Lawrence Venuti reviewed my Apocryphal Lorca in the TLS a few weeks ago.  Marjorie asked me privately what I thought of this review so I thought I would explain my position in public.  My general policy is to be thankful for the attention rather than to object to misreadings.  I was a little disappointed, though, that he did not see how influenced I was by his own work and by an article by Antoine Berman that he included in The Translation Studies Reader, "Translation and the Trials of the Foreign."  He had some nice things to say about the book, but also put forward a critique of my approach, which he found "misguided."  

I thought that I was being almost painfully self-conscious about my own positions, the way in which my own tastes and interests influence my judgments.  Apparently I should have been even more self-conscious, because Venuti's main critique of my book was that my tastes and interests were influencing my judgments.  I even talk about how we have to listen to our own aesthetic reactions, because these reactions contain very specific information that we ignore at our peril.  That does not mean, however, that these reactions have any absolute standing.  

I am very careful (or so I thought) to say that I don't have any particular view of Lorca "himself," aside from being suspicious of any reading that attempts to define him in simplistic terms.  Venuti thinks that I am simply contrasting an orthodox academic view of Lorca with a more naive American reading.  (Not being a Hispanist, Venuti doesn't quite realize that my view of Lorca is not all that orthodox, that I am making an intervention within Lorca studies rather than propagating idées recues.)  A sentence that I wrote saying that American poets were not trying to see Lorca from a scholarly point of view, Lorca "as he really is," implied, for Venuti, that I was claiming such an understanding for myself, or even the possibility of such an understanding.  

My critique of Stephen Spender's translation was that it missed an opportunity for bringing to light the modernism of Lorca.  Venuti makes the point that Spender felt solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war, and that that motivated his translation.  I'm sure it did, but that does not diminish Spender's "qualitative impoverishment" (Berman) of Lorca.     

In short, I am very grateful to get reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, and by someone whose own work has influenced my own. I realize that I have violated my rule of not protesting that I have been misunderstood. What can I do?  I continue to think of Venuti with the same respect as before, and to think about the extent to which his critique might be valid, but I can't help thinking that I have been misread to some degree.  I view this as an inevitable part of the scholarly conversation.  Venuti is defending a particular view of translation studies in which he has a considerable stake.  I share about 75% of his views so he focuses on the 25% where I do something he wouldn't have done.  His response clarifies these differences in a way that will be helpful to me in the future.  I hope you all come to my talk on Blackburn's Lorca at the MLA in Philadelphia, where I plan to continue this discussion.  I hope to meet Venuti in person for the first time.  For me, that 75% is still more important for me than the 25%.