1“Enhancing textual awareness is one of the major roles translation can play in the nexus between genetic criticism and translation”, noted Dirk Van Hulle (2015, 43). It is precisely this “nexus” between genetic criticism and translation studies which forms the basis of Genetic Translation Studies: Conflict and Collaboration in Liminal Spaces, edited by Ariadne Nunes, Joana Moura and Marta Pacheco Pinto. Genetic criticism attempts to isolate itself from other modes of textual criticism by resisting a teleological impulse towards a final, published text. Instead, a genetic study of avant-textes focuses on the writerly process, its twists and turns, unraveling, to use a Borgesian metaphor, a text’s multiple “forking paths”, its myriad possibilities. The “independence” of the genetic process from the published text sees a parallel in translation studies where the independence of the translated text from its “original” ur-text has become a talking point. Perhaps if one sees genetic criticism as a description of the genesis of a text, then translation studies could be seen as concerned with the post-text and its future reincarnations. In an oft-quoted essay by Cordingley and Montini, the authors thus postulate that “Genetic criticism has given little attention to the post-text while at the same time much attention in recent translation studies has been directed towards establishing the independence of the translated text” (2015, 5). The significance of incorporating genetic approaches to translation studies is revisited powerfully in Genetic Translation Studies.
2Conceived initially as an international conference on Unexpected Intersections: Translation Studies and Genetic Criticism under the aegis of the University of Lisbon in 2017, the book includes fourteen essays grouped under three broad tenets: (1) genetic approaches to translation and collaboration, (2) translators’ stories and testimonies, and (3) translators at work. Expectedly, several of the essays focus on case studies of Portuguese authors but the anthology does a commendable job in mapping a wide linguistic canvas with essays on translation projects in several major European languages. These include translated texts from French to English (Esa Christine Hartmann on Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of Saint-John Perse’s poem Chronique; 1961), English to Polish (Ewa Kołodziejczyk on Czesław Miłosz’s translation of “Negro spirituals”; Miłosz 1948a, 1948b), from English to French (Patrick Hersant on Maurice Coindreau’s translations of American novels; e.g. Steinbeck 1939 and Capote 1952), French to German (Joana Moura on Peter Handke’s translation of René Char’s poems from Le nu perdu; 1984 ) and even from Sanskrit to Portuguese (Marta Pacheco Pinto and Ariadne Nunes on the Portuguese Orientalist Vasconcelos Abreu’s efforts at translating the Panchatantra).
3João Dionísio’s opening piece lays out the challenges (or, as he calls it, “latency”) of genetic translation studies in Portugal. For him, this is a result of the absence of “a self-aware interpretive community” (28). Despite these obstacles, his two main examples, a fifteenth-century treatise by King Duarte of Portugal on Latin translations and a Fernando Pessoa poem which contains transcreations of a poem by the Victorian poet Alfred Austin, both showcase how genetic studies of translations challenge any unitary understanding of authorship. Dionísio ably demonstrates how a genetic analysis of these authors separated by centuries can still reveal authorship as a complex, multifarious process, involving external agents or a “network of interacting and negotiating subjects” (39). Laura Ivaska’s meticulously researched article on a Finnish translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Fratricides (1967), which used a French translation for its “best text” is a further elaboration on this network of interacting and negotiating subjects.
4If translators are crucial “intermediaries” in introducing “foreign” texts into a literary field (to echo Pascale Casanova 2004), then perhaps one of the more intriguing case studies in the volume is of a translation that is not even complete: Marta Pacheco Pinto and Ariadne Nunes’s account of Guilherme de Vasconcelos Abreu’s Orientalist projects (1842–1907), in what would have been the first Portuguese translation of the ancient Sanskrit text of fables Panchatantra (200 B.C. ca.). Pacheco Pinto and Nunes analyze Abreu’s extant notes for the translation in two unpublished volumes and demonstrate how even an unfinished, unpublished project such as Abreu’s can shed light on the debates that informed Orientalist scholarship in its early days in Portugal. What is only tantalizingly hinted at here and therefore opens up avenues for future scholarship, are larger questions about print culture and the communications circuits that connected Portuguese Orientalists like Abreu with books published in Calcutta via the India Office in London (221).
5This question of continual mediation in translation studies becomes even more apparent as we introspect the increasing proximity of digital and computational technologies and genetic criticism. Understandably, several essays in the collection refer to ongoing and future digital humanities projects. To give one example, Elsa Pereira examines the prospects of a digital edition of Pedro Homem de Melo’s poetry. Pereira argues that because of the complexity of de Melo’s genetic dossier — a mixture of allographic translations (translations of de Melo’s poetry by translators other than the poet), self-translations and what Pereira terms “alloglottic rewriting” involving several stages of rewritings of his own poems in French — a multi-layered, para-genetic edition is the need of the hour. For a “multi-level” edition of this kind, a digital edition becomes a necessity.
6What these accounts highlight more acutely, however, is that, despite new scholarship and groundbreaking theorizations in the field, the translators’s role still lacks visibility and due recognition. Marisa Mourinha quotes Gregory Rabassa — easily one of the undisputed authorities in the field, due to his much-venerated translations of Gabriel García Márquez (1970, 1975 and 1983) — from an interview released during the central years of the Latin American Boom, arguing that “It is time for at least one definitive statement about translation: it is impossible to make a handsome living out of it” (1974–1975, 37–38; qtd. 149). As Mourinha notes, Rabassa’s statement may still ring true today, in a field that is still dominated by academics. This is why, perhaps, one of the more memorable sections of this collection consists of chapters which chart out translators’s testimonies, self-reflections and correspondence, as well as the very real physical labor of translation, as in Ivančić and Zepter’s chapter (123–34). This is also where the genetic dossier becomes a treasure trove of personal anecdotes, scholarly journeys and where textuality touches on the experiential. They highlight for us moments when, as Emily Apter would note in a slightly different context, translators decide to go on, ward off challenges — philological, socio-economic, philosophic (“the singularity of untranslatable alterity”) — and decide to translate quand même (2006, 104).