Panel: Processes of Self-Translation and Multiple Texts
Copanelists: Lee Elaine Skallerup Bessette and Joanne Karpinski
An important, yet unrecognized, figure in American creative and intellectual twentieth century life, composer Dorothy Dushkin has fifty-three listed works in her opus, including her Quintet for Oboe and Strings that gained national recognition in 1976 when it was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Dushkin kept a diary from 1919 until close to her death in 1992. Her compositional works, along with her diary and correspondence, are housed at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where in 2006 I received a grant to study this material. This is the first paper to come out of this original archival research.
In the 1960s Dushkin attempted to turn excerpts from her diary into what she called “intellectual commentaries.” But in constructing this manuscript, “The Glassy Interval,” Dushkin left out her subjectivity, the variegated ways that the narrative “I” of her diary made her writing distinctly hers. This paper utilizes Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” to consider why Dushkin’s manuscript might be seen as an unsuccessful work, a “bad translation” that was returned by publishers despite her attempts over decades to get it published.
Benjamin advocates for a non-literal approach to translation that focuses primarily on the essential substance of a work, its sense. Benjamin’s approach, however, is decontextualized. He does not address the problematic of the translator’s subjectivity, the gendered politics of writing, nor influences of class privilege and regional identity.
This paper concludes that good translation also depends on context: that Dushkin was a woman creating in a particular place and time matters. This context then sets the stage for understanding the choices Dushkin made in translating her diary into the commentary form. Because words have emotional connotations, Dushkin may have gotten in her own way, blocking out the essential substance and value of her original work.
Kaitlin Briggs is Associate Director of Honors Writing and Thesis Research in the Honors Program at the University of Southern Maine.