Cormac Mccarthy's Outer Dark in Spanish
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TRANSLATION REVIEW No. 72, 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Editorial: “In Other Words:” The Interpretive Dialogue With the Text ........................................................ 1 Rainer Schulte In Translation: A Sampler................................................................................................................................. 3 John Felstiner “A Whole New Style Seemed to be Seeking Expression Here” ...................................................................... 9 Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark in Spanish Michael Scott Doyle The Disparities of Two Anglophone Renditions of “The Survivor” by Primo Levi ................................... 27 Philip Balma Friedrich Schiller’s Skull and Bones? The Reception of a European Poet in 2005..................................... 33 Don Anderson La Malinche, Laura Esquivel, and Translation............................................................................................. 41 Harry Aveling Endangered Places: Translating Toponyms in María Mercedes Carranza’s ............................................ 49 “El Canto de la Moscas” (The Song of the Flies) Michael Sisson The Vision of Zephyr Press: A Profile............................................................................................................ 57 Erica Mena Book Reviews The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry................................................................................................ 61 Translated and Edited by J.P. Seaton Reviewed by Mike Farman Love Hound: Poems by Oliver Welden.......................................................................................................... 62 Translated by Dave Oliphant Reviewed by James Hoggard Contributors ................................................................................................................................................... 65 “A WHOLE NEW STYLE SEEMED TO BE SEEKING EXPRESSION HERE”1: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S OUTER DARK IN SPANISH By Michael Scott Doyle If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious (…) The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. — The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus The good utopian promises himself to be, primarily, an inexorable realist. Only when he is certain of not having acceded to the least illusion, thus having gained the total view of a reality stripped stark naked, may he, fully arrayed, turn against that reality and strive to reform it, yet acknowledging the impossibility of the task, which is the only sensible approach (…) To declare its impossibility is not an argument against the possible splendor of the translator’s task. — The Misery and Splendor of Translation, José Ortega y Gasset I Whereas the native-language reader of Cormac incongruent Nabokovian skyscrapers of footnotes to McCarthy is always faced with a daunting challenge, service the reader’s understanding.6 In the end, his translator into another language faces what is McCarthy’s English — which pulls the reader into and ultimately an impossible task. McCarthy writes in a along its pages of narrative description and dialogue quintessential American English, in a stylized idiom while overwhelming him with the undertow of the idiosyncratic to the wordsmith yet deeply rooted either alloyed strangeness of the language and style in the landscape and laconic talk of the southern themselves and the heretofore unknown characters and Appalachian foothill- and mountainfolk (East worlds created — is also alien for the native-language Tennessee and thereabouts) or the ranchers, ranch reader. In his novel Suttree, McCarthy sums up what hands, and cowboys of the Texas-Mexico border.2 To any reader of his fiction will recall upon reading one begin with, it is an English that often requires re- of his novels: “The words of the book swam off the Englishing by the reader, a Jakobsonian exercise in page eerily and he thought he’d never read a stranger intralingual translation,3 so that even the literate tale” (294). native-language reader himself can embark on an If it is all so alien for the native-language reader understanding of what McCarthy has written, or at and speaker7 what must it be like to translate, or try to least the lexicon he has used or coined.4 In his translate, McCarthy’s literary worlds into a foreign Appalachian novels, it is a familiar, rural and folksy language, Spanish, with a completely different American English — “the raw essence of the area’s linguistic and cultural tradition and fabric? The task is uniquely guttural dialect” (Gibson)5 — with truly Ortegian.8 What does a translator do when a substandard dialectal literary roots in the tradition of novel such as Outer Dark wedges itself mulishly Twain and Faulkner. It is marked by landscape- and between Schleiermacher’s options — refusing to be object-specific words, an “unparalleled cataloging of budged toward the new cultural readership while physical and natural details” (Gibson), erudition on refusing also to be approached?9,10 What happens display through lexical acuteness. It requires the when Venuti’s compelling case for foreignization in honest reader to consult a good English-language translation is trumped — and is apparently made easier dictionary (and other hermeneutic resources) as an aid while actually becoming more challenging — by the to fuller understanding — vocabulary glossed in the writer who, to begin with, is alien and has already margins, incongruous in the genre of the novel, would foreignized in the extreme intralingually and certainly prove useful — in effect demanding that s/he intraculturally? How does a translator of Cormac too become a translator. Or the English-language McCarthy strive for Nida’s and Taber’s lucid novel itself could be accompanied by equally prescription of dynamic equivalence11 when there is no Translation Review 9 cross-cultural organism to be found, for the narrative through translatorial import-export? A map of the DNA of Outer Dark, and its aural fingerprint, are difficult translatorial terrain to be traversed is the absolutely unique to the setting and idio-socio-dialect following: of the characters and therefore resist being shared How do you translate McCarthy’s lyrical prose, a whatever crude vessels and turned in to sleep, flowing riot of words in Appalachian English sprawled on the packed mud full clothed with their cascading one upon another, into Spanish? How can mouths gaped to the stars. They were about with you possibly do it? (The alternative, that a foreign- the first light, the bearded one rising and kicking language reader learn American English well enough out the other two and still with no word among to read McCarthy in McCarthy’s English, provides no them rekindling the fire and setting their battered feasible solution because even for the native-language pannikins about it, squatting on their haunches, reader, McCarthy requires reading skills honed over eating again wordlessly with beltknives, until the years, and still what is written in the native language bearded one rose and stood spraddlelegged before remains alien.) Age-old issues of what and how, the fire and closed the other two in a foul white content and form, message and manner, sender and plume of smoke out of and through which they receiver — the nature, limits, and possibilities of fought suddenly and unannounced and mute and translation — rise phoenix-like in the task of as suddenly ceased, picking up their ragged duffel translating McCarthy, for his unique voice in and moving west along the river once again. American English should somehow remain just so as it The native-language reader of English — whose is carried into other languages, if only this were exegesis makes him the first of McCarthy’s translators possible. — is immediately challenged intralingually, as he will The reader enters the cryptic and foreboding world be throughout the novel (and is so throughout of Outer Dark through the following four sentences, McCarthy’s books), to make clear sense of what is italicized in the novel: transpiring. Nida and Taber, who privilege meaning THEY CRESTED OUT on the bluff in the late over form and manner, remind us that “translating afternoon sun with their shadows long on the must aim primarily at ‘reproducing the message.’ To sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and do anything else is essentially false to one’s task as a slowly high above the river and with something of translator” (12).12 To recast their prescription for doing its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a translation, “the translator is bound to ask himself: moment and going on again strung out in What was it that [McCarthy], writing in his day [or in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under his American cultural idiolect and the southern the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with Appalachian socio-dialect of the mid 20th century] light touching them about the head in spurious understood by the [English] he used? If we are to sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as make a faithful translation of [McCarthy’s novel] this saw the sun down altogether and they moved in is what must be our viewpoint” (8). The translator into shadows altogether which suited them very well. Spanish must first be an informed, at-home, and When they reached the river it was full dark and perfect reader who fully understands the English, no they made camp and a small fire across which mean feat because the average or even strong native their shapes