Translator Francine Ozaki reads The Recognitions through the overarching debates of twentieth-century translation theory, finding the conflict between Wyatt’s and Otto’s handling of Forgery, Originality, and Authenticity illuminating the concerns of today's professional translators. Questions of credit, treachery, allegiance, payment, and dependency are so fully addressed in the novel that translators and translation theorists should be reading it to help make sense of their own artistic and professional roles.
William Gaddis’s The Recognitions contains many scenes of translation issues. From the author who has translated his own unpublished work into nineteen languages without anyone else having read it in any of them, and the Spanish monks or Burmese diplomats eagerly awaiting translations of America’s literary pinnacle How to Win Friends and Influence People, to poets plagiarising from other languages into English uncaught by their monolingual peers, the novel seems dubious about how well translation can really serve serious, original art. But then, on the novel’s final page, the serious, original composer Stanley destroys himself precisely because he has failed to heed a warning in Italian that, had someone translated it for him, might have saved his life.
Translation, then, is an important if often misdirected force within the world of this novel: a novel that, lest we forget, reproduces extended untranslated passages of numerous non-English languages, bringing even its native readers directly into the problematic of translation. Yet for all the scholarly attention The Recognitions has received, Translation Studies is not a lens it has been examined through. My case in this essay is not only that such a lens would prove revealing, but that the novel itself has much to contribute to existing debates within Translation Studies. Its major themes—originality, authenticity, authorship, even forgery—are central matters of debate in Translation Studies, and while Gaddis himself seems to have had notably “old-fashioned” ideas about how translators should actually handle his novels, the contrast between how his protagonists Otto and Wyatt deal with originality, authorship, and authenticity in The Recognitions gets to the heart of more recent debates about translation as theory, practice, and profession. Translators and translation theorists, therefore, would benefit from reading it.
Gaddis and His Translators
The Recognitions remains one of Gaddis’s least widely translated novels: complete versions exist only in French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and these were mainly published during the 2000s, meaning that Gaddis himself did not experience them. Nonetheless, among the partial or abandoned attempts to translate it into other languages (I myself have worked on translating parts of it into Brazilian Portuguese) were some during his lifetime, some of which he was aware of and involved in. His published correspondence preserves some of his conversations with the translators in question. Notable are letters to Polish translator Tomasz Mirkowicz and German editor Thomas Überhoff. In these, Gaddis reveals a preference for a ‘word-for-word’ approach, presuming that each language has some equivalence for English, to be found one word at a time. As I’ll discuss, this was an outdated approach even in Gaddis’s own time, and has few adherents today, when translation is more widely understood as a creative process in itself.
In a 1983 letter to Mirkowicz about translating The Recognitions, Gaddis gives the general advice, “I think the safest course is simply a literal translation throughout or we shall drive each other mad.” (Letters 487). This seems to have been motivated by the confessed fact that he no longer remembered many things about his own original writing and intentions: “Heaven knows what is meant by ‘Poland has no seaports’: I think you must take your chances” (Letters 487).
The same stance is later reinforced in a 1996 letter to German editor Überhoff. When asked about an especially complex excerpt, Gaddis merely advises: “it may be the most expeditious course just to translate the whole passage word-for-word and leave it all for some brilliant graduate student to decode in his doctoral PhD dissertation” (Letters 643). Interestingly, on this same excerpt, Gaddis states: “[...] no question that that is about as dense a sentence as I have ever written, for which I apologize to Mr. Stingl (but not to the reader!)” (Letters 642). Within Translation Studies, this commitment to the aesthetic experience of reading would, ironically, align not with the linearity and dependence of Gaddis’s suggested word-for-word translation, but rather with the idea that translators should allow themselves deviations from literalness when doing so would capture the initial aesthetic feeling better.
Quite in spite of his explicit approach to translation, then, Gaddis’s general attitude to art and readership corresponds to the way his literary works resonate with contemporary Translation Theory. As we’ll see, exploration of the fluidity of concepts like originality and authorship, so central to The Recognitions, gained prominence in Translation Studies during the 1990s-2000s, especially concerning the authorship of translators dealing with literary texts. Interpreting Gaddis’s work using modern translation approaches aligns more closely with his intended reception than rigidly adhering to his earlier statements. Engaging with The Recognitions through the lens of contemporary translation practices enriches not only its potential for translation but also its role as a catalyst for contemplations on foundational principles that guide translation practitioners.
Traduttore, Traditore: Major Themes of The Recognitions, and of Translation Studies
As discussed above, some of the most widely studied central themes of The Recognitions are originality, authenticity, authorship, and forgery. They are crucial concepts in Translation Theory too, but previously no one has used this novel and Translation Theory to illuminate each other.
Gaddis explores authenticity and sincerity while challenging concepts of originality and falsification. While his characters pursue authenticity, they find themselves unable to escape interactions with what might be judged inauthentic, as Wyatt forges paintings and Otto skirts plagiarism. Contemporaneous U.S. work on authenticity, like Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), defines it specifically in opposition to the fake or forged. In a genealogy that goes back to the sixteenth century, Trilling shows how the modern era that gave birth to The Recognitions increasingly challenged ideas of authenticity based on stable cultural inheritance by quicker and quicker social transformations and moral fluidity. As a representation of that, in The Recognitions, we find characters struggling with authenticity amid insincerity. Wyatt’s conflicts arise from departing his family’s moral path due to religion. On the other hand, Otto embraces his surroundings without hesitation, reflecting the novel’s transition from modernity to postmodernity.
This framing of modern and postmodern is central to Brazilian researcher Valeria Brisolara’s study of the novel (2005), as she explores the role of plagiarism and falsification in defining the 1950s move toward postmodernity, especially in the post-Romantic shift in conceptions of authorship, which lead to a postmodern disintegration of the ‘author-god’ concept, and consequently to things that might once have been called plagiarism being increasingly defined as creative appropriation. Her study aligns The Recognitions with postmodernism’s emergence, by connecting characters’ actions with shifts in literary schools. Wyatt’s forgeries and Otto’s assimilation of the discourse that surrounds him respectively contrast modernism’s tragic distance from originals and postmodernism’s appropriation. She highlights Gaddis’s difference from his acknowledged influence T.S. Eliot, a modernist, who alluded to other literary works without questioning their authorship or ownership, whereas Gaddis took for himself dialogues and excerpts from other works, making them his own without feeling obliged to identify sources since they were now interwoven into the fabric of his own text.
Brisolara’s analysis does not include Translation Studies, but her distinctions and periodizations map very neatly onto its own evolution. The way the novel destabilizes the concepts related to originality and forgery illustrates precisely how the conception of the literary translator changed. Are translators secondary and dependent? Should they aspire to invisibility? Or, as current approaches in the field suggest, is translation a meaningfully creative process that not only conveys but generates meaning? The novel’s destabilizing approach forces us to ask: if the authorship of authors themselves is not stable, how can we stably acknowledge translators as comparable creators? This has professional and legal consequences, as in the difficulty of having translation work properly recognized for copyright purposes. The Recognitions thus points to some of the most urgent issues that translators need to care about.
The novel’s major contribution to Translation Theory is best located at the point highlighted by two proverbial descriptors: the Italian expression ‘traduttore, traditore’ (Translator, Traitor) – which first appeared in a collection of Tuscan proverbs from the 19th century by Giuseppe Giusti (see Davie) – and beautiful infidels, originating in 17th-century France, referring to translators prioritizing maintaining the (“beautiful”) form of the original over preserving its meaningful content. Translators have historically been held to criteria such as “fidelity.” Departing from these norms was deemed treacherous, leading to negative depictions, a perspective which parallels Trilling’s discussion on sincerity and authenticity, rooted in the portrayal of villains. Only recently, as translation studies became an independent academic field around the 1970s, have there been concerted efforts to theorize a less dependent, parasitic, and potentially villainous model of translation that acknowledges the translated text as an independent artwork borne out of creativity, to be judged by its own standards.
Nonetheless, the intellectual history of this field’s forerunners provides some context in which The Recognitions makes sense, not least the way that Ezra Pound’s vision of translation as a realm in which to Make It New gave an American framing to ideas derived from the German philological tradition and Walter Benjamin about the reconstructive and autonomous dimensions of translation. In the years after Gaddis wrote his novel, post-structuralists emphasized the ethical duty toward respecting difference in translation, and 1990s scholars like Rosemary Arrojo and Lawrence Venuti explored translation as a form of authorship and erudition, with potential duties toward ‘foreignization’ rather than domestication.
The key debates, which have continued to evolve since then, have remained structured by the two poles of fidelity and creative interpretation. But Gaddis, with his focus on forgery, aligns most with the concept (growing out of Pound’s experimental vision of translation) of “transcreation,” introduced by Brazilian poet and translator Haroldo de Campos. Transcreation is performed by a translator who is a “transpretender.” Essentially, if a poet is a pretender, a translator becomes a transpretender, implying a different, further level of dissimulation or inauthenticity. As with Wyatt’s intention to approach fuller authenticity through forgery, the translator as envisaged by Campos is comparable to the kind of multi-layered pretending poet imagined by the great Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa in his poem Autopsicografia (1932): “O poeta é um fingidor / Finge tão completamente / Que chega a fingir que é dor. / A dor que deveras sente” (“A poet is a pretender, who pretends so completely, that he even pretends to be pain: that pain he in fact feels”).
The vision of a translator as transpretending takes away the negative valence of translation as infidel treachery, and, as with Wyatt in The Recognitions, posits that something of greater originality may emerge from the conscious choice to forge an original anew. Yet knowing that there must be an original still sets the translator or forger in a boundaried, impossible role. Striving toward fidelity, while recognizing the impossibility of absolute fidelity due to the varied interpretations of what to be faithful to, is a challenging task. The question arises: fidelity to content or form? To author or reader? Deciding what constitutes betrayal, or insincerity, is a complex matter, especially when a concept like ‘author’ is itself unstable. The Recognitions shows an awareness of all these complications as it sets Wyatt and Otto out as contrasting artists and pretenders.
Wyatt and Otto: Translation Themes Explored
By dissecting forgery acts in various forms and levels, Gaddis destabilizes crucial Translation Studies concepts such as originality, authenticity, and authorship. Among countless instances, for this paper we’ll focus on both protagonists’ artistic journeys through counterfeiting and plagiarizing, which mirror the stance we aim to defend here.
In the novel, Wyatt creates fake artworks mimicking Flemish painters’ styles to pass as lost originals. Otto faces accusations of plagiarism when his play The Vanity of Time is rejected for its resemblance to conversations he overheard. These instances highlight how Wyatt and Otto differ in their views on the original. Wyatt’s artistic journey involves suppressing his initial originality to imitate others’ styles. Otto incorporates existing ideas and material into his work, understanding this action as original creation, and so exemplifying a new approach to authorship which diverges from conventional norms. His authorship entails absorbing existing cultural materials, rearranging and echoing them – which Gaddis referred to as ‘recognitions.’
In this sense, the novel itself appears to be an artwork representing a tradition of appropriation and assimilation. The way it challenges concepts of authorship and originality mirrors Eliot’s perspective, acknowledging past influences and constraints. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) names this feeling as ‘belatedness’: the way poets feel like their predecessors have exhausted creative possibilities. The fear of the “poem-father”’s dominance leads later poets to distort the original as a path toward their own artistic freedom. Bloom’s theory extends beyond historical context, illustrating how later artists respond to their predecessors.
In The Recognitions, this fact is evident through the actions of these protagonists. Wyatt’s artistic journey is traced from childhood, when he is chastised by his puritan family for trying to “imitate God” by painting what he sees. Despite his early work being ‘original,’ its relationship to an alleged prior creator diminishes its originality to mere imitation. He later faces deceptions, such as when his Memling-style artwork is stolen by Herr Koppel and sold as a lost original, and a failed exhibition that receives harsh criticism from critic Crémer. These experiences prompt Wyatt to abandon his original style in favor of forging others’ works, deceiving others the same way he was deceived. He imitates other painters’ styles and even forges their signatures, relinquishing his own artistic identity.
In contrast, Otto enters the plot after Wyatt’s disillusionment, embodying a different approach to authorship that shifts away from absolute notions of originality. For Otto “original creation” is comprised of absorbing and reorganizing existing cultural materials. At the beginning of the novel’s second part, both Otto and Wyatt discuss these issues directly with Recktall Brown, the profiteer for most of the novel’s artistic forgeries. Brown laughs at Otto’s concerns about being accused of plagiarism: “So you picked up a few things here and there for yours, what the hell? What hasn’t been written before? You take something good, change it around a little and it’s still good” (Recognitions 350, our emphasis). Brown here directly appeals to Bloom’s concept of creative ‘belatedness,’ advising Otto to keep this approach to incorporation and own it as his own creative process: “—Don’t you worry about that. It’s right when the idea’s missing, the word pops up. You can do anything with the same words. You just follow the books, don’t try to get a lot of smart ideas of your own” (350, our emphasis).
Interestingly, Gaddis does exactly that when using parts from another source, as we’ve emphasized from the quotes. As Steven Moore’s annotations show, both quotations mentioned in the previous paragraph incorporate phrases from Goethe’s Mephistopheles in Faust (1808). Arguments about plagiarism and appropriation are carried out (seemingly without the characters intending it) in creatively appropriated language. The deliberate theorization in such arguments, though, is lost on Otto, who has no conscious understanding of his writing process as plagiarism or stealing: he insists that he “wrote it himself,” reflecting how passively he is a product of his era’s assumptions about these questions. When Brown states that anything can be done in the same words, it becomes clear how plagiarism is understood here. As long as Otto conveys the same ideas – ‘following the books’ and not adding ‘smart ideas of his own’ – he would be safe, on the assumption that everything has already been written before, and that these old ideas are worth re-expressing. This would define Otto’s authorship as belated building upon and echoing other authors, rather than as plagiarism: Gaddis himself does exactly this by incorporating Goethe’s words.
At this point, translators can’t avoid a sense of recognition. For translation purposes the same structure applies, but in the exact opposite direction: translators have to convey the same meaning as an original, by using other words from another language. This way, the translator’s authorship would also be built in a similar understanding as Brown’s, but necessarily using other words.
While Otto seems unaware of the implications of his appropriations, Wyatt does eventually grapple with this matter. One of the initial signs of Wyatt’s struggle occurs during a conversation with Brown’s more aesthetically-informed collaborator Basil Valentine in the previous chapter. Wyatt mumbles: “If one minute, first you say, or people say It’s beautiful! and then if, when they find out it isn’t what they were told, if it’s a painting when they find out it was done by, or rather when they find out it wasn’t done by who they thought…” (334, our emphasis). Here, Wyatt questions not only his role in the scheme but also the perception of authorship – something attributed to artwork and thus ‘told’ to audiences. When Wyatt contemplates revealing proof that his paintings were forged, Valentine responds: “do you think they want to be told? […] – Do you think it’s that simple? Why… He put a hand out to the shoulder before him. – That you can do it alone, that simply?” (337, our emphasis). Later, in chapter II, as Wyatt’s crisis deepens, he confides in Brown about his struggles, receiving a similar response: “Like you say, my boy, It isn’t that simple. Do you think they want to know?” (363, our emphasis). Here, both characters involved in the forgery scheme not only emphasize the notion of “authorship” as a socially coordinated external attribution, but also argue that, once critics establish it, audiences lack interest in questioning it. This is especially true for translations, for which the general audience rarely focuses on who the translator of a particular book is. They rather make their choices about what to read on the basis of the attributed author, even though the originals are written in other languages, and so what this audience will actually be encountering is more proximately the work of the translator than the “author.”
For Wyatt, given the decline of artistic values, it is “Small choice, then, to take what others leave” from past traditions (Recognitions 365, our emphasis). As the novel progresses, we come to see that Wyatt’s pursuit for restoring his own originality is counterproductive and he ends up back where he started: restoring works of art, but now in a foreign land, answering by another name. On the other hand, Otto never gets to have his authorship recognized or relinquished: the plotlines of his play’s publication and plagiarism accusation are left open as he flees to Central America with counterfeit money and assumes the name of his play’s protagonist. Both characters pursue their recognition as artists, but lose their own identities in the process. At the end of the day, Gaddis, having created their stories and conveyed them through language both original and appropriated, is the one who emerges as the ultimate authorship instance.
Thus, indebted to T.S. Eliot’s awareness of the past’s inescapable influence, The Recognitions grapples with these concepts, positioning itself as a representative of a legacy that challenges conventional notions of creativity, originality, innovation, and tradition-inheritance. Both Gaddis and Eliot exemplify this response, engaging with their predecessors’ work while creating something unique. Despite being assimilations and quotations, their creations are deeply original. As Eliot muses in his Four Quartets, in lines that Gaddis fully assimilates in The Recognitions (160): “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable” (Eliot 2624).
Rethinking the role of translators becomes even more pertinent through these lenses. Where do translators stand when their position is even more ‘belated’ than that of the author they’re translating? In a scenario where even the authorship of the original is questioned, what remains of the translator’s claims to creative authorship? And once the authorship of writers is established, who would care about revisiting the issue to recognize the translator’s?
Wyatt’s forgery parallels the translator’s role in some ways. Translators too (especially in postmodern translation theory) incorporate elements of the original author to craft a new text in another language. By discussing these concepts from a variety of angles in The Recognitions, Gaddis anticipated important issues that would only be addressed by Translation Theory decades later. Even though his own stance on translation was based on ideas which are now deemed outdated, The Recognitions’s concerns once more proved to be ahead of its time.
A question then remains to be answered: is the translator merely a criminal, a forger or a plagiarist? If we refer back to Brisolara on postmodern plagiarism, we can see that translation too does not transgress authorship, but involves extensive dialogue between the translation and the original: dialogue which can even be analytical and critical within a movement of creative appropriation.
As Cicero noted in some of the very earliest writings about translation, translation does not have to harm or betray its original. Consciously creative translation can thus serve originals better than an approach that aims at imperfect word by word matching. Originals, as Walter Benjamin noted, may be better disseminated and preserved by forgeries and appropriations than by exclusive fidelity. Forgeries have a much wider reach and can position the original in contexts impossible for the original itself, bringing the copy of the original closer to even the most unlikely individuals. Therefore, in many ways, all the authors and artists appropriated by Gaddis in the novel were brought back to the spotlight by those mentions.
The same is true for each classic text which is retranslated and revisited in more contemporary contexts: even though a translated text might be recognized as a creative work by an authorial entity, this activity is not unbound by the original text or author. Translators and translations work in favor of original texts, in an effort to promote and value them, making access to them more democratic and universal. Otherwise, there would be no reason to translate them at all. After all, by pursuing acknowledgement of their authorship, translators do not strive to be recognized as artists but as professionals, whose activity is protected by copyright, although most of the time is not properly valued or compensated.
Closing remarks
The persisting lack of a clear model of authorship for translators—even within the field of Translation Studies—mirrors what Gaddis’s novel showed us in 1955: that both authorship and translation are inherently unstable concepts. Nevertheless translators persist in their work across the decades, honing their craft, translating literary works globally.
Approaching The Recognitions through the lens of Translation Studies does not resolve the issues of translator’s authorship or of originality, but it can still profit readers and scholars by giving them a fuller sense of the instabilities at stake. Those questionings Gaddis proposes with this novel still echo decades later in Translation Studies’s contemporary debates, amidst its ongoing unresolved discussions, in ways he could hardly have predicted. Ultimately, the novel helps us see how unresolved some matters remain, and reinforces the need for further discussion.
The persisting, almost paradoxical complexity of authorship-originality questions that The Recognitions articulates may mean that translators and translation theorists might better hope, not to resolve them, but to dissolve them in the manner Wittgenstein proposed for some ancient questions in philosophy. If the relationship to the insurmountable past lets us relinquish the goal of pure originality, what is left for translators can be answered by returning, once again, to a passage of Eliot that The Recognitions quotes (23). In “East Coker,” Eliot writes “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” (Eliot 5954).
For us – translators – it feels as though all that remains is the endeavor to overcome this dilemma and persist in our work. With the object of our allegiance so unstable, it is incumbent upon us to leave behind the idea of perfect equivalence or fidelity, and assume the roles of forgers and traitors. We don’t address the same audience as the original, we don’t inhabit the same historical moment, nor do our cultures coincide. Regardless of our priorities, no matter which facet we choose to be faithful to, there will always be those who brand us as traitors and pinpoint our errors.
For someone who is both a translator and a Translation Studies researcher, reading The Recognitions is in itself an act of recognition. It’s both a revisitation of our struggles and a reinforcement of our duties. It’s a reminder that, even though our practice is a lonesome task, we are not alone. Ultimately, as literary translators, we find ourselves mirroring Wyatt’s situation at the novel’s end: in a foreign land, responding to a different name, restoring others’ artwork. Similarly, our role as translators involves delving into foreign cultures, assimilating the original author’s style to revive their authenticity and sincerity, though in a different cultural context, place, and time. Much like Wyatt’s, our own authenticity is forged through the restoration of others’. That’s exactly why it is not plausible or equitable to assess a translator’s work in a scale of “losses” and “gains,” for we are encompassed by both losses and gains, and what may be a loss for one could emerge as a gain for others, or for all, or for none.
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