PROUST'S GRANDMOTHER AND THE ODYSSEY

Proust's narrator muses about his grandmother's attitude towards translations and, more especially, new translations superseding the translations she has been familiar with all her life. To put it briefly, she does not like them at all.

If an Odyssey from which the names of Ulysses and Minerva were absent was no longer the Odyssey for her, what would she have said when she saw the title of her Thousand and One Nights already deformed on the title page, when she could no longer find the immortally familiar names of Sheherazade and Dinarazade transcribed exactly as she had been used to pronouncing them from time immemorial in a book where the charming Caliph and the powerful Genies were hardly able to recognize themselves, having been decapitated as it were, if one dares use that word in the context of Muslim stories, and now being called one the "Khalifat", the Others the "Gennis"?

Proust, 1954

 The first point is that the grandmother quite obviously accepts the existence of translations as such. It is unlikely that she will have read either the Odyssey or The Thousand and One Nights, or both, in the original. Proust's grandmother definitely thinks translation is possible. Yet she clearly distinguishes between what are, to her, "good" and "bad" translations. She likes the translations she has grown up with. "The" Odyssey for her is a translation in which the hero is still called by his Latinized name: Ulysses, and in which the goddes Athena is likewise still called Minerva. Proust's grandmother, therefore, does not really like or dislike a translation; rather, she trusts or distrusts a translator. The translator whose work she is familiar with is, to her, a "faithful" translator.

Mette Hjort states that translations made at different times tend to be made under different conditions and to turn out differently, not because they are good or bad, but because they have been produced to satisfy different demands. It cannot be stressed enough that the production of different translations at different times does not point to any "betrayal" of absolute standards, but rather to the absence, pure and simple, of any such standards.

Translations are made to respond to the demands of a culture, and of various groups within that culture.

Cultures make various demands on translations, and those demands also have to do with the status of the text to be translated. Since languages express cultures, translators should be bicutural, not bilingual.

 

Studying André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, Introduction: Proust's grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights: the cultural turn in translation studies