Who Translates?: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason

Argues for a postrationalist conception of translation based not on the translator's rational control of words and meanings but on a flowing through the translator of voices and textualities.

Translators have long claimed that their job is to “step aside and let the source author speak through them.” In Who Translates? Douglas Robinson uses this adage to set up a series of “postrationalist” perspectives on translation, all based on the recognition that translation has always been thought of in terms of the translator’s surrender to forces beyond his or her rational control. Exploring this theme, Robinson examines Plato’s Ion, Philo Judaeus and Augustine on the Septuagint, Paul on inspired interpreters, Joseph Smith on the Book of Mormon, and Schleiermacher, Marx, and Heidegger on translation. He traces the imaginative and historical linkages between twentieth-century conceptions of ideology and ancient conceptions of spirit-channeling, and the performative inversion of power relations by which the “channel” (or translator) comes to wield the source author as his or her tool. And he argues throughout for a postrationalist conception of translation based not on the translator’s rational control of words and meanings but rather on a flowing through the translator of voices and textualities.

Douglas Robinson is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and has written numerous books on translation and culture, including The Translator’s Turn, Translation and Taboo, and Becoming a Translator: An Accelerated Course.