AN INTERVIEW WITH MARILYN GADDIS ROSE

BY CAROL MAIER

Marilyn Gaddis Rose is the founding director of the Translation Research and Instruction Program at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Here, she responds to questions about identity, pedagogy, and assessment. The interview was conducted in Toronto at the MLA convention in December 1997 and continued on e-mail and in written correspondence between mid-January and early September 1998.

Carol Maier: After talking over lunch about the demands faced by translators as academics and scholars, I wonder how you would describe your own work. In particular, perhaps you could expand on the need you mentioned to keep up with the rapid changes and developments in Translation Studies as a field.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose: Well, one does need to have a lot of energy, because the field is expanding. I say field, but I might say that the wheel is being reinvented all over the place—every academic generation has to reinvent it two or three times, and every English-speaking module of the world has to reinvent it. I don’t mean to sound ironic and disparaging when I say that, because people have to discover things for themselves, and sometimes terminology is slightly different, and the slight differences may account for certain subtle affective and semantic alterations, but you have to be somewhat high-energy to keep up. I think of myself not specifically as a translator but rather as a someone who’s working with translators all the time, more as an editor. I enjoy translating when I get an opportunity to do it. And, of course, any assignment my students have, I have also, and those assignments are both literary and nonliterary. But my work as a translator also requires looking as good as possible, as young as possible, and the expression “self-effacing” I once mentioned to you is fine, although it’s not one that people on my own campus would apply to me. What I try to do is not place myself in the foreground. I made an image change in the past decade, going from a dragon lady to a wise-cracking Mother Theresa, which has worked best on my campus and in my immediate surroundings, but there is a real need not to be too vulnerable and to be successful, but not so successful that one is envied by one’s colleagues.

CM: That’s true everywhere, don’t you agree?

MGR: I think that would be true everywhere, but more so when you’re at the edge of an interdiscipline, and Comparative Literature in some institutions is fairly embattled.

CM: I know. How has Comparative Literature fared at SUNY-Binghamton?

MGR: I’m fortunate in that in my own institution it is not embattled, and I’ve been in that discipline more than 25 years. But in my institution, Translation Studies developed from Comparative Literature, and that means it’s always on the brink, always at the margin. Now, Translation Studies can be used as an integrating aspect in a discipline, and of course in grant proposals we always point that out.

CM: Yes, you stress that.

MGR: We always stress that there can be no knowledge at all without translation and that Translation Studies derives from and contributes to so many separate disciplines that are identified as interdisciplines. Still, it’s not the same as if it were a separate department.

CM: But you are in Comparative Literature, which in the case of your institution is not an embattled department, and Translation Studies does not stand alone, as it were; but Translation Studies might well be engaged in battles involving both other disciplines and other interdisciplines.

MGR: That once became a situation in my own institution that stopped short of being intolerable, but the situation was resolved and my personnel berth—that’s how we put it—is in Comparative Literature. I also teach in Comparative Literature, and I find it very helpful as a translator to be teaching something besides Translation Studies and translation practice, because it gives me a continual infusion. I think other disciplines can make use of translation as a tool, for analysis, for all sorts of speculations, but I think Translation Studies, which is off by itself, runs a risk of rehashing the same material. As long as you’re teaching something else, there is a conduit to something different that can only enrich Translation Studies. But here I’m referring to teaching Comparative Literature, for example, not remedial English.

CM: I understand. One could teach a foreign language, or creative writing, for instance.

MGR: And there are still other things a person could do. At one time, I was closely related to foreign language teaching, and during that period I thought that every three years I should be learning another language just to open up another avenue for myself.

CM: In other words, you have worked as a linguist in some ways, you’re working as an instructor of Comparative Literature, you have taught French, you currently teach translation, you serve as a link between Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, and I know that, in addition, you are very active in the university community. And you are equally active in the translation community, both domestically and internationally. It sounds like a highly complex identity.

MGR: It’s not, actually, because all of those activities work together. I should also mention what is sometimes the most tedious thing we do in my office: we support ourselves by running a service, a community service. It’s nonprofit, but it does keep us linked to the real world of people and agencies that need translation. We’re not a money-making body by any means, but we are doing the sort of things that technical translators would do. I’m not sure where I got the statistics years ago, because I’ve never been able to find them again, but I understand that something like 97.3% of the world’s translation is not literary or scholarly, even though these might be the areas that furnish translation theory the richest body of data.

CM: Do you actually work in the center as a nonliterary translator?

MGR: Personally, I would consider that a conflict of interest and I never take an assignment, but I often have to help with one. Also, I’m training people who will go out and manage translation bureaus, or who are currently doing so. I kind of backed into this, but managing translation bureaus is what many of our alumni who chose to stay in translation are doing.

CM: Similarly, we’ve found that many Kent alumni are working with translation agencies and bureaus and going into language management.

MGR: Effective in spring 1998, one of your alumna, with one of our faculty as instructor of record, began terminology database management, and we have invested in the materials and equipment one needs to do that.

CM: Has there been much interest among the students?

MGR: There is student approval, but little student enrollment.

CM: And faculty?

MGR: This is the sort of thing that makes good PR. I am happy that no one objects. I myself am quite willing to learn terminology database management along with the other students.

CM: So you’re a student. You once told me that you were rather self-effacing, but I think it’s more a question of having so many faces that you don’t know how best to make a composite of them all. How did you begin to do all these different things? Were you trained to be a literary translator who began with an appointment in Comparative Literature?

MGR: No, I was as amateurish as one could be. I have a doctorate in French. The only job I could get and live where I wanted to live was in a general literature program.

CM: That was Binghamton?

MGR: No, that was in a private school in Columbia, Missouri: Stephens College. And I was asked to do some technical translating—I think it was on proteins; and then I needed a translation of a book I wanted to teach: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axel. And I found that there would be a need for it. I stayed at that amateur level until I came to SUNY-Binghamton, where I was asked to start a workshop. At the time I probably hadn’t translated as much as some of my colleagues there. But Comparative Literature was set up for it. One of the long-time executives in the American Comparative Literature Association was my Chair, Frederick Garber, and he asked me to do this because he thought a Comparative Literature program should have a literary translation workshop, and the workshop developed. That was in January 1971, which makes us a very stable, long-standing program.

CM: Which evolved slowly into what you have now, or did it grow rapidly?

MGR: It went in some spurts when we would get outside money, but we used only tenured faculty in staffing it. There were times when we were so successful that we were under attack, and we formed both an interdisciplinary group of faculty on campus and an advisory council outside campus. This helped with public relations, chiefly with our own colleagues, which was very, very helpful, and those were all colleagues who did much more, and have done much more, than lend their names to our endeavor. Eventually, some of them became quite treasured as members of our workshop team and do more translating individually than I do.

CM: But you don’t have time.

MGR: I don’t need a whole lot of time.

CM: Generally you have some project going, don’t you?

MGR: Yes, two publishing responsibilities, not, I trust, with immediate deadlines.

CM: I hope you’re right. But I want to return to your many tasks as a translator, because it strikes me that you weren’t prepared, at least not academically prepared, to do any of these tasks, except to teach foreign literature and language. What you’ve told me about all these components of your own personality makes me recall something Petch Peden once said about the translator having a personality like an archivist, I believe it was. Do you think it’s accurate to say that? What would you list as other characteristics of translators?

MGR: High energy, a dedication to being systematic in budgeting time, and being able to prioritize tasks. All those times when you just have to start on the outside of the desk and work all the way in, from the top side down, but still keeping, somewhere in your head, the priority of what needs to be done first, second, and simultaneously. You have to really enjoy learning new things and enjoy the work it requires to find out about them. In compensation, in nonliterary translation, for example, when we try to give a spectrum of the subjects students might encounter, so that they’ll know what the reliable sources are and how to retrieve data. It takes a lot of time, but if you’re translating a scholar’s work, he or she has already skimmed off something for you. So you do get a kind of shortcut to being an expert sometimes. And as Petch Peden makes clear, the novel can require just as much researching as any kind of technical material.

CM: So can poetry or essays; it depends on the type of research involved. Every quality you’ve mentioned is, in many ways, almost an innate characteristic. But you haven’t mentioned skills, language skills. Do you think bilingualism is absolutely necessary? How would you rate proficiency in a foreign language? What about writing abilities?

MGR: Writing and reading are very important. I would like to be much more fluent orally in languages than I am.

CM: Even for written translation, because you don’t do interpreting?

MGR: Well, yes. People expect you to be more fluent. If I go to Montreal I start practicing on the plane, so that I will be receptive to what I will hear. Eventually you’re going to need to know what sounds right and be able to recognize, for example, whether a dialogue in a foreign language is natural or strained; and you can’t do that without oral fluency, or without keeping current with the language. I personally prefer to work with authors in the public domain. I adore key novels, which make me do a lot of detective work. So I can use a 1936 dictionary. In fact, I have to be wary sometimes about a modern dictionary that would not give the appropriate usage but would be inaccurate or anachronistic. But reading in two principal languages is very, very important; and it’s so unfortunate that a foreign language graduate student has very few opportunities to read literature in his or her own language. A little too much foreignizing is perhaps not acceptable. I have no objection to foreignized translations, particularly for canonical writers who already have an established reputation in the language.

CM: Can I safely infer from what you’ve just said that the most successful graduate students in your program come from foreign languages?

MGR: By no means. Actually, the students who come from English and Creative Writing are nearly always better.

CM: Because of their writing skills? And their reading skills?

MGR: Because of their reading background. They have read more in English, American, and Australian literature, and Caribbean literature. Francophone and Anglophone literature happen to be very big. So they read a lot of that, and they know some more about the cultures as a result. But when these students have problems, it’s usually because they don’t know the foreign language well enough. So it’s hard to say which one you need to know better. But you have to be really comfortable using your target language.

CM: I don’t think enough students are aware of that. I don’t think even enough translators are aware of it. They often work without acquiring the reading background you mention, and they’re unable to find the parallel texts they need or don’t even realize they need them.

MGR: I think that’s a big, big problem. When I’ve been classified (not to say dismissed or disparaged) as someone who wants literature in translation to sound like The New Yorker, I could see that my taste is retrograde. I should spend more time with what’s being written before it makes The New Yorker category. Because something’s nearly a classic text by the time it gets there.

CM: Yes, you need an already established reputation.

MGR: It’s nice when I see former colleagues like Heather McHugh in The New Yorker.

CM: Would you say that a good translation program should require a general literary preparation of students, or provide them with one, in addition to teaching them how to translate and giving them skills?

MGR: That would be a very good thing, but given the kind of time stricture students work with, I’m not sure how a Master’s program could ever do that. Students, of course, can bring a lot into the program and can be the kind of people who have always read a lot and listened carefully, but students who go through a well-designed M.A. program with a translation emphasis like yours or mine still would have very little time to immerse themselves in contemporary American and British fiction. Just keeping up with Francophone and Metropolitan French would be almost more than you could ask of them. And doctoral programs, which are fine, almost guarantee that the translating will be a hobby, something that people will use as their creative outlet, as you yourself do.

CM: What would a competent professional program, then, which is usually a Master’s program in this country at least, aim to do? What types of courses would it have? And since at Binghamton you have a translation bureau, I wonder whether you have begun to train students in language management and whether you think that professional programs should offer this type of preparation, which resembles a program in Business more than one in the Liberal Arts.

MGR: Well, here is where I differ considerably from many of my colleagues in the American Translators Association. I do not see the goal of any graduate program that is not labeled professional (as an MBA is, for example, or an engineering degree) as having the responsibility of preparing the person for a certain slot in the work world. I think it’s the role of the university to lead, not to fill slots, so basically I am more interested in doctoral studies, and I like to see them concerned with the subjects that Translation Studies derives from. Now, that needn’t be impractical. Most of the students I see have been interested in hermeneutics, philosophy—the continental tradition and postmodern philosophy; until this year, when I inherited one of your students, and I have sent her into another branch of philosophy, artificial intelligence and that kind of exploratory work, but it’s still not in the area of technology. Knowledge expansion should show the community the direction to follow, rather than serve that community by preparing people for it. For employers who hire interpreters, of course, it’s a different matter. They want someone who can learn the terminology and step in between two speakers or provide interpreting at the conference table. I would not speak about the needs of students who intend to work as interpreters, but I would think that all our graduate programs in translation would claim that what they could do vis-à-vis the work is inculcate research skills and instill a love of research, so it’s not regarded as tedious but rather as exhilarating. And a considerable amount of workaholism is a very valuable addiction.

CM: This would provide a very vigorous program.

MGR: Yes. Well, a person should feel almost guilty not working 70 hours a week. I do like to have half an hour or 45 minutes on Sunday afternoons that I can spend just the way I want to, although I rarely do because my school life, my work life isn’t my only life. A woman in today’s world should be feeling guilty almost all the time. When you’re taking care of your house, you’re guilty because you’re not working, and when you’re working you feel guilty because you see the dust with a housekeeper’s eye. I have an agency called “Maid-to-Please” that comes and attacks the house, but there are things they miss; and it took a fair amount of time in the process and a certain amount of affluence to be able to afford “Maid-to-Please,” so I guess I would have to say all you can do is instill a love of reasonable self-sacrifice in the students, so that they are happier when they’re working and helping other people.

CM: Or so they have a definition of work that expands to include some of these other requirements or characteristics.

MGR: Well, yes. I regarded giving cocktail parties for students and faculty as part of my job, but I used to enjoy giving them.

CM: Would you also define as work some of the reading you do? Giving a cocktail party is work, but no doubt one enjoys some part of it. You don’t seem to be using “work” in the sense of “workaholism.”

MGR: No, I’m not. Translators must be really concerned about getting it right, as John Wood put it.

CM: That refers to women but also to men, I would think.

MGR: Oh, that’s anyone.

CM: But it could be broken down genderwise, or racewise or classwise, I suppose.

MGR: Well, women are, perhaps, more excoriated by the outside world if they’re not keeping their house or picking up their children, but I think anyone really has to be dedicated to doing their job right and has to enjoy doing it only that way. And you have to know when you’ve gotten it as right as you can and talk to, be on friendly terms with, philosophers who can point out that you never get something totally transferred from one language to another. You know, people say Eugene Nida thinks that there are meanings and that words can express them. Now, I think that’s kind of sweet. And I don’t believe he ever said that, but we go in waves of fashion in which anyone who did would be regarded with friendly condescension.

CM: If that, and if friendly. Having described the characteristics of a good translator and a good translation program, I wonder to what extent you believe translation can be taught. To what extent can a program develop the skills required of a competent, responsible translator?

MGR: Well, I don’t think teaching translation is any different from teaching people that there are certain educated standards of English that are expected in the work world. A very activist graduate student who has an office close to mine tells his students in a class called “Coloring Theory” that to express themselves in ways that are meaningful they must also learn to express themselves in ways that will get them ahead in a different world. Now, in nonliterary translation, we are always asking how something is said, and so our creativity is bounded the way a sonnet is. We’re not thinking of new and startling ways to say something; we’re always asking how something is said, and that would be more the way I would go into terminology. I know you have to hire good people in technical translation, and you have to be referring to the right kind of tools—you have to know, for example, when it’s a question of some chemical compound and which one—but you also have to study rhetoric.

With respect to the class sessions themselves, I think it’s up to the individual faculty member’s ingenuity in sizing up the students, assessing the class dynamic. This has to be done within the first or at least the second period, what the class dynamic is going to be and how many people one’s going to be working with. And then assignments must be adjusted accordingly.

CM: How would you do that sizing up? With a written test? A conversation?

MGR: One can use a diagnostic. I think, with respect to the North American students, that the foreign language picture is changing very quickly. In fact, in my own program we’re on the brink of making some pretty big changes about the first day or so of class; but I think one prepares the syllabi for the class one anticipates, but one does not hold to it inflexibly. It may simply not be workable. My ideal way, and it’s been three or four semesters since I’ve been able to do it this way, for nonliterary translation, is to have two or three languages in the same literary workshop. All the students would be at the same level of sophistication, and that’s the most important thing—sophistication level. And then their language competence—which we just assume, because we put down language fluency as an entrance requirement—would be the same. We haven’t done that, because of the makeup of new students, but in my ideal class everyone would be in the same group, and the assignments would be almost the same for everyone, since they would all be about the same topic; for example, this semester we prepared material about Dolly and Polly in several languages. We would have a perfectly workable system, but the languages aren’t surviving or thriving at the same rate. Our own institution is getting a very different language mix coming in, so we have more language variety and a great deal of difference in sophistication. I read about students getting older. This has not happened at my own institution, where they’re about the same age as everywhere and the students in one language are usually much more sophisticated than those in another language, and the students outside what used to be considered the most commonly taught languages may be the most sophisticated of all. So I’m going to have to do some serious thinking, and as long as I can get everyone involved in less commonly taught languages to work in literature, there’s no problem—I just keep hiring tutors.

When it comes to instruction, I think one teaches basically by academic example. One always is confronting the material for nearly the first time oneself. I mean that one confronts the actual assignments and does them, goes through the same struggles and is part of the team that’s learning to perform these various assignments; and one encourages everybody at the same time that one is submitting to criticism.

CM: And you would distribute copies of your work to your students?

MGR: No, I don’t really distribute my work.

CM: But in a workshop one passes one’s work around so that everyone sees the drafts prepared by everyone else. I distributed my work when I first began to teach, but even when all work was distributed anonymously, the students quickly figured out whose work was whose, and my text invariably became something of the “canonical version,” the point of reference. To avoid that, I now prepare specific questions about the text or suggestions that I propose in class for working with short sections of the material.

MGR: Well, that method would probably work. I’ve never done things that way. In fact, we don’t have anonymity. Each person sits with her—it’s usually her—version and we don’t trade. I freely say, “well, this is the best one, this is certainly better than what I thought of.” I say the sort of things one used to say in teaching foreign languages (“Oh good”) and if something is really funny we all laugh about it. That requires knowing the students, of course. Or I encourage little digressions that don’t take us very far from the text, because people in doing the assignments may have learned things around the text, and they want to share them.

CM: And they should, although it’s so easy for a translation workshop, or any workshop, to go off somewhere else. It’s very hard to keep to the text and enrich the text at the same time.

MGR: Yes. And in the workshop I let them mark up their own texts any way they want to, but only during that period, and then they turn them in to me. We usually have about 25 to 30 people enrolled at any one time in the workshop, and this includes all languages.

CM: I don’t understand how you could have a workshop with all the students together and all of them would work on the same text but not everyone would be translating into the same language.

MGR: As I said, that’s my ideal, but it is getting to be a memory. Well, we do usually separate the out-of-English translators, but you really need five or six people, at least, to have a workshop in a single language. Otherwise you just have a tutorial and you miss many points the tutor cannot possibly think of; so by having the same topics, the language groups manage to work together. And by some freakish error of the Registrar we often have a huge room.

CM: That seems to happen all the time.

MGR: We have to be very creative, adapting the space to our needs. This is so different from the fall semester we’ve just completed [fall 1997]. We had a very attractive room, with nice little tables and a nice rug on the floor, so we separated the students using French from the students using Spanish. We used one part of the room for Spanish. All the others were taken care of in people’s offices, and we hired about six tutors.

CM: Are your tutors full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty members?

MGR: Sometimes they are.

CM: Didn’t you indicate in another conversation that your program started with only full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and that the tutors were adjuncts?

MGR: Well, German and Russian are tutorial, because the enrollment in those languages is so low, and those tutors were tenured faculty members.

CM: Are the adjuncts, the professional, experienced nonliterary translators (who may or may not have conventional academic backgrounds and degrees) compensated at the same rate and paid in the same way as the tenured and tenure-track faculty members?

MGR: Oh, not nearly, no, and they are not quite adjuncts either. They are tutors. They are not paid by the Dean’s adjunct budget; they’re paid out of our budget as language consultants—tutors.

CM: What are your feelings about the use of adjuncts as translator trainers?

MGR: I believe that it’s a good idea. For instance, we would certainly dissuade a student in our program from specializing in legal translation, because we don’t have a law school, but a lot of our graduates have passed the New York State interactive video interpreter’s test or work in law. (I really think you should not underestimate what persons with determination and a high I.Q. can accomplish if they want to.) These people have not been specifically trained, but they could certainly teach others.

CM: So can I infer, then, that since you don’t think that programs should prepare students for specific types of translation, it’s more important to teach them writing and research skills and the kind of stamina and flexibility that you mentioned with respect to language than to teach them terminology for a particular area or how to prepare glossaries in a particular area?

MGR: You know, I think that every program is influenced by the people who are in it. I can’t imagine myself ever being interested in teaching such specialized translation, and my colleagues in Comparative Literature would be even less interested in having this done. I can’t imagine that the situation will ever be different, but maybe by 2050 the institution will change character. Our engineers and nurses often show a lot of interest in doing translation. They have administrators who are most responsive, but the nurses themselves have no time during their week.

CM: I’ve found that too, with respect to Language for Special Purposes, even when it came to Spanish for nurses, despite the students’ interest and enthusiasm.

MGR: No, they just don’t have time, and it’s not a lack of interest and concern on the part of the administration. One thing I was sorry to see go last year was our School of Management MBA concentration. The person who helped design this international concentration retired. It’s no longer on the books. We believe in truth in advertising. People in the School of Management are not prevented from getting a translation certificate, but we no longer advertise it. And that’s just because those particular people retired.

CM: There are people barely over 50 years old taking early retirement. This is very beneficial in many ways, but in other ways it’s highly detrimental to both programs and departments.

MGR: I think that’s a shame, and I believe that there’s a need to offer students that type of highly specialized translators, and cooperative programs and adjuncts are crucial because faculty members in Translation Studies lack the appropriate backgrounds and therefore the necessary enthusiasm. I could not be personally involved in helping people do something I wasn’t enthusiastic about. You yourself must really have to muster a lot of self-discipline to work in the program at Kent, one of the few programs in the United States that offer specialized, professional translator training.

CM: One way that I found that I could work enthusiastically with nonliterary translation has been to explore analogies between literary and technical translation, specifically in the area of research. For example, much of the fiction—and even the poetry—that I have translated has required highly specialized research, and the skills and resources I have needed to use there are applicable to work in medical or scientific translation. Also, I am less and less certain that it’s appropriate to speak and think in terms of two “kinds” of translation. I find that the activity of translation can be exhilarating with virtually every type of text. Also, the larger endeavor of our program itself and the work I share with my translation colleagues is invigorating.

But I would like to return to something you mentioned about your workshop and your comment to the students that one translation was better or worse than another one. I wonder how you handle evaluation of student work. For instance, what did you mean by “better”? In what context? How? The issue of evaluation interests me greatly, and I’ve been questioning the use of relative words that imply dichotomies: “better,” “not so good.” How does one even decide that a translation is “competent?” If you discard words such as “better” and “best,” “faithful” and “unfaithful,” how does one define “competent”? And an academic situation always requires grades. One can usually avoid using letter grades during the semester, but there still comes a time, at least in my institution and in most, when instructors must assign grades. Even if you give all students the same grade and use “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory,” there are students whom you cannot grade as “satisfactory” if you give all the others a “satisfactory.” In some situations, that just would not be at all fair. How would you respond to this?

MGR: When you say, for instance, that a student just doesn’t know French well enough, or Spanish well enough, it’s because there is some semantic core they’ve gotten turned around. I do quite a bit of prepping graduate students so they can use a foreign language as a research tool, and if the readers of a translation are anthropologists, particularly if they’re archaeologists, they’d want to be told to excavate the right number of feet in the right place, or the reader of a translation would be misled if the translator had gotten a subject and object mixed up in a French sentence. An error in such instance puts a translation “outside” competence.

CM: It makes a translation inaccurate, to use the conventional term.

MGR: Yes. Otherwise, I think that competence is a question of having sensitivity to whatever the prevailing rhetoric is.

CM: It’s a question of being aware of and familiar with Gideon Toury’s “norms.”

MGR: Yes, but norms change. One of the things I find somewhat alarming about people in our field is that they imagine that meanings and usages are just going to stay put, without ever changing. But if you are translating out of your own language, you may have to learn that the way in which x equals y is not unchanging.

CM: It seems to me that Toury is talking about the norms currently prevailing.

MGR: With Toury, you never know quite where or when norms stop prevailing, but I think he allows for norms to change. Some of our European colleagues, however, who are trying to teach do insist on staying inside fixed norms, using what seems to me a sort of formula, and they’ll be translated according to certain norms, when, in fact, advertising writers, for example, have gone on to another set of norms. That’s another reason I feel safer, I suppose, with translating works in the public domain, because I know that I’m not able to respond quickly enough to norm changes in another language.

CM: But you still have to know the mix, or flux, of norms at a particular time, and this requires a different type of sensitivity. You also have to be sensitive to language as it is now, so in some ways, your responsibility is just as great. If I remember correctly, in his latest book, Toury ends his discussion of norms by tending toward a definition of rules, toward a deliberate, more explicitly prescriptive definition of norms. I myself believe that, despite one’s best intentions, description is never possible without a certain amount of prescription.

MGR: I agree, although I do think that Toury has become much more mellow, and I do believe that he is genuinely describing data as he finds it. However, having lived through so many changes in prevailing norms in rhetoric, I’m more concerned that a translator be sensitive to something changing with usage. Since I’m a little out of pop culture myself, I have to make an extra effort to see how words are being used.

CM: Translator trainers really have to trust our students’ intuition in such situations, to listen to them and what they’re doing or what films they see, what programs they watch on television, especially if an instructor tends not to watch television.

MGR: I tend not to.

CM: I never watch television, but I think that it’s really important when I’m translating some texts to be in touch with people who do watch television, to have them tell me about certain programs I must see to translate those documents. Which is one way instructors learn from our students.

MGR: Yes, and it also takes one back to reading contemporary, really contemporary literature.

CM: Does your program include a course in norms per se, in order to discuss usage changes, to work with texts from an earlier time period or from another culture and try to determine the extent to which norms have changed or remained the same? I’ve never heard of a course like that, but I wonder whether it wouldn’t be interesting.

MGR: I think it might be. There have been times when I used early 18th-century English to get a class organized, to ask students to put things in their own terms. An instructor can play around with parody. It depends a lot on the makeup

of the class.

CM: And on how sophisticated the students’ use of language is.

MGR: I can remember a really stunning class in which the students’ parodies would bowl me over, with their ability to turn a poem back into prose or turn it into a psychological case study; but it’s been a while since I’ve seen students who can do that.

CM: I’m convinced that one must have a certain ability to parody to be a successful translator, as Suzanne Jill Levine’s essays and translations illustrate so well.

MGR: There are a lot of metaphors of translation, and parody is one of them.

CM: Certainly, in what you were saying earlier about the different roles you play, there was a lot of parody, I would guess, vis-à-vis the university administration or one’s physical appearance, for example. But I find evaluation the most difficult part of teaching translation, because one cannot always count on seeing conventional accuracy. When students are fluent and qualified in the language, the issue of accuracy becomes less crucial. Even so, few students can experiment deliberately with both language and accuracy, can experiment with language per se, working with language in a truly creative way.

MGR: Well, Pardy Lowe had an expression he called the “X factor.”

CM: I once heard him say that. You can evaluate that factor, which is to say you can evaluate it for yourself, but you can’t put a letter grade on it.

MGR: Well, maybe if you’ve got the X factor.

CM: But you can’t tell students that they don’t have the X factor. I don’t even want to be able to tell a student that because I don’t think that I’m always competent to do so. I think that whether someone has an X factor would depend on whether or not I could perceive it. And what if the instructor does perceive an X factor but is afraid of it? Any time you have one person recognizing another person’s exceptional ability, you are apt to have jealousy, or fear, and this would be possible among students as well as between an instructor and a student.

MGR: Well, in the literary workshop, you rarely have people doing exactly the same thing.

CM: But what if there is more than one student working with the same text?

MGR: We don’t usually face that situation in literary translation, since the student must choose his or her own text.

CM: For each class?

MGR: Yes, for the literary workshop we only meet together as a class about twice during the semester. So there would be no need to compare or rank students, and every student might well receive the same grade. I taught a course recently that was called a combined-seminar workshop, in which most people were very fluent in French. In fact, there were three people working on a new Cixous book—her agent asked them to send a sample, and that sample was really agonized over. But they had divided up the work in certain ways. When we would hear parts of it there were really tricky things we would notice, but it was quite obvious which student—I think we could have voted—had the most talent, and it’s not that she did not get a lot of suggestions too that were true improvements.

CM: So they could be competent, but maybe not outstanding translators. I don’t believe that I would have nearly so much trouble about assigning grades if I were teaching in that situation. In our literary workshop, the students all work on independent projects throughout the semester. In addition, there is a brief assignment each week, for which everyone prepares first a rough draft and then a final version, bringing the rough draft to class. The instructor must evaluate those final versions.

MGR: I tried that for a while, but I thought it did not give my students a chance to show what they could do in the best way. When they work with a text they have chosen, you go over the texts, you encourage the students to get the rights to their texts if it seems appropriate. We are really insistent about investigating that possibility, with the thought to obtaining publication. Everyone has a drill about copyrighting permission and how to go about obtaining it. Then, the literary translators are just siphoned out of the workshop and they begin to work on their individual projects, so that one would almost expect them all to get an A or an A, and evaluation is not difficult for the instructor.

CM: I understand, although I believe that the question of evaluation, even in the situation you describe, remains a vital and pressing issue for translators, translator trainers, and Translation Studies in general. But it’s one that would require an entire interview in itself to discuss thoroughly, and before we close I would like you to explain your observation at one point in our conversation that the translation student is usually “her.” The remark would certainly be accurate for the program at Kent, which is not a literary program, so both literary and nonliterary translation apparently attracts more students among women than among men. Do you have any thoughts about why this is?

MGR: You’re referring to a translator’s tendency to be self-effacing?

CM: I was thinking in more general terms. For instance, some of my colleagues who have national and international reputations are men and some of the strongest and most productive translators and translation scholars that I know are men. I cannot help but wonder why, in general, students are not picking up on that.

MGR: Well, I would have to extrapolate from my own program. At Binghamton there are more men in philosophy and comparative literature, from which we can recruit students; but although those students include more men than women, they are not the students with the strongest language foundation. The women are usually the ones who work better in foreign languages, and so they are more likely to turn up in the translation program. Some of the best work is done by both men and women, but the men usually have some cause to advance. I mean, they’re translating writers shot down by Islamic militants, for example, a Magrebian writer, or a writer from the Caribbean who cannot find an audience.

CM: Don’t you think that is often true for women also? With respect to feminism, for instance. I think what you say could also be said about women.

MGR: Well, we went through a phase when that seemed to be very, very true, but now I would say that people who are in feminism are among those philosophers and comparatists whose foreign language skills aren’t strong enough. They’ve become so much like men doing feminism that they don’t know the foreign language very well, and feminism has moved, you know, a decade or so beyond the recovery of writers.

CM: Yes, but I was thinking about the explicitly feminist work being done by some translators and translation scholars; although, as you say, “recovery” has become almost out of fashion, but feminist work in translation is not, or not only, an effort to recover particular writers. And it’s my impression that issues of gender, race, and class engage as many women as men.

MGR: Perhaps. Again, I can only speak in the context of the program at Binghamton. The person who holds our endowed fellowship is very much an activist, and she is a Latin Americanist, but there was a stage in the late 70s or maybe mid-70s when recovering women was very popular and we had a lot of people, both men and women, working with women writers. But recovery per se is no longer a part of the feminist movement.

CM: Or not part of the feminist agenda, I would say.

MGR: I remember that for a long time Women’s Studies cross-listed the translation workshop, but no one enrolled with that rubric. Even two people who are recovering women writers through their translations preferred to enroll under a different rubric. So things have changed and are still changing.

But let me add something with respect to “feminist” translation in the sense of placing in the foreground the feminist perspective inherent in the text, i.e., heightening the cues for a feminist reading. We are quite open to that at Binghamton, and I certainly approve of it.

CM: And, I infer, of the changes in both feminism and translation it implies.

MGR: Yes, definitely, which returns us to change, our leitmotif as translator. Language changes, usage changes, rhetorical fashions change and, inevitably, translation evaluation changes. I suggest that we accept that inevitability, even rejoice in it.