Translation and the academy

Via Three Percent comes a disgraceful tale of translation and tenure ($). A sample:

Mark Anderson, who is on leave from the Germanic-languages department at Columbia University, has experienced the vicissitudes that beset academic translators. In graduate school, he did a translation of poetry by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Princeton University Press published the book, which won a prize from the American Academy of Poets.

After Mr. Anderson, a Kafka scholar, got a job as an assistant professor at Columbia, he recalls in an e-mail message, “I was offered the chance to translate Kafka’s The Trial and was about to submit a sample when my chair got word of it and advised me, rightly, I think, not to do this until I finished my book and got tenure. Which I did.” He published a translation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser­ while still untenured—but under a pseudonym (“Jack Dawson,” which according to Mr. Anderson is a pun on Kafka’s Czech name and means “son of Kafka”). “We had a celebratory lunch after I got tenure at Columbia, and I told the story and got a good laugh,” Mr. Anderson says. “But it’s a real issue, and I think my chair gave me excellent advice.”

Excellent advice, perhaps, if you still want to be part of such a twisted institution. As Chad W. Post of Three Percent puts it:

It seems that the main problem is in getting people to accept the idea of translation as scholarship. Which is weird to anyone actually involved in the production or promotion of literature in translation. (And by “weird” I mean “fucking incomprehensible.”) But I’ve heard from a number of people about how hard it is to justify this activity in a system that favors the production of slender monographs that are read by a couple hundred scholars.

Now, I don’t lament for its own sake the fact that we don’t see more literature in translation published in the Anglo world, and I don’t like to read much translated literature—because I recognize the enormous difficulty inherent in doing a good job, and the fact that it really, really is (or should be) scholarship. And it’s hard to trust someone to intermediate a book for you like that. But the idea that there’s even a question between the value of translating major writers versus writing the nth journal article or monograph that will only be accessible to other people inside the incestuous network that makes such an out-of-whack value judgment to begin with is absurd.