Stations of the Crossing: The Common Source in Nonfiction and Translation

Abstract

A reader of one of Samuel Johnson’s works once supposedly wrote him to ask what he had intended by a certain passage in one of his works. In his response, Johnson wrote that when he was composing the passage, only two beings in the universe knew what was in his mind, himself and God, but now, looking back on it, God only knew what he was thinking just then. While the story may in fact be apocryphal, it can serve as a helpful point of departure in discussions about the intentional fallacy in fiction and poetry, that is, reading texts as if their meaning could be reduced to the intentions of an author. An author might, for instance, forget over time the things that went into the work other than the words put down on the page at the moment of creation. A more radical position might be to say that an author of an artistic work never really had any other way to express the thoughts in her or his mind than those that ended up on the page.