Between Two Texts| Translating James Welch's Fools Crow Into German
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University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 1998 Between two texts| Translating James Welch's Fools Crow into German Andrea Opitz The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Opitz, Andrea, "Between two texts| Translating James Welch's Fools Crow into German" (1998). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 1666. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/1666 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. 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BETWEEN TWO TEXTS- TRANSLATING JAMES WELCH’S FOOLS C R O W INTO GERMAN by Andrea Opitz presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The University of Montana 1998 Approved by: ■I a1 Cp-^hairperson Co-Chairperson Dean, Graduate School Date UMl Number; EP35003 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMT Ois»«r1ation Publishing UMl EP35003 Published by ProQuest LLC (2012). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code uest ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 opitz, Andrea, M.A., May 1998 English Literature Between Two Texts — Translating James Welch’s Fools Crow into German Directors; Prof. Lois M. W ^ e l c h ______ Prof. Gerald Fetz This thesis is a translation of part one of James Welch’s Fools Crow, the first historical novel about Native Americans written by a Native American. Published in 1986, Fools Crow chronicles the life of the Lone Eaters band of the Pikimi tribe of Blackfeet living on the Western Plains of Montana in the late 1800s. The novel focuses on a young Blackfeet, W hite Man’s Dog, who will be renamed Fools Crow. He knows, unlike the protagonists in many other texts of Native American literature, precisely who he is within the still-functioning world of Blackfeet values and discourse. In fiction, this novel is still the sole most important contribution to an understanding of what life was like for the Plains Indians in the last century. In Fools Crow. Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre) attempts to create a story of cultural recovery that could help explain to contemporary Blackfeet a part of their history written from a Native rather than a Euroamerican perspective. This story of recovery is also important to readers from other cultures who are searching for a unifying cultural identity. This aspect of the novel has prominent relevance to the German discourse of the last hundred years. This issue, along with a general discussion of translation theory, is examined in the introduction to the translation. Furthermore, the introduction explores the role of the translator, who is placed between the source author, his text and context, and the expectations of the target audience. u Table of Contents Abstract. .11 Introduction ’’Poetry is what gets lost in translation” Translation in Discourse................................................................. i Motivation for the translation and the question of audience......................................................................................... 3 Text as Context.................................................................................9 Translator as Reader.......................................................................14 Mediator between two cultures....................................................18 Appendix A ...................................................................................... 22 Appendix B ...................................................................................... 23 Appendix C .....................................................................................24 Translation Fools Crow-part i/Teil................................................................... i 26 Glossary...........................................................................................162 Bibliography............................................................................................ 166 m Introduction Before I gave myself over to the challenging, and often frustrating task of translating the first part of James Welch’s Fools Crow into German, I had to ask myself why this exericise is a valuable scholarly pursuit? 1 considered the act of translating to be important and necessary for Hterary, as well as cultural, studies. That notion, however, must have been rather vague and general, for it is onlyafter the experience that 1 can begin to grasp the value and usefulness of translating. To explain this endeavor, 1 wiU examine the nature of translation as it relates to the importance of target audience, and to text and to language as a cultural activity. Finally, I wiU explore my own personal involvement with Fools Crow as an English- speaking German. “Poetry is what gets lost in Translation ’ Translation in Discourse Translation seems to be the most underestimated and ignored literary activity. Rarely do translators appear in name on the cover of the books they translate, for example. Seldom do readers consider the fact that a great number of the books they read are in fact translations. The reason for this lack of interest might lie in the misconception that all translations are “literal.” If a translation is merely a transfer of words from one language into another, the translator can be imagined as safely remaining in the author’s shadow. W'e, as reader, then beHeve we hear the author’s, and only his/her, voice. Therefore, it would seem superfluous to make the involvement of the translator an audible issue. To a certain degree it is true that a translator first engages in, what might be called, a “Hteral” translation. This first approach establishes a text for the translator with which s/he can work. 1 beUeve that no responsible translator can stop there, if indeed, s/he wants to serve the original text and its author. Nabokov, however, seems to view the function of the translator shghtly differently. In his “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” he says that “the person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language, has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text” (134) and asserts that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase” (127). The first question that comes to mind at this point is, “What, in fact, is a 'literal' translation?” Octavio Paz believes that such a thing as a “literal translation” does not exist. It would not be a translation in that sense anyway, but merely “a mechanism, a string of words that helps us read the text in its original language. It is a glossary rather than a translation, which is always a literary activity” (154). In his introduction to The Craft of Translation. Rainer Schulte, director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas, asks another of the translator’s basic questions: “How can equivalences be established between the semantic and cultural differences of two language?” He goes on to say that translators generally hover specifically over this question. They “explore each word first as word and then as reflection of a larger cultural and historical context” (Craft ix). If a translator replaces one word with another, s/he can never be sure that she should not have picked another one. Generally speaking, it seems practically impossible to pinpoint the exact meaning of one word in another language by itself, or even in relation to the words around it, because of the different cultural connotations associated with it. Gregory Rabassa, in “No Two Snowflakes are Alike,” points to still another concern. The one thing “more deadly even than personal and cultural nuances in hindering an exact’ translation is the very sound of languages and the words that constitute them” (2). For this, and other reasons, everyone seems to agree that it is especially hard to transfer poetry into another language. As Robert Frost says in his famous statement, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation, “ or Thomas Bernard in his analogy: “Ein übersetztes Buch1 st wie eine Leiche, die von einem Autobus bis zur Unkenntlichkeit verstümmelt worden ist,” (“A translated