Translating the subaltern [Study of the relationship between translation and culture]

With regard to the most celebrated and pivotal of west Icelandic writers, Stephan G. Stephansson, all these questions endure. It is possible to hold, and defend, three contradictory views on the translatability of Stephansson: a) Stephansson's poetry is untranslatable; b) Stephansson is such a good poet that even a bad translation is unable to ruin his work; or c) Stephansson's poetry is theoretically transferrable into English but an adequate translation has not come along yet. There are good reasons for wondering about the relationship between translation and culture when it comes to Stephansson. That relationship is rendered more ambiguous by the shifting notions of culture itself. The placement of Stephansson's work in the Canadian literary arena is ambiguous at best. Even though Stephansson lived and worked in Alberta, his poetry is inaccessible to Canadian readers who do not read Icelandic. Therefore, there is practically no Stephansson scholarship in Canada. In Iceland, Stephansson is a slightly anomalous figure. Since his poetry draws on a culture and a language in dislocation, in migration and fluctuation, and his metaphors pertain to what for Icelanders is an alien landscape, he exists as a floating figure, slightly off to the side, even while being recognized as a literary master. Much more recently, in 1985, Derrida wrote his Des Tours de Babel, wherein he goes to the heart of the matter. Translation discourse arose during the Reformation, when the rise of Protestantism announced the need for vernacular translations of the Bible so everyone everywhere could read God's word for themselves. It is interesting to note that no discussion of untranslatability ever kept zealous Christians from translating the word of God. If we feel that Stephansson's Icelandic is so complex that it cannot be rendered into English, we must therefore feel that Icelandic is more complicated than the words of God. If God can be translated, why not Stephansson? However, Derrida indicates that the story of the tower of Babel is about diversification of language as a form of punishment. Because people raised a tower for themselves to aspire to the heavens, it was presumably just punishment that their goal could never be reached because they would never be able to communicate across language barriers. We therefore have mythological justification for our inability to translate. Paradoxically, God "at the same time imposes and forbids translation" (222). "Translation becomes l