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

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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 literary, of what makes language maximally expressive: stylistic deviation, different forms of repetition, tropes, a certain rep- ertoire of linguistic structures. Translation is an opportunity to renew what might be productive of literary effect, by cross-lingually extending our auditory capacities, our ability to generate associative chains and formal metamorphoses, our ability to cope with simultaneous percep- tual structures, our awareness of cultural stratifications and leakages. Foreword xi

For too long traditional and experimental forms of writing have been seen as separate currents, mistrustful of one another; literary translation as here envisaged suggests a more intimate and constructive fusion of the rearguard and the avant-garde, a fusion which has implications for the very making of translational texts: translation calls for new ways of imagining text and textual presentation, calls for the harnessing of new kinds of paratext, or hypertext, new communicational channels; translation, after all, naturally has urgent business with global technologies.

Clive Scott Professor Emeritus, University of East Anglia Fellow of the British Academy Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank Clive Scott, Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia, for his kind support for this project, in particular for his insightful and thought-provoking Foreword. The editors would also like to thank Gareth Jones for philosophical input to the Introduction. We are grateful to Olivia Middleton, our commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her enthusiasm for the book and her careful editorial guidance.

The work presented in Chapter 9 by Dorota Gołuch was supported by a doctoral award funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Additionally, Dorota Gołuch would like to thank Professor Theo Hermans for his incisive reading of the text.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of the copyright for the literary extracts reproduced in this text. The editors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: A. C. Clarke for granting permissions for a ‘Room wi’ twa nebs’, a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Le chambre double’; Paul Batchelor for granting permissions for ‘The Damned’, a poem after Dante’s Inferno (Canto V, 121–38); the Museu Histórico Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, for permission to reproduce an image of the painting Martírio de Tiradentes, by Francisco Aurélio de Figueiredo e Melo; the Fundação Museu Mariano Procópio for permission to reproduce an image of the painting Tiradentes Supliciado, otherwise known as Tiradentes esquartejado by Pedro Américo; the Câmera Municipla de Ouro Preto for permission to reproduce an image of the painting Leitura da Sentença dos Inconfidentes by Leopoldino Faria; and to Bloodaxe Books for granting permissions for quotation from the poem ‘Remembering’ from Collected Later Poems 1988–2000 by R. S. Thomas.

xii Notes on the Contributors

Jean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she teaches literary translation, translation theory, and stylistics, and runs the MA in Literary Translation. An Executive Committee member of the British Comparative Literature Association, and member of the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, she is a translator between German and English, and the editor of the Visible Poets series. Besides many articles on translation, literature and language, publications include Between Nothing and Nothing (translated poems of Ernst Meister, 2003); Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006); and A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies (2011). She currently holds a research fellowship on ‘Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust’, funded by the AHRC. Christine Calfoglou teaches on a postgraduate programme in the School of Humanities of the Hellenic Open University, Greece. She has taught undergraduate Translation and Linguistics courses at the University of Athens and seminars for the Postgraduate Programme in Translation and Translation Theory. Her research interests and published work involve the translation of poetry, translation theory and linguistics, as well as contrastive linguistics, translation in the language class, and distance education methodology. She is the author of a book on the teaching of reading and writing, and assistant editor of RPLTL, an online scientific journal. Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Along with Andrea Hammel, Jean Boase-Beier and Marion Winters, he is co-director of the Holocaust and Translation Research Network. His research interests include the cultural history of the German-speaking countries and post-Holocaust literary and autobio graphical writing. He has published on the German and English translations of the Auschwitz stories of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski, and on the German translation of Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit. B. J. Epstein is a Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia, UK, where her research is at the intersection of translation studies, children's literature and queer studies. She is also a writer, editor and Swedish-to-English translator, and she runs the

xiii xiv Notes on the Contributors translation blog Brave New Words (http://brave-new-words.blogspot. com/). She has published Translating Expressive Language in Children’s Literature and Are the Kids All Right? Representations of LGBTQ Characters in Children's and Young Adult Literature, as well as edited and contributed to Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries.

Hilal Erkazanci-Durmus is an Assistant Professor of English–Turkish translation for undergraduate and graduate levels at Hacettepe University, Turkey. Her research interests include critical sociolinguistics, cognitive stylistics, cognitive pragmatics, and translation. Her research has appeared in a number of edited collections, for example, ‘Language Planning in Turkey: a Source of Censorship on Translations’ in T. Seruya and M. L. Moniz (eds) Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes. Her book reviews have appeared in Target, The Translator, Discourse and Society, and Discourse and Communication.

Antoinette Fawcett is a researcher based at the University of East Anglia. She co-edited Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue (2010) with Rebecca Hyde-Parker and Karla Guadarrama García and is pres- ently engaged in translating poems by the Dutch poets Martinus Nijhoff (1894–1953) and Gerrit Achterberg (1905–62). She has won prizes both for her own poetry and for her tranlsations, including the Keats–Shelley 2009 (second prize) and the John Dryden Translation Prize 2010 (third prize). Between 1988 and 2001 she taught English language and literature at International Baccalaureate level in several different countries.

Dorota Gołuch is Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University, UK. Her MA dissertation, published in 2011, examined Indo-Caribbean women's writing, while her PhD research focused on the Polish reception of translated postcolonial literature in the period 1970–2010.

Irene Hirsch taught Translation Studies at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil. She was the author of Versão Brasileira.

Susanne Klinger is Assistant Professor for English Language and Literature at İnönü University, Turkey. Previously she taught in the UK at the University of Surrey, Middlesex University and London Metropolitan University. Her PhD research, completed at the University of East Anglia in 2012 and funded by the AHRC, investigated linguistic hybridity in Anglophone Nigerian writing, particularly its role in con- veying the world view of characters and narrators, and related translation issues. Notes on the Contributors xv

Duncan Large is Professor of German at Swansea University, UK. He is co-editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his published work on Nietzsche includes two monographs, two edited collections and three translations. He has also published extensively on German literature (especially Austrian Modernism and German Romanticism), comparative literature and Anglo-German literary relations (especially the reception of Laurence Sterne), philosophy and critical theory (Sarah Kofman, Michel Serres), psychoanalysis (Freud), art (Carl Einstein) and music (Wagner, Palestrina). Eliana Maestri is Italian Language Coordinator at the University of Warwick, UK, where she teaches language and translation at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She has recently been a Visiting Lecturer in Translation at the University of the West of England. She was the recipient of a EUOSSIC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2011–12), working on Italian-Australian identities and perceptions of the EU, and of a Research Fellowship at the University of Monash, Melbourne (2014). She was Lector in Italian at the universities of Bath and of Oxford, also lecturing on Italian pulp fiction, and on the works of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino. She has published a number of chapters in books on the translations of the autobiographies of Jeanette Winterson and A. S. Byatt. John Milton is Associate Professor of English Literature and Translation Studies at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. His main areas of study are the history and sociology of translation and adaptation studies. Among his many publications is Agents of Translation, edited with Paul Bandia. Clive Scott is Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia, UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Recent work in the field of translation studies includes Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading, Translating the Perception of the Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology, Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Translating Baudelaire. He is also well known for his work in the field of cultural and media studies, with books on photography and on the use of captions and commentaries in advertising, film and photojournalism: The Spoken Image and Street Photography: from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. Rocío G. Sumillera is a Lecturer at the English and German Department of the University of Valencia, Spain. She holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Granada, as well as an MA in Translation Studies xvi Notes on the Contributors from the same university. She carried out part of her doctoral research as a one-year Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (2010), and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid. Her research interests revolve around translation in the Early Modern period, Early Modern rhetoric and poetics, and ideas on poetic invention and imagination in Early Modern times. George Szirtes is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, UK. He has published 14 books of poetry, and was win- ner of the Faber Prize (1980), for The Slant Door, and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2005) for Reel. His most recent books of poetry are New and Collected Poems (2008), The Burning of the Books (2009) and Bad Machine (2013). He has translated and edited many works of Hungarian poetry and fiction, most recently by Sándor Márai, Yudit Kiss and László Krasznahorkai, and has judged a number of translation prizes including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. James Thomas is an independent scholar of nineteenth-century Occitan literature and a qualified translator. After reading English at the University of York (1992), he learnt Catalan and Spanish in Barcelona. His research-based MPhil (Bristol 2005) focused on Antoine Fabre d'Olivet and Victor Gelu in relation to sociolinguistics, heteroglossia and regional identities. He is currently editing an anthology of Occitan literature in translation and has forthcoming publications on Victor Gelu and Fabre d'Olivet (the latter for an OUP volume on reception of Dante). His other research interests include Bordeaux in the Restoration period (1814–30), British folk music and the francophone reception of British romantic writers. Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Her research and publications are mainly in three fields: translation studies; Celtic medieval literature; and Irish studies. Her critical studies The Irish ‘Ulysses’ and Translation in a Postcolonial Context both won prizes and commenda- tions. She has edited several volumes including Translation and Power (with Edwin Gentzler), Language and Tradition in Ireland (with Colin Ireland), Translation as Resistance, and Translation, Resistance, Activism. Her most recent full-length study is Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Trained as a medievalist, Professor Tymoczko holds three degrees from Harvard University. She teaches a wide variety of subjects including translation theory and practice, modern and contemporary Notes on the Contributors xvii novel, postcolonial literature, fantasy literature, medieval literature, and early Irish language and literature. Philip Wilson taught modern foreign languages for many years in comprehensive schools and recently completed a PhD at the University of East Anglia, researching the relevance to literary translation of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has worked as an Associate Tutor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA and is now Assistant Professor of Western Languages and Literature at İnönü University, Malatya. He translated The Luther Breviary (2007) with John Gledhill, and is the translator of the historical trilogy Fortune’s Wheel by Rebecca Gablé and of the anthology The Earliest German Poetry (forthcoming). Over one hundred poems have appeared in magazines, plus a pamphlet of poetry.