One of the world’s leading scholars of translation, Professor Susan Bassnett, introduces the concept of “translational imagination” in a wide-ranging keynote speech for Bristol Translates.
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Known as a staunch advocate of creative approaches to translation, Professor Bassnett seeks to draw a line under centuries of debates around “faithfulness, accuracy, exact equivalence” which, in her view, have only led to translators being seen, in the popular imagination, as traitors undeserving of the reader’s trust.
Instead, Bassnett encourages us to think of translations as impermanent interpretations of a source text that, ultimately, matters much less than the new creation.
The lecture culminates in a new vision of creative translation as a “quest.” Bassnett evokes a number of contemporary poet-translators, notably Ann Carson and Cieran Carson, who are engaged in “a process of creating new works for their own time, bringing the dead back to life and, through translating, taking us, their readers on a quest with them.”
