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Horackova Master Thesis Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Eva Horáčková Erdrich, Momaday and Silko in the Context of Czech Translation Master ’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek 2010 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. 2 I would like to thank my supervisor for his advice and patience. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction...…………………………………………………………………………4 2. American Literary and Cultural Context……………………………………………...5 3. The Czechs and the Indians…………………………………………………………...7 3.1. The Last of the Mohicans ……………………………………………………...…….8 3.2. The Education of Little Tree …………………………………………………….....14 4. Translation Analyses………………………………………………………………...17 4.1. N. Scott Momaday: House Made of Dawn ………………………………………...18 4.1.1. Translation of House Made of Dawn …………………………………………….21 4.2. Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony ………………………………………………......27 4.2.1. Translation of Ceremony ………………………………………………………...29 4.3. Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine …………………………………………………….34 4.3.1. Translation of Love Medicine …………………………………………………....36 5. Cultural Intersections………………………………………………………………...42 6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...45 7. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………47 8. Notes…………………………………………………………………………………50 4 1. Introduction The Czech culture and Native Americans has since a century been in a strong connection, despite the geographical and conceptional distance dividing them. This interesting phenomenon is what underlies the following research focused on the Czech translations of House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. The principal question of the research is whether these translations of novels by authors of Native American origin were influenced by the previous translations of fiction dealing with Indians and what place they acquired within the Czech culture. As Erdrich, Momaday and Silko were the first novelists of this kind to be translated into Czech, the comparison had to be made with works of non-Native authors. This inevitably means to deal with the problem of incomprehension of the Native American cultures, established clichés and racial context. For this reason, the position of Native American authors within the American literature will be shortly investigated. Afterwards the relationship of the Czech culture to the Indians will be treated: first in a more general cultural and literary context, then the attention will be focused on concrete translational examples that will represent the situation prevailing in the Czech culture before the translations of Erdrich, Momaday and Silko were published. After this overview, the three translations will be treated respectively. The method of the investigation is based on Peter Newmark’s recommendations on translation criticism (Newmark 1988: 186), nevertheless these were modified so that the analysis has the following structure: a brief analysis of the source text, its peculiarities, narrative mode and story structure, considering attentively cultural words and colloquiality. On the basis of these findings, the translation itself is examined, the cultural words and colloquiality being again stressed for it is often in these cases that the translator’s individual tendencies can be best observed. The translation analyses are accompanied by excerpts from the source and target texts to demonstrate some typical phenomena. No effort was made to assess the quality of the translations in either a negative or positive way: the intention was to maintain neutrality and stick to plain observation of the translational behavior. Finally, the wider cultural context, into which the translations of House Made of Dawn , Ceremony and Love Medicine were introduced, will be considered, as well as the 5 reception the translations received. Then the translations in question will be treated in terms of creating a translational sub-culture and of their place within the Czech literary translation of works on Native Americans. 2. American Literary and Cultural Context The fate of Native Americans in the American literature is quite well known: although being the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent, their presence in American fiction was more than scarce. This scarceness permitted to shape many erroneous views that created powerful stereotypes hard to be eradicated. As Gretchen M. Bataille summarizes it, “[t]he stereotype of the Indian, usually male, has long been a shadow figure in American literature. Whether invisible in Hawthorne’s forests, a savage in Cooper’s frontier, or a noble red man evoked by Lawrence, the Indian character in fiction was one readers believed they ‘knew’ because popular myths had been made real by constant repetition” (1993: 61). To this admixture, an image provided by the Western genre should be added to complete the position the Indian character held in the American literary and movie culture: an uncivilized being inferior to the majority Americans altering with a silent hero whose undeniable fate is to die. This image might not have been changed without the Native people themselves taking the initiative. Nonetheless, the evolution of literature by Native Americans was very slow, which is not surprising if the historical and social context is regarded: “there were less than a dozen novels published by American Indians prior to 1968” (Bataille 1993: 61). The first of them was The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta by John Rollin Ridge from 1854. Several other novels succeeded, notably those of D’Arcy McNickle or Mourning Dove, to cite the most sonorous names, in the 1920s and 1930s (Bataille 1993: 61). The real breakthrough came with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968. The publication of this work and the acknowledgment of the Pulitzer Prize to it boosted the rise of Native American novels that “challeng[ed] old stereotypes and forc[ed] a revolution in the image of American Indians in American literature” which is since then “[i]ncreasingly […] reflecting the heterogeneous society of America and challenging easy assumptions about the past” (Bataille 1993: 61). The most prominent authors of the period between Momaday and Erdrich, are, as mentioned by Bataille, Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Conley, Michael Dorris, Louise 6 Erdrich, Janet Campbell Hale, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, Louis Owens, Leslie Marmon Silko, Martin Cruz Smith, Gerald Vizenor, Anna Lee Walters, and James Welch. (1993: 62) If a list of the most influencial works is wanted, Robert Silberman suggests that “D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded , N. Scott Momaday’s The House Made of Dawn , Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony , James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney […] are central texts in Native American literature, bearing a striking family resemblance to one another”, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich being in an immediate relationship with them (Silberman 1993: 101). Not only the Native American literature is challenging the old stereotypes but it is largely perceived as the voice of the Indian peoples in the political and social sense. Even though the Indians constiture in fact hundreds of distinct nations, the historical situation has forced them to act cooperatively. This is well reflected by Simon J. Ortiz who suggests “that Indian literature is developing a character of nationalism”, which character was raised by the Indian writers’ acknowledgement “of a responsibility to advocate for their people’s self-government, sovereignty, and control of land and natural resources; and to look also at racism, political and economic oppression, sexism, supremacism, and the needless and wasteful exploitation of land and people” (Ortiz 1981: 12). This feature of a certain pan-Indianness can be well observed in the novels themselves: both Momaday and Silko are mixing various tribes’ heritage, Jemez, Kiowa and Navajo for the former, Laguna and Navajo for the latter. The authors seem to be no more concerned with transmitting a particular national tradition but they concentrate on more universal messages of survival of the Native Americans as well as the whole modern world population. The just mentioned thematic of the nowadays society living conditions, with the corrupted values attached to it, correlates well with the postmodern mode of writing, if one defines this as, among other features, a fractured form of narrative and a complicated position of the “heroes”. On this subject, Gerald Vizenor notes that “[t]he postmodern opened in tribal imagination; oral cultures have never been without a postmodern condition that enlivens stories and ceremonies, or without trickster signatures and discourse on narrative chance – a comic utterance and adventure to be heard or read” (1989/1993: x). The Native American literature of the second half of the 20 th century can be thus regarded as a fusion of the ancient traditions and views with the nowadays globalized world issues and attitudes. 7 It is in this canon the three novels focused on here are incorporated. It should be noted that all of them are much analyzed and cited, especially House Made of Dawn and Ceremony . An interesting, yet logical, fact is that they are seldom treated in a purely literary or linguistic context: being the works of Native American authors, they are much analyzed in the context of Native American issues and uneasy social condition. This is true not only for these three novels but for the Native American literature
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