Literary Translation

Literary Translation Also by Jean Boase-Beier A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION STUDIES THE PRACTICES OF LITERARY TRANSLATION: Constraints and Creativity (co-editor) STYLISTIC APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION Also by Antoinette Fawcett TRANSLATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE (co-editor) Literary Translation Redrawing the Boundaries Edited by Jean Boase-Beier University of East Anglia, UK Antoinette Fawcett University of East Anglia, UK and Philip Wilson İnönü University, Turkey Selection, introduction and editorial content © Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson 2014 Remaining chapters © Contributors 2014 Foreword © Clive Scott 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-31004-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. 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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-45650-5 ISBN 978-1-137-31005-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137310057 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents List of Figures vii Foreword by Clive Scott ix Acknowledgements xii Notes on the Contributors xiii Introduction 1 Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson 1 Why Literary Translation is a Good Model for Translation Theory and Practice 11 Maria Tymoczko 2 Dialogic Spaces and Literary Resonances in the French Translation of A. S. Byatt’s Autobiographical Story ‘Sugar’ 32 Eliana Maestri 3 Cloud Talk: Reading the Shapes in Poetry and What Becomes of Them 50 George Szirtes 4 The Conservative Era: a Case Study of Historical Comparisons of Translations of Children’s Literature from English to Swedish 64 B. J. Epstein 5 Translation in Sixteenth-Century English Manuals for the Teaching of Foreign Languages 79 Rocío G. Sumillera 6 Iconic Motivation in Translation: Where Non-Fiction Meets Poetry? 99 Christine Calfoglou 7 A Narrative Theory Perspective on the Turkish Translation of The Bastard of Istanbul 114 Hilal Erkazanci-Durmus 8 Fabre d’Olivet’s Le Troubadour and the Textuality of Pseudotranslation 134 James Thomas v vi Contents 9 What Does Literary Translation Bring to an Understanding of Postcolonial Cultural Perceptions? On the Polish Translation of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard 149 Dorota Gołuch 10 Translating the Narrator 168 Susanne Klinger 11 On the Work of Philosopher-Translators 182 Duncan Large 12 Translation and Holocaust Testimonies: a Matter for Holocaust Studies or Translation Studies? 204 Peter Davies 13 The Important Role of Translation in the 1789 Brazilian Minas Conspiracy 219 John Milton and Irene Hirsch 14 Using Translation to Read Literature 241 Jean Boase-Beier Index 253 List of Figures 4.1 Strategies for neologisms by year, focusing on the major strategies, in percentages 69 4.2 Strategies for idioms by year, in percentages, focusing on the two major strategies 70 4.3 Strategies for puns by year, in percentages, focusing on the three major strategies 72 13.1 Martírio de Tiradentes (1892), Francisco Aurélio de Figueiredo e Melo 238 13.2 Leitura da Sentença dos Inconfidentes (before 1911), Leopoldino Faria 239 13.3 Tiradentes esquartejado (1893), Pedro Américo 240 vii This page intentionally left blank Foreword By virtue of being temporally and/or spatially distanced from its source text, literary translation cannot but translate new kinds of knowledge, or new configurations of inherited knowledge, into that source text, so that it is governed by different epistemological or cognitive dispensa- tions. At the very least, translation reattaches a source text to a cultural milieu and redefines the cultural givens, whether those givens concern politics, ethnicity, gender or intertextual fabric. In this sense, literary translation is like the administering of a regenerative injection. In this sense, it is naturally a vehicle for the forces of proliferation and centrifu- gality. If we use the more usual and inclusive term ‘recontextualization’ to describe this process, we risk misrepresenting it, in two principal ways: we imply that the process is unproblematic and unified, when it is multiple, conflicted, heterogeneous; and we make of the translator a cultural servant rather than an idiosyncratic reader. To translate is both to capture one’s perception of the text and to develop new modes of perceiving it. The present volume is designed to demonstrate how source texts might, by translation, be invested with alternative modes of perception. Translation studies has from time to time expressed apprehensions about the dilution of the notion of translation, either through the infil- tration of ‘ancillary’ forms (imitation, pastiche, adaptation, versioning, intermedial/intersemiotic translation) or through the generalization of the activity itself: any act of comprehension, any resolution of the meaning of discourse by a metadiscourse, counts as translation; con- sequently, the integrity of the discipline and the rigour of its method- ologies have seemed to be put constantly at risk. This book lays those ghosts; partly because it is itself driven by an expanding vision of literary translation, by a conviction that literary translation, and indeed pseudotranslation, can ever only be dimly aware of where its borders lie, or should be set; partly because it is happy to look through the other end of the interdisciplinary telescope: do not just ask what other disciplines can do for literary translation, ask also what literary translation can do for other disciplines; partly because it is looking for the ways in which a metadiscourse of interpretation can find its way back to the impulses of a creative writing. ix x Foreword But if literary translation redraws disciplinary boundaries and encour- ages us to explore new and fruitful disciplinary permeabilities, we should insist further on our initial proposition, that translation invites us to discover new coordinates of knowledge. The act of translation opens up a peculiarly elastic and malleable space, in which the translational mind can remodel the literary landscape, can take reading consciousness on journeys that conventional knowledge disqualifies. It thus throws up images of what a rewritten literary history or comparative literature might look like: early oral poetry brought into the very heart of written contemporary verse, Shakespeare in alexandrines, nar- ratives reframed to different ideologies, or different gender or political agendas, Dante seen through the lens of George Herbert or vice versa. These are not moments of creative irresponsibility, but important capi- talizations on what translation peculiarly offers: a warrant to reimagine how we might live among literature. We need, nevertheless, to strike two cautionary notes. Not surpris- ingly, in the academic world, translators address themselves to translators, and explore what translation, both as activity and study, can illuminate, and in particular what the source text can reveal about the target text and vice versa. There is a danger that we thus involuntarily elide from our discussions translation’s primary audience, the monoglot reader, the one denied access to these comparative exercises, the one to whom we have not perhaps yet learned how to speak. This book implicitly suggests how that dialogue might be pursued, by engaging with issues beyond linguistic difficulty, beyond the present form of the ‘Translator’s Note’, by indicating to the reader what histories, what ideological shifts, what disciplinary perspectives might be activated and filtered by the translational process. Additionally, we must continue tirelessly to ask what kind of presence in the literary world literary translation should be. If translation is indeed a regenerative injection, if its function is not to preserve texts, as in aspic, but to reproject them into possible futures, or futures of possibility, then it must have the cour- age to refashion not just what is literary in the source text, but what is literary tout court. We are, perhaps, too wedded to certain views of what constitutes the

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