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Translation and Potentiality
I have a peculiar background as a translator. The one major translation (in terms of length) I have done so far is that of a three-hundred-pagelong text the author of which is the translator himself: I translated my doctoral dissertation from English into Spanish, which in my case means from a foreign language (in which I originally wrote it) into my native language. It would not be hard to make the case that I started by writing the translation and then translated it into the original. If there is a situation where the result of a translation can be considered an original, this is it. It might even be said that I was actually being a translator when I thought I was being an author, and that I only became an author when I translated myself. (Incidentally, this is an experience I do not recommend to anyone: you spend most of your time going back and forth between the two texts correcting, changing and recorrecting, with the following inevitable outcome: you end up with two mistranslations of an original that does not exist.) The reason I start by mentioning this is that this process of self-translation made me think about what I was doing in terms of constraints, for I was engaged in a translation under a specific constraint: I had to be faithful not so much to my original, that is, to the text in front of me, but rather to my original intentions, to some sort of chimeric original in Spanish from which the text in English I was translating had been in turn translated.
Which leads me to the basic question I would like to address: what does it mean to translate under constraints? The relation between translation and constraints tends to be thought of in terms of how to translate works that were written under constraints. I want to think about the opposite, about translating under constraints literary works in general, written under constraints or not. Can we think of possible translation constraints that would illuminate aspects of translation, or open up paths for the practice of translation in the same way that Oulipian constraints have illuminated aspects of creative writing and opened up paths to practice it?...