Through the Translation Prism: Proliferation, Permutation, Potential

Abstract

Over the past four decades or so, conceptions, theories and practices of translation have experienced an unprecedented liberation from the shackles of tradition. For the most part, this liberation has been driven by bold new translational metaphors, bold new ways of perspectivising the translational act. One metaphor that has steadily been gaining currency of late is the prism metaphor, which draws a parallel between translation and the process whereby white light is dispersed into the various colours of the rainbow, in the sense that one text can and often does give rise to several different translations. Even so, prismatic translation, as it is called, remains something of a loose baggy monster. It lacks a robust theoretical underpinning, as well as a sense of translational and literary vocation, and these limitations undercut its value as an approach to translation. Taking its affinities with Oulipian and Outranspian thought as a starting point, this dissertation argues that by integrating the Oulipian notion of ‘potential’ into prismatic translation’s conceptual framework, and by introducing an Outranspian style of procedure-based translation into its practices, the situation can be improved. Through the creation and analysis of five prismatic, procedure-forged translations of a passage from the novel, L’Étranger (1942), it is shown that this new model for prismatic translation constitutes an optimal way of exploring the multiple signifying possibilities, or potential, of a given text. And not only that, but an innovative tool for harnessing such potential to produce new – as well as a new type of – literature, too. Two prototypes of this ‘new (type of) literature’, christened prismatic translaterature, are duly debuted. It is concluded that such novel prismatic theory and practice not only provide prismatic translation with the bones it otherwise lacks, but prompt reconceptualisations of translation, literature, text, reading and writing as a whole.