The intuitive capacity of an artist

In a new interview at Words Without Borders with María Constanza Guzmán, Suzanne Jill Levine discusses the whys and wherefores of her seminal book, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction:

I wrote the book mainly, however, because I felt translating involved a rich thought process of which the reader of the finished translation would never be aware. What a loss to readers, and how unfair to the translator, that readers are not aware of what we experience, of how complex the process is and how it reveals the literary critic and scholar in the good translator. In other words, instead of writing an essay or a book, you are translating. You are using those other capacities plus the intuitive capacity of an artist. The gifted translator is a poet, a maker. Even in the Borgesian sense of a maker who, by rereading, is creating. So, that’s why I started writing notes on the margins of my translations early on.

Also, her take on Lawrence Venuti and the "canon of fluency" is extremely helpful:

I think that sometimes I’ve really taken control of the text and sometimes the editor might have been right. For example, in The Buenos Aires Affair, there was a certain amount of comma splicing, it was a device of stream of consciousness. Nonetheless, I could see where a reader might be turned off by that in English. Ronald Christ pointed it out. And I said, "Well, it’s Puig." Yes, he said, but you translate the punctuation. And he was right. Punctuation must be translated like everything else, every language has its rules and conventions. Larry says, yes, but why don’t you bring their conventions into my, your language. Well, this is a matter of negotiation. If you read his translations, they are very fluent. Theory is one thing and practice is another, in Larry’s case as well as others’: the practice of writing is an act of constant negotiation and no one theory has the final word. So, I would say that my translations, because the writers themselves wanted to be received in this culture, are definitely mindful of the reader. But I am not too sure that fluency would be the best or the most precise word to describe that.

and

To me writing can ideally be aware of its own ideological limitations, and whatever work can bring out the uniqueness of a particular translator’s voice or writer’s voice, is what is valid in literary criticism in general, and therefore in translation criticism. I don’t distinguish translation criticism from literary criticism because I think it is part of literary criticism. I get concerned when I see people imposing theories or ideologies on texts, when instead of departing from the text they depart from an ideology. I think that ideology is always present in all texts and in all readings. If you are not conscious of your own ideological limitations you are bound to make serious errors. [...] I think there has to be an awareness that each text has its own rules and (as Borges would put it) "morphology" and you have to come from inside the text as well as your ideology or beliefs. If you can’t do that well you are not doing justice to the text, to writing, to literature, to culture. I would say that the more people experience the process, the more sensitive they might be as interpreters.

New review

Over at the Words Without Borders blog, a brief review of mine on Translation in Practice, edited by Gill Paul, went up on Monday. It's full of common sense and well-delineated specifics on the ways translators, editors, copyeditors, and publishers can work together and improve communication practices in order to produce quality literary translations.

Infinite richness

I've been trying to work out what I think of Ilan Stavans' claim that "There are more Quixote possibilities in English" and Michael Orthofer's questioning of the way in which the former presents his case (regarding English translations of the classics in general). Happily, the reading that I've been doing this morning has helped me understand things a little better.

In researching the translation theory essay I'm (supposedly) writing, I've discovered the work of Wolfgang Iser. His essay "The reading process: a phenomenological approach" (anthologized in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood) is giving me some insights into the nature of translation:

The fact that completely different readers can be differently affected by the 'reality' of a particular text is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written. The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality. This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination.

This may sound a bit obvious, but the distinctions he makes have very interesting implications. As David Albertson says in this profile,

For Iser, the reader does not mine out an objective meaning hidden within the text. Rather, literature generates effects of meaning for the reader in a virtual space created between reader and text. Although reader and text assume similar conventions from reality, texts leave great portions unexplained to the reader, whether as gaps in the narrative or as structural limits of the text’s representation of the world. This basic indeterminacy "implies" the reader and begs her participation in synthesizing, and indeed living, events of meaning throughout the process of reading.

Such a theory of aesthetic response denies the simple dichotomy of fiction and reality. According to Iser, fiction proposes alternate worlds created within the virtual reality of the text’s meaning. In other words, in literature the actual and the possible can exist simultaneously. Literature thus takes on a greater human function of imagining beyond the given constraints of experience.

If (as Charlotte Mandell says) translation is "the truest form of reading," one can replace "reader" with "translator" in this passage of Iser's:

For this reason, one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. In this very act the dynamics of reading are revealed. By making his decision he implicitly acknowledges the inexhustibility of the text; at the same time it is this very inexhaustibility that forces him to make his decision.

This can help explain what Ilan Stavans was talking about in the article on the multitude of translations of Don Quixote:

All this is to say that, while it might seem preposterous to suggest that the fanciful adventures of Don Quixote are far richer in English than in Spanish, the proof is in the pudding. By rich, I mean abundant and comprehensive. There are more Quixote possibilities in English.

(via The Literary Saloon)

I think this goes along with what Jacques Delille meant (back in the 18th century) when he wrote, "I have always thought of translation as a way to enrich a language. If you write an original work in a particular language you are likely to exhaust that language's own resources, if I may say so. If you translate, you import the riches contained in foreign languages into your own, by means of a felicitous commerce."

But multiple translations do not only "enrich" a target language. As Lawrence Venuti writes in The Scandals of Translation,

Foreign texts that are stylistically innovative invite the English-language translator to create sociolects striated with various dialects, registers and styles, inventing a collective assemblage that questions the seeming unity of standard English.

So (although it may sound paradoxical) the act of translating a work into English can also help to undermine the hegemony of English.

This means that Stavans could've (should've?) taken it one step further. As Iser writes,

With all literary texts, then, we may say that the reading process is selective, and the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations. This is borne out by the fact that a second reading of a piece of literature often produces a different impression from the first. The reasons for this may lie in the reader's own change of circumstances; still, the text must be such as to allow this variation.

In this light, one can begin to see that eighteen translations of Don Quixote consitute eighteen different readings--and many more are possible.

So in reality, it isn't simply that "the fanciful adventures of Don Quixote are far richer in English than in Spanish"--but that the various translations help to reflect the infinite richness of Don Quixote itself.

Constraint, creativity, and Nabokov

Reading notes on The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity, ed. by Jean Boase-Beier and Michael Holman

~ p. 3: MH & JBB: "If the original is seen as something whose authority is in doubt, then equivalence to the original needs to be examined from the point of view of multiple potential equivalences."

~ p. 3: "Both Chaucer and Shakespeare, as Hughes remarks, borrowed freely from Ovid, often translating, transforming or adapting what Ovid had earlier adapted. Hughes himself produced a translation of the Metamophorses so compellingly Hughes-like that it won the Whitbread Award, not normally given for translations. Nevertheless, we tend to view Hughes' version of Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe as a translation, but not Shakespeare's in A Midsummer Night's Dream. We might well ask who were the translators here and what is the distinction between translation and writing?"

~ p. 10: "There will always be compromise between faithfulness and freedom, between the need to be true to one's own and the author's voice."

~ p. 13: "In a purely additive sense, therefore, it is quite clear that the burden of constraint is bound to be greater in translation than in original writing. Yet just as constraint moulded and gave rise to the creative impulse in the original, so in translation this added burden of constraint can force a translator into new ways of overcoming it and thus into new creativity."

~ p. 14: "A translator, therefore, is a rewriter who determines the implied meanings of the TL text, and who also, in the act of rewriting, redetermines the meaning of the original (Álvarez and Vidal 1996:4). Translation as radical rewriting can thus be seen as a way of rescuing the original from unwanted constraint."

~ pp. 16-17: "Translation, then, can act as an agent for change, altering and stretching perceptions, knowledge and language in the target culture, and threatening the status quo (see Hewson 1997:49), as it presents a challenge to the indigenous culture. What the papers in this book show is that it is the very fact that translation is so highly constrained which gives it the power to effect such change."

~ p. 24: Emily Salines examines how Baudelaire combined lines from Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" to create a completely new poem ("Le Guignon") that altered the initial meanings of the originals.

~ p. 96: Jenefer Coates on Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:

Behind this approach lay his belief in the specificity of experience and its transmutation into art. His withdrawal from advocating conventionally domesticated translation was prompted by realization that the specificity of the original would thus be represented by an alien imitation, and that the smooth and elegant Anglo-American versions encouraged by publishers and critics preferred the false voice of an "impersonator" to the original artist's, whose authenticity had got lost. Translation thus became a form of resistance to cultural appropriation.

~ p. 97: "Nabokov showed, he did not tell. Constructing complex narratives that only make sense at the deepest level, for example, he urges the careless or confused reader, through ludic and adversarial asides (such as addressing "the re-reader of this passage" in Ada), to follow the convolutions of text, mis-trust appearances, be wary of deception or observe the minutiae of details--all borrowings from the detective genre so frequently parodied, and all ideal prescriptions for the reading of a difficult translation."

~ p. 98: Coates again referring to Nabokov's Onegin:

It was also continuous with his own style, which similarly eschewed smoothness in favour of defamiliarization, inviting the reader to participate by decoding an intricately wrought text. Many of his stylistic effects compare with strategies that translators regularly deploy: paraphrasing particulars, reinventing proper nouns, prising open cliches, rendering the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, employing archaic and non-standard terms that strain towards their source, or leaving traces of source languages visible. Not only was Nabokov a resistant translator, he was probably the most resistant English prose stylist of this century.

(I realize again all of the reasons I love him.)

~ p. 105: "As his trust in conventional translation waned, belief in another kind of cultural proliferation gained strength: the idea of spirality and synthesis, which Nabokov began to embody in his novels by means of intertextual references and verbal mirroring and patterning."

Previous pronouncements

Reading notes on Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook, ed. by André Lefevere

~ p. 1: "Let us not forget that translations are made by people who do not need them for people who cannot read the originals."

~ p. 2: "It may be a sobering thought that some of the masterpieces of world literature, such as Cervantes' Don Quixote, profess to be translations of lost originals, i.e. that they refer to non-existent texts in order to derive some kind of legitimacy which, it is felt, would otherwise not be present to the same extent."

~ p. 13: Anne Dacier (from the intro to her translation of the Iliad, pub. 1699):

Bad translations render the letter without the spirit in a low and servile imitation. Good translations keep the spirit without moving away from the letter. They are free and noble imitations that turn the familiar into something new.

~ p. 17: Anne Louise Germaine de Staël:

The most eminent service one can render to literature is to transport the masterpieces of the human spirit from one language into another.

~ p. 25: Goethe:

That is how we should look upon every translator: he is a man who tries to be a mediator in this general spiritual commerce and who has chosen it as his calling to advance the interchange. Whatever you may say about the deficiencies of translation, it is and remains one of the most important and dignified enterprises in the general commerce of the world. The Qur'an says: "God has given every nation a prophet in its own language." Every translator is a prophet among his own poeple.

~ p. 34: Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorff:

True translation is metempsychosis.

~ p. 36: Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt (his translations were the first to be called "belles infidèles"):

Consequently, I do not always stick to the author's words, nor even to his thoughts. I keep the effect he wanted to produce in mind, and then I arrange the material after the fashion of our time.

~ p. 37: Jacques Delille:

I have always thought of translation as a way to enrich a language. If you write an original work in a particular language you are likely to exhaust that language's own resources, if I may say so. If you translate, you import the riches contained in foreign languages into your own, by means of a felicitous commerce.

~ p. 56: Shelley (from "A Defence of Poetry"):

Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both beween each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of these relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thought.

~ p. 64: Pope (from the preface to his translation of the Iliad, pub. 1715):

I know no Liberties one ought to take, but those which are necessary for transfusing the Spirit of the Original, and Supporting the Poetical Style of the Translation: and I will venture to say, there have not been more Men misled in former times by a servile dull Adherence to the Letter, than have been deluded in ours by a chimerical insolent Hope of raising and improving their Author.

~ p. 78: Goethe:

There are two maxims in translation: one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to us in such a way that we can look on him as ours. The other requires that we ourselves should cross over into what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its peculiarities, and its use of language.

~ p. 79: Schlegel:

Literalness is a long way from fidelity. Fidelity means that the same or similar impressions are produced, for these are the heart of the matter.

~ p. 171: Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorff (from the preface to his translation of Euripides' Hippolytus, pub. 1925):

This is how it is: whoever wants to translate a poem must understand it.

Navigating the labyrinth

Reading notes on Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, ed. by Daniel Weissbort

~ p. x: "Yet, as Ezra Pound remarked, translation is also a form of criticism, the highest in his view, since it represents a fusion of the creative and the critical."

~ p. xi: "Translation, as a specialised branch of practical criticism, of concentrated reading, is well worth exploring."

~ p. 10: János Csokits' discussion of how Ted Hughes translated János Pilinszky's work without knowing a word of Hungarian. (Csokits supplied word-for-word translations, plus notes.)

~ p. 18: Ted Hughes:

But even more exciting, for me, was the knack [Csokits] had of projecting a raw, fresh sense of the strange original--the particular and to me alien uniqueness of the original. I know from experience with quite a few translators that this is a very rare ability. Most translators, inevitably, translate the strangeness of the original work into the standard of their own sensibility--and the best one can hope for is that their sensibility can adapt itself interestingly. But again and again János Csokits transmitted the characters of several quite different poets, while introducing me to modern Hungarian poetry.

p. 36: John Felstiner on translating Celan: "A translator, I think, needs to become the reader par excellence--or perhaps I should say par exigence. Here I would borrow from Kafka's Trial, where Joseph K., trying to interpret the parable 'Before the Law', is told by a priest: 'The Scripture is unalterable and its interpretations often merely betray bewilderment at this.'"

~ p. 107: Weissbort interviews Stanley Kunitz on his collaboration with Max Hayward in his translations of Anna Akhmatova's poetry. (A similar procedure to that of Hughes and Csokits.)

~ p. 108: Kunitz: "During our sessions together he would read the poems aloud to me in Russian. This was of the utmost importance, for the soul of a poem, I have always felt, is in its sound. When I read my versions back to him, above all I wanted them to sound right."

~ p. 110: Kunitz: "What is most readily translatable is the matter of a poem, its substantive ground, which there is no excuse for betraying, even in the absence of equivalents. All the rest--its music, its spirit, its complex verbal and psychic tissue--one tries to suggest as best as one can."

~ p. 126: Rika Lesser on translating Sonnevi's poetry: "Perhaps it is because he is alive and still very productive and therefore I cannot devour and digest his works in my usual fashion; his next book may cast more light on an earlier book or books, which could make me read them and translate poems from them in a different way. Perhaps it is simply because there is so much more uncertainty about every aspect of a massive new undertaking, so much more inertia to overcome."

~ p. 139: W.S. Merwin (!): "I continue in the belief, you know, that I don't know how to translate, and that nobody does. It is an impossible but necessary process, there is no perfect way to do it, and much of it must be found for each particular poem, as we go."

~ p. 202: William Jay Smith: "Poets must translate poets; even if they know little of the other's language, something of the fine frenzy of the original will somehow work its way through."

~ p. 220: William Jay Smith: "Translating the poems of Andrei Voznesensky over the past twenty years has brought me closer to him, to his country and to his language. 'Form isn't what counts,' he has said; 'form must be clear, unfathomable, disquieting, like the sky in which only radar can sense the presence of a plane.' In my translations I have tried to keep the form--that clear, unfathomable sky--in which his lines may remain airborne as those of a poet of his talent and courage deserve to be."

~ p. 232: Paul Auster to Richard Wilbur on the latter's translation of Apollinaire's "Le Pont Mirabeau": "What strikes most about it is the thickness of the language, a feeling of texture...you've tackled the work as a whole, not just as a series of isolated lines, and the result is something that hangs together."

The Prayer of Van Gogh

Humbling defeat in the fields.
The air held by invaders.
Birds, the sun, and again birds.
By night what will be left of me?

At night only the row of lamps
the yellow wall of dry mud
and from the bottom of the garden, through trees,
like a row of candles, the windows,

where I too, dwelt and do not dwell,
the house where I lived and do not live,
the roof which tucked me in safely.
Ah God, then you covered me up safely.

~ János Pilinszky, translated by János Csokits and Ted Hughes
from Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, edited by Daniel Weissbort

Nuts and bolts

Reading notes on Clifford Landers' Literary Translation: A Practical Guide. (He currently has a Machado de Assis story up at Words Without Borders and his translation of Rubem Fonseca's The Taker and Other Stories will be released by Open Letter next month.)

~ p. 30: He quotes Terrance--"the literary translator believes that 'nothing human is foreign to me.' In its good and its evil, its most elevated flights of beauty and its basest profanities, humanity is both subject and object, and the translator's role is to capture its often contradictory impulses as first given voice in another language."

~ p. 31: Embarrassing to admit, but this was a huge lightbulb moment:

Beginners often ask me, 'Do I have to get permission to translate X?' The surprising answer is that anyone can translate anything. If you decide to do a retranslation of the complete short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, mazel tov.

Of course, "the problem comes in trying to publish it."

~ p. 38: This entire book is supremely helpful and I loved reading his section on "A day in the life of a literary translator." He goes through a typical day and the issues he encounters in translating a work of Rubem Fonseca's.

~ p. 45: The "eight stages" of his translation process are also incredibly useful.

~ p. 50: His "author-translator-reader" triangle (with the author at the top) reminds me of Walker Percy's "Delta factor."

~ p. 53: He tangles with Venuti's concept of "resistance" in practical terms:

Did Pushkin, Baudelaire, or Ibsen sound strange in the original? Lofty, certainly; inspired, absolutely; but not odd. A literal rendering of any world-class writer invariably makes that individual sound tongue-tied, as if he or she were speaking a foreign language, and poorly at that. 'Resistance' of this kind, I contend, often places cultural and academic considerations so far ahead of literary and aesthetic concerns as to distort the TL reader's perception of the author. Why bother with a masterpiece from another language if it reads like a trot?

~ p. 82: After recounting a particularly chilling story of Mordecai Richler's pointed disdain for one of his translators, he shares something a bit more heartwarming:

There are authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who display a commendable awareness of the formidable tasks inherent in literary translation and have only good things to say about those who labor to reproduce their works in other languages. (In fact, he argues, 'Translators should be paid the same royalties as authors.') In Vonnegut's words, 'All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine.'

~ p. 83: "Writing is a profession tailor-made for engendering self-doubt."

~ p. 100: "Any translation should--make that must--be read aloud for sonority. Sound is paramount to poets, and more than one translator has been told by the SL poet, 'When it's impossible to preserve both meaning and sound, go with the sound.' Although not all poems (both translations and originals) that sound good are good, it's a pretty safe bet that a translation that sounds bad is, well, bad."

~ p. 194: "For those treading the unfamiliar terrain of contracts, I strongly recommend visiting the web site of PEN American Center (www.pen.org) and downloading the translator's Model Contract found there. It addresses many of the doubts facing translators at all levels of experience."

~ p. 196: I'm photocopying this page and pinning it to the wall above my desk: Peter Theroux's flowchart on "One Way of Translating a Book," which points out how the translator can approach the author and publisher of a book worthy of translation.

~ p. 201: The bibliography is also very helpfully broken down by subject matter. There are three titles listed under "Getting Started":

ALTA Guides to Literary Translation. Breaking into Print. American Literary Translators Association, 2000.

Gertrud Graubart Champe, 'Letter to a Young Translator.' ATA Chronicle, August 1996.

Keith Goldsmith, 'How Badly Do You Want to Be a Literary Translator?' ATA Chronicle, January 1994.

Landers has done a fantastic job providing the right balance of practical advice and measured enthusiasm. Now I just need to buy my own copy...

Inner workings

Reading notes on Translation Studies by Susan Bassnett:

~ p. 7: "To divorce the theory from the practice, to set the scholar against the practitioner as has happened in other disciplines, would be tragic indeed."

~ p. 9: "the arrogant way in which critics will define a translation as good or bad from a purely monolingual position again indicates the peculiar position occupied by translation vis-à-vis another type of metatext (a work derived from, or containing another existing text), literary criticism itself."

~ p. 9: "It is pointless, therefore, to argue for a definitive translation, since translation is intimately tied up with the context in which it is made."

~ p. 13: Translation "belongs most properly to semiotics".

~ p. 14: "In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril."

~ p. 16: Translation as an act of decoding and recoding... Maybe I could compare Percy's triadic theory of meaning to translation?

~ p. 32: examining both linguistic and cultural untranslatability (words vs. concepts)

~ p. 37: "The purpose of tranlsation theory, then, is to reach an understanding of the processes undertaken in the act of translation and, not, as is so commonly misunderstood, to provide a set of norms for effecting the perfect translation. In the same way, literary criticism does not seek to provide a set of instructions for producing the ultimate poem or novel, but rather to understand the internal and external structures operating within and around a work of art." (Well, that's the idea anyway...)

~ p. 38: Bassnett quoting from a translated edition of Octavio Paz's Traducción: literatura y literalidad:

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

~ pp. 43-44: "Both Horace and Cicero, in their remarks on translation, make an important distinction between word for word translation and sense for sense (or figure for figure) translation. The underlying principle of enriching their native language and literature through translation leads to a stress on the aesthetic criteria of the TL product rather than on more rigid notions of 'fidelity'."

~ p. 52: "Translation acquired an additional dimension, as writers used their abilities to translate as a means of increasing the status of their own vernacular. Thus the Roman model of enrichment through translation developed in a new form."

~ p. 56: begins to examine translations of Petrarch by Wyatt and Surrey

~ p. 66: "If poetry is perceived as a separate entity from language, how can it be translated unless it is assumed that the translator is able to read between the words of the original and hence reproduce the text-behind-the-text; what Mallarmé would later elaborate as the text of silence and spaces?"

~ p. 79: "The reader, then, translates or decodes the text according to a different set of systems and the idea of the one 'correct' reading is dissolved. At the same time, Kristeva's notion of intertextuality, that sees all texts linked to all other texts because no text can ever be completely free of those texts that precede and surround it, is also profoundly significant for the student of translation."

~ p. 83: "Pound defined his Homage as something other than a translation; his purpose in writing the poem, he claimed, was to bring a dead man to life. It was, in short, a kind of literary resurrection."

~ p. 98: Bassnett does a fascinating parallel analysis of translations by Ezra Pound and Charles Kennedy of The Seafarer.

~ p. 110: In discussing how some treat the translation of novels differently from that of poetry, she says that "a different concept of the imaginary distinction between form and content prevails when the text to be considered is a novel. It seems to be easier for the (careless) prose translator to consider content as separable from form"--when, of course, this is not really the case.

~ pp. 115-16: "Again and again translators of novels take pains to create readable TL texts, avoiding the stilted effect that can follow from adhering too closely to SL syntactical structures, but fail to consider the way in which individual sentences form part of the total structure." She judges this "a deficiency in reading" and suggests that this is "a whole area of translation that needs to be looked at more closely."

~ p. 116-17: Hilaire Belloc's "six general rules for the translator of prose texts" are listed and explained.

~ p. 118: "Every prime text is made up of a series of interlocking systems, each of which has a determinable function in relation to the whole, and it is the task of the translator to apprehend these functions."

~ p. 119: "What the translator must do, therefore, is to first determine the function of the SL system and then to find a TL system that will adequately render that function."

Where theory and practice meet

Reading notes on Can Theory Help Translators?: A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface by Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner:

~ p. 2: "[W]e theorists should seek to be descriptive, to describe, explain and understand what translators do actually do, not stipulate what they ought to do. From this descriptive point of view, it is the translators that are 'up there', performing an incredibly complex activity, and the theorists are 'down here', trying to understand how on earth the translators manage. These theorists see themselves as studying translators, not instructing them." (AC)

~ p. 8: Transposition: "This means changing the word class." (AC)

~ p. 9: Deverbalization: "It means simply that a translator or interpreter has to get away from the surface structure of the source text, to arrive at the intended meaning, and then express this intended meaning in the target language." (AC)

~ p. 10: "Roughly speaking, iconicity is the matching of form and meaning, so that the form reflects the meaning or the experience that is being described." (AC) A unification of form and content?

~ p. 15: AC: "Reverence for the source text, and the consequent insistence on literal translation, is also evident in the ideas of some modern literary translators. Nabokov is a good example."

EW: "With all due respect to Nabokov, this reminds me of the 'reverence' (or lack of confidence) we see in newly recruited translators who are overawed by the subject matter. Too scared to admit that they don't really understand a text, they translate it literally in the hope that the Real Experts will be able to make something out of it."

I'm reminded of a former post of mine from two years ago--"When fidelity is treasonous".

~ p. 16: St. Jerome as "the patron saint of translators": "When criticized for his translations by St Augustine, because they changed traditional wordings in places, he is said to have replied that 'God is on the side of the scholar'." (AC)

~ p. 20: The translator as victim of divided loyalties: "It is not always possible to be loyal to both the original writer and the readers. Sometimes it has to be one or the other." (EW)

~ p. 57: Dividing translation strategies into three groups: "Search," "Creativity," and "Textual". (AC)

~ p. 68: "Distancing is something all translators, and indeed most other creative people, know about. It means stepping back mentally from what you are creating to get a better perspective on it." (EW)

~ p. 79: Two of the best motivational strategies for translators: "Respect and variety". (EW)

~ pp. 81-82: "It reminds me of Anthony Pym's definition of translation competence (in Pym 1992b: 175ff.), which goes roughly like this: a translator needs two abilities (apart from obvious language skills, etc.). One is the ability to come up with several possibilities, several potential equivalents. The second is the ability to select the best one, for the purpose in hand. The first skill needs divergent intelligence, imagination, creativity; the second needs convergent intelligence, the ability to criticize, analyze, compare, assess." (AC)

~ p. 86: "Yes, 'Never translate alone!' is an excellent guideline." (EW)

~ p. 100: "Once we had started the job, however, some of the translators suggested that one useful theoretical concept that we could use was Christiane Nord's distinction between documentary and instrumental translation (see Chapter 4), where documentary translation 'shows what the original says' and instrumental translation 'does what the original tries to do'." (EW)

~ p. 114: Eurodicautom--a "Large multilingual term bank" (EW)

~ p. 121: It's funny that it's the academic in this discussion that tends to argue for machine translations...

~ p. 127: CELEX--a "database containing all language versions of EU Regulations, Directives, Recommendations and so on." (EW)

~ p. 131: Fire Ant and Worker Bee--an "on-line problem page" for translators.

~ p. 134: the European Society for Translation Studies

On Steiner

(Continuing with the idea of using this space to keep track of my reading...)

Cursory reading notes on George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Chapter Four: "The Claims of Theory":

~ p. 250: Novalis has a part in the idea that "all communication is translation". I wonder how this links to German romanticism and, by extension, George MacDonald?

~ p. 251: These readings of I Corinthians 14 and II Corinthians 12:4 are specious at best. I see no prohibition against translation here.

~ p. 253: "Traditionally, the weight of the argument bears on poetry. Here the welding of matter and form is so close that no dissociation is admissible." I'm reminded of Eliot's essay, "The Metaphysical Poets"...and what Massimo Bacigalupo had to say on the matter:

"I find that the more unambitious the approach the better. Quasi-poets should not use translation as a means of expressing their poetic souls. The closer you look into an original the more poetry you find — even in a translation."

(This is shortly to become my MO... And hey! I could probably find this issue of The Paris Review at the university library.)

~ p. 256: Translation as an act of redemption: "As the Fall may be understood to contain the coming of the Redeemer, so the scattering of tongues at Babel has in it, in a condition of urgent moral and practical potentiality, the return to linguistic unity, the movement towards and beyond Pentecost."

~ p. 257: "It underlies the subtle exaltation in Walter Benjamin's view of the translator as the one who elicits, who conjures up by virtue of unplanned echo a language nearer to the primal unity of speech than is either the original text or the tongue into which he is translating."

~ p. 261: Translation as a unifying force: "Moreover, it established a logic of relation between past and present, and between different tongues and traditions which were splitting apart under stress of nationalism and religious conflict."

~ p. 262: Goethe to Carlyle:

"Say what one will of the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and valuable concerns in the whole of world affairs."

p. 262: "And speaking out of the isolation of the Russian condition, Pushkin defined the translator as the courier of the human spirit."

~ p. 263: "The argument against translatability is, therefore, often no more than an argument based on local, temporary myopia. Logically, moreover, the attack on translation is only a weak form of an attack on language itself."

~ p. 264: Translation transcends logic: "The defence of translation has the immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact. [...] Translation is 'impossible' concedes Ortega y Gasset in his Miseria y esplendor de la traducción. But so is all absolute concordance between thought and speech. Somehow the 'impossible' is overcome at every moment in human affairs."

~ p. 264: "The argument from perfection which, essentially, is that of Du Bellay, Dr. Johnson, Nabokov, and so many others, is facile. No human product can be perfect. No duplication, even of materials which are conventionally labelled as identical, will turn out a total facsimile." Of course, Borges explored this idea thoroughly in "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (in English as "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"). Somehow I think he had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek as he wrote it.

~ p. 291: "The translator seeks to exhibit 'what is already there'."

~ p. 308: "Poets can even smell words."

~ p. 309: "We know next to nothing of the organization and storage of different languages when they coexist in the same mind. How then can there be, in any rigorous sense of the term, a 'theory of translation'?"

~ p. 311: "An error, a misreading initiates the modern history of our subject. Romance languages derive their terms for 'translation' from traducere because Leonardo Bruni misinterpreted a sentence in the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius in which the Latin actually signifies 'to derive from, to lead into'. The point is trivial but symbolic. Often, in the records of translation, a fortunate misreading is the source of new life. [...] The logic comes after the fact. What we are dealing with is not a science, but an exact art."

Shifting gears

Things have been pretty silent around here lately due to a transcontinental move and the commencement of a taught MA (and the present lack of internet access in my room). Hopefully, this is about to change (both the silence *and* the state of my online access).

I've thought a lot about the direction I'd like this humble litblog to take, and I think the most helpful (and least dangerous) thing would be to focus on interesting things I come across during my studies. I've barely begun my reading, but already have a few things I'd like to post about. And since I am my primary audience, I look forward to keeping track of where my thoughts go in this exhilarating, complex field.

To begin with, there's this loaded little footnote in Translation Studies by Susan Bassnett that I found particularly relevant:

In his article, 'Translation in the United States', Babel VII, (2), 1968, pp. 119-24 Henry Fischbach points out that the United States has a shorter history of translation than almost any other industrialized nation of the world, and attributes this deficiency to four basic points:

(a) The political and commercial isolationism of nineteenth-century America.
(b) The traditional cultural allegiance to the English-speaking community.
(c) The American complacent self-sufficiency in technology.
(d) The strength of the myth of the Land of Promise for emigrants and their subsequent desire to integrate.

Fischbach's theory is interesting in that it would seem to show correspondences with the English attitude towards translation linked to British colonial expansion.

I was reminded of John O'Brien's infamous diatribe. He has quite a lot of righteous indignation to back his complaints about translation "hype." But from where I'm sitting, as much noise should be made as possible--even if it annoys those who go about this business the "right" way.

After all, it isn't just the "Americans" (or rather, "U.S.ians") who need certain attitude adjustments when it comes to literature from other countries.