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1. 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.

2. The archival record: a contested history

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 maintained monarchic rule supplemented royal archives with classification schemes to catalogue papers into new legislative, administrative, juridical, or historical divisions (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011: 20-21). This facilitated the work of a rising cadre of university-based, professional historians, who developed an evidence-based methodology that valorized the archive as a repository of objective “sources” for their histories of the nation state, in Europe and beyond (Carbonell 1976; Den Boer 1987/1998; Kelley 1984; Keylor 1975; Noiriel 1990).

The leading historiographer of the “scientific” historical method, the Prussian Leopold von Ranke, famously refused “the office of judging the past, of instructing the contemporary world to the benefit of the future,” he claimed his work “just wants to say what actually happened”[1] (Ranke 1824: v-vi; our translation). Ranke centred inquiry within the archive, whose authority guaranteed the objective truth of the record; this unwavering logic permeates the fifty-four volumes of his collected works.

Authentic history scratched at the archival sources until an assemblage of facts revealed the forms and contours of events that could then be woven into narratives about change. The particular was the only path to the general. Interpretation flowed logically and convincingly from the assemblage of information. The meaning of history itself emerged naturally from the authority of facts, which spoke for themselves […] Archives fused historical description and interpretation with what the repositories themselves inscribed as authentic documentation.

Blouin and Rosenberg 2011: 14-15

Archival documents thus spoke their own truths independent of interpretation. The historian is not like Thucydides a teller of tales and weaver of narratives, but one who elicits the truth residing within sources themselves. Crucially, in this period notions of archival and historical fact converged to guarantee the scientific authenticity of the newly emerged discipline of history.

Ranke’s equivalent in French historiography, Jules Michelet, overlayed this scientific historical method with a powerful rhetoric of archival dust—the title of Carolyn Steedman’s (2002) monograph on the archive. She translates Michelet’s account of his early venture into the National Archives in 1833:

I was not slow to discern in the midst of the apparent silence of the galleries, a movement and murmur which were not those of death. These papers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no better than to be restored to the light of day…. [He addresses the manuscripts and the dead] Softly my dear friends, let us proceed in order if you please … as I breathed their dust, I saw them rise up. They rose from the sepulchre … as in the Last Judgement of Michelangelo or in the Dance of Death. This frenzied dance … I have tried to reproduce in [my] work.[2]

Steedman 1998: 68

One of the most famous emblems of archival work, here Michelet’s historian revives the lifecycle of the historical record, becoming history’s medium. Yet Michelet’s hauntology evidently introduces a contradiction between the scientific principle of the document’s objectivity and the historian’s role in translating its voice. Library shelves have since been filled with disputes among historians of different persuasions on this topic. New historicists questioned the capacity of archival records, focused on institutional and political details and a patriarchal model of history’s great moments, to offer any authentic representation of history. Indebted to the work of historians of the French journal Annales, notably Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, social historians adopted a perspective of the longue durée, locating the particular in broad social, economic, and political trends. Claude Lévi-Strauss underscored the way linguistic and communicative structures shape the limits of both social interaction and the capacity for documents to “speak.” From these perspectives, the historical record became important for what it failed to articulate as much as for its unique voice, a move that paved the way for post-structuralist critiques in the 1960s and 70s of historians’ reproduction of the “grand narratives” of the Enlightenment, typified by Michel Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge discourse in Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist approach, which seeks to elicit from texts the voices suppressed within. These two intellectuals are singled out here because they were also instrumental in transforming the archive into a theoretical concept, which has profoundly altered the way one may now speak of it.

3. The archive within/without: memory and society

Today, the archive can be shorthand for any number of different concepts or sites that stand in a metaphorical relationship to the traditional archive. This is because they perform certain archival functions: recording, storing, cataloguing, conserving, preserving data. Archival studies inherits Foucault’s post-structuralist notion of the archive as a site that not only facilitates the retrieval and reproduction of knowledge and meaning but also actively produces it: analogous with a text or document, meaning within the archive is structured by and in turn structures discourses of power and knowledge. If society itself assumes “archival” form, in less abstract terms, today, the traditional archive is acknowledged to be no longer an objective “mirror” of society but

the product of decisions made by a range of stakeholders, from those who wrote the papers they contained, to the archivists who have processed and cared for them, to the state bureaucracies and officials who have determined which records were saved and which were destroyed, to the scholars who have excavated their contents over the years.

Yale 2015: 332

Archives remain a key tool and an important technology of political power for the state, within which the papers of translators occupy a marginal, if not spectral, presence. They are often found in the archives of authors or publishers, somewhat incidentally but nonetheless there, buttressing the structure upon which literary authority is publicly institutionalized and memorialized. These relationships evoke the etymological connections between the French fonds [archive] and fondations (architectural and institutional foundations), each deriving from fonder, a verb used from the early twelfth century to denote the act of establishing the theological and organizational principles of religion, and in civic contexts for the founding of a city or a centre of power. By the fifteenth century, the past participle of fonder denoted the possession of a principle, a motivation, a justification (un propos est bien fondé).[3] The archive or fonds was thus traditionally the geographic and architectural site that institutionalized legal, political, and moral authority. Jacques Derrida interrogates such historical connections in his influential essay Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (1995). He explores the nomological function of the archive as arkhè, its domiciliation of the law, reflected in a principle that is “in the order of the commencement as well as in the order of the commandment” (1995/1996: 2).[4] Such a conception of the archive may seem foreign or disproportionate to the status of the materials encountered by translation researchers, who discover files that are prototypically aporetic, incomplete, and fragile, often quite anomalous, as if they are the by-product of some other archival process, like the collecting of an author’s papers or the institutionalizing of a publisher’s archive. Yet with translation becoming a touchstone concept, even zeitgeist, of the age of information, and at a time when some translators can achieve a high degree of public notoriety for having translated authors of immense cultural capital—such as Gregory Rabassa, English translator of Gabriel García Marquez—prestigious national and university libraries in Western democracies, endowed with considerable financial resources, have accorded translators their own space within this institutionalization and memorialization of culture. Such projects have expanded into full scale digital humanities archives, like the Samuel Beckett manuscript project,[5] with its digitized manuscripts and tools for translation comparison that may be configured synchronically, to compare different language versions of source and text, or diachronically, following the genetic evolution of a source or text, or combinations of both.

Derrida challenges the idea of the archive as the centre of command and archon, the arbiter of its law. Using a deconstructionist tactic, he interrogates the etymology of the archive (“archive,” “arkhè,” “arkheion,” “archon”) to discover contradictions that reveal cracks in its armature, confirming for Derrida the absence of an originary signifier or locus of the law. He identifies the archive with the beginning of a structural breakdown that permeates society in technologies of repetition; his arkhè expands into a kind of decentralized network of information storage accessed by individuals. Derrida critiques the desire both to affirm the archive as a symbolic embodiment of state authority and to covet its power: the archive’s mal, the sickness or fever it provokes in us, denotes both the imposition of an authority built upon unstable foundations and our longing to know and possess this authority, to enter the archive with the intention of apprehending origins. This Freudian reading diagnoses an “archiviolithic” death drive, an archive-destroying narcissistic will, propagated by one’s very efforts to acquire and know the archive.

The invention of the archive as a post-structuralist philosophical category has provoked bemusement from some members of the archival profession. Jeannette A. Bastian (2016: 3) notes that “[r]ejection, indignation, speculation and even amusement have characterized the reactions of archivists to what has often seemed to them to be a misguided, misdirected, poorly understood and overly theorized construct of a primarily practical pursuit.” Alienating for some, Derrida’s analysis can nonetheless attune us to the implications of our more naïve aspirations when entering archival spaces. Indeed, there is a touch of archival “fever” in some early reflections on the archive by contributors to Génétique et traduction (Bourjea 1995a), the first collection devoted to an “archival” approach to translation. Numerous authors in this volume cite, examine, and draw inspiration from Paul Valéry’s (1992: 119) provocative description of the work of translation as “la sensation… du poète au travail.” For Valéry (1957: 215-216) translation is the path that takes the writer to the imaginative realm from which the original was born.

The work of translation, done with regard for a certain approximation of form, causes us in some way to try walking in the tracks left by the author; and not to fashion one text upon another, but from the latter to work back to the virtual moment of its formation… From that vividly imagined state one must make one’s way down toward its resolution in a work in a different tongue.[6]

Valéry 1957/1992: 120-21

Valéry’s image of the translator retracing the author’s compositional process, to discover not its textual simulacrum but the source of original creativity inspired many scholars to envision their genetic criticism as a kind of poetics, whereby the act of reconstituting the genesis of a translation through the study of successive manuscript versions revived the creative process, bringing the researcher into contact with the vital moment of creation. The editor of Génétique et traduction affirmed “the great originality of [this] common path” (Bourjea 1995b: 7), whereby scholars endeavour to “follow closely (if not reveal completely) the creative process” (Bourjea 1995b: 6; our emphasis and translation).[7] Today, most genetic critics would demure from such heady optimism, and make no claim to penetrate the infamous black box of a translator’s mind or reveal its inner mysteries. The same applies for the examination of archival materials for what they may divulge of the translator’s milieu and networks, status and habitus, working conditions, income, protocols, collaborators, and professional ethics.

Post-structuralist redefinitions of the archive also encouraged the development of a broader archival imaginary, within which “archival” dynamics—preservation, storage, indexing, cataloguing, retrieval, reuse—came to define acts of memory or artistic practice. We can now imagine a translation archive beyond the confines of the institution to be any artefact or space inscribed with the material history of one or more translators’ work—a hard drive, box of manuscript pages, a private study, an office, an online forum, a city—sites that witness the labour of translation and its relationship to its environment, collaborators and other semiotic systems. Indeed, translation archives—in the indicative—continually updating and recontextualizing its sources. And if translation is imaginable as a process of archiving, what might archivists or indeed other disciplines learn from translation studies? Polysystems theory (Even-Zohar 2005), descriptive translation studies (Toury 1995/2012), Skopos theory (Reiss and Vermeer 1984/2014) and translation sociology (Simeoni 1998; Wolf and Fukari 2007; Heilbron 2008; Meylaerts 2008) have each in their different ways shifted attention from a translation’s fidelity to its source to the role it plays as an intercultural intermediary destined for a target audience. Translation in this sense is not a memorializing activity that sacralises an original laden with the past, it looks ahead and is heavy with the future.

Here, one may compare the translation archive with the lieu de mémoire—in the sense used by Pierre Nora in his influential LesLieux des mémoire (1984), translated as Realms of Memory (1984/1996)—Nora’s places, sites, or causes invested with material, symbolic, and functional qualities. “The archive” Nora (1984/1996: 14) writes, “is a purely material site that becomes a lieu de mémoire only if imagination invests it with a symbolic aura.” A lieu de mémoire arises with the “mutual overdetermination” (Nora 1984/1996: 14) of history and memory.[8] He recalls the historian’s traditional distinction between direct and indirect sources: the former are created with the knowledge that they would be reproduced, such as laws and works of art, or, we may add, a translation or a translation contract; the latter are generated incidentally to an historical process, and so could include a translator’s notes or manuscripts, correspondence with the publisher and collaborators. The intent to be remembered is crucial in the definition of a lieu de mémoire, for without this intention there are only lieux d’histoire. The non-institutional translation archives evoked above are all potential lieux de mémoire in Nora’s sense; these material archives await the attention of translation researchers, when they will be invested with symbolic value.

The concept of memory is a leitmotif of theorizations of the archive, although what is meant by memory is not always agreed upon. In Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge (1969/1972) as much as in Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995/1996), the archive is constructed by social hierarchies, language, and systems, yet it is also a surrogate memory for individuals within society. For Nora modern memory is itself “archival” because “[i]t relies entirely on the specificity of the trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image” (Nora 1984/1996: 8). He argues that the contemporary “obsession” with the archive derives from the fact that we have lost contact with true memory, which equates with a living memory that is “social, collective, and all-embracing” (Nora 1984/1996: 8)—exemplified by the undocumented cultural memory of Jewish peoples—and which subsists today only in social practices that manifest unconsciously as “gestures and habits, unspoken craft traditions, intimate physical knowledge, ingrained reminiscences, and spontaneous reflexes” (Nora 1984/1996: 8). From direct to indirect memory, our historicized memory has been “transformed” by a contrary “passage through history” making it “willful and deliberate, experienced as a duty rather than spontaneous; psychological, individual and subjective” (Nora 1984/1996: 8). The less memory is experienced viscerally, and within, the greater the need for “external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory” (Nora 1984/1996: 8). For Nora, “[h]istoricized memory comes to us from without” (Nora 1984/1996: 10).[9] One might infer that an “archival turn” in translation studies is provoked—as it was in other social sciences over the past decades—by a desire to move from our historicized memory of translation and reconnect with its true memory. Certainly, recent interest in the figure and agency of the translator in the sociology of translation, and its derivative “translator studies” (Chesterman 2009), are testimony of a will to comprehend the translator as a visceral, embodied being with individual traits. Archival work supports a sociology of translations, of products within an international market; a sociology of translators, of translators themselves, their habitus, professional networks, gender, sexual orientation, their paratextual discourse and ideology; as well as a sociology of translating, of the sociological dimensions to the translation process itself, its practices, methods, and norms.

The evolution of translation technologies profoundly influences the sites (lieux de mémoire) and epistemologies of translation archives. A new generation of literary translators is using the power of the internet to self-organize on online platforms, seeking to preserve their own rights and working conditions in the face of technological change and diminishing remuneration. These sites are themselves translation archives containing rich data for researchers, as Susan Pickford’s contribution to this edition highlights. For Derrida, archival technologies facilitate different meanings and ontologies of the archive: “The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future (Derrida 1995/1996: 17).[10] Beyond the internet, the translation archive and lieu de mémoire that has most altered the work of professional translators in recent times is a technology of memory. The translation memory has allowed for a profound restructuring of the work of translation. Its .tmx file, standing for translation memory exchange, fragments source and target texts into lists of bilingual units (usually sentences) to be reused within databases, software, and applications for future translation. The naming of this file signals an aspiration to endow it with the true memory of a living translator. But with perfect recall of terabytes of bilingual texts, its hypermnesia surpasses anything humanly possible. It feeds computer-assisted translation systems, which struggle nonetheless to understand context, irony, allusion, humour, denoting the fact that this memory has become an entirely transformed historicized memory, coming from without (advances in AI notwithstanding). The primary function of the translation memory is not to represent the past—although one can reconstitute a source text from a translation memory, or even use its record of textual evolution to represent past translation processes—it fragments the source at the moment of archiving, effectively destroying the aura of authenticity that attaches to material objects from the past. Used within a CAT tool, the translation memory explodes its source—the metonym of the past cherished by archivists—becoming shards of translation to facilitate an ideal future, one where the labour of translation is significantly reduced, and potentially automated. With an ironic twist on this uncanny Benjaminian trope, in this future of translation, the human labour of transporting words from one language into another is potentially eliminated, thus liberating the translator to ascend to more noble tasks—or at least those too complex for computers—such as, stylistic revision and editing, scanning for coherence and terminological consistency. Typically augmented with more and more past translations, the translation memory is an archive structured towards the future; it does not memorialize the past, it anticipates future texts to translate, equipping this moment to come with atomized memories of the past, which are themselves technologies in standing reserve. The translation memory shifts the function of the archive from a bulwark against forgetting the past into an apparatus for automating the future.

4. The archive in translation studies

Traditionally, the archive’s mnemic function has presupposed an ethical imperative (we should remember), which has pedagogical implications (we should learn from the past). For historians as much as geographers or legal theorists, the archive’s contents offer precious access to the past in order to understand the present. Elmar Tophoven, the celebrated German translator of French nouveau roman authors, also pioneered the development of archives designed to testify to the art of translation, which would become resources for translator training. From the 1970s he developed a unique method of “transparent translation,” whereby translators would record their translating process, noting down difficulties in lexis, syntax and style; their records were first recorded (on paper, later digitized) and archived for the purpose of aiding future translators encountering similar textual figures and problems (Cordingley 2020a). The uses of translation archives surpass their pedagogical value and the great variety of objects encountered therein calls for a diversity of approaches. For there may be no other lieu where translation studies scholars handle sources that are as varied, make discoveries that are as unexpected, and let themselves be guided as much by happy coincidence. Nowhere other than in the archive does translation appear, at least theoretically, in all of its innumerable dimensions, from the avant-texte to reception, passing through the stages of its making: composition, deletions, corrections; author correspondence, contracts, sales figures; reading notes, revised proofs, reviews. Even if researchers choose to concentrate on only one of these aspects, the archive must be appreciated holistically. Kujamäki (2018: 247) notes that archives contain information on translations, translation procedures and translators. A translator’s personal papers, for instance, include not only translation drafts, but correspondence with editors, publisher and other patrons, drafts, contracts, and diaries. These materials may be found in private archival holdings, in a publishers’ archive or national archives; they give precious insights into past working conditions and practices, personal and professional networks, power relations and commercial constraints. The archive’s contents are the result of chance, personal and institutional affiliations, biases, economic concerns, and physical restrictions.

These questions are, however, not new to translation studies. Many scholars in the past have made use of such resources, albeit in an ad hoc manner. María Guzmán’s (2010) analysis of Gregory Rabassa’s translations of Gabriel Garcia Márquez was built upon the Rabassa collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre at Boston University. Lawrence Venuti’s (1998: 136-152, 194-232) seminal work on the ethics of translation was informed by research of the Paul Blackburn papers and the Pellegrini and Cudahy publishers’ archive. Outi Paloposki (2017) discovered in the K. G. S. Suomalainen archive in the National Library of Finland and the Edlund publishing house archive in the Åbo Akademi University Library evidence of translators’ expanded competences (proposing books for translation, discussing strategies, comparing editions and making suggestions on titles, typography and illustrations). Gideon Toury (1995/2012) was perhaps the first to contemplate a methodology for apprehending the phases of a translation using archival sources in his study of Avraham Shlonsky’s Hebrew translation of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue. Toury’s method was expanded upon by Jeremy Munday (2013) in an analysis of David Bellos’s translation of George Perec’s Les Choses,[11] within which Munday built upon Toury’s categories of textual sources and extratextual sources. Munday’s next article on the topic (2014) advocated for the use of a microhistory approach, whereby fractured and discontinuous archives are studied in depth to extrapolate general conclusions. This methodology is pertinent for cases, like that of translators, where the archival record is often imperfect, although it may also exacerbate inequalities or deepen archival silences for already marginalized translators, especially for women, whose materials are even less likely to have survived and been collected. In her study of the evolution of the concept of the archive in modern France, the archival historian Jennifer S. Milligan (2005) concludes that reflections upon the archive “need to be careful not to presume, indeed reproduce, the authority of the institution that they seek to describe and critique” (Milligan 2005: 178). Following Milligan, archival research in translation studies needs to interrogate the assumption brought to bear upon archived materials, questioning why certain translation archives acquire their own authority while others are excluded or overlooked.

Breon Mitchell (2014), who from 2001 to 2012 built one of the largest translation archives in the world as director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, identifies four principal functions for literary translation archives. Firstly, he argues that by revealing elements of the creative process, archival materials give privileged access to the translator’s thought processes and intentions, while materials peripheral to the manuscripts, especially letters, can testify to the reasoning behind seemingly anomalous translation choices, and even, in more extraordinary cases, how an original work came to be modified in light of its translation. Secondly, archival documents of translators’ proposals, readers’ reports, the opinions of individual editors, all serve to demystify how and why certain literary works, and not others, migrate from one culture to next. He underscores the role of translators as expert readers in this process, demonstrating how their multiple competences are critical to the circulation of literature. Thirdly, archives reveal the business of translation; contracts for rights and royalties, the business of marketing, financial transactions, and so on attest to the financial as much as material conditions affecting translators’ work. Lastly, archives can serve a pedagogical function for future translators and teachers, demonstrating the phases and roles of the editorial chain, “from inception to publication, including early drafts, the submitted manuscript, editor’s revisions and copy editing, further revisions for galley proofs, and the final text” (Mitchell 2014: 265).

Translators’ papers will naturally be found in dedicated archives of a national literature in translation, as in the case of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma, where one finds manuscripts by Howard Goldblatt, Brian Holton, and Wai-lim Yip into English, or Wolfgang Kubin into German. Alternatively, translators’ papers may find their way into a national literature collection, where they testify to that culture’s international reach, but may be rather anomalous, surviving in the absence of a particular strategy of the institution with respect to translation. Within the Australian literature collection at the Victoria State Library, Melbourne, for example, one finds Ouyang Yu’s Chinese translation of celebrated author Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game.[12] Yu’s manuscript is written on little more than Bible paper; in the hand, each page feels like a testimony of the manuscript’s fragile survival; and yet the stack of these pages gives the impression of a solid corpus, a small brick in the foundations of Australia’s national literature.

The end of the Cold War and the demise of many authoritarian regimes has given state archives renewed importance. Multitudes of documents and sources have been discovered that witness histories suppressed by certain regimes, which reveal also the inner workings of those authorities. State records pertaining to the selection and censorship of foreign works for translation have been particularly rich sources for translation historians, evident, for example, in studies of fascist Italy (Rundle 2010) and Spain (work of the TRACE[13] group). Indeed, until recently, it seemed that “[f]or literary translation studies purposes, the most fruitful archives are generally state censorship files or the business records of a publisher” (Munday 2013: 127). More recently, a growing corpus of archival translation studies has testified to the diversity of archival resources available to researchers, facilitated by the increasing tendency for translators’ archives to be collected by libraries and specialized archives. Tens if not hundreds of institutions around the globe now acquire documents that were once invisible, or inaccessible, which puts them within arm’s reach of researchers. Many of these archives have been the subject of genetic case studies and critical reflection upon the methodology of genetic translation studies (Durand-Bogaert 2014; Cordingley and Montini 2015; Cordingley 2020b, forthcoming; Hersant 2020). Researchers in this newly emerged discipline need to seek out greater cross-disciplinary dialogue to enrich its epistemology. For instance, Biblical scholarship has a long history of studying the archives of the King James Bible translators and the working methods of its translation teams—a tradition whose methodologies and critical debates could enrich current genetic approaches to translation (Cordingley forthcoming).

Indeed, the archive itself may be viewed from a genetic perspective, as not just a repository of preexisting objects or products but as an object itself in continual reconstitution. The archival scientist Eric Ketelaar (2006: 187) echoes the concerns of both genetic and sociological translation researchers when he calls for a shift in focus from “the archive as a product to the archive as a process,” and from the physical artifact to its “context of creation [… and] the functions, processes, and transactions which cause documents to be created.” In this vein, the draft translations of Shakespeare by Victor Hugo, exhibited recently at the Musée Victor Hugo in Paris for their cultural heritage value, may for example, become the matter for genetic research as well as the starting point for a consideration of the place of translated documents within the museum itself. Philip Larkin (1983: 99) wrote of such archival transformations when distinguishing the “magical value” of an archival document, “the older, more universal” value arising from its survival (“this is the paper he wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them”), from the document’s “meaningful value” situated in the present, “the degree to which a manuscript helps to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of a writer’s work.”

Researchers are most likely to encounter translation manuscripts produced by famous writers who occasionally translated, such as Pope translating Homer, Pasolini translating Baudelaire or Proust translating Ruskin (Hersant 2021).[14] Also rare, though less and less so, are the manuscripts of translators of a certain fame who were never authors—often translators whose renown has grown after their death—and to whom an archive is dedicated, where one may find the manuscript of a translation of Tu Fu by David Hawkes, Joyce by Savitzky, Faulkner by Coindreau, or Proust by Scott Moncrieff. Furthermore, the archive includes the work of anonymous translators, which is of no less interest for translation studies, as Stuart Gillespie notes, having found in the British Library translations from the eighteenth century of Dante, Tasso, and Petrarch:

I have compiled this selection of texts from extant manuscripts for their intrinsic interest and pleasure, but also to suggest how further archival research might make more visible the extensive history of amateur translation of classic and contemporary Italian poetry in English, and how far from routine its products can be.

Gillespie 2019: 44

How many translations exist only in the archives? Gillespie (2011: 104) reminds us that “all histories of modern western literature […] are histories of major printed works.” Indeed, when we exhume unpublished translations from the archive and inquire into the circumstances and criteria that determined whether a translation was publishable, we shift the limits and parameters of those literatures, defined in national, cultural or historical terms. We learn also how the circulation of translated texts in different periods is contingent upon cultural mores: “There were mischievous and amorous translations of the Aeneid in early modern England. Virgil was not always stern and dour. But the more mischievous Aeneids found their audiences through manuscript distribution” (Brammal 2015: 110).

As memory’s prosthetic, the archive helps us to comprehend the horrors of war and genocide, slavery and revolution, defining moments of history, as well as broader movements and trends, the realities of everyday life and the lives “forgotten” from the tomes set before us. Yet the gatekeeping that accompanies institutional collections validates the histories of some over others, and archives have more often than not reflected, if not reproduced, society’s imbalances and injustices. Translation archives are no exception: their value depends on the care and the intuition, as much as the ideology and bias, of those who bring them into being. Ketelaar (2001) writes of the phases of archiving, from the traditional notion of the processes that capture a document, to what he terms “archivisation,” which includes the “creative phase before capture,” and the “archivalization,” another neologism “meaning the conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving,” whose “searchlight […] has to sweep the world for something to light up in the archival sense, before we proceed to register, to record, to inscribe it, in short before we archive it” (Ketelaar 2001: 132-33). If the papers of high prestige authors are coveted by archivists and the public, the same has not been the case for translators, a relatively marginalized demographic within the literary field, who have long experienced exclusion, indifference, and invisibility within the archives. Subsequently, translators tend not to deem it

necessary to conserve a commented trace of their translation choices so that they do not seem arbitrary—which they hardly ever are, even if the choice is made subconsciously—and so that the act of translation, already so prone to being evanescent, does not evaporate in the course of being accomplished.

Bataillon 1991: 59; our translation[15]

In “The Ordinariness of the Archive” Tom Osborne (1999) gives a frank account of the deception arising from not finding in the archive, a feeling translation researchers know only too well, for beyond the regrettable scarcity of translation records, many translator archives end up being somewhat disappointing, either because they contain only fair copies without corrections or revisions—making genetic analysis impossible—or because they lack the correspondence, the publishing contract, or the back-and-forth of proofing that would otherwise disclose the reasoning behind some translation choices.

Nonetheless, translation researchers are only beginning to explore the archival materials available to them; they are frequently the first to open a particular box in an archive or give attention to translation materials others have passed over. Practices inevitably vary between communities of translators, especially those who translate for a particular cause, are engagé, or have an acute sense of the historical significance of their work. In Shadow Archives, Jean-Christophe Cloutier (2019: 2) identifies an “archival impulse” as “the invisible hallmark of twentieth-century African American literary practice.” Cloutier details how the archival practice of this group is carried out in the belief of un passé à venir, of a future time when the past will be reckoned. A similar sense of the need to record and document their own creation was felt by many translators during the Arab Spring, the popular democratic movement that swept across the Maghreb and Middle East in 2010-2012, from Tahrir Square (Egypt) and Tunis (Tunisia) to Sanaʽa (Yemen) (Mehrez 2012). Unlike the African American authors who archived un passé à venir, these translators were seized by an impulse to bring to international attention a moment of democratic liberation that would define a community’s future. This translation was itself a form of archiving, and evidence of such work now serves the traditional purpose of documenting an historical moment, and a failed revolution—in his reflection on the translating of Cairo street art and graffiti, Lewis Sanders (2012: 153) wrote, somewhat auspiciously at the time, “this chapter is as much an archive of what will one day be, or has already been, painted over, dismantled, and erased.”

Cloutier discusses the biological metaphors and eugenicist ideologies that permeate post-war manuals for archivists in the United States. He explores how theories of the dynamic lifecycle of records—from creation and capture, to storage and maintenance, use and disposal—draw upon anxieties over reproductive rights, population control, genocide and eschatology. Extending Cloutier’s line of thinking, it is clear that postwar American discourses that evoke the salvation of certain documents over the desuetude of others reiterates eschatological tropes of elect and preterite in American Puritan rhetoric, of those whom God passes over and the chosen for whom he reserves a place in the afterlife. Cloutier (2019: 9) underlines the importance of an alternative narrative in which African American writers take that divine power into their own hands, imagining and preparing an alternative eschatology in which their own “archived lives matter.” If most literary translators have not conceived such a fate for themselves, believing their own papers to be less shadow archives than shadowed archives, quietly decaying in the penumbra cast by author and “original,” by foregrounding the archive as an object of research, this issue of Meta hopes to begin a shift in the archival imaginary of translators and translation researchers alike. The Cameroonian intellectual, Achille Mbembe (2002: 21) writes that the “imaginary” of the archive is “always situated outside its own materiality, in the story it makes possible.” Mbembe imagines the historian working in the aftermath of violence, “[f]ollowing tracks, putting back together scraps and debris, and reassembling remains” (Mbembe 2002: 25); he reframes Michelet’s trope of dust within a post-colonial context, arguing that the archivist can bring “the dead back to life by reintegrating them in the cycle of time” (Mbembe 2002: 25). The articles in this issue of Meta begin the task of bringing shadowed archives into light, reviving narratives otherwise lost to the past, stimulating the archival imaginary of translation studies.

5. This special issue

The four articles gathered in the first part of this issue reveal the diversity of publishers’ archives and suggest a number of innovative approaches for translation studies. Indeed, translation is considered here under multiple, sometimes unexpected aspects, illustrating its complex, non-linear, and often multi-agent practices, which testifies to the fact that a translation archive is not—not only—a repository of translation manuscripts and typescripts, but rather the reflection of the variegated phases leading from the selection of an original work to the reception of its translation. It is not only the linguistic process that is perceptible in a translator’s drafts and working notes, but also a social, cultural, and commercial practice, with its intellectual and material interactions as well as scientific, economic, and political dimensions.

Venturing into the publishers’ archives of the IMEC at Caen, France, and the online Emerging Translators’ Network based in the UK, Susan Pickford manages to eschew the main risk of a “Ginzburgian microhistory,” which would highlight only those translators endowed with considerable literary capital. By adopting a “prosopographical” approach, she brings to the fore whole cohorts of translators generally left in the shade: those who, in the nineteenth century, discreetly, or anonymously worked for such publishing houses as Hachette, Larousse, and Hetzel, and those who, in the twenty-first century, have grouped together to form an informal social network, which she analyses as a “non-custodial” archive.

In the archive of a London publishing house, Michelle Milan has unearthed translators’ correspondence and publishing contracts that illustrate what she calls the “proto-professionalization” of literary translators in the nineteenth century. Among the dozens of stories that the Bentley archive contains, taking “the most humble documents” for reconstruction and recovery, Milan brings to life “many anonymous and unheard-of translators”—including a Miss Elisa Allen, seen presenting her compliments to Bentley, offering to work for him, and getting paid—and offers original insights into “literary anonymity in nineteenth-century translation.”

Outi Paloposki tackles an even less visible phenomenon, one that is almost imperceptible from the outside. In the archive of a Finnish publishing house, delving into the correspondence of dozens of translators, she listed the various impasses that can be encountered in a translation project, from rejections to delays to aborted processes. The discovery of these “(un)desired works, practices and strategies in translation” makes it possible to imagine a parallel history of translation: in addition to the “library of the untranslated” (bibliothèque des manques) mentioned by Barbara Cassin (2007: 24), here is a library of ghosts, made up of all the existing or incomplete translations that have never been published.

Sergio Lobejón Santos, Cristina Gómez Castro, and Camino Gutiérrez Lanza explore the censorship archives of the Archivo General de la Administración in Alcalá de Henares to show how some translation activity continued in Franco’s Spain despite state censorship. Assessing the usefulness and reliability of the huge amount of archival data, they set out to identify and describe the textual changes from source texts to target texts, in order to better understand the Censor’s moral or political motivations, and to reveal the inner workings of the Francoist censorship system.

Section two of this special issue explores the potential of individual translators’ archives to offer privileged insights into their working lives and professional networks, their motivations, collaborations, friendships, and partnerships. In the first of three case studies, Solange Arber and Erika Tophoven examine the legacy of the German translator Elmar Tophoven (1923-1989), known for his translations of the Irish bilingual author Samuel Beckett and a whole generation of French nouveau roman writers, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Tophoven is less recognized as a pioneering figure in the creation of translation archives in Europe, a history that began when he devised and theorized a method for documenting and archiving the translation process, which he termed transparent translation. Arber and Tophoven’s wife and collaborator Erika explore this important chapter of translation history; they consider the heritage value of the Tophoven archive, and its utility for translation research.

Tophoven was Samuel Beckett’s German translator, yet Beckett was himself an expert in the art and partner not only to Tophoven but to many of his translators. Such collaboration is difficult to measure: the reasons why it takes place, the working methods, the power dynamics at play, and the extent to which an author influences the translation are often mysterious. Pim Verhulst, Olga Beloborodova, and Dirk Van Hulle demonstrate how translation archives can resolve some, but not all, of these questions. By analyzing a broad range of Beckett’s co-translating, they show that in some cases archival evidence allows for a relatively precise reconstruction of the working methods of each party to the creative process, thus dispelling myths or misinformation about authorship. Furthermore, drawing on their experience as co-editors of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP),[16] they discuss how an attention to the process of translation is crucial for the design and exploitation of a digital translation archive.

The expansive, Borgesian library of the Brazilian author and translator Haroldo de Campos—filled with tomes from all over the world, many copiously annotated by de Campos himself—and the papers housed at the MIT archives of the Russian-born émigré, Roman Jakobson—a towering figure in the history of linguistics and semiotics, not to mention literary and translation theory—present Max Hidalgo with two formidable archives, which he reveals to be in dialogue with one another. From these materials, Hidalgo reconstructs a conversation between de Campos and Jakobson from 1966 to 1981, which illuminates the circulation of ideas between networks of intellectuals in this period and offers a basis from which to demonstrate, firstly, how archival research is key to historicizing these movements and, secondly, how it may challenge trends in the contemporary theorization of world literature.

Any archive—whether material or virtual—offers an experience of rare complexity, whereby researchers find themselves in the presence of extremely diverse materials, which invite no less diverse approaches, and more often than not inspire meditation or reverie. When the researcher finally finds his or her bearings in the enormous mass of consulted documents, when the “infinite rumour of the archive” (Foucault 1996: 27; our translation)[17] starts to recede, personal experiences of the archive foster a reflection that may serve both as a framework and a horizon for the research underway.

The third section of this issue presents two such ways of thinking with the archive. Anna Strowe describes feelings that are well known to researchers working with the archive: disappointment, fascination, and the urge to understand and remedy its aporiae. This dialectics of “loss and remediation” is explored through the concept of narrative theory (Somers and Gibson) as applied to the contents of archival materials, the preservation and organization of documents, and the creation of knowledge. Drawing from her own research in the archives of two English publishing houses, George Bell and Macmillan, Strowe examines the sometimes-divergent interests of the various agents involved—authors, archivists, researchers—and the organisation of narratives within collections in order to better understand “the narrative of the archive itself.”

Éric Méchoulan offers a personal exploration of the relationship of self to archive in this issue’s final reflection. Musing on the interweaving, translating narratives of mother tongue, forgetting, and exile, which emerged during the creation of a bilingual, multimedia archive dedicated to his family, Mother Archive/Mère Archive, Méchoulan presents “not a state archive, paternal and imposing, but a mother-archive.” As he analyses the processes of collecting, sorting, classifying, and preserving that were integral to his project, he addresses less the academic reader than the enchanted archivist of his own fonds.

The voices of archivists themselves are heard in the last section of this issue through three separate interviews. Breon Mitchell recounts the way he built up one of the richest archives of translators’ papers in the world, from 2001 to 2012 as director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington. Mitchell reflects also on the relationship of translators with their own papers and with archivists, while offering a keen insight into the workings and policies of the Lilly Library. Albert Dichy, the literary director of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Caen, France), and Marjorie Delabarre, an archivist in charge of the IMEC library, recount the creation of the largest literary archive in France, which hosts a growing collection of manuscripts and other documents pertaining to translation; they detail the entire process by which these manuscripts are acquired, prepared for conservation, classified, and made available to researchers. Lastly, Anna Kinder, head of research at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach, Germany), describes both the collections conserved at the DLA and the criteria—including research value, canonicity, and innovativeness—governing each new acquisition process, stressing the importance placed on developing networks within and between the collections.