On a Universal Tendency to Debase Retranslations; or, The Instrumentalism of a Translation Fixation

Abstract Some readers prefer an earlier translation in which they encounter a source text, particularly a canonized work, over later versions of the same text. The decisive encounter is so compelling as to establish an enduring attachment that entails denigration or outright rejection of later versions. Insofar as the attachment suggests obsessiveness, it can be called a fixation. The readers’ responses share features that transcend membership in specific linguistic communities and cultural institutions: they value a high degree of readability, which is construed as an indication of greater equivalence to the source text. Here the readers reveal their assumption of an instrumental model—that is, an understanding of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect. The fixation can be illuminated by considering the intersubjective relations in which the preferred translation is first encountered. Cases recorded or represented in literary texts enable a more incisive account of the conditions that shape the reader's experience: John Keats's poem “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957). These texts disclose an identity-forming process that can be deepened with Jacques Lacan's concept of the “object a.” The instrumentalism that underpins the fixation deserves consideration because it would in effect deny or stop cultural change, innovative interpretation, the very practice of translation.