Susan Bassnett is a leading representative of the translators are great school of thought, a school which holds that translators are as good – oh, hell, why not come out and say it – actually better than original (or rather, “original”) writers. I wouldn’t deny that translation is a creative activity – not after working on a production line anyway – but here she is arguing her point a little too hard in the essay “When is a translation not a translation?”:

When we read Thomas Mann or Homer, if we have no German or Ancient Greek, what we are reading is the original through translation, i.e. that translation is our original.

“Through” is a red herring here. We read Mann etc. in translation (or in the “”original,”” of course). She doesn’t quite go so far as to say translation = original, qualifying “original” with the word “our,” but she comes close.

So much for prepositions and possessive adjectives; there’s also fun to be had with tenses. Suggestions that translators shove themselves (nb: she doesn’t use the word “shove”) into the translation (make themselves visible) are not so radical, she says. It’s only “… what translators have been doing for centuries.” I’ll leave more attentive students of translation history to decide if that should read “what translators did for centuries” and whether we want to return to the translation practices of the middle ages.

Bassnett also cites Borges, a hardy perennial in Translation Studies. In his short story “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote,” she writes, Menard decides that in order to rewrite an identical version of Don Quixote he will live his life exactly as Cervantes did. “Not true! Menard rejects this method!” is written in the margin of my copy of Bassnett’s book. I checked. The anonymous comment writer is correct. Menard discards this method as it is “too easy.” Bassnett refers to the 1964 Penguin edition of Borges Labyrinths, giving the page reference as 62-72. A rookie’s mistake: page 72 is the page on which the following short story begins. The correct page reference, then, is 62-71.

Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere Constructing Cultures