Number Seventy-fourTranslation • 2007 Review

The University of Texas at Dallas Translation Review The University of Texas at Dallas

Editors Associate Editor Assistant Editor Rainer Schulte Charles Hatfield Christopher Speck Dennis Kratz International Advisory Board Graphic Designer Copy Editor John Biguenet Michelle Long Sandra Smith Ming Dong Gu Samuel Hazo Production Staff Elizabeth Gamble Miller Lindy Jolly Margaret Sayers Peden Keith Heckathorn Marilyn Gaddis Rose Megan McDowell James P. White

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ISSN 0737-4836 Copyright © 2007 by Translation Review

The University of Texas at Dallas is an equal opportunity/affirmative action university. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial: The Independent Translator in the Academy ...... 1 Rainer Schulte

An Interview with Joan Lindgren: The Challenge of Translating Argentina ...... 4 María del Carmen Sillato

Notes on “Notes on Translation”...... 10 Kent Johnson

Feminist Translation as Interpretation ...... 16 David J. Eshelman

Hinojosa’s Self-translation of Dear Rafe into North American Culture: Language Use as a Mirror of the Social Construction of Chicano Identity ...... 28 Silvia Molina Plaza

Five Translators Translating: Reading Blood Meridian from English into English, Spanish into English, and English into Spanish...... 35 Michael Scott Doyle

A Satisfying Condition: An Interview with Norman R. Shapiro ...... 67 J. Kates

BOOK REVIEWS

Krasznahorkai, László. War and War (Háború és háború) ...... 75 Translation by George Szirtes Reviewed by Andrea Nemeth-Newhauser

Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short-Shorts ...... 78 Translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt Reviewed by Andrea Lingenfelter

Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Rashōmon and 17 Other Stories ...... 80 Translation by Jay Rubin Reviewed by Jeffrey Angles

Lowe, Elizabeth and Earl E. Fitz. Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature ...... 83 Reviewed by Rainer Schulte

EDITORIAL: THE INDEPENDENT TRANSLATOR IN THE ACADEMY

By Rainer Schulte

iterary and humanistic criticism these words that enable the reader to visualize the L days is not enjoying a particularly situations that writers create in their emotional elevated and appreciated existence. Articles landscapes. and scholarly monographs often reach a level In most cases, the works that students of incomprehensibility, since language is used encounter in creative writing courses are to obscure rather than illuminate the subject originally written in English. International matter. Words have lost their connection to literatures, and especially very contemporary their original etymological visualization and world literature, are still foreign to many English therefore frequently function as orchestrated departments and appear to challenge instructors of sound structures rather than meaningful literature. In our globalized world, the horizon of reflections of internal thought progressions. literary studies must be expanded. It is perfectly The interpretive interaction with the text has normal that writers and poets from many countries been replaced with speculations about the text, and languages meet at international literature which contributes to the decline of literary festivals to read from their works. Many years criticism into jargon. At the same time, many ago, I participated in an international poetry of the papers read at scholarly conferences reading in London, where Pablo Neruda read next walk under a veil of darkness. to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Charles Olson, Octavio Some decades ago when English Paz, and many other poets from all over the world. Departments began to decline in attracting The flow of voices enchanted the thousands of students, creative writing programs came to people in the audience. their rescue. Today, almost every English To create such an atmosphere is still very department or program has introduced courses foreign to instructors in modern language and and workshops in creative writing. It would be literature departments. The concept of translation a somewhat frightful idea if every student in a and the teaching of works in translation frighten creative writing course were to aspire to many instructors of literature in the academy. Yet, become a published writer. Our society could it is time to recognize that we have to prepare the not hold that much creativity! What did the next generation of students to move comfortably creative writing courses achieve? A in a globalized world, since more and more reconnection of the reader and student with the cultures converge in individual countries. Obvious intricacies of a literary work rather than differences of social habits among cultures can be approaching the literary text through scholarly easily detected. However, the soul of another articles. The reader who comes to the novel, language, its people, and its tradition can only be the poem, or the dramatic text from the acquired through the refined emotional moments writer’s point of view is immediately involved of literary writing. The literary sensibility does not in a close attention to every word, to the follow a linear description but rather an sentence structures, to the internal associative way of looking at reality, which development of characters and situations. engages the reader in the movement of situations What is explored are the various associations that illuminate the human drama. inherent in a word and how these associations The translator has to come into the picture to change the moment a word is brought into change and redirect many of the preconceptions contact with another word. New energies toward world literature in English departments emerge in the juxtaposition and sequence of and especially in modern language departments.

Translation Review 1 What can the translator bring to further the the translator is able to lead the reader closer to an reading and understanding of foreign understanding of the idiosyncrasies of cultural, literatures? Not only do translators transfer historical, and aesthetic phenomena in the foreign literary texts from foreign languages into work. The excitement of the reader resides in the English, but they are also very well equipped reenactment of the foreign traits as compared to to bring the English reader closer to an those in the receptor language. After all, we are understanding of the refinements inherent in always attracted to the mystery of complex and other languages and cultures. More and more ambiguous situations in other cultures, which students have to be encouraged to pursue challenge our curiosity and imagination. Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in In the past few years, we have seen signs that the field of literary translation, with particular translators have included, either as an introduction emphasis on the actual translation of literary or as an afterword, detailed comments on the works from foreign languages into English. reconstruction of the translation process in order Having translated the work, students will be in to open a dialogue between the foreignness of the a position to open up aspects of the original other culture and the receptor language. In many text that a critic or scholar, who has not done instances, these commentaries, together with an the translation, could not perform with the intrinsic interpretive approach to the work as seen same intensity and insight. Translators are through the eyes of the translator, have greatly familiar with every linguistic, cultural, social, enhanced the accessibility, understanding, and and anthropological detail of the fictional, enjoyment of foreign works for the English poetic, nonfictional or essayistic text under reader. The globalized world forces us to find consideration. Thus, the final version of a entrance into that which is foreign in the minds of translation should be accompanied by several people in other countries to avoid an escalation of essayistic features to facilitate the reader’s the clashes of cultures. entrance into and enjoyment of the foreign text The previous considerations should be a in translation. In addition to the placement of wake-up call for teachers and professors of the translated author into the context of the literature. Rainer Maria Rilke exclaims at the end national and international scene, a section of his poem “Archaïscher Torso Apollos,” “Du should be dedicated to the interpretive mußt dein Leben ändern [You must change your perspective seen through the eyes of the life],” and this should become the motto for the translator, and finally a section in which the teaching and understanding of world literature. translator retraces the steps that she or he took Literature should be seen with the interpretive to move from the first draft to the final perspective of the translator, which will revitalize version. In that last section, another dimension the act of meaningful interpretations, decrease the of intense reading and enjoyment of the work proliferation of boring scholarly articles, and can be achieved by the translator as critic. revive the power of the word to reflect substantive Above all, translators are in a position to thought progression and make the reader a re- articulate the nuances of thinking and creator of the literary work rather than an outside perceiving in another language, to point to the observer. different cultural habits and reconstruct the For all of this to happen, creative writing aesthetic flavor of a work in its national programs and modern literature departments must environment. think seriously about introducing translation Many of the differences between two workshops into their curricula. Yet, there is a languages can be explained through the negative side to this enterprise. Universities need possibilities of critical language; however, more instructors who are versed in the art and subtle cultural peculiarities often cannot find craft of translation, and universities must display a adequate correspondences in a new language. more positive attitude toward those who want to In the reconstruction of the translation process, work in translation and teach courses in

2 Translation Review translation studies. As a parenthetical comment, we should point out that, still today, there are professors at established institutions of higher education who hide the fact that they are translating literary works or working in the area of literary translation, since this might interfere with their being promoted. Change in the academic world is slow. Moreover, we need additional faculty members who can run translation workshops and promote the presence of contemporary international literatures in seminars. Universities have to shift their focus toward the independent translator, who will be asked to accept residencies for translation workshops in the way that many universities invite creative writers to run workshops. If literature programs want to survive in the future and bring students back to a meaningful and intelligent interaction with literary works of the world, then the paradigm of translation could bring international literature into our world, not as something to be avoided but as something to enrich our lives.

Translation Review 3 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAN LINDGREN: THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSLATING ARGENTINA

By María del Carmen Sillato To my dear friend Joan, in memoriam

oan Lindgren was born into a New York while continuing her own career as a writer of J family of Irish immigrants. She studied at the fiction and non-fiction. The present interview Sorbonne, graduated from Hunter College, and was finalized in July 2007, only two months went on to receive a Master’s degree in Latin before her death. American Studies at San Diego State University. Her teaching included courses in English as a María del Carmen Sillato: According to Second Language, Comparative Literature, and Rainer Schulte, translators “do not engage in the Latin American Literature. She taught at the mere transplantation of words and […] their Escuela de Humanidades de la Universidad interpretive acts deal with the exploration of Autónoma de Baja California and as a volunteer situations that are constituted by an intense at California State Prison. As a Fulbright Border interaction of linguistic, psychological, Scholar, she initiated cross-border translation anthropological, and cultural phenomena.”1 To workshops. Joan received an NEA (National what extent do you agree with Schulte? Endowment for the Arts) grant to do oral histories with Mexican seniors in San Diego. Joan Lindgren: I do agree with Schulte, She has published short stories, poetry, essays, especially if I think of my personal process of and translations in a number of anthologies and becoming a translator. I think it probably began journals. She received the Luz Bilingüe prize for for me when I left France at twenty to come her translation of Marcela del Río’s Homenaje a home to the United States and realized that I Remedios Varo and the Alfonso X el Sabio Prize would never be able to share the beloved and for excellence in Literary Translation from San idiosyncratic Jacques Brel, for example, or Edith Diego State University. In 2005, she instigated Piaf, and what they were saying about France, and accompanied the journey to California and with the people I loved in the United States, that Canada of the Argentine project I would have to cross this enormous gulf and POESIADIARIA: Porque el Silencio es Mortal leave this all behind, keep it under wraps. I felt, and its debut as an interactive on-line project as Suzanne Jill Levine calls it, totally exiled in designed for translation by the public my own language. And it was perhaps the (poesiadiaria.com.ar). Her major publications beginning of my career as a translator, that are Unthinkable Tenderness: A Selection of brutal awakening. I also used to sing, I was a Poems by Juan Gelman (University of musician, and I think that although the theorists California Press, 1997) and in January 2008, don’t talk about it — but Alistair Reid does — two bilingual books of the poetry of Hugo that participating in the music of a writer is an Mujica: One Late Bird and What the Embrace extremely important component of translation, Embraces (Black Zinnias Press, Palo Alto, CA). particularly of poetry. And I am a poet, I Her extraordinary and productive life was confess, “soy poeta menor” (“I am a small suddenly interrupted on September 21, 2007. At poet”), but as Benedetti has said, “what would the time of her death, having finished the Mujica be the great poets without the small ones,” manuscripts and two others by Mexican poets, verdad? I think that, as a musician, as a poet, as well as an anthology of Spanish poets, Joan and as a translator, you learn to listen. was about to choose her next translation project

4 Translation Review MCS: Some scholars believe that poetry should mexicanidad. I was hungry for something less be translated only by poets. Many translators of mystical perhaps, but more seductive, more poetry, in fact, poets themselves. Which poetry glamorous. For me, Argentina is sort of the and translations do you consider an inspiration Marilyn Monroe of Latin America. All that for your own work? wonderful glamour, and I don’t say that unkindly because Marilyn Monroe … Every JL: Well, one that comes to my mind right now year we get a book on Marilyn Monroe. We are is Paul Celan. Celan said that when you translate always trying to understand her and, of course, you have to “listen in deep with your mouth.” we are trying to understand the failure of And of course, Celan also recognized that glamour, and the conflict that glamour presented translating could be a very political act and a for her. And I was very much seduced by all the fraternal act. When he translated Mandelshtam, brilliant enigmatic Argentine writers, especially the great Russian poet, he felt that he was since they talked continually about exile — until translating him as a brother. I respond to that, I Piglia said that exile ... you can’t even talk about think that is an important dimension of exile anymore, it is like oxygen, it is part of the translation. For me it has been. I have never had human condition. Like Joseph Brodsky’s saying, my back to the wall and been obliged to for example, that he is not in exile anymore, he translate a work that I didn’t want to translate, is simply living abroad. And so, I had to go to and I consider myself fortunate for that reason. Argentina to learn about exile. To me, Argentina And theater — music and tone. When I first is a laboratory for immigration and a big began translating Gelman, for example, he said metaphor, and coming from immigrant parents to me that he felt I had caught the tone of his — my mother was an immigrant and my work perfectly (I don’t know whether he said grandparents were all immigrants — it was perfectly, I may be lying about that!). But my through a glass darkly, I guess. I was removed point is that tone is extremely important, it’s because I would be experiencing Argentina in perhaps the echo of the poet’s voice, and you another language, therefore as another self, and have to find the way to locate that tone in the so it really did draw me. idiom of your own language, so that people will understand its role in the poet’s work. MCS: Before traveling to Argentina, were you aware of the political turmoil that had affected MCS: You have mentioned on a few occasions the country in the seventies and eighties? I am that you went to Argentina in the eighties to talking specifically of the years of the Peronista immerse yourself in the Spanish language and government (1973 to 1976) and of the military Argentine culture. However, your first coup d’état in 1976. That was a time of sorrow, experience regarding language and culture, of violation of human rights, of disappearances many years before Argentina, was Mexico, of political opponents. where you spent some time. My question is: what really motivated you to go to Argentina? JL: Yes, I was painfully aware of what Argentina had been through during the years of JL: Well, that’s a complicated question. In a military dictatorship. Discovering Neruda was sense, I really betrayed Mexico and the border discovering Latin America’s horrors and the role when I went to Argentina. On the other hand, of the United States. Simultaneously I was you know they say that personal identity is a discovering the horrors of my own Irish history; privilege that accompanies us on our journey the Vietnam war further politicized us, and toward bourgeois status, this search for who we human rights issues became my personal red are. Mexicans, being less European, at that time flag. The “women’s movement,” too, had raised were less inclined, as far as I can see, to tackle our hackles, and the exemplary work of the that identity, their personal identity over their Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo moved me

Translation Review 5 greatly. I had hopes of meeting them. It was on Besides the cat was a menace, always my third visit in 1991 that I was able to meet hoping with some of them. the door’d be left open to the coop so he could go in and steal eggs. One day my MCS: At that time, the Mothers were involved mother in a “therapeutic” project: to leave testimony, up in arms, gave him to our native-born through their creative writings, of all the neighbor — suffering they had been through since the who took him far out into the country — disappearance of their loved ones. I know that very far. I’ve already forgotten how to say you have played an important role, not only cat becoming a good friend and being able to listen in the dialect Mama and I spoke together. and comfort them in their suffering, but also But the days passed becoming, in some way — thanks to the and the cat reappeared — we were translation of their writings — their voice for an overjoyed! English-language audience. You have greatly We received him like a miracle. To have helped to make their stories known in other parts come back of the world. all alone. From the desert.

JL: Well, perhaps I have helped through She says: “I never had pets in my house.” This translation. Even though my role has been is the mother of a disappeared child. This is a peripheral, knowing them, in a kitchen table sort brief history of Argentina! A footnote to history. of way, has been an experience, a gift. When I And really I don’t want to say anything more actually approached the Madres (Mothers), I did about myself and the Madres, I would just like so as a translator. I wanted to find out what they to read you a few of their pieces that they have were writing. They were writing in a workshop, accomplished in their workshops. One of them a writing workshop, much like a workshop for said: “One day I began in a story to describe my the elderly that I do in California. I have so present-day house and the “profe” — wonderful much faith in words, the discovery of language, literature professor, Leopoldo Brisuela — asked to make us whole. Here is a poem, a big me which was my room and I was stunned to metaphor. It is called “That Miracle,” and this, find myself answering that although the house of course, is my translation, we would never get was large I had no room of my own. And he through if we read the two languages, so… . handed me the Virginia Woolf book by that And only the first name of the poet is given, name, and I invaded the living room, took over Elena, because in their anthology there is so part of the table, emptied a cabinet of candy much, you know, of the solidarity that their last dishes, plates, and other useless items, set up a names are unimportant, they don’t claim very old lamp, and now I have a refuge; authorship. Here is Elena’s poem: surrounded by paper, books, erasers, I feel a fierce need to write. A need that has only grown That Miracle thanks to my compañeras, this beautiful process I never had pets we have found of teaching one another. And so in my house. As a child what I thought could never be expressed in I wanted them but I was a transplant words — she had been a ceramicist before — I from a foreign country to a provincial put that aside from the workshop, this group, village. I lie: that idea that only ceramics, with its form, could we had a coop of laying hens, and a cat — be expressive. I feel our children very close and a lot of things that stood in my way; like thanks to the profe, who is still very young, and learning the language, connecting, adapting to the methods they have found to teach us. The my ways to others’. A Czechoslovakian girl. children are speaking into my ear, they help me,

6 Translation Review maybe even dictate what I write. Burned toast, texts by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. That spilled soup, useless cacerolas, a few eggs that project has been modified in order to include never got quite hard boiled, even my husband’s other translations, like those of texts written by complaint that I never listen to what he said. I survivors, ex–political prisoners, and children of think he’s partly right because at times I feel the disappeared during the years of military boiling up into my head images that I want to terror in Argentina. put into words.” Here is yet another Madre: “Like a lot of JL: Well, the saying goes that “when one women I had always lived, from very young, for person is missing the whole world seems others; I had to help Mama with things, then depopulated.” A friend of mine in Buenos Aires husband, then the children; and now I was doing workshops with the hijos, the understand that all that time I was very far away children of the disappeared, and I had the from my own self. Understand? But outside privilege of meeting a lot of these young people myself. And I ended by forgetting what I had and they put out a little anthology of their inside myself. To be self-aware is not poetry, they put on a very interesting theater selfishness or narcissism as I had thought piece. This was before the big organization of before. On the contrary. You can do better by H.I.J.O.S. — Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia others if you know yourself.” One more brief en contra del Olvido y el Silencio (Children in one: “I only decided to stay on and write thanks search of Identity and Justice, fighting against to a book that Leopoldo brought for us all to Forgetfulness and Silence), that followed on the read. It was a chapter of a famous novel, an Scilingo revelations. It was still a small group, important one that he liked a lot: The Heart Is a but it just didn’t seem right to leave these tender Lonely Hunter. As always, I was hoping for yet violent poems out. Then I began to get something substantial. But it was about two survivors’ testimonies, some of yours, for deaf-mutes that lived in a town and described example, and it seemed to me that perhaps these their daily lives, the things that they did every testimonies would not suffer by being filtered day because these were the things that let us see through my own experience, my own journey as their thoughts and emotions and the landscape, a translator in Argentina. Because this was the objects, the people that surrounded them. really Celan’s “listening deep with your mouth.” And I said to myself: if anyone had told me that And therefore the text is pretty nearly finished you could make literature out of this, I wouldn’t now, it has already been rejected once, by a have believed it. For me literature had been the university press. The chief editor loved the text art of expressing high-flown, difficult ideas because he felt its strong point was that it was so using even more difficult words, something for personal; but a reader on his committee felt that the elite. At the same time, if someone had told it was not sufficiently scholarly, it was too me that the things that I had lived and been personal. So, you know, this is the old dilemma exposed to could be written about, even made of the political versus the personal. I don’t know into literature, I would’ve written. For a long what is going to happen to it but I keep adding time, I had thought myself very small cheese. epilogues — aren’t they a mark of a life But after reading that book, at 80 years of age, examined? — and I am hopeful for it. I think imagine, at last I knew what I could write about. some more feminist-oriented press would have I stopped being the mute. I wrote about myself, an interest in it. At least, it’s with an agent. my world.” Well, as I say, I doubt that I need to talk anymore about the Madres; they’ve just MCS: Translating Juan Gelman’s poetry into spoken, right? English must have been a real challenge for you. Being myself an enthusiastic reader of his MCS: When I visited you a few years ago, your poems, I know that the poetic devices he main project at that time was the translation of incorporates in the poems — the rupture of

Translation Review 7 grammatical rules, for example — would make masculine. Those games would be wasted on an them very difficult to translate. English-speaking audience. Unthinkable Tenderness contains about 150 poems, but to JL: Well, the important part of Gelman’s poetry choose and to translate them I had to read and for me when I began to read it was that it study at least 500. My role was not only as a transcended so much of yesterday’s poetry and translator but as an editor. What Gelman instead offered what Gelman calls “el candor de discovered on his journey was part of his own otras épocas.” That intimacy of tone I collective past. He discovered the poetry of the recognized even if I’m not porteña and missed a Jewish Diaspora and he did wonderful things lot. And the circling back — I saw him as with it. He has written something called writing song cycles the way Mahler had taken com/posiciones, in which he has translated German poetry and incorporated it into cycles. poems of the Sephardis into Spanish. And he The same themes, the same language over and knew so well that every poem was not one poem over again, extraordinary music. Gelman was an alone, that every poem contained its translation, incredible challenge. I could see that this was a as he himself says in com/posiciones: “to major voice, and here is the journey of exile. So, translate is inhuman — no language or face I put aside my objections to the machismo and allows itself to be translated. we must leave this the objectification of women, particularly of the beauty intact and yet another beauty to early works, because I remembered the story accompany it. their lost unity lies ahead.” that the Irish poet Evan Boland told about the manager of the hotel where she once worked in MCS: How was your translation of Gelman’s Dublin. That was a man with a secret wound. work received by colleagues in the field of Nobody ever talked about it, but everybody who translation and in literary circles? worked in the hotel knew that at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon, after lunch, he would repair to his JL: I have paid for translating Gelman at home. room to dress this wound. I remember Many thought that other poetry should have something that Adrienne Rich had written in a taken precedence. Among a lot of my feminist book called The Dream of a Common Language. friends, and particularly my gay friends, my In a poem called “Natural Resources,” which is Mexican friends, I have been considered a a significant title, she says that it was never the “traitor … translator/traitor.” Unthinkable rapist; it was the brother lost, the comrade twin Tenderness was not listed in the New York whose palm will bear a life line like our own. I Times Magazine, but it elicited many related this to Gelman’s terrible derrota — compliments. I have a letter from Adrienne Rich defeat — his impotence at having his son and in which she told me that she was profoundly his seven-months-pregnant daughter-in-law appreciative of the experience of reading disappear, having himself had to go into exile so Gelman, and that she was going to incorporate that he was not there to protect his family. But him into her lectures. Another thing that the poetry revealed to me that he himself was on happened when the book came out is that the the path to discovering through exile many poet Edward Hirsch and Robert Coles, a components of himself. I keep trying to put professor of Child Psychology at Harvard Gelman aside and to get over, and to get into Medical School, wrote me a letter asking for other things; but I keep finding poems that have more poems of Gelman to publish them in their to be translated, and this is why I found myself magazine Double Take. And lastly, I sent a book going back again and again. At the beginning to John Berger, who was so affected by the work there was a limited number of poems that I that he incorporated Gelman into his writings on would translate, a lot of the poems were simply Frida Kahlo, two artists who had “confronted untranslatable. Gelman plays with language; he pain head-on.” So Gelman’s poetry has reached uses the feminine when he should be using the and touched some great souls. Translating it was

8 Translation Review a political act. And that has been gratifying, finally, in 2006, we met and I was able to because as a translator you want, above all, to interview him — [though he remains an enigma share something you know has value, that can to me]. Later that year, the Canadian change our awareness of our times, and of the government gave me a residency at Banff, their possibilities of language. Only two percent of International Literary Translation seminar, and books published in the United States are in three weeks I translated 120 poems from translations. Without our mutual friend Victor earlier work published in Mujica’s newly issued Pereira, well-known at UC Press, no publisher Poesía completa (Seix Barral). This work has might have spoken then for Unthinkable been a transformative experience. Tenderness, the work of a poet unknown in the United States and very political in nature. MCS: So, what is next? What projects do you have in mind for the near future? MCS: Recently you told me that you fell in love with and have been working very hard again to JL: Coincidentally I have been reading Juan translate another Argentine poet’s work: Hugo José Saer’s Río sin orillas — alas, not in 1991 Mujica. How did you come across his poetry? when it was published and would have enlarged my scope hugely. How to translate Argentina JL: I was amazed to be able to find Gelman’s without this monumental work? I am feeling Interrupciones, both volumes, in the Ateneo, in grounded in Argentina now, at home, free to the Florida Street in Buenos Aires in 1989 — a unburden myself of the things that have filled in period of terrible crisis — one dollar each, they for an autobiography. Beginning in 2008, I will cost. I had been reading about Gelman in Diario be living — at least part of the year — in the de Poesía. I took those books back to my little countryside of Córdoba. My young friends, now borrowed apartment near San Juan y Boedo. grown up and parents themselves, are dedicated, And hardly surfaced again for weeks. In 2002 I not to accumulation of things, but to organic was nosing about again in the Ateneo and a farming — not of corn and soy — to finding young man, by some uncanny coincidence, ways to establish communities of local showed me one of Mujica’s books from campesinos — farmers — to revive villages, to Pretextos in Spain. Sed adentro. An instant discover methods of irrigation, to redeem a little connection! Connection is my religion if I have of their country. I doubt that Rainer Schulte one. I read and read, all the poems over and over would have taken “transplantation of words” again, not yet giving myself permission to this far! But this will be healthy energy I translate. Then in Madrid, in that magical shop wouldn’t know where to find now in my own called Hypérion, I found Noche abierta. Again I country — and however fragile — a sense of — waited, with my ears stopped, steeping my dare I say hope? bones in the spareness. Gelman’s poetry was Argentina in flames; and Mujica’s? “The fire sale” (Richard Jackson, The Heartwall), maybe Notes even the ashes. And I did finally start and made 1“Translation Theory: A Challenge for the contact with Mujica through Pretextos. He Future.” Translation Review 23 (1987): 2. immediately sent me a copy of Casi en silencio. We worked a lot together by the internet, and

Translation Review 9 NOTES ON “NOTES ON TRANSLATION”

By Kent Johnson

he following observations respond to legitimate status and assume (the agonistic T Eliot Weinberger’s now quasi-classic certainties of their convictions now enabled by “Notes on Translation,” a two-page sequence position) the pursuit of institutional authority and of twenty-five maxims, published in 1988, in control. Thus, in the name of poetic progress, Clayton Eshleman’s late, great Sulfur entire traditions are relegated to the dust heap of magazine. Weinberger’s remarks are reprinted the passé or the verboten. As took place under the here in italics. I’ve had a fairly substantial ideology of the New Criticism, for example. Or as correspondence with Weinberger that stretches is taking place currently, within the quasi- back to 1995 or so, and like many, I’m a long- Manichean posturings of a former avant-garde’s standing, keen admirer of his varied work. academic refashioning … Poems can die this way, When I wrote to tell him I intended to offer too, having no place to go, being insufficiently reflections in direct response to his text, he “advanced,” too tainted by “superseded” forms or replied by writing, “Whoa, can’t believe those conventions of address, to be deemed worthy of notes on trans(lation) are 20 years old. translation. Haven’t looked at [them] in years, but I’m sure I don’t agree with any of it.” Forgotten as The object of a translation into English is not a they may be by their author, however, those poem in English. postulates have had a fair amount of impact on 2) The assertion is counterintuitive, to put it not a few translators over the years, and I mildly. But it’s true, or should be. Just as the suspect Weinberger won’t mind if I now object of poetic composition is the object of a reflect on them, if with friendly difference poem, the object of an act of translation should be here and there. In any case, perhaps not too an object of translation. Not, that is, something long from now, I won’t agree with much of that submissively hides its nature, but something what I’ve written here, either. Translation, that gladly bears the absences, contradictions, and with all its paradoxes, does that to one. ambivalences of its being. The ample folds of its [A more recent statement by Weinberger on robes, to allude to Benjamin again, are borne translation may be viewed at Fascicle without deference or diffidence. magazine (http://www.fascicle.com/issue01/ main/contents_frameset.htm), part of a large A translation creates a specific kind of distance: gathering of translation and essays on the topic the reader never forgets that what is being read is that I co-edited in 2005.] a translation. 3) Again, this will be because the intense I’ve said it before: Poetry is that which is translation of a poem — regardless of its worth translating. The poem dies when it has “fidelity” to the original — results not in the copy no place to go. of a poem, but in an autonomous object of 1) An echo of Benjamin here: that poems recreated language. Something ultimately other, “call out” for translation, so they may enter singular — an instance, even, as Ortega y Gasset their “afterlife.” once proposed, of a wholly different genre. And it’s worth saying, too, that deeply worthy poems often die, untranslated, through A translation that sounds like a poem in English is a kind of pointed neglect … This can happen usually a bad translation. — and on significant scales — when once- 4) Or as Schleiermacher famously advised, the oppositional literary movements come into poem should not be moved toward the reader, but

10 Translation Review the reader toward the otherness of the poem…. Bolivia fly on a broom — and you wouldn’t want But Weinberger’s “usually” is a key word to dress your kid up like one on an Aymara here: The unusual and laudable thing is the holiday, either. translation of a poem into English that does not English that which challenges the A foreign word with multiple meanings can — expectations of our English. though few do it — be translated into several English words. One word can lead to a few, just A translation that strives for the accuracy of a as a few words can lead to one. bilingual dictionary is always a bad 8) Or a single word can lead to a single word that translation. is a completely different word. If a word in the 5) Poetry is profoundly unfaithful to the original produces a certain kind of effect that the accuracy of the dictionary, so how could corresponding word in the target language does translation be bound to the accuracy of the not, the translator should opt for a completely dictionary? A tautological question, of sorts, different word or passage that does. Well, that is but one that is worth asking a bit more often, fairly obvious, I take it. perhaps. Which is not to say that dictionaries aren’t essential, nor that word-for-word Effects that cannot be reproduced in the renderings can’t be heuristically valuable corresponding line can usually be picked up exercises… elsewhere, and should be. Which is why it is more difficult to translate a single poem than a book of A translation must sound like a translation poems by a single author. Which is why a written in living English — and more, an translation shouldn’t be, though it almost always English that takes advantage of certain is, judged on a line-by-line basis. possibilities that are not normally available to 9) And it’s here, really — when “formal” poems written in English. approaches are abandoned for “dynamic” ones — 6) And in this way, translation should expand that comfortable understandings of translation’s our apprehension of what living English is, a nature and task begin to break down, get messy, category always in flux, heterogeneous, and and the act begins to interface with the energies of without horizon, if it is to mean anything. poetic composition proper. There is more to a Furthermore, and as should be obvious, there poem than meaning retrieved in left-to-right can be no such thing as “living English” in reading, and often a faithful engagement will have poetry without living translation. little to do with lexical accuracy… The translation of prose, with its relatively predictable syntactical The success of a translation is nearly always structures and lexical values, is one thing; the dependent on the smallest words: translation of poetry, where these structures and prepositions, articles. Anyone can translate values interact at multiple vectors of equivalence nouns. and are made indeterminate and strange, is 7) Yes and no. The smallest words are indeed another. To be as faithful to certain dimensions of essential to the success of a translation. But so a poetic text may well mean making the are nouns, which anyone can translate, yes, translation unfaithful at certain dimensions, too. It but not necessarily successfully. In the is almost always a negotiation. transmission of linguistic and cultural energies from language to language, nouns can become Few translators hear what they’ve written. — often must become — something quite 10) “Hear” on the inside, that is, as a poet hears dissimilar. I know the example is overused, from the inside of her or his poem. A translator but it’s true: The meaning of “bread” in senses the original from the outside, and can never Ethiopia is not the meaning of the “bread” you inhabit it as its poet had. The translator stands, as get at Cub Foods. Nor does a “witch” in Benjamin put it, outside the language forest of the

Translation Review 11 source, calling in. But the translator can and Everything can be translated. That which is must be on the inside of his or her translation, “untranslatable” hasn’t yet found its translator. must inhabit the echo chamber of its formal 12) On a certain level, this is true. But certainly variables and designs, its rhythms, pauses, the great poetry often points (can this still be said?) to meanings of its silences. In such sounding, the the untranslatable conditions of being, those that translator may begin to hear certain things in shimmer and hint just beyond the reach of the original not previously perceivable from language. Sometimes, it’s those moments of the outside. “pointing” that most seem beyond satisfactory translation. And here, in thinking about the Pound intuitively corrected mistakes in the “untranslatable,” I’ve sometimes pictured that Fenollosa manuscript. For the rest of us, it is well-known optical paradox: the figure of impossible to translate from a language one translation and the figure of the poem it faces as doesn’t know. To translate through an efflorescing into two illusory silhouettes, fixed, in “informant” is to paint by numbers: it’s their turn, by a central illusory vase. Only when the design, you merely add some color. silhouettes vanish does the vase appear; only 11) And then Pound wrote in his own when the vase vanishes, do the silhouettes appear. mistakes, of course, over those of his first But it’s just a hunch. When it comes to the “informant,” Fenollosa. And thank goodness untranslatable, I have no problem saying that I for many of the mistakes. Strange how really don’t know what I’m talking about. misunderstandings, errant guesses, and inaccuracies can enable great translations — The original is never better than the translation. great “inaccurate” translations that in turn The translation is worse than another translation, change everything about a nation’s poetry. written or not yet written, of the same original. And the poetry of other nations, too, in the 13) This would be so because the translation, as case of Pound. In fact, Pound’s translation of previously proposed, is something wholly other Chinese poetry profoundly changed 20th- from the original, in the end. There is the mother century Chinese poetry. Go figure. and there is the daughter. And we don’t usually Now, for the rest of us, it may be impossible say that the mother is “better” or more “original” to make translations that change everything, than the daughter. Yet even most translators feel but it is certainly possible to translate from a that what they create is a lesser, secondary thing, a language one doesn’t know well, so long as shadow-copy of a “true” original. It’s time to get one approaches the poem, humbly, as a poet, over this. There is no correspondence without and has a good informant. Here, then, I would difference; there is no poetry without translation. disagree with Weinberger: All translators And we still don’t know, in any case, what either should have informants, of one kind or one is, or where the activity of one stops and the another. Someone, yes, will do a first design, other begins. but designs can be, and should be, redesigned. Just make it new. Translation is not duplication. Every reading is a No, collaboration is a good thing, new reading: why should we expect a translation especially in translation, which is always a to be identical? collaboration, and all the way down. Plus, 14) It is because we can’t expect this that collaboration doubles the chances of felicitous translation practice, in the end, lacks true mistakes. epistemic boundary or location. It is a spectrum, and translations will mark their distances and velocities along different spectral points of its red- shift range. To be sure, “faithfulness” is the normative ideal of our practice. But I’d propose that freer, imitative gestures — those speeding

12 Translation Review away, as it were, from fixed points of “wristwatch.” Not for the mere sake of embracing observation — can sometimes reveal senses the exotic, but because the grammatical and measures in the original that are otherwise particularities of a language are deeply wreathed lost. in the tenor of the poem’s total poetic field — in, The analogy has its limitations, of that is, the dynamic field of linguistic and formal course … But poet-translators once practiced equivalence that makes poetry something different free imitation without restraint, infused their from prose. Which is not to say that this kind of imaginations and visions into the source, in transfer is usually possible … In languages with the spirit of tribute and reverence. Why have gendered nouns, for instance, where articles shoot we mostly lost this? Why is such practice no out deep traces of semantic charge, we are, in longer considered part of translation’s English, pretty much at a loss. legitimate reach? As I asked in another piece, written on the topic of imitation, “If we can Many of the best translators know the original have the works of, say, both Brahms and Cage language imperfectly. All of the worst translators understood as Music, the art of both Watteau are native speakers of it. and Duchamp understood as Painting, the 16) Inevitably so, as native speakers of the source writing of both Tennyson and Mac Low language will not — except in rare instances of understood as Poetry, why can’t we imagine perfect bilingualism — be native speakers of the that the task of Translation might extend, for target language. In turn, the best translators will the sake of certain purposes, beyond the be native speakers of the language they are relatively delimited protocols and horizons translating into — and thus, ipso facto, imperfect that currently ‘define’ the practice? One never speakers, to varying degrees, of the source knows what might happen: Once upon a time, language. But this does not mean that translations for example, a very unfaithful translation by a by native speakers of any language into another Scot was translated into German, and German are of no value. In fact, in lesser-known Romanticism was born.” languages, they may be indispensible. This is especially the case today, when hundreds of little- Metaphor: from the familiar to the strange. known languages are on the verge of extinction. Translation: from the strange to the familiar. Given this unprecedented linguistic emergency, The failed metaphor is too strange; the failed English-speaking translators of poetry should be translation too familiar. seeking out those who can translate dying 15) But to be sure, and I’m confident languages and offer, humbly, their services as Weinberger would agree: The poems that most collaborators. call out for translation are those that offer some profit of strangeness to the target Translations are normally reviewed by members language. Translation must seek to bring over of the Department of the Original’s Language. the strangeness, obvious or latent, of the They are proprietary, and cannot help but find all original, and always guard against the translations from their language — except those temptation to familiarize it. It is this, after all, done by certain colleagues — to be travesties. that is the gain of translation — the new 17) This is not a bad thing, since translation work surplus, semantic or grammatical, that gets little enough attention as it is. And some of languages can invest in the general economies the foreign language experts sometimes have of others. Surely, and to draw from Roman important things to say. Today, twenty years after Jakobson, if we are translating poetry of the Weinberger made this complaint, the situation Northeast Siberian Chukchees, say, we would applies, when it comes to poetry, just as much to do well to consider not rendering “rotating departments of English and Creative Writing: nail” as “screw,” nor “writing soap” as from “mainstream” and “innovative” academics “chalk,” nor “hammering heart” as alike. And rarely, very rarely, believing, as they

Translation Review 13 seem to believe, in the superiority of their third of its courses be in translation or its study. direct lineages and traditions, do they Another third would, by law, be courses devoted comment on works of translation. I say let’s to the international history of prosody. keep hearing it from members of the departments of the Original’s Language. A translation is based on the dissolution of the self. A bad translation is the insistent voice of the Translation theory, however beautiful, is translator. useless for translating. There are the laws of 20) But no, the translator’s self is never fully thermodynamics, and there is cooking. dissolved in the translation, nor should it 18) Theory is much closer to translation necessarily be. Think of the Renaissance poets: practice than thermodynamics is to cooking. Personality, voice, hubris permeate their great You can’t cook thermodynamics, but you can translations. Our selves are always in our translate theory. And translation theory can be translations, and no less, I’d say, when we pretend beautiful, even mystical, too, nourishing and they aren’t … But perhaps there are some little- sensual, like fine cuisine. It is true that no tried vehicles of distancing we might employ. single theory can guide the translator’s Perhaps, that is, it would be possible, here and practice, since different lines, even different there, for translators to dissolve their public, legal phrases or words, often require different selves by assuming the anonymous cover of enactments, almost always unconscious, of so- personae. Such a choice may have a liberating called theory. In this way, a good translation impact on the translator, making him or her less will carry, like a train in a station, after long self-conscious, more daring, and the spirit of the journey, diverse traces of the diverse act more intriguing to the reader. Why should “theoretical” regions it has traveled through translators of poetry not do what so many writers (to paraphrase an industrious translator). And have done for millennia, and quite commonly, up sometimes theories, even those founded on until not so long ago? More than 70% of novels in misprision, can produce epoch-making England during the last three decades of the 18th translations, to come back to Pound. Or they century were anonymous or pseudonymous. More can inspire translators and poets in unexpected than 50% in the first three decades of the 19th ways, even when the theory has no apparent were, too. Readers were wild for this. Translators practical use, to come back to Benjamin. of poetry might adopt the practice from time to time. English-language poets today, stuck as we Most translators are capable of translating are in the vise-grip of banal, standard authorship, only a few writers in their lifetimes. The rest is might learn something valuable. rote. 19) Every poet who has published a book To translate is to learn how poetry is written. should translate or imitate at least one Nothing else is so successful a teacher, for it collection of poems by another in his or her carries no baggage of self-expression. lifetime. Alone or with an informant. In fact, a 21) To translate is also to more deeply learn, and benevolent and wise dictator would surely marvel at, how grammar works — in one’s own pass a law, stipulating the following: If the language and in another. And it is to begin, poet has not shown evidence of at least being however tenuously, to learn and marvel (this via in process of translating a collection of work J.H. Prynne) at the mysterious space or interval before dying, all his or her personal poetry between languages — that shimmering area will be taken out of circulation and stored between repelling poles of grammar, which traces perpetually in a library called “The Museum or residues of meaning cannot traverse. An area of Self-Centered Poets.” Further, a benevolent that is very much at the heart of poetry’s and wise dictator would pass a law stipulating substance, perhaps… that every MFA program require that at least a

14 Translation Review Any poem should be translated as many times 23) This is true, though the fact is not necessarily as possible, even by the same translator over as depressing for the translator as it may, at first the years. Only fundamentalists believe in a blush, seem … For translations, as I just said, can “definitive” translation. be translated too, as they often and variously are. 22) And any poem should be imitated, A translation, too, if it is strong, will have its translucinated, or traduced as many times as afterlife. possible, even by the same translator over the years. That is to say, any poem is the raw Nearly everywhere, the great ages of poetry have material for forging experiments in translation. been, not coincidentally, periods of intense In fact, and to restate an earlier suggestion, a translation. With no news from abroad, a culture solid, so-called accurate translation may be the ends up repeating the same things to itself. It first step toward even better traductions, i.e., needs the foreign not to imitate, but to transform. imaginative transfigurations that may well 24) Which speaks, as my comment at the extend energies of the original, otherwise lost beginning, to a serious lack in our nation’s current in more fundamentalist attempts to carry poetry — where things have improved a bit of across, as Benjamin would have it, an late, as far as translation goes, but where what is “inessential meaning.” translated tends to be that which reinforces our own national fashions of the moment. A translation of classical Greek from 1900, say, is “dated” in a way that an English poem An anonymous occupation, yet people have died from 1900 is not, for we expect a translation for it. to be written in a version of current speech, 25) Not just translators, but countless innocent, and refuse to make the mental readjustments anonymous bystanders as well. Think of the Bible, as we would for a contemporaneous poem. for instance. History shows that the stakes in With greater time, however — say, an translation extend far beyond the page. In fact, Elizabethan translation from the classical and though the question may sound grandiose, Greek — such recalibration becomes what is literature, or history, without translation? inescapable: the translation, in our reading, becomes part of the age in which it was Note: This speech was delivered by Kent Johnson at written. The University of Texas at Dallas on March 20, 2008.

Translation Review 15 FEMINIST TRANSLATION AS INTERPRETATION by David J. Eshelman

hen translating the plays of Québécois considerations and to have produced translations W dramatist Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, I that are somehow “tainted.” In my view, though, have found the interpretive methods and the human mind is far more expansive than strategies of feminist translation to be very many are comfortable admitting. The human useful. To put it simply, feminist translation mind can, in fact, easily accommodate both a theory recognizes that gender matters: whether translation process based on careful reading and of an author, translator, character, or pronoun, rigorous study of a source text, while, at the gender is a legitimate concern. The field of same time, using a named interpretive theory “feminist translation” is largely a Canadian like feminist translation. In fact, I would argue invention, resulting from the cross-pollination of that, in certain cases — such as when one is two languages and the feminisms of at least working on a text with an overt feminist agenda three nations. It became prominent in the 1990s — then the translator’s mind had better contain through the writings of translators like Barbara an interpretive framework like feminist Godard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood translation. Otherwise, there is the danger that and as a result of two influential books, Sherry other interpretive frameworks — unintended, Simon’s Gender in Translation (1996) and unrecognized, and unamenable to the project of Luise von Flotow’s Translation and Gender a text — may creep in. (1997).1 Feminist translation is an inclusive term Feminist translation answers the call issued that covers studies of how gender has been by Rainer Schulte in a recent editorial in the translated in already-published works,2 in Translation Review, in which Schulte asks addition to statements and written reflections by translators to pay more attention to practicing translators who describe the “interpretation.”5 The call is provocative. For relationship of feminism to their work.3 my part, I would like to explore more fully what Feminist translation, though, has so far not taken exactly “interpretation” means. Schulte translation studies by storm. admonishes against two extremes: (1) “literal In my view, feminist translation has not translations,” defined as “the correspondence of caught on because of suspicion from translators. word to word from one language to another”6; Despite the call on the part of Rainer Schulte and (2) interpretive “theories of theories that are and others to attend to interpretation,4 there is a no longer connected to a work.”7 This second great fear of any interpretive method that can be admonition is most intriguing to me. It brings to named. This attitude is apparent when I talk to mind Susan Sontag’s classic essay, “Against other translators. When I ask about either Interpretation,” which likewise argues against feminist translation or about the role that gender applying interpretative frameworks that are not plays in translation, the typical response is that a organic to the work studied.8 In Sontag’s essay, feminist approach is unnecessary and that she argues against interpretative methods that gender plays no role whatever in translation. It ignore form for content, separating out is as if translators, ever fearful of being called individual content elements and applying a textual infidels, refuse to acknowledge that there prescriptive “code” or “rules” in order to make can be anything in their minds besides the “text sense of these elements.9 However, if itself.” Feminist or other considerations cannot prescriptive rules or frameworks are jettisoned, be acknowledged in translation work, for fear then how exactly does one interpret? I would that, by so admitting, one simultaneously like to explore in more detail what interpretation confesses to having been “led astray” by these is. Sontag attempts to answer the interpretation

16 Translation Review question by suggesting the need for “an erotics Cutting Up Men,” whose aim is “to destroy the of art” rather than a “hermeneutics.”10 But what male sex.”15 This manifesto constitutes a bold, does this mean? The question of how to interpret performative response to injustices against is of great importance to the translator. It is my women and was never taken literally by belief that feminist translation theory provides a mainstream feminism. Unfortunately, this text potential answer. has been and continues to be paraded out whenever proof is needed that feminists are Objections to Feminist Translation “crazy.” While the “SCUM Manifesto” is In spite of the proliferation of texts undeniably extremist, it does not follow that all dedicated to gender, sexuality, and queer theory, manifestations of feminism are. Similarly, feminist translation has not caught on in the “hijacking” — or “womanhandling,” to use a United States and appears to be waning even phrase coined by Godard16 — represents an among Canadian scholars and practitioners. extremist practice that is erroneously equated Although von Flotow’s 2002 assertion that the with all feminist translation. discussion around “gender in translation” is In my view, the fear of the hijacking alive and well,11 the field has not seen a translator is unfounded. The most adamantly sustained flurry of publication like that in the interventionist translators also tend to be the 1990s and seems ever less likely to cross the most careful with their technique and choosy U.S.-Canadian border and reach scholars south with their source texts. One example of this kind of the 49th parallel.12 of translator is Lotbinière-Harwood, who The main objection to feminist translation advocates “writing subversion” / “écrire la arises from an overly simplistic equation of subversion”17 while at the same time feminist translation with translator intervention. acknowledging that context determines In reality, feminist translation practice is far strategies.18 She prefers to translate texts that are more complex than the simple alteration of a both feminist- and lesbian-identified, such as the source text in blind allegiance to an “agenda.” writing of Nicole Brossard. It is apparent then This oversimplified view arises from an oft- that “hijacking” and “womanhandling” are quoted list of feminist translation strategies, negligible threats to contemporary literature: originally put forth by von Flotow. This list only those authors amenable to feminist includes the techniques of “supplementing, concerns, like Brossard, allow their work to be prefacing and footnoting, and ‘hijacking’.”13 translated by feminist translators; therefore, only Note that von Flotow includes intervention, or authors like Brossard will find their work “hijacking,” only as one of many strategies, not translated in this way. Furthermore, for a writer as a definition of feminist translation praxis. like Brossard, a feminist translation is more Also, while some translators do intervene in likely to capture the nuances of feminisms translation, fears of this practice are grossly already present in the text — nuances that other overblown. In my research, I have found this translators may be liable to miss. If, on the other strategy hardly ever used, even by the most hand, an author is hostile to the more radical adamant feminist translators. feminist translation practices, s/he will exercise Unfortunately, “hijacking” has received the his/her rights in choice of translator, thereby most critical attention. The reduction of precluding even the possibility of intervention. complex thinking to its most extreme form Feminist translation of contemporary literature, happens, all too often, to feminist work. Bold then, is not an “invasion” of a given source text; statements, intended to inspire readers to think rather, it is rather a decision on the part of to extremes, are misinterpreted as the norm. A author and translator to use feminist strategies to clear example of this phenomenon can be found ensure that certain gendered aspects of a text are with Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto.”14 In not lost.19 this document, Solanas describes a “Society for

Translation Review 17 Feminist Translation in Practice Dévoilement devant notaire, which I call in To further allay fears associated with English The Feminist’s Daughter; and the short feminist translation, I will describe how I used play, “Nacre C,” which I call “Pearloid C.” techniques from this field in my own translation Although feminist translation theory is work. In writing this essay, I considered using multifaceted, this discussion of my work will another term besides “feminist translation concentrate on the three specific strategies that theory.” One scholar, M. Rosario Martín, brings have been most important in my work: up “gender conscious” or Carol Maier’s supplementing; close attention to the gender of “woman-identified” as possible alternatives to words; and “closelaboration” (borrowing “feminist.”20 I considered using the complicated Suzanne Jill Levine’s term for the working phrase “gender in translation theory.” However, relationship of author and translator). I have consciously chosen to stay with “feminist translation” because it fits well with my Strategy 1: Supplementing particular project. The play that I have To “supplement” means to provide translated, Dévoilement devant notaire by additional information along with the Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, deals explicitly translation. It arises from the need to be as with feminism; it is, therefore, a natural fit with honest as possible about translation choices. feminist translation methods. As a product of There is a danger in texts that are not heavily 1990s Quebec, the play shares its origins with footnoted and packaged with long introductions: the specific cultural moment of the inception of they seduce readers into forgetting that what is feminist translation. Although a “cultural being read is mitigated through another person’s feminist” agenda may not fit every milieu, the reading of the source text.22 It is especially play that I have translated engages self- important to supplement feminist texts lest they consciously with some of the very same issues be read in a “monolithic” way contrary to the dealt with by theorists like Simon, von Flotow, ends of feminism.23 and Lotbinière-Harwood. The insights of cultural studies suggest that The strategies of feminist translation translations or writings on translation ought to emerge from a feminist project but tend to account for the process of creation.24 In order to emphasize transparency of the translation avoid the temptation of objective posturing, process — an attempt to ensure that the translators — especially feminist translators — translator’s work can be viewed somewhat must account for choices made, not only separately from the author’s words. One of the describing individual word choices but also most refreshing aspects of feminist translation is accounting for their readings of the original text that it is less a method and more a considered and of the author’s œuvre. To help recall their study of process. This tendency is evident when reasoning behind readings and choices, many von Flotow writes that feminist translators are translators have kept what Barbara Godard calls less concerned with the final product and its a “translator’s diary.”25 My own diary consists equivalence or fidelity than with the processes of the various drafts of my translation, along of reading, rereading, and writing again.21 with reflections on Parenteau-Lebeuf’s text Feminist translation shares with the larger field made along a specifically gendered line of of gender studies a suspicion of binaries such as inquiry. right and wrong, being instead more concerned By attending to the translation process, with how translations are made. feminist translators answer the call that In the remaining sections of this essay, I contemporary translation must be self-reflexive. will describe feminist translation as it relates to It is disingenuous for a translator to attempt to my work with contemporary Québec playwright “hide.” More and more, translation theorists Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf. I have translated have come to the same conclusion as Lincoln two of her works: the full-length play and Guba: that all inquiry is value-bound.26

18 Translation Review Being “openly ideological” is not the same thing translated and made available to English- as being “blatantly ideological” and is infinitely speaking audiences. preferable to being “covertly ideological.”27 To Parenteau-Lebeuf’s work engages issues of that end, there has been a move away from the gender, autobiography, and heroism. Rather than “invisible” translator.28 Feminist translators, too, writing in a realistic vein, Parenteau-Lebeuf strive to be open about their process, lest they employs a beautifully dense, evocative, and inadvertently re-inscribe the forces that they poetic language, crafting sumptuous speeches seek to critique with their project. that lift her characters out of the everyday to the realm of modern mythology. Her proclivities Strategy 1A: Supplementing in Action lead me to call her a “language playwright,” a My answer to the call to supplement is to term coined by Paul Castagno in New disseminate information surrounding the Playwriting Strategies that describes “a major translation. In answer to this call, I will provide influence on the practice and pedagogy of some information about Parenteau-Lebeuf and playwriting.”30 Though Parenteau-Lebeuf does her relationship to contemporary Quebec not trace her playwriting technique back to the theater. This strategy is commonly seen in the specific playwrights that Castagno mentions, her tendency in feminist translation to provide work nonetheless shares traits with the introductions and prefaces. The information that “language playwrights” on Castagno’s list, I provide is pertinent for two reasons: (1) rather including Mac Wellman, Constance Congdon, than assuming that the audience is familiar with Eric Overmyer, Paula Vogel, and Tony Parenteau-Lebeuf, it helps to introduce her to a Kushner.31 Simultaneously combining social wider Anglophone audience; and (2) it provides concerns with linguistic innovation, Parenteau- additional information that will help with the Lebeuf’s work is reminiscent of France’s Hélène understanding of Parenteau-Lebeuf’s work that Cixous or the United States’ Suzan-Lori Parks. will then help create more understanding for the The Feminist’s Daughter32 follows its main translation choices I make. By including this character, Irene-Iris, a twenty-eight-year-old information, I provide an example of what might woman who undergoes a torturous night after be included in a translation “supplement.” the funeral of her mother, a woman identified as Parenteau-Lebeuf is a young artist (born in “feminist” throughout the text. Over the course 1971) currently working as a playwright and of this one painful evening, Irene-Iris awaits the translator in Montréal. She received her degree arrival of the notary and the reading of her in dramatic writing from Canada’s National mother’s will; while waiting, Irene-Iris relives Theatre School in 1994 and has had a steady her mother’s death and her own fears, finally record of productions, publications, and awards coming to terms with the feminist legacy left to since that time. Her plays have been produced at her. The short play “Pearloid C” is part of a many top Canadian theaters, including larger work called Filles de guerres lasses Toronto’s Théâtre français and Montreal’s (War-Sick Girls).33 Though “Pearloid C” does Espace GO. She has been the recipient of not deal with feminism per se, it tackles issues numerous prizes and residencies from theaters in of power and the male gaze. France, the United Kingdom, and parts of Both “Pearloid C” and The Feminist’s Canada. Her published plays include Poème Daughter deal frankly with issues of gender pour une nuit d’anniversaire (1997), from Parenteau-Lebeuf’s unique subject position Dévoilement devant notaire (2002), Portrait as a young woman born into a feminist chinois d’une imposteure (2003), La Petite household, into a linguistic and cultural context scrap (2005), Filles de guerres lasses (2005), set apart from the (Anglo-Canadian) world and the children’s plays L’Autoroute (1999) and around her. The Feminist’s Daughter is Parc Lafontaine (2005).29 When we began somewhat unique in that it deals so explicitly working together, none of her plays had been with what it means to be “feminist” in Quebec

Translation Review 19 in the current age. The play hinges on meanings one language, such as French, and then how this of “postfeminism.” Parenteau-Lebeuf uses the gendering is translated into a differently term many times within the text, clearly gendered language, such as English. The situating her play and her main character within linguistic choices made by translators reveal a the “postfeminist” age. The term is first used in lot about attitudes regarding the cultural Scene 12, when Parenteau-Lebeuf’s protagonist meanings of gender. As a hypothetical example rebukes herself, saying, “Nous vivons l’ère du of how such decisions can reveal translator postféminisme, Mlle Lamy.”34 I translate this prejudices, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood statement as, “We live in the era of points to the title of Luce Irigaray’s famous postfeminism, Mademoiselle Lamy.”35 theoretical work, Ce sexe qui n’est pas un. The Parenteau-Lebeuf’s views on “post- French “ce” can mean either “this” or “that,” feminism” evolve within the text itself. On the depending on the situation. Irigaray’s title is simplest level, Irene-Iris is post-feminist by usually translated as This Sex Which Is Not One. reason of birth: she is the daughter of a feminist. However, as Lotbinière-Harwood points out, it However, at many points within the play, Irene- could be translated as That Sex Which Is Not Iris is also “post-feminist” in its more usual One. Whereas “this” suggests togetherness meaning: she is hostile to feminism. This around a community — in this case, a sex — a hostility, however, is complex: because she was distancing “that” might arise in a translation by raised by Clarissa, a woman who is a vehement someone unfamiliar with or hostile to the 1970s anti-patriarchy advocate, Irene-Iris’s discourse in which Irigaray engages.36 response cannot dismiss “feminism” wholly; Another example concerns the translation of instead, she must find her relationship to it. The the French word auteure. In French, where all play suggests — as does contemporary feminist nouns are gendered, the creation of new theory — that there is not just one “feminism.” feminine nouns is an activist strategy that makes The Feminist’s Daughter dramatizes one language more inclusive. Since the French word woman’s discovery of the intricacies of usually used for “author” (auteur) is always feminism. masculine, many Québécois women authors, The character of Irene-Iris represents a including Parenteau-Lebeuf, have taken to relatively unexplored subject position: the calling themselves auteures. To translate woman who was raised feminist. In order to auteure into English, Lotbinière-Harwood translate a play like Dévoilement devant notaire, coined the word “auther,” in an attempt to retain a translator must have some awareness of the the femaleness.37 Other neologisms include history of feminism, the reception of feminism, Lotbinière-Harwood’s “other” for “une autre” and the unique vantage point portrayed. There is (a female “other”)38 and Godard’s Lovhers, some risk that, without the tools of feminist which she uses for the title of Nicole Brossard’s translation, a translator could oversimplify the Les Amantes (“lovers” — both of whom must be ambiguities within the text — for instance, female and therefore lesbian).39 drawing out Irene-Iris’s hostility toward For Parenteau-Lebeuf, I had to decide when feminism without recognizing her long history and if to use similar translation strategies. with the movement. Similarly, since the text Obviously, innovations like “other” only work hinges on issues of gender, it is important that on the page and are unavailable to spectators in the gender of words be careful noted and a theater. In my work, I discovered that my thoughtfully handled. engagement with linguistic gender had less to do with my use of highlighting strategies and more Strategy 2: Looking at Gender on a to do with the gradual development of a Word-by-Word Basis particular way of reading the text. Each time I Another key feature of feminist translation translated a gendered noun, I took stock of what is the examination of how words are gendered in I was doing. By considering gender, I avoided

20 Translation Review carelessly neglecting important features of would be experienced by a Francophone can be Parenteau-Lebeuf’s text.40 recreated for an English speaker simply by In three cases, Parenteau-Lebeuf draws adding a feminine noun ending. I decided to attention to noun gender by using/creating translate bourrelle as “guillotineress.” Having feminine versions of common masculine nouns: often encountered the word bourreau in guerrière, bourrelle, and femme plancher. literature about the French Revolution, I feel Guerrière (“warrior”) is an accepted French justified embedding the specifically French word. The others, though, are neologisms based context within the word itself. Since on the common French bourreau Francophone thinking may naturally turn to the (“executioner”) and plancher (“floor”). When guillotine, I decided to turn the Anglophone’s the word guerrière first appears, it is closely mind in the same direction. Also, Irene-Iris’s associated with the Amazons, legendary female speech suggests that beheading is the bourrelle’s fighters. Irene-Iris uses this term in a speech usual technique: about undressing in front of men. She feels Tous les jours, sans répit, je guillotine des shame because of the “battle scars” left by her milliers de têtes de projets, de résistances, garments and because of her ambivalence de guérillas internes, comme la sale toward her own menstrual blood: bourrelle que je suis. Quel galant voudrait d’une guerrière? Quel homme voudrait d’une amazone incapable Every day, I relentlessly behead thousands de manipuler les fils de ses désirs? of plans, instances of resistance, internal guerrillas — like the What gentleman would want a woman dirty guillotineress I am.42 warrior? What man would want an In addition to the textual evidence supporting Amazon unable to handle the bowstrings of “guillotineress,” I also chose the word because her desire?41 of its sound. “Guillotineress” has echoes of the Because the context of the speech refers to term “murderess,” thereby evoking images of battles faced particularly by women — battles early twentieth-century female killers. with fashion and reproduction — and because The last word, femme plancher, makes use the next line includes the image of the Amazon, of a convention in French that has parallels in both femaleness and warrior-ness were English. In French, certain occupations — for important to the understanding of the text and instance, author — do not traditionally have neither element should be sacrificed. However, easy feminine equivalents. Instead, a woman English has a tendency to shy away from who is an author is often called a “woman feminine noun endings as needlessly specific, a author” (femme auteur). Like their French tendency that has grown with widespread counterparts, English speakers would objection to such terms as “poetess,” understand “woman author,” even if they did not “stewardess,” and “waitress.” However, in The approve of the term. Many English speakers Feminist’s Daughter, gender specificity is often rightly object to “woman author” on the grounds called for. Since “warrioress” is not an English that the term needlessly highlights an author’s word, I chose instead “woman warrior” — a sex, which should be irrelevant in most term not wholly unfamiliar because of Maxine situations. Many Québécois would react Hong Kingston’s well-known memoir, The similarly to the femme ____ construction as their Woman Warrior. U.S. counterparts would to “woman ____.” As In contrast to guerrière, bourrelle is a previously mentioned in an earlier section, there completely new word that is nonetheless has been a shift in Quebec away from femme comprehensible to French speakers. Bourrelle auteur toward auteure. The term femme gives a feminine ending to bourreau plancher (“woman floor”), then, represents a (“executioner”): the cognitive dissonance that step backward, a parody of former gender usage.

Translation Review 21 This sense of parody and backwardness is made like Luce Irigaray. Before I arrived at “Knot,” I evident in the text. When Irene-Iris reveals her rejected two alternatives: “Ball” because it is an desire to become a femme plancher, the text unnecessarily masculine image (suggesting a makes it clear that such a desire is no longer testicle) and “Pit” because of ambiguity, since appropriate to a modern woman.43 This the term can mean either the hard center of a backward glance is underscored by the old- fruit (like a “peach pit”) or a “hole in the fashioned, sexist phrasing. Unfortunately, ground.” Since la Boule is described as “woman floor” is confusing — suggesting, something almost palpable, “a hole in the perhaps, the all-female part of a dormitory. I had ground” did not seem appropriate. During a to find another solution; and I initially chose face-to-face encounter, I asked Parenteau- “she-floor,” which borrows the prefix used for Lebeuf to explain la Boule to me. Affirming my certain female animals — for instance, “she- understanding that la Boule is something felt wolves” and “she-bears.” However, upon deep within a person, Parenteau-Lebeuf relied speaking with Parenteau-Lebeuf, I understood on gesture in her description: as she spoke, she that femme plancher is funny in French: the clenched her fists and contorted her face and image of the femme plancher was a favorite of body. La Boule is something oppressive, like a audiences of the original production. Parenteau- Knot, that comes from within and causes Lebeuf suggested “floorwoman” for femme outward distress. plancher. I have chosen to follow Parenteau- Because la Boule is specifically depicted in Lebeuf’s lead: “floorwoman” is more humorous the text as something that women have, I because of the super-hero resonance thought that the noun’s feminine gender was (“Superwoman,” “Catwoman”). significant. For that reason, I used a feminine In addition to finding/creating feminine pronoun when translating the phrase, “Elle fait English nouns that reflected the French, I also partie de vous, croyez-moi.”46 A literal chose at times to allow the gender of certain translation of this line is “It makes up a part of French nouns to dictate pronoun choice in you, believe me.” However, the French elle can English. In places, the gender of certain nouns be translated as either she or it. Though a boule seemed important to the text, so I found ways to would typically be an “it,” I decided to make allow French gender to seep into the English. more explicit the connection between la Boule One such example is la Boule, a dominant and femininity, present in the elle. I translated image in the latter half of the play. Before I the line as “She’s a part of you, your Knot — describe how I dealt with the gender of this believe me.” Because English speakers would noun, let me first describe how I translated the not be familiar with an inanimate object like a word itself. La Boule means literally “the Ball.” Boule referred to as a “she,” the subject is re- In the text, it refers to a terrible physical and inserted to make explicit what the “she” is. In psychological pain exclusive to women. La this case, I developed a strategy that used Boule is a feeling of distress that Irene-Iris feels gendered pronouns in a way that reflected in her stomach. It is also described as “an French rather than English convention. executioner in the belly” / “un bourreau dans le ventre.”44 When Irene-Iris, at age sixteen, first Strategy 3: Closelaboration confronts her mother about la Boule, her mother Collaboration with the author is the last refuses to talk about it.45 The text indicates that strategy that I will discuss. This method is key la Boule is difficult to describe; it follows that to feminist translation theory; scholar Isabel the word is difficult to translate. After much Garayta refers to collaboration as “a trademark experimentation, I settled on “the Knot” as my of feminist translation of today’s women translation: “Knot” suggests both a twisted authors.”47 Similarly, Simon points out that feeling inside (a “knot in the stomach”) and much of feminist translation arises from a “Not” or “lack” referred to by French feminists “willful collusion and cooperation between text,

22 Translation Review author and translator.”48 I like the term they would leave traces in the hearers’ minds. “closelaboration,” derived from translator Attempting to recreate this effect, I tried to find Suzanne Jill Levine’s: suggesting that the an anagram for the title. Unable to find an working bond between author and translator is anagram, I eventually decided on “Pearloid C” unique, Levine uses “closelaboration” to refer to as the title. The morpheme “pearl” captures the this relationship; the term was coined by sense of beauty present in “nacre” (“mother of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Cuban author with pearl”). I chose to combine “pearl” with the whom Levine worked closely.49 With Parenteau- suffix “-oid”: this way, the title retains the trace Lebeuf, I have been fortunate to find an author of disease present in the original “cancer” who showed immediate and sustained interest in anagram. I chose “-oid” over other suffixes, working with me. such as “-itis,” because I felt that “-oid” As I have described the process of suggests illness (as in “rheumatoid”) while not translation and my decisions on specific choices, being too obvious. I left the floating “C” in I have often revealed that I sought the guidance “Pearloid C” because I felt it suggested a of Parenteau-Lebeuf as author. Her English is commodity to be marketed, like “Chanel No. 5.” quite good, having spent a year in Australia and When I wrote to Parenteau-Lebeuf and making a portion of her income as a translator explained my choice, she was pleased. from English to French. In the course of Another illustration of “closelaboration” in working on The Feminist’s Daughter and action involves my choice of the English title, “Pearloid C,” we exchanged countless e-mails. I The Feminist’s Daughter. In this case, I have also managed to see her face-to-face on considered Parenteau-Lebeuf’s suggestions several occasions.50 weighed against my own knowledge of English To illustrate the “closelaboration” that usage. The French title, Dévoilement devant occurred between us, I will briefly recount some notaire, literally means Unveiling before experiences in working on “Pearloid C.” Almost Notary. According to Parenteau-Lebeuf, the immediately after beginning our e-mail French title is “a sexy and mysterious title” / “un correspondence, we began an English translation titre sexy et mystérieux” to native speakers.51 In of her “Nacre C,” the short play that is part of contrast, a literal English translation, Unveiling Filles de guerres lasses. In the first place, I was before Notary, struck me as awkward and confused about the title. “Nacre” is French for clunky. On several occasions, Parenteau-Lebeuf “mother-of-pearl.” Translated quite literally, the suggested that I simply use the title Unveiling; playlet’s title is “Mother-of-pearl C.” I referred however, I feel that “unveiling” and dévoilement to the play to see how “Nacre C” was used. In are not the same. To me, “unveiling” suggests the play, Nacre C is a skin disease, found only in something light and joyful — a new automobile women, that makes their skin pearl-like and revealed at a show, a painting displayed in a beautiful to men. Later in the play, as Nacre C gallery. While dévoilement can also have these becomes epidemic, the disease is marketed on meanings, the “unveiling” that Parenteau- billboards as if it were a cosmetic. I needed, Lebeuf writes about is more painful, involving then, a title that could work for both a disease exposure. In English, veils are lifted — they and a brand of perfume. At this point, I almost float off — so that what is underneath consulted Parenteau-Lebeuf and asked her for can meet with another’s appreciation. In French thoughts on the title. She pointed out to me that — or, at least, in Parenteau-Lebeuf’s work — “Nacre C” is an anagram for “cancer” (the same unveiling is violent: it is a slow, painful, yet in French as in English): by linking an ultimately healthful process. For a time, I ornamental substance with an insidious disease, considered using as title Deveiling — which the title links beauty with death. Parenteau- orthographically suggests “deveining,” ripping Lebeuf said that, while she realized the anagram veins out of something. In the end, I decided on was not obvious upon hearing, she hoped that The Feminist’s Daughter, which does not

Translation Review 23 attempt to translate the title but rather uses the Conclusion: Translation and “Theory” subject matter as title in a straightforward and, I (with a Capital “T”) hope, intriguing way. In this essay, I have outlined three simple “Closelaborating” did not mean that I sent techniques for engaging in feminist translation: each line of translation to Parenteau-Lebeuf for 1. Describe the translation process in detail “approval.” In the first place, that would have in supplementary materials. annoyed her. Second, it is impossible to do a 2. Attend carefully to words that are translation without some degree of autonomous gendered. decision-making power. I did not second-guess 3. When possible, collaborate with the myself at every juncture. However, I did playwright. approach Parenteau-Lebeuf with specific The first point is especially important, in that, by translation challenges. I also sent her drafts for supplementing, one both interprets and makes comments. I had done the same thing with one’s interpretation known. By using these “Pearloid C” and appreciated her comments. methods, I believe that I was able to create The most important result of our working translations of Parenteau-Lebeuf’s plays that do together — as far as the translated text is justice to her language and the views on concerned — is that we formed a relationship (post)feminism represented in her texts. that helped me to understand better her play, her In conclusion, far from being unamenable other work, her culture, and her as an author. to the concerns of translation, feminist theory is Since I wanted to experience another’s necessary in some cases. As I have laid them voice, I felt that “closelaboration” would help out, feminist translation methods provide a way me to do so. Levine describes vividly how she to understand the “interpreting” component of felt when she entered into collaboration with translation. Although these methods may not be Guillermo Infante Cabrera: appropriate for every source text, they certainly I was the willing apprentice of Count can be useful. Dracula Infante, ready to tread upon his I mentioned earlier in this article that many dread Transylvania … to follow him translators distrust the motives of feminist unfaithfully … into that dimension of the translation and do not see the need for it. I Living Dead, the world of writing.52 believe that the objection can be traced to an Garayta finds this passage especially disturbing antagonism that many writers feel for “Theory.” from a feminist perspective, as it recreates a I have much experience with those who, like male-dominant/female-subservient relationship: translators, identify themselves as “writers.” All “Levine casts the author as mentor, teacher, and too often, such individuals are fearful of figure of authority, and herself as the uninitiated “theory,” as though it is a giant monster waiting student and follower, or perhaps apprentice- to suck up their “writerliness.” There remains learner.”53 While I appreciate Garayta’s critique among many an unjustified fear that too much of Levine’s re-inscription of patriarchy through thought destroys art, that the study of theory “closelaboration,” I am intrigued by Levine’s poisons the font of creativity. In my view, model for my own work — even by the idea of theory — feminist or otherwise — should not be being Parenteau-Lebeuf’s “apprentice.” In our an object of wariness or dismay but rather one case, the genders are reversed and patriarchy of the translator’s tools. troubled. This troubling adds yet another Feminist translation theory can be useful feminist dimension to my project. when working on texts identified as “feminist.” I urge my fellow translators to take a closer look at this body of work and to see what is useful. Theories, like feminist translation theory, may well help better to define the nature of interpretation.

24 Translation Review Notes Lotbinière-Harwood, Re-belle et infidèle: La Traduction comme pratique de réécriture au 1Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural féminin / The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Identity and the Politics of Transmission Rewriting in the Feminine (Montréal: Remue- (London: Routledge, 1996); Luise von Flotow, ménage/Women’s Press, 1991). Translation and Gender: Translating in the 4Rainer Schulte, “Editorial: ‘In Other Words’: “Era of Feminism” (Manchester, U.K.: St. The Interpretative Dialogue with the Text,” Jerome, 1997). Simon and von Flotow explore Translation Review 27 (2006): 1–2. the interconnections of gender and translation 5Ibid, 1. praxis. Both authors are inspiring because of the 6Ibid, 2. enormity of their scope. Rather than limiting 7Ibid, 1. discussion to one specific “method,” they cover 8Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” in a wide range of topics including the Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New recovery/discovery of female voices through York: Picador, 1966), 3–14. translation, the revaluing of the contributions of 9Ibid, 5. female translators past and present, feminist re- 10Ibid, 14. envisionings of translation metaphorics, and the 11Luise von Flotow, “Gender in Translation: The feminist interventions of certain translators. Issues Go on,” Orees 2 (2002), 2One example of this particular kind of (5 December 2006). appeared recently in the Translation Review 12The project of “feminist translation” has been (Anton Pujol, “Middlesex and the Translation of the subject of criticism since its heyday. See M. Amiguity,” Translation Review 71 (2006): 31– Rosario Martín, “Gender(ing) Theory: 36). Though Pujol does not use the term Rethinking the Targets of Translation Studies in “feminist translation,” he attends to gender Parallel with Recent Developments in through his comparison of several translation of Feminism,” in Gender, Sex, and Translation: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. The novel’s The Manipulation of Identities, ed. José intersex protagonist posed challenges when Santaemilia (Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome, translated into various Romance languages. 2005). According to Martín, critiques arise Other examinations of gender in published because roots in “cultural feminism” keep the translations include Wendy Rosslyn’s field from being influenced by more recent comparison of how women are differently developments in gender theory. In Martín’s presented in two translations of Anna view, feminist translation — especially its 1990s Akhmatova’s Rekviem; and Myriam Díaz- Canadian form — is predicated on a male vs. Diocaretz’s account of how she handled the female binary that is no longer au courant. pronouns in Adrienne Rich’s work, so that the Martín writes that Canadian scholarship has, “on lesbian-centeredness of the poetry was not lost the whole [been] grounded in a universalized in translation to Spanish (Wendy Rosslyn, definition of ‘women’ as generically oppressed “Gender in Translation: Lowell and Cixous and opposed to males and their patriarchal Rewriting Akhmatova,” in Gender andSexuality language and system” (35). in Russian Civilization, ed. Peter I. Barta 13Luise von Flotow, quoted in Simon, 14. (London: Routledge, 2001), 71–86; Myriam 14Valerie Solanas, “SCUM (Society for Cutting Díaz-Diocaretz, Translating Poetic Discourse: Up Men) Manifesto” in Radical Feminism: A Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow Rich (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985). (New York: New York UP, 2000), 201–222. 3See Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive 15Ibid, 201. Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (St. 16von Flotow, Translation and Gender, 43. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1991); and Susanne de 17Lotbinière-Harwood, 27.

Translation Review 25 18Ibid., 30. 29Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf biography, 19As one can see, my argument applies to CEAD: Catalogue des traductions des membres contemporary authors who are still living. These du CEAD, < authors, of course, maintain control over their http://www.cead.qc.ca/eng/repw3/parenteau- own work. It is true, however, that texts by non- lebeufdominick_eng.htm> 7 December 2006. living authors may also be translated and, in All of Parenteau-Lebeuf’s work is available in these cases, the author would not be able to French from Lansman, a Belgian publisher. collaborate. I believe that this is a moot point, 30Paul C. Castagno, New Playwriting Strategies: since the dead authors who are translated are A Language-Based Approach to Playwriting usually widely known. If, for instance, one is (New York: Theatre Arts, 2001), 3. dealing with the legendary author Molière, then 31Ibid. even the most radical intervention does little to 32My translation of Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, “damage” Molière’s legacy, since his works are Dévoilement devant notaire (Carnières- already so familiar and available. It should also Morlanwelz, Belgium: Lansman, 2002). be pointed out that the Canadian roots of 33Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, “Nacre C,” in feminist translation become apparent with this Filles de guerres lasses (Carnières-Morlanwelz, insistence on collaboration. Many Canadian Belgium: Lansman, 2005), 20–28. See also authors (especially contemporary Québécois David J. Eshelman, Review of Filles de guerres authors, such as Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, lasses, Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 355–356. whose work I translate) can speak, read, and 34Parenteau-Lebeuf, Dévoilement, 32. write in both French (source language) and 35All translations of Parenteau-Lebeuf’s work English (target language). Such circumstances are my own. make collaboration much easier. 36Lotbinière-Harwood, 95. 20Martín, 36. 37Ibid., 131. 21von Flotow, Translation and Gender, 41. 38Ibid., 124. 22See Simon, 107, for a discussion of the 39Nicole Brossard, Lovhers, trans. Barbara importance of textual “interference.” See also Godard (Montreal: Guernica, 1986). Isabel Garayta, “‘Womanhandling’ the Text: 40Paying careful attention to gendered words is Feminism, Rewriting, and Translation,” (Ph.D. necessary so as not to rewrite a feminist text diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1998), 126. within the dominant discourse of patriarchy. 23Illustrating the pitfalls of not supplementing, Although many critics of feminist translation Simon gives criticisms against the translator- fear the effects of “hijacking,” as I have editors of the influential 1980 anthology New previously mentioned, feminist translation French Feminisms, claiming that, because of a scholars assert that “hijacking” occurs more lack of “notes or other visible signs of often of feminist texts by non-feminist ‘interference’ … they reproduce conventional translators who ignore gendered elements. von attitudes toward language transfer,” Flotow describes cases in which suspicion of undermining the very texts that they translate. non-feminist translators appears to be merited. (Simon, 107). She cites as an example Howard Parshley, the 24Simon, 7. translator of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième 25Ibid., 23. sexe, who leaves out ten percent of the French 26Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba original in his English translation, giving an Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985), inaccurate picture of Beauvoir’s thought 38, 161. (Translation and Gender, 49). Recounting 27Ibid., 185. similar abuse by a translator, Wendy Rosslyn 28von Flotow, Translation and Gender, 35. describes the many liberties taken by Robert Lowell in his English translation of Anna Akhmatova’s Rekviem: Rosslyn points to places

26 Translation Review where Lowell’s translation “trivializes” the 44Ibid. woman speaker, changing her speech rhythm to 45Ibid., 29 make her sound less stable (73); gives voice to 46Ibid., 32. men who are voiceless in the original (74); and 47Garayta, 3. lessens the solidarity of the women by replacing 48Simon, 16. “we” with “I” or “they” (74). All of these 49Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: changes affect how the women in the poem are Translating Latin American Fiction (St. Paul, read. Drawing attention to yet another instance Minn.: Graywolf, 1991), xiii. of antifeminist “hijacking,” Lotbinière-Harwood 50These visits were thanks to grants from the points to a specific passage from the Bible Working Group in Canadian Studies and the where mention of a priestess is translated into Center for Arts and Humanities, both at the French as “quelqu’un qui se tient au centre” University of Missouri-Columbia, and thanks to (19). Since “quelqu’un” is masculine, the contributions from the Arkansas Tech translator has turned a priestess into a priest. University Departments of English, Foreign According to Lotbinière-Harwood, this act Languages, and Speech-Theatre-Journalism. creates “a grammatical fiction,” “a slip in sense 51Dominick Parenteau-Lebeuf, “RE: first draft — from gynocentric to phallocentric” (17, fini,” 16 December 2005, personal e-mail (16 translation mine). December 2005). 41Ibid., 40, emphasis mine. 52Levine, xi. 42Ibid., 30, emphasis mine. 53Garayta, 78. 43Ibid.

Translation Review 27 HINOJOSA’S SELF-TRANSLATION OF DEAR RAFE INTO NORTH AMERICAN CULTURE: LANGUAGE USE AS A MIRROR OF THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF CHICANO IDENTITY

By Silvia Molina Plaza

he aim of this article is to study the process At first glance, in the contrast between T of Hinojosa’s self-translation of Mi querido M.Q.R. and D.R., one feature is obvious: the Rafa (M.Q.R.) into the English My Dear Rafe author takes many liberties with respect to his (D.R.). Both texts are complex sites of cultural original creation, as Hinojosa opts for a cultural interaction that have absorbed and rearticulated transfer. Melucci’s concept of the multiple self the multiple crossings that take place in the may facilitate the understanding of Hinojosa’s border/frontera. This novel emerges as an positioning here. Melucci states that the rapid invaluable cultural matrix, the metaphor for the changes in our society are responsible for how juncture, giving way to new social and personal an individual’s identity is in the constant process identities in the process. of becoming. This is how what he calls the Hinojosa does not consider that what he did multiple self is formed. Melucci also can be called a translation or self-translation; distinguishes between the “changing instead, he calls it “a recreation” (Dasenbrock boundaries” and the “permanent borders” of an 6). When the semantics of the word “recreate” is individual’s identity. The combination of both taken into account, “to create anew” expresses parts ensures that there is a certain degree of that a text that was already created is stability in the concept of identity. For Hinojosa, reconsidered; this new life is governed by the as writer and translator, these concepts mean English language characteristics under which that he is able to move within the domains of the original source text is viewed. In virtue of biculturality2 and bilinguality. He chooses those this new setting, transformation of the original features the target audience is most able to text is feasible in the process of recreation. Snell identify with, since he himself is able to identify Hornby states that if a source text is culturally within those different parameters, which are bound, then recreation is often used to describe within permanent borders, those offered by his the transfer of the source text into another positioning as a declared Chicano. language (40). She refers to the difficulty of As Venuti notes in The Scandals of translating a literary source text and of Translations, some translation scholars call this achieving equivalence, such as is expected in the adaptation to reader expectations domestication. traditional notion of translation:1 This domestication may also have occurred Because Hinojosa is the author of the source during the publisher’s editing process. text, the obstacles usually connected with Hinojosa’s choice to translate his work into the source text interpretation are not problematic dominant language is a conscientious one and it for him. However, he discusses other is burdened with the language identification difficulties with the language transfer issue and the power relations3 between Spanish process of his source texts (Dasenbrock 6). and English in American society. Dingwaney He is not interested only in a mere linguistic and Maier point out precisely the essence of the transfer; rather, he shows an understanding language struggle for the bilingual individual of what he meant to convey in the source (20). Hinojosa’s writing of M.Q.R. in both text, maintaining at the same time the norms languages indicates that he senses that of the new language and taking the new maintaining the language of his childhood in readership expectations into account. literature is a manner of resistance to the dominant language and culture that is highly

28 Translation Review desirable. This resistance to dominant language dissolve and where univocal identities are was still openly present as an ideological belief challenged, the borderlands. at the time of the production of M.Q.R. The second term, bolillo, designates However, the transfer into English is almost especially the Anglos. According to unavoidable, as the afterlife of M.Q.R. would be lexicographers, a bolillo is a bun. Therefore, a reduced to a minimum impact. Domestication is, simile is established between the color of buns therefore, definitely present in the need and the Anglos’ skin color. Hinojosa experiences to translate the source Hinojosa domesticates both raza and bolillo text. in his “English” version: la bolilla que está a la Although initially his work was in Spanish, izquierda (12) becomes the girl on the left; he later decided to self-translate himself and …como ves, parte de la raza va recobrando write it in English. Hinojosa openly terrenos y parcelas (25) becomes and some of acknowledges the reasons why (Dasenbrock 5): the younger guys are buying some of the lands it is important to write in English at a time when (31). Hinojosa’s strategy involves the use of it is the language understood by the Chicano referential meaning, which leads to an youth; furthermore, he deems that Chicano uncommitted form of naming the Mexicans identification is no longer intrinsically related to living in Texas. Obviously, the English language language; it is related rather to a set of beliefs lacks words to express the ideological and and a social network of structures sustained cultural connotations of these identity-bound within a historical past the ethnic group has lexical markers. The author could have opted to managed to retain. keep the Spanish terms in the translation, Several key words that appear in M.Q.R. are explaining them in a footnote, but he did not, identity markers of this Chicano identity: raza, clearly dismissing cultural group divisions that bolillo, Chicano and fruit tramp. Some of these are definitely accentuated in the source text. The terms appear more in the original creation than outcome is that these divisions are toned down others. The most extensively used terms in the in favor of depicting a less segregated Chicano source text are raza and bolillo. The first term, community for the target reader. race, is now under dispute among modern Other relevant terms in the source text are biologists and anthropologists. Some believe Chicano and fruit tramp. Several terms have that the term has no biological validity; others been used in the United States to name a group use it to specify only a partially isolated of people in a state of flux since the beginning reproductive population whose members share a of the cultural contact: Mexicans, Mexicanos, considerable degree of genetic similarity. Mexican-Americans, and later, Hispanics and Hinojosa’s use of raza refers to all those people Latinos. These terms reflect different ideologies: who acknowledge their link to a Mexican origin the term Chicano was especially common and traditions and, most notably, the willingness during the late sixties and constructed a positive to preserve them in the construction of their self-image, although at the beginning of the Mexican-American identity; it is a spiritual- twentieth century, it was used in a pejorative cultural term to underline a common people. manner. Curiously enough, the word Chicano is They form a hybrid race, which “rather than used only once in the self-translation: “Young resulting in an inferior being provides hybrid chicano is later hired at the Klail City First progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with National and from there on to greater glories” a rich gene pool” (Anzaldúa 77).The (26–27), stressing that Jehú performs well at his consciousness that emerges from this crossing job, not just his ethnic identity. Fruit tramps exists not on the essentialist territories appear in the source text (13) as a code switch, encompassed by the border but rather on that describing the only work available to new kind of interstitial space where polarities Mexican immigrants at the very beginning of the Chicano-Anglo contact. The direct transfer

Translation Review 29 of this collocation means that Jehú’s boss’s of the word “querido” is also replaced by the ancestry is neither omitted nor downplayed. reference to what Relámpago actually is, a Another source of identity markers in the property. The adjective “old” in D.R. suggests source text are the taboo words. Their some degree of emotional sentiment, but it lacks occurrence is very high as the main character the warmth of the word “querido.” becomes more and more distressed with his A topic that also supplies frequent identity work situation. Furthermore, they are also the markers is racial and social discrimination. means by which the author expresses feelings of Members of the minority group endured work approval and admiration, “ta buena la cabrona” discrimination, but Hinojosa pays special (23) [She’s sexy, the …] is not translated attention to the discrimination in social because this comment mirrors different cultural circumstances in M.Q.R. and D.R. In one of the values related to sexist issues and the portrayal fiestas depicted, an influential female politician, of women. The social alertness and sensitivity to unaware of Jehu’s presence, inquires about the sexist language in American society prevents number of Texan-Mexicans invited to a party in Hinojosa from using an equivalent term to refer a derogatory, amusing tone. This incident to women in English, which would be surely clearly shows how chicanos are socially unexpected or shocking for the target-language prejudiced: “Well, just how many Mexicans did reader. Likewise, the term “chingar” and its Noddy invite? Eramos cinco en el grupo y yo 1) numerous derivatives appear consistently in the el único raza there; and 2) el más cerca de ella source text, usually translated by “damn” or (15)” > “Well, just how many Mexicans did “hell,” “Dejarme de chingaderas con la Noddy invite? I was sitting closest to her…” enseñanza en la High” (26) > “beats the hell (21). The translation omits the word raza that out of teaching Engl. at Klail High” (32); marks the separation between the two cultural “Noddy hace lo que le dé la ch. gana” (17) > groups, and the English version, on the contrary, “she doesn’t really give a damn, you know” serves as an introductory clause that explains the (23). In the source text, taboo words depict an woman’s reaction following the woman’s informal situation and sociolinguistic identity remarks. This transfer strategy minimizes that are not transmitted in the translated text in cultural group partitions and facilitates a new the same manner; they have been toned down or image of the Chicano in which s/he is conveyed omitted in almost all cases. as an American citizen despite the different A powerful source of identification for the cultural background. chicanos in M.Q.R. is the expropriation of Discrimination is also present in areas other Mexican-owned land by the Anglo inhabitants. than in social situations, and it is closely linked At some times, Hinojosa tones down the to control and power, almost completely placed references to this land conflict, whereas at in the hands of a few members of the majority others, he chooses to emphasize this issue. group. The following extract is significant, Although he does not delve deeply into the because Hinojosa is able to mark social historical aspect of this matter in M.Q.R., he differences that have been nurtured through this alludes to it frequently via various methods, unequal system: Noddy Perkins attempts to buy which are reconstructed in different manners for Chicano-owned land; the author makes clear in the D.R. readership. Thus, in the Spanish this situation that the social power and control of version, the author often resorts to the the border area are in the hands of the Anglos in possessive pronoun to portray attachment to the both M.Q.R. and D.R. However, this idea is land. However, the novel in English tellingly reiterated twice in M.Q.R.: “Noddy can run me omits possessive pronouns when referring to off cuando le dé la regalada gana” (40) and is land or property, as in “mi Relámpago querido” not translated in D.R. A possible translation into (17), which becomes “the old Relámpago English is whenever he wants. property” in the English version. The omission

30 Translation Review The notion of power and control derived source text. In letters four to eight, the use of the from acquired personal information is also two languages is more visible and, when the present in another extract within Noddy Perkins’ main character is almost completely immersed domain. He flaunts his knowledge concerning in work, the English becomes predominant. Jehú’s girfriend, information that is omitted Toward the end, code-switching is therefore entirely in the translation: reduced,4 and the use of the Spanish language la bolillada sabe más de nosotros de lo que becomes prevalent again in the last few letters.5 sospechamos. Se parecen a los viejitos…son In these letters, code-switching is minimal: filler bilingües aunque hay mucho secreto en eso; expressions, sentence connectors, and idioms, casí como los masones. Por ejem., sabían de Spanish being used at the beginning of ideas or los estudios de Oli y le dejaron saber que the ending of sentences. As the plot thickens and conocían a sus abuelos (20). [The Anglos the complexities with which the main character know more about us than we suspect. They is faced increase, so does the intensity of the are like old people…bilingual although there code-switching, which parallels the situation. is a lot of secrecy about that, almost like The “I” is no longer univocal and “pure” but masons. For example, they knew about Oli’s rather a juxtaposition of identities. studies and they let him know they had met Hinojosa also uses both languages to portray his grandparents]. the language diversity that emerges from a Discrimination is perceptible in M.Q.R., bilingual/ bicultural environment in a different whereas in D.R., it is foregrounded; manner. In the second section of the novel, however, there are also several examples twenty-two interviews are conducted by Mr. in which the discrimination is Galindo either almost entirely in English or in transmitted to promote levels of Spanish; the characters who code-switch more identification with the M.Q.R. reader, are Viola Barragán, with sentences during the since it is an experience that is common interview, and Olivia, Jehu’s girlfriend, using to the members of the minority group. English at work and Spanish when she engages M.Q.R. bilingualism also provides levels of in more relaxed intimate conversation with the identification for the source-text reader. interviewer. In D.R., only English is used; Hinojosa’s walking out of one language — and consequently, each of the cultural backgrounds culture — into another stands as a powerful is alluded to by other means, viz., maintaining dismantling of borders/fronteras, which allows the names in Spanish. The reader, consequently, the entrance of the Hispanic worldview into the has a point of reference as to the origin of the United States. Malakoff and Hakuta consider character’s language preference. However, the that code-switching means a larger bilingual self-translation entails a loss of the source vocabulary, playing on subtle differences meaning. The manner and the setting in which between the two languages in several bilingual expression may be used to dimensions: connotative, denotative, or communicate in a bilingual community are not sociolinguistic meaning (146). This bilingualism represented, and we also miss information about in M.Q.R. portrays the dynamism of events, the main character. Hinojosa represents how provides information about Jehu in the Jehú uses each of the languages and in what epistolary section, and depicts language situations he feels most comfortable with each diversity in a community in which Anglos and of them in M.Q.R. Chicanos live together. However, not all D.R. Other losses of meaning resulting from readers would be able to relate to the use of the translation into a single code correspond to two languages, which is the reason why the language domain usage. Peñalosa confirms that translation into English is necessary. English emerges when there is a topic related to At the beginning of the narrative, in the first work or a topic related to the majority group, initial letters, there is little use of English in the whereas Chicanos use Spanish, as Jehu does,

Translation Review 31 linked to personal affairs and family matters regarding this issue in D.R.: family members are (67). Obviously, some topics are more easily not mentioned (Very special, querido primo 15 discussed in one language because the topic has > this is something very special 22), their bonds been experienced in that particular language in are weakened, and some are not included as the relevant domains. When referring to the members of the family unit. This toning down of bank, Jehu’s place of work, the code switching the significance of the family forms part of the into English is almost immediate in M.Q.R. (41- identification process for the D.R. reader. These 42). The aim of this code switching is to recall transformations reflect part of the social the domain of work associated with the majority transformation the Chicano family is undergoing society in which Jehu uses that language. as a result of the community’s integration into There is also a code-switch into the majority the American framework. The translation language with a single word. The primary process can thus be regarded as a manner reason is that the term in question is more through which Hinojosa contributes to the frequently used in the majority language. This construction of Chicano identity by providing slight nuance of meaning is lost through new parameters for it. translation. Curiously enough, the self- The domestication in D.R. is also present in translation sometimes imposes gender on nouns, the diverging images of women that are subverting the English language usage, “pero presented. The historical context of the Chicana creo que le gustan los deals” (26) > “he likes to has shown the triple oppression of race, class, smell something out” (32). Another strategy to and gender. The women portrayed in M.Q.R. compensate for the loss of source-text elements and D.R. are both Chicano, Anglo, and a that contribute to defining the setting as a combination of these. The source text is plagued bilingual and bicultural one is to maintain by intense sexist language, especially used in Spanish accents in the names of places and in relation to a woman’s physical appearance, that the Spanish names of the characters. Examples is replaced in D.R. with more moderate abound: Relámpago (33), Rincón del Diablo language use: “Becky era la única que llevaba el (35), Victor Peláez. This strategy contributes to sombrero. Still se veía chula la cabrona” (29) > the Foreignization, because the reader situates “Becky was the only one wearing a hat. She can him/herself in a Chicano-dominant environment. flat-out wear one too. Made her even better- Similarly, Hinojosa integrates some Spanish looking, and that’s saying something” (33). words to bring the Chicano flavor into the self- Hinojosa attempts to counterweigh the loss translation: adiós (23), cabrones (37), simpatico of meaning of cabrona with two additional (63), señor (80). There are also phonetically sentences. The self-translation also tends to modified instances of English to express the amend the trivialization of women portrayed in existence of a “contact zone,” a strategy also the original creation by use of different used by other writers such as Esmeralda strategies: the shortening of a woman’s name is Santiago6: “Olmén Raymon” (20), “he was a changed into providing the female character’s vurry sick man” (50). These words compensate last name: “se llama Rebecca” (10) > “her somewhat for the loss of meaning in D.R. name’s Rebecca Caldwell” (14); the term chica As the new text has new functions, such as [girl], which minimizes female characters, is reaching out to a broader readership, the contrast transferred by a concrete professional with the source text is also apparent in the occupation: “una chica del banco (16)” > concept of family in the Chicano and American “…one of the bank secretaries” (22). The culture. From M.Q.R., the word family includes domestication goes even further than this; the aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, and it role of mother and wife is portrayed as more is a complex network of reliable people who important in M.Q.R. than in D.R. Hinojosa help or support other members of the minority changes the social conditions of Elsinore group. Hinojosa underscores cultural differences Chapman, an old acquaintance of Jehú and Rafa,

32 Translation Review who becomes not only “childless” but also El proceso de traducir del inglés al español “husbandless,” trying to represent a more me forzó a aprender de nuevo el idioma de mi contemporary chicana than in M.Q.R. Hinojosa niñez. Pero también me ha demostrado que has taken into account those aspects of the hablo, el cual yo pensaba que era el español, portrayal of women that were less likely to es realmente espanglés, ese dialecto forjado function effectively in the target setting and has del español y del inglés que toma palabras de exploited several translation strategies to los dos idiomas, les añade las expresiones transfer them, producing a functional translated familiares puertorriqueñas y cambia la text for the broader readership, with a less manera en que se escriben hasta crear otras traditional and chauvinist ideology about nuevas. En mi casa, por ejemplo, lavamos el women than in M.Q.R. piso con un mapo, compramos tique pa’l cine, Two conclusions can be drawn regarding leemos panfletos, damos el OK, y llamamos several aspects of Hinojosa’s translation. First, pa’ atrás cuando estamos muy bisi pa’ hablar the self-translator assumes the responsibility of por teléfono (16) [The process of translating establishing a new equilibrium with a distinct from English into Spanish involved learning cultural transfer of content based on gains and again my childhood language but it has also transformations, so that the translated text is shown me I speak Spanglish instead of able to function in the new setting despite the Spanish as I thought. This Spanglish is a lost elements, such as bilingual expressions, dialect made up of Spanish and English which various key Chicano words, and the issue of uses words from both languages, adding politics and the portrayal of women. Despite his Puerto-Rican idioms and changing their use of domesticating strategies, the essence of spelling thus coining new words, i.e. we clean the story that is maintained is foreignizing the floor with a mapo (mop), we buy tique content for mainstream American, a satirical (tickets) for going to the cinema, we read criticism of how the Chicano has been perceived panfletos (instead of folletos) and we call pa’ in U.S. society. atrás (back) when we are too busy to speak Second, Mi querido Rafa (M.Q.R.) and My by phone]. Dear Rafe (D.R.) make clear the power of 2Notice that this term seems to be artificially language/s to articulate identities and ideologies. constructed. It is commonly assumed that only The writer did not indulge in his first lineal “ethnics” become bicultural when coming into version of time. Unlike other Chicano writings, contact with what is considered mainstream U.S. My Dear Rafe is much more than a literal culture. Biculturalism is only then supposed to translation and represents Hinojosa’s attempt at work one way, the implication being that the retracing his steps, his hybrid culture, his ethnic groups in contact with the Anglos do not heritage and his self. Both the Spanish and the have a culture for the cultural exchange. English versions are part of the same 3We mean power in Foucault’s sense, power heterogeneous identity, one of multiple cultural related to knowledge and articulated in and linguistic crossings. discourse where control is exerted through certain discursive practices that model the way subjectivities (as Chicano, Anglo, etc.) are Notes created, as well as the way the subjects think 1Esmeralda Santiago in her autobiography, and speak Foucault’s Discipline and Cuando era puertorriqueña, also comments that Punishment. her translation from English into Spanish 4The election is now two weeks off and Ira entailed far more than a mere linguistic thinks he’s losing ground. He’s not, but he equivalence, it made her think over her current thinks he is. Ira no me preguntó por Noddy ni condition as a speaker of Spanglish: por el número de su private line; Ira was in a bad way, but it promised to get worse. For your

Translation Review 33 information: Noddy has flown up to William and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh: University Barret International to meet Hap. (…) Hoy por of Pittsburgh Press. 1995. la mañana a eso de las once, it starts again: I’m Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment. at the Ranch with a pile of papers for Noddy to New York: Vintage. 1978. sign and N. calls Ira. Éste por poco se desmaya; Hinojosa, Rolando. Mi Querido Rafa. Houston: I mean I could hear the breathing! (Extract from Arte Público. 1981. letter 14.) Hinojosa, Rolando. Dear Rafe. Houston: Arte 5...Me dio mucho gusto en verlos (a Israel y Público. 1985. Aarón) pero como vinieron preocupados por mí, Malakoff, Marguerite and Hakuta, Kenji. eso por poco me amarga la ocasión. “Translation Skill and Metalinguistic Awareness But we had fun, ya sabes. Desde mi ventana veo in Bilinguals” in Language Processing in pasar a medio Khail, but only cuando me da la Bilingual Children. [Ed. E. Bialystock] gana. (Extract from the last letter, 22.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991. 6This strategy is used in El sueño de América: Melucci, Alberto. “Identity and Difference in a esquiús? (49), beibisit (112), plé det > play date Globalized World” Debating Cultural Hybridity (204). 58-70 [Ed. P. Werbner and T. Modood] London/New Jersey: Zed Books. 1997. Works Cited Peñalosa, Fernando. Chicano Sociolinguistics. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands. La Frontera. Massachusetts: Newbury House. 1980. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 1987. Santiago, Esmeralda. Cuando era Dasenbrock, Reed. “An Interview with Rolando puertorriqueña. New York: Vintage Books. Hinojosa” Translation Review 27. Dallas: 1994. University of Texas. 1988. 3–8. Santiago, Esmeralda. El sueño de América. Dingwaney, Anuradha and Maier, Carol eds. Barcelona: Grijalbo/Mondadori. 1996. Between Languages and Culture: Translation Venuti, L. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge. 1998.

34 Translation Review FIVE TRANSLATORS TRANSLATING: READING BLOOD MERIDIAN FROM ENGLISH INTO ENGLISH, SPANISH INTO ENGLISH, AND ENGLISH INTO SPANISH

By Michael Scott Doyle

Can a translation ever communicate to its readers the understanding of the foreign text that the foreign readers have? “Translation, Community, Utopia,” Lawrence Venuti

What will he do with the rebellious text? Isn’t it too much to ask that he also be rebellious, particularly since the text is someone else’s? “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” José Ortega y Gasset

The task of the translator is surely to work out a strategy that allows the most insistent and decisive effects of that performance to resurface in the translated text and to assume an importance sufficient to suggest the vital status of stratified or contrapuntal writing in the original. “The Measure of Translation Effects,” Philip E. Lewis

God dont lie, he said. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. Blood Meridian

The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died. Blood Meridian

o read Blood Meridian, “the major esthetic “trammeled to the chords of rawest destiny” T achievement of any living American (154), the complexities of this lyrically gory writer,”1 in its original English is to become American English masterpiece9 press into already engaged in the act of translation. service the first-among-readers, the native- Whether to translate or not is rhetorical. The language English reader, as an intralingual reader of this apocalyptic gothic-esperpento- translator10 of the source-language text (SLT), picaresque2 novel — a pilgrim struggling anticipating the work of the interlingual through the desert-wind words of the author- translator, who in turn will later enfold the scribe who has indeed left us a written account intralingual translating process into that of the of people and place3 — has no choice in the subsequent interlingual re-creation, translation matter. Set mainly in 1849–18504 in the proper across two languages, English into profitable frontier “bloodlands”5 (138) of Spanish. Because the typical or average reader, westward expansion between the porous Texas- or even the accomplished amateur or Mexico border and California,6 where the professional, does not share Cormac McCarthy’s “receipts”7 against payment are in principle precise knowledge and unprecedented use of aboriginal scalps8 and all protagonists are words in Blood Meridian — the breadth of his

Translation Review 35 lexicon and taxonomies; his play across 2. “A Translation of the Spanish in Blood different languages, especially English and Meridian,” the electronically convenient Spanish but also Latin, French, and German11; but incomplete16 interlingual work — the juxtaposition of registers and discourse Englishing the Spanish — provided in domains; the diction he creates and extends the Official Web Site of the Cormac from his earlier Appalachian novels; his sheer McCarthy Society, imagination with language (syntax, punctuation, www.CormacMcCarthy.com; pacing, collocation, alliteration, images, similes, 3. A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian by and metaphors)12 — we often only intuit and Shane Schimpf, a most useful intra- as infer the meaning of many, too many, of the well as interlingual reference work; words themselves. We feel or float our way 4. Cormac McCarthy, who frequently contextually through the reading rather than provides his own intra- (Englishing the truly understanding each and every word of his English) as well as interlingual exquisitely crafted writing.13 In this sense, the translations (Englishing the Spanish and undisciplined native-language act of reading is vice versa), a within-the-narrative deficient and negligent — the “at-home” glossing of sorts17 that illustrates reader14 of the SLT fulfills in neither letter nor various tactics of literary translation spirit the hermeneutic contract presumed such as compensation, explicitation, and between author and reader. But when the native interpolation; and or SLT reader rises to the task, and takes the 5. Meridiano de sangre, the Spanish time to look up the meanings of unknown words translation (Spanishing the English) by and to work through the meaning of elusive translator’s translator Luis Murillo Fort. images, phrases, and passages, then this fuller reading becomes that of the translator decoding, I deciphering, and recoding internally what are The first of Blood Meridian’s translators is familiar yet alienating markings in one’s own the native English-language reader, the native English. In sum, to read Blood Meridian “assumed” or supposedly “at-home” or as a “translator” is to give this baroque, bizarre, “informed” reader. But it is very difficult to and harrowing narrative a thorough read. It attain such a comfort zone of reading with fulfills the hermeneutic contract presupposed by McCarthy because of what he relentlessly does Cormac McCarthy. to and in American English when writing (a Translation is inscribed as part and parcel of style characterized by a certain idiosyncratic Blood Meridian, a metaphorical “rider to the “rebellion,” “subversion,” and “radical courage” tale” (145), concretely within the narrative itself, in the face of convention),18 his speech mimesis as both intra- and interlingual requirement of the (time- and place-bound voices, diction, registers, act of reading; prescriptively and procedurally tone, pacing), and his strategic use of Spanish by the author himself; and interlingually as and other non-English languages. In order to translation proper from English to Spanish, from maximize one’s potential for appreciation of all Blood Meridian to Meridiano de sangre. A that is being made to occur in the language of distinctive thread woven into the fabric of the Blood Meridian, the reader must first understand novel, it has five principal translator the actual words that McCarthy chooses while protagonists: writing in English. The native-language SLT 1. The native-language reader who must reader must pause to look them up in a engage in intralingual translation (a re- dictionary or reference work, just as students or Englishing of the English)15 for the sake readers of a foreign language text do when of comprehension and thereby enhanced learning a foreign language. McCarthy turns his appreciation of McCarthy’s writing; readers into students of his “foreign” language, even when they are reading in what is (mis-

36 Translation Review taken as) a common native or first language. To made of buffalo hide); archimandrite (273: define is to express in other words, i.e., to abbot, the head of a monastery); are (26: a translate. To re-English McCarthy’s English is a surface measure equal to 100 square meters, or most rudimentary form and application of 119.6 square yards); azimuth (151: gunnery: translation for the essential purpose of making angle of horizontal deviation, measured comprehensible that which is not. This exercise clockwise, of a bearing from a standard in clarifying or creating meaning represents a direction, as from north or south); benjamin vital drudge- and pony-work aspect of (125: slang for “a man’s close-fitting overcoat,” translation, for words not understood breach the Schimpf 175); bumper (170: a drinking vessel contract presumed to exist between author and filled to the brim); cassinette (254: a cloth with reader (and narrator and narratee). At the same a cotton warp, and a woof of very fine wool, or time, there is a ludic quality to this devoir, as wool and silk); catafalque (190: a raised discovering or uncovering the meaning of structure on which the body of a deceased unknown words is a problem-solving activity, person lies or is carried in state); chert (173: a challenging and gratifying, and we are compact rock consisting essentially of hardwired to problem-solve and delight in microcrystalline quartz); chorine (220: a mastering language. To re-English or re- woman who dances in a chorus line); clackdish engineer in this manner, which is where (72: dish with a movable lid, formerly carried by translation and interpretation-understanding- beggars, who clacked the lid to attract notice); exegesis-hermeneutics brush up against one comber (304: a long wave that has reached its another and fuse into synonyms for one and the peak or broken into foam; a breaker); deadman same activity, imposes an antecedent question (253: an object or platform fixed on shore to on Venuti’s assumption in asking “Can a hold a mooring line temporarily); die (310: an translation ever communicate to its readers the engraved stamp for impressing a design upon understanding of the foreign text that the foreign some softer material, as in coining money); readers have?” In order to arrive at Venuti’s doggery (189: slang for saloon); dunnage (253: speculation, the “informed” and “at-home” personal baggage); fard (274: archaic for facial native-speaking SLT reader must first fully cosmetics); farrier (49: from archaic French for understand the language of Blood Meridian. one who shoes horses; once related to Although lexical comprehension will vary blacksmith but now a separate trade); filibuster according to the literacy and literary competence (42: adventurer who engages in a private of each reader, the following are examples of military action in a foreign country); gibbet the time-consuming intralingual translation (263: a gallows or device used for hanging a groundwork required by the SLT reader, who person until dead; an upright post with a must first engage in “gap” and “trace” reading crosspiece, forming a T-shaped structure from (filling in the blanks of indeterminacy that which executed criminals were formerly hung represent a lack of knowledge and for public viewing); gill (264 and 325: unit of comprehension) as part of the process of volume or capacity, used in dry and liquid 1 becoming McCarthy’s “virtual,” “hypothetical,” measure, equal to /4 of a British Imperial pint; or “ideal” reader. both pages are given: the first is for dry and the Page after page, Blood Meridian teems with second is for liquid measure); Gondwanaland uncommon nouns such as the following (172: hypothetical protocontinent of the sampling,19 itself to be read for the pure Southern Hemisphere that, according to the enjoyment of the language deployed, the reading theory of plate tectonics, broke up into India, of which will also simulate the feeling that Australia, Antarctica, Africa, and South McCarthy creates in his reader who stumbles America); harrow (4: farm implement across a startling abecedarium of lexical consisting of a heavy frame with sharp teeth or unfamiliarity: apishamore (106: saddle blanket upright disks, used to break up and even off

Translation Review 37 plowed ground); helve (275: handle of a tool, composed of the same elements in the same such as an ax, chisel, or hammer); holothurian proportions but differ in properties because of (243: echinoderm, which includes the sea differences in the arrangement of atoms; a cucumbers; echinoderms are radially complex image in Blood Meridian: “the shrubs symmetrical marine invertebrates of the phylum were like polar isomers of their own shapes”); Echinodermata, which includes the starfishes, pritchel (82: tool employed by blacksmiths for sea urchins, and sea cucumbers, having an punching or enlarging the nail holes in a internal calcareous skeleton and often covered horseshoe); ratchel (57: gravelly stone); rick with spines); jakes (316: an outdoor privy; (324: a large, usually rectangular stack or pile); outhouse); Katabasis (122: a march from the sap (155: in Blood Meridian a primitive interior of a country to the coast, as that of the blackjack made of river rocks covered with 10,000 Greeks after their defeat and the death of leather); scurf (214: scaly or shredded dry skin, Cyrus the Younger at Cunaxa; a descent, a such as dandruff; the striking image created by journey downward which can mean moving McCarthy is that of “a solitary flame frayed by downhill, a sinking of winds, a military retreat, the wind that freshened and faded and shed or a trip to the underworld); knacker’s yard scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf (189: area where dead, dying, and injured farm blown from some unreckonable forge”); skelp animals and horses are collected; the collector in (266: a wrought-iron plate from which a gun the knacker trade is called a knackerman barrel or pipe is made by bending and welding [kancer.com]); legbail (86: escape from custody the edges together, and drawing the thick tube by flight); lemniscate (229: a curve in the form thus formed); spirit level (42: an instrument for of the figure 8, with both parts symmetrical; the ascertaining whether a surface is horizontal, word is perfect for the image that McCarthy vertical, or at a 45° angle, consisting essentially wishes to convey: “the Apache struggled to keep of an encased, liquid-filled tube containing an his seat [on his wounded horse] and drew his air bubble that moves to a center window when sword and found himself staring into the black the instrument is set on an even plane); stive lemniscate that was the paired bores of (263: pouch); sulky (78: light carriage with two Glanton’s doublerifle”); looming (172: a mirage wheels [1756], a noun use of sulky [adj.] based in which objects below the horizon seem to be on “standoffishness,” because the carriage has raised above their true positions); man jack room for only one person); suttee (275: the now (125: a single individual); mansuete (293: tame; illegal act or practice of a Hindu widow’s “in beasts mansuete”); mare imbrium (105: a cremating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre dark plain in the second quadrant of the face of in order to fulfill her true role as wife; the image the moon); merestone (125: old term for a in Blood Meridian is that “They’d tied his dog landmark that consisted of a pile of stones to his corpse and it was snatched after [into the surmounted by an upright slab); ogdoad (204: a flames of the bonfire] in howling suttee to thing made up of eight parts; the number 8); disappear crackling in the rolling greenwood osnaburg (21: a heavy, coarse cotton fabric, smoke”); taw (277: the making of a long shot, used for grain sacks, upholstery, and draperies); as in a game of marbles or shooting someone pampooty (298: cuaran, “a shoe of untanned with a rifle from a great distance); tektite (188: cowhide,” Schimpf 298); pap (97: teat, nipple); any of numerous generally small, rounded, dark parallax (108: the apparent displacement of an brown to green glassy objects that are composed object as seen from two different points that are of silicate glass and are thought to have been not on a line with the object); paraselene (241: formed by the impact of a meteorite with the a luminous spot on a lunar halo, also called earth’s surface; the image in Blood Meridian is moondog); polar isomer (303: of or pertaining that “in pockets on the north slopes hail lay to the North or South Pole, opposite in character nested like tectites among the leaves”); thews or action; any of two or more substances that are (78: sinew); thunderstone (303: any of various

38 Translation Review stones or fossils formerly thought to be fallen Mexico; they reside in the states of California, thunderbolts; archaically, a flash of lightning or Baja California, and Sonora; in Spanish, the thunderbolt was conceived as a stone); thwart name is commonly spelled kumiai); Gileño (one (273: a seat across a boat on which a rower may of the eleven major Apache tribes who inhabited sit); tug (283, 298: meat; a rope, chain, or strap the areas now known as Arizona and used in hauling, especially a harness trace; in northwestern sections of Mexico); Karankawa Blood Meridian: “Toadvine gestured with his (a member of an extinct tribe of North American chin at the strings of meat. I reckon you want to Indians who lived in southeastern Texas until trade some of that tug for it” and “a parasol the mid-nineteenth century); Lipan (an Apache made from scraps of hide stretched over a tribe formerly inhabiting western Texas, with a framework of rib bones bound with strips of present-day population in southern New tug”); Vandiemenlander (81: a person from Mexico); Maricopa (a member of a North Tasmania); vidette (196: sentinel); weal (131: a American Indian people of the Gila river valley ridge on the flesh raised by a blow; a welt; the in Arizona); Papago (227: native American image in Blood Meridian is of “a weal of people inhabiting desert regions of southern brimstone all about the rim of the caldron”); Arizona and northern Sonora, a state of whang (159: thong, rawhide); etc. northwest Mexico); Tigua (the Spanish for Tiwa Blood Meridian’s strange “common nouns” [English], one of the pueblo peoples of New wash over us like relentless combers of Mexico); Tonkawa (a people native to central interwoven high- and low-register discourse Texas); and Yuma (Native American people domains, ranging fluidly from the anatomical to inhabiting an area along the lower Colorado the architectural and the legal, from the River, formerly on both banks but now mainly archeological, geological, and geographical to on the California side).21 As expected, these the cosmological and intertextual, from native American peoples inhabit the Texas-to- taxonomies of tools and tool parts, containers California setting of Blood Meridian. But it is and vessels to apparel, trades and guilds, useful for the reader to actually know who they drinking establishments, gaming… Words lead are and not confuse them with tribes such as the to other words, as the reader must also know or Sioux, Cherokee, Algonquin, Huron, Lumbee, learn what the words used in a definition mean. Seminole, etc. Not acknowledging the Words taken for granted as known and familiar, differences between indigenous Americans is as as precisely definable,20 frequently are not what inappropriate as not recognizing that Spanish- they appear to be. The reader is pounded speaking peoples are not all Mexican, but rather relentlessly by a language he thought he knew, are composed of distinctly complex, but the reading itself — often disruptive and geographically disperse nationalities and fatiguing at the lexical level — is redeemed by “ethnic” groups such as Cuban, Guatemalan, McCarthy’s plotting and art of storytelling, Panamanian, Venezuelan, Peruvian, Chilean, which lure the reader through the pages of Blood Argentine, and Spanish. Meridian despite the hurdles represented by its Other nouns include names of characters and language. classical or intertextual allusions: Blasarius (94: Numerous nouns in Blood Meridian are the “kid”: an incendiary, a person who stirs up those proper to native American Indian tribes: strife, sedition, etc.; an agitator, which is exactly Anasazi (a Basket Maker–Pueblo culture of the how the judge views the kid at the end of novel plateau region of northern Arizona and New when he accuses him whisperingly with: “… Mexico and of southern Utah and Colorado, you were a witness against yourself. You sat in dating probably from a.d. 100 to 1300); judgement on your own deeds. You put your Diegueño (also known as the Kumeyaay, a own allowances before the judgements of Native American people of the extreme history and you broke with the body of which southwestern United States and northwest you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its

Translation Review 39 enterprise… and you turned a deaf ear to me” but how many readers will also know what 307); Boaz and Jachin (94: the name of the two dowels [dowel: a usually round pin that fits pillars that stood in the porch of Solomon’s tightly into a corresponding hole to fasten or Temple, the first Temple in Jerusalem [1 Kings align two adjacent pieces] and fellies [felly: the 7:21; 2 Kings 11:14; 23:3]; Boaz [“in strength”] rim or a section of the rim of a wheel supported was on the left, and Jachin [“he establishes”] by spokes] are?); “the mules’ back galled and was on the right; Boaz and Jachin are depicted balding” (21: having a skin sore caused by on some variants of the Tarot card The High friction and abrasion); “heliotropic plague” (78: Priestess, a trump card in which the figure of the an organism or plant that follows the sun, high priestess is seated between the two pillars “itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like of B and J, which is the referent marked by some heliotropic plague”); “priapic leer” (254: McCarthy in the telling of fortunes)22; gorgon phallic); “rimpled plates” (130: wrinkled or (172: any of the three sisters Stheno, Euryale, crumpled); “serried planes of heat” (109: and the mortal Medusa who had snakes for hair pressed or crowded together, especially in and eyes that if looked into turned the beholder rows); “silkmullioned sulky” (78: windows into stone); and yahoo (160: a crude or brutish divided by vertical curtains); “his mind had person, from a race of brutes in Gulliver’s come uncottered by the acts of blood” (305: Travels, having the form and all the vices of disconnected, unhinged, as a cotter pin inserted humans). through a slot serves to hold parts together); Other parts of speech — adjectives and “sprent with stars” (15: archaic for sprinkled); verbs — press the native English-language and “withy cages” (189: made of pliable reader into frequent service as an intralingual branches or twigs, esp. of withes [a tough, translator as well. The adjectives often generate supple willow twig]). Verbs such as bate (61: to striking images: “dry bistre land” (48: yellowish flap the wings wildly or frantically; “they bated to dark-brown color); “broomed hooves” (166: and hissed and flapped clumsily”); cut (137: to surmised as frayed or splintered; yellowed like change direction abruptly; the Delaware scouts broom; both meanings apply); “Spaniards who “cut for sign” zig-zag searching for the helmeted and bucklered” (139: protected by a tracks of those being pursued); dap (117: to dip small, round shield either carried or worn on the in and out of water, “dap their hooves”); foul arm); “a chary light” (74: cautious, wary; (53: “some had fouled themselves,” soiled, sorrowful; a wonderful image); “nicely chased defecated on themselves); grit up (46: “grit up blades” (168: engraved or embossed with on this sand like chickens,” eat); rebate (139: ornamentation); “crenellated heat” (172: “faces averted from the rock wall and the indented or notched); “devonian dawn” (187: bakeoven air it rebated,” rebounded against yes, the reader will understand the reference to them, like sun off the surface of the water); an earlier epoch, but how many will know that it recruit (161: recuperate, restore, or recover; refers specifically to “the geologic time, system “Glanton carried him on the pommel of the of rocks, or sedimentary deposits of the fourth saddle until he could recruit himself”); spancel period of the Paleozoic Era, characterized by the (151: “horse and rider spanceled to their development of lobe-finned fishes, the shadows,” to be fettered or hobbled); squail (58: appearance of amphibians and insects, and the to throw awkwardly, “he picked up a stone and first forests”); “discalced” (107: barefoot or squailed it at them”); strike (151: “they had wearing only sandals, “the headless man was struck the shoes from their horses,” removed sitting like a murdered anchorite discalced in with a hammer or other tool); suck (14: “they ashes and sark [chemise or nightshirt]”); “the went sucking out past the old stone fort,” duledge pegs worked loose” (45: one of the difficult to surmise: weakened, bleeding?,); and dowels joining the ends of the fellies which tonsure (54: “tonsured to the bone,” the part of form the circle of the wheel of a gun carriage, a monk’s or priest’s head that has been shaved).

40 Translation Review Throughout Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s wallows (299), skifts of snow (302), snowy discourse-domain taxonomies force both the reeks (303), and a bed of thunderstones intra- and interlinguistic reader-translator into clustered on a heath (303); a wooded boss (303) areas of nonliterary technical translation and a gravel strand to the beach (303), the contained within the novel. Landscape, flora and broken scree of a fan washed out of the draw fauna, and guns and weapons exemplify his (314), and are “laid up in a sag on some rise” stylistic penchant for precision and (316). The lexical journey stamps the landscape thoroughness (the essential naming of “stones in our minds and, while the reader understands and trees, the bones of things”) over generic and more or less the types of terrain being traversed, vague lexical alternatives. an intralingual exercise in translation clarifies The features of the physical terrain range for us what the terms mean: that a kerf is a across “regions of particolored stone upthrust in mining term for a deep cut a few inches high, ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in used to undermine a portion of a coal or mineral faults and anticlines” (50); “trunks of great seam; an anticline is a fold of rock layers that stone treeboles” (50); “trapdykes of brown slope downward on both sides of a common rock running down the narrow chines of the crest; a seep is a small spring, pool, or other ridges” (50); talus slides (56), rimrock, and place where liquid from the ground has oozed to high rimland (213). We travel through a world the surface of the earth; a sink is a depression in of seeps, draws, and vadose water (57), traces, the ground communicating with a subterranean whinstone, and monocline (61), cairns (62), passage (especially in limestone) and formed by sinks and washes (66), swales (86), fens (88), solution or by collapse of a cavern roof; a trace benchland, “the gaunt rill of water,” and is a path or trail that has been beaten out by the canyon floors (90), foreplains (106), along the passage of animals or people; a wash may be edge of a playa (108) and on a “flat and barren either a stretch of shallow water or alluvial pan” (109). We ride “in a fold among the barren matter transferred and deposited by flowing scrag” (112), through marl and terracotta and water; a playa is a dry lake bed at the bottom of rifts of copper shale … out upon a promontory a desert basin; a pan is a natural depression in overlooking a bleak and barren caldera (113), the ground, as one containing water, mud, or past slag (114) and arroyo (119) and through mineral salts; and a coulee is a deep gulch or malpais (122), caldron (131), and slaglands ravine with sloping sides, often dry in summer. (131); “down the pitch of the inner rim to where McCarthy uses these terms with geological lay the terminus of that terrible flue” (133), precision; it is the reader’s duty to intralingually across “blue coulees of the north slopes” (136), translate them in order to understand the terrain on switchbacks (136) and across “a high saddle of Blood Meridian exactly as the author is at sunset” (136). We ride “up steep eskers” describing it. (175) and “down a broad green race over sheets The flora and fauna of Blood Meridian are of polished rock into the pool below” (193). We equally strict in their taxonomy. McCarthy bench out with muleteers in a “swag on the trail wants the reader to know exactly what kind of where the precipice was almost negotiable” tree or plant or bird or animal he has in mind. (195), and we cross basins (208), open We encounter “scattered clumps of buckbrush parkland (211), and through snow lying “in and pricklypear” (42), “dry sotols” (49), a deep pockets on the slope” (213). We encounter “vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward” gravel slides (214), fulgurite (215), a barren (50), monkeyflowers and deathcamas (57), the bajada (219), a series of narrow defiles (220), “broken stobs of a mesquite” (57), “a bare dirt rolling sandhills (277), “a vast mosaic yard fenced with ocotillo” (60), pyracantha pavement cobbled up from tiny blocks of (86), cholla and nopal … blooming artemisia jasper, carnelian, agate” (286), a “vast and and aloe (88), “a broad plain of desert grass broken plateland” (286), loose shale (293), dotted with palmilla” (88), wild lavender or

Translation Review 41 soapweed (105), piñon and scruboak (105), The main charge of powder then explodes and creosote bushes (108), saltbrush and sends the projectile out the barrel. It should be panicgrass (111), willow, alder, cherry, and noted that this is a purely modern term. In junipers (127), a dark fir forest (136), historic times, the component now known as the “dragmarks through the duff of a high forest frizzen was referred to as the hammer. In floor” (137), dwarf oak and ilex (138), wild historic times, the component now known as the primrose (144), chaparral (161), paloverde hammer was referred to as the cock). A sergeant (161), jacales (165), barren peppercorn hills carries “in his saddle scabbard a heavy Wesson (172), catclaw and crucifixion thorn (175), rifle that used a false muzzle (…) The rifle golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple carried a vernier sight on the tang and he gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory would eye the distance and gauge the wind and (187), yucca (187), evergreens (187), holly, set the sight like a man using a micrometer” oak, hardwood forests (188), scrub juniper (43). We encounter smallbore fiveshot Colt’s (195), wild orchids and brakes of bamboo revolvers and dragoon pistols and the mold and (197), scraggly acacia (207), a thicket of flask they came with, and learn that the mold for greasewood (207), willow bracken (209), the kid’s sawed-off rifle was so small that he blackened scrog (215), whitethorn (219), had to patch the balls with buckskin and that stands of grama (219), a squalid little alameda the forestock was much worn beneath (43). (221), orchards of quince and pomegranate Other gun-related terminology (large- and (223), riverbottom cottonwoods (224), Saguaro small-bore) includes grapeshot (48: a cluster of forests (241), river willows (254), sycamore small iron balls formerly used as a cannon (254), willow brakes (277), joshua trees (302), charge); gangmolds (82); charging the bores and a dark dwarf forest (316). McCarthy names and seating a bullet driving it home with the the mammals, birds, and arachnids that inhabit hinged lever pinned to the underside of the the landscape of Blood Meridian: e.g., a barrel (82); a small pig of lead (119); the javelina (73), “a small gray lanneret” (113), checkpiece (125); a brace of pistols (125); a Harpie eagles (175), jackhares (186), jokin swivelbore (133); charger (133); capping the roehawks (186), finches (189), macaws (197), piece (133); cocking the hammer (133); solpugas (215), vinegarroons (215), “vicious ramrod and thimbles (158); set triggers (158: mygale spiders” (215), “little desert basilisks” a trigger that may be fired with a conventional (215), ringdoves (228), elf owls (242), amount of trigger pull weight may be “set” by pocketmice (301), and terns or plovers (313). usually pushing forward on the trigger. This Given that Blood Meridian is built upon a takes up the creep in the trigger and allows the historical footnote to the butchery of how the shooter to enjoy a much lighter trigger pull. A American West was won,23 it is not surprising to double-set trigger accomplishes the same thing, find ample instrumentation — weapons and but uses two triggers: one sets the trigger and guns and their working parts and operation — the other fires the weapon.); cheekpiece (158); throughout the novel. The reader early on loading lever (158); wiping stick (164); vent of encounters the frizzen (25) of the kid’s pistol the barrel (220); gunstones (221); buttplate being raked open against a bartop (frizzen: a (224); twelvepound demiculverin (231); curved plate of steel used in flintlock firearms.). Tower muskets (243); howitzer (262); When the trigger is pulled, the hammer, which touchhole (262: the opening in early firearms includes a shaped piece of flint held into a set of and cannons through which the powder was jaws by a scrap of leather, snaps forward, ignited so that the weapon could be touched off causing the flint to hit the frizzen. This in turn or fired); barrels welded up from triple skelps, a causes a shower of sparks to be thrown into the small springloaded silver capbox in the toe, pan, which contains black powder; this ignites wadcutter, powderflask, cleaning jags and and sets fire to the powder in the touch hole. capper (266); shotpouch (280); seating the

42 Translation Review balls with the sprues down (281); hammer set at has lost its Spanishness or foreignness, it has halfcock, chamber (288), and derringer (305). become naturalized within the English language. During the reading of Blood Meridian, one In the context of the novel, this is the Spanish learns much about firearms in the first half of that would have been generally understood as the nineteenth century. All of the related part of the normal border discourse at the time. terminology, technical in nature, begs for On the one hand, we have an ES that is widely intralingual translation as an aid to fuller shared among speakers and readers of American comprehension. English today; on the other, there is the more McCarthy puts his reader back in touch with challenging ES that would most likely have the expressive treasury of the English language. been understood by the characters in that The novel requires an expansive and expanding particular setting at that time in history. While vocabulary on the part of the reader, whose the reader of Blood Meridian recognizes that indolence in this regard McCarthy does not McCarthy’s use of the latter lexical embedding brook. He expects his reader either to already is a communal cultural patrimony (or linguistic know or to learn his English.24 Until we matrimony) in the desert southwest in 1849– translate his language, and thereby make it our 1850, and thus poses greater problems in terms own through this intralingual reengineering, we of comprehension, it is the Spanish proper — do not know — we have not acknowledged — Spanish that appears as a foreign language per what we do not know about language and se — which most disrupts the act of reading, meaning. Intralingual translation, then, is not introducing foreign difficulties to what to begin only a crucial part of the reader’s contract with with is a demanding read in English. This cross- the author, but it serves also as a preventive linguistic enhancement of the possibilities for against taking one’s own native language for misunderstanding and misreadings (missed granted. readings if the Spanish is not understood) only adds to the heteroclite expressive turbulence that II McCarthy has unleashed in his novel. The best The second of Blood Meridian’s translators reader might in principle be the bilingual- is represented by the partially complete bicultural-biliterate Mexican-American or interlingual work done from Spanish to English American-Mexican with a historical knowledge in The Official Web Site of the Cormac of mid–nineteenth-century Mexican Spanish. McCarthy Society online glossary, provided as a Examples of ES, in ascending order of readily available e-resource for today’s readers. difficulty, begin with Spanish words that form McCarthy’s use of Spanish in the novel is part of today’s American English code (there is knowledgeable,25 subtle, varied, and extensive, no code switching between the two languages; at times highly problematic for the native rather, the Spanish now forms part of the English-language reader (as evidenced by the English-language code), such as “a Mexican provision of online translations into English), cantina” (15); “Está borracho, said the old ranging from idiomatic English-Spanish to man” (24); “great pale lobos” (45); “some dry Spanish proper. By English-Spanish (ES) I tortillas” (60); “The kid pulled the stopper and mean the idiomatic use of Spanish that has drank and stood panting and drank again. The become embedded in American English, that leader reached down and tapped the canteen. Spanish which has become part of national Basta, he said” (64); “the jefe” (70); “dusty and/or regional discourse in English in the pueblos” (71); “vendors of tamales” (73); “a United States, historically in 1849–1850 through hacienda” (81); “They did not noon nor did today. It refers to the Spanish that is frequently they siesta” (88); “They camped in the plaza” used while speaking English (a reverse (89); “Centavos, said Bathcat” (101); “there is “Engspan” variant precursor of today’s another caballero” (103); “a slender black widespread Spanglish), such that the Spanish cigarillo” (107); there were no paseos (171);

Translation Review 43 and serapes (199). These are words that add (100: night watchman; again, a surprising touches of local color and authenticity to the misspelling of sereno); “Toadvine pushed the novel and whose definitions are at hand in few tlacos toward the barman” (103: Mexican English-language dictionaries. Closely related in coins); “The ciboleros” (108: Mexican buffalo terms of ease of reading are the cognates that the hunters); “only three animals left in the English-language reader should be able to caballado” (111: string of horses); “remuda” comprehend without too much difficulty, e.g., (115: herd of horses from which ranch hands “Los heréticos” (74), “An ambuscado” (108: select their mounts); “the smoke spread along coined term), and pistola (301). the sagging vigas above them” (117: rafters or It becomes increasingly disruptive for the roofbeams whose ends project from an outside monolingual English-language reader when the adobe wall); “He entered the cuartel” (118: ES lexicon shifts to words that would be used barracks); “we filled our wallets and panniers more typically by English-speaking residents of and our mochilas” (127: a flap of leather on the the desert southwest, either on ranches or in seat of a saddle, used as a covering and towns or cities today or especially during the sometimes as a base to which saddlebags are time of Blood Meridian. Here, the reader who is attached); “El virote” (151: issue, matter, not from that geographic location — and subject); “Un hacendado” (151: landowner, therefore not familiar with its peculiar blending ranch owner); “hogskins filled with pulque” of English and Spanish — finds that the (189: drink made from fermented cactus sap); momentum of the reading in English is more “nothing remained of the poblanos” (216: a frequently interrupted. The novel’s readership dark-green, mild or slightly pungent chili becomes more exclusive as the ES becomes pepper, which yields a startling consequent culturally denser and deepens its geographical image: “It was the remains of the scalps taken and temporal imprint of local color and on the Nacozari and they had been burned authenticity. From easily recognizable ES, the unredeemed in a green and stinking bonfire so reader is moved to more time- and place-bound that nothing remained of the poblanos save this ES, which begins to require a greater knowledge charred coagulate of their preterite lives”); “the of Spanish, such as: “High walls of the cárcel” kid held the woven reata” (219: lasso); “bowls (38: jail); “They pass along a ramada in the of guisado” (221: stew); “raw brown peloncillo courtyard” (39: shelter, hut); “To the south the sugar” (221: little cones of unrefined sugar, blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler Schimpf 238); “estancia” (227: ranch); “a fibre image on the sand like reflections in a lake” (46: morral filled with coins” (264: nosebag for mountain ranges); “They took to riding by night, feeding horses and mules, from the Spanish silent jornadas” (46: journeys); Sopilotes (55: “morro,” snout); “As he was crossing the plaza turkey buzzards); “The carreta” (55: wagon); toward the little mud cabildo” (268: town hall); “They carried escopetas” (63: shotguns); “lazarous bodega” (268: bar, saloon); “a pitcher “women in dark rebozos” (69: shawls); “their of aguardiente” (268: eau-de-vie, a clear faces stained red with almagre” (69: a fine, brandy distilled from fermented fruit juice); “the deep red ocher, somewhat purplish, found in alcalde’s house” (270: mayor); “in the juzgado” Spain); “they had us in the calabozo” (70: jail, (271: court); and “dried carcasses of mules with dungeon); “the azoteas” (76: terrace roofs); the alparejas still buckled about” (287: “feet tucked into tapaderos slung nearly to the packsaddles). Here is where “A Translation of ground” (80: leather hoods that cover the the Spanish in Blood Meridian,” the online stirrups of a Mexican saddle); “He fired upon a glossary in The Official Web Site of the Cormac clay garraffa” (83: demijohn, bottle; oddly McCarthy Society, becomes more useful for the misspelled with a double “ff,” given McCarthy’s monolingual English-language reader, as it does attentiveness to Spanish orthography); “a few also for yet a higher degree of ES difficulty, that old pelados” (97: conscripts); “The sereño”

44 Translation Review of the blended dialogue that now requires an “Nito, she called. Venga. Hay un caballero aquí. intermediate level of Spanish in order to be able Venga” (14). Now it is the English-language to read with limited disruption. reader who may be in need of translation, which When ES dialogue appears in Blood the online glossary renders as: “Nitto [oddly Meridian, the typical monolingual English- misspelled with a double “tt”], she called. language reader is forced to move beyond a Come. There is a gentleman here. Come.” simple recognition of Spanish nouns to include Most such passages are translated in the that of verbs, tenses, and moods as well. This online glossary, usually in a literal and stilted type of reading disruption begins early in the manner rather than literarily into the ES or novel when Toadvine, who had “left [his] mule English of Blood Meridian. The translations, with a Mexican family that boarded animals at while generally useful as comprehension cribs the edge of town,” wheezes at the señora who — similar in nature to the first form of meets him at the door, “Need to get my mule” translation discussed earlier, the native English- (13). In an ironic inverted prefiguring of the language reader’s Englishing of McCarthy’s comprehension difficulties to follow — those English — are often rather incongruous in that that the monolingual English-language reader they do not seek to imitate consistently the style will soon stumble across repeatedly in Spanish and diction of the novel. For example, an — she calls out for help from somebody who intralingual touching up of the online translation can understand Toadvine and communicate to into English might more appropriately render her in Spanish what he is seeking in English: translations along the following lines (14)26:

SLT Online Translation First Proposed Revised First Proposed Revised Translation – Seeks to Translation – Seeks to Retain Spanish Retain Tone and Style of Flavoring (Doyle) McCarthy’s English (Doyle)

Dígame, he said (…) Tell me sir, he said (…) Say to me, he said (…) What’ll ye have, he said (…) [retains the “ye” spelling used throughout Blood Meridian]

The barman looked across The barman looked across The barman looked across The barman looked across the room to where two the room to where two the room to where two the room to where two men were playing men were playing men were playing men were playing dominoes at a table. dominoes at a table. dominoes at a table. dominoes at a table. Abuelito, he said. Grandpa, he said. Abuelito, he said. Grandpappy, he said. [retains Spanish use of the diminutive]

The older of the two raised The older of the two raised The older of the two raised The older of the two raised his head. his head. his head. his head. Qué dice el muchacho? What is the boy saying? What the kid he say? (…) What’s the kid sayin? (…) (…) [retains and plays off the (…) [retains and plays off name of this protagonist, the name of this “kid”] protagonist, “kid”]

Quiere echarse una copa, He wants a drink, he said. He want drink, he said. He wants a drink, he said. he said. Pero no puede But he cannot pay (…) But he no can pay (…) But he caint pay (…) pagar (…) [retains spelling form consistent with “aint” used above and “caint” throughout the novel]

Translation Review 45

Quiere trabajo, said the old He wants work, said the He want work, said the old He wants work, said the man. Quién sabe (…) old man. Who knows (…) man. Who know (…) old man. Who knows (…)

Quieres trabajar, said one Do you want a job, said You want work, said one So ye want a job, said one of the men at the bar. one of the men at the bar. of the men at the bar. of the men at the bar.

The online translation falls short in conveying Finally, the online glossary would also be the tone and diction of the SLT, either in more useful if it included translations of the Spanish or English, delegating this task of the Spanish used in the chapter headings: e.g., translation to the reader’s imagination, as Chapter IV, The ghost manada (42: herd); V, illustrated by the two proposed alternatives. It Sopilotes (variant spelling of Mexican zopilote: would be strengthened considerably by turkey buzzards); The carreta (55: wagon); Los rendering the translated passages as literary heréticos (74: The heretics); VII, Pasajeros de translations, with a Spanish ring or remnant to un país antiguo (81: Passengers from an them, which would enhance the consistency and ancient land); XII, Un hacendado (151: A authenticity of the novel’s reading while still landowner [ranch]); XIV, Tierras quemadas, serving as a comprehension tool. tierras despobladas (Burnt lands, deserted Incomplete as it is, the online glossary lands); A bodega (saloon); Cazando las almas remains a work in progress whose utility to the (Hunting for souls); The conducta (muletrain); monolingual English-language reader can also Los pordioseros (186: The beggars); XVII, be improved considerably by providing the Tierras quebradas, tierras desamparadas translations that are missing. For example, on (Broken lands, defenseless lands); Un hueso de p. 120, the glossary provides the following piedra (241: A stone bone); and XXII, Los translation: “Friends, we’re friends.” The full ahorcados (305: The hanged). text of the Spanish (with missing translation added) on that page is: III Who are you? The third translator is Shane Schimpf in A Amigos, somos amigos. / Friends, we’re Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian,28 which also friends. could be retitled or subtitled “The Blood They were counting each the other’s Meridian Dictionary.” This book is a valuable number. resource for the reader, or re-reader qua De dónde viene? called the strangers. / translator, of the novel. A Reader’s Guide in Where are you coming from? truth provides us with the cumulative work of A dónde va? called the judge. / Where are two researcher-translators, as it builds upon the you going? earlier work of John Sepich’s seminal Notes on Blood Meridian.29 The back cover announces Or the translations are missing on pp. 202– that “With this Reader’s Guide, Shane Schimpf 203:27 has gone a long way toward defanging the Joven, said the judge. / Youngster. novel.” The corollary to this statement is that the The boy leaped up. “defanging” definitions, translations, and notes Eres mozo del caballado? / Are you a in the Reader’s Guide, “the kinds of things that stableboy? could not easily be looked up[,] although a Sí señor. A su servicio. / Sí señor, at your dictionary is certainly a good place to start,” servicio. only make us marvel all the more at McCarthy’s Nuestros caballos, he said. / Our horses, he wondrous writing. The cover also states that the said. book “has much to offer the returning reader,” whom Schimpf in his Preface addresses as his primary beneficiary:

46 Translation Review I want to make one suggestion on how best (72). The “king’s road” is a translation of the to proceed and that is to read the novel one Spanish, and we now understand that the time through without any aid (…) Blood cultural referent is not to any King William or Meridian is an exquisitely written novel King George. When the captain says to Sergeant above all else and one need not understand Trammel that “we don’t want to look like every term and allusion to appreciate this bobtails” (35), the Reader’s Guide provides the (…) I do not want these notes to detract following intralinguistic translation for from the novel’s beauty. Once having read “bobtails,” such that the reader doesn’t the novel, read it through a second time with erroneously envision the referent as an animal the notes.30 with a shortened tail or bobtail deer bounding away: “Slang: A dishonorable discharge from There [is] a wealth of clever allusions and one of the armed services” (86). When we take references McCarthy has packed into his “heretics” as a facile cognate for “heréticos,” masterpiece and it will only deepen one’s explicitation clarifies that it is not as understanding to be made aware of them. straightforward as it appears, as “heréticos” is a With a firm grasp on the trajectory of the mid–nineteenth-century Mexican reference to novel and its characters, one will be able to protestant Anglos (Schimpf via Sepich, 119), get the most out of the research contained gringo heretics in terms of Roman Catholicism. herein. The end result will be a more In the heading of Chapter V, “Adrift on the complete understanding of McCarthy’s Bolson de Mapimi,” the latter three words project. (iv) remain a mystery for the monolingual English- Given the complexity of Blood Meridian, language reader until Schimpf translates bolson Schimpf’s Reader must also be considered a as “a flat-floored desert valley that drains to a work in progress,31 as is the online glossary playa” (107), such that we now recognize it as discussed earlier. In the face of the seemingly an ES word (derived from the Spanish for inexhaustible novel, and the fact that each reader “pocket”) just as is playa. On p. 97, we read that requires different translations and types of “a few old pelados sat mute in the doorways,” translation, such a work may never reach a state earlier translated as “conscripts,” which fits the of completion. A few examples serve to context, but which the Reader’s Guide nuances recommend the welcome utility of A Reader’s or better translates by explaining that “a pelado Guide to Blood Meridian. is a person suspected of criminal activity; in Blood Meridian opens with three epigrams: particular, cutting the hair of a Mexican the first by Paul Valéry, the second by Jacob prisoner. This meaning also ties into the novel’s Boehme, and the third a quote from a 6/13/82 scalphunting theme” (151). report in The Yuma Daily Sun. Schimpf’s notes (brief essays) on the first two epigrams, which IV themselves have been translated into English in The fourth of Blood Meridian’s translators the novel, provide the reader of Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy himself, who assists the with the full contexts of when and why the lines native English-language reader, the primary were written. The result, as Schimpf indicates, is reader for whom he has written, by means of his that the epigrams thus make more initial sense. own intra- and interlingual translations within When the kid “keeps off the king’s road for the novel. The extent to which McCarthy makes fear of citizenry” (15), the translatorial self-translation visible as an integral part of the explicitation provided by Schimpf is useful: narrative is somewhat surprising, given “Also known as The Old San Antonio Road, the McCarthy’s high expectations of his readers’ Camino Real, the King’s Highway and the San lexical knowledge and his general refusal to Antonio–Nacogdoches road. It was a major provide assistance when it comes to the English artery intoTexas as early as the late 1600’s” language, as illustrated by the following brief

Translation Review 47 dialogue, in which the captain (metaphorically quite specific, reinforcing the nuanced precision McCarthy as author) denies lexical aid to his with which McCarthy chooses his words, as sergeant (metaphorically the reader): when the judge expounds on his “point of view for his work as a scientist” (186): And see if there’s any forage here for the animals. Only nature can enslave man and only when Forage? the existence of each last entity is routed out Forage. (48) and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. The blunt message here is, “If you don’t know What’s a suzerain? the word, go look it up.” Yet with unexpected A keeper. A keeper or overlord. frequency, McCarthy himself engages in three Why not say keeper then? types of translation within the novel’s writing: Because he is a special kind of keeper. A intralingual Englishing of his own English, suzerain rules even when there are other interlingual translation from English to Spanish, rulers. His authority countermands local and interlingual translation from Spanish to judgments. (198) English. He does this by means of complete direct translation as well as indirect partial Intralingual self-translation also helps translation, the latter of which is the technique McCarthy’s reader to comprehend the meaning of providing just enough translation for the of his idiosyncratically stylized lexicon, as in the reader to be able to glean meaning obliquely use of the verb “find” to mean “to come up with from the context. While auto-translating, the necessary funds” to pay for Glanton’s McCarthy uses traditional translation strategies protection. Only when the adverb “adequately” and tactics that provide a procedural and is shifted32 to its adjectival form in the phrase prescriptive blueprint — a modeling and “adequate in money” does the reader licensing — for his eventual interlingual comprehend clearly the previously oblique translators proper in techniques of meaning of “provided they find themselves compensation, explicitation, and interpolation. adequately”: Examples of McCarthy’s intralingual translation technique in Blood Meridian include He’s willing to take a few passengers under synonymic rewording and explicitation (direct the protection of his company provided they and indirect) of words in English: “the riders can find themselves adequately. wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and Well now yes. Got some money. How much blackened human ears” (78); “he’d took out his money are we talking about? pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture” How much have you got? Said Glanton. (131); “they took what they required by way Well. Adequate, I would say. I’d say of commissary” (172); and “old muskets and adequate in money. (233) miquelets or guns fabricated out of parts rudely let into stocks of cottonwood that had McCarthy’s self-translation also ranges from been shaped with axes like clubhouse guns for English into Spanish and from Spanish into boys” (220). At times, in order to provide English, depending on the directionality needs sufficient context for the meaning to be inferred, of the dialogue between characters: the explicitation lengthens in terms of cohesion and coherence: “They wanted to know from me What about my boots? said the kid. if you were always crazy, said the judge. They Y sus botas, said the Texan. Botas? said it was the country. The country turned Sí. He made sewing motions (38) them out” (306: turned them out = drove them crazy). The intralingual self-translations can be

48 Translation Review We’ll get out. It aint like the cárcel. reed” (313); “That’s prime bullmeat, son. From What’s the cárcel? the corrida. You’ll get it of a Sunday night” State penitentiary. (75) (77: here McCarthy brings together language and culture — the tradition of the Sunday Who can ride against the Tejanos? They are afternoon bullfights). soldiers. Que soldados tan valientes. La At times McCarthy’s interlingual Spanish- sangre de Gómez, sangre de la gente… English self-translations rely on a description of He looked up. Blood, he said. This country kinesics as a form of explicitation: “Andale, he is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a said. He made a shooing motion with the back thirsty country. (102) of his hand” (24: the translation of “Andale” is achieved by describing what this typical gesture All dead save me, he called. Have mercy on in Spanish looks like); “The old man made a fist me. Todos muertos. Todos. (134) with the thumb pointing up and the little finger down and tilted his head back and More often than not, McCarthy’s tipped a phantom drink down his throat. interlingual translations take the form of Quiere echarse una copa, he said” (23: the contextualized explicitations or interpolations description of the typical Mexican gesture for (aids to coherence and cohesion) that clarify for drinking serves as the translation for “He wants the monolingual English-language reader the to have a drink”); “You are sociedad de guerra. meanings of words in Spanish: “They were Contra los barbaros. Toadvine didn’t know ciboleros down from the north, their [was unable to understand the words spoken in packhorses laden with dried meat (…) They Spanish, as would be the case with many carried lances with which they hunted the wild readers], The old man put a phantom rifle to buffalo on the plains” (120); “men kep his shoulder and made a noise with his watchfires burning on the azoteas or roofs” mouth. He looked at the Americans. You kill (88); “a solitary jacal, crude hut of mud and the Apache, no? (102); and “Cuánto, said wattles” (48); “A stall half filled with dry sotols Toadvine. The barman looked fearful. Seis? he in the way of feed” (49); “It was a carreta, said. Seis what? The man held up six fingers lumbering clumsily over the plain, a small mule (101: the number of fingers held up indicates the to draw it” (67–68: i.e., mules draw or pull six centavos that must be paid). Sometimes the wagons or carts); “Two weeks before this a reader of Blood Meridian is assisted by party of campesinos had been hacked to death McCarthy, the online glossary and Schimpf, as with their own hoes” (88: enough context is McCarthy provides only a partial translation provided for the reader to work out the which the other resources complete: translation or meaning, as hoes are typically used by farmers); “a small steel tapadero (…) You tell fortunes? he took up the little footguard” (140); “where The juggler’s eyes skittered. Cómo [Online: the indians had cooked mescal and they rode What]? he said. through strange forests of maguey — the aloe Glanton put the cigar in his mouth and or century plant — with immense flowering mimed a deal of cards with his hands. La stalks that rose some forty feet into the desert baraja, he said. Para adivinar la suerte air” (147); “a conducta of one hundred and [Schimpf: The cards… To tell fortunes]. twenty two mules bearing flasks of quicksilver The juggler tossed one hand aloft. Sí, sí, he for the mines” (194); “reduced indians or said, shaking his head with vigor” (91). tontos as their brothers outside the gates would name them” (239); “boletas or notes of An integral part of the writing of the novel discounted script from the mines near Tubac” — procedure, craft, art, and style — is the self- (240); “They were led by a pitero piping a translation that permeates its pages.33 The extent

Translation Review 49 to which McCarthy translates in Blood Meridian intralingual translation as needed, a Spanishing reveals that the act of translation is a key of Murillo’s Spanish, repeating what was ingredient of this particular instance of creative required of the SLT reader on behalf of the writing. reading of Blood Meridian in English. Murillo has many other trials and tribulations to face in V Spanishing Blood Meridian into Meridiano de The fifth of Blood Meridian’s translators is sangre, including the thorny issues represented accomplished translator Luis Murillo Fort,34 by the chapter headings; nicknames and who renders the novel into Spanish as surnames; dialect, diction, and register; the Meridiano de sangre (2001). The challenge for variety of discourse domains; lexical Murillo subsumes and far exceeds that of the compounds and neologisms; and poetic and native-language reader whom McCarthy first lyrical prose. The purpose here is to examine pressed into service as his intralingual translator. what Philip Lewis has referred to as “specific The movement from intra- to interlingual nubs” of difficulty in the original (271), translation of Blood Meridian must surely be a applauding Murillo up front for a very fine job translator’s delight, as the need for creative overall of rendering Blood Meridian in Spanish. problem-solving everywhere presents itself in Indeed, Murillo’s adroitness makes of myriad ways. Meridiano de sangre a best-practices model for It is not the principal job of the interlingual literary translation of the highest standards and translator to demystify and clarify meanings of achievement. Backtranslation (BT), a technique language, as in the case of the native English- of comparative and contrastive reading back language reader (the intralingual translator who across languages, will help us to explore Englishes McCarthy’s English) examined Murillo’s handling of difficulties that arise earlier; rather, it is to convey as fully as possible between the distinct expressive possibilities of the story and manner of the SLT, including the English and Spanish, and McCarthy’s use of mysterious and magnetic workings of its story- English versus Murillo’s use of Spanish. telling language and how and to what effect this BT is a translation analysis tool that allows is packaged and presented. The intralingual us to map and measure what is transformed or translator who works within the SLT language shifted in a translation, added or omitted, gained translates the meanings of words for the sake of or lost, the translator’s visibility/invisibility, and comprehension; the interlingual translator the visibility/invisibility of the SLT vs. the translates the words themselves — their forms, target-language text in terms of form, semantics, messages, and esthetic effects — rather than culture, and reception esthetics. It allows us to simply their meanings. Murillo does not map possibilities and limits of translatability, necessarily have to know that anchorite means where the words and manners of expression in hermit in order to translate it as anacoreta one language cancel out — culturally nullify (whose meaning he does not necessarily need to and exclude — and therefore must be know in Spanish, either), nor does he have to foreignized, adopted and naturalized into those know the meaning of parallax to render it in another. It allows us to explore what correctly as paralaje. He simply needs to find McCarthy does in English versus what Murillo the formal lexical equivalents — the surface does in Spanish, and what can and cannot be shells of the words — in a dictionary or other done when the English is regenerated as reliable source (many of Blood Meridian’s Spanish. words are not listed in standard dictionaries such Dialectal literature does not allow one as The Oxford Spanish Dictionary). But in order system of signifiers to successfully replace to better understand Meridiano de sangre, the another. The target-language text cannot reader of the Spanish translation will in turn be successfully supplant the SLT because the challenged to perform his or her own signifieds and referents derive from and inhabit

50 Translation Review different, unique, and nontransferable cultural written by McCarthy. What, then, becomes of it and ethnic worlds. McCarthy’s precision in when it is transported or transmuted into English, and what he does to the English Spanish? What happens to Blood Meridian language, can never find an exact equivalence when it reappears as Meridiano de sangre? — not in the same way to the same effect — in The chapter headings in Blood Meridian another language like Spanish (or any other serve as abstracts and atlases for the novel itself. language).35 It is like pretending to move East In and of themselves, they make for a Tennessee bluegrass music and lyrics and challenging and entertaining synoptic read. The moonshine to another birthing ground, which heading for Chapter I entices the reader with the simply cannot be done. The ethno-cultural promise of revealing genealogical origins, context from which Blood Meridian emerged, action, adventure, violence, exotic-sounding and the language of its expression, its genius locations, and flight. A BT table format allows and lifeblood, is sui generis. Dialect, diction, us to compare the words and manner of and register are place-, time-, and people-bound. expression in the SLT (column 1) with Murillo’s As such, they are uniquely resistant to the notion translation (column 2; italics are used in the of transfer, even within one and the same Spanish publication36), and a literal but language, because they are a one-of-a-kind idiomatic and natural BT of Murillo’s rendition cultural manifestation, an ethnicity wrapped (column 3), which can then be read against within its own exclusive time and forms of McCarthy’s original expression in the first communication. The American English of Blood column, serving to highlight the differences Meridian belongs to this novel only as it is between McCarthy’s English and Murillo’s Spanish.

Text of Blood Meridian Murillo Translation into Spanish Doyle BT of Murillo Translation Childhood in Tennessee – Runs Infancia en Tennessee –Se va de Childhood in Tennessee – He leaves Away – New Orleans – Fights – Is casa – Nueva Orleans – Peleas – Le home – New Orleans – Fights – shot – To Galveston – Nacogdoches hieren – A Galveston – Nacogdoches They wound him – To Galveston – – The Reverend Green – Judge – El reverendo Green – El juez Nacogdoches – The Reverend Green Holden – An affray – Toadvine – Holden – Una refriega – Toadvine – – Judge Holden – A brawl [affray] – Burning of the hotel – Escape (3) Incendio del hotel – Retirada (9) Toadvine – Burning of the hotel – Withdrawal [retreat]

The differences between the idiomatic forms of Spanish words works very well while matching expression in English and Spanish immediately the staccato, gun-like report of “Is shot.” begin to reveal themselves, as does Murillo’s “Affray,” a rather unusual, archaic-sounding skill in turning the English into a fitting Spanish. word for “fight” or “brawl,” becomes “refriega,” “Runs away” becomes “He leaves home,” which a nice match for McCarthy’s unusual word is idiomatic Spanish (“se va de casa”) for choice in English. “Escape” becomes “Retirada” conveying the same message, and a better (withdrawal, retreat), again a felicitous change choice than “se fuga,” the primary dictionary brought to bear by Murillo, as the escape under entry for “run away.” “Is shot” is more consideration is that of withdrawing from the problematic in terms of finding an equally “battlefield” of a fight. The subtle changes in the concise two-word dynamic equivalence in new Spanish text of Blood Meridian represent Spanish, which perhaps could have been Murillo’s successful compensations, which stay rendered as “Recibe un tiro” (literally “receives on task with message, tone, pacing, and overall a gunshot” → “is shot”), but Murillo knows that style, now subject to the rhetorical conventions the reader will soon discover that the wound of of Spanish rather than to those of English. “Le hieren” (they wound him) is from a Nonetheless, it is interesting to note some gunshot, such that his clipped rendition in two inconsistency, as when “New Orleans” is

Translation Review 51 Spanished as “Nueva Orleans” (as is North bodies or the dead; “cadavers” works very well, Carolina [264] / Carolina del Norte [320]) while and perhaps is more consistent with the gore] – the same is not done for Tennessee (Tenesí), The chief – An Apache child – On the desert – especially given that the name of the state was Night fires – El virote – A surgery – The judge first recorded by Spanish explorer Captain Juan takes a scalp – Un hacendado – Gallego – Pardo in the summer of 1567.37 Ciudad de Chihuahua” (151). Clearly it has The chapter headings not only augur but also become a necessarily different read in Spanish, encapsulate the nature and breadth of the which in no way detracts from Murillo translation difficulties to be encountered providing his readers with an excellent, throughout the text of the novel. “Chapter IX: entertaining, and artfully crafted read, still An ambuscado [Murillo: Emboscada] – The uniquely McCarthyesque, as there is no writing dead Apache – Hollow ground – A gypsum lake quite like that of Meridiano de sangre within the – Trebillones [Murillo: Torbellinos, surmised Spanish tradition, just as occurs with Blood from the “dustspouts” and “mindless coils” Meridian within American literature. But in described on p. 111] – Snowblind horses Spanish, McCarthy is no longer McCarthy as we [Murillo: Caballos con ceguera de la nieve; BT: once knew him in English — he is less and at Horses with snow blindness; the Spanish the same time more, the same yet language does not easily accommodate heteromorphic. compound words as does English] – The Nicknames and surnames in the SLT novel Delawares return – A probate [Murillo: represent an interesting translation problem to Verificación] – The ghost coach – The copper be addressed (or circumvented) with mines – Squatters [Murillo: Intrusos, rather than consistency. One of the protagonists, the “kid” the more explicit but ponderous “ocupantes from Tennessee, distinctively spelled in small ilegales,” which has all the legality but lacks the case letters in Blood Meridian, has many options threat connoted by transgressing “intruders”] – in Spanish: niño, chico, muchacho, joven, rapaz, A Snakebit horse [Murillo: El caballo mordido mozo, mozuelo, párvulo, chaval. Murillo settles por la serpiente; BT: The horse bit by the snake; on the latter, a ready transculturation with a again, the problem represented by compound fitting colloquial ring in Spanish. He does not words] – The judge on geological evidence translate or transculturate surnames such as [Murillo: El juez hablando de hechos Toadvine (124), which would be like the geológicos; BT: The judge speaking on absurdity of pretending to translate González or geological facts] – The dead boy – On parallax García into English, or nicknames such as and false guidance in things past [Murillo: Sobre Bathcat and Grannyrat (Meridiano 124–125). la paralaje y los equívocos a que conducen las But he does so with other nicknames both for cosas pasadas; BT: On parallax and mistakes to characters and rifles: Brassteeth is refit oddly as which things past lead] – The ciboleros” (108); Dientes de Bronce (99: Bronze Teeth rather than “Chapter XII: Crossing the border – Storms – the brass in Dientes de Latón, an unusual Ice and lightning –The slain Argonauts [Murillo: oversight by Murillo?); Sweetlips becomes the Los argonautas asesinados; BT: The literally coined compound word “Dulceslabios”; murdered/assassinated argonauts] – The azimuth and Hark From The Tombs is rendered as – Rendezvous [Murillo: Cita; does not retain the “Oídme desde la Tumba” (Meridiano 155). Lost French, which has become embedded within the by not coining nicknames in Spanish for Bathcat English language code as an English-French and Grannyrat are the images evoked by the word] – Councils of War [Murillo: Asambleas; English words, “a cat in or averse to a bath” BT: Assemblies] – Slaughter of the Gileños – (cats are known for avoiding water, which Death of Juan Miguel – The dead in the lake connotes the dubious hygiene of this particular [Murillo: Cadáveres en el lago; BT: Cadavers or character) and perhaps “little ol’ granny with a Corpses in the lake, rather than “Muertos,” dead face like a rat.”38 But when read simply as is —

52 Translation Review in English — in Spanish, these nicknames are Most of the characters in Blood Meridian are devoid of suggestiveness and mean absolutely uneducated frontier roughnecks and criminals nothing to the monolingual Spanish reader. The who speak with diction reminiscent of problem here is how to create a “matching McCarthy’s earlier Appalachian novels, set in equivalent” replacement in terms of form and the hills, hollers, and mountains of East effect, which Spanish precludes. The translator Tennessee. The kid hails from Tennessee, and is in a real quandary with nicknames, and many of the other characters also come from Murillo resolves the issue by translating and Tennessee or Kentucky, or surely pass through transculturating when feasible and these at-the-time outlying states, as could be circumventing or footnoting when not. expected in a story about westward expansion. The following examples of dialogue in dialectal English, with the problematic nubs highlighted, are rendered by Murillo into Spanish as follows:

Text of Blood Meridian Murillo Translation into Doyle BT of Murillo Translation with Commentary Spanish

Seen ye smoke, said the kid. He visto el humo, dijo el I saw the smoke, said the kid. I was thinking you might Thought you might spare a chaval. He pensado que give me a sip of water. [The distinctive orthography man a sup of water. (16) podría darme un sorbo de and colloquial flavoring and authenticity of the SLT agua. (24) are lost to flattening conventionalities, as is the idiomatic flavor of “spare” (can you spare a dime?).]

Don’t have no bacca with ye No tendrás tabaco por ahí, You wouldn’t have any tobacco there, would you? do ye? ¿verdad? No, said the kid. No I aint, said the kid. No, dijo el chaval. That’s what I thought. Didnt allow ye did. Me lo figuraba. Do you think it will rain? You reckon it’ll rain? ¿Cree que lloverá? Sure looks it. Probably not. [“Me lo figuraba” and It’s got ever opportunity. Tiene toda la pinta. “Tiene toda la pinta” are indeed fine renditions that Likely it wont. (19) Probablemente no. (28) capture the substandard quality of the SLT.]

See to this man now. I got to Ocúpese de este hombre. He Look after/take care of this man. I must leave (…) get (…) Aint nobody sick is de irme (…) No hay nadie Nobody’s sick, right? [Murillo’s “He de irme” is a they? (37) enfermo, ¿verdad? (49) good compensation for what is lost by not being able to adequately reproduce the substandard “I got to get.”]

You best keep chewin. Dont Mastica bien. No te conviene Chew well. It’s not good for you to lose your strength. let it feel ye to weaken. (77) perder fuerzas. (98) [The form, tone and voice of the expression are completely lost.]

Gentlemens, said Toadvine, Señores, dijo Toadvine, me Gentlemen, said Toadvine, I’ll bet I know what’s I’ll guarangoddamntee ye I juego algo a que sé lo que se cooking. [It seems impossible to find an adequate know what that there is está cociendo. (101) Spanish equivalent for “Gentlemens” or about. (79) “guarangoddamntee ye,” but “me juego algo” works well for the latter, as does “lo que se está cociendo” for “what that there is about.”]

“Ye’ve not hunted the Nunca has ido a cazar You’ve never gone hunting for aborigines, right? [The aborigines afore.” (87) aborígenes, ¿verdad? (110) “ye’ve” has no suitable equivalent nor does “afore,” a typical Smoky Mountain Appalachian English usage, see Montgomery pp. 5–6.]

Aint that the drizzlin shits, Qué gansada, dijo. (113) What a silly thing to do. [The correct meaning is

Translation Review 53 he said. (90) conveyed by slang but devoid of the scatologically humorous graphic image.]

We thought you was injuns Pensábamos que eran indios We thought you were Indians [The substandard (114) (143) ungrammaticality and orthography are translated away.]

Mayhaps he aint to your Puede que no sea de tu He may not be to your liking [The archaic quality of liking (122) agrado (152) “mayhaps” (1530–40) is lost, as is the substandard orthography of “aint.”]

Every man jack of us knew Hasta el último de nosotros Every single one of us knew that in that region that in that godforsook land sabía que en aquella región abandoned by the hand of God [The variant (125) dejada de la mano de Dios substandard spelling of godforsaken is lost.] (154) I’d doctorfy it myself but I me curaría yo mismo pero no I’d heal/dress it myself but I can’t get a good hold of caint get no straight grip puedo agarrar bien la flecha the arrow [The folksy substandard “doctorfy” is (161) (197) translated away into conventional Spanish as are the ungrammaticality and substandard spelling of “caint.”]

Ort to of shot that one too, Deberíamos haber matado a We should have killed that other one, he said. [The he said (226) ese otro, dijo. (274) Smoky Mountain variant spelling for “ought” is lost.]

That’s why he’s a wantin to Por eso quiere ir a That’s why he wants to go to California, said another. go to Californy, said California, dijo otro. Como Since he already has a sack of gold [Again, the another. Account of he’s ya tiene un saco lleno de oro characteristic Smoky Mountain use of “a” before a done got a satchel full of (282) verb is lost, as are the substandard orthography for gold now (232) California and the substandard grammar and diction of “Account of he’s done got.”]

Such culturally bound dialectal diction and to the transformation “sameness” that we know its orthographic representation starkly reveal the as translation. Given the perils of pretending to limits of translatability across the two different find or create a parallel dialect and diction, languages, as the lexicon and manner of speech Murillo resorts to the conservatism of of the characters in Blood Meridian simply convention — the safest, surest, and probably cannot be transferred elsewhere with best solution. Again, this does not mean at all authenticity and therefore to the same effect. that the reader in Spanish is not reading a There is no feasible possibility for magnificent novel in Murillo’s Meridiano de translinguistic transculturaltion, which through sangre. It simply points to the expressive the unavoidable loss accrued exposes the brink differences, traditions, and mutually exclusive at which translation must fall back into the more possibilities of the two languages, what each conventional conveyance of meaning, which can will and will not allow, where the twain refuse also be achieved artfully but which moves the to meet. interlinguistic literary translator (as writer and The variety of discourse domains in Blood artist) back toward the definitional functionality Meridian adds to the pleasure of the reading and of the first of McCarthy’s translators discussed to the demands placed upon Murillo, who must earlier. To gain the fullest appreciation of how remake within his Spanish the same broad McCarthy writes and what he does to English repertoire of registers. When the judge holds while writing, Blood Meridian can only truly be forth or the narrator narrates, the lexicon, read in his English, an inexorable capitulation diction, tone, voice, and syntax are at different before the facts of the language. It is what it is extremes from the untranslatability of and admits of no other, yet paradoxically yields substandard oral colloquialism and slang, and

54 Translation Review Murillo’s adroitness affirms itself. Among the property rights in beasts mansuete and he wide-ranging discourse typologies encountered quoted from cases of attainder insofar as he are the philosophical, legal, and technical reckoned them germane to the corruption of (different examples touched upon earlier), blood in the prior and felonious owners. examples of which follow, accompanied by their (293) deft renditions into Spanish — fitting in voice, tone, balance, structure, translator’s license Enumeró puntos de jurisprudencia, citó (creative compensation), and idiomaticalness casos. Comentó sobre las leyes relativas a within the context of the novel(s) as written los derechos de propiedad en material de within their respective languages. Often, bestias mansuetas y aludió a casos de muerte excepting dialect and diction, one imagines that civil en la medida en que los consideraba Meridiano de sangre, or at least significant parts pertinentes dada la corrupción de sangre por of it, might have been written by McCarthy parte de los anteriores, y criminales, himself had Spanish been the language of his propietarios. (353) writing: Philosophical Discourse: Moral law is an Technical Discourse (Numismatics): There invention of mankind for the were doubloons minted in Spain and in disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor Guadalajara and half doubloons and gold of the weak. Historical law subverts it at dollars and tiny gold half dollars and French every turn (…) The willingness of the coins of ten franc value and gold eagles and principals to forgo further argument as the half eagles and ring dollars and dollars triviality which it in fact is and to petition minted in North Carolina and Georgia that directly the chambers of the historical were twenty-two carats pure. The grocer absolute clearly indicates of how little weighed them out by stacks in a common moment are the opinions and of what great scale, sorted by their mintings, and he drew moment the divergences thereof. For the corks and poured measures round in small argument is indeed trivial, but not so the tin cups whereon the gills were stamped. separate wills thereby made manifest. (264) (McCarthy 250) Había doblones acuñados en España y en La ley moral es un invento del género Guadalajara y medios doblones y dólares de humano para privar de sus derechos al plata y pequeñas piezas de oro de medio poderoso en favor del débil. La ley de la dólar y monedas francesas de diez francos y historia la trastoca a cada paso (…) El que águilas de oro y medias águilas y dólares los protagonistas acepten renunciar a una con agujero y dólares acuñados en Carolina disputa que consideran tan trivial como de del Norte y en Georgia de una pureza de hecho es y apelen directamente al tribunal veintidós quilates. El tendero fue pesando del absoluto histórico indica a las claras las monedas en una balanza corriente, cuán poco importan las opiniones y cuánto clasificadas por lotes según la acuñación, y en cambio las divergencias que los descorchó y sirvió generosas raciones en enfrentan. Pues la disputa es en efecto cubiletes de estaño que llevaban marcado el trivial, pero no así las voluntades nivel de una ración. (320) independientes que de ella se derivan. (Murillo 304) Compound words (nouns, adjectives, and adverbs) and neologisms represent another Legal Discourse: He [the judge] called out immense challenge for Murillo. McCarthy points of jurisprudence, he cited cases. He conjoins words to such an extent in Blood expounded upon those laws pertaining to Meridian that the attentive native-language

Translation Review 55 reader becomes disoriented and often must look revestida de cuero [368]); lifeforms (75: formas up the synthesized words in order to confirm vivas [97]); lobeshaped (148: en forma de whether or not they are an official entry in lóbulo [181]); makebelieve (332: de ensueño English or a coined McCarthyism, a stylistic [359]); melonseeds (149: pepitas de melon trademark of the novel (and of his writing, as is [182]); midmorning (220: a media mañana his eschewing of punctuation that he considers [267]); moonblanched (244: blanqueado por la redundant, including the hyphen between lexical luna [297]), nightskies (46: el cielo nocturno compounds). [60]); nightwinds (122: la brisa nocturna Word alloys abound, as in the following [151]); othersea (304: otro mar [365]); representative sampling: bloodlands (138: pilotbread (20: galleta marinera [29]); sangrientas tierras [169]); bloodloss (293: la pistolbarrel (270: cañón de una pistola [327]); sangre perdida [353]); bonestrewn (272: pitchtent (99: tienda de feria [124]); plagado de huesos [329], a wonderful, powerful plankboard walkway (264: pasarela de tablas image in Spanish, “plagued by bones”); [264]); plateland (286: campo chapado [345]); bowieknives (78: cuchillos de caza [100]); rainblown bottomland (4: hoyada batida por la cavefolk (236: hombres de las cavernas [286], lluvia [10]); rawskulled (157: peladas [192], four words required in Spanish); chairlegs (171: BT “peeled,” a nice compensation for the lost patas de sillas [209]); cinderland (61: capa de image); redhot (153: al rojo vivo [187]); escorias [78]); closesnapped (168: bien riverrock (155: piedra de río [190]); carmenados [205]); cloudbanks (154: bancos rubymeated (281: de cara roja [340], BT “red- de nubes [188]); coldforger (310: forjador en faced,” purely functional); salmoncolored (304: frío [370]); dawnstar (152: lucero del alba de color salmón [365]); sashmilled (264: mal [187], equally poetic-sounding in Spanish); ensamblados [320]); scalphunters (119: deathbells (30: toque de muertos [42]); cazadores de cabelleras [148]); seabeast (251: desolatelooking (201: con apariencias bestia marina [305]); silverheaded (168: con desoladas [245]); dewsoaked (86: empapadas cantera de plata [205]); silvermounted (168: de rocío [109]); downcountry (42: rumbo al sur repujadas en plata [205]); singlefile (113: en [55]); downshore (304: playa abajo [365]); fila india [142]); smelterlights (186: luces de driftlogs (253: madera de deriva [308]); fundición [227]); snaredrum (99: tambor eatinghouse (234: casa de comidas [284]); militar [124]); snowblue (151: azul níveo fishcolored (258: color de pez [313]); [186]); sootysouled (124: redomado [154]); floodstained (256: manchados por la crecida springloaded (266: accionada a resorte [322]); [311]); gamechickens (38: gallos de pelea stockthieves (54: ladrones de ganado [66]); [50]); gametrails (212: caminos de caza [258]); stoneage (228: de la edad de piedra [277]); goathorn eartrumpet (189: trompetilla de tailorwise (215: a lo sastre [262]); tentshow cuerno de cabra [231]); gunstones (221: (245: circo [298], loses the image of the circus piedras de río [268]); gutcart (112: carreta “big tent”); thornthicket (230: arbusto espinoso llena de vísceras [140]); halfbroken (201: [279]); twobarreled (78: de dos cañones [100]); apenas amansados [245], a wonderfully urinecolored (47: color de orina [61]); alliterative Spanish); hardlooking (4: de viciouslooking (78: de aspecto depravado expression adusta [11]); hatband (87: cinta [100]); wagonboards (69: tablas de carro [87]); interior [111]); hitchingrail (22: atadero para wagonboxes (253: cajas de carro [308]); caballos [31]); hoopshaped nostrils (261: wagonsheets (228: lonas de carro [277]); hocicos dilatados [317], BT “dilated nostrils,” wagontongue (278: vara de carro [336]); which completely cancels out the “hoop” wagonwheels (47: ruedas de los carros [61]); image); horsetracks (216: rastros de caballos wagonyard (237: de carretero [288]); [263]); inkblack (46: negros [60], loses the watchchain (305: cadena de reloj [368]); image of how black); leathercovered (305: waterkegs (48: barriletes de agua [62]);

56 Translation Review whippingpost (231: poste de flagelación [281]); puntería” (tirofijo in slang), is how Toadvine wickercovered (31: con tapa de mibre [42]); refers to the kid’s marksmanship: “He’s a and yessir (234: Sí señor [284]). deadeye aint he?” (281). This is wonderfully Usually Murillo’s solution is to translate rendered by Murillo in idiomatic, proverbial- away neologistic compound words into the sounding Spanish: “Donde pone el ojo pone la conventions of the Spanish language, which bala, ¿eh?” (339: BT, Where he puts his eye he after all is now Blood Meridian’s alter language, puts the bullet / The bullet goes right where he the language and culture into which the novel is aims). In a similar example, the judge says of being adopted and reared. The translation Tobin that “The priest also would be no technique becomes one of explicitation — godserver but a god himself” (250), translated definitions and descriptions — such that the as “El cura prefiere ser un dios él mismo que interlingual translator now doubles back to servir a ese Dios” (304: BT, The priest would perform the work of the intralingual reader- rather be a god himself than serve that God”). translator described earlier. A longbarreled Murillo’s rendition contains no replacement sixshot (82) is rendered as “de cañón largo y neologism for “godserver.” It is lost, translated seis disparos” (106: BT, having a long barrel away. But he has retained a McCarthyish style, and six shots), a onestringed fiddle (148) is tone, and syntax in his Spanish, such that trans-explained as being “de una sola cuerda” McCarthy is still very much alive and well in (182: BT, having a single string), and Meridiano de sangre, despite the permutations. sunchalked (317) is translated as “blanqueados Perhaps the most enduring feature of Blood por el sol” (383:BT, bleached/whitewashed by Meridian is its lyricism — streaming the sun). At times, Spanish trumps the alliteration, unanticipated images, similes and limitations of English — and does for Murillo metaphors, syntactic surprises, lexicon and what conventional English was unable to do for structures that stretch our ability to read, McCarthy — by officially providing a single imagine, and assimilate — the sheer poetry that word to express what the English-language permeates the prose that portrays the historically compound was created to convey: based gore and its setting.39 Page after page, the ambercolored (303: ambarinas [365], a perfect prose of Blood Meridian lends itself to being word in Spanish, which expresses orangish recast in verse form: amber/orangey amber); benchvise (267: torno [323]); clackdish (72: tablilla [92]); claywalled The flames (227: tapiado [276]); deadman (253: sawed in the wind desembarcadero [308]); deathsheads (191: and the embers calaveras [233], BT “skulls,” the traditional paled and deepened Mexican candy treat on the Día de Los Muertos and paled and deepened [Day of the Dead], which is the context in the like the bloodbeat novel); footlamps (276: candilejas [333]); of some living thing legflung (55: espatarrados [71]); melonpatch eviscerate upon the ground (227: melonar [276]); pistolfire (174: tiroteo before them [213]); pugmill (231: machacadera [281]); and they watched ribtines (290: costillares); shotpouch (280: the fire cartuchera [339]); and tavernkeeper (4: which does contain within it tabernero [11]). something At other times, Murillo resorts to different of men themselves translation tactics in which the unit of inasmuch as they are less without it translation analysis becomes the phrase or and are divided from their origins sentence. Deadeye (281), defined by the Oxford and are exiles. Spanish Dictionary as a “tirador con buena

Translation Review 57 For each fire It remains a somewhat lyrical prose in Spanish is all fires, (e.g., the rhythmic repetition of palidecían- the first fire oscurecían / palidecían-oscurecían, although and the last ever to be. (244) “oscurecían” is weighed down by the reflexive “se,” and the alliterative “fuego” of the second How can a translator not revel in working on sentence — particularly the “s,” “a” and “f” these rewarding aspects of the myriad sounds), though considerably less so than the difficulties at hand! Murillo’s translation of the English original, due to slight but significant two sentences above is the following: changes such as “are exiles” to “are like [very prosaic] an exile/exiles” (BT: “está como Las llamas oscilaban al viento y las brasas exiliado”) and the ending thud of “el último que palidecían y se oscurecían y palidecían y se habrá nunca” (BT: “the last that will ever be” vs. oscurecían como el pulso sanguíneo de un McCarthy’s much lighter “the last ever to be”). ser vivo eviscerado frente a ellos en el suelo Of course, neither McCarthy nor Murillo was y contemplaron el fuego, el fuego que writing verse when they were working on Blood contiene en sí mismo algo de los propios Meridian, such that this recasting into verse hombres en la medida en que el hombre es form merely serves a heuristic purpose. But menos sin él y se aparta de sus orígenes y alliteration abounds in the image-making that is está como exilidado. Pues cada fuego es Blood Meridian: todos los fuegos, el primer fuego y el último que habrá nunca. (297)

Text of Blood Meridian Murillo Translation into Doyle BT of Murillo Translation with Spanish Commentary

The river led a limegreen El río salía de las áridas The river emerged from the arid mountains on a corridor of trees down out of montañas por un pasillo de corridor of lime-green trees. [River and trees go the barren mountains. (90) áboles verde lima. (114) together in both versions, but in English the river leads a limegreen corridor of trees out of the mountains while in Spanish, which is more ambiguous, it appears that the corridor of trees is the means, the vehicle upon which, by which the river emerges. Similar but different images.]

Two thick ropes of dark Dos cabos gruesos de Two thick ends of dark blood and two thinner ones blood and two slender rose sangre oscura y dos más rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and drew like snakes from the stump delgados se elevaron como a curved trajectory to land hissing in the fire. [While of his neck and arched serpientes del muñón de su the Spanish version loses the economy of “arched hissing into the fire. (107) cuello y describieron una hissing” and uses seven words in place of two, it is a trayectoria curva para vivid idiomatic read in Spanish — a good translation.] aterrizar siseando en el fuego. (133)

(…) a buzzard labored up (…) un ratonero alzó (…) a buzzard labored up in flight among some from among bones with pesadamente el vuelo entre bones going whoop whoop whoop with its wings like wings that went whoop unos huesos haciendo fup a toy hanging from a string [Here we see for one of whoop whoop like a child’s fup fup con sus alas como the few times the need for the translator to work with toy swung on a string. (187) un juguete pendiendo de un onomatopoeia, a difficult area of translation.] cordel. (228)

(…) like the imbreachment (…) a modo de irrupción like an irruption of some new alchemic experiment of some ultimate alchemic de algún nuevo hatched in the secret darkness of the heart of the earth work decocted from out of experimento alquímico [Imbreachment, from breach or rupture, is a word

58 Translation Review the secret dark of the earth’s urdido en la secreta difficult to locate in a dictionary, which again heart. (195) oscuridad del corazón de la demonstrates the willingness of the translator to do tierra. (238) the requisite research and intuitive surmising.]

He squatted on the sand and Se acuclilló en la arena y He squatted on the sand and watched the sun on the watched the sun on the observó el sol en la hammered surface of the water. Islets of clouds hammered face of the water. superficie martilleada del sailing on another salmon-colored sea. Aquatic birds Out there island clouds agua. Islotes de nubes in silhouette. Down the beach the undertow pounded emplaned upon a embarcados en otro mar de dully. [Each in their own language, what McCarthy salmoncolored othersea. color salmón. Aves and Murillo write is far better than this BT, which Seafowl in silhouette. acuáticas en silueta. Playa would have to be re-Englished literarily for it to Downshore the dull surf abajo la resaca golpeaba convey the high literary quality of the Spanish boomed. (304) sorda. (365) translation.]

Clearly, Blood Meridian epitomizes what Notes Ortega would call a “rebellious text.” In his 1 Assessment by renowned literary critic Harold seminal essay, “The Misery and Splendor of Bloom in The New York Observer, as published Translation,” the Spanish thinker wonders on the back cover of the 1992 Vintage Books rhetorically if it is not too much to ask that the edition used for this article. translator be similarly rebellious. Philip E. 2 Blood Meridian is the reverse side of the coin, Lewis, in “The Measure of Translation Effects,” an esperpento underbelly of the picaresque echoes Ortega while springboarding off Walter novel, a crimson American West subversion of 40 Benjamin: “The task of the translator….” Luis the genre that was “originally developed in Murillo has written that, faced with the task of Spain, in which the adventures of an engagingly translating Blood Meridian, “I found myself roguish hero are described in a series of usually overwhelmed…I was aware that many things humorous or satiric episodes that often depict, in sounded diminished in my translation, that they realistic detail, the everyday life of the common lost their unique quality, their dialectal people.” Esperpento is the subversive esthetics uniqueness…But then again, Tennessee is not of the grotesque (Valle Inclán), reality reflected Almería, El Paso is not Mérida…The big in convex and concave mirrors. The kid is no question for me is, okay, you found the “engagingly roguish hero”; rather, he is a equivalent for a word or phrase. Now, does it terrifying cold-blooded killer who wanders as have the same cultural, semantic weight as the agent, witness, and victim through a world of original word or phrase has or is intended to unrelenting mayhem and murder. What little 41 have?” To engage in the honest attempt to humor there is in the novel is dark, nefarious, transfer this “same cultural and semantic disturbing. The “everyday life” minutely weight,” which includes the rebelliousness of described in Blood Meridian is that of the the “contrapuntal writing in the original” monstrous John Joel Glanton and his company (Lewis), when beset by limitations such as of conscripts or “irregulars” (of historical publishing house “correctors,” is indeed to rise record) and Judge Holden (the judge), all to the occasion. Meridiano de sangre is Blood programmed by the “dance” to kill and kill Meridian in Spanish, yet not the same novel or again (whether it be people or puppies) as the reading experience, the paradoxical outcome novel “explores the nature of evil and the allure that represents the misery and certainly the of violence” (Woodward). Regarding the lust for potential splendor of translation. violence, the “judge on war” has the following to say: “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Translation Review 59 That is the way it was and will be. That way and for mindless violence” (3), to 1878 when he not some other way (…) All other trades are disappears into the judge’s “immense and contained in that of war (…) It endures because terrible flesh” (333) in the jakes in Griffin, young men love it and old men love it in them” North Texas. Most of the actual plot occurs in (249). Toward the end of the novel, the judge 1849 and 1850. 5 declares that “If war is not holy man is nothing Blood is an image that flows from beginning to but antic clay” (307). Dan Moos, in “Lacking end of this novel commanded by historical yet the Article Itself: Representation and History in “fairybook beasts” (190), with reinforcing Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” has descriptions such as “the Evening Redness in observed that “War is the marketplace in Blood the West” (the novel’s subtitle), “the western Meridian.” sky was the color of blood” (152), “that 3 Not only do the author, narrator, and characters immense and bloodslaked waste” (177). In his tell us “how it was that people had lived in this 1992 interview with Richard B. Woodward place and in this place died,” but the story of (Official Web Site of the Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian has of course been retold by Society, www.CormacMcCarthy.com), reviewers, critics, and translators, all of whom, McCarthy stated that “There’s no such thing as especially the latter, provide this work of life without bloodshed.” Because of this, “His literature with an afterlife (Walter Benjamin). list of those whom he calls the ‘good writers’ — This writing and rewriting are the novel’s record Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner — precludes of what occurred, a fictionalized voice against anyone who doesn’t ‘deal with issues of life and historical silence and oblivion. This same irony death.’” Further, in response to the observation is at work again on pp. 184–185, when the that “Might does not make right,” the judge in words in print emphasize that the reader is a Blood Meridian responds that “Decisions of life witness to the murder and mayhem and utter and death, of what shall be and what shall not, depravity that has occurred: beggar all questions of right. In elections of The bodies of the dead were stripped and these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, their uniforms and weapons burned along moral, spiritual, natural” (250). 6 with the saddles and other gear and the The essential setting, which begins with the Americans dug a pit in the road and buried kid’s birth in Tennessee (the setting of them in a common grave, the naked bodies McCarthy’s first four novels, which take place with their wounds like the victims of in Appalachian East Tennessee: The Orchard surgical experimentation laying in the pit Keeper [1965], Outer Dark [1968], Child of gaping sightlessly at the desert sky as the God [1974], and Suttree [1979]) and quickly dirt was pushed over them. They trampled follows his movement west to St. Louis, New the spot with their horses until it looked Orleans, Fredonia, and Nacogdoches, is the much like the road again and the smoking length of the permeable Texas-Mexico border gunlocks and sabreblades and girthrings and west through the desert across the State of were dragged from the ashes of the fire and Sonora to Yuma, San Diego, Los Angeles, north carried away and buried in a separate place to San Francisco, and back to Texas. For more, and the riderless horses were hazed off into see Schimpf. 7 the desert.” Glanton orders a member of his company of Despite the efforts of Glanton’s filibusters to nineteen marauders to “get that receipt for us”: conceal the massacre that has occurred, the “A Mexican (…) took a shining knife from his reader already knows and will remember “the belt and stepped to where the old woman lay spot” in the road. and took up her hair and twisted it about his 4 The novel covers the time period from 1833, wrist and passed the blade of the knife about her when “the kid” from Tennessee is born, in skull and ripped away the scalp” (98). Later in whom by age fourteen “broods already a taste the novel, in a cantina, it is Mexicans

60 Translation Review themselves who represent the receipt, as from one language into another, e.g., English Glanton incites his men: “Hair, boys, he said. into Spanish) and intersemiotic (from one The string aint run on this trade yet” (180). Dan signifying system into another, e.g., from verbal Moos, in “Lacking the Article Itself: into nonverbal expression such as literary text Representation and History in Cormac into musical performance or painting). McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” describes 11 This work focuses on the translation issues “genocide as a commodity” in the novel. involving English and Spanish, the primary 8 The character Bathcat observes to Toadvine, languages of Blood Meridian. Other “foreign another character, that “Ye’ve not hunted the language” texts that appear in the novel aborigines afore” (87). But what begins as “the certainly complicate the reading as well: e.g., Et furnishing of Apache [or any other Indian] de ceo se mettent en le pays (74: And of this scalps” (204) degenerates into an indiscriminate they put themselves upon the country → They collection of non-Caucasian human hair — a leave it to the jury to decide; see Schimpf, pp. scalp is a scalp is a scalp. 121–122), Hiccius Doccius (81: corruption of 9 Steven Shaviro has written that “the scariest the Latin for “this is a learned man”; Schimpf, thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a 130), Tertium quid (81: a middle course; euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a Schimpf, 130), Sie müssen schlafen aber Ich tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing muss tanzen (316: You must sleep but I must one … Once we have started to dance, once we dance; Schimpf, 309–310). have been swept up in the game, there is no 12 Woodward describes McCarthy’s self- pulling back” (1996 précis by Rick Wallach, in acknowledged Faulknerian stylistic debt in the excellent Official Website of the Cormac terms of his “recondite vocabulary, punctuation, McCarthy Society, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete http://cormacmccarthy.com/works/bloodmeridia sense of the world” n.htm). The “dance” is synonymous, by (www.CormacMcCarthy.com). Dan Moos McCarthy’s own definition (or intralingual describes Blood Meridian as “hyper-real” and translation) in the novel, with “orchestration,” writes that “Ironically, the meticulousness of “event,” “ceremony,” “ritual.” As is the judge McCarthy’s research and his use of archaic but — “the greatest fiddler” (123) — to the “dance,” historically appropriate language defamiliarizes so is McCarthy with his own form of fiddling or the novel” (24). orchestration, the storytelling of Blood 13 Shane Schimpf’s A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian. At the end of the novel, the judge Meridian (345) is a much more comprehensive warns the kid and the reader that “a ritual [the treatment than the definitions (researched dance] includes the letting of blood” and he tells independently online) provided in this article. A the kid that “Only that man who has suffered up Reader’s Guide is a very useful resource for himself entire to the blood of war, who has been plumbing the depths of the novel’s lexicon and to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the allusions. My own independent online research round and learned at last that it speaks to his simply supports and confirms the accuracy and innermost heart, only that man can dance” breadth of Schimpf’s extensive and important (331). work. 10 In his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of 14 Readership typology includes the following, Translation,” Russian linguist Roman Jakobson drawn from the discourse of reader–response identifies the first of “three ways of interpreting criticism: the “real” reader (the actual person a verbal sign” as “intralingual translation or with book in hand — Gibson, Iser); the rewording (…) an interpretation of verbal signs “autonomous” reader (there is the book and here by means of other signs of the same language” am I; Michaels); the “mock” reader (a reading (145). The other two types of translation he persona or role assumed by the “real reader”; identifies are interlingual (translation proper Gibson); the “implied” reader (“a textual

Translation Review 61 structure anticipating the presence of a recipient established usage, and into accepted linguistic without necessarily defining him”; Iser) who norms. It is an act of permanent rebellion approaches the “virtual” or “assumed” reader against the social environs, a subversion. To (whom the author imagined as a reader of what write well is to employ a certain radical he/she has written; Prince); the “informed” or courage.” “at-home” reader (who knows the language in 19 In my own reading of Blood Meridian, I which the text is written and “has literary typically encountered 1–5 unknown words per competence”; Fish); the “gap” reader (who fills page, × 335 pages = at least 1,000 such in the blanks and vacancies of indeterminacy by problematic words. In order to informally gauge “[supplying] the missing links”; Cohen, Iser); the difficulty of the language used, I asked six the “trace” reader (who tracks down “the other readers with varying degrees of literacy — multiplicity of traces” that help fill in the “gaps” three undergraduate students (two general in a reader’s understanding; Doyle); the readers of literature and one major in literature), “hypothetical” reader (“the one upon whom all a college graduate (general reader and an expert possible actualizations of the text may be at word games and crossword puzzles), and two projected”; Iser); the “ideal” reader” (who professors of English (professional readers) — “would understand perfectly the least of the to take a vocabulary “quiz” in which they were author’s words, the most subtle of his asked to indicate from a list of 348 Blood intentions”; Prince); and the “super” or Meridian words, including the 61 in this “multiple” reader (Riffatere), etc. For more on sampling, the ones for which they could answer readership typology, see Jane Tompkins with confidence the simple question of “What (Reader-Response Criticism) and Wolfgang Iser does this word mean?” Little to no context was (The Act of Reading and The Implied Reader) provided for the words. (In my own reading and and bibliographies in these works. reflections, I found that while context often 15 Recall that in his “Circular Letter on enabled me to better grasp the still fuzzy Translation” (1530) Martin Luther used meaning of a word, it generally did not mean “translate” and “Germanize” as synonyms. This that I could define the word any more precisely: particular way of describing what translation is I either knew what it meant or I did not, with or by means of how it works is most apropos: the without context. This was a surprising target or receiving language becomes the agent realization.) The three undergraduates, and verb of its own function, both protagonist outstanding students at prestigious American and purpose of the act of translation. universities, averaged a 4% definition rate; the 16 One wonders why the full translations general reader, 20%; and my two colleagues, contained in Shane Schimpf’s Reader’s Guide both professors of English, averaged 27% were not used for the online glossary. between them. This would seem to confirm the 17 Woodward informs us of the novel that level of difficulty of McCarthy’s lexicon. An “McCarthy learned Spanish to research it,” interesting aspect of the vocabulary of Blood complementing his new literary language with Meridian is that somebody who grew up on a extended trips through Mexico, which explain ranch, riding horses and working with cattle, or his sure-handed embedding of Mexican culture who had done a lot of camping, served in the in the novel, his first to take place outside of military, or frequented saloons and casinos, East Tennessee. In 1967, he had also lived with might recognize as many words as a university his second wife, DeLisle, “for many months on professor whose more sanitized world is the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where primarily books and the classroom. he wrote Outer Dark.” Spanish was also the 20 In a 6/28/07 e-mail exchange about official language of this Balearic island. McCarthy’s language in Blood Meridian with 18 Ortega reminds us that “To write well is to Dr. Cy Knoblauch, Professor of English at UNC make continual incursions into grammar, into Charlotte, he observed that “there are in fact

62 Translation Review comparatively few words that we can define shouldn’t have to punctuate…[use] just what’s ‘with any real precision’ — ‘understanding needed” (6/5/07, www.oprah.com). meaning’ and ‘defining’ are two different 26 The page numbers used for the online “A enterprises.” My response was that “It just Translation of the Spanish in Blood Meridian” shows that Cormac McCarthy is on another are the same as for the edition of Blood plane when dealing with language, because he Meridian cited in this work. does know how to define the exact words he 27 Incomplete or missing translations occur on uses in his writing, such that his ‘understanding pp. 42, 55, 74, 81, 100, 101, 151, 186, 197, 202, of meaning’ is much more sharply defined.” 229, 230, 241, 271, and 305. McCarthy knows the precise meanings 28 About his book, Schimpf writes in the Preface (definitions) of the words he uses; therefore we that “The book you are reading is not the one I must become better, more complete readers in set out to write. My original goal was to publish our quest for “understanding meaning” in Blood an annotated edition of Cormac McCarthy’s Meridian. Blood Meridian.” McCarthy’s literary agent, 21 See Schimpf, 329–330, for greater detail. I Amanda Urban, informed Schimpf in a two-line had already looked up the information presented letter that “Cormac McCarthy wishes his novels on these native American tribes before accessing to be read the way he’s written them. I do not A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian. This is the believe he would be able to help you with your case throughout this article, unless indicated well-intentioned questions” (i), which led to A otherwise through attribution. Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian. 22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The _High_ 29 In his Acknowledgements, Schimpf writes: “I Priestess (6/28/07). In Blood Meridian: “The owe a special thanks to John Sepich. Simply put, woman [the blindfolded fortune teller] sat like his book Notes on Blood Meridian is awe that blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inspiring. To think how he tracked down all of inscribed upon the one card in the juggler’s deck McCarthy’s references in a time before the that they would not see come to light, true Internet is mind boggling. Needless to say, my pillars and true card, false prophetess for all.” book is greatly endebted to his. In fact, part of 23 Dan Moos has written in “Lacking the Article my motivation for writing this reader’s guide is Itself: Representation and History in Cormac to share some of Sepich’s scholarship” (v). McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” “Unveiling the 30 In my own reading of the novel, quite by violence of Manifest Destiny, McCarthy accident I followed Schimpf’s recommendation. presents us a kind of memory or a history we I first read Blood Meridian as McCarthy believed long masked” (24). intended it to be read, simply on its own. After 24 Schimpf writes in his Preface, “Blood being at times overwhelmed by this initial Meridian is a hard read, and this is no accident” exhilarating reading, I began my own research, (iii). which eventually included studying Schimpf’s 25 McCarthy’s Spanish in Blood Meridian Reader’s Guide. demonstrates conventional correctness, as he 31 The translations of the Spanish into English generally uses accent marks where required for would benefit by being consistently rendered as proper orthography. Yet he also does to his literary translations rather than as literal Spanish similar things to what he does to his translations, or perhaps have both types of English when writing. For example, he will omit translation together. the inverted question mark that is required by 32 For more, see J.C. Catford, “Translation Spanish convention: Qué dice el muchacho? vs. Shifts,” in The Translation Studies Reader. ¿Qué dice el muchacho? Whether writing in 33 Close reading of many other contemporary English or in Spanish, he is consistent with his novelists (e.g., Jeffrey Eugenides, Khaled recent statement in an interview with Oprah Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yann Martel, etc.) Winfrey that “If you write properly, you reveals that intra- and interlingual self-

Translation Review 63 translation are an integral element of their the SLT is thus visually marked for the Spanish- fiction writing, which suggests that translation is language reader of the translation. Murillo often part and parcel of the process and product indicates this with a translator’s footnote on of fiction writing itself, that to write is to be p. 22 of Meridiano de sangre: “Las palabras que engaged continuously in forms of translation. aparecen en cursiva figuran en castellano en la Perhaps translation as integral to writing — as edición original. (N. Del T.).” part of how writing works — is axiomatic, 37 “Tennessee’s Name Dates Back To 1567 especially for dialectal or ethnic writers, and Spanish Explorer Captain Juan …” represents an interesting area of inquiry into the (www.tngenweb.org/campbell/hist- nature of fiction writing and writing in general. bogan/tennessee.html). McCarthy’s own dialectal novels could also be 38 Murillo acknowledges the difficulty, as on classified as ethnic within the American English p. 99 of Meridiano de sangre, he provides a tradition, as Appalachian East Tennessee and translator’s note explaining that Grannyrat is the southwest U.S.-Mexico border deal with the “Abuelita rata, un apodo” (Granny Rat, a drama and trauma of individuals and minority nickname). groups within the larger society, characters who 39 Schimpf refers to the novel as “a long, surreal share a distinctive culture and language in each poem” (iv). of his novels. 40 In his essay “The Task of the Translator,” 34 Having translated seven of McCarthy’s ten Benjamin writes that “The task of the translator novels, Murillo may be considered his Spanish consists in finding that intended effect translator. In addition to Meridiano de sangre, [Intention] upon the language into which he is Murillo’s translations include The Crossing (En translating which produces in it the echo of the la frontera. Barcelona: Random House original” (19–20). Mondadori, S.A., 1999); Cities of the Plain 41 7/13/07 e-mail to Michael Doyle, part of an e- (Ciudades de la llanura. Barcelona: Random interview. House Mondadori, S.A., 2002); The Orchard Keeper (El guardián del vergel. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, S.A., 2000); Outer Works Cited Dark (La oscuridad exterior. Barcelona: “Apache Tribes.” http://www.indians.org/ Random House Mondadori, S.A., 2002); Suttree articles/apache-tribes.html. (Suttree. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” S.A., 2004 [under the nom de plume Pedro Trans. Harry Zohn. The Translation Studies Fontana]); No Country for Old Men (No es país Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London and New para viejos. Barcelona: Random House York: Routledge, 2000: 15–25. Mondadori, S.A., 2006); and his recently Catford, J.C. “Translation Shifts.” The completed translation of The Road (La Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence carretera. Barcelona: Random House Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, Mondadori, S.A., 2007). 2000: 141–147. 35 In order to experience the difficulties Dictionary.com. . This involved, the reader is encouraged to review the online site includes definitions taken from useful translation(s) of Blood Meridian into a familiar sources such as Dictionary.com Unabridged target language, or to translate the passages (v 1.1), based on the Random House selected from Blood Meridian for discussion in Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. this article. 2006; The American Heritage® Dictionary of 36 In Meridiano de sangre, the Spanish words the English Language, 4th Edition, Houghton that appear in Blood Meridian are italicized in Mifflin Company, © 2006; The American the text of the novel but not italicized in the Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms, Houghton chapter headings or titles. What was Spanish in Mifflin Company, © 1997; Online Etymology

64 Translation Review Dictionary © 2001 Douglas Harper, Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy www.etymonline.com. It also includes a wealth Society.

Translation Review 65 Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Venomous Fiction.” New York Times Magazine Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and 19 (Apr. 1992): 28–31+. Metanarratives in Children's Literature. New WordReference.com, English-Spanish York: Garland, 1998. Dictionary. Entries from Diccionario Espasa Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Trans. Concise: Español-Inglés English-Spanish. N. J. Dawood. London: Book Club Associates, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, S.A., 2000. 1975. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

66 Translation Review A SATISFYING CONDITION: AN INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN R. SHAPIRO

By J. Kates

orman Shapiro is best understood in situ. talking about N The situs is Adams House on Plympton Shapiro’s lifelong Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next door involvement in to the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. From here, languages and Shapiro commutes to Wesleyan University in translation. If Connecticut, where I first met him as my there’s one thing professor of French literature more than forty that marks him, it’s a constant linguistic self- years ago, and from which he is still not ready to consciousness of words and word-play. retire. It was at Adams House that I sat with JK: How is it that you approach language and Shapiro for the beginning of this interview, in its translation so playfully? dark wood-paneled dining room, with undergraduates milling and susurrating around NS: There are texts that lend themselves to us. (We continued it on two later occasions in linguistic playfulness, and others that are very one of his other haunts, a coffee shop a few dour. Or “dow-er.” There, that’s playing with blocks away.) Shortly after we started our talk, language. If we take it seriously, we fail to have we were interrupted by the producer of French a good time with it, and we’re always looking farces in Shapiro’s translation, which were to be for some way to enjoy what we do. Language presented that evening as an Adams House being the stuff of translation, translations activity. Shapiro has been associated with the deserve to be played with, or then we’re not house ever since he was first a Harvard having a good time. I try to translate for my own undergraduate there, and then a tutor, in the amusement as well as for some more noble 1950s. He is now writer-in-residence there, a purpose. distinction he calls “spurious.” Translators have to be people who are generally aware of language, its interest for its NS: It’s spurious because I’m not a writer in the own sake. traditional sense, and I’m not in residence I’m thinking of some texts I’ve translated in except on weekends and at other odd times, on the past that are not playful. Certainly sabbatical, for example. I owe Adams House a Baudelaire, he’s usually much too serious to be lot. It’s a wonderful place to sit and work. I concerned with linguistic banter. And some can’t work in a library, in the sarcophageal quiet plays I’ve done recently; for example, Victor of a library. Is that a word, “sarcophageal?” Séjour, the New Orleans nineteenth-century mulatto poet. His Diégarias — rebaptized, so to JK: It is now. It’ll show up in the next edition of speak, as “The Jew of Seville” in my version, the OED. five acts in Hugoesque verse, no less — not too much room for play … NS: I suppose on the analogy with esophageal, it is. JK: You translate a lot that is deliberately playful, your farces. There are not many of us who have on the tip of our tongue, so to speak, the adjectival form of NS: Farce chose me. When I was on my esophagus. And that’s where I wanted to begin Fulbright in France, a professor, Marcel Ruff,

Translation Review 67 suggested that I look at Feydeau, and when I kind of blackface minstrel talk, and a genuine came back here I thought I would really enjoy reflection of the Creole language is an extremely studying him, and of course I did. My late delicate one. Delicate, because while wanting to lamented colleague here, Dan Seltzer, asked me make it sound authentic, I have to avoid making to translate a Feydeau farce and said that we it sound condescending. could do it as part of the Adams House Christmas celebration. So I picked a short one, JK: Please fill in some of your background, the On purge Bébé. It wasn’t done as part of the human interest and credentials stuff. Christmas celebration after all, but it has been done dozens of times since, all over. I called it NS: I was born in Boston, graduated from Going to Pot, and there’s some obvious Boston Latin in 1947. As a senior I won a prize linguistic humor there. I chose the title for in translation from Latin, an ode from Horace, several reasons. The harried husband is a book II, “Rectius vives, Licini.” I had a porcelain manufacturer and he’s trying to get a wonderful mother who wrote poetry as much as contract for the exclusive manufacture of housework allowed and who was always asking chamber-pots for the French army. His entire my opinion … Do you think this line works? business goes to pot. So does his marital life, all That sort of thing, more to flatter me than because of the unreasonable behavior of his wife because she needed it. Undoubtedly she and of his seven-year-old son, who begins the ingrained in me the feeling for what works and play being slightly constipated. what doesn’t. My French women poets anthology bears a dedication to “the loving JK: You say “Farce chose you.” Is this how you memory of the first woman poet I ever knew, usually go about choosing what you translate? my mother.” Poetry was always in the house, in the air. NS: Sometimes things choose me. The Séjour At Harvard I majored in Romance plays came to me when Lynn Weiss, a former languages, stayed there for graduate work. In student of Werner Sollors and a scholar of 1955 and 1956, I enjoyed a Fulbright to France. American literature in French, asked me if I I became a tutor at Adams House, which has would translate this very powerful play about a remained a lifelong association. I taught at Jew who poses as a Christian to rise to power in Amherst for one year, before moving to Spain. Wesleyan in 1960. Then I did another one, The Fortune Teller, certainly as serious a drama as Diégarias, but JK: You teach literature mostly, but you have there are moments when the language can be also taught translation workshops. somewhat playful. And I’ve just done an 1825 five-act prose drama based on the Haitian NS: Teaching translation is impossible, although insurrection of 1791, L’Habitation de Saint- we do it. I don’t do it often, mostly because it’s Domingue, by Charles de Rémusat, that’s a luxury course my department can’t afford. A coming out from LSU next year. The subject is course like that … I do one every several years. dark, it’s sombre, and it’s very philosophical, But I often have students working with me on very political, and very anti-slavery. But even translation projects for their theses. I did have a there, there are moments of comic relief. very nice course a couple of years ago — about Another new Orleans writer I’ve been fifteen or so students — they translated a lot of translating is the nineteenth-century poet Jules poetry, and then submitted it for a volume that Choppin, a white who often wrote using a exists even today, Poems & Poèmes — the Creole patois that I have to translate into ampersand can be either “and” or “et.” I’ll be equivalent English that isn’t always easy to find. doing a similar workshop next year and expect There the line between unintentional comedy, a another little volume will come out of it.

68 Translation Review JK: Do you hold to any theory of translation? were writing for their contemporaries as well as for ours. Ours would accept free verse, theirs NS: I often cite a quote supposedly translated wouldn’t. It’s the same thing with vocabulary. I from a Latvian novel — actually I made it up, try not to put into my versions a word in English but I say it’s from a Latvian novel. It’s a that didn’t exist, or that doesn’t have the same dialogue. One character says, “Those who can, tone now as in the time of the author. I try to do. Those who can’t, teach; and those who can’t beware of anachronisms of speech. I don’t mean teach, compose theories.” “And what do those to make a rule of it. It’s just the way I feel it who can’t compose theories do?” “They should be. vigorously champion the theories of others.” And rhyme and meter are more of an Theories are fine, but they’re two, three, ten accepted challenge for me. The poem is sitting times less useful than actually getting your there, thumbing its nose at me, saying, “I bet hands dirty. You can learn a lot about what you can’t translate me. Just try to find a way.” works and what doesn’t just by translating If the original poets in French — or Italian, something. What seems to work for one person I’ve done some Italian — are writing according doesn’t work at all for another. to the conventions of their time, then I assume If I have any theory at all, it’s the metaphor that the poets were working in that system, and I of the pinball machine, and this is part of a try to do the same. If I were doing a twenty-first cosmic view of life. We seem to be suspended century adaptation, that would be different. between being totally independent or totally dependent … a polarity. An old-fashioned JK: Most of your translations are of dead pinball machine is similar in that the ball comes writers. out of the channel and it can go anywhere — or not — the only thing it can’t do is escape from NS: True, most of the people I translate now are the frame, from the machine. On the one hand, no longer with us. Living poets assume that you totally “unfree,” and at the same time totally are a technician, that you are there to bring them free. It’s a wonderful icon for the existential across. They don’t always recognize that you’re choices man has. The translator is in the same making something new, that you are position. You get a text. There are innumerable collaborating with them to produce a poem that ways that you can treat that text — maybe an could stand on its own. infinite number of ways — but the one thing the After a number of anthologized medieval translator can’t do is change the text. You do poems, Old French, Old Provençal, yes, my that and the machine flashes TILT and shuts the earliest published poetry translations were game down. Total freedom with total mainly of living poets … Black French poets, in “unfreedom.” It’s a wonderful compromise the anthology Négritude. Those people were all between the two extremes of total responsibility alive. That collection got me invited by Senghor and total freedom. You’re totally responsible to to a conference in Dakar, in 1970, which I was the text because you can’t write a different text, not able to attend. But yes, all those poets were but you’re totally free within that responsibility, still alive, except for one or two. which is why there are many translations of the As for the earlier things, as I said, I was same work. No two are the same. attracted by medieval French poetry and did a That’s kind of a satisfying condition. certain amount of work in it. Here’s an interesting coincidence. As a JK: But you are something of a formalist in graduate student, I did some translations of Old translation. Provençal troubadours. I had taken a course in Old French with a person who later became a NS: Something … If I translate Ronsard or Du collaborator on my Comedy of Eros. As a final Bellay or Baudelaire, I insist on rhyme as if I paper, I decided to do some translations instead

Translation Review 69 of research. I put them aside, and several years century. That turned into The Fabulists French, later I came across them, decided they weren’t which came out in 1992 and won an award from bad, and sent them to Botteghe Oscure. I got a ALTA the following year. letter back that began “Dear Norm,” which The importance and influence of La seemed oddly informal, but it turned out to be Fontaine were there, even when his followers from a woman I had known as a student. She took pains to say, “I am not influenced by La said they couldn’t take the work because Fontaine.” His influence is so pervasive that Botteghe Oscure was closing down; but, in the even when he was absent, he was present. The very same mail, I got a letter from Jim shadow of La Fontaine lay everywhere. I’ve Wadsworth, my former professor — back-to- called him “the Beethoven of the fable.” Like back envelopes — asking me about those very the symphony after Beethoven, after him the translations I had done for his course years fable was never the same. before. I took that as a sign from Heaven that I So here I had two manuscripts, Fifty Fables should be translating. of La Fontaine and The Fabulists French. I also Well, I like translating from the Middle had the good fortune to be in correspondence Ages. Dead poets can’t complain if you with an editor at University of Illinois Press, Liz misinterpret them or commit any of those acts Dulany, who had a passion for fables. we’re all guilty of, much as we try not to be. I did fifty more La Fontaine, which were published in 1998. JK: How did you get started on La Fontaine? I did another sixty — Once Again, La Fontaine for Wesleyan University Press in 2000 NS: I had done a collection of medieval fables, — and thought that was the end of it. There are Fables from Old French: Aesop’s Beasts and roughly two hundred forty-five in all, and I Bumpkins. A dear friend of mine, Evelyn Simha, thought I’d done enough. There were other said, “That’s all well and good, but why don’t things I wanted to do. But Bill Regier, the editor you work on somebody important?” at Illinois, said something like, “I would hate to I had taken a course in La Fontaine in think that La Fontaine in English is only the way graduate school, so I had read most of his work. Marianne Moore did him.” The first one I translated, decades later, I was So I said sure, why not? driving down to Middletown. I kind of worked it And I finished up the remaining eighty or so, out in the car. It was the frog who tried to grow including the very long ones in Book Twelve, as big as an ox. I did that one mainly because it that are not really fables at all, but rather contes, was short and I could work out a lot of the lines like the ones in my La Fontaine’s Bawdy. in my head before getting there. I probably We decided to put them all in one volume. shouldn’t say this, but I work terribly fast. Not John Hollander contributed a very erudite in the car. But it’s a good place to think things introduction, and we carried over David out … And so, over the next few weeks, I did Schorr’s illustrations from the earlier books. another dozen or fifteen. Soon I had enough to make a nice little collection, and Fifty Fables of JK: Do you find a difference between La Fontaine was born in 1985. translating for the theater and translating for The fable is such a pleasant genre, one I the page? have a flair for, so I thought that maybe I should look into others, the successors to La Fontaine. NS: It’s not as major a difference as you might It would be interesting to look at Florian, for expect. Ideally, even poetry should be read instance. Once I did that, I decided that maybe a aloud, should be heard the same way, but of collection of French fables in general would be course it isn’t always like that. Because all interesting — I already knew something about poems should be read aloud, acted, there is medieval fables — all the way into the twentieth always the element of performance. The big

70 Translation Review difference is in having to worry about authorial prose, where there’s no pre-existing grid, and negligence, directions, at odds with what’s there make it sound right. The liberties that you take in the words. There’s a lot of clearing up you with verse are more excusable because it’s have to do. poetry, and one doesn’t expect a rigid, word-for- Also, novels and poetry reach a reader one word translation. person at a time. This is different from theater. The translator always has to keep in mind how JK: I like to say that the translator has a wider theater is trying to reach large audiences at one range of choices translating poetry. You can encounter. choose to alter a metaphor for effect, to play There’s obviously a difference between around more with the text. In prose, you have to something that’s going to stay between covers stick too close to the literal original. and rarely be read out loud — although of course it should be — between that and the play NS: I think I’m saying the same thing in that only comes to life, that is only called into different words. life, like a musical score, in performance. It’s what aestheticians call “art in time,” and ideally JK: Do you think there are any works that it comes into “existence” again and again, each should not be translated? time it is performed. “But it exists on paper, on the notes of the written score,” you tell me … NS: Things that are so idiosyncratic that to Not really. Only potentially. Ideally, the poem translate them isn’t really an act of translation, too “exists” only when read. Or at least read but of total adaptation, a gender reassignment. “aloud” in the reader’s head. Like much of the verse of the Grands I love translating plays. It’s not just Rhétoriqueurs of the French Renaissance, which translating them, it’s collaborating with the is all pun, all based on punning. French being author, and a lot of myself gets put into it. In what it is, a single line that is perfectly dealing with comedy, you pretty much have to pronounceable with one meaning is spellable in take more liberties than with poetry. The several different ways, giving entirely different original was fine for its time, but if you want to meanings. Unless we’re exceptionally clever, bring comedy into the twenty-first century we should probably keep away from things that there’s also a strong obligation to the audience are based on the intricacies and complexities of — to make them laugh. A rigid fidelity to the the source language. I wouldn’t say that they text is counterproductive, unless what’s wanted shouldn’t be translated at all, but they should is an archival text, literally exact — or more or come with a caveat that it’s a work in the same less. For an audience that can be deadly. When style, not really a translation. I’m thinking for you’re translating comedy, there’s bound to be a example of a wonderful work by Georges Perec, certain amount of liberty, but it’s all in good fun La disparition, a novel written completely — keep ’em laughing. without the letter “e.” But obviously the translator couldn’t “translate” — he had to do JK: Have you translated prose? something in the same key [Gilbert Adair, A Void, 1994] and produced a tour de force. NS: Sure. Lots. Novels. Short stories. For me, But I guess it comes down to the question, prose is harder, more difficult. Verse is much “Should translation be only a breaking of the less demanding than prose, and the reason I’m shell, to get at the kernel?” Is translation just an sure is that verse has a certain structure that you archival thing, or a transmission of content, fit into. In prose, you have to be aware of the tone, and feeling? different tones — the narrator, the speaker — but you also have to respect certain speech JK: Sometimes there’s a choice between fidelity rhythms, and it’s much harder to do this in to the feeling or to the text?

Translation Review 71 NS: You try to get both, if possible. If you’re time learning the lines from them. So I had a doing poetry, the person who wants archival long conversation with the publisher, who said it translation goes to the Penguin anthologies had to be done that way because we had to where the translation is glossed in a footnote at consider the economics of it. Publishing full the bottom of the page. Not my cup of tea … pages would have doubled the size of the book. I enlisted the aid of my cyber-guru, who, JK: What’s next? with other people, determined it could be done. And it was done. I had to have the whole thing NS: French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: reformatted at my own expense. But the dire The Distaff and the Pen is coming out in June predictions of the publisher were exaggerated. It from Johns Hopkins with a foreword by added about seventy pages, and it will be Rosanna Warren, and introductions by various coming out supposedly in the fall. As I want it scholars. I just know that some bastard of a to appear. Translators have — or should have — critic will say there are so many poets I didn’t some say in such matters, even if they have to include. “Didn’t he know …?” And others who pay for it. will carp on this or that … But there’s something of the masochist in all us translators. JK: I always like to end an interview by asking So be it. if there’s a question you’d like to be asked. Then also coming out in the near future are poems of Sabine Sicaud, I should give you her NS: With so many disadvantages that accrue to dates — 1913–1928 — the fifteen-year old who the translator — I can name them if you want — wrote lots of poetry while she was still alive — things like crabby critics who don’t see the no surprise! — but sick and suffering. That’s forest for the trees, and until recently a general coming out from Subtext, Inc., hopefully soon. misperception of the translator’s art and craft, And something that was just accepted by and other practical problems like having to get Black Widow press, Preversities, a Jacques rights, et cetera — with all the disadvantages Prévert sampler that should be coming out in and problems, why do I still enjoy translation? ’09. At the moment I’m working on a collection JK: So, answer it. of Théophile Gauthier, not of his prose, which is sort of mystery-type stuff, but his verse. This, at NS: For the money. the suggestion of John Hollander — nobody has No. done Gauthier’s verse. It’s deceptively simple- Because of that latent masochism. looking. I’m well along on that, and it’s typical No. of the way I attack things. I say, “Well, I’ll do But because it gives me a feeling of one and see if I like it,” and before I know it accomplishment. It’s a form of artistic self- I’ve done thirty-five. expression. I’ve met the challenge, and the text Right now I’m proofreading a book of one- can stop thumbing its nose. Before I did it, it act plays by Eugène Labiche. It’s fourteen one- didn’t exist. Where there was none before, a act plays of Labiche and his battery of various translation now exists. collaborators, so I call it Labiche & Co. I picked the title before seeing Shakespeare & Co., by the way. The publisher sent it to me to be proofed, and I was appalled because the pages were all double-columned, which is fine if you’re studying a play, but for the theater, plays that you want to have produced, double-column pages are not appropriate. Actors have a terrible

72 Translation Review Book Translatıons by Norman R. Shapıro

Four Farces of Georges Feydeau with Georges Feydeau. The Pregnant Pause, or introduction (University of Chicago Press, Love’s Labor Lost, comedy in one act (Léonie 1970). est en avance, ou Le Mal joli) (New York, Applause Theater Books, 1987). Négritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean translation and notes (New York, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. The October House, 1971). Brazilian, comedy in one act (Le Brésilien) (New York, Applause Theater Books, 1987). The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love (Urbana, University of Illinois Eugène Labiche. A Slap in the Farce, and A Press, 1971). Matter of Wife and Death, comedies in one act (La Main leste and La Lettre chargée) (New Anne Hébert. Kamouraska, novel (New York, York, Applause Theater Books, 1988). Crown, 1973). Paper edition (Ontario, PaperJacks, 1974). Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, with Introduction and Notes (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, Joseph Majault. Virginie, or The Dawning of the 1988). World, novel (New York, Crown, 1974). The Fabulists French: Verse Fables of Nine Jean Raspail. The Camp of the Saints, novel Centuries, verse translations with prologue and (New York, Scribners, 1975). Paper edition notes (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, (New York, Ace Books, 1977). Reprint, Social 1992). Contract Press, 1995. La Fontaine’s Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts and Georges Feydeau. Tooth and Consequences, Lechers, verse translations from the Contes et comedy in one act (Hortense a dit: “Je m’en nouvelles en vers, with prologue and notes, in fous!”) with introduction (New York, Samuel the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translations French, 1980). series (Princeton University Press, 1992).

Feydeau, First to Last, Eight One-Act A Flea in Her Rear, or Ants in Her Pants, and Comedies, with introduction (Ithaca, Cornell Other Vintage French Farces (New York, University Press, 1982). Paper edition (Cornell, Applause Theater Books, 1993). 1982). Fifty More Fables of La Fontaine, with Georges Feydeau. Going to Pot, comedy in one introduction and notes (Urbana, University of act (On purge Bébé) (New York, Samuel Illinois Press, 1998). French, 1984). Selected Poems from Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs Fables from Old French: Aesop’s Beast and du Mal,” with introduction and notes (Chicago, Bumpkins (Middletown, Wesleyan University University of Chicago Press, 1998). Press, 1983). A Hundred and One Poems of Paul Verlaine Georges Feydeau. A Fitting Confusion, comedy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999). in three acts (Tailleur pour dames) in Classic Comedies, edited by Maurice Charney (New York, New American Library, 1985).

Translation Review 73 All Gall: Malicious Monologues and Ruthless Forthcoming: Recitations, texts by Feydeau, Allais, Xanrof, Bernard, MacNab, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Apollinaire, Picabia, Reynaud, and others (New Distaff And The Pen (a bilingual collection of York, Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, some 800 works of fifty-six female poets, from 1999). Marie de France to Albertine Sarrazin) (Johns Hopkins University Press, June 2008). Georges Feydeau. Take Her, She’s Yours! or Introductions by Rosanna Warren, Roberta Till Divorce Do Us Part, long-lost comedy in Krueger, Catherine Lafarge, and Catherine three acts (A qui ma femme?) (New York, Perry. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2000). Labiche & Co., Fourteen One-Act Comedies, Once Again, La Fontaine: Sixty New translated from the French, with introduction Translations from the “Fables.” Introduction by (Subtext, Inc.). John Hollander (Wesleyan University Press, Fall 2001). The Complete Poems of Sabine Sicaud (1913– 1928) (Subtext, Inc.). Introduction and notes by Victor Séjour. The Jew of Seville, five-act verse Odile Ayral-Clause, California Polytechnic drama, originally entitled Diégarias (University State University. of Illinois Press, 2002) (Paper edition 2007). Introduction and notes by Lynn Weiss, College Charles de Rémusat. L’Habitation de Saint- of William and Mary. Domingue, ou L’Insurrection, drama in five acts (Louisiana State University Press). Introduction Victor Séjour. The Fortune-Teller, five-act and notes by Doris Kadish, University of prose drama, with prologue, originally entitled Georgia. La Tireuse de cartes (University of Illinois Press, 2002) (Paper edition 2007). Introduction Preversities: A Jacques Prévert Sampler. A and notes by Lynn Weiss. bilingual collection of some 165 translations, with notes (Black Widow Press). Lyrics of the French Renaissance: Marot, Du Bellay, and Ronsard (Yale University Press, In preparation: 2002). Tulane University. Reprint publication in paper by University of Chicago Press (2006). Comtesse Anna de Noallies (1876–1933): A Life of Poems, Poems of a Life. A bilingual Creole Echoes (a bilingual collection of poems collection of some 145 translations, with notes. by the Francophone Louisiana poets of the mid- To contain an introduction by Catherine Perry, 19th century) (University of Illinois Press, Notre Dame University. 2003). Introduction and notes by Lynn Weiss, College of William & Mary. Poems in French and New Orleans Creole by Jules Choppin (1830–1914). Will probably The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine contain introductions by Werner Sollors, (University of Illinois Press). (August 2007). Harvard University, and Lynn Weiss.

Poems of Théophile Gautier, from Emaux et camées, España, and other collections.

74 Translation Review BOOK REVIEWS

Krasznahorkai, László. War and War. Consequently, all data have been erased from (Háború és háború. 1999.). Translation by your home page.” (The wording, one can note, George Szirtes. New York. New Directions. is peculiarly British for a web page originally 2006. 279 pp. Paper $16.94. opened in New York.) ISBN 0-8112-1609-8. War and War is the story of the obsession of a rural archivist, Dr. György Korin, with a Andrea Nemeth-Newhauser, Reviewer mysterious and beautiful manuscript he finds in the archives. In his own words, it was László Krasznahorkai is a prolific, highly acclaimed Hungarian writer with an apocalyptic a manuscript for which he could find no vision of human existence. His first novel, source, no provenance, no author, and what Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango), was called one of was strangest of all, Korin raised a warning the most important books published in the 1980s finger, without a clear purpose, something in Hungary. Although all of his subsequent that would never have a purpose, and books were eagerly awaited, Krasznahorkai therefore not the kind of manuscript he’d turned the publication of War and War, in rush to show the director of the institution, particular, into a carefully orchestrated though that is what he should have done, but multimedia event: before its actual publication one that made him do something an archivist in book form, the author published individual should never do: he took it away, and by sentences from it in three periodicals, followed doing so he knew, knew in his bones, that by Isaiah Has Come, a pamphlet he originally from that moment on he had ceased being a wanted to deliver to his friends personally, but true archivist, because by taking it he had which ultimately was published without fanfare become a common thief, the document being through traditional channels. When the book the one genuinely important item he had came out, it contained a pouch at the end for the ever handled in all his years as an archivist, insertion of this pamphlet. The book also the one undeniable treasure that meant so appeared on a CD-ROM that contained the much to him he felt he couldn’t rightly keep sentences published earlier, the pamphlet, the it to himself, as one kind of thief would, but, novel, and a fourth, added chapter about real like a different kind of thief, had to let the events. Namely, the final wish of the protagonist whole world know of its existence, not the is that the last sentence of the novel should be world of the present, he had decided, since written on a commemorative plaque and should that was wholly unfit to receive it, nor the be placed on the wall of a museum in world of the future since that would Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and indeed, it can be certainly be unfit, not even the world of the found there today (a film of the unveiling of the past which had long lost its dignity, but plaque is also contained on the CD-ROM). The eternity: it was eternity that should receive protagonist’s website was ostensibly available at the gift of this mysterious artifact, and that http://www.warandwar.com, but the text he put meant, as he realized, that he had to find a on the Internet in the novel is no longer at that form appropriate to eternity, and it was site, if it ever had been. Instead, we find the following the conversation in the restaurant following message: “Please be informed that that the idea suddenly came to him, that he your home page service has been called off due should lodge the manuscript among the to recurring overdue payment. Attempted mail millions of pieces of information stored by deliveries to Mr. G. Korin have been returned to computers which, following the general loss sender with a note: address unknown. of human memory, would become a

Translation Review 75 momentary isle of eternity, and now it didn’t descriptions of the people and situation. The matter, he wanted most firmly to emphasize uninterrupted flow of speech is apparently a this, it really didn’t matter how long reflection of Korin’s breathless eagerness to computers preserved it, the essential thing complete his task and to unburden himself to was, Korin explained to the woman in the anyone who will listen. Some paragraphs, for kitchen, that the thing should be done just example, paragraph 27 in Chapter 1 and once, and that all the extraordinary mass of paragraph 22 in Chapter 2, are a retelling of the computers that had once been previous paragraph not written in indirect interconnected, or so he suspected, a speech. In paragraph 7 in Chapter 5, Korin tells suspicion confirmed by much subsequent his hostess about a conversation between two of thought on the matter, would, all together, the travelers in the manuscript concerning the have given birth to, produced between defensibility of Venice; when Mustemann themselves, a space in the imagination that wakes up, one of the speakers repeats to him his was related not only or exclusively to eternal line of argument almost verbatim, adding truth, and that this was the right place in another layer of distance — and the requisite which to deposit the material he had stylistic elements — to the original telling. The found ... (92–93) breathless telling and retelling is executed so masterfully, however, that the reader may not So Korin rids himself of all his material even become aware of it until well into the possessions in a single hour and sets off for New novel, especially since the first several York, the center of the world, to type the text of paragraphs have our hero cornered by a gang of the manuscript into a computer and publish it youths on a railway bridge, fearing for his life online, intending to end his life once this task is and talking his way out of his predicament. accomplished. The manuscript itself is revealed Though all critics admire Krasznahorkai’s to the reader only from Korin’s descriptions linguistic bravura, the sad beauty of the novel’s interwoven into his own story. It is the story of hopeless philosophy and characters — five men who appear at different times and prominently featuring a vile Hungarian places in history: four friends, quite different in interpreter, and especially the beauty of its appearance and temperament, traveling together, language replete with lush descriptions, some spending all of their time in philosophical were puzzled by the convoluted story line and discussion, and Mustemann, a demonic fifth questioned the need for Korin to go to New figure, whose appearance indicates impending York to accomplish the task of putting the doom. The manuscript follows the travelers manuscript on the Internet and to go to from Minoan Crete to 1812 Cologne and on to Switzerland to commit suicide. Some also took Venice and 15th-century Spain. After issue with the events surrounding the completing his task, Korin becomes fascinated publication, calling them needlessly overblown. with a sculpture in Schaffhausen; he goes there The reader of the English translation will not to see it and to shoot himself with a pistol. be troubled by such exterior diversions. The If the publication of the novel was a book contains only the novel, a photo of the multimedia spectacle, its style is no less plaque in Schaffhausen, a black page extravagant. The eight chapters consist of reminiscent of Tristram Shandy — perhaps to numbered paragraphs, each of which consists of represent the pouch? — followed by Isaiah Has a single sentence, some just a few lines, some Come printed in a different font. There is no several pages long (see the long quote above). preface or introduction and no scholarly Much of the novel is written as indirect speech, apparatus in the book other than the footnotes in which the narrator retells Korin’s or some that can be found in the original, so in format, other character’s description of events and down to the numbered paragraphs, the translated conversations, inserting the narrator’s own novel is just as the author intended it to be. The

76 Translation Review English-speaking reader will also be treated to fact that Korin used a familiar form of address the same level of linguistic bravura as the reader — a notoriously difficult stylistic level to of the original, which is a tribute to the art and convey — in his Hungarian speech to the craft of the translator, George Szirtes. He is a American officer, which he most likely would much acclaimed bilingual poet living in not have done had the officer been Hungarian. England, who has translated many books and In a few instances, Szirtes’ minute insertions are poems from Hungarian, including The outright elegant: they add to the reader’s Melancholy of Resistance, an earlier novel by enjoyment but at the same time are thoroughly Krasznahorkai (Quartet, 1999). His numerous in keeping with Krasznahorkai’s style. On p. 50, awards include a 2005 PEN Translation Fund for example, instead of the simple “landing in Grant to translate War and War. the New World” of the original, Szirtes uses the On the whole, Szirtes is exceptionally true expression “arriving on the terra firma of the to the original. He masterfully handles the New World.” On p. 40, one finds a paragraph in challenge of indirect speech, which in English which Korin describes his debt to the Greek god requires a different treatment of tenses than in Hermes. The author calls this debt in Hungarian Hungarian, and navigates the minefield of run- “one that cannot be unstitched (or disentangled) on sentences that are not problematic in any further,” and Szirtes amusingly calls it Hungarian but are tricky in English. Both of “hermetically sealed.” In one puzzling instance, these tasks require great attention to detail while however, Szirtes renders the perfectly simple following the meandering sentences. Though Hungarian phrase “egy pillanat alatt” (in an some might think that the endless sentences instant) as “before you could say Jack pose a serious syntactic challenge, in reality the Robinson” (46), even though both the speaker translation requires much less rearrangement and the listener are Hungarians and the than one would expect. conversation takes place in Hungary. I, at least, Szirtes has witty solutions for potentially found this solution jarring. awkward translations. He used “Teflon heart,” Items that need explanations are handled words that occur in English song lyrics, to smoothly. On p. 41, for example, Szirtes adds translate “Ragaszthatatlan szív” (ungluable “the psychoanalyst” to give a context to the heart) from the lyrics of an actually existing name “Kerényi.” At other times, such as in the song Korin hears in Hungary. Instances of case of the Hungarian airlines, MALÉV, which foreign-language phrases within the text are recurs many times in the novel, he lets the name handled well, either when the foreign language stand without explanation until its nature is English for Hungarians or Hungarian for emerges in the course of the story. When Americans. The confusion of the curious form Hungarian words may have multiple meanings “lahsmini” and its revelation as “last minute” that are appropriate in the context, he may use (34) is done so smoothly in the translation that it two words to translate one, for example, does not matter that the speakers are Hungarian. “restlessness and anxiety” on p. 41 to render the In another instance, on Korin’s arrival in New Hungarian word “nyugtalanság.” Conversely, on York City, the translator has to clarify that for p. 142, when Korin’s host goes on about his lack of English, Korin is talking in Hungarian to relationship to art, that (in a literal translation) the immigration officer, and at the end of his “he was ordained to it by fate, he was preparing speech uses two English words: “no for it all his life, he was born to do it,” Szirtes understand.” In his translation, Szirtes puts in elegantly shortens this to “art was his raison the Hungarian words for this phrase, followed d’étre.” by “in other words,” and the English translation, Having witnessed this level of ingenuity to which he then appends the clause: “adding, and acuity in George Szirtes’ translation, I was usefully, in English, No understand” (51). The somewhat puzzled by the number of only element that got lost in translation is the mistranslations and inaccuracies. Taken

Translation Review 77 individually, however, they are rather Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short- insignificant and do not disturb the reader’s Shorts. Translated and edited by Aili Mu, Julie enjoyment of the novel. Just to give a few Chiu, and Howard Goldblatt. New York. examples, on p. 29 we read, “and the clothes he Columbia University Press. 2006. 272 pp. wore! that enormous, long dark-gray overcoat Cloth $25.00. ISBN 978-0-231-13848-2. smelling of mothballs, his great lanky body and his comparatively tiny, round bald head,” Andrea Lingenfelter, Reviewer whereas the original actually means “the way he looked was astonishing! a long dark-gray Although still relatively obscure in the US, overcoat smelling of mothballs, and compared the short-short story has been immensely to his great lanky body, a comparatively tiny, popular in the Chinese-speaking world for round bald head.” In this instance, “óriási” decades. Until recently, however, this rich (enormous, huge) in the original did not mean tradition has not been available to English- the size of the overcoat; it indicates the language readers. Loud Sparrows, an anthology speaker’s surprise at Korin’s appearance. A few of short-short fiction, goes a long way toward lines later, Szirtes writes, “for who would have filling this gap. The editors, Aili Mu, Julie Chiu, failed to recognize himself from such a and Howard Goldblatt (who are also the book’s description,” as opposed to the original: “he translators, with additional translations by the could not have recognized himself from such a writer Lin Li-chun), have collected a diverse description.” On p. 33 we read, “she had always array of engaging short-shorts from the PRC, had a weakness for big ears because they made Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Penned by over 60 the face look sweet, and in any case she could different authors, these 91 stories reflect the have stood up and left him any time she variety and complexity of their authors’ wanted.” Contrast the original: “she had always societies. had a weakness for big ears because they make a As one might expect, the genre has attracted face look sweet, even one that you would veteran or established writers like Wang Zengqi, otherwise easily walk past.” On p. 36 we find, Mo Yan, and A Cheng in the PRC, Yuan “scattered individual browsers of brochures Qiongqiong and Ku Ling in Taiwan, and Xi Xi desirous of travel,” instead of “people desirous and Ye Si (Leung Ping-kwan) in Hong Kong. of travel standing around in scattered clusters” But the form is also notable for its appeal to (an easy confusion of “füzet” [brochure] with non-professional writers, people from all walks “füzér” [cluster]). On pp. 145–46, Szirtes talks of life, for whom it constitutes an accessible of “monastic travelers” and “monks” instead of outlet for self-expression. The stories assembled the “pilgrims” of the original. Such in Loud Sparrows reflect a wide variety of mistranslations are easy to make, however, and styles, subjects, and sensibilities; and they run they do not question the translator’s skill. On the the gamut, from literary to plain-spoken, from other hand, they do indicate that it would be political to psychological, from oblique and desirable for publishers to ensure that every open-ended to straightforward and punchy. translation undergoes a careful, side-by-side Taken together, these pieces create a group comparison with the original. After having portrait of the diverse literary communities that successfully navigated the rapids of a novel such produced them. as this one, the translator is hardly in a position With so many different voices to render into to perform this task accurately. Only careful English, the translators had their work cut out vetting by an independent pair of eyes can for them. Unlike a novel or single-author ensure that the otherwise excellent work we collection of poetry, where one can settle into hold in our hands does full justice to what the one author’s voice and style, the translators of a author wrote. collection like this have to be especially nimble if they are to preserve the individuality of the

78 Translation Review pieces. The team of translators has done an Although united by a single written admirable job here. Take, for example, these language, the tales in Loud Sparrows range far short passages from Julie Chiu’s renderings of and wide: from country to city, from past to pieces by two different authors. The first excerpt present, and over several political systems and is from “Mothballs,” by Chen Kehua (Taiwan): stages of economic development. Stories from the early-1980s PRC portray a society bogged And so they don’t say another word. He down by bureaucracy, while in later pieces, takes her hand and carries it into his corruption comes more to the fore — and yet the overcoat pocket. They walk off together. importance of guanxi remains unchanged. In Such cold, dry weather is rare in Taipei. Hong Kong and Taiwan, the protagonists tend to His tan overcoat, with its turned down face problems more characteristic of the collar, gives off the faint smell of mothballs, developed world and the middle class. Indeed, I carried in the air by the wind. Only just felt that a sense of place was important to many taken out of the closet, it seems. As she of these stories, and I wonder whether the leans close to his shoulder, she thinks: A reading experience might have been even richer man’s body cannot smell any better than if the editors had highlighted these regional this. variations by noting the authors’ locations in the Clean, neutral, with few associations. main text. (This information is included in the biographical notes at the back of the book.) Contrast this with the opening of “Fad,” by Cantonese transliterations might also have been Zhang Zheng (PRC): used throughout the stories from Hong Kong, which currently include both Mandarin-based Tang Ying was obsessed with the pinyin and familiar Cantonese words like thought that her clothes weren’t hip enough. Kowloon and Mongkok. Given the strength of She spent five or six reminbi a month Hong Kong cultural and linguistic identity, such subscribing to magazines like L’Officiel, a move might provide useful context. But these Fashion, and Haute Couture but still felt are minor cavils, and I hope that the fine dissatisfied with her personal style. translators of this collection will not take my suggestions amiss. Above all, Loud Sparrows is The voices are quite distinct. Chen’s spare delightful, and each of the stories in it is a sentences and fragments are remade in a pleasure to read. restrained English, while Zhang’s prose pours In closing, I would be remiss if I did not forth in long, almost gushy sentences. mention another of the treats found in these Some short-shorts, like the Ku Ling pieces pages. To introduce each thematically grouped included in the anthology, depend on snappy last section, Howard Goldblatt has written a piece of lines for their effect. In these instances, the flash fiction. These are a lot of fun (my favorite translator faces the extra challenge of matching is the piece that introduces the section entitled that punch in English. Again, the translators “(In)Fidelities”), and they are further evidence have met that challenge, as their fine renderings in support of my long-held belief that every of Ku’s “Family Catastrophe,” “Death Dream,” good translator is a writer in his or her own and “Confession of a Photographer” amply right. demonstrate. (I won’t cite any passages here, lest I spoil the fun for future readers!) At other times, it is subtler shifts that a story turns on, as in “Empty Seat” by Yuan Qiongqiong; and the translator’s smooth English has just the right amount of finesse.

Translation Review 79 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Rashōmon and 17 Akutagawa to international literary fame by Other Stories. Translation by Jay Rubin. creating a market for new translations, including Introduced by Haruki Murakami. New York. Rashōmon and Other Stories (Boston: Tuttle, Penguin Books. 2006. 268 pp. Paper $15.00. 1952; NY: Liveright, 1952), translated by the ISBN 0-14-303984-9. Japanese professor Kojima Takashi. Over the years, Kojima continued to champion the work Jeffrey Angles, Reviewer of Akutagawa to English-speaking audiences, eventually producing the two thick volumes (Note: Japanese names in this review appear in Japanese Short Stories (NY: Liveright the traditional Japanese order, with the surname Publishing Corp., 1961) and Exotic Japanese first and given name next. For instance, Stories, co-translated with John McVittie (NY: Akutagawa is the family name of the author, and Liveright Publishing Corp., 1964). Thanks to Ryūnosuke is his given name.) these widely distributed and often reprinted translations, Akutagawa was probably the best- The case of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892– known modern Japanese author in the English- 1927) is proof that, as André Lefevere has speaking world of the early 1960s. Interestingly, shown, the time and circumstances under which many of the works translated in these early a particular author’s work is translated greatly collections draw their inspiration from classical shape the position that author will occupy when Japanese and Chinese literature. As a result, stepping onto the stage of world literature. these early translations gave the misleading Akutagawa is one of the most highly respected impression that Akutagawa belonged more to masters of the short story, well known in Japan the classical world than to the twentieth century for his ability to produce short, entertaining, and — the era of dramatic literary change and marvelously crafted tales which, despite their development in which he actually lived and brevity, are rich in philosophical implications. worked. Although Japanese have accorded him a Although Akutagawa’s reputation as one of prominent position within the canon in their the great authors of twentieth-century literature country, his position on the international stage has not eroded in Japan, he slowly lost ground in has shifted significantly over time. America as other Japanese authors stepped into Because he worked in the relatively the limelight. An entire generation of English- accessible medium of the short story, he was speaking readers interested in modern Japan — among the earliest contemporary authors to be not the classical world that dominates the stories translated into English. Several translations translated in the early English collections of appeared during the prewar period, but most Akutagawa’s works — turned to new came from Japanese publishers such Hokuseido translations of Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Press, which published Glenn W. Shaw’s book Jun’ichirō, and Mishima Yukio, and Akutagawa of translations Tales Grotesque and Curious in went to the back of the line. By the 1980s and 1930. These books, however, circulated 1990s, only a few of his stories — those that primarily within Japan and did not contribute Kurosawa had immortalized — remained well significantly to Akutagawa’s fame abroad. This read, and even university courses about all changed in 1950, when the director Japanese literature in translation rarely featured Kurosawa Akira released the film Rashōmon, any more than those. Part of the problem was no which was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories. doubt that the language of the translations from Rashōmon took the Venice Film Festival by the 1960s did not sound contemporary. It gave storm and quickly began appearing in cinemas the impression that there was “nothing new” around the world, helping to create a large about Akutagawa — that there was nothing international market for Japanese cinema for the especially modern about him, nor was there first time. Kurosawa’s film catapulted anything more to know. Over the years, a

80 Translation Review handful of new translations of his work most famous stories and compels the appeared, featuring experimental pieces that Anglophone world to see him with new eyes. revealed to Anglophone audiences a modernist Perhaps because Rubin has translated so side of the author whom English readers had much contemporary work, he has a fine ear for known primarily as a teller of historical tales. colloquial language, and this is reflected in Still, the principal audience of these works many places in his translations. For instance, the remained a relatively rarified group interested in bandit Tajōmaru begins the famous confession Japanese culture. Despite his enormous stature of “In a Bamboo Grove” (藪の中), “Sure, I in Japanese letters, Akutagawa’s stock in the killed the man” (13). In the Japanese, the English-speaking world had fallen. statement is stiff but dramatic: This new collection of translations should do (あの男を殺したのはわたしです), literally wonders to correct this. The book sports an eye- “The one who killed that man was I.” The catching manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro on the natural tone that Rubin has adopted here is not cover — an attempt, no doubt, to capture the inappropriate; in fact, the colloquial tone is interest of those millions of Western fans of entirely in keeping with the speech patterns that Japanese animation and graphic novels. The appear elsewhere throughout Tajōmaru’s name of the wildly popular contemporary speech. postmodern novelist Murakami Haruki, who Still, Rubin knows not to go too far and wrote the introduction, appears prominently on accidentally turn the character into a the cover in a font that is almost as large as the contemporary American. A few lines after the name of the author himself. These two factors quote above, Rubin’s Tajōmaru makes the give the distinct impression that Penguin Books statement, “Oh come on, killing a man is not as has resurrected Akutagawa as a new, fresh big a thing as people like you seem to think” figure relevant to a new generation of readers (何、男を殺すなぞは、あなた方の思ってい interested in postmodernism and Japanese pop るように、大した事ではありません culture. ). The Although the name of Jay Rubin, the idiomatic “come on” gives a contemporary feel translator, appears on the cover in letters so to the sentence, yet Rubin has resisted what small they are almost invisible, it is he who is might be a slangy but natural tendency to render the one that deserves the overwhelming credit the clause (大した事ではありません) as “it for giving Akutagawa this fresh, polished look. was no big deal.” In another place, Tajōmaru Rubin, a professor emeritus from Harvard, is brags about his skill as a famous bandit: “Still, I one of the most prominent translators of modern am Tajōmaru. One way or another, I managed to Japanese literature in the United States. knock the knife out of her hand without drawing Although he has published outstanding my sword” (14). In the Japanese, this appears as translations of older classics of modern a single unbroken, unmarked sentence: literature, such as the early twentieth-century (が、わたしも多襄丸ですから、どうにかこ work of Natsume Sōseki, his most widely うにか太刀も抜かずに、とうとう小刀を打 circulated works have been his translations of ち落しました). Rubin has used italics to the contemporary novels of Murakami Haruki represent the natural stress patterns of English, — the same author who wrote the introduction and he has broken the long sentence into two to this collection. Few people would dare to take where a contemporary English speaker would on the task of retranslating such a canonical probably stop. Still, in rendering the expression author as Akutagawa, especially when he has (どうにかこうにか) he has opted not for the been given such short shrift in the English- straightforward and perhaps more colloquial speaking world in recent decades. For this “somehow” but the clause “one way or another,” reason, we should be deeply grateful to Rubin which contains the multiple options present in for this book, which retranslates many of the

Translation Review 81 the Japanese (“in some way, perhaps this way”). sensibility into a story set long ago. After all, as Here then is the value of these marvelous new Murakami argues in the introduction to this translations: Rubin has given us a fresh new volume, Akutagawa was, despite his interest in Akutagawa free of all of the cobwebs that had premodern subject matter, always “pointed settled over Kojima’s translations from the toward modernism” (xxvi). 1960s, yet he does not render the text in such a To remove the French in this translation breezy, idiomatic voice that readers lose would have been to distort the original by perspective and forget that the original was by a polishing away its modern graininess, separating Japanese author with his own unique style. it away from the moment that the story was In fact, one of the goals of Rubin’s written and placing it instead in the moment in translations is clearly to highlight those which it was set. Interestingly, that is exactly idiosyncrasies within Akutagawa’s style that what Kojima did in his earlier translation of this were not always visible in earlier translations. passage: “And the weather had not a little to do For instance, in Rubin’s translation of the with his depressed mood” (NY: Liveright, 1952: famous “Rashōmon” (羅生門), one finds the 37). Unlike Akutagawa’s original and Rubin’s following sentence. “The weather, too, translation, which draw attention to the medium contributed to the sentimentalisme of this Heian of language through the insertion of French, Period menial” (4). The macaronic use of the Kojima’s effacement of the foreign word leads French word sentimentalisme may seem jarring an English reader to forget that in these stories, in a work about twelfth-century Japan until one Akutagawa is a modern observer peeping realizes that it is there in roman letters in the through a lens into twelfth-century Japan. middle of Akutagawa’s original: Rubin’s translation is, to borrow a term from (その上、今日の空模様も少からずこの平安 Lawrence Venuti, minoritizing in that it shows 朝の下人の Sentimentalisme に影響した). As the graininess of the original and helps to situate the original work within the larger system of Rubin explains in his introduction to the Japanese literature — a particular moment in the collection, this particular choice of words is one 1910s when authors like Akutagawa were sign of Akutagawa’s youthful inexperience at looking for fresh new ways to represent the controlling diction — a gaffe of the kind that he world of the inner self. would learn to control later in his development One of the most interesting uses of a as a writer (xvii). Although it does seem minoritizing style is in the story “O-gin” startling in the context of a story about おぎん traditional Japan, the French word does make ( ) about a family of Japanese Christians sense when one considers that Akutagawa wrote near Nagasaki martyred during the first half of this in 1915, an era when Japan was undergoing the seventeenth century. (Spanish and what the scholar Isoda Kōichi has called “the Portuguese missionaries had been especially revolution of emotion” (感情の革命) and active in that region before the national government outlawed the religion.) The text is numerous Japanese writers, drawing upon narrated from the point of view of someone who European romanticism and French symbolism in knows only a bit about Christianity and who particular, were using increasingly flowery finds the concepts of the Japanese Christians terms to talk about personal feeling. Like many curiously foreign. Throughout Akutagawa’s of his generation, Akutagawa was fascinated original, one finds Christian terms transliterated with European literature, and he read numerous from European languages but not translated into works of French, Russian, and English いんへるの literature. Therefore, one could see the Japanese, for example, (inheruno interjection of the French word sentimentalisme or “inferno”), ばぷちずも (bapuchizumo or as a reflection of this interest and his attempt to “baptism”), ぜすす (zesusu or “Jesus”), and breathe a modern, contemporary, and personal はらいそ (haraiso or “paradise”). While there

82 Translation Review are modern Japanese equivalents for each of as Japan attempted to expand its empire. Here, these words (地獄, 洗礼, イエス, and 天国, for the first time in English, we have all of these respectively), Akutagawa instead uses the aspects of his writing in one handy volume. transliterations to suggest how alien these words Rubin deserves praise not simply for translating sounded to the narrator. Meanwhile, he locates Akutagawa so well but also for presenting an the text in that particular moment in the early English readership with a marvelously selected seventeenth century when these concepts had and thoroughly annotated collection that shows been introduced into Japanese but had not yet the author in his many chameleon colors. been fully digested to the point that they had As a final aside, it is worth noting that only developed Japanese equivalents. Rubin has months after Penguin published Rubin’s made the clever decision not to translate the translations, another collection, titled meaning of these words but to re-transliterate Mandarins: Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the Japanese transliterations back into Roman translated by Charles de Wolf (Brooklyn, NY: letters. The result is that the text is peppered Archipelago Books, 2007), appeared in print. with words like “inherno,” “baptismo,” “zesus,” Although this collection contains two stories in and “haraiso” (84, 86). As a result, Rubin’s common with Rubin’s collection, it also translation perfectly replicates for English contains several new translations of previously readers the illusion that Akutagawa has created untranslated works. It is a rare and wonderful — an illusion that these terms are strange and year when the English-reading public receives foreign for the narrator and that the concepts two such treasures from one of modern Japan’s they represent have still not yet found Japanese most interesting authors. equivalents. Needless to say, this defamiliarizing effect would vanish entirely if one were to replace these words unproblematically with their common English Lowe, Elizabeth and Earl E. Fitz. Translation equivalents. and the Rise of Inter-American Literature. Of the eighteen stories in this collection, Foreword by Ilan Stavans. Gainesville. nine have not been translated before. Rubin has University Press of Florida. 2007. 240 pp. taken care not to focus too much on the Cloth $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8130-3168-2. historical stories like Kojima Takashi. He has also chosen an array of stories that are more in Rainer Schulte, Reviewer keeping with the Japanese view of Akutagawa as a multi-faceted writer. He includes previously Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz have written a untranslated stories, such as “The Writer’s scholarly book that is free of academic jargon Craft” (文章) and “Death Register” (点鬼簿), and a pleasure to read. Both the general reader that show Akutagawa as a trickster who mines and the student who pursues the study of Latin his personal life for literary material but remains American Literature and World Literature find coy enough that his real life remains always in this monograph an accessible and insightful slightly out of view. He includes stories, such as orientation of the works that have shaped the new translations of “The Life of a Stupid Man” powerful tradition of literature in the Americas. (或阿呆の一生) and “Spinning Gears” (歯車), The refreshing interpretive perspective that the authors bring to the study is that of the that show Akutagawa as a modernist translator, who is the most important mediator experimenting with fragmentary modes of between cultures and also the most intense expression and exploring altered states of mind. reader of literary texts. All the detailed He also includes “The Story of a Head that Fell interpretive approaches to the major writers of 首が落ちた話 Off” ( ), which shows Akutagawa the boom and after the boom in Latin America as interested in stories collected from far away are guided by the translator’s perspective.

Translation Review 83 Many Latin American writers have had the In the preface, the authors clearly outline good fortune of finding excellent translators to what they want to achieve in this monograph: see their works flourish in the English-speaking world. The names of all these translators — “It is our intention, then, to call attention to Gregory Rabassa, Margaret Sayers Peden, and the importance translation has had, and Edith Grossman, to name just a few — and their continues to have, on the reception of Latin successes are a bright light in the history of American literature in the United States, 20th-century translations. The choices made by where it has made available to English the translators ultimately determine how well or speakers the richness, sophistication, and how poorly a particular text is received by a diversity of writing in Brazil and Spanish very different reader from a very different America.” culture and with very different sets of expectations. To a great extent, they have been Thus, many of the South American writers are responsible for the recognition the boom of featured with their translators and with Latin American Literature has experienced in discussions of how these translations have the United States. drastically shaped the way an American reader Latin American literature showed American now views the sensibility of a continent that is writers how to think in new ways about old so close, geographically speaking, to the United topics, and the translators are ultimately States but still separated by an intellectual and responsible for stimulating a New World emotional wall. cultural exchange. The underlying intention of In the act of translation, the specific Lowe and Fitz’s study is to promote Inter- interpretive perspective of the respective American literature as an emergent new field for translator does become transparent and forms comparative literature studies and world the reader’s image of the original text. literature. The concept of Inter-American However, the success of a translation in its literature comprises the literatures of Canada, recreation of the power of the original depends both Anglophone and Francophone, the United on the strength of the translator’s orientation in States, Spanish America, Brazil, and the the language, culture, and artistic environment Caribbean. Within these broadly conceived of the source language. The coming together of boundaries, the emphasis of the book lies on the a group of excellent translators at the time of the detailed analysis of individual writers and their boom was responsible for recreating the power works as these works have traveled into new of the original language and for transferring a cultures via the efforts of the translator. different and intriguing way of looking at the The dialogue between North and South world, which in turn reshaped writing in the America reveals a strange imbalance. Latin United States. Americans are quite familiar with the United Anyone who has a fluent reading knowledge States and its culture, whereas there has been a of a foreign language knows that a translation continuous resistance to the acceptance of will never fully recreate all the nuances of the foreign literatures in North America. The original. Yet, if we wish to participate in the superpower United States tends to disparage and diversity of world literature, we must accept the dismiss writers from Brazil and Spanish reading of world masterpieces in translation. America, and the relationship between the Both authors are keenly aware of this dilemma, United States and Latin America has from the and they have expressed their views with these beginning been beset by animosity and mistrust, words: which has often interfered with a meaningful cultural exchange. Americans need to learn “Reading foreign literature in translation is more about the other nations of the New World. the second best option, although, as we have sought to demonstrate in the preceding

84 Translation Review pages, it is important to bear in mind that no Weltanschauung, which finds a new residence in matter how meticulously done a translation North America through the transformation of may be, it simply does not offer the same translation. In addition to the sensitive range of experiences that reading a text in its interpretation of individual authors, specific original language offers. It is one thing to themes emerge that give an internal coherence read the text known as One Hundred Years to that Weltanschauung, namely, the of Solitude, but it is quite another thing to overpowering presence of “solitude.” read the one known as Cien años de soledad, “The condition of solitude, as it is elevated and it is yet another thing to read the two to a symbol of hemispheric importance in One together, comparing and contrasting the Hundred Years of Solitude, is a now unifying linguistically driven Weltanschauung that though previously divisive New World each projects (Rabassa’s English version of experience. Translation is the mechanism that García Márquez’s Spanish) and has allowed the literary cultures of Spanish contemplating the similar yet different ways America and Brazil to overcome the cultural these worldviews are developed, transmitted, solitude, born of disrespect, which had so long and, above all, interpreted.” plagued them and inhibited their recognition by their hemispheric neighbors and by the world The conceptual essence of the above quote can audience generally.” One Hundred Years of be considered a leitmotif of the entire Solitude by Márquez and The Labyrinth of monograph. On the one hand, the translator Solitude by Octavio Paz inhabit the landscape of takes on the role of being the most important that idea. In addition, writers like Carlos figure in establishing a meaningful and Fuentes, Euclides da Cunha, and Mario Vargas responsible dialogue between cultures and Llosa are keenly aware of how solitude drives languages, and on the other, the comparative the search for identity in Latin American study of the original and the translation of a literature. While solitude haunts many of the work opens up a new and expanded characters in the novels of these authors, the understanding of the Weltanschauungen of intrinsic isolation of that solitude finds a new people who live on different continents with resonance in North America through the act of different languages. Moreover, the simultaneous translation and could ultimately be considered a reading of a work in the original and its common revitalizing denominator to link the translation should become a valuable two Americas. In a sense, North America, and methodological approach to expand the study of especially Canada, could find its identity anchor comparative literature. After all, the in the transformational possibilities of solitude. methodologies derived from the art and craft of In Rebellion in the Backlands, da Cunha translation can drastically revitalize the reading “focuses our attention not only on the solitude of and interpretation of both national and Brazil as it seeks to take its place in a world that international literatures. largely ignores it but the solitude imposed on One of the coherent structural principles of people the world over by ignorance, poverty, the monograph is the detailed interpretive and fanaticism.” In The Labyrinth of Solitude, discussion of many Latin American writers seen Paz argued very convincingly that his “solitude” through the eyes of the translator. In each case, was not meant to isolate Mexico, but rather to the success of a work in a new language see Mexico in relation to its northern neighbor. environment depends on the intuitive and Paz arrives at the following conclusion: informed recreation of a work by the translator. “Mexicans knew a great deal more about the All the discussions of the individual writers United States than Americans did about Mexico. engage the reader in experiencing the More than this, they were shocked by a writer atmosphere of what is specific to a Latin from an ‘inferior’ culture having the audacity to American worldview, an extremely vital actually criticize some of the most salient

Translation Review 85 features of American life, which Paz would and its original text to ascertain what was compare, often quite incisively, with life in gained and what was lost, linguistically, Mexico.” aesthetically, and culturally, in the process The balance between the insightful of translation itself. This latter form of interpretations of individual works by Latin translation scholarship, when amplified with American writers and the crystallization of notes and full analytical discussion of the Weltanschauungen that place these works into myriad decisions that the translator makes the larger context of world literature creates the when interpreting the original text, can often intensity and attraction of Lowe and Fitz’s be very successfully developed as a doctoral study. At the same time, they are keenly aware dissertation, as can a close comparative that an inter-American communication must rely study of the various translations that may very heavily on the art and craft of translation, exist of a single source work, such as and they point the way to an exciting new field Borges, Neruda, or Machado in their various of doctoral dissertations in the field of English versions.” translation scholarship: Translation and the Rise of Inter-American “For doctoral students, translations may be Literature has widened the interpretive used to round out or expand a reading list, perspectives toward Latin American literature they might serve as the focus on an influence and traced meaningful paths toward an and reception study, or they might facilitate expanded understanding between the two a close comparative reading of a translation Americas.

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Cover image: Sculpture by Philip John Evett Born in 1923 in England, currently resides in Texas

Santa Barbara 2003 cedar, mahogany, and wenge woods 77 3/4 x 14 x 15 inches

Represented by Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas Photograph courtesy of Ansen Seale