In dealing with the topic of resistance, all the papers appear to share a meta-discursive interest in the ways in which language and other forms of representation resistbeing relegated to the role of transparent instrument, neutral conduit, or pale copy. In other words, a representation is never a simple reflection of an idea or an object but is always a refraction, a versioning, to use Karen Littau’s term, and, as such, one could say, has a life of its own. In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges, presents the quest for sameness or equivalence as ultimately quixotic when the translator Menard becomes so obsessed with faithfully rendering the original that in the end he simply copies the original text. But even then, Borges notes, this faithful reproduction cannot reproduce the original because three hundred years of novel writing and reading have gone by since Cervantes wrote his novel, and so it will not—and cannot—be read the same way. Incidentally, Cervantes presented his novel as a translation from the Arabic, that is, already a copy. Because of the very nature of natural languages (as opposed to artificial languages), namely, that they are asymmetrical or non-equivalent codes and that most words are polysemous, the translator’s task is never a simply linguistic matching game but a complex decision-making process, to use the words of the Czech theoretician Jiři Levý. And because that decision-making is shaped by the translator’s historical moment, socio-economic background, and psychology, studying the shifts in translated texts is becoming increasingly popular in fields across the humanities and social sciences that are attempting to break free of traditional nationalist frameworks and to transnationalize their scholarly perspectives. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it, “no human society is a tabula rasa. The universal concepts of political modernity encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institutions, and practices through which they get translated and configured differently” (Chakrabarty xii).

For Romantics, the impossibility of equivalence was a depressing insight, suggesting the limits of language, the fact that language was incapable of fully capturing ideas and sentiments, which for them existed somehow a priori, outside language. This viewpoint was dramatically expressed by the Russian nineteenth-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev in his poem “Silentium,” every stanza of which ends with the line: “Molchi!”—Be silent! (Of course, Tyutchev’s injunction didn’t stop him from writing poems.) In any case, the post-structuralist or postmodern notion that meaning in language is endlessly deferred undermines instrumentalist claims that language recovers a pre-existing meaning, in so doing “effing the ineffable,” as Eric so memorably put it, and lending new autonomy to representations and copies—not least among them, translations, while at the same time underscoring the borrowed or imitative nature of all writing, as Octavio Paz argues in his essay “Translation: Literature and Letters.”

The postmodern autonomy of representation, however, is not absolute; it is a dependent or relative autonomy, one that makes no sense without a connection to other texts and other words. We see this dependent autonomy in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which Kimbote’s commentary threatens to overwhelm the “original” text or in Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, where his footnotes are three times the length of the work he translates. We see it, too, in Walter Benjamin’s claims that translation grants an afterlife to the original or in David Damrosch’s definition of world literature as “texts that get translated.” Indeed, the idea that translations constitute the source text as an original is the subject of Karen Emmerich’s recent book Translation and the Making of Originals.Moreover, the practice of prominently displaying on book covers the fact that a work has been translated into X number of languages suggests that translation is not only a fact of the target culture, as Gideon Toury famously declared, but also a fact of the source culture. And doesn’t the phenomenon of pseudo-translation—original works that claim to be translations, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis,and more recently Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha—suggest that translation in source-culture contexts can confer “added value” to a work rather than diminishing or distorting it? Nathan’s reading of Mark Harman’s translations of Kafka, influenced by Harman’s reading of Beckett, also underscore the hermeneutic potential of translations, leading us to see the original in new ways as the translator is necessarily compelled to create his or her translation from the literary heritage of the target culture, as Borges describes in his brilliant essay on the various translations of The Arabian Night. In fact, this postmodern “dependent” autonomy of representation is clearly foreshadowed by Tolstoy’s description of Anna’s portraits that lead the viewers to see the “real” Anna differently, as Marie discusses in her paper, a phenomenon parodied by Oscar Wilde in his Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the painting lives while the living subject stays the same. We also see it even earlier in the figure of the golem, discussed by Jonas, and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—creations that resist being mere creations, taking on an insidious and destructive life of their own.

In my reading, the three remaining papers—by Hannah, Jordana, and Melissa—engage with the impact of representation’s autonomy on the individual’s agency, a central preoccupation in postmodernism. As Foucault put it, the postmodern individual is a subject in two meanings of the word, that is, she is made a subject by being subjected to pre-existing norms and conventions of language. In that sense, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” offers a kind of parable of individual agency in the modern world. At the very opening, as Hannah points out, the loss of human speech is conflated with a loss of a sense of time. Indeed, the story in haunted by time: Had the alarm gone off? When would his boss be knocking at the door? And then there’s the problem of managing the train schedules. The homogenous empty time of modernity, measured by the worker’s time clock, divides time into equal but equally meaningless, that is, infinitely transposable units of measurement, which Kafka associates with a loss of language, or at least intelligible language. (Compare this to time in cyclical agrarian models, in which one season cannot replace another.) We see this, too, in the spectre of Auschwitz as a pointed critique of Dasein. Indeed, Auschwitz, which is often described as a death factory, took Taylorism to its extreme.

One could also see Shirley Jackson’s We Have always Lived in Castlesas a haunting postmodern contemplation of agency, and, specifically, of woman’s agency. While women in patriarchal societies are, one could say, twice subjected—first to language in general and second to the language of patriarchy in particular, I would argue that Jackson holds out a possibility of resistance that Kafka does not. Jackson’s sisters inherit their father’s surname, Blackwood (in patriarchal societies, of course, women carry the surname of either their father or husband), but they ultimately succeed, paradoxically, in reappropriating or repossessing that name by burning down their father’s house to chase away the male heir. In so doing, they transform the Blackwood estate into charred remains, or black wood, underscoring the notion that resistance will be fashioned in the language we are given or to which we are subject(ed). This is not, however, a self-destructive act as the sisters continue to live amid the charred remains. And so, I completely agree with Hannah that Freidan’s interpretation doesn’t do justice to the complexity of Jackson’s work.

One of the most compelling examples of reappropriation as resistance is the US Civil Rights movement, which adopted Old Testament narratives of the Jews in exile and adapted them to its own situation and needs. Forced to adopt Christianity, Black Americans then took those authoritative, sacred tales of White America and made them their own in a way that not only sanctified and dignified their project but also lent it an air of inevitability. As Martin Luther King said in his final speech in Memphis: “We will get to the promised land.”

Like the Blackwood sisters, Ivan in Sorokin’s story “The Swim” is subjected to language in a very literal way—by having to carry a torch that, together with the torches of the other swimmers, forms a quotation from the sacred book that is carried down the river dividing the city to the wild applause of the citizen onlookers. But chance intrudes on this well-structured authoritarian society when Ivan’s torch suddenly springs a leak, leading to the destruction of several of the letters and a reformulation of the original quotation. The empty bureaucratese of the original quotation ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY SPECIAL PURPOSE BOROUGH CONSTRUCTION WAS, IS AND WILL EVER BE THE ISSUE OF THE OPPORTUNE INTENSIFICATION OF CONTRAST, becomes at the end: ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY SPECIAL PURPOSE BURROUGH CONSTRUCTION WAS I. As with Jackson’s sisters who had to burn down their father’s house in order to claim it as their own, the emergence of the “I” in this quotation as the new predicate is predicated on the introduction of chance. If the profligacy of signs suggests the impossibility of preserving Truth in time, that very profligacy also holds out the promise of resistance and change. Linguistically, I is a shifter, meaning that its referent will change when the speaking subject changes—in other words it’s both the ultimate expression of one’s self-hood but one that can be inhabited by anyone. As a translator, I am acutely aware that any “I” that appears in translation belongs simultaneously to me and the source text author.

So, all the papers raise central questions about the nature of individual agency in language, something very succinctly expressed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his essay Speech Genres, where he writes: “Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness,’ varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, re-accentuate.” Or to use the words of Jeffrey Cohen as cited by Jonas: “The message proclaimed is transformed by the air that gives its speaker new life. Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural. and literary-historical) that generate them.”

Works Cited

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.