LAUSR

The modern praxis of translation, which draws upon sub-disciplines from etymology to ethics, exists on a continuum between science and art. When it comes to literature, it is more art—and fraught with difficulties that, when the gap between two cultures is wide, pile up at a dizzying rate. Translating literature takes quite a lot of time, a view of the process that is at the same time broad and nitpickingly narrow, and an artist’s grasp of the language into which the text is being translated. If these conditions are met, however, there are approaches that allow for what we might call “good” translation—and room for artistic liberty. The translation of literature, while dating back to the Old Babylonian translation of the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh, was first propounded as a discipline in its own right by Holmes. It belongs to the interdiscipline of translation studies, drawing on topics from etymology to ethics, and while it recognizes different approaches to translation, it is nonetheless based on equivalence theory, which is applied as a measure of success of the approach in question to the text and its context. The fact is that different approaches take what is meant by “equivalence” slightly differently, whether they incorporate historical or cultural relativism, questions of localization, skopos theory, or the wrinkle of “directional equivalence,” which acknowledges the limitations of translation in producing equivalence in that back-translation does not necessarily reproduce the source text. Even-Zohar’s theory of polysystems describes literature as an open system into and out of which texts, including translated literature, flow. Within the polysystem, its position is either primary (i.e., it is avant-garde in some way) or secondary, fitting into the polysystem’s cultural consensus as to what literature ought to look like, or its “norms,” as Levý first put it. Translated literature, if it fills a gap or niche in the primary position, always has a foreign feel to it, whether exotic, fresh, or surprising, while that in the secondary position merely fits in: a difference between what MartínezSierra calls “foreignization” and “familiarization.” Yet, as Toury points out, translated literature is never wholly foreign or wholly familiar; rather, its position within the polysystem—indeed, whether it is even recognized as translated, a possibility that is portrayed to humorous effect in Shimizu’s satirical novel Sunō Kantorī—rests with how it is regarded by the reading public. Position, then, is a cultural construct based on Levý’s norms. As such, we need to take a step back from position when it comes to