of “bad writing”, he thinks they are rich in texture due to their polylingual value.

Berman sets out to determine several deforming tendencies in terms of translation of literary works, which are too many to cover in this response paper, so I will refer to four of them, which I think are intermingled with one another. The first tendency that Berman focuses is rationalization, which he explains as “recomposing sentences and the sequence of sentences, rearranging them according to a certain idea of discursive order.” While Berman thinks that rationalization deforms the original and reverses its basic tendency and thus attributes a negative value to the act, Anton Popovic prefers to call such changes in semantic properties of the text as “shifts of expression”. For Popovic the translator resorts or has to resort to making shifts to preserve the norm of the “original” but the result does not always have to be the destruction of the strata, the depths and the polylogism of the text as Berman suggests. As Popovic maintains incorporation of the linguistic impression of the original cannot be accomplished directly but via appropriate shifts.

Another tendency that Berman postulates is clarification which basically involves explicitation, which he either relates to the literary language of the target culture or to the goal of rendering clear what the author wishes to keep ambiguous in the original. Berman connects this tendency to another one; expansion that he thinks stems from rationalization and clarification processes. He uses the term overtranslation and makes a generalization that every translation tends to be longer than the original. For Berman, expansion stretches and impedes with the rhythm of the text.

Ennoblement, as Berman puts it, is another tendency which is a type of “rewriting” , a “stylistic exercise” at the expense of the original. He draws attention to how this procedure of making texts “readable” so as to enhance the meaning is very common in the literary field. I inevitably find this tendency relevant to Andre Lefevere’s notion of rewriting which feeds mainly from the disciplines such as translation, historiography, anthologization, criticism and editing. As Lefevere puts it, the non-professional reader reads literature as written by its rewriters and it has always been that way. Berman calls this act of rewriting as “banalizing” in order to assign those texts a predominant place.

In my opinion, while the presence of the source-text’s linguistic and semantic values in his comparative approach puts Berman in a source-oriented realm, his insistence on the translator’s role in rendering the true meaning as well as preserving the foreignness of the text shows that he actually seeks to emphasize the source-culture elements inherent in the text and to let the reader have a taste of the foreign.