Between the Foreign and the Domestic: Neoliteralism and the Problem of Readership
As a rule, neo-literal translation theories manifest an “aversion” (Robinson) for the target reader. According to Berman, the translator should make no concessions to the latter in order to better reveal the foreigness of the original. Taking as its starting point the hypothesis that such an exclusion of the reader produces very specific reader effects, this article proposes to examine the nature and function of these effects by referring to the difficulties encountered by the GRETI while retranslating the vernacular of Faulkner's The Hamlet and to the strategies used to overcome them. It also seeks to understand, from a reader-response perspective, what is potentially at stake during the translation process when the translator adheres to the Bermanian definitions of the foreign and the domestic. More specifically, an attempt is made to shed some light on the dialogical relations which, over and above those linking the source text/culture to the target text/culture and in the context of a neo-literal translation project, are established between the translator, the translated text and its public through the construction of clearly delineated model readers and reading positions. It is argued 1) that not only must the concept of foreignizing serve as a basis for a theory of the translating subject, it must also be incorporated into a theory of the reader of translated texts; 2) that this would lead at once to a rethinking of the relations between the foreign and the domestic, to a reconsideration of the various charges of cultural elitism and political conservatism habitually levelled at neo-literal theories of translation, and to an appreciation of the argumentative dimension underlying the poetical and ethical dimensions of neo-literal translation as defined by Berman.