by Susan Sontag
“Joseph Brodsky” was written in 1997 as the afterword to Mikhail Lemkhin, Joseph BrodskylLeningrad Fragments (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
“On Being Translated,” a speech given in November 1995 at a conference on translation held at Columbia University and organized by Francesco Pellizzi, the editor of Res, was printed in Res 32 (Autumn 1997).
Notes
1 The version of the aesthete sensibility I once tried to include under the name “camp” can be regarded as a technique of taste for making the aesthete appreciations less exclusionary (a way of liking more than one really wants to like) and as part of the democratizing of dandy attitudes. Camp taste, however, still presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination—in contrast to the taste incarnated by, say, Andy Warhol, the franchiser and mass marketer of the dandyism of leveling.
2 This modernist dictum that writing is, ideally, a form of impersonality or absence underlies Barthes’s move to eliminate the “author” when considering a book. (The method of his S/Z: an exemplary reading of a Balzac novella as virtually an authorless text.) One of the things Barthes does as a critic is to formulate the mandate for one kind of writer’s modernism (Flaubert, Valéry, Eliot) as a general program for readers. Another is to contravene that man date in practice—for most of Barthes’s writing is precisely devoted to personal singularity.
3 There is a metaphoric use of translation-as-adaptation, which evokes the older, physical sense of translation: translating (transposing) from one medium to another. Here there are no guidelines about what may be produced by following the original more, rather than less, literally; or (as is often recommended) choosing an inferior work to strut one’s stuff. When Berlin Alexanderplatz was “translated to the screen” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the filmmaker preserved a large part of the spirit of Döblin’s masterpiece, and also made a film that is a masterpiece. What might seem a counterexample, with equally exemplary results: Henry Bernstein’s Mélo is far from a great play, but Alain Resnais’s Mélo, which scrupulously follows the text of Bernstein’s boulevard melodrama of 1928, is a great film. Resnais did not have to improve Bernstein’s play. He only had to add to it his own genius.
WHERE THE STRESS FALLS. Copyright © 2001 by Susan Sontag. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sontag, Susan, 1933—
Where the stress falls : essays / Susan Sontag. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42131-1
PS3569.O6547 W48 2001
814’54—dc21
2001033704
First Picador Edition: November 2002