Meredith McKinney: More Close Reading

Meredith McKinney: More Close Reading

Dina Famin

 

One thing I admired about Meredith McKinney’s talk was her demonstration of just how aware a (good) translator is of every decision they make, and not just that the decision is made, but the reason that it is.

McKinney’s translation philosophy is that we, as translators, must “bring ourselves to the text without imposing ourselves” upon it. We must remain “passionately dispassionate.”

But this position is not the one the translator starts with—as several audience members back up when McKinney called her own highly subjective first draft into question. The first draft is an exercise in active reading. McKinney says that you must always “listen, listen, listen” to what the text is saying; in this case, you are listening to what the text is saying to you. In this draft, she says, “I felt what I felt and I said what I thought she felt.”

During the second draft, the translator clears up confusions and returns to their first assumptions of character and content. “I know my tendency,” McKinney says about her empathy and desire to portray Lady Nijo as sympathetic to women, “I give it too much but I like what I do.” But in the second draft, the translator must ask: “Am I overegging this cake?”

By the third draft, the translator must appreciate the “complex play” going on in the characters’ minds, and appreciate their sociohistorical context. This involves understanding both how an author plays with and approaches the act of writing, and resisting the urge to portray that writer and literature as modern, a problem most starkly felt when translating premodern texts. This also extends to over-domesticating an author’s voice. McKinney quotes Rajyashree Panday on feminist translation: “in our desire to speak on behalf of our sisters we sometimes unwittingly reproduce the imperializing gestures of first world feminism.”

“I hope,” McKinney says, “I [translate] what I think the text is saying, not what [I think] it should be saying.” That is the problem of the final drafts, the endless revision and attention paid to every word. In my own translations, I’ve always departed from the text in further stages of editing, rather than at first; but it’s easier to move closer than further away. And it’s easy to mistake a close reading for an assumption. McKinney calls on us to be aware of every choice we make, to avoid arbitrary alterations and approach our translation with a critical eye.

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