Every group needs a cheerleader. And it would have been no surprise if Susan Bassnett, during her lecture to a group of literary translators at the LCB last night, had whisked out a pair of pom-poms and whirled them in front of the noses of her enthralled audience members. She seemed able to do the can-can, high five, the splits or whatever was required. When asked why I hadn’t asked her any questions at the end, I realized later that I had just wanted her to carry on talking, sounding out her sometimes poetic, sometimes political notions of what a translator’s task could be. She made everything seem possible, she made translation theory seem like fun. And her questions were so good that she pre-empted any I might have of my own:

1. Is a translation a copy of the ‘original’ when even writers are refuting there is such a thing?
2. Does a fatherless or orphan text exist?
3. Is there any creation without tradition?
4. Can tradition survive without re-invention?
5. How far can a translation diverge from its original and still be a translation?

On the first point, taking three South American writers (Argentinian Borges, and Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz), Bassnett used their comments as metaphors for the dilemma translators face. First came Borges Borges: “I do not write, I rewrite. I am a plagiarist.” Then Fuentes’ postscript to “Aura” entitled “This is how I wrote Aura”, which is full of ‘echoes’, or lists of how people, films and other books gave him the ideas for his novel. This set the whole provocative tone of the evening. (It was implied that the answer to one and two was ‘No’.)

To illustrate question three, the first metaphor popped up: that of a tree ‘re-greening its leaves’. This referred to tradition renewing itself in both space and time, much as post-colonial, postmodernist Latin American writers like Borges and Fuentes have done, to embody an ideological shift that can only be interpreted in relation to tradition but makes a break with it. (Questions 3 and 4, “Mais non!”)

Moving onto question 5, a handy quote was inserted: “A literal translation obscures the sense in the same way that the thriving weeds smother the seeds.” (Lefevere, 1992: 48-49.) By this point, there was a distinct sound of translators in the audience salivating.

Rather than directly answering this set of questions – we were too busy watching her can-canning to notice she hadn’t really answered ­– Bassnett then took us through an entertaining gallop through attitudes towards translators (once seen as ‘betrayers’) to notions of what a translation can be (an ‘after-life’ of a text, according to Walter Benjamin). Translations, clearly, have to be recasts of the ‘original’ of the text for another audience and the preoccupation of translators should be how to reinvent cultural and linguistic signs so that the audience may understand the writer’s intentions. (Much snorting here and saying how if we understood each other, there would be no divorce!)

Nevertheless, this was a crucial point: different languages reflect different experiences and so there simply is no way a translator can convey the absoluteness of the original: the translator has to “piece together a vessel” much like an archaeologist (Walter Benjamin) or

“ (…) unlike a literary work, a translation does not find itself,

so to speak, in middle of the high forest of the language itself;

instead, from outside it, facing it, and without entering it, the

translation calls to the original within, at that one point where the

echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the

foreign language’s work. Its intention is not only directed toward

an object entirely different from that of the poetic work, namely

toward a language as a whole, starting out from a single work of

art, but is also different in itself : the poet’s intention is

spontaneous, primary, concrete, whereas the translator’s is

derivative, final, ideal. (‘The Translator’s Task’, Walter Benjamin)

So whether gardening is your field (trees, seeds, weeds) or pottery, or forestry, a literary translator’s job entails getting down on your knees, getting your hands dirty and recasting language and cultural semiotics for a new audience. (The theoretical term ‘equivalence’ is one that Bassnett explicitly said she felt uncomfortable with.)

An interesting anecdote came up with Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz’s text, “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”: apparently, the authors find no or very few similarities between 19 different versions of a poem by Wang Wei (Rick Gekoski should perhaps have read this before his ill-advised recent article in the Guardian about Booker Prize candidates in translation). Translators will inevitably impose different readings on the same texts. This seems less important the further away in time we are from the original text: the original poems by the Roman Catullus have been reduced to fragments and were it not for the efforts of some industrious scholars, he would be lost by now – translation as a means of survival. Or the recontextualization of Ancient Greek plays on the stage, in films and fiction offers a way of seeing translation as “one of the many forms in which works are rewritten” according to Bassnett – translation as a means of adding layers of interpretation.

Here, Bassnett cited two writers, Michael Longley (Ceasefire) and David Malouf (Ransom), both of whom take book 24 of The Iliad and rewrite it for different settings, Longley for the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Malouf, as a reflection on the postwar Australia he grew up in.

In her fielding of the questions that came afterwards, there was a sense of people daring to challenge this cheerleader display and check out the credentials under the can-can skirt; but ultimately, Susan Bassnett did an admirable job of answering, sending out vibes of solidarity all with remarkable good humour.

The final thought she left us with was a quotation, again from Octavio Paz, who summed up the difference between the writer and the translator thus: “The writer’s job is to fix linguistic signs in an immutable order, whilst the translator’s task is to liberate those signs in preparation for their reordering in another context.”

There was a pause as the salivating turned to brain cogs whirring. Feeling ready to liberate, I moved towards the door. And I don’t think I was alone in the crowd.