Quotation & Translation

In last week's class, we briefly touched upon the topic of collaboration: is collaborative reading the best model for the interpretation of interdisciplinary art (such as digital poetry)? My response to this was the whole "death of the author" notion described by theorists such as Roland Barthes and Stanley Fish (I know - shouldn't lump them together), in which meaning stems from both author and reader as well as the cultural contexts surrounding both of ends of the game. That is to say, all reading is collaborative, as is all artistic creation.

Another topic Lori, our prof, recently brought to our attention was quotation. This New York Times article mentions recent controversy over works by (German) Helene Hegemann and (American) David Shields, who both make extensive use of quotation and appropriation of previous writers' words, blog posts, etc. In no way is this technique new: Shields himself cites the likes of Joyce, Eliot, Sterne, and others as literary thieves. Walter Benjamin, whose critical work is chock full of quotations, composed his gargantuan Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) entirely from quotations. The Taoist classic Lieh-tzu (written around 200-300 CE, and which I'm currently translating) borrows liberally from the older Taoist classic Chuang-tzu. Ecclesiastes 1:9, written sometime between 400-200 BCE, states: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: there is no new thing under the sun." And yea, that was before modernism.

What's new about the controversy is copyright law. The Google Books Project has brought this issue to the forefront: what business has one business to make their business from another's business? Well, apparently our founding father's thought it was necessary to a vital democracy that ideas circulate freely, so they limited copyright to 15 years. However, this length of time grew until, after the most recent incarnation of the Mickey Mouse Law, it now lasts "the life of the author plus 70 years" or, for corporate authorship, "120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier." Given the enormous wealth to be made from art (some types more than others, naturally), many artists and publishers get seriously pissed off when someone appropriates their work for a profit. Thus the current controversy.

What's interesting to me is how closely this relates to translation. When I quoted from Ecclesiastes earlier, I quoted as if the original were English, even though the original is more like "מַה־שֶּֽׁהָיָה֙ ה֣וּא שֶׁיִּהְיֶ֔ה וּמַה־שֶּׁנַּֽעֲשָׂ֔ה ה֖וּא שֶׁיֵּעָשֶׂ֑ה וְאֵ֥ין כָּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ׃," which I quoted from the Westminster Leningrad Codex online. To what extent should we copyright translation? (The laws don't extend nearly as long for translations as they do for original works.) Are translators original authors, as Ezra Pound asserts, or collaborators drawing on entire cultural traditions, as theorist Lawrence Venuti asserts (though later contradicts himself, but that's a discussion for another course)?

How about when translation is passed off as one's own work, such as the many parts of Paradise Lost that are direct translations from Ovid and Virgil? How about when one's own work is presented as a translation, such as Kenneth Rexroth's The Love Poems of Marichiko? What if the work I translate from and pass off as my own is still copyrighted? What if I translate the fake Chinese versions of Book 7 of the Harry Potter Series - should I be sued?

For my final project, I've been considering translating parts of the Lieh-tzu into digital poetry, working with a collaborator, adding explicitly collaborative (digital) elements, and inviting readers to interpret it collaboratively. Is this a form of quotation? Am I right to call it a translation? Is it an original work? Of both of us, or just my programmer/collaborator?

All this and more.