Voiceless ends: Melville’s Benito Cereno and the translator in narrative discourse

Abstract

The first part of this article confronts the ways in which translation scholars have drawn on insights from narratology to make sense of the translator’s involvement in narrative texts. It first considers competing metaphors for conceptualizing the translator’s involvement, arguing for a clearer differentiation between modes of framing and telling. Next, it evaluates the ways in which translation scholars have attempted to integrate the translator as a separate textual agent in governing models of narrative communication, concluding that the conceptual gains to be reaped from positing the translator as a separate enunciator or agent in narrative transactions are limited. The second part of the article analyzes two Dutch translations of Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, by Johan Palm (1950) and Jean Schalekamp (1977) respectively. Rather than striving to isolate the translators as separate tellers or co-producers of narrative structure, the analysis reveals that their agency shows foremost in the ways the ‘voiceless’ narrative of New World slavery is perspectivized in view of changing readerly expectations.