Translation and the Illusion of Transparency: a Case Study of Ezra Pound and Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

Surveying the history of translation theories, whether British concept of domestication, German Romantics’ theory of foreignization, Roman Jakobson’s concept of de-familiarization, Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybrid, one could discern that the priority has been given to the original author and that a translation has been viewed as a derivative or a potentially false copy. However, examining the cases of Ezra Pound and R. Tagore, a translator’s own cognitive immediacy and authorial decisions make more critical impact on producing what Benjamin calls “an echo of the original,” which transcends both the original and the translation. Therefore, this paper approaches to Pound and Tagore as a translator and gives full recognition to a translator’s authorship by means of re-examining the dispute between Ezra Pound and R. Tagore in the estimation of English Gitanjali. In particular, it tries to shed a critical light to the inevitability of a translator’s visibility in the signifying process of translation.