The diminished status of originality (long a fixture of avant-garde doctrine or modernist credos of authorial impersonality), finds a limit case in examples of pseudotranslation in which readers are, in effect, urged to accept the clone of a code as a replacement for the original, or to give up conventional, essentialist notions of what the original “is.” As far as the ethics of translation is concerned, this demotion of originality accords the translator such license that he or she is authorized to invent an extramural or imaginary source. In this way, just as Rexroth ethically sanctioned his transcription of Japanese verse by a poet who never was, so the late James Merrill and his partner David Jackson, dedicated themselves to channeling the voices of those no longer there: Plato, Proust, Auden, Maya Deren, Maria Callas, Rimbaud, and Yeats. Alison Lurie’s Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson describes the strange, lifelong fascination of the pair with the spiritist messages of the Ouija board.23 Merrill’s magnum opus The Changing Light at Sandover (1980) was, in the poet’s own estimation, not a work of self-inspired imaginative lyric, but the most outré form of prosopoeia, an address from the dead transcribed “en direct.” Lurie characterizes the way in which the poem “came” to Merrill and Jackson like a set of instructions in code that demanded transcription rather than an act of imaginative translation. For Lurie, this amounts to a downgrading of the poetic, a submission to the prosaic quality of code and a tragic sacrifice of lyrical talent on Merrill’s part.

Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover constitutes an extreme case of translation without an original; an example of translation as language code transmitted from the beyond, of instructions express-mailed from an untenable source written as master-code or program. The text is rendered through the artificial assistance of the poet, now cast as the genetic engineer or technician whose primary challenge consists in transporting the work to its afterlife (Rimbaud will be rebirthed in T. S. Eliot in the phrase: “YET RIMBAUD? IN HIS GENES WAS A V WORK CUT OFF BY LIFE. . . . Rimbaud ghostwrote ‘The Waste Land’”), or in preventing the garbling of instructions. Not unlike the processes of machine translation or digitally created sound; the text code is recorded, unscrambled, and recombined. Consider this excerpt from Mirabell: Book 2:

741 now dictates D’s and my

Vastly simplified Basic Formulas:

JM: 268/I:I,000,000/5.5/741

DJ: 289/I: 650,000/5.9/741.1 (S 143)

The poet of Sandover duly transcribes and decodes these numerological formulas: “Number of previous lives; then ratio / Of animal to human densities.” “At 5.1 Rubenstein, 5.2; Eleanor / Roosevelt, 5.3; and so on. The Sixes are / LINDBERGH PLITSETSKAYA PEOPLE OF PHYSICAL PROWESS / & LEGENDARY HEROES / Characters from fiction and full-fledged / Abstractions came to Victor Hugo’s tables” (S 143). If Victor Hugo is here transcoded as a kind of literary DNA, elsewhere in the Book of Mirabell, textual cloning is an explicit trope: “Is DNA, that sinuous molecule, / The serpent in your version of the myth?” (S 119) or “I AM A MERE MIXING AGENT WITH MY SUPERIORS” (S 155) or “CAN IT BE? DO WE FORETELL THE CLONE?” (S 184). Cloning, in this instance, may be identified as a translational technology that banally reproduces poetic voice (repeating and unscrambling the codes by which it communicates) while providing the latter-day version of aesthetic reincarnation.

In “Task of the Translator,” Benjamin defines translatability as “an essential quality of certain works.” Certain originals have it—the Bible, Heine, Baudelaire—and others do not. Merrill’s Sandover, according to Benjaminian criteria, would probably fall well below the bar of a text intrinsically worthy of translational afterlife. But what is perhaps most relevant to the ethics of translation is the way in which Benjamin implicitly devalues the original; suborning the source text (and its privileged status as primum mobile) to the translation (now elevated to the position of midwife in the obstetrics of translatability):

It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original. Yet, by virtue of its translatability the original is closely connected with the translation; in fact, this connection is all the closer since it is no longer of importance to the original. We may call this connection a natural one, or, more specifically, a vital connection. Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life.

Here, it would seem, translation reproduces not an original text, but an afterlife cloned from the (lost) life of the original. In shifting the ethics of translation away from questions of fiability and fidelity (crucial to determinations of pseudotranslation), and toward debates over the conditions of textual reproducibility, Benjamin provides the groundwork for defining translation in its most scandalous form: that is, as a technology of literary replication that engineers textual

afterlife without recourse to a genetic origin.

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