'Not One Between Equals': Anita Raja Dives Into Translation's Secrets & Mysteries

In her article, "Translation as a Practice of Acceptance," Anita Raja discusses her experience translating works from German, especially Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Georg Büchner. Her essay, which originally took the form of a lecture at NYU Florence titled "La traduzione come pratica dell'accoglienza," appears in Asymptote in translation from the Italian by Rebecca Falkoff and Stiliana Milkova. From the beginning:

For thirty-five years I have had a secondary but constant side job as a literary translator from German. I have translated—and continue to translate—essentially for pleasure. Since translation for me has never been a job to pay the bills, I have always been able to choose the texts that interest me, texts of good, even lofty, literary quality, texts requiring an intense involvement. In these pages I will draw on my work as the translator of two contemporary, twentieth-century women writers, Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, and of a nineteenth-century writer, Georg Büchner.

What does it mean for me to translate literature? It means establishing an intense relationship which unfolds entirely within the written word, a relationship which begins with one written text and produces a second written text; it is therefore not only a relationship between two languages but above all a relationship between two modes of writing, between two utterances that are by nature strongly personal.

This relationship is not one between equals—in fact, it is characterized by inequality. It requires a particular disposition: the translator must retreat so as to accept the language of the other, to allow herself to be invaded by it so as to accommodate it.

Of course I am referring to translating the work of a great writer with a great linguistic capacity. In this case the translator submits to the authority and wonder of the original text, and offers her own language with love, with passion, with admiration, and even with devotion. If these conditions are fulfilled, then to translate is to position oneself to accept a tightly structured text, to surrender, word after word and sentence after sentence, to the text’s needs, to compel one’s own more modest linguistic capacity to grow and rise to the level of the original.

Read more in Asymptote.