Reconstruction 11.1 (2011)
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Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe. Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey, 2009. 196 pp. Paperback. US $11.16.
<1> In The Subversive Scribe, Suzanne Jill Levine explores the intricacies and issues present at the process of translation. The author seeks to disclose to readers of Hispanic American literature the translator’s quest to decide on how to bridge similarities and differences between languages and cultures, and how certain decisions made by the translator affect the outcome of translations in unexpected ways. However, more than elaborating on a theory about the process of translation, Levine’s TSS establishes a cogent argument in favor of the re/vision of the translator as a secondary actor. The author crafts a manifesto-of-sorts that counters the figure of the translator as shadow, an agent who is completely destitute of any creative attributes.
<2> As Levine argues, in the effort to maintain or recuperate meaning translators are constantly faced with intellectual dilemmas that leave them with no choice but to exercise creativity beyond the duty of maintaining the supremacy of form and meaning found in the original text. The close examination and justifications of Levine’s book on matters of translation reveal the process to be a rather collaborative act between writers and translators instead of a solitary practice consisting of relating meaning to a foreign audience with no authorial interference or input in the final product. In this sense, the very question of originality comes into play in Levine’s theory of translation, which reinforces the appreciation of any text as an artifact whose existence belongs to a creative continuum. As suggested by Levine’s arguments, the Barthean paradigm of the “death of the author” in the birth of the text is well sustained through the appreciation of the role of the translator as a collaborator, for the foreign text is fundamentally emphasized as a product whose only exigency is completion, regardless of the language in which it is written.
<3> Levine is today, by all accounts, one of the most prominent translators of Latin American literature, particularly the so-called Boom and Post-Boom generation. The translator’s close association and friendship with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig has, certainly, exerted a significant influence on her philosophical inquiry into the exercise of translation as a form of collaboration. According to Levine, translation always corresponds to “a fragment, an approximation of the original.” Levine’s self-reflective account on the workings of a theory of translation focuses chiefly on Infante’s, Sarduy’s, and Puig’s writings because these authors’ texts directly allude to the translation enterprise as a form of self-betrayal, since language recreation is at the core of their literary premise. The reflections and anecdotes that Levine recounts when working mainly on Cabrera’s Three Trapped Tigers, Sarduy’s Cobra, and Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair serve as a point of departure for the translator’s description of the adversities and compromises made when attempting to restore lost meaning in titles, proper names, sexual innuendos, and contextual references.
<4> TSS is divided in four parts dealing with problematic issues confronted by translators when communicating to foreign audiences texts that are imbued with a strong sense of locality and historical particularity. At the heart of TSS, however, Levine makes apparent the emotive link that she shares with the object of her translations, revealing to her readers her Self in every choice meant to solve problems existing in the bridging of disparate cultures through words. When recounting her translation of Puig’s Heartbreak Tango (she is also a Puig biographer), Levine confesses: “I found myself ‘sounding’ the depths of my childhood, among adults, for kindred feelings of frustration and desire—and for the words that both hid and expressed those feelings—in an attempt to bridge, once more, the foreign and the familiar” (86).
<5> In Part I and II, Levine approaches the question of how to proceed with the “untranslatable.” In other words, Levine asks her readers what kinds of associations or affinities between meanings can exist when, metonymically, the primary text appears distant from any possible reality experienced by a target audience. Levine questions the extent of the “permission to abuse” given to the translator as she delves into language play and identity performance as problems. Word-puzzles, alliterations, proper names and other signifiers bearing a close tie to regional specificity denunciate language itself as an instrument that, according to Levine, conceals more than reveals meaning. In the face of such a predicament, the translator stresses that the emotive effect should correspond to the chief objective of any translation, as she walks her readers through a series of examples that attest to her reasoning behind the choices of her translations.
<6> In Part II and III Levine attentively examines the question of how to translate Cabrera’s, Sarduy’s, and Puig’s sub/version of the traditional meaning of the historical nation, which is in tension with linguistic paradigms in constant state of reformation. The theme of translation as an ethical dilemma is particularly visible in this section of the book, as the textual subtleties employed by the aforementioned authors often underscore meaning and tradition as possibility. To the foreign audience, much can be lost if one has not experienced history at a certain level of proximity to the authors’ point of view. Because Infante’s, Sarduy’s and Puig’s works challenge well-regimented literary paradigms and confront traditional images associated with Latin America in very particular—and often contradictory—ways, they risk alienating audiences that may expect in translation the transformation of otherness into familiarity, or sameness. Levine discusses the difficulties in explaining to a foreign audience the subtleties and political economies found in the works that she examines, arguing that the translator’s task is first and foremost to acknowledge that the emotive effect in translations must always lead readers to respond to any “language’s distortions and language distorted” (79). For Levine, the recognition of the source of authorial inspiration appears to correspond to an important step towards translating to an audience the impetus of an original work. For translation requires association, the knowing that one is able to bridge cultures not only through what is logic but also through what is apparently illogic, what is stated underneath the text concealing its life as a supplement of the authorial figure, never quite being her. Thus, it is not surprising that Levine’s book closely relates to authors whose lives are declaredly extensions of their works and vice-versa, authors who do not claim to speak on behalf of Latin American culture but rather assert their origins in the idiosyncrasies and tribulations associated with repression, exile, and the memorial experiences tied with these conditions.
<7> Part IV conclusively elucidates Levine’s motives for writing TSS, which interact directly with her intentions to “jolt the reader out of a comfortable (or uncomfortable) view of translations as faint shadows of primary, vivid, but lost originals” (167). In this chapter, Levine discusses translation as a personal matter, disclosing her position of a “subversive scribe” as that of a woman transgressing the boundaries of patriarchal discourse by translating men who also translate realities experienced by women of their respective countries. “Woman is Other,” she writes, “either idealized or degraded in most writing by men, and sometimes—despite themselves—in writing by women writers” (181). Yet, rather than concluding her work with a trite feminist remark meant to locate the position of the gendered translator, Levine indicates that the disclosure of the Self constitutes an inevitability in the very act of translation, as we decode to others not only what we know but also what we imagine we are, often recognizing—whether consciously or not—the insufficiency of language to perform such a task. If anything, Levine’s TSS reveals the translator as a Sherazade-like figure, someone who seeks pleasure through the sortilege of words, constant retelling the story of an Other in order to secure the meaning of one’s Self and her own survival through literature.
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