Pseudo Pseudo-translation: on the potential for footnotes in translating Li Shangyin

Abstract

Literary translators into English hate footnotes. This is doubtless due in large part to an antipathy for the anemic quality of academic versions, for which footnotes have long been a hallmark. And yet writers from T. S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov to David Foster Wallace and Mark Danielewski have incorporated footnotes as an essential (if ironic) feature of their non-anemic, non-academic works or texts in English. Furthermore, pseudo-translations—which add to and draw from the expansion of generic norms seen in literary translation proper—have also taken advantage of annotations and other paratextual elements in framing their “foreign” interventions. Starting with another look at footnotes in experimental literature and pseudo-translations, my presentation will consider whether our current ethics and aesthetics of literary translation into English allow for the possibility of footnotes as contributing to the literary, and not only scholarly, effect of a translation. From there I will engage in the role of annotation in the editorial tradition of China, particularly with reference to the printing and dissemination of Li Shangyin 李商隱 (c. 813 – 858), a poet for whom the annotative urge reaches something of an apotheosis. Can a new translational practice not only reconcile the Chinese critical tradition with the English-language reader’s need for explanation of reference and cultural background in the encounter with a poet as recondite and erudite as Li Shangyin, but also merge the dueling demands of scholarly and literary translation? My presentation is in search of an answer.