and temporary use.” In the present translation I have used English idioms from a variety of times and places, in the hope that readers who find some episodes hard to follow will find others enjoyably familiar.
73.Raymond Queneau, Exercices de style. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. On constrained writing in general, see Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium; and Hofstadter, Le ton beau de Marot.
74.I’m not sure that I agree with Kilito that “chaque séance . . . tourne autour d’un genre” (Séances, 244), though if the claim is true it would help make the case for my approach.
75.Translating into a particular historical or literary idiom is of course nothing new either. For examples and discussion see Steiner, After Babel, 352–71. Note, however, that the cases he discusses involve putting the entirety of the foreign work into a past register of the target language, not using many different registers in the course of a single translation. By using some of the “many voices, standard and nonstandard, that constitute English speech and writing,” I am hoping, among other things, “to interrogate the unified appearance that English is given” in naturalizing translations (Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 190; see also 235 and 273).
76.Kroll, “Translation, or Sinology,” 561.
77.I suspect that Kroll might describe my work as an example of what Dryden calls “imitation” (see “Translation, or Sinology,” 561). But an imitator “assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion” (cited in Steiner, After Babel, 267–68), while my English Impostures, though cast in a variety of idioms, strives always to maintain the sense. (Forsaking the words, it seems to me, is inevitable.) Being put into non-Standard English does not, in itself, make a translation inaccurate.
78.Benabdelali, “Fī mā lā yaqbalu t-tarjamah / De l’intraduisible,” in Ḍiyāfat, 11–17, at 13.
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