CLAS 532
March 17, 2025

Sappho and Alcaeus (Attic red-figure, ca. 470 BCE)

1. Venuti, “Translation, Interpretation, Canon Formation” (in Lianeri & Zajko, eds. Translation and the Classics: Identity as Change in the History of Culture (Oxford, 2008))

• classic (κανῶν, “measuring rod”): evaluative construct of the academy, publishers, literary culture, not stable essence; translation instrumental
  
  Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 19.8.5 (authority for proper usage of words): . . . vel oratorum aliquis vel poetarum, id est classicus adsiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius
  
  
• “classics” forming canons subject to interpretations of readers & institutions within receiving cultures; status & meaning of classics not fixed by unchanging intrinsic values/qualities, but constructed in interpretation (= evaluative cultural-historical contexts, axiological element)
  
  
• translations often reflect dominant interpretations in culture & play role in canonizing foreign texts (introduce TL elements to classics, recontextualize ST), but may produce new interpretations, i.e. both inscribe new evaluations and interrogate old ones through recontextualization (translation as classic’s lifeblood) – “reception” vs. “tradition”?
  
  In contributing to the canonicity of a foreign text, the translation leaves neither that text nor the receiving situation unaltered. The foreign text undergoes a radical transformation in which it comes to support a range of meanings and values that may have little or nothing to do with those it supported in the foreign culture. And the linguistic choices, literary traditions and effects, and cultural values that comprise the translator’s interpretation may reinforce or revise the understanding and evaluation of the foreign text that currently prevail in the receiving situation . . . (Venuti, p. 30)
  

• translation as second order metalanguage (pp. 30-5): “proof” of impossibility of equivalence – ST a first order sign system (chain of signifiers & signifieds), TT a second order sign system signifying the ST (= the signified) creates new chain of signifiers with different intertextual & intersemiotic relations, lexical, auditory, grammatical and graphemic differences, different representational relationships with reality/real objects = new signs in new linguistic, literary & cultural context with losses and gains of meaning, not equivalence
  
  
• translation necessarily employs interpretants: formal, thematic, semantic interpretants of TL, theoretical and critical discourses (e.g. historicizing, philosophical, cultural, linguistic) grounded in current target culture interpretation (to create quasi-equivalence via losses and gains?) – Exercise #2 Guidelines
  
  It is in applying interpretants that the translator inscribes an interpretation in so far as the interpretants become the criteria by which the translator chooses linguistic form, literary traditions and effects, and cultural values to render the foreign text. (Venuti, p. 34)
  

• translation yields sustained interpretation (“linear and coextensive”), not selective interpretation as criticism or commentary
  
  
• further axiological aspect of translation: “a chain of signifiers accumulates meaning and value through its circulation [in target culture]” to produce an additional signified/connotation, e.g. designation “literature” itself (other cultural, social, economic values attached to translation, not in ST) – what is “literature”?
  
  . . . the third or axiological order consists of the value that accrues to the inscription [of meaning by a translation], both because the interpretation is likely to include meanings that have already been judged valuable by the potential receptors and because the translation is continually interpreted and evaluated as it circulates. It is the axiological dimension that reveals how translation performs various cultural and social functions, including the establishment and reinforcement of the classic status of foreign texts. The value-laden inscription enables a translation to contribute to the process of canon formation housed in academic and other cultural institutions, to maintain the distinction between elite and popular literatures as it is currently drawn, to serve as a metonymic representation of national literatures and cultures, to work as an ideological practice in cultural political agendas, and to create a market for translated literatures. (Venuti, p. 38)

• canonicity: UA Classics MA Philology Reading Lists