(Self)Translation and Censorship
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(SELF)TRANSLATION AND CENSORSHIP: A STUDY BASED ON DIARIES OF JASMINA TEŠANOVIĆ BOJANA KOVAČEVIĆ DOCTORAL THESIS VOLUME I DIRECTOR: DR HELENA MARIA MILHEIRO TANQUEIRO FACULTY OF TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING PHD PROGRAMME IN TRANSLATION AND INTERCULTURAL STUDIES SEPTEMBER 2015 2 To my brother Andrej 3 4 Acknowledgments First, and most of all, I would like to thank Dr Helena Tanqueiro for her unconditioned guidance, expertise and patience throughout the process of writing this thesis. I am very grateful to Dr Willy Neunzig as well, for his support and help whenever the need arose as well as to the rest of the staff at FTI who were always so forthcoming. Also, I would like to thank my committee members for their attendance and interest. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my friends in Serbia, Spain and Finland – especially Milja, Patricia and Paavo – who encouraged me to keep going and saw this through with me. Endless gratitude goes to my family for offering me their love and support throughout all the years of research. Last but not least, special thanks to the extraordinary Jasmina Tešanović and her creations. 5 6 Summary Continuing the research in the field of self-translation which started with the master’s project, this doctoral thesis focuses on the analysis of two case-studies: the diaries called Matrimony and The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade, originally written in English, translated into Spanish by Anna Inés Borges and later on self-translated into Serbian by the author Jasmina Tešanović. The investigation was based on the concepts of translation studies, hoping to bring innovation and significant contribution to these studies, and in particular, to the studies of self-translation, analysing diary as a medium between translation and self-translation. The literary form/subgenre of diary (that the author also publishes in the form of essay) appears to be inseparably linked with the subjectivity and ideology of the author/self-translator Jasmina Tešanović; it is the main tool in getting her message across, reflecting her life and her standpoint. During the investigation, the first, English versions of the diaries are treated as originals and thus, as self-translation or translation in mente. The contrastive analysis that has been done between English and Serbian texts tries to reveal the moments where this happened in the course of (self)translating the diaries into her mother tongue, as well as the differences that the passage of time brought about. Regarding these two versions of her diaries and the third one, translated into Spanish, we have then contrasted the differences, i.e. elements that show the influence of (self)censorship, as well as political and cultural references between these distant languages, primarily related to the expectations and knowledge of the readership but also the author’s sensibility. Key words: Self-translation, Censorship, Diary, Jasmina Tešanović, Feminism, Political Idiot, Matrimonium 7 8 Introduction Self-translation, though going back at least to the Middle Ages, has only come into the spotlight at the beginning of this century; consequently, it is a branch of translation studies that still has not been studied thoroughly. Many theoreticians or investigators in this field from the late XX and early XXI century mention self- or auto-translation as something rare, exceptional, something that very few authors have done. In this regard, Helena Tanqueiro (2000: 50) claims that “while it is true that throughout history there have been many writers who wrote in more than one language, such as for example, Paul Celan, Derek Walcott, Samuel Beckett, Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún, Antonio Tabucci, it is nevertheless interesting to see that only a few, very few indeed, actually translated their own work, despite the fact that all of these, and other important writers such as Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, Valéry, and so on, devoted much of their lives to translation…” That is one side of it, and even if there is a large number of bilingual writers who had or have never turned to translating their own work, our research has shown that there is just as impressive number of writers and scholars throughout history who did turn to self- translation, ever since the Jewish author and (self)translator Flavius Josephus in the first century BC via prominent medieval translators Moses Sephardi and Ramon Llull, XVI century authors Thomas More and John Calvin, to XX century prominent literary figures such as James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Samuel Beckett, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, Karen Blixen and many others. The list of the people in the latter group is endless, which only brings us to conclude that there is an ever-growing yet non- documented corpus of texts translated by their own authors. (Santoyo 2005) That said, it is important to further mention the fact that the studies of self-translation realised have, until very recently, been based mainly on bilingualism, whereas this doctoral thesis approaches self-translation from the point of view of translation studies. Moreover, many more examples of self-translation have been found in Western than in Eastern cultures and similarly, numerous examples of self-translation can be found between languages that are etymologically close, for instance French and Spanish, Italian and 9 Spanish or Portuguese and Spanish; and as such have been studied by AUTOTRAD investigation group of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In this regard, this doctoral thesis contributes to the work of AUTOTRAD group by analysing two self- translated works, done between two distant languages, English and Serbian while at the same time juxtaposing them with the translation into Spanish done by a different person/translator. The interest in this particular line of research came primarily from the fact that, coming originally from Serbia, the author of this thesis wanted to inspect the situation in the literary world regarding self-translation in the Balkans, knowing of so many prominent authors in the region – Danilo Kiš, Miloš Crnjanski, Milorad Pavić, Biljana Srbljanović, then the Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, to name just a few – who all spent a significant part of their life abroad, working both as writers and translators. Nonetheless, our research has shown, to our surprise, that not many of them ventured into applying their bilingualism to their own work. Be it for the feeling of nostalgia or patriotism, added to the experience of wars, asylums and other political conflicts in this South-East European region, yet the life situations they found themselves in drove these authors to write exclusively in Serbo- Croatian, or today’s Serbian (or Croatian) language. An extensive search of Serbian authors and translators revealed the name of Jasmina Tešanović - born in a Communist family in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, raised in Cairo and Milan, yet nowadays residing in her Serbia-Italy-USA triangle. We chose her work because it showed an abundant field for deeper insight and investigation in terms of self-translation and translation theory studies. What is more, Jasmina works with the combination of languages that is interesting for us and AUTOTRAD, as mentioned, being a self-translating between distant languages, such as English and Serbian, and belonging to different language roots, Germanic and Slavic, respectively. Further interest for choosing to investigate on this author and her work came from the fact that she deals with contemporary issues of our country, mine and hers, and all the things we went through, one way or another, politically or socially, with endless wars and pre- and post-depressions that have been going on in this region for a long time and of which each of us got a share. Her books speak in the name of all us that happened to live in this “conflict region” in the last century. Then again, while creating, Jasmina is influenced by her private and political side of life, which is reflected in her books. In relation to this, the 10 prominent element of her writing is the question of censorship and self-censorship, one of the most interesting topics when talking about translation / self-translation. The major part of censorship is imposed indirectly by the character of her mother, mostly while she was alive but not only then. The most particular detail is the reason of Jasmina’s writing in English – she desperately wants to avoid being despised by the one she loves. Only once her mother is dead, does Jasmina dare to (self)translate it into her/their mother tongue, Serbian, but even then not daring to utter absolutely everything that she was able to reveal by writing it originally in English. This motif can be noticed in all of Jasmina’s work. We focused on the abovementioned factors already during the master project, analysing Jasmina’s book Me and My Multicultural Street/ Ja i moja multikulturalna ulica, where the contrastive analysis was done between the English and the Serbian version, mainly highlighting the question of censorship. During that project we also started dealing with the questions of ideology, time lapse, diary as a genre - which we now tried to elaborate and to draw conclusions that contribute to the research of AUTOTRAD group and to the translation theory studies in general. During the course of doctoral studies, the primary interest remained the same yet the focus switched to other works of Jasmina Tešanović, the diaries called Matrimony and The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade, originally written in English, translated into Spanish by Anna Inés Borges and later on self-translated into Serbian by Jasmina herself. Interesting for their form, these diaries follow the inner and the outer world of the writer upon the death of her mother and upon the death of her state or its part as she knew it.