Theoretical challenges for a genetics of translation

ABSTRACT

Translation archives are sources of insight into the creative processes of literary translation. This article examines the challenges of using the methodology of genetic criticism, which was devised for studying literary composition through archival evidence, for research in translation. It identifies conceptual limitations in this theory’s consideration of translated texts and their specific ontology, and it assesses the applicability of genetic criticism’s primordial categories – literary exogenesis and literary endogenesis – to translation. This paves the way for the construction of a methodology and a conceptual vocabulary for genetic process research in translation studies. It is argued that this new methodology can alleviate certain ambiguities or anxieties in current debates relating to the capacity of the translator to exercise their creativity and perform acts of writing that some would equate with authorship. Finally, adopting a translation studies perspective is suggested as a way for genetic criticism to shed its untenable Romantic heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Genetic translation studies
• translation archives
• genetic criticism
• critique génétique
• history of translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an overview see Cordingley (2021).

2 This is less true of early theorization (e.g. Bellemin-Noël 1972) than in what the movement came to represent.

3 Grésillon (1994, 245) employed the term scripteur to designate a text’s creator – a term that could be translated into English as writer or author, except that by avoiding both écrivain and auteur, Grésillon was evidently searching for a term that was less ideologically charged, and that could also designate someone using a writing instrument who was not responsible for the content (e.g. an amanuensis).

 

Additional information

Funding

This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie [grant number 893904].

Notes on contributors

Anthony Cordingley

Anthony Cordingley is Robinson Fellow at the University of Sydney, on secondment from the Université Paris 8, France where he is Associate Professor in English and Translation. He co-/edited Self-translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (Bloomsbury, 2013), Collaborative Translation: from the Renaissance to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2016), and special issues of Linguistica Antverpiensia, “Towards a Genetics of Translation” (2015) and Meta “Translation Archives” (2020). He edits Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, authored Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation (Edinburgh UP, 2018), and recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship project, “Genetic Translation Studies” at KU Leuven's Centre for Translation Studies.