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Rewriting Mansfield: Writing, Editing and Translation

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Rewriting Mansfield: Writing, Editing and Translation Rewriting Mansfield: Writing, Editing and Translation By Davide Manenti A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literary Translation Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2015 Abstract This thesis explores the notion, the process and the ethical implications of rewriting, drawing on insights from literary and translation theories, psychoanalysis and trauma studies. It analyses three major forms of rewriting: the author’s, the editor’s and the translator’s. While writing, editing and translation have their own specific norms of production, methodologies, possibilities and limits, all these textual practices are implicitly concerned with the meaning-making process of rewriting. Chapter One presents the central case study of the project: John Middleton Murry’s editing of Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, which resulted in the publication of Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927). The chapter reviews relevant Mansfield scholarship and discusses textual, methodological and theoretical issues concerning the problem of rewriting. Chapter Two follows the ebb and flow of Mansfield’s own rewriting process by discussing the ways in which she ‘translated’ her notebook entries into her fiction. Chapter Three offers a re-reading of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield and sheds new light on Murry’s controversial editorial manipulation. Chapter Four examines the first Italian translation of the Journal – Diario di Katherine Mansfield, authored by Mara Fabietti in 1933 – and my own re-translation of ‘Life of Ma Parker’ – a 1921 Mansfield story that epitomizes the main themes and issues addressed in this study. ii This thesis demonstrates how deeply intertwined writing, editing and translating are, and presents an understanding of rewriting as a complex and fascinating process that simultaneously resists meaning and yearns for it. iii To the memory of my mother To my father We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. TONI MORRISON, ‘Nobel Lecture’ Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. VIRGINIA WOOLF, Mrs Dalloway iv Contents vi Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 5 CHAPTER ONE The 1927 Journal: Critical and Theoretical Issues 27 CHAPTER TWO ‘Until I simply exhaust my store’: Writing, Rewriting and Working-through 60 CHAPTER THREE After the End: Editing Mansfield 97 CHAPTER FOUR Translating Mansfield 135 Conclusions 140 Works Cited v Acknowledgments I want to thank my supervisor, Dr Marco Sonzogni, who supported this project from the very beginning. His enthusiasm and advice have greately benefited my work. I am also grateful to my secondary supervisor, Dr Sally Hill, for her edits and insightful suggestions every step of the way. I am indebted to Victoria University of Wellington for funding my doctoral assistantship. The School of Languages and Cultures has provided a friendly and supportive work environment; a special word of thanks goes to the School administrator, Nina Cuccurullo. In 2007, when I was studying for my master’s degree in Book Publishing at the University of Milan, I had the good fortune to attend Franca Cavagnoli’s lectures. She revealed to me the fascinating and endlessly challenging art of translation and opened the gate to the path that led me here. Without her, I would not even have dared to embark upon this New Zealand journey. A number of friends and colleagues have read and offered their helpful comments on my writing; in particular, I want to thank Keren Chiaroni, Bob Lowe, Paul Frisby and Kirsten Reid. I would also like to express my gratitude to Giulio Chimetto, vi Massimiliano Matteri, Mirko Lamonaca, Maria Letizia Tonelli, and Naomi Trigg for their love and friendship. Finally, I want to thank my family: my aunts and uncles, my brothers Francesco and Andrea, my grandmother Giuseppina and Pietro, my father. My greatest thank goes to my mother Mina, with whom I spent many hours talking about this research project. She was a gentle, loving, admirable woman – and a mother to the end. vii Introduction The initial idea for this project was a comparative study of the Italian translations of Katherine Mansfield’s works. I was particularly interested in her Journal, which was published posthumously in 1923 by her husband, John Middleton Murry, and translated into Italian a few years later. As soon as I became familiar with the Journal’s publishing history, however, I realized that the Italian translation was only the top layer of a much deeper palimpsest. The Journal of Katherine Mansfield – the supposed ‘source text’ – was a highly selective and manipulated version of Mansfield’s manuscripts – a series of notebooks, diaries and papers that she never intended for publication. Moreover, the author herself often reused her notebook material as a stepping-stone towards her fiction. I found myself in the middle of a terrain vague: the unexplored but fascinating domain of rewriting. This thesis has a twofold purpose: to shed new light on the multiple ‘afterlives’ of Mansfield’s notebooks while exploring a number of key theoretical issues about the notion of rewriting itself. 1 In Chapter One, I review relevant scholarship on Murry’s editing, arguing that the different and conflicting assessments of the editor’s task can be explained, first of all, from a textual point of view. Murry produced two editions of the Journal: one in 1927 and the other in 1954. In the first edition, he intervened in Mansfield’s text several times, particularly in her most personal diary entries. The 1954 ‘definitive’ edition, albeit still selective, reproduced a much larger portion of the manuscripts; the editor also corrected, as much as he could, his previously censured transcriptions. A distinction of these two versions is therefore essential for a critical appreciation of Murry’s editing process. For reasons that I will explain in due course, I am here exclusively concerned with the first edition of the Journal. In the opening chapter I also review two influential studies on rewriting: Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree and André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. Genette’s investigation on the palimpsestic nature of literature is still useful, especially from the point of view of textual analysis. However, Genette focused mostly on the ‘sunnier side’ of rewriting – that is, on texts whose rewriting is openly stated – thus avoiding any discussion on the ideological constraints that govern literary rewritings. Rather different was Lefevere’s approach, which showed in an unmistakable way that practices of rewriting are culturally, ideologically and personally determined. And yet the notion of rewriting offered by Lefevere – a practice occurring ‘in the middle’, between writing and reading – is still not entirely persuasive. My argument is that rewriting is best 2 understood as a process that transcends conventional boundaries between different practices. In Chapter Two I investigate the ways in which Mansfield ‘translated’ some of her notebook entries into her short stories. ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘The Garden Party’, however, are not only the result of an actual practice of rewriting but also exemplify – in their rhetoric and themes – some key issues at the heart of rewriting itself. More specifically, these stories problematize the complex relationship between reference and representation – the what and the how of literary rewriting. My research intersects here with trauma theory: the notion of trauma – an event, according to Cathy Caruth, which simultaneously claims and challenges our understanding – can be purposefully employed for a better appreciation of Mansfield’s rewriting process and of rewriting in general. My close readings – and in particular my analysis of ‘The Woman at the Store’ – also provide new insights into the field of Mansfield studies, examining a number of texts that have received little critical attention so far. In Chapter Three I explore Murry’s editing process resulting in the 1927 Journal of Katherine Mansfield. I begin by addressing the vexed question of the Journal’s authorship. Murry adhered to a romantic conception of authorship that contributed to the ‘invisibility’ of his editorial intervention and to the consequent foregrounding of the diarist’s ‘true presence’. My analysis draws on Lawrence Venuti’s theory of the translator’s invisibility and on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’. I then provide a number of significant examples of editorial ‘trimming’, indentifying 3 the ‘implied author’ created by Murry. This, in turn, allows me to describe the editing process in terms of a fictional plot. In the closing section of the chapter I suggest that the narrative tension between the fragment and the whole underlying Murry’s editing process bears witness to Mansfield’s own desire to overcome the sense of fragmentation that she experienced as a woman and as a writer; a sense of fragmentation that, I argue, has its origin in her traumatic encounter with death. In Chapter Four I focus on the rewriting process enacted in translation. The problematic relationship between reference and representation is particularly evident in the movement from one language to another.
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