It’s true that I often felt a certain impatience with the thinking and methods of textual analysis that reigned for many years in France under the name of ‘structuralism’. And if ‘labour ’in a poem by Yeats feels to me more like ‘childbirth ’than ‘work ’I shall translate by enfantement even if the English doesn’t prove outright that this sense prevails in the ambiguity of the word. When I translate, I don’t model my prosody or metrics on what I perceive of the source text because only in my own prosody am I sufficiently at my ease and only in my own metrics am I sufficiently free for my assent to the foreign author to be meaningful. The pianist shouldn’t imitate the violin on his keyboard but dialogue with it and by means of this duo salvage the central intuition of the work, which fortunately transcends these different approaches. For example, the translator must trust to her own music and never sacrifice her own rhythms. This is bound to produce extremely bold and entirely legitimate displacements of the signifiers of the original. On the one hand, I firmly believe that the translator must assert her freedom and can only authentically encounter a work by bringing it into the world of her own reflexive relationship. I have to say that I have somewhat contradictory thoughts about translation and the effect of these contradictions varies with my knowledge of the language. And the relationships in these two cases are obviously very different.
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