ABSTRACT
‘At best an echo,’ translation has been figured literally and metaphorically in secondary terms. Just as Clara Schumann’s performance of a musical composition is seen as qualitatively different from the original act of composing that piece, so the act of translating is viewed as something qualitatively different from the original act of writing. Indeed, under current American copyright law, both translations and musical performances are treated under the same rubric of ‘derivative works.’ The sexualization of translation appears perhaps most familiarly in the tag les belles infidèles - like women, the adage goes, translations should be either beautiful or faithful. In the metaphorics of translation, the struggle for authorial rights takes place both in the realm of the family, for translation has also been figured as the literary equivalent of colonization, a means of enriching both the language and the literature appropriate to the political needs of expanding nations.
