A Comparative Study of Roy Campbell's Translations of the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca
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A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ROY CAMPBELL'S TRANSLATIONS OF THE POETRY OF FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA by Marcia Stephanie Lockett Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PIIlLOSOPHY in the subject Spanish at the University of South Africa Promoter Professor M.C. Maree Joint Promoter Professor W.N. Strike 1994 SUMMARY Roy Campbell (1901-1957), who ranks among South Africa's leading poets, was also a gifted and skilled translator. Shortly after the Second World War he was commissioned by the Spanish scholar Rafael Martinez Nadal to supply the English translations for a planned edition of the complete works of the Spanish poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, to be published by Faber and Faber, London. However, most of these translations remained unpublished until 1985, when the poetry translations (but not the translations of the plays) were included in Volume II of a four-volume edition entitled Campbell: Collected Works, edited by Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, and published in South Africa. In 198617, Eisenberg published a collection of letters from the archives of the Spanish poet and publisher Guillermo de Torre in a Spanish journal, Ana/es de Literatura Espanola, Alicante, which revealed that the politically-motivated intervention in 1946 of Arturo and Ilsa Barea, Republican supporters who were living in exile in London, prevented the publication of Campbell's Lorca translations. These poetry translations are studied here and compared with the work of other translators of Lorca, ranging from Lloyd (1937) to Havard (1990), and including some Afrikaans versions by Uys Krige (1987). For the analysis an eclectic framework is used that incorporates ideas from work on the relevance theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as applied to translation theory by Gutt (1990, 1991) and Bell (1991), among others, together with Eco's (1979, 1990) semiotic-interpretive approach. The analysis shows that although Campbell's translating is constrained by its purpose of forming part of a Lorca edition, his versions of Lorca' s poetry are nevertheless predominantly oriented towards the target-language reader. In striving to communicate Lorca's poetry to an English audience, Campbell demonstrates his skill and creativity at all levels of language. Campbell's translations that were published during his lifetime earned him a place among the best poetry translators of this century. The Lorca translations, posthumously added to the corpus of his published work, enhance an already established reputation as a fine translator of poetry. Key terms: Roy Campbell; Federico Garcia Lorca; Translation theory; Interpretation; Meaning; Reader response; Relevance Theory of Communication; Literal equivalence; Dynamic equivalence; Poetic equivalence; Context; Intertextuality. I declare that "A Comparative Study of Roy Campbell's Translations of the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca" is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my thanks to: The University of South Africa for the award of a Doctor's Exhibition in 1990 towards this doctoral study. The National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, for permission to use and to quote from the hand-written manuscript copies of Campbell's translations that are housed there. (iii) CONTENTS Page CHAPTER ONE IDSTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE TRANSLATIONS 1.1 South Africa's Most Prolific Poet 1 1.2 The Project to Translate Lorca 1 1.3 The Barea Letters 3 1.4 Poetry and Politics 10 CHAPTER TWO ROY CAMPBELL-TRANSLATOR I AND THE TEXT TRANSLATED 2.1 A Gifted and Skilled Translator 12 2.2 The Source Text 13 2.2.1 In Lorca: An appreciation of his poetry 14 2.2.2 In Campbell: Collected Works, Volume II 15 2.3 The Present Study 23 2.4 Categorisation of the Translated Poems 25 2.4.1 Class 1 26 2.4.2 Class 2 26 2.4.3 Class 3 27 2.5 A Framework for the Study 27 CHAPTER THREE LITERAL TRANSLATING OF POETRY 3.1 The Notion of Literal Meaning 29 3.2 Campbell's "Literal Prose Translation" 33 3.2.1 A comparison with Loughran (1978) 35 3.2.2 Rhythm and the poetic line 39 3.3 A Comparison of Two Versions of "Rain" 42 3.4 "Pause of the Clock" (from Primeras canciones, 1922) 47 (iv) 3.4.l Relativity and Einstein in Spain 50 3.5 What Constitutes "Literal"? 52 CHAPTER FOUR CONSTRAINTS AND ASSUMPTIONS IN DYNAMIC EQUIVALEN CE 4.1 The Concept of Dynamic Equivalence 53 4.2 Constraints 55 4.2.1 Lexical equivalence 57 4.2.2 Verse-line equivalence and rhythm 63 4.2 Assumptions about the Poetry of Lorca 68 4.3.1 Assumptions about the poetic image 75 4.4 Interpretations 77 CHAPTER FIVE THE CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS OF POETIC FORM 5.1 Context as a Factor in Meaning 79 5.2 Poetic Form as Contextual Effect 81 5.3 The Spanish Romance Form 83 5.3.1 The Gypsy Ballads. 86 5.3.2 The lullaby, a sub-genre of the romance 92 5.3.3 "Ballad of the Three Rivers" 95 5.4 The Sonnets 96 5.5 Other Poems 99 5.6 The Relevance of Poetic Form 101 CHAPTER SIX OPTIONAL SIDFTS 6.1 Optional Shifts and Levels of Equivalence 103 6.2 Goal-directed Shifts of Expression 104 6.2.1 Goal as determiner of linguistic form 104 6.3 Semantic Properties 107 6.3.1 Semantic associations 110 (v) 6.3.2 Semantic irrelevance 111 6.3.3 Dealing with culture-bound expressions 114 6.3.4 Implications for semantic features 118 6.4 Intertextuality 120 6.4.1 Culture-specific intertextual relations 120 6.4.2 Knowledge activation 123 6.5 Optional Shift and Errors 126 CHAPTER SEVEN PROBLEMS, ERRORS AND COMPARISONS 7.1 "To Err is Human•.. " 129 7.2 Bailing Problems 130 7.2.1 A surrealist image or symbol 131 7.2.2 The idiomatic expression "al aire" 132 7.2.3 Errors in the source text 133 7.2.4 Using context to resolve an obscurity 133 7.2.5 "Norms" (from Poemas sueltos) 134 7.2.6 Brandy and November 135 7.3 Do Numbers Count? 136 7.4 Line Correspondence 137 7.5 Change of Perspective in Metaphor and Image 144 7.6 "Some Words Tie, Bind, Ravel ... " 148 7.7 Syntax 152 7.8 The Term "Blanco" 155 7.9 II .•• To Forgive, Divine" 158 CHAPTER EIGHT "THE END OF POETRY.•• " 8.1 Meaning and Interpretation 160 8.2 Creativity in Poetry and Poetry Translating 167 8.3 The Socio-cultural Context 172 (vi) 8.4 In the End... 174 NOTES 177 REFERENCES 191 APPENDIX! 202 APPENDIX2 209 APPENDIX3 263 INDEX TO THE POETRY 265 FIGURES 2.1 The Equivalence Continuum 26 4.1 My Wife and My Mother-in-Law (E.G. Boring after W.E. Hill) 58 4.2 A schematic representation of the relationships between the total perceptual field and its semantic representation 59 4.3 Shared elements in semantic feature specifications 61 5.1 (Ostensive-inferential communication (after Gutt 1990) 80 I 6.1 Linguistic constituents in optional shift 105 (vii) CHAPTER ONE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE TRANSLATIONS 1.1 SOUTH AFRICA'S MOST PROLIFIC POET Roy Campbell was born in Durban, South Africa, on 2 October 1901, and died tragically in a motor accident in Portugal on 23 April 1957. He has taken his place as one of the major South African poets of this century and, in addition, has left his mark on English literature as a whole. His compatriot, the Afrikaans poet Uys Krige (1960: 32), considered that he would "stand out as one of the finest lyric voices of his generation", while British intellectuals like Edith Sitwell (1958:48) and Kenyon (quoted in Povey 1977: 222) judged him to be "a great poet, a genius". The South African poet Douglas Livingstone expressed the view that "Campbell is the only major poet" produced by South Africa (Chapman, Gardner and Mphahlele 1992: 100). He is included in international reference works, such as the 1979 edition of Great Writers of the English Language: Poets (ed. Vinson) and, more recently, in 1989, in the Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature (ed. Wynne Davies). In the latter publication Campbell's lyrics are described (1989: 382) as "eloquent" and "clear-cut". The critic considers that: "He was vigorous in all he wrote, but not distinctively original". In their introduction, the editors of Campbell: Collected Works (1985, 1988 - Alexander, Chapman and Leveson), describe him as "South Africa's most prolific poet". Campbell's stature as a poet is well established and several studies of his life, his poetry and prose have appeared (e.g. Wright 1961; Povey 1977; Alexander 1982). The major part of his poetry was written prior to the Second World War. His first published work, The Flaming Terrapin, a long and rambling poem, established him, at the age of twenty-three, as a poet of achievement rather than promise. Adamastor, the first and best collection of his shorter poems, appeared in 1930. His prose works included two autobiographical books, Broken Record (1934) and Light on a Dark Horse (1951). 1.2 THE PROJECT TO TRANSLATE LORCA Less attention has been given to Campbell's ability as a poetry translator, although he was recognised during his lifetime as a fine translator (see Chapter Two). A possible contributing factor is that a considerable part of his translations - those of the work of Federico Garcia Lorca - were not published until 1985, almost thirty years after his death, while some still remain unpublished to date.