View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Érudit Article "“How Can You Use Two Languages and Mean What You Say in Both?”: On Translating Margaret Atwood’s Poetry into Spanish" Pilar Somacarrera TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 18, n° 1, 2005, p. 157-181. Pour citer cet article, utiliser l'information suivante : URI: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/014371ar DOI: 10.7202/014371ar Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir. Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter à l'URI https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Pour communiquer avec les responsables d'Érudit : [email protected] Document téléchargé le 9 février 2017 03:59 Appendice “How Can You Use Two Languages and Mean What You Say in Both?”1: On Translating Margaret Atwood’s Poetry into Spanish Pilar Somacarrera The reception of Margaret Atwood’s works in Spain Contrary to what might be expected, a Canadian literature in Spanish translation already exists, as demonstrated by the list of Canadian books published in Spain displayed in the web page of the Canadian Embassy in Madrid which reveals over one hundred and forty titles.2 One of the most represented writers in the list is, expectedly, Margaret Atwood, who already has a readership, as well as a certain literary prestige in a country like Spain, where Canadian culture still lives in the shadow of the United States. The review of Oryx and Crake which recently appeared in the national newspaper ABC describes her as “a candidate to the Nobel Prize for Literature, a prolific author whose titles are well-known to Spanish readers” 1 These are two lines from Margaret Atwood’s “Two-Headed Poems,” in Selected Poems. Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 227. This article was written with the assistance of the financial aid from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Project HUM 2004-00515 FILO. 2 See http://www.international.gc.ca/canadaeuropa/spain/libros-es.asp. I would like to thank the Canadian Embassy in Madrid for granting me access to their file of Spanish newspaper articles about Margaret Atwood. 157 (Velasco, 2004, p. 13). Although Atwood has been described as a writer who is concerned, in the words of Luis Marigómez, “with the exploration of women’s lives” (1998, p. 25), Spanish male critics who have reviewed her work do not consider her a radical feminist. Marigómez remarks that he is interested in Margaret Atwood because “although she has a feminist point of view, it is not radical.”3 José Antonio Gurpegui, a professor of American Literature at the University of Alcalá de Henares who regularly writes reviews of Atwood’s novels, observes that to catalogue Atwood as a feminist author is to reduce the meaning of her work (1998, p. 18). All of Atwood’s novels except Life Before Man, as well as three of her collections of short stories have been translated into Spanish. A look at the list4 of Atwood’s titles which have been published in Spain reveals some significant facts. Firstly, the excellent reception which the Canadian writer has had in Catalonia, as most of her books have been published by Catalan editors, and two of her novels−Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin−have even been translated into the Catalan language, the last of which in two different editions. Secondly, that one of her most acclaimed novels, The Handmaid’s Tale, which was the first novel by Margaret Atwood to be translated into Spanish, was reedited in 2001. Thirdly, that some of her earlier novels, like the first one, The Edible Woman (1969) (La mujer comestible, 2003) have recently been translated more than twenty years after they were first published, a fact which indicates their present relevance for Spanish readers. Reviews of Margaret Atwood’s books started to appear regularly in the Spanish press since the mid-nineties, with the publication of Lady Oracle and The Robber Bride. Miguel Dalmau describes her as “one of the most interesting novelists in North America” (1996, p. 39), and she has also been hailed as “the grand Dame of Canadian letters” (Gurpegui, 1998, p.18). Another evident sign of her popularity among the Spanish readership is that her book 3 Interview with Angélica Tamarro: “La cara oculta de Atwood,” El Norte de Castilla, February 2th, 2000, p. 13. 4 See Appendix. 158 Murder in the Dark (Asesinato en la oscuridad, translated by Isabel Carrera) was included in a series of works by the most important writers of the Millenium published by the national newspaper El mundo. The major Spanish newspapers included notes when Margaret Atwood won the Booker Price in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. When the Spanish edition of this novel was published, a full-page photograph of her appeared in the cultural supplement of one of the most prestigious national newspapers, El País. The coverage included an interview and a full-page review by Ana María Moix, a well-known Spanish writer, who refers to Atwood’s book as “another great novel by Margaret Atwood” (2001, p. 3). Atwood’s Spanish translators have also been praised. In her review of Oryx and Crake, the writer Ana María Moix observes that Atwood has been lucky to have excellent translators into Spanish, both for her poetry and fiction (2004, p. 8). Her Spanish translators include poets like Luís Marigómez, and University professors of literature, like Lidia Taillefer, translator of The Journals of Susanna Moodie, affiliated with the University of Málaga, and Isabel Carrera, a professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of Oviedo, and an Atwood specialist. Outside the literary and academic world, Atwood has been translated by Juanjo Estrella, one of Spain’s most prestigious translators, who rendered Dan Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code into Spanish. Translating Margaret Atwood’s poetry: a critical and stylistic approach A great deal of attention has been paid to the difficulties involved in the translation of poetry which derives from the fact that, as Barbara Folkart argues, poetry is a cognitive activity and a way of modeling the world (1999, pp. 31 and 33). When I started translating Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics into Spanish, I felt it was essential that the original could be recognized in the translation, but I was also aware that, as David Connolly points out, the translated text had to function as a poem in Spanish (1998, p. 171), a language whose rhythmical and tonal structure is very different from English. As a researcher and a teacher of Canadian literature, I also bore in mind the multiple readings that the poems could offer. The multiplicity of interpretations of a poem corresponds to the many possible translations (Frawley, 1984, p. 4; Bassnett, 1980, p. 101). 159 My way into the poems was, first of all, a thorough stylistic analysis which, like Connolly, I consider a prerequisite in poetic translation (1998, p. 173). In a second step, I reviewed the literary criticism about the poems which led me to confirm the plurality of interpretations offered by Atwood’s collection, which depicts heterosexual relationships as a Foucaldian struggle for power. For a long time, the book has only been approached from a feminist point of view (Onley, 1974; Blakely, 1983), and, in fact, it has been argued that the poems can be considered a response to Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics, published in 1970, in which the concept of heterosexual relationships as political was first articulated (Stein, 1999, p. 30).5 Although Power Politics has received other interpretations,6 a translator cannot ignore that the fact that the collection was first published at the highest point of Second Wave feminism, fuelled by Millett’s groundbreaking work which gave voice to the anger of a generation. Gayatri Spivak reminds us that the task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of gendered agency (2003, p. 397), and this should be taken into account when translating a book like Power Politics. As Louise von Flotow argues, feminist translators working in a context and culture conducive to feminist writing are thus likely to produce work that is politically congruent with their time (1997, pp. 43-44). To support her argument, von Flotow quotes Barbara Godard: “Translation, in this theory of feminist discourse, is production, not reproduction” (1990, p. 91). 5 In fact, the interaction between sexual and political power in the book is inescapable, and as Katherine E. Waters notes, sexual politics is a microcosm of the wider political reality of imperialism (Katherine Waters, “Margaret Atwood: Love on the Dark Side of the Moon,” in Margaret Andersen, ed., Mother Was Not a Person, Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1972, p. 102). 6 See, for example, Judith McCombs’ gothic reading of the poems: “Atwood’s Haunted Sequences: The Circle Game, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and Power Politics,” in Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, eds., The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, Toronto, House of Anansi, 1981, pp. 35-54. 160 As a translator, I also felt it was necessary to revise the existing criticism about Atwood’s poetry, which is not as copious as that on her fiction.