I’ve been busy working my way through the JCO translation, thus the silence on the blog. The experience – a first for me – is ever more illuminating though. The book itself is no difficult material – in terms of language or syntax.
Yet, what makes translating it a difficult exercise is my own sense of alienation towards it. And I’m not talking here about what Terry Eagleton famously called “the moment of wondering self-estrangement”, specific to any literary experience. It’s more than that.
As a reader, I find myself at odds with JCO’s raw sensibility and choppy style. I don’t dig it. As a translator, I have to engage intensely with this Other and, to some extent, tame it – while sticking to its feel and register.
A continuous negotiation between her voice and mine, which seem to be so radically different. Having to mediate between these two gives me a strange feeling of satisfaction.
Oh, and for those of you interested in literary theory with a Marxist twist, the above quote is to be found in Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic.
