Motivation

I admit that part of my motivation in going after Venuti is personal. I read again his review of my book the other day. I was reading Weinberger's review of Alter's version of the psalams, in LRB, and I thought how Venuti is so lacking in literary depth.  It is almost shocking.  I have this kind of incandescent rage that nobody has called him out yet.  

He seems to think there is one, evil philosophy of translation through the millennia, that he calls "instrumentalism." 

"The target of this polemic is a model of translation that I shall call instrumentalism. It conceives of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect."

Yet, if we remove the word "invariant," we are left pretty much with a definition of translation itself. And who really believes the text to be "invariant"? He rails against the idea of "mechanical" translation, but who really believes translation to be mechanical?  

It is all straw man argument and caricature, Manichean.  He loves to contrast his own authentic, hermeneutic model, but aren't there many, intersecting models of translation? There is not a single, theoretically correct model against which the conventional idea fall short.