Translation archives: an introduction

For archival scientists, the archive is both a source of research objects and an object of research. The current issue of Meta adopts this perspective to explore archives as repositories of the evidence of translation and as sites that shape our understanding of the translation process, the translation profession, and the lives of translators. Over the past decades, translation research has grown in complexity and relevance through a series of encounters with other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive sciences, history, and intercultural studies (Gambier 2006: 31). The archive enriches this dialogue, firstly, by offering an invaluable trove of primary sources for such inquiry, and secondly, by presenting a new vector through which to measure, critique, and conceptualize translation practice, its function and status in societies past and present. Researchers comb the archive for materials most relevant to their own investigation, yet a single source lends itself to a variety of readings: a translation draft of a poem, for example, will stimulate a literary scholar to decode its variations and intertextual references, a sociologist will use it when sketching out the translator’s habitus and professional milieu, the cognitive scientist may detect the operation of memory and environment, a linguist its stylistic patterns or socio-linguistic phenomena, and so on. Crucially, the materials encountered in the archive, or their absence, provoke questions about the value accorded to some translators over others. Who is collected, how, why, and by whom? These issues are examined in the articles of this issue of Meta, the first attempt in the field of translation studies to interrogate the status of translation archives from diverse perspectives. The first section presents sociological and historical analyses of the archives of publishers dating from Victorian England, Finland in the 1880s-1940s, and Franco’s Spain. The second offers case studies of individual archives, giving vital insights into the professional networks and working processes of influential translators: from Germany, Elmar Tophoven; from Ireland and France, Samuel Beckett; and from Brazil, Haroldo de Campos. The third section demonstrates how rethinking translation through the perspective of the archive stimulates conceptual innovation, be it through contact with narrative theory or through reflection on how a translation archive may shape one’s relationship to one’s own self and tongue, mother and family. Lastly, three interviews trace the recent founding and the evolution of three important translation archives: the Lilly Library (Indiana University Bloomington), the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Caen, France), and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach, Germany). Our present contribution examines the contested status of the historical record itself, the way it has been apprehended by translation scholars, and the potential of research within the archives. In the age of an exponentially expanding internet, filled with countless galaxies of data, managed by innumerable technologies and applications, the traditional notion of an archive appears somewhat distant. Yet this image has a tenacious hold on the popular imagination, conjuring up a vault-like edifice of state populated with public servants (from the inside) and historians (from the outside). In the context of Western democracies this model derives from a method of historical research, a notion of preserved evidence, and an ideology of continuous, national heritage, indebted to two nineteenth-century European phenomena in particular. Firstly, in this period national archives were consolidated by states in an effort to symbolize and institutionalize the continuity of national identity—from newly founded nations, such as Germany (Fritzsche 2005), to those that had experienced regime change, such as France, with the transformation of the royal archives into the Archives Nationales (Hildesheimer 1997) or the Bibliothèque du Roi into the Bibliothèque Nationale (Favier 2004). Even states that …