How Peripheral is the Periphery? Translating Portugal Back and Forth : Essays in Honour of João Ferreira Duarte [1 ed.] 9781443883047, 9781443874205

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How Peripheral Is the Periphery? Translating Portugal Back and Forth

How Peripheral Is the Periphery? Translating Portugal Back and Forth Essays in Honour of João Ferreira Duarte Edited by

Rita Bueno Maia, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Sara Ramos Pinto

How Peripheral Is the Periphery? Translating Portugal Back and Forth: Essays in Honour of João Ferreira Duarte Edited by Rita Bueno Maia, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Sara Ramos Pinto This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Rita Bueno Maia, Marta Pacheco Pinto, Sara Ramos Pinto and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7420-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7420-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Images ............................................................................................. ix List of Tables .............................................................................................. xi Foreword .................................................................................................. xiii Helena Carvalhão Buescu Introduction ............................................................................................. xvii Portugal and Translation between Centre and Periphery Rita Bueno Maia, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Sara Ramos Pinto PART I MAPPING THE PERIPHERY Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Translation on the Semi-Periphery: Portugal as Cultural Intermediary in the Transportation of Knowledge Karen Bennett Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 The Project of a Critical Bibliography of Translated Literature and its Relevance for Translation Studies in Portugal Teresa Seruya Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 31 Dramaturgy, Translation and Performance: The Case of Contemporary Portuguese Theatrical Repertoires Christine Zurbach Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 45 The TETRA Project: Preliminary Results and Perspective Manuela Carvalho

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Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 63 Why Don’t You Ask Them Yourself? Immersion into the Field of Professional Translation Practice in Northern Portugal (A Holistic View) Fernando Ferreira Alves PART II BETWEEN THE PERIPHERY AND THE CENTRE: DIALOGUES AND MOVEMENTS Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 85 The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story: Its English Reception and Portuguese Afterlife Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 119 A “Medley of Dialects”? Liberality and Stringency in Ted Hughes’s Poetics of Translation Rui Carvalho Homem Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 135 The Translator’s Creativity Susan Bassnett Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 149 Vanishing Boundaries: Fernando Pessoa and His Translators Maria Eduarda Keating Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 165 From Periphery towards the Centre: Salgari’s Adventures in Portugal and a Bibliography Maria Lin Moniz Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 205 The Power of Locality and the Use of English: A Case Study of Non-Translation in the Portuguese Blogosphere Alexandra Assis Rosa Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 221 The (Un)Translatability of Frailty: On Deafness and Humour in Four Renderings of David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence Alexandra Lopes

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PART III PERIPHERY ON THE FRINGE OF ENCOUNTER Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 243 Diabolical Mirrors, Exact Arts: George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion and João Ferreira Duarte’s View of Translation as the Crossroads of Culture Ricardo Gil Soeiro Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 257 Translation and the Projection of Cultural Difference Conceição Lima Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 275 Will the Aliens Come Home? Diaspora and Translation in PortugueseAmerican Literature Margarida Vale de Gato Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 297 Performative Identities and Interwoven Art Practices: Paula Rego, Menez and Alberto de Lacerda Ana Gabriela Macedo PART IV LOOKING BACK INTO THE PERIPHERY Translation Studies in Portugal and Interview with João Ferreira Duarte ........................................................................ 319 Rita Bueno Maia, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Sara Ramos Pinto Contributors ............................................................................................. 333 Onomastic Index ...................................................................................... 337

LIST OF IMAGES

10-1 Number of Portuguese translations, re-translations and editions of Emilio Salgari’s work organized by decade since the first published translation .......................................................................... 170 16-1 Untitled by Menez ........................................................................... 301 16-2 Stray Dogs/Os Cães de Barcelona by Paula Rego .......................... 305 16-3 Portrait of Alberto de Lacerda by Paula Rego ................................. 308 16-4 The Dance by Paula Rego ............................................................... 309 16-5 Departure by Paula Rego ................................................................ 310

LIST OF TABLES

4-1 Theatre series published during 1950 and 1979 ............................. 52-53 4-2 Titles included in the series Teatro no Bolso between 1956 and 1962.......................................................................................... 55-57 6-1 19th- and early 20th-century Portuguese short stories that appear in four or more of the anthologies listed below ................................... 98 6-2 Short Stories and novellas in Portuguese anthologies that have been translated into English .......................................................... 99-100 A-1 Portuguese short stories in English translation .......................... 104-114 A-2 List of works consulted, including school anthologies and compilations published in Brazil................................................. 115-118 10-1 Number of records under “Salgari” found in library catalogues ................................................................................... 168-169 10-2 Notes regarding the identification of Salgari as the author ...... 175-176 B Bibliography of the Portuguese translations of Salgari’s novels... 178-204 11-1 Presence of foreign languages in post titles by Etudogente morta.com (1.1.2010—30.6.2010) ..................................................... 208

FOREWORD

This volume is not only a tribute to a leading scholar in the Portuguese academic world, João Ferreira Duarte, but also a significant map of a major area of studies, which has asserted its relevance especially in recent decades: Translation Studies. In Portugal, but also in the wider international arena, João Ferreira Duarte and Translation Studies have always been closely related. His contribution to the introduction and establishment of this field of research in Portugal, the inspiring role he has played for a significant number of colleagues and younger scholars, the way he firmly put Portuguese Translation Studies on the map within the international context, and perhaps mostly his enthusiasm, all have been crucial to the development of Translation Studies as well as of Comparative Literature in Portugal and abroad. João Ferreira Duarte has always taken as his point of departure that through translation we are able to gain a wider picture of processes of literary exchange (and therefore of literary phenomena), leaving behind nationalistic criteria as the major source of literary achievement. He has always considered that Portugal and its position in a semi-periphery have specific characteristics, and that by studying them it is also the international arena that is illuminated. João Ferreira Duarte has also explored the connections between Translation Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Again, the Portuguese case is decisive for a fuller comprehension of the postcolonial dimension. In fact, Portugal’s historic and therefore strategic position in the present world cannot be disconnected from that of other such countries that likewise have to deal with a colonial past as well as with the latter’s historical legacy for the present. This means that the role of mediator between different cultures that span from Europe to Africa, SouthAmerica, or Asia, as is the case of the Portuguese language and literature, has to be understood as a form of cultural (but also literal) translation. João Ferreira Duarte has underlined these connections, and he has always insisted that scholarship in Literary Studies should pay particular attention to them. This volume confirms the ideas that I have tried to emphasize just now. By bringing together a significant number of scholars in Translation Studies who, in Portugal or elsewhere (United Kingdom, Angola), have

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regularly collaborated with João Ferreira Duarte, this book maps the guidelines and the results of what has been written on translation from a descriptive, non-normative perspective. The metaphor of the centreperiphery is a major way of representing Translation Studies in Portugal— if one understands that the periphery itself is interrogated, and therefore helps to redesign what might otherwise be considered as a stable centre. Translation Studies scholars from several major universities are represented here, clearly manifesting the major role João Ferreira Duarte has played, and his ability to gather students and colleagues in this area of studies. It is not everybody that is capable of such an endeavour. Reading this volume, and perusing João Ferreira Duarte’s extensive bibliography, we come to understand the range of topics that he addressed and made available for all of us in the Portuguese academia, how he passed on his enthusiasm for Translation Studies to his students (some of whom are responsible for the present volume), and his role in affirming Portugal’s specific contribution to this area of studies, from an international perspective. His has always been a cosmopolitan view. I would like to end this foreword by simply recollecting João Ferreira Duarte’s role in the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon. In 1997 João Ferreira Duarte and I started thinking about the possibility of founding a Research Centre, considering that a truly interdepartmental orientation was fully justified, and that the bringing together of different area studies, at that time separated in institutional terms, might play a crucial role in the advanced education in Comparative Studies in Portugal. We were right, of course. But the project would never have come to light if it were not for João Ferreira Duarte’s enthusiasm and hard work. For a significant number of years, he was a very active and thorough Vice-Director of the Centre, always ready to give his full support to all the projects that might further Comparative Studies in Portugal. He has always been eager to open up new areas of studies, among which, as I mentioned earlier, the relations between Translation and Postcolonial Studies. His ability to recognize the quality of work done by others, be they colleagues or students, has definitely made a difference within the Portuguese academia, and it has contributed significantly to fostering the interest for Translation Studies in Portugal. João Ferreira Duarte himself has contributed with important essays about the problems posed by translation, whether on the theoretical questions involved, or case studies with significant implications, including some cases in non-translation, and in which he has always shown a keen awareness of the ideological dimensions of a literary problem.

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The period in which he accepted to be Vice-Director of the Centre for Comparative Studies has strengthened our mutual appreciation, and has shown to me how special it is to find a colleague with whom scientific relations may in fact help to promote personal appreciation and friendship. I have always found in João Ferreira Duarte an open and generous mind, ready to do everything he could to help and to strengthen the position of the Centre for Comparative Studies, and of Comparative Studies at large, in Portugal. Even after his retirement, João Ferreira Duarte continues to be a reference in both the Centre and in Translation Studies. It is especially rewarding to experience his intellectual availability and the generosity with which he continues to offer his presence and work to all members of the Centre for Comparative Studies. HELENA CARVALHÃO BUESCU

INTRODUCTION PORTUGAL AND TRANSLATION BETWEEN CENTRE AND PERIPHERY RITA BUENO MAIA, MARTA PACHECO PINTO AND SARA RAMOS PINTO

In a lecture entitled “That Strange Object Named Translation” (October 24, 2011), João Ferreira Duarte drew attention to an apparent paradox that has underlined Translation Studies (TS) overall: how has TS managed to develop as a successful academic discipline when translation has low symbolic capital, that is, when the discipline’s object of study is traditionally perceived as inferior, derivative, secondary? To João Ferreira Duarte the success of the discipline lies precisely at the disjunction between empirical object and conceptual object, between pragmatic object and object of knowledge. In other words, the discipline of TS has selfreferentially freed itself from the empirical value of the object as it circulates in society. In Portugal, as in other cultural systems where translation has been used to overcome certain voids, despite the low symbolic capital of translation per se, there is a high volume of translation activity that makes it central to the Portuguese publishing market and intercultural dynamics (Seruya 2001, 2005, 2007; Rosa 2005, 2006). In fact, since the late 1980s, that strange object named translation has fed the interdiscipline of TS and helped to reshape and better understand Portuguese history and historiography, cultural memory and identity. In “Highlighting the Shadows: Translation and the Space of History” (2004), João Ferreira Duarte links neo-historicist paradigms and their emphasis on space as a “postmodern counterpart to modernist time-centred conceptions of historical existence” (2004, 323) to the epistemological definition of TS:

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Briefly, narrative-based historiography, the discourse that provided knowledge of history from a traditional, modernist perspective, must give way to the rise of cartography, the art and/or science of map-making, space-bound and descriptive in mode. For the historical study of translation the epistemological consequences of this move are immense. [...] Its first historical apparatuses were made up of such spatial metaphors as “centre”, “periphery”, “transfers”, and “shifts”; the concepts of “intercultures”, “domestication”, and “foreignisation”, for instance, rely entirely on a logic of distance and proximity, of contacts and connections between home and abroad; other familiar images for the translated texts, such as “exiles” or “migrants”, convey the idea of displacement across territories. (Duarte 2004, 324; emphasis in the original)

Such apparatuses, concepts and images show that reflection on the discipline of TS is inextricably bound to spatial concepts and metaphors: [...] [W]hatever the vocabulary may be that we use in describing Translation Studies—discipline, interdiscipline or even transdiscipline—, its primary function has been to chart social spaces, to draw cultural maps. (Duarte et al 2006, 4)

Hence, the discipline does not seem able to escape from the centreperiphery binarism,1 which usually functions as a general frame of reference for reflecting on the translation phenomenon and mapping TS at large (see also Duarte 2005); nor can its empirical object (translation/s), and the role it plays in a given cultural system, be considered outside of such a guiding framework, especially if one understands translation as the transfer of cultural goods that circulate across national boundaries and between systems. Analysing the scope of circulation of such goods makes it possible to identify trends in how they circulate, to draw maps of cultural contacts and contamination, to position culture producers and cultures as a whole within a wider network of knowledge transfer. 1

From a socio-economic perspective, the concepts of centre and periphery were developed following a certain idea of social system as envisaged by Wallerstein along with the notion of world-system (1974). According to this author, the worldsystem is the basic unit of social analysis and the world is divided into core countries, semi-peripheral countries and peripheral countries. Characteristically, the core countries, positioned at the centre of the system, concentrate on higher skill, capital-intensive production, while more peripheral countries focus on lowskill and labour intensive production and raw materials. Yet the system is dynamic and thus peripheral countries can gain a place at the centre as well as push core countries to lose their status of dominance.

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From a historical and sociocultural perspective, Portugal has been consensually charted as a periphery of Europe and an atypical centre of the Portuguese-speaking world. The discussion initiated and furthered by authors such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1993, 2011), Eduardo Lourenço (1988, 1990) or José Mattoso (1998) is crucial on this matter. Santos, in particular, argues that Portugal has historically belonged to two different zones—the European zone and the colonial zone—and almost always in a peripheral position. The sociologist claims that, since the short-lived leading role it assumed (along with Spain) in the 15th and 16th centuries, more often than not Portugal has been relegated to a peripheral position in opposition to other stronger European economies, such as England and France. This apparent paradox has resulted in somewhat of a mismatch with History in which Portugal [...] lived most of the Modern age (the second Western Modernity) in a peripheral way, ever outside the centre whether of the European zone (because Portugal was present in the colonial zone when the colonial zone was peripheral for Europe) or of the colonial zone (because it failed to keep a strong presence in the colonial zone when the colonial zone became central for Europe as a whole). (Santos 2011, 404)

To put it differently, Portugal seems to have been living in a manner which was desynchronized with Europe’s main concerns or agenda. It has historically been divided between a central position in relation to its own colonies and a peripheral position within the European context. In the 19th century, such a position became all the more evident following the Berlin Conference in 1884 and the British Ultimatum in 18902 (Mattoso 1994; Ramos et al 2009), which compelled Portugal to assume an effective colonial presence, in order to secure its presence in Africa, and thus act similarly to other European colonial powers. This is one such episode which illustrates that which Santos has referred to as the indecisive nature of Portuguese colonialism (2002, 2011), highlighting the historical dependency of Portugal on foreign decision-making imposed by more

2

Subsequent to the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the British Ultimatum was delivered to Portugal on January 11, 1890. It forced Portugal to make a stand regarding the occupation of its African colonies, as it demanded the retreat of Portuguese troops from the territory between the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. Portugal reluctantly ceded to the British demands, which was felt as a national outrage especially by the Republicans.

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central European systems.3 During the dictatorial years of the Estado Novo (1932-1974), Portugal reinforced its central position in its enduring colonial zone, but with the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of the decolonization process it refocused its position within the European Union and worked to reinforce its role as a bridge between Europe and the Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa and Brazil. The CPLP/CPLC,4 created in 1996, was the result of such a strategy and of efforts to promote Portuguese as a world language. On the whole, also according to Santos, Portugal has tended to behave peripherally within the European context, while attempting to assume a central position within the Portuguesespeaking space (2011). It was, in fact, this intermediary condition that led the sociologist to position Portugal as a semi-periphery (1993, 2002, 2011). From a literary perspective, studies seem to support Portugal’s abovementioned reliance on other, more central European systems. Similarly to other countries in an analogous position of external dependency, Portugal has traditionally imported cultural assets, such as literature, from model systems, i.e., systems offering a standard literary repertoire by which Portugal could regulate itself (Nunes and Gonçalves 2001; Lousada 1998; Machado 1984; Rodrigues 1951). In this context, importing repertoires from systems, such as those in England and France, not only meant translating what they were originally producing in their national languages but also what they were actually translating. The cultural and literary affinities Portugal established with France throughout the 19th century are a case in point (see Machado 1984), as they greatly promoted the (indirect) translation into Portuguese of France’s repertoire of translated literature. As remarked by Heilbron on the sociology of translation, “the more central a language is in the translation system, the more it has the capacity to function as an intermediary or vehicular language, that is as a means of communication between language groups which are themselves peripheral or semi-peripheral” (1999, 435). In the 19th century, Portugal was accordingly an example of a peripheral or semi-peripheral system that tended to establish contact with other peripheral or semi-peripheral 3

On the consequences of the British Ultimatum on the Portuguese translation policy, namely the ideological refusal of Shakespeare’s plays in Portuguese translation in the last decade of the 19th century, see Duarte 2001b. 4 CPLP/CPLC stands for Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa [Community of Portuguese Language Countries] (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, Sao Tome and Principe, and East Timor). Macau is not part of this community even though Portuguese is one of the official state languages.

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systems (e.g., Chinese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish) via more central systems, such as the French. Another case in point is the intermediary position of Portugal within the Iberian context, which, according to Fernando Cabo, has decisively influenced the historiographical Portuguese discourse: The role of the “other” Peninsular literature, Spanish, and the representation of the “minor” literatures of the Iberian Peninsula are telling characteristics of the historiographical discourse of Portuguese literature. As we have seen, on the part of Spanish historiography there have been many attempts, often sly and timid, to integrate Portuguese literature as a variety of Spanish literature. On the side of Portugal, there has always been a tendency to look in the mirror of those other Spanish literatures, in contraposition to Castilian hegemony, as a way of reaffirming political independence and its consequence in the development of literature. (Cabo 2010, 45)

Hence, Portugal’s geographical location in the Iberian Peninsula has perpetuated its continuous confrontation with the “Spanish literary hegemony” (Rodrigues 1951, 3; our translation): on one side, the strong Spanish (Castilian) literature promoting an unbalanced power relationship; on the other side, the weaker remaining systems of Spain represented by the Basque, the Catalan and the Galician literatures. Bearing all this in mind, we can recognize Portugal as an importer of cultural goods from European central systems and possibly also as an exporter of cultural goods to its peripheral systems, using Portuguese as a vehicular language. But what shape have these movements taken across history and spaces? How can one draw the borderline between a peripheral and a semi-peripheral system? Is this borderline useful or necessary? How peripheral would we say the Portuguese cultural system is as far as translation transfers are concerned? How stable or pacific has this positioning been? Does the economic and historical perception of Portugal as peripheral entail that, from the viewpoint of translation, it would behave similarly? These are some of the issues the articles gathered in the present volume try to address, showing in particular that the centre-periphery binary classification can hardly be said to do justice to the multitude and complexity that characterizes the overall Portuguese cultural system.

The Volume The purpose of this volume is twofold. On the one hand, it was born out of the need to reflect upon Portugal’s position from the viewpoint of the literary assets imported and also exported through translation, hence

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the question posed in the title—How Peripheral is the Periphery? We invited TS scholars working directly on the Portuguese cultural system to analyse this question from the theoretical perspective of TS and/or based on case studies of translation flows and movements in the Portuguese cultural system. By Translating Portugal Back and Forth, the articles seem to point towards the direction of an intermediary condition, in which Portugal would simultaneously share aspects of the centre and the periphery. Such a condition is brought to the fore by revisiting, sometimes directly, other times more obliquely, Even-Zohar’s (1990) polysystemic interplay between centre and periphery, whose historic value is generally recognized. On the other hand, and more importantly, as shown by this volume’s (second) subtitle, Essays in Honour of João Ferreira Duarte, it is our purpose to pay homage to one of the most prominent TS scholars in Portugal, who has extensively reflected on the binary discourse on translation, its metaphors and images. With this tribute, the editors wish to publicly recognize João Ferreira Duarte’s efforts to turn TS into a discipline in its own right in Portugal, to attract, train and retain students and future translators and to engage scholars in research or teaching in the field. A grateful acknowledgment is due to all the scholars that generously accepted to contribute to this volume, as colleagues, disciples, students or simply friends of João Ferreira Duarte, and thereby show their indebtedness to and appreciation of his intellectual generosity and work, which is imprinted all over the essays. Aiming to contribute to the discussion on the place of translation in a (semi)peripheral system such as the Portuguese cultural system, the present volume is divided into four parts which approach the topic from different angles. They are preceded by an introductory testimony (foreword) by Helena Carvalhão Buescu, who highlights João Ferreira Duarte’s cosmopolitan view and pioneering role in “affirming Portugal’s specific contribution to this area of studies, from an international perspective”, and to Comparative Studies at large. On the whole, the volume gathers 16 articles that are thematically grouped into three interconnected sections. The dialogue across these sections is promoted from different disciplinary starting points, such as literary studies, hermeneutics, cultural studies, or interarts studies, which enrich the debate on translating Portugal back and forth and reinforce the status of TS as an interdiscipline. The articles included in the first section, entitled “Mapping the Periphery”, show a broader perspective and focus on the role translation and the translator have assumed within the system as well as their position

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in time. As previously discussed, Portugal has occupied different positions and functions within the European and World contexts, and it is important to understand the impact that might have had on what has been translated and how it has been translated, but also to understand the role translation might have played in the definition of the functions carried out by the Portuguese cultural system. Karen Bennett’s article discusses the fact that, even though there have been some changes and shifts in the balance of political and economic power, Portugal has assumed a very stable role as a point-of-call between the Americas and the East, between Europe and Africa. Confirming its semi-peripheral position, the Portuguese cultural system seems to be a translators’ system par excellence that imposed itself as a crucial transition zone for scholars and texts moving from the centre to the periphery and vice-versa. This seems to be confirmed by Teresa Seruya, whose article reaffirms that the space occupied by translation within the Portuguese system is of great importance and considerable size. The corpus collected within the project Intercultural Literature in Portugal in 1930-2000: A Critical Bibliography, which Seruya presents in her article, allows us a better view of what was translated in this period and the source cultures and languages from which it came. It presents itself as an important perspective not only to acknowledge the role translation has had in the Portuguese system, but also to provide a history of translation from the viewpoint of the periphery. Taking us out of the realm of literary translation and into the realm of theatre translation, Christine Zurbach’s article shows both the role played by translation in the development of a genre (drama) where national production was weak, and how linked translation policy is to the national political and ideological context. Translation is here examined as a form of importation of texts and genres lacking in the Portuguese cultural system as well as a promoter of change and innovation through the creation of new repertoires. Zurbach’s essay echoes João Ferreira Duarte’s claim that “[t]heatre is thus made to take sides on the current ideological clashes going on in the country, in fact, nothing but the logical outcome of an art that is critically a political event” (2012, 72). In addition, it highlights the behaviour of competing centres of prestige and the important role of other peripheral and semi-peripheral systems after the 1990s. This perspective is complemented by Manuela Carvalho’s article where a broader view is taken with the help of a larger corpus. The data collected in TETRA-Base within the project Theatre and Translation: Towards a History of Theatre Translation in Portugal, 1800-2009, focusing on the translations promoted both for publication and performance, expands the corpus presented by Teresa Seruya. Carvalho’s article allows us to compare the data offered on

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both corpora and to better understand the role played by translation in two different subsystems which have developed distinct traditions and views on translation and where translators seem to enjoy a different status. It confirms Karen Bennett’s claim of the Portuguese system as a translation system par excellence. But how are translation and translators seen by the broader community? Following a sociological approach, Fernando Ferreira Alves’s article presents one of the very few studies on the position assumed by Portuguese translators in society, how they are socially perceived, and how they see the translation activity themselves. The second section, entitled “Between the Periphery and the Centre: Dialogues and Movements”, focuses on the contact established between the Portuguese and other cultural systems. In this context, the article by Patricia Anne Odber de Baudeta examines from a Portuguese viewpoint the translation history of the literary short story as it emerged during the second half of the 19th century, and explores the ways in which the literary production of a peripheral system such as the Portuguese was disseminated and perceived by scholars and reviewers in 19th-century Britain. Rui Carvalho Homem discusses how central systems translate poetry from peripheral systems. Focusing on Ted Hughes’s translation of Portuguese poets such as modernist Sá-Carneiro, the author presents a representative case study which notes a clearly spelled out concern, within a specific literary and political agenda, in relation to giving a voice to peripheral authors in central cultures. Echoing João Ferreira Duarte’s question of whether translators have bodies (Duarte 2004), Susan Bassnett looks back in time and offers a personal testimony of her own questionings and concerns as regards literary translation practice and motivations for translating. Bassnett challenges the commonly accepted low value attached to translation in comparison to an original work by revisiting the literary and theoretical works of translators of canonical texts or authors, such as Sir Richard Fanshawe, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley. Bassnett poses the question of whether translation practice is as much a passionate act as one “of remembrance, of homage, [...] a bridge across the river of oblivion”. This bridge across oblivion aptly describes the contributions of Maria Eduarda Keating and Maria Lin Moniz. Assuming a bottom-up approach and comparing different translations of Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquiet] and their contextual elements, Maria Eduarda Keating exemplifies the contradictions and power relations noted in processes of “consecration” by the mainstream literatures of literary works belonging to peripheral systems. Based on the translations of Emilio Salgari’s adventure novels, Maria Lin Moniz discusses how translation can be used to fulfil a

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certain void in the target culture, particularly in relation to genres considered peripheral in the target culture, and the contextual elements which lead to a different positioning of those translations in time. Alexandra Assis Rosa brings us an innovative perspective on the Portuguese blogosphere and relations between centre and periphery by putting forward cases of non-translation as examples of the influence the centre exerts over the periphery. Following João Ferreira Duarte’s lead (2000), the author argues for the relevance of cases where translation does not happen and which seem to reflect uneven relations between cultures as a certain linguistic/ideological infatuation when the language of the centre becomes “a means of accessing translational spaces, networks and, of course, elites”. The final article of this section by Alexandra Lopes defies most of what is discussed in the previous articles. By comparing four translations of David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence promoted by cultures positioned differently in the world system, the author brings us an example of a work of fiction that not only questions the peripheral status traditionally assigned to translation, but also upsets any metaphor attempting to crystallize meaning or clear-cut boundaries between traditional concepts of centre and periphery. The third section, entitled “Periphery on the Fringe of Encounter”, focuses on the role assumed both by the Portuguese cultural system and the Portuguese language as a connecting/semi-peripheral system between systems of different nature. This section opens with an article by Ricardo Gil Soeiro reviewing two different approaches to translation: Steiner’s hermeneutical perspective, which “rests on a set of philosophical and literary assumptions and towering figures”, and the cultural approach upon which João Ferreira Duarte developed his work on the Portuguese system, its colonial past and its postcolonial presence (see especially Duarte 1999, 2006, 2008, 2010). Confirming the influence of the cultural approach to the role of translation in the Portuguese system, Conceição Lima provides an example of the way in which semi-peripheral cultures and languages assume the role of connector in postcolonial contexts, bridging the gap between two historically and linguistically connected worlds. Lima focuses on the Angolan short-story writer Luandino Vieira and discusses his creative use of the language of the ex-colonizer as a challenge to the centre-periphery dichotomy. Margarida Vale de Gato offers another example of creative use of language, this time by immigrants. Drawing on Portuguese-American literature, the author discusses the translation of multilingual texts as intermediary products in which the difference between “self” and “other” is not clear-cut, thus unsettling the above mentioned logic of “distance and proximity, of contacts and connections”

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(Duarte 2004, 324), in this case between different kinds of homes. The concept of stereotype becomes an important aspect to bear in mind and the author calls our attention not only to the role of translation in perpetuating a certain stereotypical image traditionally created in migrant literature, but also to the challenges faced both by the translator when translating into one of the languages in the source text and the reader when faced with the image that is constructed of him/herself. Last but not least, Ana Gabriela Macedo’s article is informed by a comparative, interarts approach. The author discusses a case of intersemiotic translation, reflecting on how translation has been used as a metaphor that helps other disciplines (in this case painting and poetry) to reflect upon themselves and the existing connections between them and other disciplines. This article shows that translation is a travelling concept; it is a clear example of the widespread use of the translation metaphor, a movement that João Ferreira Duarte considers to have been turning translation from a represented object into a means of representation (Duarte 2001a, 2). All in all, the articles collected explore the intermediary, syncretistic nature of the Portuguese cultural system by looking at the circulation of cultural goods, which varies in time and according to the spatial perspective or (poly)systems in consideration. The articles offer different perspectives and standpoints by confirming or challenging patterns of translational behaviour, by illustrating typical and atypical movements between centre and periphery, as well as from one periphery to another, and sometimes by questioning these concepts themselves. Despite the clear focus on the Portuguese cultural system, the arguments put forward are very likely not exclusive to the Portuguese system and may be posed or extended to other target cultures. At this stage, the editors would like to acknowledge the striking absence of Brazil in this discussion and highlight the need for research and productive discussion on the role played by translation in the relations between these two systems. The volume ends with an interview, conducted by the editors, with João Ferreira Duarte, to whom this collection of essays intends to be a tribute. As one of Portugal’s pioneering scholars in TS, it seemed appropriate to include his testimony. This interview, which started as a pleasant conversation in a café and later assumed the form of a written interview, provides important insight into how the discipline came into being in Portugal and how the academic debate was framed and has evolved. Finally, we would like to leave a word of appreciation and, sadly of goodbye, to Paulo Eduardo Carvalho (1965-2010) who had enthusiastically accepted to contribute to this volume, but whose life was unexpectedly cut

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short. There are not enough words to describe the reputable professor, the skilled translator and the talented researcher that left us that sad morning. We cannot avoid expressing our highest regards for the support he gave to a new generation of scholars in TS and for all he did to rescue Theatre Translation (his area of expertise) and TS from the shadows of the periphery. Since the ultimate proof of the pudding is in the eating, we hope that, in addition to enjoying the challenges posed by the articles here collected, our readers feel tempted to rethink the (Portuguese) moving space(s) and come to share our respect and admiration for the professor, great listener and friend João Ferreira Duarte.

Bibliography Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando. 2010. The European Horizon of Peninsular Literary Historiographical Discourses. In A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, vol. 1. Edited by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín Gonzalez, and César Domínguez. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 152. Duarte, João Ferreira. 1999. O destronar do original: tradução carnavalizada. In Literatura e pluralidade cultural. Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 539-548. —. 2000. The Politics of Non-Translation: A Case Study in AngloPortuguese Relations. TTR – Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 13 (1): 95-112. —. 2001a. A tradução enquanto metáfora e modelo. In IV Congresso internacional da Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada, vol. 2. Organized by Carlos J. F. Jorge and Christine Zurbach. Évora: Universidade de Évora. Available at http://www.eventos.uevora.pt/ comparada/VolumeII/A%20TRADUCAO%20ENQUANTO%20META FORA%20E%20MODELO.pdf (accessed October 12, 2010). —. 2001b. To Play or not to Play Wordplay: Hamlet in Portugal, 1887. In Estudos de tradução em Portugal: novos contributos para a história da literatura portuguesa. Organized by Teresa Seruya. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 137-150. —. 2004. Highlighting the Shadows: Translation and the Space of History. In Novas histórias literárias. Coimbra: Minerva, 319-326. First published version: 2003. Translation and the Space of History. The European English Messenger XII (1): 16-20. —. 2005. Do binarismo em tradução. Relâmpago 17 (10): 21-46.

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—. 2008. A Cultura entre tradução e etnografia. Lisbon: Nova Vega. —. 2010. The Narrator in the Contact Zone: Transculturation and Dialogism in Things Fall Apart. Diacrítica—Dossier literatura comparada 24 (3): 141-156. —. 2012. Hamlet in Portugal: The Italian Connection. In Depois do Labirinto: teatro e tradução. Organized by Manuela Carvalho and Daniela Di Pasquale. Lisbon: Nova Vega, 57-73. Duarte, João Ferreira, Alexandra Assis Rosa, and Teresa Seruya, eds. 2006. Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. Polysystem Studies. Poetics Today 11 (1): 926. Heilbron, Johan. 1999. Towards a Sociology of Translation. Book Translations as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory 2 (4): 429-444. Lourenço, Eduardo. 1988. O Labirinto da saudade—psicanálise mítica do destino português. Lisbon: D. Quixote. —. 1990. Nós e a Europa ou as duas razões. Lisboa: INCM. Lousada, Isabel Maria da C. 1998. Para o estabelecimento de uma bibliografia britânica em português (1554-1900). Admission examination to Research Assistant. Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Machado, Álvaro Manuel. 1984. O “Francesismo” na literatura portuguesa. Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa. Mattoso, José. 1994. História de Portugal. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa. —. 1998. A Identidade nacional. Lisbon: Gradiva. Nunes, João Arriscado, and Maria Eduarda Gonçalves, eds. 2001. Enteados de Galileu? A Semiperiferia no sistema mundial da ciência. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. Ramos, Rui, Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa, and Nuno Monteiro. 2009. História de Portugal. Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros. Rodrigues, António Augusto Gonçalves. 1951. A Novelística estrangeira em versão portuguesa no período pré-romântico. Coimbra: Biblioteca da Universidade. Rosa, Alexandra Assis. 2005. Tradução para os media na FLUL. In VIII Seminário de tradução científica e técnica em língua inglesa: tradução e inovação. Lisbon: União Latina. Available at http://alexandra.assis rosa.com/HomePage/Publications_Publicacoes_files/Rosa-2006b.pdf (accessed May 7, 2012).

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—. 2006. Does Translation Have a Say in the History of our Contemporary Linguacultures? Some Figures on Translation in Portugal. Polifonia 9: 77-93. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1993. Modernidade, identidade e a cultura de fronteira. Tempo Social 51: 1-2, 31-52. —. 2002. Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity. Luso-Brasilian Review 39 (2): 9-43. —. 2011. Portugal: Tales of Being and Not Being. In Facts and Fictions of António Lobo Antunes. Edited by Victor Mendes. Dartmouth: Tagus Press, 399-443. Seruya, Teresa, ed. 2001. Estudos de Tradução em Portugal: novos contributos para a história da literatura portuguesa. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Seruya, Teresa, ed. 2005. Estudos de Tradução em Portugal: colecções Livros RTP/Biblioteca Básica Verbo. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Seruya, Teresa, ed. 2007. Estudos de Tradução em Portugal: colecções Livros RTP/Biblioteca Básica Verbo II. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

PART I MAPPING THE PERIPHERY

[...] o mundo da tradução, onde historicamente os tradutores se inscrevem em redes de poder e autoridades, de relações desiguais entre culturas, que condicionam a sua actividade e os produtos dela. João Ferreira Duarte. 2004. Os Tradutores têm corpos? Para uma crítica da “intercultura”. Dedalus— revista portuguesa de literatura comparada 9: 198.

[...] the world of translation, where historically translators find themselves in networks of power and authority of unequal relationships between cultures, and which condition their activity and its products. [Editors’ translation]

CHAPTER ONE TRANSLATION ON THE SEMI-PERIPHERY: PORTUGAL AS CULTURAL INTERMEDIARY IN THE TRANSPORTATION OF KNOWLEDGE KAREN BENNETT

The conventional wisdom regarding Portugal’s status in the global system is a sad tale of slow decline. We usually hear that, after the golden age of the Discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Spain and Portugal effectively divided up the world between them, the country gradually lost political and economic influence, and became something of a backwater, cut off from the rest of the world by repressive conservative regimes. From this perspective, the culmination of the process has undoubtedly been Portugal’s ignominious inclusion into the group of EU member states known as the PIGS, 1 an acronym that groups together countries that happen to be all situated on the very edge of the European landmass, branding them as economically incompetent and politically irresponsible. This implicit association between geographical location and economic role becomes more explicit in the rather more positive concept of the “semi-periphery”, which to a large extent overlaps with the PIGS acronym in the European context. Originally formulated by Wallerstein (1984), and developed by Santos (1985) with regard to Portugal, this analysis views semi-peripheral countries as essential components of the world system. Positioned geographically and economically between the core and the periphery, they have characteristics of each; thus, they not only provide a buffer zone between rich and poor, but also mediate important processes of change in the system as a whole.

1 The countries perceived to be at risk of defaulting on their sovereign debt (Portugal, Italy/Ireland, Greece and Spain).

4

Chapter One

As traders and transporters of economic and cultural assets, semiperipheral countries are also translators par excellence. Without actually using the term, Cronin (2003, 76-103) has shown how Ireland’s semiperipheral location and status with regards to the UK and to Europe enabled it to become “an important node in the new global economy of translation” (Cronin 2003, 81), today dominating the market in the software localization industry. Similarly, Montgomery (2000), in his remarkable study of movements of knowledge through cultures and time, describes the important historical role played by semi-peripheral countries in the transmission of science through the centuries. A particularly relevant example is the so-called “12th-century Renaissance”, when much of the Hellenistic knowledge that had been lost to the Western world began to be retrieved through a massive effort of translation from Arabic. The protagonists in this enterprise were all located on the frontiers of Christendom, primarily Iberia (through its large Mozarab population), but also Italy and Sicily (Montgomery 2000, 141-144).2 In this article, I challenge the received notions concerning Portugal’s status in the field of science by examining its role in the transmission of knowledge since the 15th century. By assessing the volume, nature and direction of scientific translation to and from Portuguese, and the volume, nature and direction of scientific voyages and migrations 3 to and from Portugal at various periods up to the present day, I suggest that Portugal has always played a pivotal role in the transportation of knowledge between the centre and the periphery, both textually and physically. Special attention will be given to those cases where Portugal (the territory) and Portuguese (the language) operate as crucial transition zones for scholars and texts heading from the centre to the periphery and vice-versa.

2

Particularly important was the School of Toledo, which had a large population of Arab-speaking Christians, though there were also other centres scattered around these countries (Montgomery 2000, 141-142). 3 “In earlier times [...] before the modern age, the local nature of knowledge and ideas to be translated was less abstract and philosophical. Indeed, translation of such local knowledge might involve a very concrete crossing of space, for it often presupposed physically transporting yourself (translating yourself or carrying yourself across) to a new place, as a precondition of transposing those ideas from one language to another, from one local cultural system to another” (Tymoczko 2010, 220; emphasis in the original). See also Di Biase (2006), Cronin (2000) and Montgomery (2000) on the close relationship between translation and travel as regards the cultural transfer of knowledge.

Translation on the Semi-Periphery

5

1. Portugal as Cultural Mediator in the Transmission of Knowledge My starting point in this exploration was the massive body of work currently being generated in Portugal into the History of Science in this country. Beginning with the extremely informative and user-friendly website Ciência em Portugal [Science in Portugal] (Crato et al), and moving on to the many books and articles cited by it or produced under the auspices of other research projects in this domain (e.g. Nunes 2001; Fitas et al 2008; Nunes and Gonçalves 2001; Fiolhais and Martins 2010; Saraiva and Jami 2008), I proceeded to scour the material for evidence of translation activity and scientific travel. The results were then transferred to two charts and organized chronologically to enable trends and currents to be appreciated at a glance. As regards the first question, the main problem encountered was the difficulty of distinguishing between translation proper and other forms of paratranslational activity, such as adaptations, abridgements and popularizations. Moreover, in the case of texts by Portuguese authors published abroad at different periods, it is often unclear whether these works were translated, or whether they were written directly in the target language by the author.4 However, even in the latter case, it is reasonable to assume that other people (editors, revisers, foreign collaborators, etc.) may have intervened in the work, suggesting that, then as now, 5 the traditional dichotomies between Source/Target Text and between Author/Translator are by no means clear cut. In the case of scientific voyages or migrations by scholars, these took a number of different forms. In all periods, we find examples of what Montgomery (2000, 104) calls “study pilgrimages” [viagens philosóficas] —that is to say, periods of time spent abroad by junior scholars in order to acquire knowledge or experience that may not be easily available in the 4

This is particularly difficult to gauge when the language in question is Latin, which of course was the lingua franca for scholarly communication up to the middle of the 18th century, occupying much the same kind of role as English occupies today. 5 Following a survey of Portuguese researchers carried out in 2002 and 2008 to assess, amongst other things, their academic writing habits in English, I conclude that, in this field, translation cannot be considered a binary activity involving two people and two versions of the text. “Rather it is a complex process in which many different people may intervene, and where the publishable version may occupy any position along a cline between the fully Source-Culture-oriented text and the fully Target-Culture-oriented text” (Bennett 2010, 208).

6

Chapter One

home country. These were undertaken as private initiatives or were institutionally organized and funded, and operated predominantly in two directions: from Portugal to European centres, and to Portugal from its overseas territories. In most periods, there are also examples of established scholars being invited abroad to take up teaching or technical posts, or participate in projects. Predictably, these flows are mostly from European centres to Portugal, and from Portugal to its colonies, though there are some interesting exceptions of the reverse pattern at different times. Another phenomenon that seems to run through all periods is the “philosophical voyage” or “scientific expedition”. These were trips to different parts of the globe to gather data about aspects of the natural world and its inhabitants, and were organized both by Portugal and by other European countries. There are cases in my data of foreigners being called from Europe and from the colonies to participate in Portuguese voyages, and of Portuguese scientists being invited to join expeditions organized by other countries. Finally, one of the most prevalent motives for migration amongst Portuguese-born scholars seems to have been to escape persecution by intolerant regimes, something that occurs at various periods of history. In many cases, these scholars established themselves elsewhere and became important conduits for information, often acting as catalysts for epistemological and political change in the home country. Let us now look briefly at my findings for different historical periods.

2. 15th and 16th Centuries As might be expected in this Golden Age, when Portugal’s empire was at its height, there was a great deal of intercultural activity in all directions, fomented by trade, but with inevitable repercussions upon the generation and transfer of knowledge. Despite its economic and political importance at this time, Portugal still retained characteristics of semi-peripherality. This was not only because of its geographical location at the extreme south and west of Europe, which made it an inevitable point of passage, or because the cultural centre of gravity in the continent was still situated far to the east in Rome, Portugal was also semi-peripheral with regard to its epistemological status, which bore traits of both central and peripheral countries.6 6 “One of the main features which distinguishes centres from peripheries is the different role played by scientific and technological knowledge in determining the

Translation on the Semi-Periphery

7

This duality is reflected both in the mobility patterns and translation practices of scholars at the time. As regard the former, the attempt made by King John III to renovate the education system by creating a system of scholarships, enabling a new generation of Portuguese masters to be trained in the prestigious University of Paris,7 as well as his recruitment in 1547 of a team of masters from France (the “Bordeaux mission”) for the recently-founded College of Arts, offer clear indications that Portugal was perceived as lagging behind other European centres with regards to the Humanistic current that had begun to replace Scholasticism in the universities. On the one hand, in the technical domains of astronomy, mathematics, cartography, medicine and botany, etc., there was a ferment of original activity, generated by the practical needs of navigation and commerce. Indeed, many of the voyages that were made at this time had a scientific component: João de Castro’s travels in the East resulted in the production of elaborate maps, supplemented with astronomical tables and topographical sketches, while Garcia de Orta’s stay in India yielded a comprehensive study of the plants of the region and their medicinal properties. In the field of translation, a similar duality emerges. There are examples of scientific texts by prestigious foreign authors being translated into Portuguese from Latin (for example, Pedro Nunes translated Sacrobosco’s Treaty on the Sphere, Purbachius’ Theory of New Planets and Ptolemy’s Geography), and also of adaptations for educational purposes (such as João de Castro’s introduction to the Treaty on the Sphere8 presented in the form of a dialogue with questions and answers). On the other hand, there was also a considerable amount of activity going in the opposite direction. Garcia de Orta’s major work on Oriental plants and their medicinal properties, written in Portuguese (Os Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da Índia, 1563) was published in Latin by Charles de L’Escluse and translated into Spanish by Cristóvão da

distinctive profiles and social functions of men of science. In the centres scientists concentrate on the production of knowledge, whereas in the peripheries they focus basically on its dissemination through educational activities. Thus scientists in the centres contribute to the further development of new dimensions of scientific knowledge and its applications—whereas, in contrast, their role in the peripheries depends strongly on the prevailing ideology underlying the establishment of a ‘modern’ society” (Carneiro et al 2000, 592). 7 These were known as the King’s Scholarship holders or bolseiros d’El Rei (see AA.VV. 2010). 8 O Tratado da Sphaera, por perguntas e respostas a modo de dialogo (15291536).

8

Chapter One

Costa; João de Castro’s O Roteiro do mar Roxo [“Red Sea Route”] (1540), written in Portuguese, was translated into Latin, English, French and Dutch; while João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco (Amato Lusitano)’s medicinal work Curationium Medicinalium Centuriae (1531-1561), which seems to have been written directly in Latin, was reputedly translated into 59 languages. Portugal also played a part in translation involving non-European languages. An early isolated example was Abrãao Zacuto’s compendium of astrological tables known as the Almanach Perpetuum, which was translated from the original Hebrew into Latin in Leiria by José Vizinho in 1496. 9 Much more significant was the vast body of science translation carried out by Jesuits in the context of the Portuguese patronage (“Padroado”) of Asia. 10 Although much of this would have been from Latin to Chinese, there were also some notable works involving the Portuguese language, such as the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary of technical and scientific terms prepared by the Italians Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri in around 1579. In all cases, Portugal’s role as mediator between central and peripheral cultures is paramount, a role which would be repeated at other periods of history, as we shall see. These examples also illustrate the great influence on Portuguese science of Jews and Jesuits, respectively, who were inherently bi- or multicultural. Zacuto, like the parents of Garcia Orta, was a Spanish Jew that came to Portugal following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Although Jews were formally banished from Portugal too, five years later, in reality, most of them were subjected to forced conversion and lived the next few decades as New Christians, until the Inquisition finally caught up with them. Many then had to flee the country to escape persecution. Zacuto himself died in the Ottoman Empire in 1522, while the physicians Amato Lusitano (1511-1568) and Zacuto Lusitano (1575-1642) fled to

9

This was a compendium of tables showing star movements enabling the prediction of celestial events. A version was later produced in Spanish (Fiolhais and Martins 2010, 6). 10 The “Padroado” (1552-1773) was a set of privileges granted by the Pope to the Portuguese Crown for the management of religious buildings in its territories in the East. In exchange for a portion of the ecclesiastical revenues, the King was to endow the religious buildings and dispatch missionaries, who came from all parts of Europe to Lisbon, from where they travelled to Macau aboard Portuguese ships. From the late 16th century, this Jesuit evangelization mission put great emphasis upon the transmission of Western science, which naturally involved a great translation effort (Saraiva and Jami 2008, ix-x).

Translation on the Semi-Periphery

9

Amsterdam and Antwerp respectively, where they continued their scientific work in relative safety. As regards the Jesuits, these first made their appearance in Portugal in 1540, the year of the first autos-da-fé. Indeed, a remarkable number of Portugal’s scientists in this period were Jesuits who had come to the country from elsewhere, thus introducing another intercultural element into society. Examples were: Christopher Clavius (1538-1612), German mathematician and astronomer, who settled and taught in Coimbra and was largely responsible for perfecting and disseminating the work of Pedro Nunes; Christoph Grienberger (1561-1636), Austrian astronomer, who studied and taught at St. Anton’s College; and Giovanni Paulo Lembo (1570-1618), Italian mathematician, instrumental in disseminating the ideas of Galileo in Portugal. Other Jesuits merely passed through Portugal on their way to missions in the Orient, yet left an important mark upon the scientific culture of the country. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607), mentioned above, were two such cases, as was the mathematician Cristoforo Borri (1583-1632), who taught at Coimbra and Lisbon before proceeding to the East. Hence, this period is characterized by a great deal of intercultural movement in all directions, both physically and textually, which clearly illustrates the pivotal role played by both Portugal and Portuguese in transmitting knowledge between the centre and the periphery.

3. 17th and 18th Centuries Despite the efforts by King John III to modernize the University in the 1530s, changes in the political climate in the wake of the CounterReformation meant that these measures were soon reversed. The teachers he had brought over from Bordeaux to staff the College of Arts were denounced to the Inquisition in 1548, and in 1555 the College was handed over to the Jesuits. There followed a long period of epistemological conservatism, as Scholasticism was re-established in the university, and any suspected of having unorthodox views were hunted down. This situation only began to change in the early 18th century with the reign of King John V (1707-1750), who began to forge links with scholarly figures and institutions abroad with a view to modernizing Portuguese universities. This progressive tendency culminated in the period of office of the Marquis of Pombal (1750-1777), when the University was completely overhauled, the Jesuits expelled and measures were passed to replace Scholasticism with the new empirical learning of Bacon and Newton that was in the ascendancy elsewhere in Europe.

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Chapter One

By and large, the mobility patterns of scholars in this period reflect these ideological shifts. The 17th and early 18th centuries were marked by an influx of Jesuits, Oratorians and other religious groups, some of whom had been sent specifically to Portugal by their Order (as in the case of Raphael Bluteau, the French lexicographer) and others that were en route for the East to carry out missionary activities in the context of the “Padroado” (as with the Belgian Jesuit Antoine Thomas who taught at the College of Arts before heading off for China). In some cases, they had been summoned by the Portuguese king who wished to make use of their skills, as with the Italian Jesuits Giovanni Baptista Carbone (1694-1750) and Domingos Capassi (1694-1736), whom John V planned to send to Brazil to measure longitudes.11 Then after 1759, we see a movement in the opposite direction, with many Portuguese scholars that were members of religious orders having to leave Portugal in order to escape persecution at the hands of the Marquis of Pombal. These included Inácio Monteiro (1724-1812), Jesuit mathematician and physicist, who fled to Italy and took up a post at the University of Ferrara; Teodoro de Almeida (1722-1804), Oratorian and natural philosopher, who took refuge in France, only returning to Portugal after the downfall of Pombal; and the Oratorian astronomer, João Chevalier (1722-1801), who settled in Brussels, helping to found the Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters in that city. All these migrations contributed to the establishment of an informal network of cosmopolitan intellectuals known as “estrangeirados” [foreignized], who were a crucial conduit for the transmission of ideas during this period. Some of the most influential were Jews who had established themselves elsewhere to escape the Inquisition (such as the physicians Jacob de Castro Sarmento and António Ribeiro Sanches); others (like botanist José Correia da Serra and physicist-chemist João Jacinto Magalhães) were effectively on voluntary “study pilgrimages”, perhaps finding the atmospheres of England, France and Italy more conducive to their scientific pursuits. The term “estrangeirados” (as used by Carneiro et al 2000 and Diogo et al 2001) also covers foreigners in Portugal, such as Bluteau, Carbone and Capassi, mentioned above. What all these people had in common, beyond a desire for modernization, were connections abroad, especially in Italy, France and Great Britain; most had attended foreign universities and were members of foreign learned societies (Carneiro et al 2000, 597). 11

In the end only Capassi went to Brazil. Prior to this, he and Carbone had held the position of royal mathematicians and astronomers, setting up the astronomical observatory at the College of St. Anton.

Translation on the Semi-Periphery

11

The “estrangeirados” were active in disseminating the works of foreign authors in Portugal, though it is not always clear whether their works were translations, adaptations or simply based upon prior texts. For example, Manuel Azevedo Fortes’ cartographical treatise, Tratado do modo mais facil, e o mais exacto, de fazer as cartas geograficas... (1722) seems to have drawn very heavily on various earlier texts by several French engineers, while his second work, O Engenheiro portuguez [The Portuguese Engineer] (1772) echoes Jean-Louis Naudin’s L’Ingénieur français [The French Engineer] (1696) even down to the title. Jacob de Castro Sarmento in 1737 wrote a commentary on Newton entitled Theorica verdadeira das mares, conforme a philosofia do incomparavel cavalhero Isaac Newton [True theory of the tides, in accordance with the Philosophy of the incomparable gentleman, Isaac Newton], while the Brazilian Vicente Coelho de Seabra translated and adapted Lavoisier’s Méthode de nomenclature chimique as Nomenclatura chimica portugueza, franceza e latina (1801). The “estrangeirados” also published many of their own works in prestigious scientific journals outside Portugal, though it is not always clear if and when they were translated, especially as these men were generally very accomplished linguists. Correia da Silva has an impressive list of publications in English and French in the annals and transactions of scientific societies of many countries, and João Jacinto de Magalhães and José Anastácio de Cunha both published in French—though in the latter case it is known that his Principios mathemáticos was translated by a disciple, João Manuel de Abreu (Diogo et al 2001, 221). On the other hand, Carbone and Capassi’s account of the eclipse that they had witnessed in Lisbon in 1724, published in both Acta Eruditorum, Lipsae (1725) and the Philosophical Transactions (1726), was probably written and published in Latin. The second half of the 18th century saw a surge of translation activity in Portugal of dictionaries, treatises, manuals, and articles from the specialized scientific press, mostly from French and English (Nunes 2001, 8). These included the Compendio historico of 1771, commissioned by the Marquis of Pombal to divulge the works of Enlightenment thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, Pascal and Newton; the encyclopaedic Miscellanea curioza e proveitoza (1779-1785), effectively a compilation of articles from various foreign journals, translated and edited in Lisbon; and the Bibliotheca das sciencias e artes of 1793, containing works translated from Latin, French, English, Italian and German. Amongst the various periodicals that appeared around this time were the Gazeta litteraria (1761), which aimed to divulge information about agriculture taken from

12

Chapter One

English and French sources, and the Jornal enciclopedico (1779-1793) based on French model Journal encyclopédique (1756-93).12 There was also an increase in migrationary activity under the Marquis of Pombal, who was keen to recruit all available talent in his plans to modernize the country and university. Like John V before him, many of the men he invited to participate in the reform of the university were Italians, such as the mathematician Michele Franzini, engineer Michele Ciera, physicist Giovanni Della Balla and natural historian Domenico Vandelli. But there were also a number of Brazilians: José Monteiro da Rocha, invited to head the mathematics department at the University; José Mariano Veloso, who took charge of the printing press Arco do Cego, which for many decades played an important role in divulging Enlightenment thought in Portugal; and perhaps most importantly, the University rector, Francisco de Lemos, who oversaw the Pombaline reforms and became known throughout history as the “reforming rector”. The appointment of Francisco de Lemos seems to have been instrumental in attracting other Brazilian students to Coimbra, for by some estimates, as many as 300 came over at this time. Of those, the most important were Vicente Coelho Seabra, already mentioned, and José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, who went on to become an important international figure, not only as a scientist (his name is linked to the discovery of lithium and nine other minerals) but also as statesman and mentor of Brazilian independence. Indeed, the relationship between Portugal and its South American colony was perhaps the most interesting transcultural phenomenon that occurred during this period in the field of science. Here, more than anywhere else at this time we can see Portugal’s semi-peripherality in operation; for while the country was clearly marginal in Europe in the field of science at this time, it was a major destination, indeed a metropolis, for Brazilian students and scientists. Many of these returned to their own country afterwards, taking with them the knowledge that they had acquired in Coimbra which was put to use in the modernization of their own country. Others, like Andrada e Silva, used it as a stepping stone to other European centres, going on to develop prestigious scientific careers.

12 For a highly detailed study of the scientific periodicals and other publications that appeared in Portugal at this time see Nunes (2001).

Translation on the Semi-Periphery

13

4. 19th and 20th Centuries The tug-of-war between “ancients” and “moderns” that had begun in Portugal in the 18th century became more pronounced in the 19th,13 with important consequences for the development and transmission of knowledge. The progressive camp found itself once more curtailed after the 1st Vatican Council of 1870, which condemned a wide range of positions associated with rationalism, liberalism and materialism, 14 and prescribed Neo-Thomism as the official philosophy to be taught in Catholic schools. The result was that Portugal found itself once more largely cut off from the main European currents. It is significant, for example, that Darwinism did not make much of an impact in the country (the Origin of Species was only translated into Portuguese in 1910, though there were a few French translations circulating at the end of the 19th century). Indeed, it was the Social Darwinism of Haeckel and Spencer that had most impact in Portugal, reflecting the growing spirit of conservatism and nationalism that ultimately culminated in the establishment of the Estado Novo in 1926.15 Throughout most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Portugal, science was largely at the service of the country’s colonial interests, resulting in a surge of scientific mobility. This mostly took the form of expeditions to Africa to map out the terrain and assess its resources under the auspices of the National Geographic Society, Naval Institute 16 and other national bodies, and by the time of Luiz Wittnich Carrisso (18861937), Scientific Colonialism had been established as a rational approach to the administration of these territories (Varanda 2007). Thus, knowledge 13

In political terms, this first took the form of a conflict between absolutists and liberals, mutating into a tussle between monarchists and republicans in the latter part of the century. 14 The Index of books forbidden to Catholics was extended to include names like Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill and Comte. 15 We can perhaps see a similar ideological impulse at work with the efforts of the so-called “Carlos Ribeiro Group” to introduce the anthropology of Paul Topinard and Broca into Portugal in the early 20th century. As Roque (2001, 256) points out, the translations that were undertaken at this time, supposedly with the objective of creating a “replica” of French anthropology in Portugal, were actually slanted to serve a particularly nationalistic agenda and feed into the ethnogenic debates that were current in Portugal at the time. 16 Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral, best known as aviators, were routinely involved in cartographic and geodesic missions to Africa on behalf of the Naval Institute to which they belonged.

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flows between Portugal and Africa were considerable during this period. Not only was Western science and technology exported to that continent in order to exploit its resources, create infrastructures and improve health and living conditions, new knowledge was also being generated there, which was returned to Europe in the form of artefacts and specimens that were studied and written about in universities, and displayed in the many museums and botanical gardens that sprang up at this time. In other respects, however, Portugal clearly occupied a very peripheral position in relation to the rest of Europe. In the 19th century, many of the periodicals that managed to avoid the censors, such as Jornal de Coimbra (1812-1829), the Revista estrangeira, periodico de litteratura, philosophia, viagens, sciencias e bellas artes (1837-1938) and the Jardim portuense, jornal de cultura universal (1843) were basically compilations of material translated from foreign publications,17 while scientific mobility patterns within Europe displayed a similar subservience. We find Portuguese scientists heading to other European centres to acquire expertise alongside specialists (the engineer Bernardino Barros Gomes went to Germany, for example, and the physician Marck Anahory Athias went to France) while foreign scientists (such as geologists Charles Bonnet, Léon Paul Choffat and Ernest Joseph Xavier Fleury) tended to come to Portugal to teach and research. An interesting exception to this rule was the case of Goan-born chemist Agostinho Lourenço (1826-1893), who first came to Portugal on a grant in 1848. This was subsequently doubled by the Portuguese government to enable him to move on to France, Germany and England, where he built a successful career in a series of prestigious laboratories, before returning to Lisbon in 1861 to teach in the Polytechnic. As in the case of the Brazilian, José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva, mentioned earlier, this clearly illustrates how Portugal functioned as a stepping stone between the periphery and the centre for certain illustrious individuals. Moreover, it suggests that the periphery had now begun to transform itself “into an entity that was able to digest models and then re-export them a new reinvigorated form” (AA.VV. 2010, 96), a mechanism that may prove vital for global change processes in coming years, as I suggest below.

17

Portuguese scholars in exile continued to play an important role in this regards, also publishing Portuguese language periodicals in London and Paris.

Translation on the Semi-Periphery

15

5. 1974 onwards Since the revolution of 1974, which put an end to the dictatorship, and particularly since accession to the European Community in 1986, there has been a massive catch-up operation under way in Portugal in order to bring it up to the level of its European partners. In the early stages, there were large-scale translation projects to publish canonical science and textbooks in Portuguese, and create terminology in fields where no equivalents existed. In more recent years, measures have been taken to stimulate new research, establish international partnerships, and encourage the mobility of students, professors and researchers to and from the country. Despite having lost the colonies that in previous centuries guaranteed Portugal’s role as mediator between the centre and periphery of the world system, the country continues to exploit its historic links with those countries to transmit knowledge back and forth. Interestingly, the direction of those flows appears to be changing. With regards to the hegemonic knowledge issuing from the centre of the world system (which of course has now shifted across the Atlantic to the USA), Portugal’s former colony, Brazil, has become an active mediator itself, producing numerous Portuguese translations of English-language textbooks and other scientific works, which it then exports to Portugal. But in recent years, there has also appeared an interesting trade in non-hegemonic knowledge, in which Portugal is an active participant—something that looks set to increase in the postcolonial climate. One cutting-edge project under way at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, aims to disseminate and valorize alternative knowledges from the periphery in a conscious critique of hegemonic science. In the final part of this article, I shall look more closely at one of the volumes published under this rubric to examine the strategies used in the process of dissemination.

*** Voices of the World (vol. 6 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestos, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos) is a collection of interviews with individuals from around the world that are involved in (according to the editors) projects for social emancipation. The interviews were conducted in a number of different languages, sometimes with the help of an interpreter, and then transcribed and translated for

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publication in both Portuguese and English. 18 Thus, the chain of transmission was often very complex, involving a large team of translators, reviewers and editors. The objective, according to the Introduction (2010, xv-xxxv), was to allow the interviewees to express their particular forms of knowledge in their own words, in the understanding that such knowledges are deeply embedded in social contexts and practices, and therefore cannot be easily extracted from the languages in which they arose. Hence, a variety of different translational strategies are used in an attempt to retain something of the subject’s original voice, whilst making it intelligible to readers from very different cultures. There are, for example, extensive footnotes, which provide glosses of untranslatable terms or references that would otherwise be unintelligible to a reader unfamiliar with the culture; and each interview is preceded by an introduction which provides background information about the interviewee(s) and the context in which the interview was conducted. These metatextual features are target-culture-oriented, which means that they vary considerably between the English and the Portuguese versions, even as regards relative length (the English versions tend to be much longer, particularly in the case of interviews emanating from Lusophone contexts). Whenever the interview was conducted in Portuguese, the words are faithfully transcribed in the Portuguese edition of the book, with care to reproduce all the non-standard grammar and vocabulary, backtrackings and hesitation devices manifested in the recording. In the case of the interview with Tikuna Indian, Pedro Inácio Pinheiro, even the pronunciation is reproduced, resulting in a text that is very evocative but only just about comprehensible for a non-Brazilian Portuguese speaker. For example, the phrase “Então meu pai me levô pra pescaria no igarapé” (“So my father took me fishing in the stream”) uses non-standard spelling (“levô” and “pra” instead of “levou” and “para”) to evoke the speaker’s pronunciation, colloquial syntax (“me levou para a pescaria” instead of “levou-me à pesca”), as well as vocabulary items from the local Tikuna language (“igarapé”). In the English edition, the non-standard grammar has been reproduced to some extent, though made more comprehensible; punctuation has been standardized, and the frequent verbal tics, so typical of orality (such as “né?”, a contraction of “não é?” meaning “isn’t it?”) have been omitted. As for the Tikuna words, these have been kept and glossed in a footnote in both versions. 18

Published in English in 2010 by Verso (London and New York) and in Portuguese in 2008 by Edições Afrontamento (Porto) under the title Vozes do mundo (reinventar a emancipação social: para novos manifestos).

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Sometimes the footnotes engage in an elaborate discussion of certain translation options and their respective connotations. This is the case with the English version of the interview of Maciane F. Zamba and Carolina J. Tamele from Mozambique, where the term “nyàngá” (eventually translated as “traditional doctor”) is discussed at some length, providing information about the historical usages and ideological implications of the English terms “witchdoctor”, “medicine man” and “traditional healer”. In all, Voices of the World is an extremely successful exercise in cultural mediation, in which a team of Portuguese sociologists, in collaboration with their colleagues in other parts of the world, have used their privileged position on the semi-periphery of the world system to transport to the centre voices from the periphery that would otherwise never get heard.

6. Final Remarks In this article, I have attempted to show that, over the centuries, Portugal has consistently played a key role in the transmission of knowledge back and forth between the centre and the periphery of the world system, and that this is directly related to its geographical position on the very edge of Europe. In the south, its proximity to North Africa and the Middle East meant that it was a natural meeting place for Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures during the Medieval and Early Modern periods, while its long Atlantic seaboard in the west contributed to the development of its seafaring capability, making it a natural point-of-call for voyagers on their way to and from America and the East. This in turn fostered a linguistic and cultural polyvalence conducive to the practice of translation, essential for the transfer of knowledge across language boundaries. Despite the fact that Portugal itself was culturally closed for long periods, its role as mediator in the transfer of knowledge seems to have remained remarkably constant. What does appear to change at different times is the direction of transmission. That is to say, of all the various directions possible (from Portugal to the various European centres; from the European centres to Portugal; from Portugal to the East, South America or Africa; from those more peripheral territories to Portugal), certain channels and directions appear to have acquired more prominence at particular points in history in accordance with shifts in the balance of political and economic power. Today, we seem to be on the verge of another major shift in the world system, following the crisis in the European and American banking

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sectors, and with the sovereign debt issue threatening to bring down the Euro. There is much talk of emerging economic powers, a cluster of seemingly disparate countries that have now been grouped under the acronym of BRIC,19 and which together account for 25 % of the world’s land mass and 40 % of its population. Portugal (which of course has traditional links with three of these countries and has become a favoured immigration destination for nationals of the fourth) has already begun the process of reorientation necessary for it to retain its role as cultural mediator. Its government ministers are striking up trade agreements with these countries, and there is a new demand for Chinese and Russian in the areas of language teaching and translation. In the case of Brazil, there are signs that the old colonial balance of power is inverting. Brazil now contributes to the International Monetary Fund rather than benefiting from it and is clearly in the ascendancy as regards international trade. In higher education, many of the Brazilian students that have been a constant presence in Portugal since the 18th century have begun to go home to take advantage of a university system that is not only expanding but also free. And it is the Brazilian variety of Portuguese that is now favoured by foreigners wishing to learn the language, of whom there are more than ever before. This situation may at first sight seem to be an uncomfortable one for a country that was once the metropolis of its own vast empire. But the fact that it shares a language with one of the up-and-coming powers may prove to be the means by which it safeguards its position in the changing political landscape. That is to say, there is every indication that Portugal will ride the forthcoming economic storms by continuing to do what it does best—namely transporting knowledge and other symbolic goods back and forth between the centre and periphery of the world system.

Bibliography AA.VV. 2010. Descrição do bem—histórico e evolução. In Universidade de Coimbra—Alta e Sofia—vol. 1: candidatura a património mundial. Coimbra: Coimbra University Press. Bennett, Karen. 2010. Academic Writing Practices in Portugal: Survey of Humanities and Social Science researchers. Diacrítica—Série Ciências da Linguagem 24 (1): 193-210. 19

Brazil, Russia, India and China. These countries held their first joint meeting in June 2009 after which they issued a declaration calling for a new multi-polar world order.

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Carneiro, Ana, Ana Simões, and Maria Paula Diogo. 2000. Enlightenment Science in Portugal: The Estrangeirados and their Communication Networks. Social Studies of Science 30 (4): 591-619. Crato, Nuno, Fernando Reis, and Luís Tirapicos, eds. [N.d.] Ciência em Portugal. Personagens e episódios. Centro Virtual Camões, http://cvc. instituto-camoes.pt/ciencia/index1.html (accessed December 12, 2010). Cronin, Michael. 2000. Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation. Cork: University of Cork Press. —. 2003. Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Di Biase, Carmine. 2006. Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Diogo, Maria Paula, Ana Carneiro, and Ana Simões. 2001. Ciência portuguesa no Iluminismo. Os Estrangeirados e as comunidades científicas europeias. In Enteados de Galileu? A Semiperiferia no sistema mundial da ciência. Edited by João Arriscado Nunes and Maria Eduarda Gonçalves. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 209-238. Fiolhais, Carlos, and Décio Martins. 2010. Breve história da ciência em Portugal. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra/Gradiva. Fitas, Augusto T. 2005. The Portuguese Community and the Theory of Relativity. E-Journal of Portuguese History 3 (2), http://www. brown. edu/Departments/Portuguese_Brazilian_Studies/ejph/html/issue6/pdf/a fitas.pdf (accessed December 15, 2010). Fitas, Augusto T., Marcial A. E. Rodrigues, and Maria da Fátima Nunes, eds. 2008. Filosofia e história da ciência em Portugal no século XX. Casal da Cambra: Caleidoscópio. Montgomery, Scott L. 2000. Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Times. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Nunes, Maria de Fátima. 2001. Imprensa periódica científica (1772-1852). Lisbon: Estar Editora, Lda. Nunes, João Arriscado, and Maria Eduarda Gonçalves, eds. 2001. Enteados de Galileu? A Semiperiferia no sistema mundial da ciência. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. Roque, Ricardo. 2001. Porto-Paris, ida-e-volta: estratégias nacionais de autoridade científica. A Sociedade Carlos Ribeiro e a antropologia portuguesa no final do século XIX. In Enteados de Galileu? A Semiperiferia no sistema mundial da ciência. Edited by João Arriscado Nunes and Maria Eduarda Gonçalves. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 239-290.

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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1985. Estado e sociedade na semiperiferia do sistema mundial: o caso português. Análise social XXI (87-88-89): 869-901. Saraiva, Luís Manuel Ribeiro, and Catherine Jami, eds. 2008. The Jesuits, the Padroado and East Asian Science (1552-1773). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. Varanda, Jorge. 2007. O Biombo de fotos. In Missão botânica transnatural, Angola 1927/1937. Edited by Paulo Bernaschina and Alexandre Ramires. Coimbra: Artez, 5-35. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1984. The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements and the Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER TWO THE PROJECT OF A CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TRANSLATED LITERATURE AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR TRANSLATION STUDIES IN PORTUGAL TERESA SERUYA

1. Introduction The aim in this introduction is to give a very general outline of the genesis and development of Translation Studies (TS) in Portugal because it is my belief that this is the only way one may perceive the need for a project based on the critical bibliography referred to in the title. When a history is compiled about TS in Portugal one day, it will involve going back to the beginning of the 1980s when the GUELF— Grupo Universitário de Estudos de Literatura Francesa (University French Literature Studies Group) organized the 2nd Meeting on Translation Studies at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon (FLUL) in 1983. The outcome of this Meeting was the publication of the book Problemas da tradução—Escrever, traduzindo [Translation Problems— Writing, Translating We Go] (1983). In Coimbra, literary translation was increasingly receiving more attention and a Masters Degree was for the first time offered during the 1982/83 and 1983/84 academic years, although this time at the instigation of the teaching staff in German Studies. It gave rise to the book Problemas da tradução literária [Problems of Literary Translation] (1986). Significantly, both these steps were taken within the institutional frameworks connected to Comparative Literature. This epistemological tutelage was confirmed in the decisive year of 1989 when TS saw the light of day in Portugal. Indeed, the first

This text was written in January 2011.

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congress held by the Portuguese Association of Comparative Literature in Lisbon that same year had a section called “Translation Studies” headed by José Lambert. It was in this section that we were able to hear Armin Paul Frank (and his team) speak about the Göttingen University Centre for Literary Translation Studies. It was a sign foretelling us that over the next few years the trend would be for TS to break away from Comparative Literature and, as it happened, also from Linguistics, owing to its very practical nature in the sphere of training translators—a field which had not really reached university standard as of yet in Portugal. In limiting ourselves to Lisbon, apart from the relevant role played by the Higher Institute of Languages and Administration (ISLA) in educating translators, it is fair to say that 1990 was the year in which FLUL started offering a post-graduate Specialization Course in Translation (CET), the first of its kind in this area at the Faculty. It should be kept in mind that only a decade later was the first undergraduate degree—a licenciatura—in Translation offered at the FLUL. Indeed, it was precisely within the sphere of CET that Horst Turk from Göttingen first came to Lisbon. Some members of FLUL teaching staff, such as João Ferreira Duarte, João Flor and Fernanda Gil Costa, interested in Translation mainly through their work with Reception Studies, were thus able to closely follow the wellknown “Literary Translation” project (SFB, Sonderforschungsbereich “Die literarische Übersetzung”). Even though the impact was felt more on an individual scale, getting acquainted with such a project was a key step in propelling TS in Portugal. Portuguese researchers were given bibliographical and scientific support by the Göttingen group over a number of years including short teaching exchanges falling within the Erasmus Programme. However, a few more steps were needed to reach beyond casuistic studies which, although doubtlessly relevant when drawing attention to the role Translation played in Portuguese culture/literature (owing to the fact that a renewed look at our national literary history was one of the important aims of TS research and Descriptive Translation Studies more particularly), were not enough to establish a new disciplinary area or even systematic research. Other conditions were demanded if this were to happen and one of them was setting up international networks to receive and permanently update information. It was nothing short of painful, therefore, to witness that no mention was made of Portugal in historiographic reference studies pertaining to translation, work such as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998, 2001, 2009) or the history book published by the International Federation of Translators (IFT) called Translators

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through History (1995). Registering Portugal in the international TS circuits therefore became a pressing need. Another condition called for was a basic number of organized sources. To this end, we may mention as a happy coincidence the first volume of A Tradução em Portugal [Translation in Portugal] published in 1992 by A. A. Gonçalves Rodrigues (the 5th and last volume was published in 1999). Towards the end of the 1990s, C. Castilho Pais published in 1997 his anthology Teoria diacrónica da tradução portuguesa (séc. XV-XX) [Diachronic Theory of Portuguese Translation (15th to 20th centuries)], thus calling attention to an angle of our literary history about which we were not overly aware. In the meantime, apart from swelling the ranks of those who were possibly interested in TS and willing to form a team, the opportunity arose of acquiring an indispensable formal status within an institutional framework. The Centre of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature and Culture (CLCPB), operating at the Catholic University of Portugal, set up the first project aiming at enquiring the connection between translation and national literary history. The project was called “Literary History and Translations. Representations of the Other in Portuguese Culture” (19982005) and was composed of several stages. It started off with a critical study of the main histories of Portuguese literature and gave way to a more concrete field of research consisting of numerous case studies that extended from authors, translations and translators to more complicated objects such as collections or more specific topics such as censorship. Worth mentioning is the fact that the project’s initiatives open to the public were held both at home and abroad. Virtually all of them included the active role of João Ferreira Duarte to whom this book is dedicated and indicated the very productive relationship forged between the Centre for Comparative Studies (at FLUL) and the CLCPB. The change in the institutional framework—the CLCPB was abolished and, since 2007, the Centre for Communication and Culture Studies (CECC) 1 took its place—coincided with a re-assessment of and a new approach to research work in TS in Portugal, something which had been in the offing since 2005. On the one hand, there seemed to be a certain deadlock as to the direction the research team should be taking since a wider horizon was needed. On the other hand, there was a growing awareness that it was possible to make a more valuable contribution in order to proceed with TS more fruitfully among us, or rather, so as to launch a solid, broad-based infra-structure that would lead to the history of 1

Initially called the Centre of Language, Cultures and Literatures.

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translation in Portugal. One of the most obvious gaps had to do with the translators; hence the project based on a Dictionary of Portuguese Translators. To meet this purpose, it was possible to enlist the support of the University of Lisbon English Studies Centre (ULICES) and the AngloPortuguese Studies Centre at the New University of Lisbon, in addition to specialized researchers coming from other Portuguese universities (Coimbra and Évora, for example). The application put forward to compile a Dictionary of Portuguese Translators presented to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in 2006 was unsuccessful despite the fact that the preliminary rejection of the application was contested in terms of the application rules. The evaluation panel’s reasons are difficult to understand given the fact that they seemed to confound bibliography with dictionary: according to its opinion, our project would overlap with Rodrigues’s bibliography. Be that as it may, a temporary setback may well be the mother of invention and thus it happened that within the new CECC, and by taking advantage of the advice dispensed by the distinguished panel, a new proposal was put forward involving a bibliography of translations that would carry on from the last volume of Rodrigues’s A Tradução em Portugal which did not present data further than 1930. The work on Intercultural Literature in Portugal 1930-2000: A Critical Bibliography was started in 2008 in the context of a partnership between the CECC and the ULICES (both Centres received FCT funding). An account of this project is given in the following section.

2. Reasons for a Bibliography Looking at the international circulation of literary texts from a transnational stance, we may note that it is a strictly hierarchical universe. In other words, the dislocations of texts from the home country to any other are anything but symmetrical (Casanova 2002, 7-8). It is not by chance that “dominated” languages (Casanova 2002, 8) such as Portuguese reveal that they have a greater number of translations than the so-called “dominant” languages, where English obviously takes the lead.2 Translation 2

According to Casanova, the dominated languages do not make up a homogenous group but may rather be divided into four groups. Portuguese may be placed in the third group: it is a language bespeaking the culture and tradition of a “small” country which has a relatively important history and credit although, due to its limited broadcast, it is little spoken by polyglots, hardly known beyond the country’s borders and is undervalued in the world literary market (2002, 9). Described in these terms, this attribution is undoubtedly problematic if we think

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is therefore an unequal interchange that allows one to perceive the dominant relationships exercised in the international literary field. Casanova’s clear ideological position contradicts G. Toury’s realpolitiklike explanation: we import what we do not have from places where there is plenty and we translate so as to fill the gaps (Toury 1995, 27). For his part, Theo Hermans does not like the idea of a culture that has empty spaces (Hermans 1999, 109). We may choose words as an analytical tool, but we should also look at publishing “facts” that need interpreting. For example, why was science fiction in Portuguese, grosso modo during the years the Estado Novo3 was in power, practically all translated? And why did the same thing happen with “light” literature (romantic novellas and westerns)? Where did these books come from and why were these products so much in demand by an increasingly disparate urban reading public who went to the cinema and had more free time to enjoy leisure and entertainment? It is high time that the bibliography is made available in order to study these phenomena on the basis of reliable data. Another more obvious, although more distant, reason for undertaking this project lies in wanting to provide a generational testimony: in the same way that Rodrigues left us his bibliography (which no doubt will have to be reviewed one day), we also feel that it is our duty to look after it, and continue where he left off, with the advantage, however, of still being able to reap the fruits of our labour. Having teams and centres available to us, it is our duty to carry on the task and complete the business. Another reason is, so to speak, of a methodological nature: if the field is already known, it is easier to pinpoint and select the objects of study more judiciously and, as a result, work out the pertinent research tasks. A bibliography enables us to form a viewpoint about a certain whole (an author, a genre, a publisher, a translator, a year, a decade, etc.) greatly helping to formulate the question to be studied. Furthermore, there is a series of more “political” reasons: in keeping with what has been mentioned above, the history of translation has been written from the perspective of powerful, dominant cultures which have tended to decry, if not erase, the peripheries. For their part, the peripheries have not always striven to make themselves heard nor have they shown about Brazil that is no longer a “small” country today; in addition, Portuguese does not exactly have “national borders” in the same way that Danish has. However, I believe that the remaining criteria are applicable. 3 The Estado Novo was the dictatorial regime which governed Portugal after the fall of the Republic (1910-1926). The first years were a military dictatorship, followed as from 1933 by a constitutional regime which entitled itself Estado Novo [New State] (1933-1974).

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that being on the fringe may be seen as a vantage point from which to better observe the centre(s), and how they and the periphery may become interconnected and even interdependent. Calling translated literature “intercultural literature” makes a lot of sense. The translated literary text, if understood as something new— neither “slavish” to the original source text, nor confused with an original piece of work in the target language—might well be the meeting place of at least two language cultures. Needless to say, this characteristic is not sufficient to identify a translation, as we may find for example in the literature of migration: authors with a particular mother tongue producing literary texts in their adopted language. Without wishing to mention the well-known examples of J. Conrad and S. Rushdie, Germany for instance boasts a rich heritage of this nature today. Nevertheless, although the title of the project is bound to give rise to some doubt, the choice has once again been due to “political” criteria: applications for public funding have to be couched in “mainstream” language and we should not forget that, in this case, the somewhat low prestige afforded to “translation” activities and products is also “mainstream”... With regard to the period under study, it covers the Estado Novo with all its conditioning factors calling for an important comparison between them with the deep-seated changes (in literacy, the reading public, taste, and publishing practices) that came later on with democratic, global society up to the turn of the 21st century. It is also pertinent to reflect upon the decision to call it a “critical bibliography”. From the start, it is selective because it chooses what information to be given on each entry; moreover, it justifies an entry by referring to the physical existence of the respective book. The user may, therefore, be sure that the reference corresponds to an object. Where the material support is concerned, it only includes the “translations made of literature and published in book form which, on the other hand, is a very latent concept of literature”.4 In this respect, the work we are busy with is smaller in scope when compared to Gonçalves Rodrigues’s. However, the (desirable) goal of wanting to include the bibliography of all translations would defeat the purpose for practical reasons. Likewise, the way in which “translation” is (and indeed has to be) understood is also latent, coming as it does in several “versions”, “adaptations” and “free translations”, without forgetting the pseudo-translations which often appeared among us in bygone decades—where such pseudo-translations were awarded the right 4 I have excluded, for example, the translations of serials or translations for the theatre that were not published in book form.

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to a place in the bibliography owing to the fact that they were read as if they were real translations. After all, what we are dealing with is a critical bibliography because the way it is laid out provides a first opportunity to confront the “original”, which is the same as saying the beginning of the text’s circulation on its way to meet Portuguese culture. It may be said therefore that it is a translation bibliography that shows its promise as well as its limitations. In other words, it works as a mirror reflecting itself.

3. Layout and Possibilities I shall now be going through several items that describe each entry, testing the information contained in these items by means of a first provisional commentary (so far, the period between 1930 and 1955 is available in the textual version dawn up—see www.translatedliterature portugal.org). The great horizontal dividing line is between the target text (the translation) and the source text. The order deliberately follows this rationale because this is the centre of the bibliography and, as Toury (1995) has taught us, it is also the departure point for the entire study, as the element composing the Portuguese culture. Be that as it may, it is accompanied by its origins whether real or remote (as in the case of indirect translations), demonstrating that it wishes to preserve the concept of translation that does not de-characterize the kind of text it is (as would happen if a concept were to be extended to “cultural translation”, see Duarte 2008). João Barrento clarified the issue in an exemplary way when, in referring to literary translation, he spoke about the: Predominant presence of the original text, which is always present on the translator’s horizon and is the only, more stable reference possible [...]. Without the source text, there is no translation and because of this, it will always act as a moderating influence on the translator’s arbitrary caprices [...] or personal reveries. (2002, 47)

The first column of the bibliography consists of the dates on which the translations were published. Many refer to the Portuguese Legal Deposit dates, the dates on which the book was printed or the dates registered by the PorBase system, which indicates the publishers’ deliberate habit not to record the publication date where they should. The feasible explanations for this omission, which go far beyond mere carelessness, are not at all flattering in terms of the publishers. This column is followed by the titles of the books, after which, wherever pertinent, there is an indication of their genre. This latter data may have marketing strategies in mind. The column reserved for information on the translator (name, date of birth and death,

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or only the first) leads to the following, albeit provisional, interpretation: the number of translators who have left not a single trace of themselves in the bio-bibliographical records available is staggering; anonymity and invisibility seem to be the overwhelming trait. This is a serious, although no less meaningful, gap for the future history of Portuguese translation. The other side of the coin is the number of important figures in Portuguese culture who came from the most varied walks of life and were sporadic or frequent translators. The place of publication and the publishing houses confirm the suspicions of anyone who knows something about Portuguese literary affairs: the vast majority of publishing houses which published translations were concentrated in Lisbon, followed by Porto and then Coimbra lagging far behind. Centralization was clearly the order of the day. The column reserved for the collections is warranted due to the observation made earlier on about collections being a very popular marketing practice and strategy with the publishers. As there has been renewed interest recently in anthologies and collections on the part of TS, the data obtained from this column may certainly cater for various kinds of study goals. The name of the text (under the publisher’s responsibility) will help towards study based on the Portuguese culture’s self understanding as regards the concept of translation. The following column about the mediation language is therefore a fundamental component of this study and, at one and the same time, it will allow us to see not only what the dominant source culture is, but also gain insight into the linguistic competences of Portuguese translators. Finally, the data about the target text pertaining to the “Literary Mode” gives us a glimpse of a predominant characteristic: the overwhelming majority of the translations are narratives. The next horizontal segment shows the collected data pertaining to the “source text”, a term which is not exempt from ambiguities because, as it is well-known, the source text of a translation may not always be the original source: French was very often used among us as a mediation language for Russian and German literature for example. The solution found to safeguard a specific language and terminological coherence (the target text vs. the source text) and inform the user about the real original at the same time, and whenever it was possible to do so (because the circuit needs to be built up), was based on interpreting the “source text” as the oldest version available in the respective national libraries. An asterisk has been inserted against the book titles where the original titles have been printed in the Portuguese translation credits: this is a relevant piece of information for critical studies about the editions of different translations which in themselves represent a particular aspect of publishing practices in

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Portugal—not noted for their strictness. Information about the author opens up various levels of the Portuguese literary polysystem: it swings between authors who are celebrated in the universal literary canon and little-known authors residing on the fringes of their own original systems where they have already appeared hidden behind prestigious (English language) pseudonyms—is the case of the “Westerns” imported from Spain. Apart from the customary data that remain and belong to the source text (place of publication, publishing house, country and language), what stands out is the country and language as a determining factor for identifying the dominant culture(s) in Portugal. In this way, at the very least, they may be quantified and assessed as to their relative importance and their existence throughout time.

4. Conclusion I have already shown in previous studies (Seruya 2009, 2010) some of the potentialities of the current bibliographical project compiled on the basis of preliminary data collections dealing with the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, particularly as regards answering the question about the dominant culture. The description made in the preceding section about the bibliographical layout allows us to glimpse at the wider possibilities, at the many roads opening up to TS in Portugal. Above all, we believe that our work will make a significant contribution to the indispensable “archaeological stage” (Pym 1998, 5) in Portuguese translation history which is, to coin a phrase, a desideratum of TS in Portugal. It will be a long, slow process requiring a solid foundation, one which CECC and the ULICES researchers intend to donate to Portuguese culture.

Bibliography Barrento, João. 2002. O Poço de Babel. Para uma poética da tradução literária. Lisbon: Relógio D’Água. Casanova, Pascale. 2002. Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 144 (1): 7-20. Duarte, João Ferreira. 2008. A Cultura entre tradução e etnografia. Translated by Sara Ramos Pinto. Lisbon: Nova Vega. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems. Descriptive and Systemoriented Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Pym, Anthony. 1998. Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

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Seruya, Teresa. 2009. Introdução a uma bibliografia crítica da tradução de literatura em Portugal durante o Estado Novo. In Traduzir em Portugal durante o Estado Novo. Organized by Teresa Seruya, Maria Lin Moniz and Alexandra Assis Rosa. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 6986. —. 2010. Translation in Portugal during the Estado Novo Regime. In Translation under Fascism. Edited by Christopher Rundle and Kate Sturge. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 117-144. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

CHAPTER THREE DRAMATURGY, TRANSLATION AND PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF CONTEMPORARY PORTUGUESE THEATRICAL REPERTOIRES CHRISTINE ZURBACH

Initially associated with Comparative Literary Studies, translation started to be considered an autonomous discipline from the 1970s onwards. The Portuguese academic community is now aware of the role of translation(s) as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, of its/their place and function(s) in literature and in recipient cultures, as well as of its/their influence on the development of relationships among national literatures in a globalized context. This is evidenced by the number of ongoing national and international research projects undertaken in research centres at the most important universities in Portugal (Lisbon, Coimbra, Porto, Braga, Évora). These centres have developed research programmes which, on the one hand, lead to the production of PhD and Masters dissertations and, on the other hand, allow the inclusion of translation theory in the curricula of professional training courses for translators, combining technical training to a critical evaluation of relevant issues. There is a large number of publications representative of the state of the art of translation in Portugal, thus contributing to the recognition and visibility of the results achieved by a wider audience. Outstanding is the work of João Ferreira Duarte at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. Since the 1970s, his scientific research has focused on translation theory, with special emphasis on literary theory and historiography. He has also contributed to the establishment of a thriving school of young researchers with international recognition. Similarly to what was happening abroad, the young discipline of Translation Studies was initially seen in Portugal as a branch of either

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Literary Studies or Linguistics. However, this area of work soon started expanding its range of action, thus being able to respond to a variety of issues which had, until then, been considered peripheral in the context of established academic disciplines or even ignored. This confirmed the complexity of the concept of “translation”, a multifaceted object, difficult to define, present in a variety of contexts, as diverse as its uses, justifying an approach to translation in epistemological terms.1 However, at present there is still some controversy about the relationship between translation and literature, requiring an urgent review of the approaches to translation adopted by Literary Studies, as noted by José Lambert: [R]esearch on translation is often carried out in a “much too literary way”, i.e. while making use of many implicitly literary views on language, texts, etc.; one of the paradoxes, however, is that literary research hardly cares about translation(s); those (sub-)areas of literary studies that claim to stress the importance of translation (comparative literature; medieval studies, etc.) are generally speaking a clear confirmation of our unhappy feelings about the literary approach to translation, where “fidelity” remains a central issue [...]. (2005, 10)

This kind of criticism was the central point of discussion in the meeting where the (future) discipline of Translation Studies (TS) emerged. At this meeting, which took place in Leuven in 1976, Gideon Toury introduced an approach to translation from an historical perspective, appealing to the concept of “norm” in a programmatic sense, adopted from sociology, with the aim “of promoting new approaches to Literary Studies”. Hence the title: “Literature and Translation. New Perspectives in Literary Studies” (cited in Holmes 1988). A novel approach to translation was also proposed by Itamar Even-Zohar at this meeting, who suggested that translations should constitute a field of study focused on their position or function in their specific cultural context, thus overriding the dilemma language/literature, at least as academic categories. The relevance of including translations within the discussion of the evolution and interferences among national literatures has been reinforced as noticeable in the title of José Lambert’s paper: “Production, tradition et importation: une clef pour la description de la littérature et de la littérature en traduction” (2006 [1980]). Lambert’s proposal, which will be further discussed below with reference to a case study, both allows the researcher 1 For an overview, see Delabastita (2003), among others, who refers to “the increasing number of disciplines acting as models” (2003, 7).

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a wider scope and provides him/her with a structure in a domain where the issues, rather than being restricted to translation and literature, focus on the study of their host cultures, with special emphasis on debates of a political and identitarian nature. In fact, as it has been recognized by the scientific community involved in TS, the fundamental issue in this type of research is how to explain the rationale for the existence of translation as well as its place and function among cultures and literatures.

1. Translation and some Key Concepts: Production/Translation/Importation Following similar case studies (Zurbach 2001, 2002), the methodological and theoretical framework adopted here is based on the approaches defined by the founders of the discipline, concerning the descriptive approach and the fundamental parameters of Polysystem Theory. This research aims to describe and analyse the role of translation as a phenomenon with cultural significance and, in particular, the case of theatrical texts in the second half of the 20th century, which was marked by the tensions between conservatism and innovation regarding repertoires, whether original or translated, published or staged. More specifically, this study will adopt the approach defined by José Lambert (2006 [1980]) and summarized by the editors in the preface to the volume Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation (Delabastita et al 2006), which considers translated texts “as constructs in their own right and (integrated) into a larger view on literary communication and interaction” (Delabastita et al 2006, xi). Three interconnected categories are thus proposed for the purpose of analysis: Production, tradition and import. Production covers all new messages of whatever textual kind that are being produced within a given system, roughly corresponding to what contemporaries would define as “literature”; tradition and importation both comprise elements that are copresent within the system and interact with it, while still belonging to different systems. Translation, then, is a cross-cutting discursive procedure establishing relations and defining configurations between the three categories. For example, texts imported via translation may combine with texts selected from the national tradition to revitalize the centres of production. (Delabastita et al 2006, xi-xii; emphasis in the original)

In the case study presented below, translation as a practice and the result of that same practice defines a process of importation both of theatrical repertoires from other literatures and dramaturgies, and of

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cultural strategies associated with those repertoires in their societies and cultures of origin. These were cultures with which Portuguese theatre maintained close contact between 1970 and 2000, a period of renewal for the national theatrical scene, marked by a significant increase in production of original writing in Portuguese. Given the typology of translation discussed here, in its connection with a polysemic artistic practice involving textual and non-textual data, we adopt the definition of “Literature” given by Even-Zohar, who considers, [l]iterature as a set of activities for which the label “literary” can be used more conveniently than any other. The “text” is no longer the only, and not necessarily for all purposes the most important, facet, or even product, of this system. (1990, 30)

From a polysystemic and functional perspective, the phenomenon “Literature” consists of a range of systemic relationships or interdependencies allowing the effectiveness of the different factors. We also understand the concept of “repertoire” in its traditional sense—as an organized stock of texts—, but also as an “aggregate of rules and materials which govern both the making and use of a given product” (1990, 39). In the latter sense, the term is used here to designate “any performed or performable set of signs, i.e. including a given ‘behaviour’” (1990, 43). In the model of analysis mentioned above, the concepts Production/ Translation/Importation are connected as areas of interaction, contributing, in our view, to a broader interpretation of the globalizing cultural dynamics of the repertoires and, thus, meeting the purposes of EvenZohar, who considered the function of translation in a wider framework relating to its position within/among cultures. I have already analysed the situation of the national production in a previous study (Zurbach 2001), which pointed towards the historical dependence of the Portuguese theatrical system on other literatures. Particular attention was paid to the situation in the second half of the 20th century, emphasizing the evolution in the national production: [A]n evolution in the situation described before and, in that case, in which direction and from which type of new relationship between the theatrical and the literary fields? The production in Portuguese seems to have regained some momentum and new authors have appeared, supported by a small number of publishers (in particular Cotovia) and by a governmentbacked project—DRAMAT—developed at the Teatro Nacional II in Oporto. (Zurbach 2001, 252)

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Following the hypothesis just quoted, we will analyse the case of cultural agents related to professional theatre who associate the three categories mentioned above both in their repertoires and in their artistic practice. We will take into account the commitment of those agents in supporting and stimulating the effective emergence of a new dramaturgy in Portuguese, and the consequences that might have had regarding the function and role attributed to tradition and to the process of importation through translation in the theatrical model they are placed in. We will analyse new phenomena, visible in the repertoires under investigation (as well as in the broad theatrical field in the period between 1970 and 1990) and associated with strategic changes in the relationship between the national dramatic literature and imported European literatures traditionally dominant. This is evidenced, for example, by the case of the repertoire of professional theatre translated from French originals, historically present in this type of interliterary relations (Casanova 1999, I.1-I.3). We will consider the examples of the Teatro da Cornucópia and the Centro Dramático de Évora. First, it is clear that, after 1974, French literature starts having to compete with other foreign literatures, namely with German dramaturgy, leading to a redirection of the Portuguese theatrical scene as far as the imported theatrical model and the selected authors are concerned. Furthermore, it is evident that, throughout the 90s, European literary and theatrical systems, which had been traditionally dominant, started to lose their hegemony. New dramaturgies, originating from peripheral cultures and languages, started claiming a space in the Portuguese theatrical scene, translated and performed by new projects as it is the case of theatrical companies such as Artistas Unidos (AU) or Teatro da Rainha (TR). Breaking with the European post-war models imported during the 1970s (see below), these companies introduced innovative concepts and aspects in the Portuguese theatrical scene. Previous studies2 have already shown the prevalence of translation in the Portuguese theatrical scene, particularly in the repertoires offered to 2

See: J. Oliveira Barata. 1991. História do teatro português. Lisbon: Universidade Aberta; P. E. Carvalho. 2009. Identidades reescritas. Figurações da Irlanda no teatro português. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 69-98; T. Filipe e Campos. 2007. A Recepção do teatro de August Strindberg em Portugal. Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio; L. Stegagno Picchio. 1969. História do teatro português. Lisbon: Portugália Editora, 157-183, 274-277, 338-334; M.-A. Robilliard. 2009. Le Répertoire du Teatro da Cornucópia (1969-1979). Miroir d’une oeuvre théâtrale en période révolutionnaire, Université de Paris 3, PhD thesis (unpublished); C. Zurbach (2001, 2002).

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audiences by theatre companies. What is the reason behind this phenomenon? The answer for this question lies within the national literary and theatrical systems. In fact, plays’ scarce production is incapable of satisfying the demand for new repertoires by cultural agents which, allied to the dependence on influential literatures strongly established in Portuguese cultural tradition, may explain the peripheral positioning of the Portuguese literary system in the theatrical scene. In addition, despite the structuring role translation has played in the national literary life, it has not always been well accepted throughout history. In fact, it has mostly been perceived as negative both on the basis of linguistic and/or literary criteria, and ethical grounds. Nevertheless, for present-day researchers, translation, in particular when considering literature, cannot be seen as something well defined due to cultural mobility; hence, the redefinition of translation(s) in terms of cultural issues whose political and ideological dimension acquire increasing relevance. In this article, I will be presenting examples of some theatre companies which use repertoires of plays that are representative of the way in which translation corresponds to a cultural importation and, simultaneously, is able to promote innovation.

2. The Centro Cultural de Évora, Teatro da Rainha, Teatro da Cornucópia and Artistas Unidos: Case Studies In a country which has been independent for almost nine centuries, it is important to note that the theatre, the social art par excellence, has had very little visibility in the national outlook panorama of the arts. A victim of almost uninterrupted censorship,3 the theatre has had a low output in terms of original dramaturgy,4 having repeatedly resorted to importation through translation, or to the adaptation “according to the Portuguese taste”, of texts associated with the dominant models in Europe, in order to promote innovation or reform the writing and the prevailing practices of theatre. A similar phenomenon continued through the 20th century, 3

We refer to the religious censorship, during three centuries, with the Inquisition between the second half of the 16th century and the beginning of the 19th century, and the political censorship between 1933 and 1974. 4 The historiography of theatre tends to mention three authors as canonical: Gil Vicente, whose European dimension is presently subject to a new perception; António José da Silva, said “O Judeu” [The Jew], who promoted the creation of new forms inserted in an operatic aspect of theatre; Almeida Garrett, who, during his time, presented the dramaturgy promoted by the Romanesque revolution in the North of Europe.

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confirming the peripheral position of the dramaturgy of national authors in the Portuguese theatre system, which continued to import the most striking aesthetic currents of modern Europe, sometimes with a clear function of “political and cultural resistance” (Serôdio 2006, 5). The change occurred on April 25, 1974 when the Carnation Revolution brought to an end a right wing dictatorship and, with it, the end of censorship. For the first time in thirty-one years there was freedom for creators to choose their own repertoires, and the creation of new companies with state support was made possible. Nevertheless, the importation of cultural models was maintained and even stimulated, particularly those which prevailed in the European literary and theatrical systems at the time. It is to this last period, between 1970 and the present, that the four cases here analysed and described belong: 1) Teatro da Cornucópia (TC); 2) Centro Cultural de Évora (CCE), whose representativeness lies, firstly and in both cases, in the programmatic nature of their reforming intervention in the national cultural and theatrical life, in the context of the ideological and political change introduced in 1974, and, secondly, in their ability to give rise, direct or indirectly, to new projects from 1990 onwards, respectively; 3) Teatro da Rainha (TR), and 4) the group Artistas Unidos (AU), in a context of renewal of artistic practices in Portugal in the acute perception of the cultural impact on a globalized world, increasingly more evident at the national level. The relevance and representativeness of these cases for our study pertain to two transversal or paradigmatic aspects that they share, in terms of norms (Toury 1995): on the one hand, the primacy given to the text, dramaturgy and translation as constants in the artistic practice of theatre; on the other hand, the shared dynamics of breaking with tradition in several domains (namely institutional, socio-cultural and aesthetic), although with differences in historical terms. A complementary aspect to be examined is the ability that such breaks revealed to promote the implementation of various models of innovation in the theatrical scene in Portugal, with particular emphasis on the period beginning in the 1990s: new repertoires imported through translation or produced in institutional contexts designed to support the writing and renewal of the national repertoire, also equally open to international circulation through translation. The particular origin of the Teatro da Cornucópia company (TC), established in 1973 in the context of the academic practice of theatre at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, lies in its connection to the literary component of theatre, the tradition of the “great literature” that constitutes the cultural heritage explored by most creators in the second half of the 20th century in Europe. It is indeed with this theatre of text that

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the practice of modern staging, as a privileged vehicle for the renewal of the theatrical art since the end of the 19th century, asserted itself in the major European scenes. 5 Inspired by the most influential French model with the greatest influence in European theatrical culture at the time, TC’s option for this type of repertoire aimed to introduce an aesthetic and political renewal in the Portuguese theatre. Based on textual choices that articulated classic with contemporary authors, both national and foreign, whose literary and/or theatrical value guaranteed the institutional recognition of the project, this repertoire is governed by a renewed ethical commitment to literature and to the art of theatre present in the works of Shakespeare, Brecht, Müller, Bond or Gil Vicente, subject to an updated stage reading. Breaking with the prevailing academic tradition, the reading of Gil Vicente’s work is now guided by a clarification of the critical position of the playwright and courtier concerning the society of his time. Acclaimed by critics and by the Academy, and regularly state-funded by government institutions, TC takes a central position in the Portuguese theatrical system, a fact clearly reflected in their choices of repertoire. In this area, the corpus of texts staged since 1973 and the metatexts accompanying each performance reveal the decisive role played by translation, both in quantitative terms (the number of translated works is largely predominant in each season), and discursive terms, as it can be verified in the norms formulated in the testimonies of Luís Miguel Cintra presented in the programmes for each performance: opposed to the frequent process of “adaptation” of texts recurrent in the theatrical system, Cintra, as the artistic director of the project and the person responsible for the selection of the works, personally undertakes the translation task or entrusts it to highly reputable literary translators. At the same time it is a crucial element for the creation of an innovative artistic-aesthetic programme, translation also works, in a contradictory way, towards the maintaining of tradition, expressed in the confirmation of the canonical value of the established literary heritage set out in the target society and culture. With state funding designed to support an unprecedented theatrical and cultural programme in Portugal, the professional theatre group CCE, whose initials and modus operandi lasted until 1991, is established in 1975 under the direction of the actor and director Mário Barradas. Aiming to initiate a theatre decentralization policy, the model is inspired by the state 5

See: Maria Helena Serôdio. 2001. Questionar apaixonadamente: o teatro na vida de Luís Miguel Cintra. Lisbon: Cotovia; the already mentioned Marie-Amélie Robilliard’s Le Répertoire du Teatro da Cornucópia (1969-1979). Miroir d’une œuvre théâtrale en période révolutionnaire (2009).

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programme implemented in France during the immediate post-war period and, following the Jean Vilar’s TNP programme, it claims the status of “public service” for the theatre. Located in the Alentejo province, more precisely in Évora (the district capital), the project is designed for the periphery, asserting itself against the macrocephaly of Lisbon, to which it opposes a policy of establishing regional cultural centres that aim to defend the effective promotion of access to culture (Zurbach 2002). This is a programmatic model acquired by the artistic directors of CCE in the course of their training carried in France, in the early 1970s, and theorized in countless documents whose primary function is mainly to demand rights before a state that will progressively disengage from the project. To achieve its goals, CCE designs a repertoire based on the dramaturgy of the so-called universal theatre, with a strong component of works from the Western canon. Translations of French and German works predominate in this repertoire, along with a very restricted selection of national authors. We can define four repertoire areas sharing a common axis, the stimulation of critical reflection on History by the viewer: the importation of contemporary dramaturgy rooted in a materialistic world view (which explains the exclusion of authors from the so-called theatre of the absurd); the appropriation of classical authors for a popular audience; the critical and realistic comedy; a revision of the reading of the national canonical repertoire, with two authors from the national canon—Gil Vicente and Garrett—in a reforming reading of its ideological and cultural significance. The project follows Brechtian aesthetic guidelines which, supported by historical and social realism, question the discursive and critical potentialities of the literary heritage (until then restricted to be read and studied at schools), thus giving consistency to the political vocation of the company’s work (Zurbach 2006, 30). Again, translation emerges as a key vehicle for communication, representing an element of ambiguity: it innovates because it gives access to an unexplored repertoire, but, at the same time, it is used to promote a return to the literary tradition. In partnership with TR (see below), the project is restructured in 1991 under a new name, Centro Dramático de Évora (CENDREV), intended to convey the meaning of a redesigned programme, created in response to a qualitative change in the state’s policy towards culture. In this context, the repertoire’s selection criteria changed, increasing the number of contemporary authors, now the object of a wide dissemination both in Europe and worldwide. Worthy of notice, however, is the near absence of authors or texts from the (still sparse) new national production.

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Teatro da Rainha (TR) is created in 1985 by the actor and director Fernando Mora Ramos, originally a member of CCE. Conceived as a new theatrical production unit engaged in the pursuit of decentralization (Zurbach 2006, 27), TR was set up in the province (Caldas da Rainha). However, it established itself as a critical and autonomous project, breaking with CCE, the matrix, from which TR wanted to distance itself, and which it criticized both for its insufficient attention to the artistic work per se, and the dubious selection of the works it staged, namely as far as the so-called “classic brand” was concerned. Thus, TR’s repertoire adopted a typology emphasizing the value of the text, both through the articulation between dramaturgy and staging, and through the space assigned to it, as evidenced by a vast metatextual production published in intellectual and artistic magazines such as Finisterra, Adagio, Teatro escrito. The authors favoured by TR emerge in the early seasons, in new translations in the case of foreign works done by the company itself. In addition to classical authors, contemporary authors with a recognized status in the international theatrical system, such as Heiner Müller, Christoph Hein, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Pierre Sarrazac are also included. But after integrating the CENDREV project (see above), TR returns to Caldas da Rainha in 2000 and conducts a reorientation of its repertoire, with a strong focus on contemporary authors from foreign repertoires, sometimes little known or still unpublished in Portugal. With this, the weight of the translated works sees itself reinforced through works by Hristho Boytchev, Manfred Karge, Herbert Achtenbusch, Rocco D’Onghia, Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, George Tabori, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Markus Köbeli, Joseph Danan, and Thomas Bernhard. It is hardly surprising that Fernando Mora Ramos, artistic director of TR, was invited, in the late 1990s, to direct the project of the Centro de Dramaturgias Contemporâneas—DRAMAT within a programmatic framework marked by a prestigious connection with the Teatro Nacional S. João (TNSJ). In reaction to the low indices of production of a national dramatic literature, this project represents a unique case in Portugal so far, aiming to boost the reception of foreign dramaturgy through translation as well as the production of new repertoires within the structured framework of creative writing workshops. Originally scheduled for a period from two to four years, the activities and objectives of DRAMAT are described on the official website of TNSJ in the following terms: TNSJ invests in generation and realization of contemporary “scenic languages”, capable of reinterpreting for today’s public the great texts of

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our dramatic heritage, both classical and contemporary. The theatre pays very particular attention to the stimulation of new Portuguese dramatical writing, through theoretical and practical work developed by DRAMAT— Centro de Dramaturgias Contemporâneas do Porto [Centre of Contemporary Dramaturgies of Porto].

Thus, even in the short time it was active, DRAMAT encouraged the emergence of new playwrights, with the support of the publisher Cotovia, which published the output of the initiative in several volumes: we find translations of works by contemporary European playwrights such as Koltès, Brian Friel, Handke, Wedekind, Marius von Mayenburg, Sarrazac, Caril Churchill as well as new original Portuguese texts (DRAMAT 2001a, 2001b). It is also noteworthy that, in this case, the translation is not placed at the service of a particular agent; rather it is the object of a revaluation both on the literary and on the cultural levels, and is articulated with the dramatic writing and with the artistic practice of theatre. Moreover, in international terms and in association with publishing as a potential factor for dissemination and institutional circulation—a rare situation in the theatrical field (Zurbach 2001, 252)—, translation enters the area of exchange of repertoires in a global world: the translation and publication of the classic and contemporary Portuguese theatre, and its reception in the European theatre system, gives consistency nowadays to a cultural sector in full expansion.6 Artistas Unidos (AU) is the latest of the four cases chosen, having been created in 1995 by the actor and director Jorge Silva Melo, a founding member of the company Cornucópia, in whose activities he participated until 1979. Unlike the production model of TC, AU promotes collective creation, valuing the creativity of the actor against the hegemony of the director, in the name of civic and ethical principles that present themselves as a political option: “[P]roduction is an act of creation and a social art” (Fadda 2006, 42). However, its practice is based on a vast repertoire of works by renowned authors from Shakespeare to Brecht, Pinter and Beckett, which are the object of new translations designed to update the work or to recover its original dramaturgy. It also includes new dramaturgies, originated in peripheral literatures or languages (Fadda 2006). Despite claiming a profile that clearly invests in a type of creative work that breaks with the institution, AU also illustrates the need felt by 6

The Maison Antoine Vitez, in France, is an example of that expansion, having created a collection dedicated to the Portuguese playwrights.

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the Portuguese theatrical system for a continuous and indispensable resort to importation and translation in the sense of innovation. This is, however, articulated with production and a critical evaluation of the diversity of the processes of rewriting. Translation is thus discussed in workshops open to the public, in collaboration with international partners (e.g., the Atelier Européen de la Traduction [European Translation Workshop]), and, like the DRAMAT project, AU encourages the national dramatic production of original works, supporting young playwrights such as José Maria Vieira Mendes, at present translated into several languages. Moreover, in the field of publishing, Jorge Silva Melo, in association with the publisher Cotovia (see above), heads the collection “Livrinhos do teatro” [Little Theatre Books], a repository of a wide range of new authors and translations (Fadda 2006, 44).

3. Translation and Cultural Innovation: Some Conclusions The cases that have been described here have shown the role of translation within a range of strategies which may oppose each other, but which can only be understood in the light of cultural strategies and policies. In the most recent past of Portuguese theatre, and particularly in matters concerning the offer in text repertoires and aesthetic models, it has been shown that the importance of translation, both in qualitative and quantitative terms, dramatically increased given the profound changes affecting the national political and ideological context after 1974. This allowed the creation of new repertoires, new authors and texts, promoted innovation and contributed towards a break with tradition. Regarding this last point, the role of translation appears somewhat paradoxical: linked to some of the most innovative cultural projects between the 1970s and 1990s, with international prominence, translation is also linked to tradition, the literary heritage of the “classics”, yet at the same time it puts forward new ways of translating or reworking texts which come into evidence via new staging practices, especially as regards playwriting linked to staging. The term “manipulation”, much debated (and perhaps, debatable), which has always been and will always be associated to TS, is perfectly applicable in this context: new ways of reading and interpreting texts are supported by retranslations of texts, which already form part of the literary canon, but are now reformulated in such a way that they support and encourage a critical view of the debate on tradition. The ubiquitous presence of translations in theatrical repertoires worked well in conjunction with the very small quantity of work produced in this area in national literature, but from the 1990s onwards, various agents

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within the cultural stage begin to introduce new, imported theatrical models, which, in spite of being in the periphery of the cultural agenda at first, soon become its centre, linked to the reinvigoration of theatre productions. A new world view, brought in by translations, is introduced into the writing of original Portuguese texts. We should highlight the quality of the texts in the various projects that have been described here, yet the text resulting from a translation cannot only be seen in terms of the technical aspects or issues of style guiding the translator’s work. In fact, the examples referred to show opposing facets in the various uses to which translations are put, something which allows us to raise the question of the lack of a proper theory of theatre translation. One which is perhaps able to give an overall analysis of the subject. But what type of theory? Given the fact that the area of translation we are looking at is part of a multidisciplinary field, the researcher cannot rely on literary or linguistic theories. We have seen that translation transcends such limitations. Taking into account the methods used by the cultural agents included in this corpus, we proposed an interpretative approach capable of articulating the three terms we started with: production, translation and importation. Whether this is understood as an autonomous system (Even-Zohar 1990) or an intermediary, in harmony with the national cultural situation turning its existence into a necessity, translation encourages innovation or the renewal of the areas upon which it acts. Maybe it is time for translation researchers to have another, critical, look at Pascale Casanova’s compelling 1999 thesis on the globalization of literature: the traditional relationship between centre and periphery has emerged completely reshaped at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. Such an analysis could bring about a much-desired renewal to the approach to the history of translation, literature and theatre, taking into account the power of translation for the creation of the space of interlinguistic and intercultural communication which is our world nowadays. Presented as a map-based model, as referred to by João Ferreira Duarte when he resorts to the image “space of History”, and abandoning an exclusively diachronic perspective, the historical approach could redefine its aims: “[T]o provide knowledge of intercultural appropriations, what translation is in fact all about” (Duarte 2003, 16). Finally, we should emphasize the definition of translation (as it is proposed here) and its clarity and precision, as a powerful mechanism which, just as understood by the founders of TS, (re)shapes literature and culture and frees it from its secondary role in traditional academic studies.

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Bibliography Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Le Seuil. Delabastita, Dirk. 2003. Translation Studies for the 21st Century: Trends and Perspectives. Génesis 3: 7-24. Delabastita, Dirk, Lieven D’hulst, and Reine Meylaerts, eds. 2006. Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation—Selected Papers by José Lambert. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DRAMAT—Centro de Dramaturgias Contemporâneas. 2001a. Dramaturgias emergentes I. Cadernos Dramat 5. Lisbon: Cotovia. —. 2001b. Drama-turgias emergentes II. Cadernos Dramat 6. Lisbon: Cotovia. Duarte, João Ferreira. 2003. Translation and the Space of History. The European English Messenger 12 (1): 16-20. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. Poetics Today. Polysystem Studies [special issue] 11 (1). Fadda, Sebastiana. 2006. When Producing Art Is a Social Act. Western European Stages 18: 41-44. Holmes, James S. 1988. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Introduction by Raymond van den Broeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lambert, José. 2005. Is Translation Studies too Literary? Genésis 5: 7-20. —. 2006 [1980]. Production, tradition et importation: une clef pour la description de la littérature et de la littérature en traduction. In Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation—Selected Papers by José Lambert. Edited by Dirk Delabastita, Lieven D’hulst and Reine Meylaerts. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 15-35. Serôdio, Maria Helena. 2006. Theatre in Portugal: A First Approach. Western European Stages 18: 5-8. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zurbach, Christine. 2001. La Constitution d’un corpus d’étude en traduction. Le Cas de la traduction comme fait culturel. In Estudos de tradução em Portugal. Novos contributos para a história da literatura portuguesa. Organized by Teresa Seruya. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 145-254. —. 2002. Tradução e prática do teatro em Portugal entre 1975 e 1988. Lisbon: Colibri. —. 2006. CENDREV, 1975-2005: Thirty Years of Theatrical Decentralization. Western European Stages 18 (2006): 23-30.

CHAPTER FOUR THE TETRA PROJECT: PRELIMINARY RESULTS AND PERSPECTIVE MANUELA CARVALHO

1. Theatre Translation in Portugal: The TETRA Project The Theatre and Translation (TETRA) project was designed as a response to questions arising out of ACT 15—Theatre and Translation: Contact Stages, a conference organized in 2006 by the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) in collaboration with the Centre for Theatre Studies (CET) of the University of Lisbon. TETRA ran from 2007 to 2011, with funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.1 Studies carried out under the aegis of the TETRA project are retrospective and diachronic by nature, and use the theoretical and methodological background of Descriptive Translation Studies, especially useful when the corpus invites an historical approach. The project set out to reconstruct the map of what has actually been translated in Portugal, drawing on empirical evidence from specialized libraries, national archives, university and municipal libraries, theatre company and theatre venue archives, radio and television network archives, and other sources, such as publishers’ catalogues, online and bibliographical catalogues. Through data gathering and classification it has been possible to select corpora for analysis, pinpoint general and specific trends in translation and thus contribute to an historical perspective of theatre translation. Histories of theatre in Portugal generally tend to disregard the translation component and its role in the constitution and renewal of theatre repertoires. Additionally, most of these (few) works have tended to focus on published theatre text analysis, disregarding contextual, semiotic 1

http://tetra.letras.ulisboa.pt/tetra/en/apresentacao.

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and performance aspects, with the exception of recent research undertaken by CET, such as their History of Theatre in Portugal online (HTP) and CETbase. For different reasons, past and present, Portuguese stage productions and theatre repertoires are still dominated by foreign models and translated plays, ample corroboration of the argument that drama still occupies a peripheral position in the Portuguese cultural system. One needs only remember António José Saraiva’s seminal comment on the history of Portuguese theatre to appreciate the historical tendency where only canonical literary names have acquired legitimacy as part of a national theatre history: “The History of Portuguese theatre reminds us of a wasteland where two great hills rise up together: Gil Vicente and Garrett. It is a history that can be summarized in two names” (Saraiva 1967, 13).2 Part of this misconception is due to the lack of research and archive-based investigation of documents on theatre performance and dramaturgy as well as playtexts. In the words of Duarte Ivo Cruz: From the beginning, the History of Portuguese Theatre has sent out a weak message which since its birth has indicated a disregard and neglect of this form of creation, both in terms of performance and dramaturgy. Centuries have elapsed, yet little is known about the performances. (2001, 13)

Translation of playtexts, both for publication and performance, filled the gap created by the paucity of theatrical works in Portuguese and the peripheral condition of Portuguese culture in general, by importing canonical authors and texts as well as groundbreaking theatrical practices and texts. The TETRA research project set out to examine the meaning, relevance and reception of theatre translation in different historical and social contexts. This approach takes into account the role of theatre translation in the constitution of theatre repertoires and in the transformation of local and national artistic practices as a result of contact with foreign models. Following seminal works by Bassnett (1990, 1991, 1998) and Aaltonen (2000), it is widely accepted that theatre translation, its production, circulation and reception belong to two different systems, the literary and the theatrical, which in turn are part of the cultural, social and economic systems. In fact, following this logic, Aaltonen makes a clear distinction between drama and theatre (2000, 33). Bearing all this in mind, it is clear that translation strategies and the relationship between source and target text can differ according to the system to which they 2

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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belong. Some translations are made for the reader, in others performance takes priority. In fact, the economic and commercial reasons that preside over the selection of a translation to be published are not the same as those ones that lead to a performance on stage. Some translated plays are published but never performed, while other plays are translated specifically for the stage. Both systems invest in and regulate text translation in distinct ways. The translation strategies expected and accepted from translators vary according to the system in which they function. With these considerations in mind, it was crucial for us to look at both published translated drama, as well as translations for the stage, in order to obtain a full and complete picture of the cultural innovation potentially introduced by these transfers. TETRA also proposed to demonstrate how the relationship between the dramatic text and its performance affects translation strategies, and how the translation of theatrical practices from one culture to another enriches and determines Portuguese theatrical production during the period under scrutiny, as well as identify its function within Portuguese culture and society. As a consequence, one will better appreciate the impact of certain foreign playwrights on Portuguese literary and theatrical production. The main objective of this research, then, is to understand the processes of theatrical production and reception in Portugal and to contribute to a history of theatre translation in Portugal. In terms of scholarship, within the last two decades, theatre translation, in its different variants and perspectives (drama translation, translation for the stage, performance translation), has become a significant area of research, following the publication of some seminal works, such as the above mentioned Aaltonen (2000) and Bassnett (1990, 1991, 1998), as well as Brissett (1990). Most interestingly, we have witnessed a shift from an academic research mainly rooted in Translation Studies to work undertaken with a cross-disciplinary focus, closer in reality to Theatre Studies, where the context of drama and theatre practice becomes essential. These multiple perspectives and discourses have been well attested in the different collections of essays published over the last decade, namely Upton (2000), Coelsch-Foisner and Klein (2004), Anderman (2005), Zatlin (2005), Brilhante and Carvalho (2007), and Baines et al (2011). In the latter, attempting to introduce yet another perspective, the authors and contributors move on from the practical experience of the translator who transposes the text for the stage to theorize and examine the relationship between translations and theatre practice. This approach assumes that theatre translators are also

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practitioners or have a link with the different participants in this process of stage performance. In the Portuguese context, although a handful of scholars have undertaken groundbreaking studies in the area, Theatre Translation is not yet an established academic discipline, 3 and the isolated studies and contributions that do exist deal with the influence of particular national traditions and playwrights on national theatrical practice. Christine Zurbach (2002) examines the role of French theatre in the repertoire of some theatre companies in Portugal, and makes a convincing argument for establishing the academic discipline of theatre translation in Portugal (Zurbach 2007a and 2007b). Paulo Eduardo Carvalho (2009a) considered the Irish dramaturgical presence on the Portuguese stage, while Sebastiana Fadda (2007) studies the Italian influence. João Almeida Flor (2009), João Ferreira Duarte (2000) and Maria João da Rocha Afonso (1993) have, for their part, carried out in-depth research into Portuguese translations of Shakespeare (principally 19th century).4 Still, no major general survey or study of theatre translation in Portugal existed before TETRA, nor has much research been undertaken in the area of history of theatre practice in Portugal, with the exception of work undertaken in CET. It was the pressing need for an historical study that gave rise to the TETRA project.

2. TETRA-Base: Methodological Background and Overview As may be inferred from the above, TETRA provides a diachronic view of translation of theatre in Portugal in the last two centuries, in which individual investigations were planned in such a way as not to overlap but lead to the accumulation of data in a structured, methodical way. Thus, the first step was to define the different areas of research and data gathering for each member, as well as for the full-time undergraduate and graduate research assistants appointed to the project. While researchers worked in 3

In the Portuguese Higher Education system, only two universities offer undergraduate or postgraduate courses within the area: the University of Évora, very much under the influence of Christine Zurbach, and the University of Porto, with their dedicated research projects on theatre translation. In Lisbon, TETRA has created an intensive course on theatre translation and delivered workshops in the area. 4 I have only included the most recent or representative publications on the subject by these authors on Shakespeare’s translations. For a more complete bibliography on theatre translation, see http://tetra.letras.ulisboa.pt/tetra/pt/bibliografia.

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particular areas (according to nationality, period, publisher, medium), the research assistants were assigned the task of collecting information from the broadest possible range of libraries and archives. In order to encompass the different target formats we used medium as a category which would then branch into the subcategories of edition, stage, television, and radio. By using such disparate sources it has been possible to produce extensive inventories of translations, thus providing a detailed account of the history of theatre translation in Portugal as well as a more reliable map of translated culture. In addition, this is the first systematic research to have been carried out in theatre company archives, allowing us to crossreference this information with data gathered from other sources.5 As regards the organization of the collected information in TETRABase, it was registered according to pre-established categories, which present plays translated in different formats and for different media. Each category helps to describe the translation, type of translation, and, where possible, the conditions of reception. The information is registered according to the material consulted and additional information is also included. The fields that make up the TETRA core record are a reflection of all potentially recurrent information that may be drawn from a single target text. These fields are structured in three levels: ƒ Information on the target text: translator, translated title, year of the target object, source language, classification (in other words, how the translator classifies his/her version); ƒ Information regarding the source text: genre, title, and author; ƒ Information on reception: medium (stage, TV, Radio or Publication), format, and source. Each individual target text is described in a single record, which gives the information that it was possible to extract from the target text and other potential sources of information. The field “observations” makes it possible to offer more contextual or less recurrent information.

3. Some Preliminary Results and Identification of Corpora The data that has been collected and categorized in the TETRA-Base, which currently contains around 5143 entries, 6 is extremely useful in 5

For a complete list of archives consulted, see TETRA-Base at http://tetra.letras. ulisboa.pt/base/search?advanced=1. 6 As of April 2012.

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selecting corpus material, which will help us to understand the impact and function of certain transfers within Portuguese culture and society. It also helps to identify potential areas of research, such as the comparison of published translations with the respective stage versions, or the recurrence of features which in turn reveal translation tendencies and criteria at different points in time. Although more in-depth research is needed, even a cursory look at the TETRA-Base enables the user to detect the existence of certain patterns. Firstly, the data collected allows us to say that particular foreign authors and source cultures received more attention in specific periods. For instance, during the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th, French playtexts and repertoires exercised a significant influence on both Portuguese theatrical culture and aesthetic models. This is the case of a 19th-century theatre collection, Archivo Theatral, constituted by playtexts from the Parisian repertoire translated into Portuguese (Santos 2011). Secondly, the evidence suggests that particular text types and genres are privileged at specific points in time, for example, those works selected for translation during the Estado Novo7 and in the first decade after the Carnation Revolution (1974), which were characterized by precise social and political concerns, not to mention the didactic purposes, which will be further discussed in this article. Thirdly, it becomes clear that the most innovative foreign models and non-canonical authors translated into Portuguese enter first through the theatrical system; some of these translations may then be published in book form. This process is amply demonstrated by the theatre company Artistas Unidos’ series “Livrinhos do teatro” [Little Theatre Books], published on their behalf by Cotovia. This joint project translates, performs and publishes works by lesser-known or hitherto untranslated playwrights, such as Lluïsa Cunillé, Pau Miró (Catalan), Lula Angnostaki, Dimítris Dimitríadis (Greek), Enda Walsh (Irish), Spiro Scimone (Italian), or Dea Loher (German).8 Patterns can also be observed in translated plays published in dedicated theatre series. I shall elaborate more on this case as an example of the type of study that builds on the information made available through TETRABase. In respect of published translated plays, an understanding of the editorial practice of publishing series is essential for our appreciation of the role played by imported texts in promoting cultural innovation. In fact, 7

For further information on Estado Novo, please see footnote 3 in Teresa Seruya’s article. 8 For a complete list of this series, see http://www.artistasunidos.pt/publicacoes/766livrinhos.

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in certain periods this practice is more evident than in others, and some of the series are closely linked to the performance of these translated plays (publications produced in partnership with theatre companies). Likewise, the analysis of these theatre series, where there are not only translated plays but also original Portuguese works, provides valuable insights into the relationship and balance between original and translated texts. As Christine Zurbach (2007b, 149) has argued, one must consider, on the one hand, the editorial motivation behind the selection of these texts and, on the other, the profile of the translator chosen for the enterprise, either a theatre professional or a professional translator, since they are indicative of the editor’s purpose and target context. Zurbach’s 2007 article is based on three important series from the 1970s, but it already pinpoints an important cultural phenomenon. Unlike other periods, the 1950s to the 1970s were marked by prolific translation both for the stage and for publication. In contrast with other genres, theatre was the channel through which the most provocative, challenging and politically motivated writing and authors entered the Portuguese cultural system. It was a period of intense publication of different theatre, literature and anthology series, in which translated plays figure prominently, as attested by TETRA-Base. Generally, theatre series were intended to renew theatre repertoires and revitalize the canon through translation in a period of scant original production due to censorship. At the same time, it was sometimes possible to introduce foreign playwrights who had been banned by the regime but passed virtually unnoticed in multi-author anthologies or series (Odber de Baubeta 2007, 214; Carvalho 2009b, 230). It was certainly easier to introduce certain subjects and aesthetics via a foreign culture than site them in the national or domestic sphere (Zurbach 2007b). The publishers aimed to bring new, vanguard productions to the Portuguese stage and bookshelves. Most of these series were published in cheap paperback editions and intended for a wider readership. Besides being published, some were also performed and were therefore translations for the stage. Theatre companies and directors manifestly wished to capitalize on the success being enjoyed by certain foreign contemporary playwrights, but they also continued to stage classical plays. No other period in the history of Portuguese theatre has seen such rich translation activity for stage and page, usually led by small publishing houses and theatre groups, and resulting in paperback publications. By consulting TETRA-Base we can draw up a list of theatre series published during this period (this list does not include literary or singleauthor series or anthologies):

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SERIES —1950 to 1979 Title of the series

Stage/Page translation

Period

“Repertório do Teatro de Sempre”. Publisher: different publishers for each volume

published and performed

1950s

“Teatro”. Publisher: Guimarães

published

1950s

“Teatro”. Publisher: Minotauro

published

1950s

published and performed

1950s

published and performed

1950s

published and performed

1950s

“Teatro—D”. Publisher: Divulgação

published

1960s

“Tempo de Teatro”. Publisher: Tempo

published

1960s

“Teatro”. Publisher: Cronos

published

1960s

“O Grande Teatro do Mundo” (ed. Paulo Quintela). Publisher: Atlântida

published and performed

1960s

published

1960s

published

1960s

published and performed

1960s

published and performed

1960s

published

1960s

“Repertório para um teatro actual” (ed. Luiz Francisco Rebello). Publisher: Prelo

published and performed

1960s

“Cena Aberta”. Publisher: Livraria Civilização

published

1960s

“Palco”. Publisher: D. Quixote

published and performed

1960s

“Teatro”. Publisher: Portugália

published

1960s

“Teatro”. Publisher: Presença

published

1960s

“Teatro no Bolso” (ed. Luiz Pacheco). Publisher: Contraponto “Teoremas de Teatro”. Publisher: Teatro d’Arte “Repertório do Teatro Experimental do Porto” (ed. António Pedro). Publisher: Círculo de Cultura Teatral

“Teatro Contemporâneo”. Publisher: Presença “Clássicos—série teatro”. Publisher: Presença “Teatro”. Publisher: Início “Teatro de bolso da Ática”. Publisher: Ática “Teatro” (ed. Osório Mateus, Luís Miguel Cintra and Jorge Silva Melo). Publisher: Estampa/Seara Nova

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“Teatro”. Publisher: Livraria Civilização “Prisma—série Teatro” (bilingual). Publisher: Europa-América “Encenação”. Publisher: Editora Mocidade Portuguesa “T”. Publisher: Livraria Paisagem

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published

1960s

published

1960s

published and performed

1970s

published

1970s

Table 4-1: Theatre series published during 1950 and 1979 Of the twenty-four series listed above identified during this period, eleven contained play translations made for the stage (and therefore published and performed). In none of them do we find any attempt to make an exhaustive collection of texts or authors. Most of the series do not specify the criteria for selecting the texts, but we frequently find prefaces justifying the choice of authors on the basis of their representativeness, success in their source context and their importance for a contemporary theatrical repertoire. For instance, Luiz Francisco Rebello in his introduction to the volumes of the series Repertório para um teatro actual states that the texts selected for this series both ask and answer the question “What is a repertoire of contemporary theatre?”, giving different examples of theatrical genres, languages, themes and periods. For Rebello, contemporary does not equate with chronological time, but rather denotes relevance for the present-day audience. Thus, this collection includes classical plays such as Aeschylus’ The Persians, Aristophanes’ Peace, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Molière’s Tartuffe, Büchner’s Woyzzeck and Witkiewicz’s The Mother. Although the chosen authors were Western and canonical, the plays selected for translation, publication and performance were carefully chosen not only for their aesthetic value but for their themes, which could still be read against the current time and context, and for the history of the texts and performances. Rebello states in relation to the edition of Witkiewicz’s The Mother (written in 1924, but unpublished until 1962 and performed only two years after): The “repugnant play” by Witkiewicz—as his author ironically called it— offers today an interest that is as contemporary as at the historical moment when it was written, but this interest is today more intelligible than before. After the dissemination of Artaud’s theories on the theatre of cruelty, after the various proposals of the theatre of the absurd, from Ionesco and Beckett to Genêt and Arrabal, after the experiences in the area of the “happening” and similar practice—the message of Witkiewicz becomes

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Interestingly, this edition of The Mother includes a detailed description of the stage set and production, the actors chosen and photos of rehearsals in 1972 (the same year as the publication), as well as the censorship report stating that the play was forbidden for stage performance (“O processo do espectáculo anulado” [The Legal Process for Banning the Performance]). In fact, the majority of the plays in this series deal with issues of power and political (in)stability. Furthermore, many of them were experimental and innovative, and thus controversial at the time when they were written and produced, hence the interest in the history of the text itself. Some theatre companies were also publishers, for example Teatro d’Arte, directed by the writer and critic Orlando Vitorino. Often, translations and series were linked with a theatre company, mostly the socalled theatre circles and university theatre groups. For instance, some of the translations published by Minotauro (in Braga) under the “Teatro” series were performed by TEP (Teatro Experimental do Porto [Porto Experimental Theatre]) and Círculo de Teatro de Aveiro [Theatre Circle of Aveiro], while a number of the translations from the series O Grande Teatro do Mundo [The Great Theatre of the World], edited by Paulo Quintela and published by Coimbra’s Edição Atlântida, were performed by TEUC (Teatro dos Estudantes da Universidade de Coimbra [The University Theatre of Coimbra]) and directed by Paulo Quintela himself. It is important to note that the editors of these collections, such as Paulo Quintela, Luiz Francisco Rebello, Orlando Vitorino and António Pedro, show a common background: in addition to being editors, they were also translators, and often academics and/or playwrights and theatre practitioners. If one looks through the list of translators associated with each publisher and series there are recurrent names in all of them, and we can probably say that they constituted a close circle of translators and theatre people at the time. TETRA-Base reports on the version for the stage, providing additional information about the performance: venue, director, actors, any particular dramaturgical work done on the text (for instance, cuts and changes) and dates of performance. One interesting area of research to pursue would be the comparison between published text and stage version in terms of translation strategies and level of adaptation. Censorship reports are also important to consider in these cases. Given the habitual imposition of cuts and prevalence of self-censorship (the manipulation of the texts by translators and practitioners as a strategy to satisfy the censors and ensure

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that the play received official approval), a study of both versions in the cultural context of the time (Estado Novo censors were clearly more permissive with published plays than with performed ones [Seruya et al 2009; Carvalho 2009b]) might be extremely revealing. Nevertheless, everything leads us to believe that during this period theatre imported through translation was used as an instrument to introduce subjects and discourses that otherwise would have been forbidden by censorship or not considered viable as topics for national authors and playwrights. Translated theatre became an integral component of theatre companies’ repertoires and was the vehicle for innovation and the introduction of themes prohibited by the censors. This is evident in the repertoire of experimental theatre companies and theatre circles, such as the TEP.9 One noteworthy example of the symbiotic relationship between publishers and practitioners is the series published by Contraponto and edited by Luiz Pacheco: Teatro no Bolso [Theatre in the Pocket] between 1956 and 1962. Title

Author and translator

Director/Theatre Company/Venue

1

João Gabriel Borkman

Author: Henrik Ibsen Translator: Costa Ferreira and Luiz Francisco Rebello

Costa Ferreira/ Teatro Monumental

1956?

2

As Velhacarias de Scapin

Author: Molière Translator: Leopoldo de Araújo

Pedro Lemos/ Teatro Nacional

1958

3

Castro

Author: António Ferreira

1959

4

Os Velhos não devem namorar

Author: Alfonso Castelao Translator: Alberto da Costa and Manuel dos Passos

Teatro do Gerifalto

O Mentiroso

Author: Carlo Goldoni Translator: Grazia Maria Saviotti

Gino Saviotti/ Companhia de Teatro Sempre/ Teatro Avenida

Date

No.

1956

1958

9

5

See the work done by Inês Marques as part of TETRA project: “Teatro Experimental do Porto: An Analysis of the Group’s Translated Repertoire”, presented at the conference Palcos em Tradução/Stages in Translation, 30 June to 1 July 2011.

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1959

6

Wozzeck

Author: Georg Büchner Translator: Rosário Corte-Real and Natália Correia

1959

7

Seis personagens à procura de autor

Author: Luigi Pirandello Translator: Gino Saviotti

1959

8

A Cantora careca

Author: Eugene Ionèsco Translator: Luís de Lima

1959

9

O Gebo e a sombra

Author: Raul Brandão

1959

10

Diálogo entre um padre e um moribundo

Author: Donatien Alphonse de Sade Translator: José Manuel Simões

1959

11

Auto da compadecida

Author: Ariano Suassuna

1960

12

A Visita da velha senhora

Author: Friedrich Dürrenmatt Translator: Rosário Corte-Real

1961

13

1961

14

1961

15

1961?

16

Falar a verdade a mentir O Morgado de Fafe em Lisboa D. João da Câmara e os caminhos do teatro português O Princípe de Homburgo

Teatro S. Carlos Libretto by Alban Berg Gino Saviotti/ Companhia de Teatro Sempre/ Teatro Avenida Luís de Lima/ Companhia Luís de Lima in collaboration with Teatro Nacional Popular

Empresa Amélia Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro/ Teatro Nacional

Author: Almeida Garrett Author: Camilo Castelo Branco Author: Luiz Francisco Rebello

Author: Heinrich von Kleist Translator: Goulart Nogueira

António Manuel Couto Viana/ Companhia Nacional de Teatro/ Teatro da Trindade

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1962

17

Tirésias

Author: Guillaume Apollinaire Translator: Goulart Nogueira and Lopo de Albuquerque

1962?

18

A Primeira família

Author: Jules Supervielle Translator: João Belchior Viegas

57 António Manuel Couto Viana/ Companhia Nacional de Teatro/ Teatro da Trindade António Manuel Couto Viana/ Companhia Nacional de Teatro/ Teatro da Trindade

Table 4-2: Titles included in the series Teatro no Bolso between 1956 and 1962 Of its eighteen volumes, twelve are translations (five from French, three from German, one from Norwegian and one from Galician). Among the Portuguese language plays, one is Brazilian and five Portuguese, representative of different periods and theatre genres. The series as a whole encompasses both classical and contemporary plays, with a discernible political agenda behind this selection of texts. The inclusion of an iconic Galician work by a symbol of Galician nationalism, linked to political and cultural movements such as the Xéración Nós, is completely in keeping with the mission of the publisher and editor of Contraponto: Contraponto in 1950 (September), in Rua Rafael Andrade, no. 12 1st, Lisbon, motivated by the idea of contesting the current Regime and institutions. He envisaged a publishing house whose objective was to denounce the political, social and literary situation. The work of writing, revising, printing and distributing was all done by himself, with the help of friends who offered to carry out certain tasks and guarantee the publication of his works. (Cunha 2008, n.p.)

Apart the political motivation, the selection of texts shows a variety of artistic approaches and movements that were far from being practised in Portugal, such as the so-called theatre of the Absurd, Surrealist and epic theatre, etc. There is an evident attempt to import these models and thus introduce new theatre practices to Portugal. Contraponto was a small publishing house, very much centred on Luiz Pacheco both ideologically and in terms of working practice. Its main intention was to expose the current political and social situation. As for the series Teatro no Bolso, published between 1956 and 1962, the paperback books were intended to follow and complement the performance of the plays and the theatre scene in Lisbon at the time. They were both sold in

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bookshops and at the entrance of theatre venues. In parallel, there was the collaboration with some theatre companies, theatre venues and directors, who were often the translators of the plays, namely the theatre company Teatro de Sempre [All Time Theatre], which belonged to the Teatro Avenida in Lisbon, under the artistic direction of Gino Saviotti, who was also the translator of some plays. There was also collaboration with the Teatro da Trindade and the theatre company Companhia Nacional de Teatro, with the National Theatre, Theatre of S. Carlos and Teatro Nacional Popular, in other words, the main theatre venues and companies in Lisbon at the time. What is remarkable about this series is not just the fact that such texts were published, but that they were indeed performed.

4. Conclusion The systematic collection and ordering of the TETRA-Base data has already thrown up many possible topics for future work and research. Taking due account of the sociocultural context in which translations are produced, translation can assume an important role for a particular society or culture, for instance as a means of cultural innovation in the target system. This is certainly the case for the period that I have just referred to, but it also applies to the more recent decades, albeit in a different way. Since the 1990s, one can observe clear distinctions between translations made for publication (even within series), where only canonical and Western authors are recurrently translated, and theatre repertoires which introduce innovation not only through the selection of less well-known playwrights and source languages, but also the dramaturgical work done with canonical texts, such as reworkings and adaptations to contemporary times of classical authors. Information concerning the translators, the theatre practitioners who commissioned the translations, critical reviews, the reception of these plays and context, all of these are essential for a meaningful historical approach. Of the principal tasks to be undertaken, or areas that demand closer investigation, we would foreground the following four. Firstly, the comparison and analysis of versions of the same translation for page and stage. Secondly, the relationship between censorship and theatre translation. Thirdly, the study of contemporary theatre repertoires and the contribution of translations, with particular reference to partnerships between theatre companies and publishers. Finally, a close study of the different theatre series published from the beginning of the 20th century.

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This essay has outlined TETRA’s aims and its achievements. While more questions than answers have emerged from our project, there is no doubt that TETRA-Base constitutes a rich source of data and an important point of departure for more in-depth studies, which can shed light on processes of rewriting and adapting foreign playtexts for the Portuguese stage. An historical approach to translation of theatre not only provides new insights and a more complete view of the history of theatre, but challenges the misconception of a poor and peripheral theatrical tradition in Portugal (at least in comparison with other genres such as poetry). Theatre translation renews or confirms existing theatrical practices, aesthetics and canons. Viewed from an historical perspective, this process undoubtedly reveals different ways of dealing with social and cultural contexts, of confronting contemporary societies and lived political situations.

Bibliography Aaltonen, Sirkku. 2000. Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Afonso, Maria João da Rocha. 1993. Simão de Melo Brandão and the First Portuguese Version of Othello. In European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age. Edited by Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’hulst. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 129146. Anderman, Gunila. 2005. Europe on Stage. Translation and Theatre. London: Oberon Books. Baines, Roger, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuela Perteghella, eds. 2011. Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bassnett, Susan. 1990. Translating for the Theatre—Textual Complexities. Essays in Poetics 15 (1): 71-83. —. 1991. Translating for the Theatre: The Case against Performability. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 4 (1): 99-111. —. 1998. Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre. In Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 90-108. Brilhante, Maria João, and Manuela Carvalho, eds. 2007. Teatro e tradução: palcos de encontro. Porto: Campo das Letras. Brissett, Annie. 1990. Sociocritique de la traduction. Théâtre et altérité au Québec (1968-1988). Montréal: Le Préambule.

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Carvalho, Paulo Eduardo. 2009a. Identidades reescritas: figurações da Irlanda no teatro português. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. —. 2009b. Um Encontro adiado: Sean O’Casey no Portugal do Estado Novo. In Traduzir em Portugal durante o Estado Novo. Edited by Teresa Seruya, Maria Lin Moniz and Alexandra Assis Rosa. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 229-248. Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine, and Holger Klein, eds. 2004. Drama Translation and Theatre Practice. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Cruz, Duarte Ivo. 2001. História do teatro português. Lisbon: Verbo. Cunha, Ana Maria Mota da. 2008. Contraponto—Luiz Pacheco. Seminar on the History and Sociology of the Book. Lisbon: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, http://luizpacheco.no.sapo.pt/contraponto/contraponto.htm (accessed March 10, 2011). Duarte, João Ferreira. 2000. The Politics of Non-Translation: A Case Study in Anglo-Portuguese Relations. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 13 (1): 95-112. Fadda, Sebastiana. 2007. Goldoni mal entendido e mal tratado. Sinais de Cena 8: 89-92. Flor, João Almeida. 2009. Hamlet (1887): tradução portuguesa de um caso patológico. In Shakespeare entre nós. Edited by Maria Helena Serôdio, João Almeida Flor, Alexandra Assis Rosa, Rita Queiroz de Barros, and Paulo Eduardo Carvalho. Ribeirão: Húmus, 184-201. Marques, Inês. 2011. Teatro Experimental do Porto: An Analysis of the Group’s Translated Repertoire. Paper presented at the conference Palcos em Tradução/Stages in Translation, 30 June. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Odber de Baubeta, Patricia Anne. 2007. The Anthology in Portugal. A New Approach to the History of Portuguese Literature in the Twentieth Century. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Rebello, Luiz Francisco. 1972. Apresentação de Witkiewicz. In A Mãe de Stanislas Witkiewicz e o processo de espectáculo anulado. Lisbon: Prelo, 9-20. Santos, Ana Clara. 2011. A colecção Arquivo Teatral ou a importação do repertório teatral parisiense. In Depois do labirinto: teatro e tradução. Edited by Manuela Carvalho and Daniela Di Pasquale. Lisbon: Nova Vega, 75-98. Saraiva, António José. 1967. Para a história da cultura em Portugal. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América.

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Seruya, Teresa, Maria Lin Moniz, and Alexandra Assis Rosa, eds. 2009. Traduzir em Portugal durante o Estado Novo. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora. Upton, Carole-Anne, ed. 2000. Moving Target. Theatre Translation and Cultural Relocation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Zatlin, Phyllis. 2005. Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner’s View. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Zurbach, Christine. 2002. Tradução e prática do teatro em Portugal entre 1975 e 1988. Lisbon: Colibri. —. 2007a. Tradução teatral: o texto e a cena. Lisbon: Caleidoscópio. —. 2007b. Entre os Livros RTP e a Estampa Seara Nova: tradução teatral e coleccionismo. In Estudos de tradução em Portugal. A Colecção Livros RTP—Biblioteca Básica Verbo—II. Edited by Teresa Seruya. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 149-167.

CHAPTER FIVE WHY DON’T YOU ASK THEM YOURSELF? IMMERSION INTO THE FIELD OF PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATION PRACTICE IN NORTHERN PORTUGAL (A HOLISTIC VIEW) FERNANDO FERREIRA ALVES

Ethnography aims to penetrate, describe and interpret another person’s life. (Koskinen 2008, 55)

In a presentation delivered during the 2009 CETRA research seminar, Peter Flynn gave an interesting title to his project: “Fieldwork in Translation Studies: Why Not Ask Them Yourself?”, which would lead to the preparation of a panel devoted to the topic “Trekking Further in Context: Exploring the Relation between Translators’/Interpreters’ Practices and their Discourses”,1 in which I took part. In that document, the author analyses some issues concerned with what is known as “fieldwork” within Social and Language Studies, and in particular within Translation Studies, positioning the field analysis in the wider domain of translation theory. As supported by several authors in the field of Translation Studies (Inghilleri 2003; Angelleli 2004; Koskinen 2008), the concept of fieldwork is an integral and specific part of research methods in a vast range of disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnography, sociolinguistics and sociology, among others. This approach encompasses a variety of data gathering techniques as well as qualitative and quantitative activities,

1

This panel took place during the 6th EST Conference “Tracks and Treks in TS”, in Leuven, Belgium, from 23-25 September 2010, and aimed at demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of Translation Studies, by drawing on new approaches, research methodologies and assumptions from outside Translation Studies proper.

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which include, for example, surveys and questionnaires, interviews or participant observation.2 According to some definitions, the notion of fieldwork may take on multiple shapes, but the concept remains essentially linked to Malinowski (1884-1942). Barnard and Spencer (1986) claim that this perspective includes two important aspects and that there are two types of knowledge involved in fieldwork: one refers to the practical and everyday language that learned individuals use in their daily lives, whereas the second type of knowledge stems from the way the “anthropologist” reflects on what he/she has perceived and observed, now with a critical knowledge and distance that allow for comparison with other groups. Thus, in practical terms, fieldwork is much more than simply the time spent in the field. It requires prior preparation, reading and research, the capacity to cultivate and develop knowledge through a disposition of great curiosity, with the necessary open-mindedness and availability. As such, the researcher finds himself in a field that allows him to adopt different ways and methods of penetrating a difficult ground, in agreement with the demands and specificities of the universe of study in question. In my specific case, for example, I have opted for a mixed or hybrid technique and approach, which has enabled me to adopt a more quantitative focus, initially materialized in on-line surveys and questionnaires. This strategy was later complemented with qualitative tools, namely interviews with the translators and subsequent observation of the work and analysis of their discourse against their translations. In terms of goals, a fieldwork-type analysis is able to fully capture the essence of the translatorial practice, as well as the socioprofessional perceptions of the community of translators under study, with special relevance to the “native” views of professionals on the same practices, which are close to the notions of “insider/outsider” (Koskinen 2008, 154, 157) developed by the author to refer to the double role played by the researcher-translator in the context of research.3 There are some basic data and assumptions that we can put forth when we are talking about fieldwork. In the case of sociolinguistics, for example, as well as in linguistic ethnography, the use of language is indissolubly linked to its user and his/her worldview, and to the respective 2

See on this matter Glaser (1998), Glaser and Strauss (1967), Strauss and Corbin (1994) and Strübing (2007). 3 This practice is rather frequent, particularly in the field of Interpreting Studies (Pöchhacker 2004). It has been developed by several authors who have studied the behaviour and positioning of interpreters, namely Hertog (1999), Hertog et al (2007), Angelelli (2004), Inghilleri (2003) and Marijns (2006).

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perceptions, actions, values and attitudes. Indeed, and as demonstrated by Rampton et al (2004, 2), both language and the social realities are ultimately shaped and adapted to each other. There are several hypotheses that provide a methodological framework for my approach. First and foremost, the issue of the translator’s (in)visibility within a certain practice community, which on the one hand refers to the theorization of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1998) and Lawrence Venuti (2004), and, on the other hand, to the issue of role playing by the social actors and the respective professional identity underlying the social roles performed. Secondly, social perceptions within work settings. And, lastly, the construction of a professional identity through translation discourse and practice, which implies the analysis of the discourse components of translators in relation to the set of social manifestations, assuming on the one hand, as mentioned by William Hanks, that the values imparted to language by its speakers are in themselves social facts (Hanks 1996, 14) and, on the other hand, that any given discourse is a means for the actor to take over the social world, in terms of commitment and engagement, from which real and tangible consequence may be extracted (Hanks 1996, 14). For the purposes of this essay, I shall consider translation as a sociocultural activity, integrated in the field of technical and intellectual work, developed in a complex network system among a specific community of practice, where various social actors converge and interact. These actors hold and perform the commercial application of an organized set of intellectual knowledge, which generates multilingual products in a certain social context. Thus, translation constitutes the application of professional knowledge to the service of processes and products that are socially framed in network systems with fragile and blurred boundaries, as we shall see ahead. Concomitantly, this is also a hybrid and dynamic phenomenon, framed in a functional and professional nexus and grounded upon social and relational networks. Hence, in the specific case of professional translators, fieldwork is crucial in order to allow for a better understanding of how they conceive and frame issues as wide-ranging as the socioprofessional realities, sociolinguistic repertoires, cultural differences, institutional and relational personal networks, professional networks, the very process of translation, among others. There are indeed several ways, as sustained by Angellelli, to “break into the closed circle” (2004, 36), which is after all the professional territory par excellence in which these subjects inhabit. Different authors suggest innumerable hypotheses, ranging from interviews with translators to the participation in common projects or yet observing them in a real work context.

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In the course of my study, I have adopted a typically ethnographic strategy (Caria 2005, 2007), which involved the analysis of quantitative data through a questionnaire applied in the field. Additionally, I was present in the contexts of work and interaction of translators, analysing the discursive practices of the agents in a professional context, and observing the daily routine of these professionals. With my participation in the contexts of interaction of translators it was sought to create opportunities of informality in order to stimulate reflexivity on the part of professionals, approaching them individually with questions aimed at eliciting comments, confrontation or the simple description of their positioning with regard to the professional group under analysis, as well as the market and clients involved in the long and complex chain of translation service provision. By adopting a pivotal position both in and outside the group, I played in many cases the role of “the equal”4 who is able to talk about a common experience, privileging the identity-related questions that cut across the various work contexts and that result from the negotiation of expectations concerning the role assigned to translators and the need that they develop of legitimizing discourses about the specificity of their professional action in relation to the other actors (Granja 2008, 165-223).5 In reality, the motive that led me to focus my attention on a specific community of translators, in particular starting from the analysis of a standard interview, lies in my wish to move translators into the limelight, toward a position of prominence, as facilitators of intercultural communication through my interviews, confronting their discourse and their translations. Therefore, in preparing both the questionnaire and the script that served as model for the subsequent interviews, I relied unequivocally on my experience as a professional translator and researcher in the field of Translation Studies.6 4 This dichotomy between being “equal” and “different”, established by Chesterman (2000), and further developed by Koskinen (2008) and Koskinen and Kinnunen (2010), associated with the concept of “translational trust” (Chesterman 2000, 181-183), is a crucial aspect of my research as an elementary ethical asset and default position for any translation professional/researcher/scholar in order to be able to act like a trusted insider, i.e. someone who can be trusted despite being primarily an outsider. 5 The translator/researcher was first designated by Daniel Gile as “practisearcher” (Gile 1998). This term was later appropriated by Koskinen (2008, 39). 6 Is it likely that this immersion in the field may have brought upon me a “cultural blindness” and that I may have become absorbed by the whirlwind of sensations and experiences triggered by the interviews.

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In this case, my posture was mostly reflexive and especially, as with Briggs (1986), derived from an attitude clearly marked by a series of preconceived ideas that the researcher brought to the interview and which explain and justify a certain stand, based on the assumption that the interview is a social production between the interviewer and the interviewee involving collaborative and interactive construction among two active parties, as something contextual and situationally produced and staged inasmuch as it generates reciprocal knowledge. In particular, I have attempted to analyse a common practice shared in a specific relational context and limited by objective conditions and institutional prescriptions and, simultaneously, to capture an identity built on social interaction through the indigenous definition of territories and meanings, allowing for the mobilization and activation of knowledge as defined by the actual professional group. On the other hand, I have sought to identify the norms and routines behind the episodes described as unforeseen, as well as the abstract knowledge to be mobilized in order to best understand the situations of professional practice, based on the view that they all converge toward a better conceptualization and assimilation of what is nowadays known as professional culture. Telmo Caria, a Portuguese sociologist specialized in this area, underlines the notion of professional culture associated with “occasional groups whose work and employment afford high social status and prestige, based on the possession of a title and higher level of schooling that allow for the use and application of abstract and scientific knowledge in actions regarded as belonging to the exclusive competence of professionals rather than amateurs” (2005, 126; my translation).

1. Why Follow an Ethnographic Approach of Discourse/ Narrative Analysis A theoretical object that involves the process of identity construction and the sociocognitive activity that supports professional action requires suitable methodological choices rooted in an ethnolinguistic approach to the field, capable of allowing for the researcher’s presence in the domains of professional action through intensive and prolonged observation, articulation with the endogenous senses of professional subjects, stimulus to the expression of reflexive subjectivities and multi-angle observation of the relational exchanges. In this context, an ethnolinguistic approach clearly brings out what seems to connect different strands of social interaction through language and discourse, meaning that despite being purely subjective dimensions,

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identities are also socially constructed and culture-specific. In addition to its representational and communicative functions, the intersubjective dialogue through language mediation ultimately involves the expression of identity and the establishment of an articulated and interdependent relationship between the theory and the facts arising from discursive reflection about the professional practice. In the chapter entitled “Believe in Your Own Performance” in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a book of reference in the field of social psychology, Goffman starts as follows: When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possess the attributes he appears to possess. (Goffman 1959, 17)

It was precisely from this angle that I departed in order to analyse a special case of construction of a personality in social and professional terms within a specific geographic and cultural context, based on the assumption that each individual should have, to some extent, the awareness of their performance of a certain role in society. The theories of Goffman, as a sociologist of everyday social life, are quite pertinent to analyse how professional translators present themselves to their clients and peers, considering that we are indeed before a social production of the “self”. In particular, I adopt the notion of a specific community of practice and, as in van Leeuwen, the concept of social practice as a principle liable to recontextualization by means of discursive practices (1997, 169). On the other hand, the model of analysis developed is also based on the assumption that, as suggested by Fairclough, social changes occur in a context of social practice and interaction, which in turn implies the modification of the actual network of intercultural practices due to the way relations are gradually established among the various domains, fields, institutions, individuals and organizations involved. As a work methodology, I have applied the variables of discourse analysis aimed at the representation of social actors by van Leeuwen (1997, 171), according to whom it is possible to assign specific values and categories to the discourse produced by the agent in a certain time and space, using dichotomous and bipolar categories. 7 This sociosemantic inventory associated with van Leeuwen’s study (1996) about the representation of social actors provides a useful characterization of the main forms to 7 See also: Theo van Leeuwen. 2008. Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

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represent the social actors through discourse, following specific linguistic realizations and rhetoric strategies. This is a dynamic perspective involving the construction of an identity and subjectivity from relational frameworks, particularly based on a specific set of research guidelines presented in “The Representation of the Social Actors” (van Leeuwen 1997). During the interview stage, and through the analysis of individual and collective narratives, my goal consisted in analysing the development of the process of constructing a professional identity by the translator, by focusing on two different, but essential categories leading to professionalization, such as: ƒ the socioprofessional level, whereby both discourse and representations were focused on distinctive issues like professional recognition, personal and collective identity, self-awareness and recognition, professional accomplishment, as well as autonomy and control over the product of one’s work; ƒ the economic/financial level, through which respondents stressed on the multiple business/behavioural dynamics resulting from the interaction between professional practice and translation markets, by pointing out the major features, constraints, relational/ collaborative networks and norm-governed approaches underlying the practice of translation both as a process and a product (Chesterman 1993). The study of the narratives of the translation professionals, the analysis of their tacit and implicit knowledge and the assessment of their translation portfolio have further allowed me to draw the limits and boundaries of a fragile and blurred professional identity, which is often insufficiently consolidated in social terms. Thus, selecting the professional knowledge of translators as my object of study also implied aiming the research process at professionals who were consolidating their knowledge with a possible license to practice the profession, with solid levels of selfesteem and repertoires of a latent praxis, thus affording the necessary energy and confidence for professional action. Similarly, I have further tried to ascertain the state of consolidation and development of this knowledge in terms of phases or stages inherent to the construction and application of a notion of professionalism (incipient, embryonic, pre-

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professional, proto-professional, intermediate, advanced), as I try to demonstrate further ahead.8 In the daily routines of professional translators there is, as we shall see, tacit knowledge which, in a seemingly automated and self-aware manner, results from the management of the translation process and their professional practice, revealing practical schemes rooted in basic “certainties” and trust that allow them to channel their energy into the desire to act and confront the most diverse situations and demands inherent to the provision of a service, always in relational contexts. Most of the times, these contexts are rather conflictive, with high levels of uncertainty, instability and singularity, which are typical of events located in little structured contexts, contradictory and sometimes paradoxical, marked by an unremitting decision-making process with norms, judgements and values typical of the teleological characteristics of action and by a considerable number of problems and dissatisfactions with the executed task, which may be shared and acknowledged (implicitly or explicitly). Due to the complexity of professional action contexts, my methodological approach has developed a kind of holistic analysis with sharing of professional everyday routines, expectations, anxieties and activities and, as such, it has taken as guidelines the specific characteristics of the concrete situations observed with the contributions derived from the subjectivity of the actors concerning the meaning of the action in a professional context, by privileging the recognition of professional knowledge and the validation of intuitive, relational, communicational, social and ethical knowledge.

2. Analysis and Discussion of the Results In order to better contextualize this, first I adopted a quantitative approach according to which a survey called “The Professionalization of Translation in the North of Portugal” was developed and published online and launched from 7 January 2008 to 30 March 2008. This preliminary questionnaire was aimed at studying some of the important issues associated with the notion of professionalization and typifying the major

8 The focus of the observation resulting from the narratives was materialized in specific professional acts, characterized by impressions, operational images and summary charts built by multiple and transverse knowledge in combination with the individual and group experiences acquired and tested, which after all make up the sociocognitive structure of professionals.

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background against which professional dynamics occur among all the agents involved in the process. This research helped map the translation market scenario and led to the current research topic, i.e. the study of a particular controlled group in a specific geographical context (Northern Portugal), by focusing attention not only on the group dynamics of professionalization, but also on the individuals’ perceptions about their activity. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, I found it useful to borrow some of the tools used in social research to look at translation from a sociological/ethnographic perspective by changing the focus from text as a “symbolical cultural product” to context-driven, system-organized dynamics where individuals act and behave, constructing their own professionalism in relation with others and with themselves. This socio-ethnographic approach based on fieldwork was later complemented by a qualitative-oriented perspective in which I conducted a series of qualitative-in-depth interviews with 34 respondents based on a narrative approach with an emphasis on “life-history, storytelling of formative phases and challenging situations” (Sela-Sheffy and Shlesinger 2008, 2009; Flynn 2005).9 These interviews were elaborated according to a pre-codified open script, by focusing my attention on personal, social and professional perceptions based on their personal narratives, in order to tap into the perceptions of the major actors involved in the translation process via discourse analysis. One of the main conclusions concerns the bipolar way in which translation is regarded, in a curious game of mirrors among various looks and perceptions, alternating between antithetical poles. For their multiplicity and comprehensiveness, these looks introduce us to a complex and heterogeneous profession, marked by strains which result, on the one hand, from a conflict between the internal (endogenous) view of professionals and the external (exogenous) view of society, consumers and clients of that service; and, on the other hand, from the extraordinary ambivalence of perceptions associated with the profession by the translators themselves and that reveal the different ways in which these individuals experience their professionalism. The other conclusion to be drawn from our study is based, on the one hand, on the absolutely transverse and strategic role of translation in the 9 A narrative approach or analysis is a research method within the field of qualitative research through which field notes, autobiographical texts, letters, interviews, family stories, and life experience are considered as units of analysis to research in order to understand the way people create meaning in their lives as narratives.

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language industry and, on the other hand, on the complex comprehensiveness of the language markets and the outstanding range of services requested from the professionals, suggesting a mobile and unstable geographic area whose contours are hard to define, especially due to the levelling dynamics of globalization. One of the aspects that stands out in our study derives from the fluid and dynamic nature of the relations established between the centre and the periphery, between the translators and the markets at local, regional, national and international levels, via remote work, in a geographic sphere where the absence of barriers serves to enhance business potential. However we must note with concern the utter deregulation of the market and control of access to the profession, which translates into the immense number of people offering Portuguese language translation services. This points to a weak and vulnerable professional field, marked by the coexistence of amateurs, semiprofessionals and professionals, and easily exposed to the interference of foreign elements to the system. As a result, the way translators position themselves as professionals displays clear signs of some fragility and inconsistency resulting from their irresolute social affirmation and absence of political and institutional recognition, together with the economic and financial variable, which undoubtedly conditions and confounds the perceptions on the provision of translation services. On the other hand, it is particularly interesting to remark that several contradicting tendencies arose when we confronted the profiles and testimonies of professionals with the questionnaires applied to the translators and the clients/consumers of translation services, respectively. Furthermore, it is equally unquestionable that we are before a highly fragmented and hierarchized market. There are clear asymmetries in terms of professional prestige and affirmation and also in terms of recognition before the hiring entities/clients. There is a huge gap between, for instance, technical and literary translation, even though the former is responsible for over 70 % of market demands. Furthermore, the balance of power concerning the so-called translation editing is unstable, with important consequences in terms of payment. Lastly, there is a notorious imbalance in the relationship between translators and translation agencies, which proved one of the most relevant pieces of data we were able to extract from our study. As mentioned by Pym (2002), translation services are still characterized by a hierarchy, which in soccer terms could be compared to first and second leagues. In this hierarchy, translation in EU institutions remains as one of the major career aspirations of translators due to the

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work stability it affords, along with some highly specialized market niches associated with technical translation, with a high degree of exposure and distinction as well as intervention on the end product. Concomitantly, literary translation is gradually losing importance. It is often associated with low income and labour exploitation, although it represents deepseated vocational motivations of translators since many accumulate this activity with a main occupation. In audiovisual translation (mostly subtitling, in the case of Portugal) and localization, the levels of precariousness and instability are more visible. These two cases are absolutely exclusive and deserve some attention in my analysis because, albeit associated with other neighbouring professions such as audiovisual, cinema, television and informatics, they nonetheless involve low salaries, lack of conditions, absence of control over the work, tight deadlines (hence temporally restrictive), multiple demands and, in some cases, exploitation of cheap labour and unscrupulous abuse, especially of newly graduates and amateurs, who become fascinated with the possibility of pursuing a somewhat glamorous career. Such cases are nothing short of harmful to the class inasmuch as they disparage the profession and contribute to perpetuate the vicious cycle of poor quality (Gouadec 2002, 82). Notwithstanding the strategic importance of translation in the business sector, and despite the added value that it generates for companies and institutions from an economic perspective as a distinctive product, the truth remains that this service is still regarded as superfluous and unnecessary, as an inferior activity which can be performed by individuals who are external to the profession. Finally, the analysis model of translator “professionality” that I propose is based on yet other values that converge towards the construction of a professional field associated with translation, namely: 1. Level of involvement in the activity 2. Experience 3. Professional positioning 4. Economic and financial variables 5. Autonomy/Time control 6. Autonomy/Work control 7. Impact on family life 8. Self-esteem 9. Satisfaction with the profession 10. Professional accomplishment 11. Feelings towards the profession

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By attributing different grades (on a 1 to 5 scale) to each of these categories based on a specific pre-codified set of data, and by applying discourse analysis variables to the recorded interviews, we might be able to draw a series of professional/individual charts that would help us identify the different dynamics, levels and degrees of professionalization and confirm my research hypothesis, i.e. the construction of significantly fragile, disperse and fragmentary professional identities.

3. Professional Translation: Five Underlying Dynamics At this juncture, I believe that it is possible to detect five points of intersection and five underlying dynamics which seem to be common to professional practice. First and foremost, we have the globalization dynamics developed according to a reticular matrix, characterized by instances such as telework, networking, teletranslation, but also mobility and flexibilization of work, managed at a distance, and the investment in new technological formats and concepts, as well as new management systems, production processes and modes of hiring and organizing work such as outsourcing, paving the way for what many designate as “portfolio workers” (Fraser and Gold 2001, 679). Secondly, we detect the actual dynamics of translation as a linguistic, textual and sociocultural act with a certain degree of public visibility and exposure and a considerable degree of fragility arising from a pronounced deficit of institutional recognition and from the isolation to which the “profession” is consigned. Seen as both a textual process and product within a social framework shaped by a set of specific, socially determined norms, translation as an act of interpersonal and intercultural communication par excellence reveals its ironic nature by neglecting the crucial role of the individual as an element endowed with agency, relegating it to a submissive role and simultaneously promoting its unjust professional “ghettoization”. Here it is important to mention the strains and pressures that seem to affect the profession, both internally owing to the fierce competition among professionals, and externally due to the proximity and sharing of the same field with other professions (e.g. the media policy, the editorial industry or the institutional principles of the translation profession itself). Thirdly, we shall consider the dynamics of teaching and training, which is to include the learning of new professional and professionaloriented skills and knowledge, as well as the development of methodological and conceptual issues adapted to a real situation of professional communication liable to effectively tackle the demands and

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challenges posed by the multidimensionality of language professions. By virtue of the current circumstances surrounding the phenomenon of translation, this dynamics may come to entail the redefinition of the training paradigm and, ultimately, the modification of the teaching and learning process through new pedagogical proposals and methodologies as a result of a market-oriented view. Fourthly, we mention the economic aspect associated with the profession. As I have demonstrated with my interviews and with the reactions of the clients and consumers of this service, translation contains within itself a deep-rooted ambiguity (perhaps an impossibility), which results on the one hand from the fact that it is omnipresent, as a true catalyser of human communication and indispensible to all quadrants of society, and on the other hand from its association with an underground and undeclared economy, marked by the exploitation of cheap labour, low salaries, declared levels of dissatisfaction and precariousness—and all this despite the thriving character of the language industry and its exponential growth in the past years. Lastly, we propose the analysis of the business dynamics, which is absolutely transverse and strategic, especially if we consider the increasing importance of the issues coming from the field of standardization, and in particular the huge deal of attention devoted in recent times to the important role of business culture and language originating from the management theories, which is in fact frequently pointed out when, for instance, we are confronted with the norms and procedures applied, for example, by professionals in the localization industry. At the same time, the constant and relentless market demands, which are most of the times structured around the famous “quality, speed, efficiency, price” quadrinomial, entail the implementation of new skills, clearly focused on ergonomics, involving the development of other professional, emotional, physiological and cognitive competences, among others.

4. Centre, Periphery and Beyond When locating globalization within his world system theory, Wallerstein (1974) defined a world-system as a “multicultural territorial division of labor in which the production and exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants” (1974, 347). This division of labour is clearly marked by an asymmetrical movement underlying the world economy as a whole, and structuring the world into core, periphery, and semi-periphery areas. This approach

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structures the current world-system according to a power hierarchy between core and periphery, in which powerful and wealthy “core” societies dominate and exploit weak and poor peripheral societies. Peripheral countries are structurally constrained to experience a kind of development that reproduces their subordinate status (Martínez-Vela 2001, 4). In his essay on flows, boundaries and hybridity, Ulf Hannerz uses an identical centre-periphery model to explain how culture functions in a globalized world, and expands this notion beyond the economic realm, stating that culture flows from cultural centres to peripheral areas (Edwards and Gupta 2006). There are two major ideas resulting from his perspective. While multiple cultural centres export culture, resulting in a complex set of cultural influences, centre-periphery roles “are asymmetrical, but not free from contradictions, and they do not relegate the periphery to [an] entirely passive role in cultural construction” (Hannerz 2004, 115). The notions of agency, empowerment and transformation that are ascribed to peripheral countries are, therefore, a major influence in the flux of cultural products since peripheral areas are able to interact with exported cultural symbols and practices, thus transforming, adapting or rejecting them. As far as translation is concerned, Portugal still remains a peripheral country where translation practice occurs mostly from English and other languages into Portuguese. As pointed out by Heilbron and Sapiro (2007), Portugal is a country that receives translations, where translation basically occurs from languages playing a central or hypercentral position, like English, from the core to the periphery (Heilbron 2010), and where texts and other translated materials circulate from other languages. Most of the literature that circulates in Portugal are translations, a percentage that can easily reach 35 %, or even 45 % in terms of the national output, according to Heilbron and Sapiro (in Wolf and Fukari 2007). However, it would be misleading to overstress the importance of literary translation in the Portuguese scenario, especially considering the political, economic and social weight of technical documentation and scientific texts that usually gravitate around the so-called concept of translated products. However, hidden underneath the literary “crust” there is an immense territory formed by technical, specialized material whose economic capital is by far more valuable than the rest. The usual split between technical and literary translation is therefore quite visible in social terms in Portugal, a finding that tends to be in tune with Heilbron and Sapiro’s conclusion that “[l]iterary and academic translators are thus

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distinct in many ways, including economically, from the whole set of ‘technical’ and professional translators” (Heilbron and Sapiro 2007, 102). The impact of this conjuncture is reflected in the proliferation of translation services at a national basis, both professional and nonprofessional, thus leading to the creation of a grey area, a sort of no-man’s land, where translation practice normally occurs with little certification, institutional recognition or validation. The way professionals and agencies promote their services is quite diversified as well, which means that people tend to look for identical singularities in the so-called associated professions within the language industry, thus showing how uncertain, diffuse and dispersive the professional field associated with this activity is, and by focusing their marketing strategies on peripheral professions and other related services When depicting her “world republic of letters”, Pascale Casanova applied at a world scale the theories of Pierre Bourdieu on the independence of the literary field from the political field and the laws of the market, based on the notion of a relatively independent international literary space, organized according to a certain temporal geography, with its hubs and peripheries (Cunha 2012). This globalization of translational/transnational movements also affects professional practice in Portugal, partly due to institutional pressures, connected with market dynamics, internal and international regulations, as well as economic and financial variables, which try to keep up with the transformations of the art/cultural/literary world, namely literary/cultural industries, the translation market, knowledge industries, the digitalization of knowledge and the democratization of cyberspace). Appadurai’s formulation of global culture as a set of various “-scapes”, comprising multidirectional, multilayered, transnational flows of people, is, indeed, an important contribution to the diagnosis of the effects of globalization on cultural practices in the age of modernity, illustrating how contemporary economic and cultural flows actually cut across the increasing borders of nationstates and highlighting the multiple noneconomic flows between individuals, groups and states. Faced with the ubiquity and pervasiveness of translation, as a crossborder phenomenon which erases the notion of frontiers and established territorial boundaries, that which becomes evident in the age of global translation is that “the world is not enough” (Cunha 2012) because the concept of global markets is not enough to fully encompass the polyphony of texts and their geographical identities, as well as local, regional, national and transnational idiosyncrasies.

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Bibliography Angelelli, Claudia. 2004. Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Barnard, Alan, and Jonathan Spencer, eds. 1996. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge. Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caria, Telmo. 2005. Saber profissional. Coimbra: Livraria Almedina. —. 2007. Análise social do saber profissional em trabalho técnicointelectual (ASPTI)—uma linha de investigação em desenvolvimento no Norte de Portugal. Paper presented at the IV Congresso AsturGalaico de Sociologia, 23 March. La Coruña: Universidad de A Coruña. Chesterman, Andrew. 1993. From “Is” to “Ought”: Laws, Norms and Strategies in Translation Studies. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 5 (1): 1-20. —. 2000. Memes of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cunha, Carlos. 2012. Spatial Identities: The World Is Not Enough. Paper presented at the congress Crossroads, 2-6 July. Paris: Association for Cultural Studies. Edwards, Brian, and Anubhav Gupta. 2006. Globalization & Culture. Comp Lit 383, http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/projects/global ization/general%20articles/Globalization%20and%20Culture.doc (accessed in November 2014). Flynn, Peter. 2005. Linguistic Ethnography of Literary Translation: Irish Poems and Dutch-speaking Translators. PhD Thesis. Gent: University of Gent. —. 2009. Fieldwork in Translation Studies: Why Not Ask Them Yourself? Paper presented at CETRA 2009, 17-18 August. Leuven: K. U. Leuven. Fraser, Janet, and Michael Gold. 2001. “Portfolio Workers”: Autonomy and Control amongst Freelance Translators. Work Employment & Society 5 (4): 679-697. Gile, Daniel. 1998. Observational Studies and Experimental Studies in the Investigation of Conference Interpreting. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 10 (1): 69-93. Glaser, Barney. 1998. Doing Grounded Theory: Issues and Discussions. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.

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Glaser, Barney, and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Gouadec, Daniel. 2002. Profession: Traducteur. Paris: La Maison du Dictionnaire. Granja, Berta Pereira. 2008. Assistente social—Identidade e saber. Examination for the doctoral degree in Social Service Sciences. Porto: Universidade do Porto, http://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/bitstream/10216/ 7188/2/ASSISTENTE%20SOCIAL%208211%20IDENTIDADE%20E %20SABER.pdf (accessed February 14, 2013). Hanks, William F. 1996. Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Hannerz, Ulf. 2004. The Global Ecumene. In The Globalization Reader. Edited by F. J. Lechner and J. Boli. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 109-119. Heilbron, Johan, and Gisèle Sapiro. 2007. Outline for a Sociology of Translation. Current Issues and Future Prospects. In Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 93-108. Hertog, Erik. 1999. And I Shall Say: Interpreting Forms a Family. Linguistica Antverpiensia 33: 39-54. Hertog, Erik, A. Corsellis, K. Rasmussen, Y. Van den Bosh, E. Van der Vlis, and H. Keijzer-Lambooy. 2007. From Aequitas to Aequalitas. Establishing Standards in Legal Interpreting and Translation in the European Union. In The Critical Link 4: Professionalisation of Interpreting in the Community. Edited by Cecilia Wadensjö, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova and Anna-Lena Nilsson. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 151-166. Inghilleri, Moira. 2003. Habitus, Field and Discourse: Interpreting as a Socially Situated Activity. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 15 (2): 243-268. Koskinen, Kaisa. 2008. Translating Institutions. An Ethnographic Study of EU Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Koskinen, Kaisa, and Tuija Kinnunen, eds. 2010. Translator’s Agency. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Marijns, Katrijn. 2006. The Asylum Seeker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Martínez-Vela, Carlos A. 2001. World Systems Theory. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Pöchhacker, Franz. 2004. Introducing Interpreting Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Pym, Anthony. 2002. Training Language Service Providers: Local Knowledge in Institutional Contexts. In Training the Language Services Provider for the New Millennium. Edited by Belinda Maia, Johann Haller and Margherita Ulrych. Porto: Universidade do Porto, 21-30. Rampton, Ben, Karin Tusting, Janet Maybin, Richard Barwell, Angela Creese, and Vally Lytra. 2004. UK Linguistic Ethnography: A Discussion Paper, http://www.lingethnog.org/docs/rampton-et-al-2004uk-linguistic-ethnography-a-discussion-paper/ (accessed January 29, 2011). Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet, and Miriam Shlesinger. 2008. Strategies of ImageMaking and Status Advancement of Translators and Interpreters as a Marginal Occupational Group. In Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury. Edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger and Daniel Simeoni. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 79-90. Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet, and Miriam Shlesinger, eds. 2009. Translation and Interpreting Studies. Profession, Identity and Status. Translators and Interpreters as an Occupational Group [double special issue] 4 (2). Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. 1994. Grounded Theory Methodology. In Handbook of Qualitative Research. Edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 273-285. Strübing, Jörg. 2007. Research as Pragmatic Problem-Solving: The Pragmatist Roots of Empirically-grounded Research. In Handbook of Grounded Theory. Edited by A. Byrant and K. Charmaz. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 580-602. Van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. The Representation of Social Actors in Discourse. In Text and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. Edited by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard. London: Routledge, 32-70. —. 1997. A Representação dos actores sociais. In Análise Crítica do Discurso. Edited by Emília Ribeiro Pedro. Lisbon: Caminho, 169-222. Venuti, Lawrence. 2004. The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

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Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice. Learning as a Social System. Systems Thinker, http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/ cop/lss.shtml (accessed April 22, 2013). Wolf, Michaela, and Alexandra Fukari, eds. 2007. Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

PART II BETWEEN THE PERIPHERY AND THE CENTRE: DIALOGUES AND MOVEMENTS

Mas se as questões de poder intercultural podem condicionar o quando e o quê uma cultura de chegada escolhe transferir de uma cultura de partida, a verdade é que, do ponto de vista das estratégias discursivas pelas quais o texto estrangeiro é convertido em texto autóctone, prevalecem sempre os objectivos, as normas e os interesses da cultura de chegada. João Ferreira Duarte. 2001. Tradução e expropriação discursiva: The Lusiad, de W. J. Mickle. In Floresta encantada—novos caminhos da literatura comparada. Edited by Helena Carvalhão Buescu, João Ferreira Duarte and Manuel Gusmão. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 521.

But if questions of intercultural power condition when and what a target culture chooses to transfer from the source culture, the truth is that in terms of the discourse strategies through which the foreign text is converted in a autochthonous text, one notices that the objectives, the norms and interests of the target culture always prevail. [Editors’ translation]

CHAPTER SIX THE LATE 19TH- AND EARLY 20TH-CENTURY PORTUGUESE SHORT STORY: ITS ENGLISH RECEPTION AND PORTUGUESE AFTERLIFE PATRICIA ANNE ODBER DE BAUBETA

1. Introduction It is often argued that Portuguese literature dwells on the periphery of Western cultural production but is rarely granted a place in the centre. With this assertion in mind, I propose to examine the translation history of one particular genre as it emerged during the second half of the 19th century, namely the literary short story. The woman-authored short story is not foregrounded in this study as I have found little evidence that any such works were translated into English at the time of writing, and very few at a subsequent date. If Portuguese short stories or indeed novels are to be translated and published in English, potential translators, whether academics, scholars, devoted Lusophiles, amateur or professional translators, must first be aware of their existence and in a position to make informed judgements about their relative merits and literary value. At the same time, commissioning editors and sponsors have to be persuaded that a readership does exist for such works, that they will recoup their initial investment, and the whole undertaking will not prove to be an exercise in futility. Nowadays, there are well-established mechanisms for bringing key authors and their works to the attention of the international publishing community, for example specialist publications such as Sights from the South, produced by the Instituto Nacional do Livro e das Bibliotecas, or international events such as the Frankfurt Book Fair. Familiarity, however, does not always lead to a binding contract.

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How could the 19th-century English reading public find out about the literary production of their oldest allies? Who wrote about Portuguese literature, what did they say about it, and did they really exert any significant influence, stimulate curiosity, create expectations or form tastes?

2. Dissemination of Portuguese Literature in England News of Portuguese literature, both ancient and modern, was disseminated through articles and reviews in magazines, histories of literature, the so-called Cabinets and Encyclopaedias,1 even through travel writing. In fact, from the first decade of the 19th century onwards, there was a steady drip of information bringing Portuguese literature to the attention of the “educated” British reader. However, many of the articles and reviews dealing with Portuguese literature that appeared in The Quarterly Review, The Retrospective Review, Foreign Quarterly Review, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Literary Gazette and other 19th-century journals, quite simply predate the writing and publication of literary short stories, many of which first saw the light of day in the Portuguese periodical press. It is not until the last decades of the century that reviewers begin to mention short stories. Even so, such references are few and far between, as attention tended to focus on the canonical Camões and one or two other preferred poets. As well as English reviewers, at least two Portuguese scholars, each with their own clearly stated preferences, and not so hidden agendas, contributed to the pool of knowledge about Portuguese literature, Augusto Soromenho and Teófilo Braga, both of whom wrote for The Athenaeum in the 1870s and 1880s. Soromenho (1833-1878) was a teacher, philologist and scholar who published extensively on literature and other subjects. His articles (1871, 1875, 1876, 1878) were presumably translated from Portuguese into English. In “Portugal”, The Athenaeum (no. 2305, December 30, 1871, 878879): Soromenho pays a brief tribute to the late Júlio Dinis and mentions Os Serões de Provincia2 by name. He praises Teófilo Braga, laments the

1

For example, the Reverend Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (133 volumes), begun in 1829 and completed in 1849. 2 In this article, following the author’s request, the titles follow their original capitalization norm (Editors’ note).

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passing of Rebelo da Silva and refers positively to As Farpas. His tone is generally acerbic and he makes no attempt to disguise his personal bias. In the following year, “Portugal” (The Athenaeum, no. 2357, December 28, 1872, 857) contains more of a personal diatribe than an objective review: The statement that Portuguese literature is “a bad translation from the French” is not far from being correct, and there is reason to fear that, if it be true, the literature of Portugal is the expression of her social state [...] all the literary sewage of France is translated into Portuguese, without respect either for modesty or good taste. (1872, 857)3

On the positive side, Soromenho does include praise for Júlio Dinis and the late Rebelo da Silva, Braga’s scholarship and Pinheiro Chagas’ work as a historian, but then he inserts a scathing comment about “silly feuilletons”. Soromenho’s review “Continental Literature in 1874” (The Athenaeum, no. 2462, January 2, 1875, 15-16) deals mainly with publications on History and Archaeology. The few comments on literature would not encourage would-be translators: Especially in literary matters, Portugal follows in the steps of France. As literature is not with us a vocation but a trade, authors—I except works of genius which do not form a school—imitate, and it is easy enough to imitate Baudelaire. In a society which loves the novels of Belot and Flaubert, inspiration and beauty are not cared for. [...] Our poets write about “The Canaille,” “The Proletarian,” and such subjects. (1875, 16)

Soromenho is even less impressed by the latest novels—Guerra Junqueiro’s A Morte de D. João (1874) is described as “a mere freak of a disordered imagination”, while Bernardino Pinheiro’s Amores de um Visionário fares no better in his critical judgement: The characters are all impossible, and the accuracy of the sketches of manners is spoiled by the fact that the personages of the tale belong neither to the period chosen nor to Portuguese Society of any date. (1875, 16)

Soromenho’s The Athenaeum review of 1876 (no. 2566, December 30, 879), is especially germane to this article because, at last, he mentions short-story collections:4 3 4

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. I have transcribed the reviews as they appear and not updated the Portuguese.

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Chapter Six In the section of belles lettres, the reaction against the extravagance of the French style begins to operate: the romances of Julio Diniz serve for an example. Pedro Ivo, Bento Moreno, two noms de plume, figure on the title pages of notable books. The first, who was already known for his “Contos”, has now published “O Sello da Roda” and Bento Moreno has issued the “Comedia do Campo”, pictures of manners, scenes in the Minho, small unaffected stories, admirably, nay, adorably narrated.

A. Sarmento has also published the Contos ao Soalheiro, an estimable work, in which is found a rich collection of proverbs, adages, idiotisms, and popular Portuguese phrases, as well as a description of the customs and superstitions of our people. Dona Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho, the authoress of the “Vozes do Ermo”, is already known among us not only as a poetess of distinction, but also as a prose-writer of eminence. There is not one of the Portuguese ladies who aspire to literary honours able to compete with her. The “Vozes do Ermo” is the only book of verses which I consider I ought to particularize. (1876, 879)

Pedro Ivo was, of course, Carlos Lopes (1842-1906), author of Contos (1874), O Selo da Roda (1876) and Serões de Inverno (1880). Following in the footsteps of Camilo and Júlio Dinis, he is normally described as a post-romantic. Bento Moreno was the pseudonym used by Francisco Teixeira de Queirós (1848-1919), author of Comédia do campo: cenas do Minho (1877). Both of these authors were practitioners of the conto rústico, or rustic tale, which is deemed to have begun with Herculano’s O Pároco da aldeia (1844). This review is also notable because it alludes to a woman writer. “Portuguese Literature in 1877” (The Athenaeum, no. 2619, January 5, 1878, 16) returns to Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho: In belles-lettres, I will first mention the romance “Amor Divino” by Bento Moreno. [...] It is an admirable study. “Serões no Campo” is a book by D. Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho. It contains literary essays and short stories. Among these we must give the first place to “A Engeitada”. [...] “Lisboa d’hontem”, like all the books of J. Cesar Machado, is a work without pretension, sincere, lively, and, in the present instance, full of memories of childhood. It speaks to us of the Lisbon of the past, in a mirthful manner and with bonhomie, the humour being always diversified with loving recollections of older times. (1878, 27)

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Following Soromenho’s death in 1878, Teófilo Braga, remembered as much for his politics as his erudition, took over as Portuguese contributor.5 No more objective than his predecessor, he uses this opportunity to comment unfavourably on notable figures, the government of the day, and anything else to which he was opposed. Braga would have been well aware of what was being published in Portugal, given his work as a literary historian and anthologist, Antologia Portugueza (1873) and Parnaso Portuguez Moderno (1877). His first report, “Portugal” (The Athenaeum, no. 2670, January 1878, 843-844), covers a range of topics, including Braga’s disapproval of Herculano’s “O Bobo”: There has just been published “O Bobo”, a deplorable and most unworthy imitation of Walter Scott. It would be much better for the reputation of the illustrious historian if his primitive essays were not introduced into the body of his works. [...] In literature and poetry there is little to notice. (1878, 844)

He also comments on O Primo Basílio: “To speak the truth, Eça de Queiroz is a great artist, a worthy pupil of Balzac and Zola, and quite capable of competing with them” (1878, 844). Like Soromenho, Braga refers to Bento Moreno’s latest novel, Amor Divino (844). “Portuguese Literature in 1879” (The Athenaeum, no. 2723, January 3, 1880, 17-18) contains Braga’s observations on history and poetry. Os Noivos is now attributed to “Senhor Teixeira de Queiroz”, as opposed to Bento Moreno (1880, 17). As regards short(er) fiction: A new talent has just been revealed by a series of novels published under the title of “Phototypias do Minho”: the author is Senhor José Augusto Vieira, a student in the Medical School of Oporto. These novels give a vivid description of the original and picturesque popular customs of the Minho; of this class I may mention the “Carta do Brazil”, the “Arrecadas de Rosina”, and the “Procissão dos Defuntos”. The “Cura de uma Nevrose” is very original, and is a profound satire on the anarchy which exists in the Portuguese Church. (1880, 18)

5

Joaquim Teófilo Fernandes Braga (1843-1924), Doctor of Lisbon University, Member of the Portuguese Academy, listed as a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom in 1909, President of the Provisional Government of the Portuguese Republic 1910-1911, political activist, prolific author, anthologist, literary historian.

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In “Portugal” (The Athenaeum, no. 2774, December 25, 1880, 857858), Braga reports on cultural events, translations of Camões, history and literary history, making his opinions perfectly clear: “It is certain that Herculano exercised an evil influence on Portuguese society” (1880, 857). As far as prose fiction is concerned, there is a negative comment on Júlio Lourenço Pinto’s A Vida Atribulada because “it imitates a little the realistic school of Zola” (1880, 857), among other flaws. Eça’s O Mandarim (The Mandarin) does not fare much better. Though Braga acknowledges Eça’s talent as a novelist, “the fantastic nature of the subject renders it nothing more than a piece of literary pastime, without plot or purpose; and it is really lamentable that a writer of first-class talent should waste his energies on such a trivial work, merely written for the occasion” (1880, 858). Braga’s final review, “Portugal” (The Athenaeum, no. 877, December 31, 1881, 892-893), makes no mention of short stories. The Academy (no. 648, October 4, 1884) included a favourable review of a Portuguese dictionary: [B]ecause Englishmen seldom now-a-days take up Portuguese as a study, but only use it for commercial correspondence, or to read financial prospectuses. It is a great pity that Portuguese has been so much neglected, for Portugal has a grand literature, and the new school of Portuguese historians and poets, headed by Alexandre Herculano and Almeida Garrett, have written much which well deserves attention. (1884, 215)

While the review is unsigned, it sounds very much as if it was written by Edgar Prestage, or at least by someone who shared his views. A few years later, in his seminal article “English Neglect of Portuguese Literature” (The Academy, no. 1101, June 19, 1893), Prestage bemoaned the fact that the study of Portuguese literature was neglected in England (notwithstanding his own, vigorous efforts to redress the balance). Here he mentions the Cancioneiros and Romanceiros as well as a number of Portuguese authors, Gil Vicente, Camões, Bernardim Ribeiro, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Júlio Dinis, Almeida Garrett, Antero de Quental and João de Deus. Indeed, he drops a very heavy hint, “As Pupillas of Julio Diniz calls loudly for a translator of which let Mr Heinemann take notice” (1893, 506). 1896 saw the publication of a review article by one J. Fulano (pseudonym?) in The Academy (no. 1260, June 27, 1896, 526).6 This is in

6 In its early years, the journal followed the convention of publishing anonymously.

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fact a review of Antonio Padula’s I Nuovi Poeti Portoghesi, Naples,7 in which the reviewer adopts a fairly sweeping approach to Portuguese literature, disagreeing with some of Padula’s views, and recommending that the Italian critic devote more attention to the commanding personalities of Garrett and Herculano, in their many-sided activity, as also to the remarkable pamphlets of Anthero de Quental and the fiction of Camillo Castello Branco, so characteristically Portuguese in its shortcomings no less than in its high qualities. Also, if the name of D. Alice Moderno be retained, he would do well to introduce that of D. Claudia de Campos, Portugal’s most brilliant lady writer, and say something of her short stories and her last volume of psychological studies, entitled Mulheres, with its long and thoughtful study of Charlotte Bronte. (1896, 526) .

The reviewer’s comments are interesting, because they draw attention to two women writers, Alice Moderno8 and Cláudia de Campos.9 Prestage himself had published a translation of Moderno’s “Soneto Geográfico” two years before (The Academy, 1894), perhaps a coincidence, perhaps a clue to the real identity of J. Fulano. An additional opportunity for English readers to discover Portuguese literature through the English press came with Oswald’s “Poetry of the Portuguese Renaissance”, published in The Fortnightly Review (May 1873), then reprinted as a chapter in Portugal Old and New (1880). 10 Crawfurd also published a devastating review of Mary Serrano’s translation of O Primo Basílio in The Academy (July 13, 1889), in which he criticizes Eça’s adherence to the tenets of Naturalism and Serrano’s extreme puritanism quite even-handedly.

7

Padula also wrote Camoens petrarchista: studio con appendice di sonetti del poeta nella traduzione inedita di T. Cannizzaro (1904). 8 Alice Moderno (1867-1946) (Augusta Pereira de Melo Maulaz) wrote poetry, plays and novels, published in French, and was anthologized in her own lifetime by Nuno Catarino Cardoso and Forjaz de Sampaio, and posthumously by António Salvado. 9 Cláudia de Campos (1859-1916) moved in the highest social circles, frequented the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon and the literary salons of the Casino and was generally fêted by the writers of the day. She was especially concerned with female psychology and wrote novels and short stories. 10 John Oswald Frederick Crawfurd (1834-1909), British Consul at Oporto in the 1880s and prolific author, sometimes using the pseudonym John Latouche: Latouche’s Travels in Portugal (1875), Round the Calendar in Portugal (1880), Portugal Old and New (1880).

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Next comes the work described as the “New Hallam”, namely Periods of European Literature. The Later Nineteenth Century, edited by George Saintsbury for William Blackwood and Sons (1907). Because of Saintsbury’s unfamiliarity with Portuguese literature, the information was supplied by the acknowledged expert on such matters, Edgar Prestage. As for the target readership of this work, Saintsbury wrote, with a certain irony: Some have described these volumes as “school-books,” and others have been good enough to call them a “popular series.” We certainly must have attained a pretty high stage of culture as a nation if they are either one or the other. It was, indeed, the editor’s hope in planning the book originally, and is still now as he takes leave of it, that it may be of the greatest value to students, whether in the highest forms of schools, in universities, or in subsequent and private pursuit of knowledge. He would also have much liked to think that people might take the volumes home from the library instead of novels or travels. But what they were chiefly planned to do was to supply intelligent possessors of larger and smaller collections of literature with something like an atlas or dictionary of the subject. (1907, xiii)

We can only speculate about Saintsbury’s reaction, had he been told that one hundred years later, his history of literature would go global, accessible in downloadable PDFs to anyone with a computer, the right kind of software, an internet connection and, of course, a measure of intellectual curiosity. Prestage covers history, poetry, drama, the Questão Coimbrã, 11 the novels of Camilo, Júlio Dinis and Eça, as well as The Relic and The Mandarin, referring obliquely to his own translations, “two admirable short stories, two of which have recently appeared in an English dress” (1907, 289).12 Seven years later, Aubrey Bell published Studies in Portuguese Literature (1914) and offers his own opinion of Eça’s writings:

11

Polemic developed in different pubications (periodicals, feuilleton, speeches), published in 1865 and 1866, which has oposed two divergent conceptions of literature. On the one hand, the poetry more abstract and intimate by the older generation and, on the other, poetry socially engaged proposed by the new generation. 12 This curious expression, “in an English dress”, seems to have been used quite often by translators.

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In 1887 was published A Reliquia, an extraordinary book—vulgar, repulsive, blasphemous, fantastic, amusing, sordid, horrible. [...] He had already written a similar fragmentary sketch in A Revolução de Setembro in 1870. (1914, 207) In O Mandarim (Porto, 1879, 1880, 1889, 1900), as elsewhere, Eça de Queiroz showed that he could combine realism and sobriety with extravagant fancy. (1914, 210)

Although he mentions Prestage’s translations of Eça’s O Suave Milagre (The Sweet Miracle) and Eça’s O Defunto, given the more religious title of Our Lady of the Pillar (1914, 211), it is clear that he does not share all of Prestage’s critical judgements. Bell includes abundant information about short stories in his Portuguese Literature (published in 1922 by the Clarendon Press, though written before 1916). In the section 1816-1910 “The Reaction and After”, a number of the works he singles out for comment coincide with the choices of later Portuguese anthologists. On Luís Augusto Rebelo da Silva: In the same (the first) volume of A Epocha appeared his short conto entitled A Ultima Corrida de Touros em Salvaterra, which won and has retained popularity by its skilful presentment of a stirring and pathetic episode in the reign of José I (1750-77). (1922, 296)

As for his judgement of Francisco Teixeira de Queirós: The obvious defects of his work—its laborious realism, its insistence on medical or physical details, its vain load of pedantry—need not obscure its real merits. The careful style has occasional lapses, the psychology is thin, the conversations commonplace. His art, like a winter sunshine, fails to penetrate. (1922, 319)

Bell does give Teixeira de Queirós some credit, however: [I]n the Minho scenes of the Comédia do Campo his scrupulous descriptions obtain their full effects. [...] Minho and the Minhotos are presented with naturalness and skill. (1922, 320)

Carlos Malheiro Dias is paid an unusual—and probably unwelcome— compliment: There is a welcome Spanish directness in the work of the able journalist Snr. Carlos Malheiro Dias (deputy for Vianna do Castello in 1903-5) in his

94

Chapter Six novels Filho das Hervas (1900), Os Telles de Albergaria (1901), and A Paixão de Maria do Ceo (1902). Frankly sensational in Grande Cagliostro (1905), he displays his gift for the short story in A Vencida (1907), a volume of dramatic tales, of which A Consoada is especially effective. (1922, 320)

Abel Botelho is granted a passing reference, to the effect that he “showed an intermittent power of description in seven stories of his native Beira, collected under the title Mulheres da Beira” (1922, 321). Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho’s A Engeitada “has reminiscences of Julio Diniz’ A Casa Mourisca, and Contos e Phantasias” and she “treated slight themes with a delicate charm” (1922, 324). Bell does not emerge as especially pro- nor anti-feminist. It is more likely that he did not have access to publications such as the brief anthologies compiled by Nuno Catarino Cardoso or Albino de Forjaz Sampaio:13 If we except D. Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho, the literary achievement of women in Portugal in recent years has not been remarkable. Like D. Claudia de Campos, author of the novels Elle (1898) and A Esfinge and short stories, D. Alice Pestana (Caiel) has cultivated with success both the novel, as in Desgarrada (1902), and the conto, as in De Longe (1904), which contains stories of familiar life written with sincerity and truth. If D. Anna de Castro Osorio’s Ambições (1903) gives the impression rather of a series of scenes than of a long novel, in her short stories Infelizes (1898)—especially A Terra—and Quatro Novelas (1908) she ably describes common family life in town or country, or (in A Sacrificada) the lives, past and present, of aged nuns in a dwindling convent. (1922, 324325)

One comment is especially germane to this discussion: The growing prominence of the conto is felt in the work of Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz, Teixeira de Queiroz, Snr. Jaime de Magalhaes Lima (Via Redemptora, 1905, Apostolos da Terra, 1906, Vozes do Meu Lar, 1912), and many other novelists. (1922, 325)

It is interesting that he designates the short-story writers as, first and foremost, novelists. Bell refers to the authors and works he considers most important, coinciding in some cases with the anthologized stories listed below in Table A-1 (see the Appendix A): 13

Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta. 2007. The Anthology in Portugal. A New Approach to the History of Portuguese Literature in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York, and Wien: Peter Lang.

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Julio Cesar Machado (1835-90) showed talent in Contos ao luar (1861), Scenas da minha terra (1862), Quadras do campo e da cidade (1868), À Lareira (1872). [...] [P]erhaps more natural are the Contos do Tio Joaquim (1861) by Rodrigo Paganino (1835-63); the pleasant stories of village life, Contos (1874) and Serões de Inverno (1880), written by Carlos Lopes (born in 1842) under the pseudonym Pedro Ivo; and Contos (1894) and Azul e Negro (1897) by Afonso Botelho. The poet Augusto Sarmento (born in 1835) also wrote stories of village life, Contos do [sic] Soalheiro (1876), but stories à thèse, treating of emigration and other minhoto evils, among which he includes beatas, witches, and brasileiros de torna-viagem. A writer of contos as disappointing as Machado is Alberto Braga (18511911). He has a sense of style and technique, and some of his tales, especially O Engeitado, are pathetic, but after reading his Contos da minha lavra (1879), Contos de aldeia, Contos Escolhidos (1892), Novos Contos, one has the perhaps somewhat unfair impression that they are mainly concerned with viscondessas and canaries. (1922, 325-326)

Bell also comments on the Conde de Ficalho, as well as Fialho de Almeida, and refers directly to “the poignant sketch of the ruined old scholar fidalgo” (1922, 327) in D. João da Câmara’s O Paquete, translated by Prestage as “The Packet-Boat”, and he also flags up Trindade Coelho’s stories, which, “collected under the title Os Meus Amores (1891), natural and deeply felt scenes of peasant life, are all marked by an exceptional delicacy of style and by a most alluring freshness and simplicity” (1922, 327). He goes so far as to describe Abyssus Abyssum and Idyllio Rustico as “two little Masterpieces” (1922, 327). Bell also comments on Júlio Brandão, Raúl Brandão and António Patrício (Serão Inquieto, 1910), among others (1922, 328). Bell ends his review with the interesting comment that “[t]he large number of contos is a sign of the times, corresponding to the favour shown towards the brief revista in the drama and the host of sonnets which now replace the long romantic poems of the past” (1922, 328).14 Unfortunately, Bell does not expand on his observation; it may be that he did not really approve of this change in public taste.

14 Bell’s work was continued by Gerald Moser, who produced a series of articles from the 1940s to 1960s for The Modern Language Journal and Hispania on “Recent Publications on Portuguese Language and Literature”, frequently mentioning short-story collections and anthologies, though not in so much detail as Bell.

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3. Conclusions So what do the data tell us about the Portuguese short story: does it have an “afterlife” in English translation, and just how many stories have been “preserved” for future generations, in Portuguese anthologies? I have found no evidence of any story having been translated during the 19th century, and relatively few in the first decades of the 20th century. Indeed, we have to stretch the parameters and include writers who were born at the end of the 19th or in the early years of the 20th, publishing in the first half of the 20th century, if the numbers are to be even remotely respectable. How do we account for this gap in the publishing system? The scarcity of translations has less to do with the intrinsic qualities and merits of the stories, and owes more to external circumstances, for example the fact that many were initially published in the periodical press before being gathered together in single-author volumes or multi-author anthologies. As a consequence, few travelled across frontiers to encounter their potential translators. There may have been a perception that short stories were somehow “trivial”, because they were published in newspapers, aimed at a “popular” readership or audience—especially if the story was read out loud during the “serão”, “à lareira”, or used to while away a tedious train journey, as Erik Van Achter points out in his doctoral thesis (2009). And the view has always existed that the short story, though ideal for the translator’s purposes, is the “poor relation” of the novel, used by writers to “try their hand” and practise their craft. As I have already observed, Aubrey Bell saw the authors of the contos that he reviewed first and foremost as novelists. English-speaking translators, publishers and possibly even readers have traditionally been more interested in poetry and selected plays.15 This situation can be explained as a result of trends within the British literary world, the perennial interest in Camões, the Romantic appetite for romances and ballads or plays dealing with the life and death of Inês de Castro (see, for example, John Adamson 1808). Attention shifted slightly from Camões to Gil Vicente once his works had been “rediscovered”, though more often than not because of his Spanish plays and poems.16 The Galician-Portuguese lyrics were virtually unknown until the late 19th 15 There had been sporadic interest in the novel, but this only came to a head when Saramago was awarded his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. 16 The exceptions are the unnamed author of “Ancient Portuguese Drama. Gil Vicente”, The Quarterly Review, 1846, Edward Quillinan and John Adamson, who planned to translate Gil Vicente but never actually did so.

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century, but have since found their English voice, with 59 translators, up to 2011. Garrett was taken up by fashionable society because of his (romantic) English exile, received the patronage of enthusiastic Lusophiles like John Adamson (1842), was lauded by Terence Hughes (1845), then consecrated by Edgar Prestage’s translation of Frei Luís de Sousa (1909). But with this one exception, the presence of Portuguese emigrés in London failed to stimulate British interest in Portuguese literature (Pym and Styles 2003). Many Portuguese short stories seem to have emerged in response to the Realist and Naturalist movements. Their subject matter, ranging from village life to the decadence of the city, may have been considered unattractive by English publishers or commissioning editors; perhaps no one cared enough to insist that they were worth translating. Prestage selected his texts with care, following the advice of his mentors. Aubrey Bell was scrupulous in drawing readers’ attention to authors and their works, but was personally more inclined towards poetry (and Gil Vicente). Oswald Crawfurd had a marked partiality for Sá de Miranda—“a poet that the richest literature in the world might well be proud of” (1887)—, and translated a number of his poems in “Poetry of the Portuguese Renaissance” (1873). Roxana Dabney translated Júlio Dinis’ Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca in 1891 as a result of her close personal interest in Portuguese culture, and Mary Serrano tackled O Primo Basílio (1889) because her livelihood depended on her translations of lengthy novels for a growing—and hungry—American readership. There has been no shortage of people willing to turn their hand to Fernando Pessoa & heteronyms, and now, in the 21st century, Camões still attracts translators who wish to render his lyrics into English.17 As Table A-1 (see Appendix A) will show, the earliest English translation of a work of Portuguese short fiction that I found dates from 1904 (Prestage’s The Sweet Miracle). 1920 saw the inclusion of 9 Portuguese stories in Hammerton’s Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, most of them by authors already mentioned by Soromenho, Braga and Bell, from whom the anthologist may have taken his lead. (This set of translations has been reprinted several times.) The most recent translations of Portuguese prose fiction are due to the efforts of Margaret Jull Costa in the UK and Christopher C. Lund in the U.S., while Alison Aiken’s work also deserves recognition.

17 See, for example, William Baer. 2005. Luís de Camões Selected Lyrics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

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At the same time, I considered the issue of canonicity, and tried to establish, as a rudimentary indicator, which short stories appear most frequently in Portuguese anthologies or compilations. Thus, in my search for 19th-century short stories I have examined an initial sample of 70 anthologies (Table A-2, see Appendix A), some dedicated to the 19thshort story in particular, some to the short story in general, others with unifying themes such as Love, or Christmas, some destined for secondary school children and officially approved by the Institutions of the Estado Novo18 for this purpose, three recent anthologies incorporating the latest critical readings produced by scholars in the Centre for European and Lusophone Literatures (CLEPUL), University of Lisbon, several compilations published in Brazil (the selections do not differ noticeably from the European selections), as well as two anthologies dedicated exclusively to women’s writing, one Brazilian, one Portuguese. Author Eça de Queirós Almada Negreiros Rebelo da Silva Alexandre Herculano Ferreira de Castro Raúl Brandão Carlos Malheiro Dias Conde de Ficalho Júlio Dinis Eça de Queirós Eça de Queirós Eça de Queirós Raúl Brandão

Title O Suave Milagre O Cágado Última Corrida de Touros em Salvaterra A Dama Pé-da-Cabra O Senhor dos Navegantes O Mistério da Árvore A Consoada A Caçada do Malhadeiro O Espólio de Senhor Cipriano O Tesouro Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura José Mathias Natal dos Pobres

Frequency 9 7 7 6 6 6 5 5 5 4 4 4 4

Table 6-1: 19th- and early 20th-century Portuguese short stories that appear in four or more of the anthologies listed below Table 6-1 shows the most frequently anthologized stories; I opted for maximum inclusiveness as regards the parameters. Eça, Almada Negreiros and Rebelo da Silva are at the top of the league table, followed by Herculano, Ferreira de Castro and Raúl Brandão (two stories) and Malheiro Dias. In fact, Eça appears four times with four different stories, which makes him the outright winner. It is impossible to say whether this 18 For further information on Estado Novo, see footnote 3 in Teresa Seruya’s essay.

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ranking reflects these authors’ general prestige as novelists, historians, or cultural figures, or is the result of a genuine appreciation of their short stories. In either case, the fact that so many of the most anthologized stories have a Christmas theme confirms something I have already flagged up elsewhere, the perennial popularity of the Christmas story among Portuguese readers. The topic seems to have been de rigueur for any shortstory writer worthy of the name, an obligatory rite of passage. Finally, I looked for correspondences between my inchoate database of anthologized stories, and the corpus, such as it is, of 19th- and early 20thcentury Portuguese short stories in English translation (see Table 6-2). Story/Novella

Anthologies

Suave Milagre

9

O Cágado Última Corrida de Touros Reais em Salvaterra

7 7

O Senhor dos Navegantes

6

A Estranha Morte do Prof. Antena José Mathias

4

O Tesouro

4

Os Canibais Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura

4 4

O Defunto

3

Sede de Sangue

3

Gente Singular A Igreja Profanada

2 2

4

English translation titles The Sweet Miracle The Turtle The Last Bull-Fight at Salvaterra The Last Bull-Fight in Salvaterra Our Lord of Mariners Our Lord of All Seafarers The Strange Death of Professor Antena José Mathias José Mathias José Mathias The Three Brothers and the Treasure The Cannibals Peculiarities of a Fairhaired Girl The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman Our Lady of the Pillar A Friend in Need The Hanged Man Blood Lust Blood Threat Singular People The Desecrated Church

Versions 1904;1906; 1914; 1916 1995 1909 1920

1963 1997 1996 1947; 1993 2007 2009 1920 1995 1965 1997; 2009

1906 1911 1995; 2009 1995 2009 2009 1995

Chapter Six

100 O Filho Suze A ideia de comadre Mónica Margareta O Amante O Banqueiro Anarquista O homem dos sonhos O Paquete Os dois pescadores de Leça da Palmeira Os Novelos de Tia Philomena Perfeição Ressurreição

2 3 1

Her Son Suze A Profitable Vintage

1920 1997 1943

1 1 1

Margareta The Lover The Anarchist Banker

1999 1997 1997

1 1 1

1996 1923 1920

1

The Man of Dreams The Packet-Boat The Fisherman of Lessa da Palmeira Tia Philomela

1 1

Perfection Resurrection

1923 1996

1924

Table 6-2: Short Stories and novellas in Portuguese anthologies that have been translated into English For the present, any conclusion drawn must be provisional and contingent, due to the limited data I have been able to gather.19 Of the 63 translated stories and novellas, fewer than half, 26, appear in the Portuguese anthologies that I have examined so far. Six of these stories were written by Eça de Queirós, again reinforcing his status as author. While this ratio makes it difficult to prove a strict correlation between short stories published in the two languages, it does suggest there are two canons: one in Portugal, the other in the English-speaking world, with the former influencing the formation of the latter. I use the word “influencing” advisedly, since the selection criteria for anthologies, whether of works in their original language or in translation, are many, varied and sometimes utterly unpredictable.

4. A Footnote in the History of Translation Studies So far, thirty individuals have translated works of Portuguese short fiction written and published in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. This

19 When the CLEPUL online database becomes available, this kind of analysis will become considerably easier, and more accurate.

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number will rise when the Santa Barbara Project comes to fruition.20 If we were to ask what all of the translators have in common, the obvious answer would be a knowledge of the Portuguese language and an appreciation of Portuguese literary culture, enhanced by an understanding of the social and political contexts in which the stories were written. Regrettably, many of those who carried out the pioneering work of translating from the Portuguese are no longer with us.21 New translators have taken their place, but are not necessarily committed to translating European Portuguese literature, let alone the short story, preferring to look further afield and embrace the concept of Lusofonia. While this is a perfectly valid option, it does leave a number of interesting authors, especially the women writers of the Republic, if not in limbo, certainly beyond the reach of an English language readership. There is no shortage of material to tempt any translator who wishes to usher Portuguese literature in from the periphery. In the British context, the committed Lusophile may take a pro-active stance in promoting Portuguese as part of a Modern Languages Degree, insert Portuguese into the field of Translation Studies, or engage in constructive dialogue with publishing houses and funding bodies in order to promote translations that will resonate with English-speaking readers.

20

In 2011, a number of stories or prose extracts was published, in English translation, under the editorship of Professor João Camilo dos Santos, Centre for Portuguese Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. These include: Júlio Dinis, “O Espólio do Senhor Cipriano”; Almeida Garrett, “O Inglês”; Ramalho Ortigão, “Uma visita de pêsames”; Teixeira de Queirós, “O enterro de um cão”; Eça de Queirós, “No Moinho”; Camilo Castelo Branco, “Aquela Casa Triste”; Abel Botelho, “Uma corrida de touros no Sabugal”; Brito Camacho, “A Verruga”; Bourbon e Meneses, “O Seromenho”. Translations of other stories by Camilo Castelo Branco and by selected 20th-century authors have also been projected for 2011-2012. 21 In alphabetical order: Alison Aiken, Aubrey F. Bell (†), Donald Burness, John Byrne (†), Margaret Jull Costa, Alberta Gore Cuthbert (†), Francisco Cota Fagundes, Robert M. Fedorchek, Roberta Fox, Michael Henry Gaffney (†), Richard Franko Goldman (†), L. D. Gunn (†), Philip Krummrich, Clifford Landers, Alexis Levitin, Christopher C. Lund, Kim Marinus, Charles Marriott (†), Luís Marques (†), P. A. Odber de Baubeta, Rosemary Palmeira, Kerri Pierce, Giovanni Pontiero (†), Edgar Prestage (†), Gregory Rabassa, Maria da Costa Roque (†), Charles Sellers (†), Ann Stevens, John Vetch, Pamela Waley. To this list will be added Helen Kelsh (see bibliography) Shirley Clarke. Were this list to include English translators of Portuguese poetry and travel literature, the numbers would increase exponentially.

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However, if with a few exceptions (Camões, Eça, Pessoa and Saramago) Portugal’s literature may not be not universally known, Portuguese Translation Studies enjoys an altogether different status. Far from any periphery, its scholars sit at the heart of an academic Venn diagram of overlapping international networks. Under the kindly tutelage of Professor João Ferreira Duarte, the discipline has gone from strength to strength, as evidenced by the abundance of theses, articles, monographs, and collective volumes produced by Lisbon scholars. But most remarkable has been his nurturing of successive—and successful—academics and translators, theorists and practitioners, who have gone on to pursue rewarding careers of their own. A very distinguished legacy indeed.

Bibliography Adamson, John. 1808. Dona Ignez de Castro, A Tragedy, from the Portuguese of Nicolau Luís, with Remarks on the History of that Unfortunate Lady. Newcastle: D. Akenhead and Sons. —. 1842. Lusitania Illustrata: Notices on the History, Antiquities, Literature, etc., of Portugal. Literary Department, Part I. Selection of Sonnets, with Biographical Sketches of the Authors. Newcastle upon Tyne: T. and J. Hodgson. Bell, Aubrey. 1914. Studies in Portuguese Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 1922. Portuguese Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Braga, Teófilo. 1878. Portugal. The Athenaeum 2670: 843-844. —. 1880a. Portuguese Literature in 1879. The Athenaeum 2723: 17-18. —. 1880b. Portugal. The Athenaeum 2774: 857-858. —. 1881. Portugal. The Athenaeum 2877: 892-893. Crawfurd, Oswald. 1873. Poetry of the Portuguese Renaissance. The Fortnightly Review 13 (77): 586-605. (Reprinted in Portugal Old and New. London: C.K. Paul & Co., 1880.) —. 1887. Sá de Miranda. The Saturday Review 63 (637): 376-378. —. 1889. Review of Serrano’s Translation of O Primo Basílio. The Academy 897: 15-16. Fulano, J. 1896. Review. The Academy 1260: 526. Hughes, Terence McMahon. 1845. The Ocean Flower: A Poem. Preceded by an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Island of Madeira, a Summary of the Discoveries and Chivalrous History of Portugal, and an Essay on Portugal, and an Essay on Portuguese Literature. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.

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Kelsh, Helen. 2001. Towards a History of Portuguese Literature in English Translation—Volume II: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses 10: 67-82. Odber de Baubeta, Patricia Anne. 2007. The Anthology in Portugal: A New Approach to the History of Portuguese Literature in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang. Prestage, Edgar. 1884. Review. The Academy 648: 215. —. 1893. English Neglect of Portuguese Literature. The Academy 1101: 516. Pym, Anthony, and John Style. 2003. Spain and Portugal, 1790-1900, http://www.tinet.cat/~apym/on-line/translation/spainportugal_07.pd f (accessed January 3, 2011). Saintsbury, George. 1907. Periods of European Literature: The Later Nineteenth Century, vol. XII. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Soromenho, Augusto. 1871. Portugal. The Athenaeum 2305: 878-879. —. 1872. Portugal. The Athenaeum 2357: 857. —. 1875. Continental Literature in 1874. The Athenaeum 2462: 15-16. —. 1876. Review. The Athenaeum 2566: 879. —. 1878. Portuguese Literature in 1877. The Athenaeum 2619: 16. Van Achter, Erik. 2009. On the Nature of the [Portuguese] Short Story: A Poetics of Intimacy. PhD Thesis. Utrecht: University of Utrecht.

Appendix A

Chapter Six

Rebelo da Silva

1848

“Última Corrida de Touros Reais em Salvaterra”, in Contos e Lendas, Lisbon: Livr. Ed.de Mattos Moreira, 1873

Title “O pároco da aldeia”, O Panorama 8; in Lendas e Narrativas, 1851

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

Edgar Prestage

Translator L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

Other details “The Village Priest”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories. The Thousand Best Complete Tales of all Times and all Countries: Spanish and Portuguese, Volume 18, London: The Educational Book Company Ltd., 1920.1 “The Last Bull-Fight at Salvaterra”, London: Archibald Constable, 1909. Reproduced from The Oxford and Cambridge Review, 1909. “The Last Bull-fight in Salvaterra”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories. The Thousand Best Complete Tales of all Times and all Countries: Spanish and Portuguese, Volume 18, 1920; London: Senate, 1995.

The earliest anthology of Portuguese literary short stories found. The selections coincide with some of the recommendations made in Saintsbury.

1

Author Alexandre Herculano

Year 1844

Table A-1: Portuguese short stories in English translation

104

Álvaro do Carvalhal Rodrigo Paganino

Júlio César Machado

Júlio Dinis

Teófilo Braga

Pedro Ivo (Carlos Lopes)

18651866 1861

1861

1862

1865

1880

Margaret Jull Costa

“Os Canibais”, Revista de Coimbra “A galinha da minha vizinha”, in Os Contos do Tio Joaquim “Os dois pescadores de Leça da Palmeira”, in Contos do Luar “Os Novelos de Tia Philomena”, Jornal do Porto, 22 January 1863, etc.; Serões da Provincia, 1870 “O Relógio de Estrasburgo. Conto de 1352”, in Contos Fantásticos “O homem mal encarado”, in Serões do Inverno3 L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

Luís Marques

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

Margaret Jull Costa

“A Igreja Profanada”, Revista Contemporânea Portugal e Brasil2

3

105

The Christian World Magazine4

“The Great Clock of Strassburg”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920.

“The Desecrated Church”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, eds Eugénio de Lisboa and Helder Macedo, Sawtry: Dedalus, 1995. “The Cannibals”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995. “The Greater Burden”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920. “The Fisherman of Lessa da Palmeira”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920. Tia Philomela, London: Harrap, 1924. Repr. 1943 and thereafter.

Published biographical sketches, critical articles, poems, short stories, by contributors such as Teófilo Braga, Pinheiro Chagas. Reprinted by Livraria Civilização Editora, to commemorate “Cem Anos de Literatura em Língua Portuguesa”, 1983. 4 Not seen.

2

Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro Chagas

18641865

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story

Eça de Queirós

Fialho de Almeida

Fialho de Almeida

Fialho de Almeida

Eça de Queirós

Fialho de Almeida

1880

1881

1882

1882

1887

1893

106

“O Filho”, in O País das Uvas

A Relíquia

“A ideia da comadre Mónica” “Mephistopheles e Margarida”, in A Cidade do Vício “Madona do Campo Santo”, in A Cidade do Vício

“O Mandarim”, Diário de Portugal

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

Margaret Jull Costa

Aubrey F. Bell

P. A. Odber de Baubeta

Miss Maria da Costa Roque Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Richard Franko Goldman

Chapter Six

“The Relic (An Extract)”, in The Mandarin (and Other Stories), 1993, 2009; The Relic, Sawtry: Dedalus, 1994; New Dedalus edition, 2003. “Her Son”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920.

“The Mandarin”, in The Mandarin and Other Stories, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1965; London: The Bodley Head, 1966. “The Mandarin”, in The Mandarin (and Other Stories), Sawtry: Dedalus, 1993, 2009. “A Profitable Vintage”, The XX Century IV (5), 1943: 388-390. “Mephistopheles and Margarita”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995. “The Madonna of the Graveyard”, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories, vol. 1, ed. Eugénio Lisboa, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997. The Relic, New York: A. A. Knopf, 1925; The Reliquary, London: Reinhardt, 1954.

Eça de Queirós

1897

6

“José Mathias”, Revista Moderna de Paris

Edgar Prestage

“O Defunto”, Gazeta de Noticias, 7-16 August

Christopher Lund

Margaret Jull Costa

Luís Marques

Margaret Jull Costa

Douglas Ainslie

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

“A Chávena de Chá”, in Contos de Afonso Botelho, Lisbon: Livraria de António Maria Pereira

107

“The Cup of Tea”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920; in Outstanding Short Stories, ed. S. E. Paces, Hong Kong: Ling Kee Publishing Company, 2002.5 Our Lady of the Pillar by Eça de Queiroz; Done into English, London: Archibald Constable, 1906. “A Friend in Need (To the Memory of Eça de Queiroz)”, in Mirage. Poems, London: Elkin Mathews, 1911, 25-83.6 “The Hanged Man”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995; in The Mandarin (and Other Stories), 1993, 2009. “José Mathias”, in José Mathias and A Man of Talent, London: Harrap, 1947; in The Yellow Sofa and Three Portraits, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993. “José Mathias”, in The Mandarin (and Other Stories), 1993, 2009. “José Matias”, in Three Short Stories, Santa Barbara, CA: Centre for Portuguese Studies, University of California, 2007.

I have not seen this translation, but am assuming the publisher has reprinted the existing one. Not seen.

Eça de Queirós

1895

5

Afonso Botelho

1894

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story

Júlio Dantas

D. João da Câmara

Eça de Queirós

Eça de Queirós

18??

1900

1900

1902

108

Edgar Prestage

“A Man of Talent”, in José Mathias and A Man of Talent, London: Harrap, 1947; in The Yellow Sofa and Three Portraits, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993.

Luiz Marques

“O Suave Milagre”, in Contos

“Pacheco”, in Eça de Queiroz and The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, London and Manchester: Sherratt and Hughes, 1906; Pacheco, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922.

Edgar Prestage

“Pacheco”, in A Correspondência de Fradique Mendes; A Correspondência do Snr. E. Mollinet, Director da Revista de Biographia e de Historia

The Sweet Miracle, London: David Nutt, 1904, 1905; The Sweet Miracle, Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1914, 1916; The Fisher of Men, Portland Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1906, 1914.

The Packet-Boat, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1923.

Edgar Prestage

O Paquete, Lisbon: Livraria Editora Guimarães

“Drama”, The XX Century 4 (5), May 1943: 387-388.

Miss Maria da Costa Roque

“Um Drama”

Chapter Six

Not seen.

Eça de Queirós

1902

7

Eça de Queirós

1902

“Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loira”, in Contos

“O Tesoiro”, in Contos

Margaret Jull Costa

Richard Franko Goldman

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert

Michael Henry Gaffney

Sisters of Notre Dame

109

The Sweet Miracle: A Mystery Play by Eça de Queirós, translated from the Portuguese and adapted from the dramatized version of Alberto D’Oliveira, with a preface by the Bishop of Salford, Edinburgh and London: Sands and Co., 1910.7 Sweet Miracle, a drama adapted from the Portuguese of Eça de Queiroz and translated into English by Michael Henry Gaffney with a translation into Irish by G. M. Cussen and preface by Edgar Prestage, Dublin and Cork: The Talbot Press, 1927. “The Three Brothers and the Treasure”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920. “Peculiarities of a Fair-haired Girl”, in The Mandarin and Other Stories, 1965; The Bodley Head, 1965. “The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman”, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories, vol. 1, 1997; in The Mandarin (and Other Stories), 1993, 2009.

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story

Eça de Queirós

Eça de Queirós

Brito Aranha

Teixeira Gomes

Teixeira Gomes

António Patrício

António Patrício

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

1902

1902

1909

1909

1909

1910

1910

1915

110

“A Grande Sombra”, in Céu em Fogo

“O Homem das Fontes”, in Serão Inquieto “Suze”, in Serão Inquieto

“Sede de Sangue”, in Gente Singular

“Bom Exemplo”, in Contos e Narrativas “Gente Singular”, in Gente Singular, Lisbon: Livraria Clássica Editora

“Perfeição”, in Contos

“Um Poeta Lírico”, in Contos

Margaret Jull Costa

John Byrne

Margaret Jull Costa

Christopher C. Lund

Margaret Jull Costa

L. D. Gunn, Alberta Gore Cuthbert Christopher C. Lund

Christopher C. Lund

Charles Marriott

Christopher C. Lund

Richard Franko Goldman

Chapter Six

“Good Example”, in The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, 1920. “Singular People”, in Singular People, Santa Barbara, CA: Centre for Portuguese Studies, University of California, 2009. “Blood Lust”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995. “Blood Threat”, in Singular People, 2009. “The Fountain Man”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995. “Suze”, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories, vol. 1, 1997. “The Great Shadow”, in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), Sawtry: Dedalus, 1996.

“A Lyric Poet”, in The Mandarin and Other Stories, 1965; London: The Bodley Head, 1965; in The Yellow Sofa and Three Portraits, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993. “A Lyric Poet”, in Three Short Stories, 2007. Perfection, London: Selwyn & Blount, 1923. “Perfection”, in Three Short Stories, 2007.

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

Mário de Sá-Carneiro Mário de Sá-Carneiro Mário de Sá-Carneiro Almeida Negreiros

Fernando Pessoa

Eça de Queirós

1915

1915

1915

1921

1922

1925

1915

1915

1915

Mário de Sá-Carneiro Mário de Sá-Carneiro

1915

“Alves e Ca”

“O fixador de instantes”, in Céu em Fogo “O Cágado”, Revista “ABC”, 30 June 1921 “O Banqueiro Anarquista”

“O homem dos sonhos”, in Céu em Fogo “Asas”, in Céu em Fogo

“A estranha morte do Prof. Antena”, in Céu em Fogo “Mistério”, in Céu em Fogo

“Ressurreição”, in Céu em Fogo “Eu-próprio o outro”, in Céu em Fogo

John Vetch

Robert M. Fedorchek

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

111

“Resurrection”, in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “Myself the Other”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995; in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “The Strange Death of Professor Antena”, in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “Mystery”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995; in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “The Man of Dreams”, in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “Wings”, in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “The Fixer of Moments”, in The Great Shadow (and Other Stories), 1996. “The Turtle”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995. “The Anarchist Banker”, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories, vol. 1, 1997. Alves and Co, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. “The Yellow Sofa”, in The Yellow Sofa and Three Portraits, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993.

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story

Teixeira Gomes

Teixeira Gomes

Teixeira Gomes

Teixeira Gomes

Teixeira Gomes

Teixeira Gomes

José Marmelo e Silva

José Rodrigues Miguéis

1935

1935

1935

1935

1935

1938

1939

1940

“Léah”

“O Sítio da Mulher Morta”, in Novelas Eróticas Maria Adelaide, Lisbon: Seara Nova “Depoimento”, Presença 1 (2)

“Deus Ex Machina”, in Novelas Eróticas, Lisbon: Seara Nova “A Cigana”, in Novelas Eróticas “Margareta”, in Novelas Eróticas “Cordélia”, in Novelas Eróticas “?”, in Novelas Eróticas

unknown translator

John Byrne

Christopher C. Lund

Alison Aiken

Alison Aiken

Alison Aiken

Alison Aiken

Alison Aiken

Alison Aiken

Chapter Six

“Maria Adelaide”, in Singular People, 2009. “Testimony”, in Professor Pfiglzz and His Strange Companions and other Portuguese Stories, vol. 2, ed. Eugénio Lisboa, 1997.8 “Léah”, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories, vol. 1, 1997.

“Question Mark”, in Erotic Stories, 1999. “Dead Woman’s Grove”, in Erotic Stories, 1999.

“Cordelia”, in Erotic Stories, 1999.

“Margareta”, in Erotic Stories, 1999.

“The Gypsy”, in Erotic Stories, 1999.

“Deus Ex Machina”, in Erotic Stories, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999.

“Depoimento”, 1st edition, Presença 1 (series II), November 1939; 2nd edition, in Os Melhores Contos Portugueses, Oporto: Portugália; 3rd edition, in O Sonho e a Aventura, Coimbra: Atlântida, 1943; 4th edition, Lisbon, Col. Mosaico, [n.d.]; 5th edition in Os Mais Belos Contos de Amor da Literatura Portuguesa, 1967.

8

Teixeira Gomes

1935

112

Domingos Monteiro

José Régio

José Régio

José Régio

José Régio

José Régio

José Régio

1943

19411946

1946

1946

1946

1946

1946

Not seen.

Branquinho de Fonseca

1942

9

Irene Lisboa (pseud. João Falco)

1942

“Maria do Ahu”, in Histórias de Mulheres “O vestido cor de fogo”, in Histórias de Mulheres

“Sorriso triste”, in Histórias de Mulheres “Menina Olímpia e a sua criada Belarmina”, in Histórias de Mulheres “História de Rosa Brava”, in Histórias de Mulheres

Francisco Cota Fagundes

“O Barão”, in O Barão, Novelas Inquérito 46, Lisbon: Editorial Inquérito “Enfermaria”, in Enfermaria, Prisão, Casa Mortuária “Davam grandes passeios aos domingos”

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

Margaret Jull Costa

John Byrne

“O Amante”, in Esta Cidade

113

“They Used to Go for Long Walks on Sundays”, in The Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999. “A Sad Smile”, in The Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories, 1999. “Miss Olímpia and Her Maid Belarmina”, in The Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories, 1999. “The Story of Rosa Brava”, in The Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories, 1999. “Maria do Ahu”, in The Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories, 1999. “The Flame-Coloured Dress”, in The Flame-Coloured Dress and Other Stories, 1999.

The Baron, Santa Barbara, CA: Centre for Portuguese Studies, University of California, 1996. “Infirmary”, The Odyssey Review 2 (3), June 1963: 80.9

“The Lover”, in The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories, vol. 1, 1997.

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story

José Régio

Ferreira de Castro

Ferreira de Castro

José Cardoso Pires

1946

1947

1947

1949

114

“Até amanhã, se Deus quiser”, in Os Caminheiros e outros Contos

“O Senhor dos Navegantes”, in A Missão

“Pequena comédia”, in Histórias de Mulheres “A Missão”, in A Missão

Giovanni Pontiero

Margaret Jull Costa

Ann Stevens

Ann Stevens

Margaret Jull Costa

Chapter Six “Brief Comedy”, in The Flame Coloured Dress and Other Stories, 1999. “The Mission”, London Magazine 1 (6), September 1961. “Our Lord of Mariners”, London Magazine 11 (2), February 1963; in Bazaar, New York, 1963; in Stories from the London Magazine, ed. Alan Ross, London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1964. “Our Lord of All Seafarers”, in The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, 1995. “Tomorrow, God Willing”, in Passport to Portugal, eds Mike Gerrard and Thomas McCarthy, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994.

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story

115

Table A-2: List of works consulted, including school anthologies and compilations published in Brazil Works consulted 1. Arquivo Universal, vol. 3 2. Contos de Autores Portugueses, vol. 1, Porto: Porto Editora (didactic) 3. As Melhores Páginas da Prosa Feminina, by Albino Forjaz de Sampaio, Lisbon: Livraria Popular Francisco Franco 4. Os Melhores Contos Históricos de Portugal, by Gustavo Barroso, Rio de Janeiro: Dois Mundos 5. Os Melhores Contos Portugueses. Antologias Universais. Conto, primeira série, by Guilherme de Castilho, Lisbon: Portugália (1st edition) 6. Natal Português, by Vitorino Nemésio, Lisbon: Edições Dois Mundos 7. Páginas de Amor dos Melhores Escritores Portugueses, by António Feio and Raúl Feio, Lisbon: Romero (2nd edition) 8. Contos e Novelas, vol. 1, Prosadores Portugueses Contemporâneos, [Coimbra]: Publicações Europa-América/Edições Academia & Académica Editora, Limitada 9. Contos e Novelas, vol. 2, Prosadores Portugueses Contemporâneos, [Coimbra]: Publicações Europa-América/Edições Academia & Académica Editora, Limitada 10. Antologia do Conto Português. Para o 3.º ano liceal, by Almeida Lucas, Lisbon: Francisco Franco (didactic) 11. Contos Escolhidos de Autores Portugueses, by Júlio Martins, Lisbon: Livraria Didáctica Editor (didactic) 12. Mercurio 1 13. Mercurio 2 14. Mercúrio 6 15. Os Melhores Contos Portugueses. Antologias universais. Conto, segunda série, by Guilherme de Castilho, Lisbon: Portugália 16. As Mais Belas Histórias da Medicina, by João Gaspar Simões, Lisbon: Arcádia 17. As Mais Belas Histórias do Natal, by Miguel Urbano Rodrigues, Lisbon: Arcádia 18. Maravilhas do Conto de Natal, by Diaulas Riedel, São Paulo: Cultrix 19. Maravilhas do Conto Português, by Diaulas Riedel, São Paulo: Cultrix

Date 1860 19?? 1936 1943 1943

1944 1944 1946

1948

1952 1952 19551 1955 1955 1955 1957 1957 1957 1957

1 There is uncertainty about the precise date of publication of the Mercúrio numbers.

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20. Maravilhas do Conto Feminino, by Diaulas Riedel, São Paulo: Cultrix

1958

21. Maravilhas do Conto Histórico, by Diaulas Riedel, São Paulo Cultrix 22. Maravilhas do Conto Universal, by Diaulas Riedel, São Paulo: Cultrix (2nd edition) 23. Os Melhores Contos Fantásticos, by Eurico da Costa, Lisbon: Arcádia 24. Os Melhores Contos Portugueses. Antologias Universais. Terceira série, by João Pedro de Andrade, Lisbon: Portugália 25. Contos de Natal, by Júlio de Capa Sousa, Lisbon: Edições Hércules 26. Natal, Lisbon: Instituto Luso-Fármaco 27. Os Melhores Contos Portugueses. Antologias Universais. Conto, Primeira Série, by Guilherme de Castilho, Lisbon: Portugália (7th edition) 28. Antologia do Conto Fantástico Português, by Fernando Ribeiro de Mello, Lisbon: Afrodite 29. Antologia do Moderno Conto Português, by Temístocles Linhares, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização 30. Contos para ler ao serão, CIX, by Maria Clarisse Abrunhosa Raposo Marques, Colecção Educativa, Series G, 9, Lisbon: Ministério da Educação Nacional & Direcção Geral do Ensino Primário (didactic) 31. Antologia do Humor Português, by Ernesto Sampaio and Virgílio Martinho, Lisbon: Afrodite 32. Natal, Lisbon: Instituto Luso-Fármaco 33. Natal, Lisbon: Instituto Luso-Fármaco 34. Antologia do Conto Fantástico Português, revised by E. M. de Melo e Castro, Lisbon: Afrodite (2nd edition) 35. O Conto Português, by Massaud Moisés, São Paulo: Cultrix (didactic) 36. Natal, O Prazer do Texto, Lisbon: Arcádia 37. Portugal. A Terra e o Homem. Antologia de Textos de Escritores dos Séculos XIX e XX, by Vitorino Nemésio, Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian 38. Antologia da Ficção Contemporânea, by Jacinto de Prado Coelho and Álvaro Salema, Lisbon: ICP 39. Homo Ludicus, by Manuel Sérgio and Noronha Feio, 2 vols, Antologia de Textos Desportivos da Cultura Portuguesa, Lisbon: Compendium 40. Portugal. A Terra e o Homem. Antologia de Textos de Escritores do Século XX: David Mourão-Ferreira, vol. 2 (2nd series), Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian 41. Antologia do Conto Português Contemporâneo, by Álvaro de Salema, Lisbon: ICLP

1959 1959 1959 1959 1964 1966 1966

1967 1968 1968

1969 1969 1971 1974 1975 1978 1978

1979 1979

1979

1984

The Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Portuguese Short Story 42. Gente do Século XIX, by José Viale Moutinho, Lisbon: Ulmeiro 43. Contos do Século XIX. Antologia, by José Ribeiro da Costa, Porto: Porto Editora 44. A Urgência de Contar. Contos de Mulheres dos Anos 40, by Ana Paula Ferreira, Lisbon: Caminho 45. O Conto Realista e Naturalista, by Maria Saraiva de Jesus, Porto: Campo das Letras 46. Contos Fantásticos de Natal, by Loy Rolim, Sintra: Colares 47. Ficções de Férias. Revista de Contos, ed. Luísa Costa Gomes, Fora de Série, Lisbon: Tinta Permanente 48. Noites de Natal: uma antologia literária, by Sandra Silva and Ana Matoso, Lisbon: 101 Noites 49. Antologia do Conto Português, by João de Melo, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 50. Ficções de Comer. Revista de Contos, ed. Luísa Costa Gomes, Fora de Série, Lisbon: Tinta Permanente 51. Ficções. Revista de Contos (6), ed. Luísa Costa Gomes, Lisbon: Tinta Permanente 52. Antologia do Conto Fantástico Português, Lisbon: Arte Mágica 53. Ficções de Bichos. Revista de Contos, ed. Luísa Costa Gomes, Fora de Série, Lisbon: Tinta Permanente 54. Ficções. Revista de Contos (8), ed. Luísa Costa Gomes, Lisbon: Tinta Permanente 55. Gloria in Excelsis. Histórias Portuguesas de Natal, by Vasco Graça Moura, Mil Folhas, Lisbon: O Público 56. Os Melhores Contos e Novelas Portugueses, vol. 1, by Vasco Graça Moura, Lisbon: Selecções do Reader’s Digest 57. Os Melhores Contos e Novelas Portugueses, vol. 2, by Vasco Graça Moura, Lisbon: Selecções do Reader’s Digest 58. Os Melhores Contos Portugueses do Século XIX, by José Viale Moutinho, São Paulo: Landy 59. Ficções. Revista de Contos (9), ed. Luísa Costa Gomes, Lisbon: Tinta Permanente 60. Vinte Belos Contos de Natal, by Manuela Espírito Santo, Antologias Vivas, Vila Nova de Gaia: Ausência 61. As Mais Belas Histórias de Natal, Lisbon: Nova Vega 62. Carris de Papel. O Caminho-de-Ferro na Literatura Portuguesa, by Albert Von Brunn, Lisbon: Caminho 63. Conto Português. Séculos XIX-XXI, vol. 1, by Isabel Rocheta and Serafina Martins, Porto: Caixotim (didactic) 64. Contos de Oitocentos, Lisbon: Esfera do Caos 65. As Mais Belas Histórias Portuguesas de Natal, by Vasco Graça Moura, Lisbon: Quetzal 66. Chegou o Natal!, by José António Gomes, Porto: Porto Editora 67. Contos de Outros Tempos, Lisbon: Esfera do Caos

117 1987 1993 2000 2000 2001 2001 2001 2002 2002 2002 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2004 2004 2006 2006 2006 2006 2008 2008 2008

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68. Conto Português. Séculos XIX-XXI, vol. 2, by Isabel Rocheta and Serafina Martins, Porto: Caixotim (didactic) 69. Natal dos Escritores, by Sandra Silva, Lisbon: 101 Noites 70. O Conto na Lusofonia. Antologia Crítica, by Isabel Rocheta and Margarida Braga Neves, Porto: Caixotim (didactic)

2009 2010 2010

CHAPTER SEVEN A “MEDLEY OF DIALECTS”? LIBERALITY AND STRINGENCY IN TED HUGHES’S POETICS OF TRANSLATION RUI CARVALHO HOMEM

“Ted Hughes’s last known poem is a translation” (Weissbort 2006, 197): this piece of factual information, proffered by one of the literary figures who more regularly collaborated with Hughes, is rich in implications. It summons the topos of one’s “last words”, their poignancy and inferred consequence magnified by the fame of a poet whose disappearance in 1998 made a prominent critic declare that it felt “as if a giant oak had toppled” (Blake Morrison cited in Sansom 1999, 11); a poet, moreoever, whose first wife famously recalled spotting at the party where they met as “the only one there huge enough for me” (cited in Wright 1999, 4), and whose name was to prompt countless puns on such memorable “hugeness”. First and foremost, however, Weissbort’s note on Hughes’s “last known poem” suggests that translation, by defining his final venture, looms large as a signal feature of his legacy. Indeed, as I will be pointing out in greater detail below, Hughes’s vocal advocacy of poetry translation is unmissable amid the range of his public causes. But it is also true that most of the attention given to this strand of his work has been directed towards his versions for the stage—Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca, Lorca—and his late Tales from Ovid (published in 1997, the year before he died). This article will circumvent Hughes’s dramatic and narrative ventures to focus on particular and little-known instances of his translational commitment to the dominant genre of his oeuvre—here considered through his versions of four Portuguese poems. Prior to offering a critical reading of these lyrical versions, I will be arguing that Hughes’s espousal of translation is consistent with the perplexities that made him one of the most controversial English authors of the late 20th century.

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Hughes’s active interest in translation began fairly early in his writing career, as shown by the dates of his first known versions (1960, 1961), and it clearly belongs within that inflection in poetic output and literary taste with which critics like Alvarez were around those years crediting him and other poets of his generation. According to this critical narrative, they pioneered a reaction against the “academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgeable, efficient, polished” that had become the trademark of the so-called Movement—arguably epitomized by Philip Larkin (Alvarez 1966, 23). The “new seriousness”, the “new depth poetry” that Alvarez championed in his famous attack on the “gentility principle” was supposedly grounded on a refusal to accept that life was “the same as ever” in a mid- to late-20th-century world that could not but assimilate lessons such as those afforded by “psychoanalysis”, as also by the full range of “modern horrors”—“the concentration camps”, “the hydrogen bomb” (Alvarez 1966, 27-28, 32). Such “new poetry” was arguably predicated on an “openness to experience” which was also cultural and linguistic (against, say, the provocative Little-Englandism boasted by the Larkinian persona). As Hughes was to acknowledge, regarding his confrontation with the stark realities of the post-war world, “I was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be out there” (Faas 1980, 201). Hughes’s fascination with the big “out there” of linguistic and literary diversity was always combined with a sense of loyalty to his personal roots, in terms that involved both a sense of territory and language—in particular Yorkshire and its dialect(s) (Corcoran 1993, 114; Weissbort 2011, 8, 21). This coexistence foregrounds one of the lurking contradictions in Hughes’s poetics, as his work is arguably pervaded, on the one hand, by a (centripetal) concern with the possibility of an identityendowing, basic, pristine vernacular; on the other, by a (centrifugal) interest in the cognitive and imaginative enablement afforded by representations and verbal constructs to be found in other languages (and locations). The contradiction is all the more noticeable in the light of the values that have underscored the rise of the inter-discipline of Translation Studies in recent decades, in particular since its much discussed “cultural turn”—values that prominently include a mistrust of essentialist understandings of identity, in particular when they are proposed as not dissociable from language and territory, and scepticism regarding celebrations of the “authentic” or “original”. 1 Intellectual frameworks 1

References for charting the intellectual and political sources of these values, and their importance in the disciplinary rise of Translation Studies, would be too many to list here. The introductions of the various sections of Lawrence Venuti’s The

A “Medley of Dialects”?

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predicated on such values (indeed, dominant in contexts defined by the enabling concerns of the libertarian causes that have marked the western consciousness since the 1960s) may find it difficult to accommodate the pervasiveness in Hughes’s writing of notions derived from myth and folklore that inevitably claimed an absolute and universalizing content. Instances of these that raised many an eyebrow in critical and literary circles rather famously included: i. Hughes’s acknowledged ambition to offer representations (e.g. of animals) that achieve an artistic release from contingency and circumstance, transcending time and space to acquire an “intensity and generality” that gives them archetypal value (Wilmer 1994, 147); ii. his belief that “art is in general the psychological component of the immune system”, and that its ability to “[operate] for us as medicine” was closely bound up with violence—which always (in “any form”) “[invoked] the bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of the Universe” (Wilmer 1994, 151; Sansom 1999, 11; Weissbort 2006, 14); iii. the structuring value of notions of totality in his poetics, epitomized in his fascination with the “goddess of complete being”—indeed, part of the title of his most substantial critical work (Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being), an unreconstructedly canonizing study in which completeness becomes a self-evident mark of the Bard’s mind and work (Hughes 1992); iv. his claim, included in a reflection on his role as Poet Laureate (and again derived from anthropology and psychology), that monarchy was a “centre” that should hold, for the sake of “psychological unity”; and hence the line (included in an epigraphic piece to one of his best-known “Laureate” poems): “A Nation’s a Soul” (Wilmer 1994, 148; Hughes 2003, 802). Such potentially regressive and totalizing views, ostensibly at odds with the dominant relativizing (and “progressive”) ethos of the literary environment in which Hughes was so often a public and vocal mover, did not prove incompatible with his determination to launch ventures that notably contributed to a deeper acquaintance of the Anglophone literary scene with poetic voices emerging from many of the world’s languages and traditions. Modern Poetry in Translation, co-founded by Hughes and

Translation Studies Reader, and the post-1960s texts compiled in this anthology, still provide a useful overview—see Venuti 2004, 145ff.

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Daniel Weissbort in 1965, was to prove an influential forum towards the attainment of such a goal; and the series of Poetry International meetings, inaugurated in London two years later, compounded that effort with opportunities for personal encounters that often had literary and translational consequences. In general, Poetry International (which was to continue long after Hughes’s founding impulse) allowed for poets who often came from less well-known languages and cultures to make their voices heard at a major cultural metropolis—with poets from Eastern Europe, writing under repressive conditions, proving an object both for humane concern and widespread politico-literary fascination in the festival’s earlier editions (Weissbort 2011, 9). In a series of texts he wrote for these public initiatives Hughes was explicit in the aims and methods he was championing. His 1967 programme note for Poetry International was vocal in its wishful statement of an influence: “[W]e now give more serious weight to the words of a country’s poets than to the words of its politicians”; this was construed less as the proclamation of an empowering difference, than as a bid for a “global unity” that could be made possible by “the essential solidarity of the very diverse poets of the world” (Weissbort 2006, 199-200). Indeed, Hughes’s apologia for “global” designs, presented in no uncertain terms as a prospect to be welcomed rather than feared, may offer present-day readers—for whom “global(ization)” is likely to be equated with effacement of plurality—a reminder of the inevitable reconceptualization of discourses on diversity and freedom over a time span of more than forty years. Something similar may be said of Hughes’s advocacy, in the editorials he wrote for Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), of his and Daniel Weissbort’s project to contribute to a more widespread “acceptance of the world’s medley of poetic dialects” (Weissbort 2006, 205). His impassioned endorsement of the political cogency of poetry translation as a response to the brutalities of contemporary history and the ensuing “need [...] to find a shared humanity”, “[and] not only on the level of the heart”, will certainly strike a chord with most readerships. However, the imagery employed to describe the project—“we saw our editorship as something like an airport for incoming translations”—may strike some today as offering a less than enrapturing rendition of “the passionate international affair” (Weissbort 2006, 202, 204). Besides his remarks on the overall politics of the MPT venture, Hughes was, from the outset, insistent in his support of definite translational attitudes, especially by arguing the case for a stark literalism. His reasons may initially come across as simple, and straightforwardly put: glossing the “literalness” he endorses as “a deliberate tendency, not a dogma”

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(Weissbort 2006, 200), his argument seems to be above all driven by a concern with allowing the source text to shine through in its uniqueness. Hence, strategies of poetic translation in the light of which “the original becomes strangely irrelevant” are explicitly decried, which also entails very little sympathy for both the notion of translation as re-creation, and practices that yield versions with a significant degree of textual autonomy: “[A]s soon as devices extraneous to the original are employed for the purpose of recreating its “spirit”, the value of the whole enterprise is called in question”—so read the editorial to MPT 1, in 1965. Already with the benefit of hindsight, Hughes was to add, in 1982: “[W]e tried to avoid translators who claimed to produce a “parallel equivalent” of some original’s unique verbal texture” (Weissbort 2006, 200, 205). Even those free versions that become acknowledged as poems in their own right, as part of the oeuvre of celebrated authors, are grudgingly recognized—rather than hailed as examples: “‘[I]mitations’ like Robert Lowell’s, while undeniably beautiful, are the record of the effect of one poet’s imagination on another’s”; this characterization of a re-creative process to which other authors might wish to accord exemplary status is accompanied by Hughes’s reservations, justified by the uncertainty of its effect: “They may help in the appreciation of the original, they may simply obscure it” (Weissbort 2006, 200). This emphasis on translation in the service of the original, albeit at odds with the target-text orientation and the pleas for a de-hierarchization of the original-derivative nexus that were to mark the rise of Translation Studies in the final quarter of the century, might seem in line with views put forward by other prominent authors in Hughes’s formative years—one is inevitably reminded of Nabokov’s preference (stated in 1955) for “the clumsiest literal translation” over “the prettiest paraphrase”, and his view of the literary translator’s “only duty”: “[T]o reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term ‘literal translation’ is tautological” (Nabokov in Venuti 2004, 115, 121). And yet Hughes’s expectations with regard to the textual yield of the literalness he advocates cannot be defined as those proper to a crib—in its strict functionality, in its inherent dependency on (and often adjacency to) the source. Hughes clearly expects poetic versions to enjoy a substitutive rather than complementary status vis-à-vis originals, as made clear by his remark on the rhetorical and emotional clout of literal versions—remark that is tantamount to acknowledging an unexpected aesthetic accomplishment: “The very oddity and struggling dumbness of word for word versions is what makes our own imagination jump” (Weissbort 2006, 201).

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Indeed, this remark testifies to two sustained and interrelated concerns in Hughes’s understanding of the literary: his dissatisfaction with the traditional forms and resources of English verse, which he tended to denounce as hackneyed, and his yearning for access to a pristine diction, a quasi-mystical connection with a poetic fons et origo. As regards the first, the instrumental value that he accorded to translation in renewing poetic practice in English was highlighted when, in his introduction to Tales from Ovid, Hughes praised the “dynamic role” played in literary history by versions of the Metamorphoses (Hughes 1997, vii; see also Weissbort 2011, 46). Likewise, in an earlier remark he had acknowledged that translating Éluard taught him “how to shake off the English trotting harness in which every single poet in England performs” (Weissbort 2006, 43), an observation that curiously sounds like a metre-and-rhythm equivalent of Pound’s acknowledged lexical struggle (again, involving translation) to shed “the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary” (Pound in Venuti 2004, 88). But this to some extent overlaps, in its conception and expression, with the second concern—the broader ambition to ground his poetic language on resources that are pre-lexical, even pre-rational, “the possibilities of a language of tones and sounds, without specific conceptual or perceptual meanings” (Weissbort 2006, 71). Indeed, it was Hughes’s belief that certain authors and/or poetic traditions (both current and ancient) might be closer to such basic linguistic energy that led him to champion calque renderings, which would supposedly allow the qualities of those originals to survive the linguistic transit into English. The overall constancy of Hughes’s remarks on poetry translation, and in particular his repeated pleas for specific strategies, would seem to constitute what Eliot once called “the criticism of the practitioner” (Eliot 1957, 146)—a phrase that might here apply to Hughes’s condition both as a (practising) poet and a (practising) translator, with the additional possibility of construing his translation work and “his own” poetry as mutually enlightening practices. This set of relations is, however, less neat and predictable than such a scheme would suggest. Assessments of Hughes’s abilities as a critic have differed substantially (to say the least), sometimes proving as scathing as Donald Davie’s remark on how difficult it was “to keep apart the sometimes splendidly intelligent Hughes who writes poems, from the less intelligent Hughes who pontificates about them or about the poems of others!” (Davie 1989, 165). The extent to which Hughes was able (or willing) to enact, as a translator, the critical values that he rather insistently preached has hardly been consensual, not even in the eyes of scholars who have always shown their appreciation for

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(if not outright dedication to) Hughes’s oeuvre. Hughes’s co-founder of MPT, Daniel Weissbort, has himself admitted to having been intrigued by Hughes’s strategies when translating from a language that he did not know (the rule rather than the exception, since “French was the only foreign language he could work with directly” [Weissbort 2006, 43]). In the resulting intra-lingual exercise, Hughes was prone to offering rather free versions in those cases when his source text was a previously published version; whereas, when confronted with a crib offered by the original poet or a third party, he could be painstakingly literal, often subjecting the crib to minimal rhetorical or prosodic adjustments (Weissbort 2006, 24)—on the apparent assumption that unpublished, personally accessed versions, preferably authored by the source poets themselves, ensured a direct contact with the original that itself required greater translational fastidiousness. Within the context of Hughes’s oeuvre, his versions of four Portuguese poems, chronologically among his first known efforts as a translator, provide significant food for thought in the light of his remarks on translation, and against the broader background provided by currently prevalent notions in Translation Studies. Hughes’s interest in rendering a few pieces from a poetic tradition that has consistently been little known (with the odd exception) in the world of Anglophone letters reflected his personal acquaintance with one of the poets that he was to translate: Helder Macedo, who had in 1960 moved to London as an exile from the Portuguese dictatorship and a graduate student at King’s College (where he was later to become the Camões Professor of Portuguese), and (with his wife Suzette) became close friends of Hughes and Plath. Correspondence between Hughes and the Macedos, dating from 1962, leaves no doubt that it was through them that Hughes not only took an interest in Macedo’s own poetry, but also became acquainted with the work of Mário de SáCarneiro (1890-1916), an influential proponent of early Modernism in Portuguese verse (despite his short life and the malaise that hounded his final period in Paris, where he committed suicide). Hughes translated three poems by Sá-Carneiro and one by Macedo, and these versions arguably reflect some of the contradictions that Weissbort (as seen above) was to find “intriguing”. The challenges posed by the poems in question are briefly discussed in letters that Hughes sent the Macedos. In them, he reiterates his commitment to literalness and asks for more cribs, insisting that “the rougher & more literal the translations are the more suggestive to me they are. Just word by word transcription would be ideal”; but the letters also contain Hughes’s admission that his versions show his

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“somewhat free manner of anglicizing them”, and his apologetic acknowledgment of his “verbal presumptions” (Weissbort 2006, 208-209). Of the three Sá-Carneiro pieces, the longest—originally entitled “Caranguejola” (a humorous Portuguese word for a contraption of some sort, or, as in this case, a human being who is awkward in shape and motion)—is the one in which Hughes’s principle of minimal intervention seemingly proved easier to apply (Sá-Carneiro 1953, 157-159; Weissbort 2006, 21-22). This can partly be due to the poem’s relative prosodic looseness: unlike the other two, the source text is not in this case metrically strict, its quatrains consisting of tendentially sprawling lines that play off their metrical irregularity against rhymes (patterned either abba or abab) and the odd regular decasyllable or alexandrine, so as to enhance the piece’s tone of desperate humour. This tone reflects the (ostensibly autobiographical) subject’s helpless, world-weary condition, yearning for a cocoon-like retreat into a bedridden self-pity that finds adequate expression in the opening exclamation, “O fold me away between blankets” (in Hughes’s version). Indeed, “Caranguejola” is a stark example of Sá-Carneiro’s propensity to dramatize the self’s “nostalgia for a careless childhood, his resentment at the burden of obligations faced by one’s social being, compounded by an utter inability to make decisions and by a very low self-esteem” (Morão 2008, 751; my translation). In his version, Hughes uses the first line for his title (as in fact he did in many of “his own” poems), does away with the rhyme pattern, and further explores the sprawling tendency of some of the poem’s lines; otherwise, his rendering of “Caranguejola” is nearly a calque. This textual closeness occurs with regard to a poem that appears marked by a diction— expressive of the persona’s outrageous (albeit humorous) selfdramatization, lassitude and emotional abandon—that the poet-translator was unlikely to find congenial, if one is to judge from the combination of verbal severity and animal vitalism that defined Hughes’s output from the very beginning of his career: by 1962, Hughes had already published The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, collections that proved notorious for their brutal animal presences and harsh natural settings. Indeed, Hughes’s remarks on his versions of Sá-Carneiro, in one of his letters to Helder and Suzette Macedo, do not omit his perception of the “bizarre” voice in the original (Weissbort 2006, 208). Somewhat in contrast to his relatively neutral approach to “Caranguejola”, the other two Sá-Carneiro poems that Ted Hughes translated provide evidence of a much more complex re-creative process— which itself suggests that the pieces proved challenging to the poet qua translator. In his version of Sá-Carneiro’s “Aqueloutro” [That Other One],

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Hughes again employs the device of turning the poem’s opening line into its title, which becomes: “The two-faced, the pretender, with the lie in his marrow” (Sá-Carneiro 1953, 166-167; Weissbort 2006, 20). In this case, however, the source text is a regular sonnet in decasyllables, with a Petrarchan rhyme scheme, which Hughes translates into free verse. The inevitable consequence is that his version of “Aqueloutro” is bound to come across to readers as formally a much more demotic and radical construct than the Portuguese source text—a shift that gains particular relevance in the light of Sá-Carneiro’s gift for combining representations of a troubled, divided self with impeccable formal control and prosodic rigour (Morão 2008, 754-755). From the poem’s opening line (and title), free verse allows Hughes to strive for semantic sufficiency through amplification: he forges three epithets out of the two in the source text, with the additional periphrastic rendering of “mentiroso” [liar] as “[he] with the lie in his marrow”. Paradoxically, this amplification may prove an apt way of giving the poem’s concise title its due: the deictic compound “aqueloutro” (which has long had a slightly archaic ring) is usually associated with an emphatic othering of the person thus referred to (vis-àvis the more neutral form, also pronounced somewhat differently, “aquele outro”); Hughes’s enumeration, to the extent that it resembles invective, may therefore correspond through an expansive device to the implication of contempt that in the source title was provided by a conflation. Since SáCarneiro’s sonnet totally consists of demeaning epithets, like a crescendo of rhetorically well-rounded insults (that the poet may ultimately be hurling at himself), Hughes’s initial interventionist strategy in fact turns the title into a semantic and rhetorical epitome of the poem’s full design. A potential risk incurred by Hughes’s amplifications, however, is that of sounding like the poetic upgrade of dictionary glosses: even more than his pointed decision not to render “mentiroso” as “liar”, such is arguably the case with his translation of “atónito” as “gaping in clownish amazement”—rather than as (e.g.) “astonished”, the single-word option that one might regard as the morphological and etymologically obvious equivalent. But these are not the only instances (still in Hughes’s version of “Aqueloutro”) of translational decisions that are blatantly at odds with his pledge to literalness. Hughes’s translation of Sá-Carneiro’s “lacaio invertido” [inverted lackey] as “wheedling pansy” closes the poem’s octave with a memorable description—but it introduces a demotic, slangy note which is alien to the loftier register of the source poem. This strategy becomes even more notorious with Sá-Carneiro’s final epithet, which in the original appears capitalized as “o Esfinge Gorda” [the fat/bloated Sphynx]. Possibly one of Sá-Carneiro’s most memorable phrases (and

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possibly also a case of bitter self-satire [Morão 2008, 755]), the epithet is demoted from its resounding closing position in the original, since Hughes’s version changes the order of the sonnet’s closing lines, and it becomes “this fat half-cat”. While it is true that a sphynx is a “half-cat”, Hughes’s version totally discards the epithet’s mythical ballast—which in the source poem was introduced only to be promptly neutralized through an adjective that gave the phrase a quasi-oxymoronic ring. Hughes’s avoidance of the sphynx image seems all the more surprising in view of the recurrence in his poetry of imaginative resources derived from a broad range of symbolic and belief systems, but it is hardly incidental in his version of “Aqueloutro”. Indeed, a similar effacement of a complex reference occurs in the line that Hughes moves to closing position, and its key phrase: “Império astral” [Astral Empire] in the original, “starry Empires” in his version. Again rejecting the literal option, Hughes deliberately removes a word that (in the source) carried a theosophical implication—which was itself a reminder of the extent to which SáCarneiro’s literary mindset was indebted to the mystical and occultist obsessions that had characterized the turn-of-the-century Symbolists and Decadents (Morão 2008, 749, 752-753). As a transitional figure between late 19th-century modes and early Modernism, Sá-Carneiro indeed derived from some of his immediate forebears an active interest in learned and esoteric symbols and motifs, as can be seen from the start in his poem “Álcool”—a title that, for once, Hughes calqued simply as “Alcohol” (Sá-Carneiro 1953, 58-59; Weissbort 2006, 19-20). The title’s straightforwardness, however, is hardly shared by the rest of his version, which not only bypasses the exalting effects obtained by the original’s prosodic strictness (regular decasyllables in six rhymed quatrains), but also opts for images that substantially change the poem’s referential range. The opening line—“Guilhotinas, pelouros e castelos”—is translated by Hughes as “guillotines, battlements, bombardments”. Although he rearranges the enumeration (second and third terms exchange positions), this would seem a fairly literal version, understood as distinct from a simple calque—were it not that Hughes’s swerve, yet again, from the more obvious lexical correspondences (possibly for the sake of alliteration and internal rhyme?) arguably occludes his readers’ perception of the poem’s opening references. His option for “bombardments” totally misses the specific meaning of “pelouros” as gunstones or pellets as common motifs in heraldry—indeed, the lexical and referential range that Sá-Carneiro was drawing upon; and his choice of “battlements”, instead of the more obvious “castles” (again a

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more easily perceived heraldic motif), compounds the referential effacement. The complications raised by the poem’s opening line could merely reflect the translator’s unawareness of the allusions, but other lines in “Alcohol” show Hughes actively and deliberately not abiding by his literalist precepts. A case in point—possibly the moment in these poems with richest translational implications—is the third line, Sá-Carneiro’s “volteiam-me crepúsculos amarelos”, which is given as “I am hurled through daffodil twilights”. Hughes’s decision to opt out of a literal rendering of the colour reference (“amarelos” as yellow) has additional implications for the poem’s pervasive heraldic references, but this pales in comparison with the impact of the translator’s chosen phrase. By opting for “daffodil twilights”, Hughes yields to the pull of a recognizable English diction (in spite of his wish to get rid of the well-worn habits of the English lyric) and pays tribute to the most influential representation of the colour yellow through a particular flower: Wordsworth’s “host of dancing daffodils” in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, one of the bestknown (and most often quoted) lyrics of the English language (Wordsworth 1994, 145-146). However, Hughes’s decision to bring SáCarneiro’s “Alcohol” “home” into the English lyric, indeed through “a domestic inscription of the foreign” (Venuti 2004, 469 and passim), means in this case also rewriting it in his own poetic language, or (in other terms) refracting it through his own experience and writing—and it is the image of the daffodils that, again, proves instrumental. Hughes was to write at least three poems about these flowers (two of them entitled just “Daffodils”, and the third “Perfect Light”—Hughes 2003, 711-713, 11251126, 1136). All three were published decades after the translations, but, when they are read together (in ways that acknowledge their autobiographical frankness, at its most prominent in “Perfect Light”), they are all recognizably about a stage in Hughes’s life experience that coincides with the period (the early 1960s) when he was working on these versions of Portuguese poems. Besides the intertwined literary and personal inscription through the “daffodils” reference, the options made by the poet-translator of “Alcohol” include other examples that reveal Hughes’s “own” poetry as the dominant space in which the process of domestication unfolds. Still on line 3, the opening verb form (“Volteiam-me”) is translated by Hughes in such a way (“I am hurled”) that the self, although not in control, is represented as a participant in a scene of turmoil, rather than as the passive recipient of impressions that are paraded in front of him (the cognitive circumstance that might, in fact, seem more congenial to Sá-Carneiro, whose line could

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otherwise be literally rendered as “yellow twilights whirl before my eyes”). Indeed, the representation of an overwhelmed self in “Alcohol” is couched in a diction that comes remarkably close to trademark features of Hughes’s early collections, especially as regards the violent encounter between man and superior forces (in this case, those of nature): one could easily intersperse lines from “Alcohol”—“Blades storm my eyesockets,/ Havoc my soul and bleed out my senses”—with a few from the title poem of Hughes’s first book, The Hawk in the Rain: “Banging wind [...]/Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,/And rain hacks my head to the bone” (Hughes 2003, 19). Further, Hughes’s fascination with wild animals that lend themselves to mythopoeia lead him to misread SáCarneiro’s use of the verb “grifar” (to brand, mark, or imprint) as involving “griffins”; hence, one more line featuring the self as the troubled space for a synaesthetic inscription—“Grifam-me sons de cores e de perfumes” [I am branded with sounds of colour and perfume]—becomes, in this version, the setting for the appearance of mythical monsters: “Griffins of stained odorous sound undulate around me.” Hughes’s versions of these three poems by Sá-Carneiro seem, in a variety of ways, to belie his intent to practise translation as a service to the poetry of others (and only indirectly as a reinvigorating tool of one’s own), rather than as an appropriating, self-directed exercise. But this inability on the part of the poet to practise a verbal self-effacement may also be, ultimately, an inevitability, especially when the poet-translator is not a Keatsian chameleon—but, on the contrary, is known for his assertive understanding of the act of writing, construed as “not one of complaisance but of control” (as Seamus Heaney once described Yeats’s creative circumstance—Heaney 1980, 71). A perception of this inevitability seems to have struck Hughes himself in a letter to Helder Macedo apropos of his translations of a few of Macedo’s own poems (of which only one has since been published). Openly apologizing for “distorting” his addressee’s “originals”, Hughes remarks on the difficulty in matching starkly distinct poetics: “Your poetry includes or indicates meanings that can’t be nailed down with words, whereas the great characteristic (and great limitation) of my language is to nail things down.” And he adds, still with regard to this perceived gap between a poetic language that thrives on abstraction and another (Hughes’s own) that grounds itself on referentiality and a sense of the material: “I feel I’ve spoiled the original to make a more concrete but less suggestive poem” (Weissbort 2006, 209). The version in question is indeed characterized by stark departures and creative rewritings (Macedo 1979, 49; Weissbort 2006, 23). Macedo’s title, “Quebrado o espelho” [Now that the Mirror Is Broken], is translated

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by Hughes as “When the Mirror Is Broken Open” (my emphasis)—a version that already adds a sense of the ulterior, of a step beyond, which is arguably at odds with the piece’s static, literally contemplative stance. The second stanza, proposing a confrontation of the speaking self and his/her lover that ultimately envisages an exchange of identities (“estamos face a face/mais um do outro/do que de nós mesmos” [we are face to face/more of each other/than of ourselves]), might seem congenial to Hughes, in view of the ultimate situation of the “Lovesong”, daunting in its scene of mutually predatory desire, that he was to write a few years later: “In the morning they wore each other’s face” (Hughes 2003, 256). However, Hughes completely discards the face-to-face image, in favour of a conjoined “nakedness” that combines the erotic with a sense of threat: “Your nakedness and/Mine whisper/Together against us”—to which he added, in a gloss that Weissbort reproduces: “(I mean conspiratorially).” This practice of translation as a form of meta-writing, the source used as an imaginative starting point for a referentially, semantically and rhetorically distinct utterance is continued in the final stanza—indeed, another case of what Hughes was to reject, in his manifesto-like editorial for MPT 1 (1965), as “devices extraneous to the original”, and “the record of the effect of one poet’s imagination on another’s” (Weissbort 2006, 200). The wish, in Macedo’s poem, that the lovers’ mutual quest will prompt a reawakening of the “mortal essence” that defined their bodies (“a essência moral que os definiu”) apparently comes up against Hughes’s avowed counter-yearning for “concreteness”—hence the lines: “Where death forgets/Our deaths/Our hands/Holding torches” (another gloss acknowledges that “‘flames’ might be better”). The utter novelty (vis-à-vis the source) of the closing image is compounded by parataxis, a trait that foregrounds Hughes’s altogether distinct handling of form: Macedo writes discursively throughout, his syntax as conventional as his prosody—even if his chosen lineation graphically masks his reliance on regular decasyllables, a total of eight spread out over sixteen short lines. Hughes’s version, though produced on the basis of a word-for-word crib, is at all levels “a very different poem” from its acknowledged source, progressing through “odd departures and additions” (as pointed out by Suzette Macedo, who had provided him with the crib [Weissbort 2006, 209])—a short but autonomous piece, recognizably embedded in the translator poet’s diction. Ted Hughes’s commitment to translation arose, amid the causes that characterized the 1960s, from a jointly literary and geopolitical agenda—a clearly spelled-out concern with allowing poetic voices from peripheral

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languages and traditions to be heard in mainstream Anglophone environments. As Hughes envisaged it, the liberality of the programme that he defined for MPT was to be served by a formally stringent code: the literal approach that he repeatedly urged was predicated on what in later years might be described as a concern with difference, a wish to retain the otherness of the texts that he encountered as a keen (though linguistically not very adept) reader. His commitment to word-for-word closeness to the source would often prove unfeasible in his own practice, but some of the reasons for this difficulty may be closely imbricated with a broader problem raised by his programme—a problem that also complicates its discussion in the light of the today familiar alternatives of “domestication” and “foreignization”. The mindset (intellectual, ethical, political) that, in the latter part of the 20th century, added particular urgency to the concern with cultural plurality, and fostered a range of attitudes that included an enhanced linguistic awareness, also provided the conceptual platform for arguments in favour of de-hierarchizing the various forms of writing that make up literary traditions—which also ultimately entails the collapse of distinctions between supposedly original and derivative writing. In the light of such arguments (which underlie much of what is known as poststructuralism, as also of currently dominant strands in Translation Studies), Hughes’s advocacy of sticking to the letter of one’s source texts, in the hope of preserving the experience of their first readers, could be described as pervaded by a metaphysics of origin; while it also lays him open to charges of demoting the translational venture, to which he pledged so much effort, to the condition of a subaltern writing (see Weissbort 2011, 55). This general contradiction is overlaid with Hughes’s difficulty in sustaining his declared principles in his translational practice, as suggested by the discussion above of his versions of four Portuguese poems, written around the same years when he was developing the interests out of which grew MPT and Poetry International. This small case study seems to attach a sense of the inevitable to the appropriative urge of poets, manifested with regard to poems that they perceive as apt to be domesticated in their diction. Or, in other words, it is as if authors who respect both their craft and their readers’ entitlement to their best will only be able to offer, even when ostensibly rewriting another’s creations, verbal constructs that they believe are poems; and these (ineluctably determined by a sense of aesthetic-rhetorical duty) cannot but be their poems. Paradoxically, this could ultimately validate Hughes’s misgivings vis-à-vis the common notion that poets are in every case the ideal poetry translators, his perception that “the translation of the practitioner” (to rephrase Eliot

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again) would hardly give its due to a liberal, non-appropriative poetics of translation.

Bibliography Primary Sources Hughes, Ted. 1992. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1997. Tales from Ovid: Twenty-Four Passages from the Metamorphoses. London: Faber and Faber. Hughes, Ted. 2003. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Macedo, Helder. 1979. Poesia 1957-1977. Lisbon: Moraes. Sá-Carneiro, Mário de. 1953. Poesias. Lisbon: Ática. Weissbort, Daniel, ed. 2006. Ted Hughes: Selected Translations. London: Faber and Faber. Wordsworth, William. 1994. William Wordsworth: A Selection of his Finest Poems. Edited by Stephen Gill and Duncan Wu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Secondary Sources Alvarez, Al, ed. 1966 [1962]. The New Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Corcoran, Neil. 1993. English Poetry since 1940. Harlow: Longman. Davie, Donald. 1989. Under Briggflats: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988. Manchester: Carcanet. Eliot, T. S. 1957. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber. Faas, Ekbert. 1980. Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Heaney, Seamus. 1980. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber. Morão, Paula. 2008. Sá-Carneiro, Mário de. In Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do modernismo português. Edited by Fernando Cabral Martins. Lisbon: Caminho, 748-757. Sansom, Ian. 1999. Totem Poll: Ian Sansom on the Myth of Ted Hughes. Poetry Review 89 (3): 10-11. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2004. The Translation Studies Reader. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. Weissbort, Daniel. 2011. Ted Hughes and Translation. Nottingham: Richard Hollis.

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Wilmer, Clive. 1994. Poets Talking: The “Poet of the Month” Interviews from BBC Radio 3. Manchester: Carcanet. Wright, Carolyne. 1999. What Happens in the Heart: Carolyne Wright on an Encounter with Ted Hughes. Poetry Review 89 (3): 3-9.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE TRANSLATOR’S CREATIVITY SUSAN BASSNETT

I was sorting my office out recently when I came across some old, forgotten files. Opening them I found they were full of translations done when I was an undergraduate, over 40 years ago. Even my handwriting was different then, it was neater and more legible, perhaps because the idea of using a typewriter as a student was unthinkable, so we wrote everything down in longhand, just as our ancestors had done in classrooms for centuries. Indeed, much of the way we studied and were taught had changed so very little, that I have often joked about being the last of the 19th century generation of students. I opened the first of the files and began leafing through page after page of Anglo-Saxon: the Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, the Battle of Maldon, passages from Beowulf... and then page after page of Latin, Virgil, Catullus, Caesar, Juvenal, Horace... And they were all absolutely dreadful, dull, literal, uninspired translations, so dreadful that I wondered why I had ever bothered to produce them, because not all of them were for tutorial presentations, most of them were for my own benefit. Why had I bothered, I asked myself, why had I spent so long making translations that were ultimately so poor in quality as to be almost unreadable? What did I think I was doing? The answer is that I was already dimly aware of the importance of translations that went beyond the kind of literal exercise pieces that characterized classroom translations, when the purpose of a translation was to test linguistic competence into and out of the second language. I must have been striving to produce something worthwhile, a translation that captured some of the strength and beauty of the originals, which a reader unfamiliar with either Anglo-Saxon to Latin would not have been able to discern. But I was still inexorably bound to a notion of fidelity, to completeness, hence even my efforts to create “poetic” translations were severely restricted and the results were predictably dull and feeble. I had not yet realized that some of the finest translations are those that manage

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to break free of the original and recreate it in new ways. I had not yet understood that a great translation is one that does not force language to follow the mould set by the original, but uses language in new, thrilling ways. In short, I did not know then that translation can be—as it so often has been—a force for innovation and creativity. The famous opening line of J. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between begins: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” In the foreign land of my student days, translations counted very little. Original work was ranked far more highly than translations, indeed I was advised early in my academic career not to mention translations on my CV. Translation was very definitely a second-class activity, deemed unscholarly and hence less than admirable. Job opportunities and promotion prospects were unlikely to be enhanced by translations. Better by far to publish an article in a minor but decidedly scholarly journal than to translate a novel by Balzac or attempt a version of the Orlando furioso! And yet... in that distant land, despite the superciliousness of some academics, translation was booming. Ted Hughes and Danny Weissbort founded Modern Poetry in Translation in 1967, publishers like Cape and Penguin were bringing out collections of translated poetry, some in bilingual editions, there was great interest in the literature and drama of other cultures generally. Students like me read Hermann Hesse and Gunther Grass and Beckett and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in our leisure time, we looked to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, to Lucács and Auerbach, then to Bahktin as our aides in essay writing. And we made connections between literatures, aware—sometimes hyper-aware—of seeming patterns of influence. I can still remember my tutorials on T. S. Eliot and the dawning realization of how many threads were spun into his poetry from a huge range of sources from other literatures, ancient and modern. When I had to write an undergraduate dissertation, I wrote about James Joyce and Italo Svevo. Later, at doctoral level, I embarked on a great baggy project that sought to explore ways in which 20th century European playwrights had interpreted Einstein’s theory of relativity on the stage. Such research necessarily involved reading extensively in translation. So we have a paradoxical situation in that distant foreign land— translation was both undervalued (and underpaid, of course) and yet translation was at the centre of the youthful desire of the post-1968 generation to reach out beyond national cultural boundaries. The cosmopolitan student of my generation smoked Gauloises, watched films with subtitles, read French political theory and had done more than just glance at the Thoughts of Chairman Mao. In translation, naturally.

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Over the last few decades, with the development and expansion of research into translation, attitudes have slowly started to shift. I stress “slowly”, because there is still a long way to go. When I stand up in front of a group of young researchers who see themselves as positioned within Translation Studies, the mood is often one of buoyancy: look how far the field has developed, Translation Studies can now define itself as a discipline in its own right; see how many journals, conferences, monographs, university degree programmes there are—translation has finally arrived! But when I stand in front of researchers who do not define themselves as within Translation Studies, then often there is still an uneasiness around the idea of studying translation, and it is undeniable that much of the research published by Translation Studies scholars does not find its way to a larger audience, which gives some of us cause for concern. I welcome a publication like this, because it offers an opportunity for dialogue between those who would see themselves as literary scholars with an interest in translation, and those who see themselves as Translation Studies scholars with an interest in literature. I believe that there needs to be much more dialogue between these two groups, which are often divided institutionally as well as by the theoretical apparatus they employ in their study of texts. As has often been pointed out, we have a situation today where there seem to be two parallel tracks of thought around the whole idea of translation: on the one hand, we have research calling itself Translation Studies, and on the other hand we have the use of “translation” in a figurative sense, as a means of talking about transnational writing. For when Salman Rushdie talks in 1992 about “translated men”, he is not referring to interlingual translation at all, but to physical transposition, to the condition of exiles and migrant writers, to those who do not see themselves as belonging to a single culture. Research into the history of translation, that has come to occupy a central place in Translation Studies, has led to a radical revision of what constitutes movement between and across literatures. Over 35 years ago when Itamar Even-Zohar proposed a systemic model for the study of translation, he stressed the importance of thinking about translation as a shaping force in literature. The role played by translation in the introduction of new forms, genres, ideas, themes, etc., continues to be a rich area of study, as also is research into the importance of translation in the literary career of individual writers. Yet until recently, both these lines of research were marginalized, probably as a result of the emphasis on writing literary histories from a nationalist perspective, particularly in an imperial context. The tendency has been to view a writer’s work not so much holistically but in segments, with translations all too often relegated

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to a more lowly place in the hierarchy. Translations, as I have said elsewhere, have often tended to be seen as immigrant texts, as outsiders. F. R. Leavis’s Great Tradition, for example, foregrounds the confident Englishness of English literature, a grand narrative that had little room for translation. In contrast, Seamus Heaney, coming from a very different space, both geographically and politically, in his collection of essays Preoccupations that explore influences on his own writing from childhood onwards, locates himself in a web of interconnected texts from many languages. The opening sentences of the first essay, “Mossbawn”, set the tone of what will follow: I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the aerodrome at Toomebridge, the American troops manoeuvre in the fields along the road, but all of that great historical action does not disturb the rhythms of the yard. (Heaney 1980, 17)

Heaney begins with the Greek word, listens to it, repeats it, translates it through the familiar sounds and rhythms of his everyday world. This is how he often describes his method of translating, starting with sound and finding ways of relating other sound patterns to those in which he feels most at home. In his preface to his translation of Beowulf, for example, he relates how he had first tried his hand at translating it when he was a student, but had had to wait a very long time before the sound patterns he wanted began to take shape in his mind. He returns to the idea of needing to find the right sound in an essay about being invited to produce a version of Antigone for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2003. He was struggling to find a way of going beyond the content of the text when—then suddenly, as if from nowhere—I heard the note. Theme and tune coalesced. What came into my mind, or more precisely into my ear, were the opening lines of a famous 18th-century Irish poem. The poem is a lament by the widow of a man cut down by a group of English soldiers and left for dead on the roadside; Heaney felt the connection between the sound and rhythms of the Irish poem and Antigone’s desperate words to her sister about the edict prohibiting the burial of their dead brother Polyneices. Both men’s bodies had, in Heaney’s words, “been left exposed, unattended to, cut down by enemies and abandoned” (2004, 423), and both are, in different yet similar ways, mourned by their outraged womenfolk in powerful words of grief, rage and despair.

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Heaney is one of many important poets who also translate. Significantly, he appears to make no distinction between translating from a language he knows or, as was the case with Ancient Greek, translating from a language he does not know. This is a contentious point, and Ted Hughes, for example, evolved his own theory of translating when working with texts written in languages he did not know. He would begin working with a native speaker, trying to find his way to an understanding of the original. His co-author, Janos Csokits, who worked with him translating Janos Pilinsky, describes Hughes’s method in the following terms: “It is almost as if he could X-ray the literals and see the original poem in ghostly detail like a radiologist viewing the bones, muscles, veins and nerves of a live human body” (Bassnett 2009, 86). What Hughes did was to begin by working closely to the original, then to strip out what he saw as extraneous layers of language. His version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, entitled Tales from Ovid, is a radically shorter version of the Latin poem, carefully crafted for readers in the 20th century. His deliberate choice of title, Tales FROM..., signals that he has used Ovid as a point of departure, moving beyond the emphasis on closeness to the source that underpinned his thinking about how to translate of the Modern Poetry in Translation period. Hughes’s view of translation is fundamentally highly ethical; he was concerned to allow the original to be seen through the translation; in this respect, the image of the X-ray is highly appropriate. Other translators have different motivations. Michael Longley describes himself as “Homer-haunted for 50 years” (2009, 101). Here, though, the driving force was not patterns of sound so much as subject matter. Longley explains in an essay on his own and Ancient Greek poetry. Homer, he says, “enabled me to write belated lamentations for my mother and father” (2009, 97). Homer also enabled him to write about the situation in his native Northern Ireland, most famously in his sonnet “Ceasefire”, published in the Irish Times immediately after the IRA declaration of a ceasefire from August 31st, 1991. “Ceasefire” is, on the surface, a translation of the sequence in Book 24 of The Iliad when old King Priam of Troy goes to the tent of the Greek hero, Achilles, to ask for the body of his son, Hector, whom Achilles has killed. Not only has Achilles slaughtered Hector, however, he has dishonourably dragged his body round the city walls in full view of the horrified Trojans. The king kneels in supplication before the warrior; and then there is one of those amazing moments that characterize The Iliad and make it still so accessible to readers across the millennia: Achilles, seeing the old man on his knees, remembers his own father and is moved to tears.

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The two men then eat together and talk about their exploits, and Achilles helps to wash Hector’s body before handing it over to Priam for burial. The horrors of war cease in a moment of understanding. The power of Longley’s poem derives from its structure as much as from the content. He explains how he compressed some 200 lines into 14 and changed the order of Homer’s lines. In Homer, Priam kisses Achilles’s hand at the beginning of their encounter. I put this at the end of my poem and inadvertently created a rhyming couplet. Here, then, is that rhyming couplet, which flows on from the previous quatrain: When they had eaten together, it pleased them both To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might, Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed: “I get down on my knees and do what must be done And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.” (Longley 2006, 225)

By putting Priam’s words at the end of the poem, Longley changes the emphasis radically, so that the reader is led straight to the tragic irony at the heart of the encounter: the old man, now enjoying a convivial dinner, had begun the meeting with the man who slew his son in battle with an act of atonement and humility. Note also the word “killer” that is here employed so powerfully. And lest we need reminding, let us remember here that the rhymed couplet at the end of a sonnet that characterized what has been termed the Shakespearean sonnet was an English variation on that new imported poetic form, the sonnet, imported, that is through translation in the early 16th century. The “original” sonnet form consisting of an octet and a sestet did not end with a rhymed couplet. That was a variation which changed the nature of the sonnet form, since it means that the poet can play with an ending that can even have the power to reverse the meaning or tone of what has come before, thereby creating a powerful ironic effect. Here, in Longley’s sonnet, the final couplet is used to stress the magnitude of the encounter between the two men, the killer and the bereaved parent. Yet Longley, in an essay on his translations entitled “Lapsed Classicist”, insists that the voice in the poem is that of the ancient poet: “It was Homer who spoke to us across the millennia. I was only his mouthpiece” (2009, 105). In 2006, Peter Bush, who had long experience as a literary translator, and I co-edited a book entitled The Translator as Writer, a collection of

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essays involving 18 translators, some based in universities, others freelance. We set out the premise for the volume in our introduction: We asked a variety of literary translators to write essays in response to the idea of “the translator as writer” to test out what seemed to us an evident, though frequently occluded, truth. Nobody doubts that a writer writes, it is in the world and even more importantly in the status. If one is a writer, whether of horoscopes, recipes or sonnets, the nomenclature brings an aura of respect. A translator translates and in so doing rewrites what is written by somebody else and that is where doubt and irritation have set in. A concert hall or opera house could not dispense with conductor or diva to give flesh and rhythm to what is created by others, and can certainly nor hide their presence, in fact contracts will strongly affirm the place on the poster and even the font and size of print. It seems with that the written text, read individually, or the performed play, seen by an audience, the illusion of the unmediated word has traditionally to be maintained. (Bassnett and Bush 2006, 1)

The contributors to the volume placed very different emphasis on their work and on the relationship with the original. John Rutherford, translator of Don Quixote, did not pretend to be a new Cervantes, but saw his task as ensuring that a 21st-century version of the novel should be pre-eminently comic, freed from the shackles of pedantic convention or Romantic exaggeration. Jiri Josek, Czech translator of Shakespeare, drew attention to the ever-changing landscape of Shakespeare in Czech in terms of the political significance the plays had exercised at different points in time, arguing that his primary task is to write a version for contemporary audiences. “I am well aware”, he notes, “that my translations are only my readings of the Bard” (Josek 2006, 93). A great many translators stress the importance of reading critically, and clearly reading is a vital first stage in the production of any translation. Others stress the problem-solving aspect of translation: in a conversation with the Portuguese and Spanish translator Margaret Sayers Peden, she suggests that a translator is “someone fascinated by puzzles”. But she also insists on her status as a writer and declares that “a translator is composed of creative writer, scholar, archivist, innovator and, often, a large portion of masochist” (2002, 72). Why do we translate is a question I keep coming back to. There is no simple answer to this, once we deduct translating as a business proposition, as a livelihood, and as I have suggested earlier, the downgrading of translation by the producers of literary histories has made it more difficult to see quite why translation should be an important stage

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in the creative journey of so many writers, which it most certainly is. Let us consider just a few examples of writers who have chosen to translate, not as a sideline or an arbitrary exercise, but as a stage in their own creative development. Let us start with Sir Richard Fanshawe, the Royalist courtier who was ambassador to Spain and then to Lisbon during the period of the Commonwealth in the 1650s and who translated, among other works, Horace, Virgil, Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido and the great Porrtuguese epic poem, Os Lusíadas [The Lusiads]. The Lusiads offers an intriguing example of the shift in status that so often happens in translation, whereby a canonical work in one culture is virtually unknown in another. The poem first appeared in Portugal in 1570, written by Luís Vaz de Camões, a writer whose life bears some relation to that of Cervantes, being full of all kinds of incidents, including years at sea. There is a huge body of literature about Camões’ life and about his poem, which is a hymn of praise to the great Portuguese empire which is at the same time tinged with nostalgia for a greatness already in decline, but I need at the very least to mention this because of a possible link to Fanshawe as we shall see shortly. Camões died in 1580, probably of the plague, though before he died he wrote letters saying he had lost the will to live, for two years earlier, in 1578, a disastrous “crusade” to Morocco led by the idealistic young king Sebastian ended with the death or enslavement of his army of some 20 000 Portuguese soldiers. With the king and the sons of the Portuguese nobility dead, the way was opened for the annexation of Portugal by Philip II of Spain. Fanshawe completed his translation in less than a year, and seems to have worked at it compulsively. It reads well, with a lot of energy, written in the fashionable epic form of ottava rima, but it had little impact. What is interesting is why Fanshawe, the diplomat turned translator, should have chosen this highly politicized work to translate at a time when the young king Charles was still in exile in France. The English king would not be restored until 1660. Camões dedicated his poem to the doomed idealistic king Ferdinand. His epic is a hymn to greatness of the past and a hopeful plea for the renewal of greatness in the future. This theme may well have struck a chord with Fanshawe, who saw his own country, under Cromwell, as waiting for renewal. Moreover, as Portugal had regained its independence in 1640, it is not improbable that Fanshawe saw this too as a sign of hope in the restoration of the English monarchy. In short, Fanshawe translated a work that sent all kinds of intratextual signals to a potential readership.

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The significance of the text was not so much in the words, but in the context in which those words had been written and could now be read. We should not overlook the obsessive element in some translators. Queen Elizabeth I became obsessive about her translations in the latter years of her life, translating Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy at the age of 65, then works by Horace and Plutarch. She, like Fanshawe, seems to have worked compulsively, and the texts she chose share themes of the deceit and ingratitude of courts and the inconstancy of fame. Translation was for the aging queen a space in which she could write out her anxieties and ambiguities, and the time she increasingly dedicated to translating in her daily routine shows the importance she attached to it. A different kind of obsession can be seen in the case of Dorothy Sayers, a writer who rose to fame through her detective fiction, as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey. In her early 50s, she embarked on the project of translating Dante’s Divina commedia and her effort was so successful that it became the standard Penguin edition for decades. She had no Italian, so taught herself and began to read her way through previous translations as preparation. She struggled to find a suitable form, rejecting blank verse and then deciding to engage with terza rima, despite her recognition that this was not a comfortable English form. Translating the Inferno took her 3 years, and the whole project remained unfinished when she died, 18 years after starting out on it. Paradiso was completed by Barbara Reynolds. In a letter to E. V. Rieu, editor of the Penguin classics series, she wrote defensively about herself: It is only recently that I “fell in love” with Dante. It is, in the long run, not good for your Penguins, as it is certainly not good for my reputation, to encourage the idea... that I am merely a middle-aged sensation-novelist amateurishly dabbling in this or that gigantic project, without training or qualifications. If I have not long been a dentist, I am at least a Romance linguist and, to some extent, a medievalist. (Hitchman 1976, 172)

Note that Dorothy Sayers uses the language of the love-affair: she fell in love with Dante, hence her decision to embark on a project that was to last two decades, until death did them part. Translation and passion make interesting companions. In the essay on my own work that I contributed to The Translator as Writer I used similar imagery. I pointed out that I had written books and articles on Luigi Pirandello, had translated plays, one for its English premiere and other writings:

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Chapter Eight That interest in Pirandello lasted for a good twenty years, then vanished completely. Pirandello, with his intellectual contortions reflected in his difficult sentence structures, his open-ended plots and his dark sense of black humour intrigued me for years, then suddenly ceased to be important. I have no idea how or why that happened, but after years of writing about the man and translating his work, in short really getting to know him, I fell out of love with him. I had fallen in love with a completely different kind of writer, the Argentinian poet, Alejandra Pizarnik [...] After years of translating intellectual writers (Pirandello was by no means the only intellectual writer whose work I translated in my twenties and thirties) I discovered another writer, a very different writer, whose moods chimed with my own in some inexplicable way. (Bassnett and Bush 2006, 177-178)

The relationship with Pizarnik lasted a long time and though I no longer translate her poetry, I certainly have not put her firmly in the past as I have with Pirandello. For through translating her poetry, I felt my own work changing, and this is what I was trying to convey in my collection of poems and translations, Exchanging Lives. The title itself was a gesture to the contact between writers that translation involves, a highly intimate contact for it requires the translator to “get to know” another writer’s work in the fullest possible way. If you do not understand a text on its many levels, then it is not possible to produce a workable translation. You have to read and reread and then go back and read again, then once you start to make the translation, you have to keep rereading the new text and reshaping it in its new form. As I reread Pizarnik and played with the dozens of tiny poems that comprise her opus, I found my own writing changing, and that is what the collection seeks to show, the impact of translation on one writer’s work, through the act of translating. T. S. Eliot, in “Little Gidding”, Part I, says this: And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. (Eliot 1970, 51)

We are all familiar with Walter Benjamin’s lovely essay on translation, that posits translation as after-life, as a form of re-naissance of the dead. I use that essay a lot, in teaching, because it stands so strongly against the discourses of loss and betrayal that have characterized a lot of what has been said about translation. And a couple of years ago, when invited to give a lecture in honour of the late Malcolm Bowie, I found myself thinking again about Benjamin and about T. S. Eliot’s communication

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tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. For it struck me that just as we were all gathered together to remember a great scholar and friend, so translation too can be seen as an act of remembrance. When we translate another writer, whether living or dead, the translation itself is a visible trace of that other, which was created by someone else in some other time and place. I can now see that for me, translating poetry is an act of remembrance, and I think this is why the affair with Pirandello came to an abrupt end: he was a great writer, a clever man, a wordsmith, but he was not a poet, and what I most need to do is to translate poetry, because I write poetry, so translation is a logical stage in my own development. This explains why so many poets also translate; why Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison have all translated, why Simon Armitage has taken on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, why Cieran Carson produces translations interspersed with collections of his own writing, why Josephine Balmer can combine translating Ovid’s Tristia with a sequence of poems about Gallipoli. In the introduction to that collection, The Word for Sorrow, Jo Balmer says this about translation: Translation is not just a means of expressing or exploring the process of narrative but an integral part of the narrative itself. And whereas my previous collection, Chasing Catullus, employed this interplay between translation and original to explore personal grief, in The Word for Sorrow it is a means of approaching wider, universal tragedies. (Balmer 2009, xvii)

Sometimes translating is the only way for a writer to go, and this is not, as has sometimes been suggested, because translation serves to plug a creative gap, it is because sometimes one wants to write something that has already been written, and so the obvious thing to do is to write it again, not mechanically, word for word, like the translator of Cervantes in Borges’s short story who “becomes” Cervantes in order to produce an identical work. Ezra Pound understood that; in his essay on Cavalcanti he looks back at the translations he had made 18 years earlier and remarks that he did not “see” Guido at all. He was not then at the right stage of his own poetic development to be able to produce a translation that came from another direction, from within, as it were, rather than from outside. Right now I am trying very unsuccessfully to translate some of Antonio Machado’s poetry. It is a way of dealing with personal grief and loss, because some of the most powerful and moving poems in Campos de Castilla are written out of grief for his beloved young wife, Leonor, who died after just three years of marriage. Machado’s pain is written into the landscape, and the poems are deceptively simple in their stark intensity. I

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had been writing fragments of poems about my own loss for weeks, when I realized that I needed to go back to Machado. I had done some basic translations a few years ago when my partner and I visited Soria, but I did not work on them much, I simply did them to give him some sense of Machado because he had no Spanish. Machado returned to me, you could say, and I started translating again. Now, when I look at the notebook, I cannot tell where Machado ends and I begin; the translations and the original poems are all mixed together, because what I started to do with Machado’s landscape was to change it to my own. Where he has olive groves and ilexes, I have stone walls and sycamores, where he has mountains, I have fellsides, where he has the river Duero, I have the Swale and the becks that rush down to join the Ure. This is another form of recontextualization. Earlier, we saw how recontextualizing ancient Greek literature can speak to political situations in time present. With the translations I am trying to do of Machado, I am transplanting his Castile into the landscape of North Yorkshire, though my muse is not a young woman but an old man. Let me show you one of the drafts: Dice la esperanza... Hope cries: just hold on long enough you’ll see him again some day. Despair mutters: from now on, nothing— bitterness and a breaking heart. Clay claimed its own but the stars shine on.

I have gone for a more colloquial tone and have radically changed the last two lines. Machado ends with a statement of resignation but with a glimmer perhaps of hope—not everything has been swallowed up by the earth. I kept trying to render that idea, but a dominant set of imagery from my own writing kept coming back. I write a lot about the stars, about birds, about the world above me, while Machado focuses much more on the soil, the earth. And because of my state of mind, the famous poem by W. H. Auden had been floating around me for months, Auden’s great grief poem—“Stop All the Clocks...”—in which he demands that all sounds should be silenced, even the stars should be put out, so I found that could acknowledge Machado through the word “clay” and end on a similarly

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ambiguous note: “Let the stars shine on” echoes Auden, and could be read as both a deeply pessimistic or a potentially hopeful line.

Conclusion Translation is an act of remembrance, of homage, it is a bridge across the river of oblivion. It has taken me a lifetimes to discover this. Translation an offer an after-life, it can be a form of resurrection of the dead. Being able to translate ancient runes scratched onto stones by unknown ancestors can give us a glimpse into a society that has vanished from the face of the earth, and even though we have no sense of who the carvers might have been, yet in a sense they live on. Being able to translate the clay tablets that have given us the Epic of Gilgamesh shows us that a writer could express human emotions as powerfully thousands of years ago as writers can today. Through translation we are able to peep beyond the curtain that holds back the past. Yet any notion of an afterlife, be it reincarnation or resurrection, is wreathed in mystery, reliant on negotiations with the unknown, on intuitive understanding, on fleeting instants of enlightenment, on faith. Translation may be a means of recovering the past, of bringing the dead back to life but what it recovers must remain forever incompletely known and understood. Translation is always troué, there are gaps across time and space that can never be fully bridged, and translation is a literary act that is destined to be incomplete, always in the making, always in motion, never reaching a final point of stillness.

Bibliography Balmer, Josephine. 2009. The Word for Sorrow. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. Bassnett, Susan. 2006. Writing and Translating. In Translator as Writer. Edited by Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush. London and New York: Continuum, 173-183. —. 2009. Ted Hughes. Tavistock: The Northcote Press. Bassnett, Susan, and Peter Bush, eds. 2006. Translator as Writer. London: Continuum. Eliot, T. S. 1970. Little Gidding. In Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber, 47-59. Josek, JiĜí. 2006. A Czech Shakespeare? In Translator as Writer. Edited by Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush. London and New York: Continuum, 84-94.

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Heaney, Seamus. 1980. Preoccupations—Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber & Faber. —. 2004. Title Deeds: Translating a Classic. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 148 (4): 411-426, http://www.amphilsoc.org/ sites/default/files/480401.pdf (accessed in September 2010). Hitchman, Janet. 1976. Such a Strange Lady—A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Avon. Longley, Michael. 2006. Collected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 2009. Lapsed Classicist. In Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English. Edited by S. J. Harrison. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 97-113. Peden, Margaret Sayers. 2002. A Conversation on Translation with Margaret Sayers Peden. In Voice-overs. Translation and Latin American Literature. Edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz. New York: State University of New York Press, 71-82. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER NINE VANISHING BOUNDARIES: FERNANDO PESSOA AND HIS TRANSLATORS1 MARIA EDUARDA KEATING

The history of literature is always a dynamics of selection and restitution. Some obscure works from the recent past are worth elevating to canonical status, for example, those of Fernando Pessoa in Portugal; and some important authors might pass into oblivion, as will be the case, undoubtedly, of some Nobel Prize- and Goncourt Prize-winners. (Dewanto 2007, 4) Indeed, anything we can write about the simultaneously heteroclite and coherent texts that nowadays form that sort of non-book, thought out by its scribe as a heap of crumbs, is redundant. (Lourenço 2004, 94)

The publication and first translations of Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquiet] since the 1980s initiated a new stage in the international reception of Fernando Pessoa which, until then, had been reasonably discrete.2 As Eduardo Lourenço states, 1

The translation of this article is by Maria Amélia Carvalho, whereas the translations of all the quotations inserted in the text are my own. 2 Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is one of the greatest Portuguese language poets and of European Modernism as well. He grew up in South Africa and lived most of his life in Lisbon, where he worked as a trading correspondent. His poetic persona multiplies in manifold fictional poets—the heteronyms—endowed with their own personalities, biographies and distinct poetic works: the most well-known of Pessoa’s alter ego heteronyms are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. The Book of Disquiet is a posthumous work, reconstructed with fragmented manuscripts found years after the poet’s death and published for the first time in 1982. Authorship of the texts that constitute The Book of Disquiet was problematic for some time, but was eventually attributed to “Bernardo Soares”, “the book-keeper’s assistant in Lisbon”, a “semi-heteronym”, according to Pessoa (1946, 268).

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Chapter Nine Pessoa’s presence became known a bit all over the world, thanks to The Book of Disquiet. That outward victory, under the banner universal publicity, is less important than the causes that determined it. What Lipovetski calls the “Age of Emptiness” already comprehended its epic or burlesque scribes of genius, from Kafka to Beckett and Ionesco, or its brilliant commentators, such as Cioran; but it still did not have its neutral “accountant”. Neutral and simultaneously inside and outside of that experience of the void as essence of Modernity. (Lourenço 2004, 106)

This international “disclosure” of Pessoa, which was followed by some perplexity, brought forth a wide array of translations of Livro do desassossego that still continues nowadays. Today, there are more than thirty translations of Livro do desassossego in about twenty languages: It is difficult to explain why the critical and editorial fortune of Fernando Pessoa in English-speaking countries has been so slow and intermittent, when in so many European and South-American countries he was quickly recognized as one of the major creative writers of the twentieth century. Owing to the absence of translations, Pessoa was for many years a “bestkept secret” in British and American literary circles. Since the publication in 1991 of the first of the English language translations of The Book of Disquiet its editorial and critical fortune has been rising steadily, especially in the United States. (Blanco 2008)

This editorial fortune is manifest also in Europe, as Livro do desassossego by Bernardo Soares is the only Portuguese text to have reached the top of the list of bestselling books in Denmark (Larsen 2007). Despite this new trend, Gray argues that Pessoa is still generally an unknown poet: It is curious, and at the same time somehow fitting, that Pessoa should continue to be so little known. Long before Postmodernism became an academic industry Pessoa lived deconstruction. [...] But, for the most part, Pessoa remains as he was during his lifetime: an obscure, almost inexistent figure, among whose many aliases are to be found some of the most authentic voices in European literature. (Gray 2001)

1. An Unstable Translation Project A fragmented book, Livro do desassossego was formed by small, somewhat scattered texts, and found in the renowned trunk left by Pessoa, which was unlocked several years after his death. Eventually, the book would be recognized, both in artistic and academic circles as one of the greatest works of Western modernism, which simultaneously raises the

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fundamental issue of post-modernity, and comprises “a great deal (almost everything) that is of interest to the literary scholars” (Seixo 2006, 31). The troubled and unfinished story of the composition and organization of the original text is already generically linked to the issue of translation. The different editions of Livro do desassossego, which correspond to the progressive “disclosure” of the fragments left by Fernando Pessoa and to the different organizing criteria that were being adopted by the revisers, create a plurality of “original texts” which are themselves “second-hand texts”, since they derive from a reading and rewriting process.3 The organization of these texts varies in each publication and the fixation and transcription of Pessoa’s manuscripts are not always consensual.4 Every new edition of Livro do desassossego, either in original or translated version, depends on reading criteria and on a process of reconstitution and editing of fragments that profoundly affect the status of both editors and translators, blurring the boundaries between edition and translation and rendering the very idea of “original” problematic. This situation, thus, defines Livro do desassossego exactly as it can be read today—an intrinsically and deeply unstable work, in continuous change. This instability runs through it at all levels, from the fixation of the “original text” to translations. This instability is enhanced by the fact that the identity of the “author” of Livro do desassossego has not always been clear, wavering between Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro and Vicente Guedes, until it finally settled on Bernardo Soares.5 Ultimately, both editors and translators, globally, have pursued the hesitations, reformulations and ambiguities of the Pessoa project, sustaining and reinforcing the original “enigma”. On the other hand, this incomplete and fragmented book is, simultaneously, one of “exaltation”, of “infinite conversation”, and the “darkest in Portuguese literature”, as it is classified by Eduardo Lourenço (2004, 99). It unfolds in an “attempt to capture an unspoiled silence in the pitfall of words” (Lourenço 2004, 105), through a “transparent writing” 3 Hitherto, around twelve Portuguese editions of Livro do desassossego have been published, eight of which are ascribed to Richard Zenith. 4 The fragments are always presented in a numerical order. But the numbering of the fragments itself varies in the different editions and translations, according to the different modes of organization. It thus works as a reference solely inside each edition, accentuating the image of indefiniteness and transitoriness when we compare different editions of the book. 5 About the evolution of the project of Livro do desassossego by F. Pessoa and the history of its rediscovery and “reconstitution”, see for example Richard Zenith’s preamble to Livro do desassossego (Pessoa 2002b, vii-xxxi).

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(Lourenço 2004, 100) that challenges interpretative habits and radically involves any applicant to the role of translator, compelling him/her to make a profound and permanent reflection, both about Pessoa’s text and the art of translating. Translators’ discourses, disclosed either in the preambles to their translations, or in essays and interviews, play a particularly relevant role, due to the fact that they bring visibility to the publication, interpretation and creation work, which are inherent to the translation of this text. They also explain the doubts, options and viewpoints of each translator.

2. The Translators’ Disquietude and The Book of Disquiet Translators’ debates are also, and very strongly, reading debates and the main conflict seems to take place between the translator and his/her own language, a kind of “tug-of-war” with the target language that radically brushes the questions of discourse, its rhythm, syntax and also the issues regarding the word, its sonority, and lexical invention. The translators’ disquietude starts straightaway, along with the title of the book, one of the emblematic areas of all debates, as we can see from Zenith’s words: The title of the work itself is problematic. Not even the Spanish desasosiego has the same weight as the word “desassossego”. The French translator (F. Laye) practically invented the word intranquillité [...] that was introduced in the French vocabulary. In my first version, I chose disquietude, however, in England the word is considered a bit obsolete, and that pushed me to use the word disquiet in my second version. (2006, 40)

The French versions of Françoise Laye and Inês Oseki-Depré have different titles as well, that originate in different “dictionaries”, opposing interpretations. Bearing in mind the fact that intranquillité “sounds stranger and less banal” (Oseki-Depré 2006, 52-61), Inês Oseki-Depré preferred inquiétude, a word she finds to be more accurate, “because it designates a state of mind, a human feeling, whereas intranquillité, which is the opposite of tranquille, may denote noise, silence, may lead us back to human, is used to designate an attitude or behaviour rather than an internal unrest” (Oseki-Depré 2006, 52-61). Inversely, Françoise Laye explains she preferred intranquillité, for the sake of rigour, even “when the Portuguese insisted that inquiétude should have been chosen (because it is similar to inquietação)”—bearing in mind the fact that “inquiétude doesn’t correspond at all to the word desassossego, nor to the notion of anguish, of central importance in Pessoa’s work, but solely to the idea of care, of

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genuine concern, because the train is late, or the cat is sick” (Laye 2006, 43-49). What is emphasized here is the discussion inside the target-text language itself, bringing forth, in a sensitive way, the specific relationships of the translators with their language, making them define and deepen the exact significance that words have for themselves in their own language.6 The well-known “radical heterogeneity” of languages, so thoroughly studied by philosophers and linguists since the 19th century and used as a fundamental argument for the notion of “untranslatability”,7 extends here to the individual use of language, questioning both the notion (and possibility) of translation, and of communication itself, and transferring the interrogations about the impossibility of communicating, stated in Livro do desassossego, into the debate about translation (Pessoa 2002b, 98): The true substance of whatever I feel is absolutely incommunicable, and the more profoundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is. In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his/her language—saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he/she, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. (Pessoa 2002b, 260) No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However much one soul strives to know another, it can know only what is told him by a word—a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding. (Pessoa 2002b, 359)

This essential impossibility to communicate, motivated by the discontinuities arising from expressing oneself through words is, actually, deeply linked to the subject of translation throughout Pessoa’s work, as enunciated in several excerpts of Livro do desassossego:8 6

The situation of each of the French translators is not contrary to this difference of positions in translation, as Inês Oseki-Depré remarks: the difference between “a translation made by a bilingual French translator [Françoise Laye] and a translation made by one of Portuguese-speaking origin (Brazilian) [Inês Oseki-Depré]” (Oseki-Depré 2006, 54) will necessarily determine specific approaches either to the reading of the original text, or to the poetics and language itself of the target text. 7 As studied by Paul Ricoeur (2004, 55-70). 8 About the “principle of translation” as a “poetic principle”, see Rita Patrício’s 2006 essay, “Pessoa e o princípio da tradução” [Pessoa and the Principle of Translation].

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Chapter Nine To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted—to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling—isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations? (Pessoa 2002b, 433) Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality. (Pessoa 2002b, 260)

Since the only means to communicate is through art—“for art is communicating to others our intimate relationship with them” (Pessoa 2002b, 260)—, it necessarily implies translation: In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his/her language—saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he/she, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. [...] If I try to translate this emotion with close-fitting words, then the closer the fit, the more they’ll represent my own personal feeling, and so the less they’ll communicate it to others. And if there is no communicating it to others, it would be wiser and simpler to feel it without writing it. (Pessoa 2002b, 255-257) Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that truth—personal and incommunicable—could never accomplish. (Pessoa 2002b, 260)

The translators’ disquiet in this book seems to derive, first of all, from the awareness about these interrogations and about the understanding that “the only character in this true-false diary is the act of writing” (Lourenço 2004, 105). To translate Livro do desassossego is to recreate “this kind of ontological stertor of a voice that attempts to express itself, of an existence that also tries to be”, assuming “what can never be translated” (Lourenço 2004, 96).

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3. The Translator as an Expert The inconstancy of this text, and of its reception, is manifest in the existence of several translations in the same language.9 This multiplication of translation projects, some of them by the same translator, derives, on the one hand, from both the progresses achieved in the editing of Pessoa’s manuscripts and the transition of Pessoa’s work to the public domain in 1985.10 On the other hand, the role of the translator frequently extends to editorial work, establishing a sui generis relationship with the source text. When dealing with a source text of unsettled fixation, the translator finds him/herself compelled to choose and re-organize the order of the fragments, re-reading and re-editing the Portuguese editions and, in a certain sense, recreating his/her own “original” text. For example, in the decade between Richard Zenith’s two English translations, i.e. 1991 and 2001, one notices that besides the change in the title from The Book of Disquietude to The Book of Disquiet, this Autobiography without Facts (subtitle) is from then on composed of a lower number of texts, organized in a different way. In one of the first French, yet unabridged, translations, the one by Inês Oseki-Depré, accomplished in 1987 and based on 1982 Jacinto Prado Coelho’s edition, we notice that the selection and reorganization of part of Pessoa’s texts were undertaken by Oseki-Depré herself: Livre de l’inquiétude, without the article, as it appears in the original work (Livro do desassossego) did not have, from the start, the pretension to be exhaustive, but rather, a project to introduce a great poet in French poetic prose. [...] Consequently, we have chosen to select the texts that were most suitable to be included in a poetic project, not taking into account the appearance of an intimate diary, but rather of a sketch book where the poet practises his prose, a form which, he says, makes it more difficult to become another. [...] [W]e are dealing with a new selection here, because it is included in the totality of the texts gathered under the same topic. (Oseki-Depré 2006, 53; my emphasis)

The Portuguese edition of Livro do desassossego is taken upon as the subject-matter of a new work in French. The latter aims to convey Pessoa’s poetic project in favour of its own “pedagogical” project, to

9

At least five in English, three in French, two in Spanish, two in German, three in Chinese, two in Japanese. 10 See, for example, Richard Zenith (1991, 2002) and Françoise Laye’s translations (1988, 1999).

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disclose and transfer an exceptional poetic production to the French literary system. This rearrangement and selection of the text(s) is also clear in the adaptations of Livro do desassossego to theatre and cinema. The recent Film of Disquiet by João Botelho (2010) is a good example: according to the producer, this target text only makes use of “a small part” of the book. That was also the case of the theatre play directed by Alain Rais in 1989, who, using the French translation, not by Oseki-Depré, but by Françoise Laye, undertook a collation of texts and, afterwards, adapted them to theatre dialogue (Zurbach 2006, 63-73). The inconstancy and incompleteness of the original text thus seem to be decisive factors in the text’s reception modes, authorizing and promoting different readings and creating different versions of Livro do desassossego, resulting both from the discovery of new texts and from their selection and organization. In this sense, Livro do desassossego is “condemned” to retranslation, along with what that entails in terms of additional complexity for the reception of a text. Each new translation or adaptation is taken over as a new project, more rigorous than the preceding ones as far as the poetic project of Pessoa is concerned: Later translations do supplement the initial translation, but rather than each translation building on the previous one, attempting to add another brick to complete the mosaic of understanding the original, there will be a back and forth movement. (Milton and Torres 2003, 10)11

The enigmatic nature of the original text is decisive to the relationship between translators, text and author(s), marked by the simultaneously critical and accomplice posture regarding the original text: to translate Livro do desassossego it is always a “gamble” to every translator, because it implies facing a challenge. The translation may represent an experience of “osmosis with the author”, close to “intimate ruin” (Laye 2006, 49), a 11

The study of retranslation is one of the research areas of contemporary Translation Studies which is more pertinent to the reception study of Livro do desassossego. “Little theoretical attention has been paid to the subject of Retranslation and Adaptation”, stated John Milton and M. H. Catherine Torres in 2003 (Cadernos de tradução da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, no. XI). It is interesting to observe that diverse studies about retranslation and adaptation presented in this issue of the Brazilian magazine show a profound connection between the phenomenon of retranslation and the existence of problematic original texts (the Bible, D. Quijote, Arabian Nights, etc.), and study the very narrow threshold between translation, retranslation and adaptation, foregrounding both the project of the translators and the scope of translation.

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personal voyage “through the crisp pages, at times dormant amongst treacherous seaweed, other times, some (very few), at last transparent and inviting” (Cuadrado 2002, 599-603) or a “visceral, intuitive, straightforward act” in the quest for an “erotics of translation” (Zenith 2006, 3738). Either case, the common goal of all the translators is “to render Fernando Pessoa and The Book of Disquiet a good service” (Zenith 2006, 37-38). This objective unfolds in the manifold modes of “negotiation” with the target languages and their readers and is articulated with the individual relationships of the translator/reader with the “grain” of this specific text and with Pessoa’s work generally speaking. The exceptional character of this work therefore transforms the translator into an expert, regarding the reception of the text and Pessoa’s image in the target context.

4. Translation Strategies Besides the task of (re)constructing the source-text, all the translators of Livro do desassossego, without exception, allude to enormous difficulties in the translation work, linked to the specificity of Pessoa’s writing, whether at the level of syntactic construction, semantic complexity, or creative inventiveness that occur at lexical level, contradicting the supposed “transparency of [his] writing” pointed out by Eduardo Lourenço (2004). The fixation problems, related to the manuscripts’ legibility (and consequently to their interpretation) and displayed when reading the original texts, extend to the translation work, inducing different “interventions” from the translator in the interpretation or even in the “correction” of certain excerpts. Following Chesterman (2000), these interventions can be taken as translation strategies working both at a macro-textual level (on certain sequences of excerpts or on paragraph organization), and a micro-textual level (word or sentence), bringing forth changes in each version, and ending up by reinforcing the interrogative relationship that all the translations and all the readings establish with this work. The first added difficulty stated by the translators is the syntax of Livro do desassossego. Maria Alzira Seixo (2006) places the question of syntax at the core of the reflection about translation, regarding it as one of the fundamental aspects of this book: If, to be understood in translation, a text has to have its meanings altered so often for an identical effect to be produced on the other side, by whoever reads that version, what must the translator keep to guarantee the shades of difference in the possibilities presented for the comprehension of that text?

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The translators of Livro do desassossego show a sound awareness and understanding of the essential importance of Pessoa’s syntax that simultaneously forms one of the greatest “technical” difficulties of the book’s translation. However, the phrase “to keep the syntax” is, as far as translation is concerned, a questionable possibility since, in the viewpoint of the linguistic norm, it immediately stands in opposition to the grammatical structures of the target languages, and it may impeach communication itself and also the ability to denote meaning in the language of the translation. The “syntactic competence”12 (Pessoa 2002b, 198) is, thus, a particularly sensitive and “conflicting” area in this text, whether regarding the original text or the translations: in the original text because it arouses the senses, disclosed by a syntax that frequently deviates from the norm; in translation because syntax represents a conflict area between the translator and his/her own language norms. The question concerning the reception ability of the “different” in the reception language is set both at sentence and at word level, and frequently leads translators to “linguistic normalization”, be it by substitution, paraphrase, or explanation. The use of neologisms, for instance, which is read in the original language as an unequivocal poetic process, tends to be received, in a translated work, as an indicator of a “bad translation”, therefore presupposing the translator’s lack of “competence”. Hence, the translators of Livro do desassossego face a dilemma: either stand closer to Pessoa’s awkward syntax, consequently exposing themselves to readers’ criticism, or try to avoid this criticism by producing acceptable normalized translations. This dilemma is felt and stated by all translators of our corpus working within different linguistic systems, namely Spanish, French and English:

12 According to Bernardo Soares, “[t]here is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky. It comes down to the same thing—the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians” (Fragment 228, Pessoa 2002b, 198).

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From the original text I tried to keep, as far as possible, the syntax with agrammatical or anti-grammatical frequency [...] as well as the sentences of Pessoa’s semantics, in other words, and that proved to be an impossible task [...]. With certain words that are obsessively repeated in Livro, with more or less significance (and sometimes unnecessarily, or with no specific meaning or connotation whatsoever) [...]. I played with those same words and with synonyms, or using paraphrase, trying not to bore the reader, nor numb him/her or make the reading of Livro gratuitously disquieting. (Cuadrado 2002, 599-603) To attempt to pour the poetic power of Fernando Pessoa’s language into the quite inflexible and rationalizing mould of the French language, without weakening or modifying it, is a never-ending acrobatics [...]. It would also be necessary to take into account the need (vital for the French reader who boasts about Cartesianism) to stress the stages of Pessoa’s thought. These are clear in Portuguese, but are not solid or are inconsistent in French, forcing the translator to emphasize these stages with words of bare logic, such as therefore, thus, notwithstanding, however, etc. (Laye 2006, 47) In other words, our translation is much more “literal”, an option that takes into account the fact that Fernando Pessoa is sufficiently a master of his own art for us to be able to translate him as closely in French. That means (to obey) the order of words, no omissions, and respect for his syntax, for his use of neologisms. (Oseki-Depré 2006, 57) Pessoa transgresses, stretches, transforms Portuguese syntax. He uses neologisms. I try to use them in English, obviously. There is wordplay and invention, and improvization that result beautifully in Portuguese but not in English, which are slightly awkward in Portuguese and extremely odd in English [...]. Many manuscripts were, in fact, mere drafts that the author never even revised [...]. There are unfortunate expressions that Pessoa would certainly have corrected. Does the translator have the right to “improve” a clumsy sentence? In theory, he/she doesn’t, but in actual fact, I believe he/she does, as long as his/her intervention is minimal and obeys Pessoa’s style. (Zenith 2006, 39)

5. The Translators and the Literary (Poly)System These statements show, on the one hand, that the problem translators face (which also occurs in debates amid translators [Zenith 2006; OsekiDepré 2006; Laye 2006]) is the traditional conflict of “adequacy” vs. “acceptability”. This conflict makes them consciously define some translation options and carefully manage “the nuisance of serving two masters, the foreigner in his oddness, the reader in his desire to

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appropriate” (Ricoeur 2004, 63), thus assuming the boundaries of the translation. On the other hand, the statements of the translators outline a somewhat contradictory frame: all of them assume the work of Pessoa and particularly Livro do desassossego as an important work in the Western canon. Simultaneously, all the translators claim for themselves a relationship of extreme complicity and identification with the poet. This undermines the traditional invisibility of the translator in the presence of the “great works” of the literary canon: the translators do not hesitate to correct “the unfortunate expressions that Pessoa would certainly have corrected” (Zenith 2006, 40) or “words that are obsessively repeated in Livro do desassossego, with more or less significance (and sometimes unnecessarily, or with no specific meaning or connotation whatsoever)” (Cuadrado 2002, 601). This interventional attitude towards the source text is most likely linked to the “semi-peripheral” status of Portuguese literature (and language)—according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos—in the broader context of the Western literary polysystem and to the politico-cultural contexts of the target languages (English, French, Spanish) that belong to stronger literary systems.13 There is a significant difference between the cited statements of American-born Richard Zenith, or those assumed by Françoise Laye (see above) declaring the limitations of the French language—that justify the deviations from the literal aspect in translations—and the statements of the French translator of Brazilian origin Inês Oseki-Depré. The latter claims a literal approach to translation insofar as “Fernando Pessoa is sufficiently a master of his own art for us to be able to translate him as closely in French” (Oseki-Depré 2006, 57). The translators themselves are part of the literary polysystem, carrying along with them their own positions and power relations. In this sense, the translations of Livro do desassossego seem to display in some way the contradictions and the power relations that imply the processes of “consecration” by the mainstream literatures, of the literary works belonging to minor systems, according to Pascale Casanova (2002, 20): As a matter of fact, the central mediators reproduce to their own perceptive categories, transformed in universal norms, the literary works coming from abroad [...]. Because great literary nations make pay the right to worldwide 13 See Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s works on the semi-peripheral status of Portuguese society and culture (for instance Santos 1994).

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circulation this way, the history of literary celebrations is a long sequence of misunderstandings as well [...].

It seems to me that, nevertheless, in the case of Livro do desassossego, this pertinent yet simplified vision of the international literary relations is more problematic, because the characteristics, both literary and editorial of this book, lead first and foremost to an essentially interrogative and selfcritic position by the translators, which partially contradicts a straight “ethnocentric annexation” as mentioned by Casanova (2002).

6. Concluding Remarks All these different approaches to Livro do desassossego seem to show that the end result is indistinguishable from each translator’s individual experience, from his/her particular relationship with the language (and languages) and literature, defining the art of translating as the art “of the translator”, the art of every specific translator. The translators’ editorial strategies on the macro-textual level seem to bring them closer to the source-text author, thus diluting the boundaries between author and translator. On the other hand, their hesitations and concerns regarding the micro-textual level (syntactic and lexical issues) seem, on the contrary, to redraw these boundaries between source-text and target-text author, thus somehow “normalizing” the situation. The analysis of these translators’ work, their problems, hesitations and contradictions, thus point to the interpenetration, or even the blurring of the borders, between author, reader and translator, stressing their experience in the translation of Livro do desassossego as a radical and wholesome artistic one.

Bibliography Blanco, José. 2008. Fernando Pessoa’s Critical and Editorial Fortune in English: A Selective Chronological Overview. London: Modern Humanities Research Association/Gale, Cengage Learning, http://www.thefreelibrary.com (accessed December 12, 2010). Casanova, Pascale. 2002. Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 4 (144): 7-20, http://www.cairn.info/revue-actes-de-la-recherche-en-sciences-sociales -2002-4-page-7.htm#no1 (accessed April 15, 2011). Chesterman, Andrew. 2000. Memes of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Cuadrado, Perfecto. 2002. Nota del traductor. In El Libro del Desasosiego, by Fernando Pessoa. Barcelona: Editorial Alcantilado, 599-603. Dewanto, Nirwan. 2007. Periphery—Lost and Found. International Writing Program, University of Iowa, http://iwp.uiowa.edu/archives/ ICPL/Dewanto_periphery.pdf (accessed December 11, 2010). Gray, John. 2001. Assault on authorship. New Statesman, 28 May, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/140414 (accessed December 12, 2010). Larsen, Ingemai. 2007. De uma periferia à outra na tradução portuguêsdinamarquês. Cadernos de tradução XIX (1): 11-24. Laye, Françoise. 2006. “O Livro do desassossego” de Pessoa. Diacrítica— Literatura 20 (3): 43-49. Lourenço, Eduardo. 2004. O Lugar do anjo—ensaios pessoanos. Lisbon: Gradiva. Milton, John, and M. H. Catherine Torres, orgs. 2003. Tradução, retradução e adaptação. Cadernos de tradução XI (1). Oseki-Depré, Inês. 2006. Intranquillité ou inquiétude? Quelques remarques sur la traduction française du Livro do desassossego, de Fernando Pessoa—Bernardo Soares. Diacrítica—Literatura 20 (3): 5162. Patrício, Rita. 2006. Pessoa e o princípio da tradução. Diacrítica— Literatura 20 (3): 23-30. Pessoa, Fernando. 1946. Páginas de doutrina estética. Selection, preface and notes by Jorge de Sena. Lisbon: Inquérito. —. 1982. Livro do desassossego, vols. I and II. Organized by Jacinto Prado Coelho. Lisbon: Ática. —. 1987. Livre de l’inquiétude. Translated by Inês Oseki-Depré. Le Muy: Editions Unes. —. 1988. Le Livre de l’intranquillité de Bernardo Soares. Translated by Françoise Laye. Paris: Bourgois. —. 1991. The Book of Disquietude. Translated by Richard Zenith. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited. —. 1999. Le Livre de l’intranquillité de Bernardo Soares. Translated by Françoise Laye. Paris: Bourgois. Pessoa, Fernando/Bernardo Soares. 2001. Livro do desassossego. Edited by Richard Zenith. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim. Pessoa, Fernando. 2002a. El libro del desasosiego. Translated by Perfecto E. Cuadrado Fernández. Barcelona: Editorial Alcantilado. —. 2002b. The Book of Disquiet. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. London and New York: Penguin Books. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Sur la traduction. Paris: Bayard.

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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1994. Pela Mão de Alice: o social e o político na pós-modernidade. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. Seixo, Maria Alzira. 2006. Elogio da sintaxe: tradução, ensino e poesia, a partir do Livro do desassossego. Diacrítica—Literatura 20 (3): 31-36. Zenith, Richard. 2006. Traduzir o Livro do desassossego: notas para uma não-teoria. Diacrítica—Literatura 20 (3): 37-42. Zurbach, Christine. 2006. Le Livre de l’intranquillité: dramatização do Desassossego—as vozes e os corpos do Livro. Diacrítica—Literatura 20 (3): 52-63.

Filmography O Filme do desassossego, directed by João Botelho (Lisbon: Ar de Filmes, 2010).

CHAPTER TEN FROM PERIPHERY TOWARDS THE CENTRE: SALGARI’S ADVENTURES IN PORTUGAL AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY MARIA LIN MONIZ

1. Introduction The Italian author Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) has probably been one of the most read and translated authors in Portugal for several decades. Evidence can be found in the numerous Portuguese translations, retranslations, editions, re-editions and adaptations of his many adventure novels, besides all other manifestations that can be found on the Internet, such as blogs and other sites. A first look at all these publications seems to indicate that, even though Salgari’s work has been kept within the minor system of adventure literature, his novels have been read by whole generations of readers. The same interest is noticeable in other countries, and the influence he has exerted on modern writers, cinema directors and TV producers should be noted. Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez or Pablo Neruda, just to mention a few, have assumed how Salgari’s novels influenced their own writings (Salgari 2009). Salgarian traits can also be found in films by Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone and, more recently, Steven Spielberg (Salgari 2009, viii-ix). And certainly many of us still remember the famous TV series Sandokan, about one of the most famous Salgarian heroes, released in Portugal in the 1970s. It is our purpose to study the reception of Salgari’s novels in Portugal since the 1920s to nowadays, in order to assess the impact of this author among Portuguese readers and the more or less peripheral position he occupies within several literary systems.

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As a first step towards that aim, a bibliography (see Appendix B) was put together collecting all the translations and editions of Salgari’s novels in Portugal. The data will be analysed within the framework of EvenZohar’s polysystem theory in order to, on the one hand, discuss the novels’ peripheral position in different literary systems, possible motivating factors and the function they seem to have fulfilled. On the other hand, to ponder on the latest revival of Salgari’s novels in Portugal and the contrary movement from the periphery to the centre that it seems to indicate.

2. Theoretical Framework A decisive and important contribution to the Descriptive Translation Studies was given by Itamar Even-Zohar with his polysystem theory, made known in the early 1970s and developed from the Russian Formalism and the Czech Structuralism. According to Even-Zohar, each semiotic phenomenon (language, literature, society, etc.) should be considered as a system—“a structured whole with internal connections between the elements being more intensive and qualitatively different from those with elements outside the system” (Hermans 1999, 164). This implies a dynamic perspective rather than a static point of view. Phenomena should not be seen as mere aggregates of various elements, but as diverse and complex manifestations ruled by their own laws. A polysystem is, therefore, according to Even-Zohar, a set of various systems intersecting and overlapping in different ways. Although they are far from uniform, they function as a whole. The author admits that this approach can apparently bring some disadvantages, such as the impossibility of making a thorough analysis of an isolated phenomenon. It is not possible to reduce, for example, the heterogeneity of a certain culture to the culture of the dominant class because, with time, the governing laws may change. Standard language, for instance, cannot be studied out of the context of its variants, the same way the so-called “mass” or “light” literature can only be considered as “non-literature” in opposition to the “grand” literature. The study of literature cannot thus be reduced to the so-called masterpieces, defined solely by the “taste” or the existing norms. “Taste” and judgements are not to be neglected, because they are active elements in the establishment of governing laws, and they should, on the contrary, be an object of investigation. Certain social behaviours cannot be understood if such governing laws are not taken into consideration.

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Within a polysystem, the systems are not similar, rather hierarchically organized and in permanent tension. Change is brought about by this tension, since certain phenomena or elements are pushed from the centre towards the periphery whereas others make their way towards the centre. However, within a polysystem there is not a single centre or a single periphery. A certain phenomenon can be transferred from the periphery of a given system into the periphery of another system or, eventually, into its centre. When speaking of literature, a distinction is made between “canonized” and “non-canonized” literature. “Canonized” comprises the norms and the literary works “accepted as legitimate by the dominant circles within a culture and hence preserved and transmitted as part of the cultural heritage” (Hermans 1999, 107). “Non-canonized”, on the other hand, applies to norms and texts rejected by the dominant circles. Canonical and non-canonical literature is not necessarily synonymous with “good” or “bad” literature because it is no longer thought in terms of the intrinsic quality of the texts. It is rather defined by certain individuals, groups or institutions that control the polysystem. Still according to Even-Zohar, translated literature, being itself a system, is included in the polysystem with its canonized centre and its periphery. Translation, like other forms of transfer, is defined by this scholar as a case of “interference”, “a relation between literatures”, in which the source literature may, directly or indirectly, influence the target literature. Translations can play an important role in specific situations. EvenZohar points out three cases: (1) in “young” literatures, i.e., those which are not yet crystallized; (2) in “weak” and/or peripheral literatures, or (3) when a certain literature has a vacuum or is facing a crisis or a turning point (Even-Zohar 2000, 193-194). The polysystem theory, despite all the criticisms made upon it, provides a very useful framework to observe the circulation of Salgari’s novels in Portugal and other geographical areas.1

1

Some of its limitations pointed out by Theo Hermans, for example, are: it is a “ferociously abstract and depersonalized”, “thoroughly text-bound” approach; it focuses on classifications and correlations without shedding light on the underlying causes; the multiplication of the pattern of binary opposition creates the structuredness of the method, which, in turn, produces the structuredness of the object. For deeper analysis, see Hermans 1999, 117-119.

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3. Salgari, the Italian Adventure Author Emilio Salgari was born in Verona on August 21, 1862 and started publishing in an Italian Magazine, La Valigia, at the age of 21. It was the beginning of an extremely prolific and successful career as an adventure author. Having written about 88 novels and 120 novellas, Salgari’s literary success was such that, in the 1950s, he became known as “the father of mass literature” (Salgari 2009, x). Without ever leaving his country, Salgari wrote about distant and exotic lands with all the details he would get from encyclopaedias, maps, geography magazines or stories told by sailors. Some of the main characters of his novels were a true inspiration to young people far beyond Italy. According to a Che Guevara biography by the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, for example, the Bolivian revolutionary had no less than 62 Salgari’s novels in his own library (Salgari 2009, ix). Despite all the literary fame and success, however, Salgari’s personal life was rather miserable. Shamefully exploited by his publishers, he was unable to provide a comfortable life to his family and he eventually committed suicide on the April 25, 1911.2

4. Salgari’s Adventures in Translation As a very first step in the process of accessing the position of Salgari’s work in different literary systems, several library catalogues were browsed, making it possible to infer the larger or more reduced circulation of Salgari’s books in certain countries or, in other words, the more or less peripheral position they have occupied. The results are provided in Table 10-1: Online catalogues Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF) (http://www.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/ ) Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP) (http://porbase.bnportugal.pt/ ) Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) (http://www.bne.es/es/ ) Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) (http://www.bnf.fr/fr/ )

No. of records 1164 382 1250 114

2 For further information on Salgari’s life and work see the introduction to A Rainha dos Caraíbas (2009, vii-xvii) by Luís Torres Fontes.

From Periphery towards the Centre Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) (http://www.d-nb.de/) British Library (BL) (http://catalogue.bl.uk/) Library of Congress (LC) (http://catalog.loc.gov/) Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (Brazil) (http://www.bn.br/portal/) Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (http://www.dibam.cl/biblioteca_nacional/) Catálogo Red de Bibliotecas del Banco de la Republica (Colombia) (http://ticuna.banrep.gov.co:8080/opac/inicio.htm) Católogo en Linea Nautilo (Biblioteca Nacional de México) (http://biblional.bibliog.unam.mx/bibn/)

169 96 31 (no English translation) 140 (no English translation) 57 208 145

133

Table 10-1: Number of records under “Salgari” found in library catalogues The number of records under “Salgari” found in each catalogue seems to confirm the popularity of Salgari among Iberian and Latin-American readers, in contrast with his complete obscurity in Anglophone countries. With the exception of the British Library, where only Italian titles are available, most records concern national translations, denouncing the large number of translations made into French, Spanish and Portuguese, but none into English. Even in the Library of Congress it is possible to find translations in several languages—Spanish, French, German and even Russian—, but no English translations. According to Paulo Varela Gomes (2007), the first English translations of Salgari’s novels appeared in 2003; however, no such editions were found on British or American online catalogues. The fact that these are not included in the collection of the two main English and American libraries must be taken as a sign that Salgari’s work occupies a very peripheral position in the English-speaking literary systems. Several aspects could be put forward as justifying reasons for the lack of English translations. One of the reasons pointed out by Gomes (2007) is a certain “British hostility”3 given that, in Salgari’s stories, the evil is usually associated to the British Empire. Another plausible reason suggested by this scholar is “perhaps the 3 All quotations from Portuguese are quoted in translation into English. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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snobbery of those who are (rightfully) convinced to have the best adventure novels” (2007). This preliminary search made it possible to assess the fact that the translations found range from the beginning of the 20th century to 2010 showing not only that his novels have been surviving for several decades, but also that re-editions have been promoted at a constant pace. The “resilience” of Salgari is, in fact, astonishing, especially if we bear in mind that his work has been kept in the peripheral system of “adventure literature”, often considered as “paraliterature” or “minor” literature. “A man of good taste experiences a kind of guilt for having abandoned himself to the lust provoked by that literature—which is, undoubtedly one of the constant particularities when reading an adventure novel”, is what Delacroix felt when reading Dumas (Rêgo and Castelo-Branco 2003, 25). In Portugal, Salgari’s work seems to be equally appreciated, making it possible to identify throughout the 20th century dozens of new translations, re-translations or new editions of old translations. Based on the bibliography put together it was possible to organize the data collected in a time graph: 1900-1909 0 1910-1919

3 71

1920-1929 1930-1939

74

1940-1949

40

1950-1959

70

1960-1969

51 28

1970-1979 1980-1989

13

1990-1999

19 13

2000-2010 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Fig. 10-1: Number of Portuguese translations, re-translations and editions of Emilio Salgari’s work organized by decade since the first published translation

The graphic shows clearly that the number of translations was in steady decline during the 1970s and 1980s, but a renewed interest in Salgari’s work appeared in the 1990s. The centenary of Salgari’s death, celebrated in 2011, is probably a good reason for this revived interest, expressed in new and recent editions published after 2000. Nevertheless,

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in Gomes (2007) other reasons are pointed out as behind the increased interest since the 1990s. According to this author, Salgari has been (re)discovered as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist author by the political and academic circles of Europe and Latin America, given the libertarian vision of his heroes against a Eurocentric world. Gomes also predicts that, sooner or later, Salgari will be included in Women Studies, considering that Salgari also created heroines, who had little in common with the women of the bourgeoisie of his time. Such libertarian characteristics, however, must have gone unnoticed to the Portuguese censorship. There is not a single reference to Salgari in the censorship reports. On the contrary, Salgari is even included in the 1946 list of books of Biblioteca Ambulante do SNI [the Circulating Library of the Propaganda Office of the dictatorial Estado Novo 4 regime], in the section “Viagens e aventuras” [Travels and Adventures], along with Jules Verne, Daniel de Foe [sic] and Jonathan Swift. There were 50 books under Salgari’s name, 26 under Verne’s and 1 under each of the other authors (Rosas 1990, 419). It is fair to suppose that the personal qualities and ethical attitudes—courage, friendship, loyalty, integrity—of the Salgarian heroes were highly valued in the shaping of the character of the Portuguese youth of that time. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that around 81 % of the translations of Salgari’s work were published before the end of Estado Novo in 1974. However, either using old or new translations, the more recent editions (1990s onwards) have different characteristics. They include essays on Salgari’s life and work, lists of original titles and dates of publication, publisher’s notes, footnotes, quotations from famous writers or from Portuguese notorious people. For example: the 2009 edition of A Rainha dos Caraíbas includes an “Introduction” on Salgari’s life and work by Luís Torres Fontes5 (pp. viixvii), a “Publisher’s Note” (p. 3), a reproduction of the cover of the first edition (1901) of the source text (p. 5), a list of the author’s bibliography and biography (pp. 237-240), as well as a list of essays and reviews (p. 241). The 2010 edition of O Corsário negro, the first volume of the collection “Os Livros da minha vida” [The Books of my Life], includes a 4

Estado Novo is the term used to address the Portuguese dictatorship period from 1932 until 1974. See footnote 3 in Teresa Seruya’s article in this volume. 5 Luís Torres Fontes is a translator. The list of his translations is available on DocWeb (http://pesquisabmc.cm-coimbra.pt/docbweb2/plinkres.asp?Base=ISBD& Form=COMP&SearchTxt=%22AU+Fontes%2C+Lu%EDs+Torres%2C+trad.%22 &StartRec=0&RecPag=5).

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publisher’s note (pp. 7-8), a preface entitled “Memórias de papel” [Paper Memories] (pp. 9-11) by Marçal Grilo (a former Minister of Education and currently president of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), and the previously mentioned introductory text on Salgari’s life and work by Luís Torres Fontes (pp. 305-317). On the back cover quotations from Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco can be read. On the 2010 edition of Viagem sobre o Atlântico em balão, the first volume of the collection “À Esquina do mundo” [At the Corner of the World], there is a “Preface” (pp. 5-16) about Salgari’s life and work by Silvino Gonzato, an Italian journalist and writer, and an “Afterword” (pp. 213-219) by Vanessa Castagna, the translator of this volume, justifying the relevance of this new translation.

5. Conclusion Taking into account the 382 records found in the Portuguese online catalogue of the Portuguese National Library (BNP-PorBase) from 1910 to 2010, it is not only safe to attest the interest the Portuguese audience has for Salgari’s novels, but also to say that the translations of Salgari’s novels occupied a significant position within the Portuguese literary system in opposition to the place it assumed in the Anglophone systems, for example, where almost no translations can be found. This agrees with Even-Zohar’s idea that a certain author can occupy different positions in different literary systems, according to the state of a system at a given moment and the function ascribed to translation. Still bearing in mind Even-Zohar’s proposed roles translation can assume, and considering the lack of adventure novels by Portuguese authors for decades, as can be confirmed by searching the PorBase catalogue, we could argue that the translations of Salgari’s novels fulfilled that void, meeting the needs and the interest of generations of young Portuguese readers. It is, nevertheless, curious to acknowledge that Salgari’s novels were never included among the “canonical” works, as was the case with Stevenson’s or Dumas’s novels. Given the different status recognized to each of the systems involved and Even-Zohar’s “governing laws”, we come to understand that this difference in status can be partly due to the fact that authors such as Stevenson or Dumas belong to more central literary systems in the European context, while Salgari belongs to a more peripheral one. A different attitude can be noticed, though, towards Salgari’s novels in recent years. The paratexts included in the latest editions of Salgari’s novels in Portugal seem to be part of a strategy of the “dominant circles”

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referred to by Even-Zohar (scholars, editors, critics, etc.), thus suggesting a very specific agenda—to push Salgari from the periphery towards the centre of the literary system, eventually leading to the canonization of the author. As stated before, Salgari has been re-evaluated, re-discovered and re-read under new perspectives, namely those provided by Postcolonial and Women Studies. The peripheral position the Portuguese system assumes within the European literary system and the centrality recognized to the English and French systems has led to the situation where authors such as Salgari, with a higher number of translations and re-translations, are kept in the periphery by the discourse assumed by the “dominant circle”, which does not present him as a canonical author. This situation seems to be, nevertheless, under evaluation at a moment when the governing laws and the system’s hierarchy are also being evaluated.

6. Final Notes on the Making of the Bibliography Putting up all the Portuguese translations of Salgari’s novels in order to produce his bibliography in Portugal can be quite a hard work given the large number of records found on online catalogues. Besides, the reference to the date of publication is often neglected by publishers and a considerable number of volumes do not follow the organization of the source texts (ST), either dividing one volume into different translations or merging two different STs in one single translated volume, thus making the identification of the original titles difficult to determine if they are not mentioned in the target text (TT). Very often these could only be confirmed by checking the volumes themselves. In some cases, the dates of publication provided by PorBase are not accurate or reliable. Although the oldest editions found in PorBase dated back from 189-, we confirmed that this information was not correct, since they were registered in the BNP in 1929 and 1930, respectively.6 Apart from these two cases, the earliest editions on PorBase were not found before the 1920s. However, there are references to a 1910 first edition on the Internet (“A Colecção Salgari das Edições Romano Torres”, http://salgari.com.sapo.pt/Coleccao.html). Sometimes the authorship of the novels is not clear, either because Salgari wrote under pseudonyms or because other authors, including his own children, used his name for editorial and “marketing” purposes. 6

We reported this misinformation to the BNP and hope the due correction will be made soon.

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Several and extensive cartoon series were published in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s under the name of Salgari but they were in fact free adaptations of his novels. That is the case of some titles recorded on PorBase, such as the 1956 O Leão de Damasco and O Corsário das Bermudas or the 1979 Dois fugitivos na Malásia. The most important publisher of Salgari’s novels was João Romano Torres, from the 1910s to 1960s, although some other publishers are to be mentioned: Agência Portuguesa de Revistas, Círculo de Leitores, Fernando Pereira, Livraria Internacional, Presença, Público Comunicação Social, Verbo and, more recently, Temas e Debates (2003), Via Óptima (2009), Sopa de Letras (2010), and Clube do Autor (2010). Despite the high number of publications, the translators were not more than twenty, considering that some of them used different pseudonyms. More regular translators of Salgari were Henrique Marques (1859-1933), who also wrote under the names José Carlos Meneses, Carlos José de Meneses or Vasco Marques; Henrique Marques Júnior (1881-1953); Leyguarda Ferreira (1897-?), who used pseudonyms as well—António Vilalva and, most probably, Duarte Vieira—; Bernardo de Alcobaça, pseudonym of Pedro Herculano Leal (n.d.), and A. Duarte de Almeida, pseudonym of Carlos Bregante Torres (1879-?). The amazing thing is that a new edition by a different publisher did not necessarily mean a new translation. Even the latest editions from 2009 (A Rainha dos Caraíbas) or 2010 (O Corsário negro) use the old translations published by Romano Torres. Nor did a new edition of the same novel by the same publisher indicate the same translator. A paradigmatic case is the novel A Rainha dos Caraíbas. This novel was first published in 1938 by João Romano Torres under the name of Duarte Vieira as translator. The second edition by the same publisher was released in 1955 and a third one in 1963 but, this time, both with a translation by António Vilalva. It is still António Vilalva’s translation which is published in 2009 by Via Óptima. However, in an editor’s note included in the 2009 edition, it is clearly stated that it uses the “original translation of this novel published in Portugal in 1938 and re-edited in 1955 and 1963 by the extinct publisher Romano Torres in two volumes, A Noiva do corsário negro and A Rainha dos Caraíbas” is used (Salgari 2009, 3). This is the reason why we can assume that Duarte Vieira and António Vilalva are the same person. António Vilalva is known to be a pseudonym of Leyguarda Ferreira (Andrade 1999, 42). In order to produce this bibliography, which is provided in appendix, most records concerning Salgari’s translations were collected from PorBase. Other sources were equally relevant though. Some data

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comprising 1930-1955 translations could be compared, completed or corrected by searching the online database Intercultural Literature in Portugal 1930-2000: A Critical Bibliography. 7 Another useful resource was a list of the collection “Salgari” published by João Romano Torres, organized by Marques de Sá (MS) and available online.8 As mentioned before, the 2009 edition of A Rainha dos Caraíbas also provides information about the original titles and the dates of publication. Given the impossibility of adding an extra column for “Observations”, where some problems would be discussed, a list of notes is here presented for a clearer understanding of this bibliography: 1) The dates of the TTs indicated in the bibliography following this article are those found in PorBase but, whenever the whole or part of it was missing, it was completed with information provided by MS or by myself according to the information obtained from the volumes. In such cases, the dates or part of them are in square brackets (example, 193[2]). 2) All the STs dates were checked on the online catalogue of Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF). However, some STs dates could not be determined. They are signalled with a question mark (?). The STs dates indicated in square brackets were provided by MS. 3) Some of the STs titles could not be identified. They are signalled with a question mark (?). 4) The translator’s name is not referred to in some volumes. 5) As mentioned above, Salgari’s authorship is not very clear or unanimously attributed to in some cases. Further information is provided in Table 10-2. Title A Esmeralda de Ceilão [Lo smeraldo di Ceylan] A Última aventura de Sandokan (1942) [Addio, Mompracem!] A Vitória do Águia Branca [L’Aquila Bianca]

Notes According to MS, the author is Giovanni Bertinetti. According to BNCF, the author is Salgari. According to MS and BNCF, the author of this edition is Luigi Motta. Later editions are referred to as Salgari’s on BNCF. According to MS, the author is Americo Greco, but according to BNCF it is Salgari.

O Ceptro de Sandokan [Lo scettro di Sandokan]

According to BNCF and MS, the only author is Luigi Motta.

7 8

Available at www.translatedliteratureportugal.org. Available at http://salgari.com.sapo.pt/Coleccao.html.

176 O Escravo de Madagáscar [Lo Schiavo del Madagascar] O Naufrágio da Medusa [Il Naufragio della Medusa] O Último tigre [L’ultima tigre: Le grandi cacce nell’India] Os Caçadores do Far-West [I cacciatori del Far-West] Sandokan nas montanhas de cristal [La tigre della Malesia] Sandokan, soberano da Malásia [La gloria di Yanez] Uma Herança de 100 milhões [L’ereditá del Capitano Gildiaz]

Chapter Ten MS indicates Giovanni Bertinetti as the author of ST. BNCF, however, indicates Salgari as the author. BNCF and MS refer to Luigi Motta as the author of the ST. BNP indicates Salgari and Luigi Motta. MS indicates Americo Greco as the author of the ST. BNCF, however, indicates Salgari as the author. MS indicates Luigi Motta as the author of the ST. BNCF indicates Salgari as the author, although a 1949 edition is referred to as Motta’s. According to BNP, the authors of the ST are Salgari and Luigi Motta. MS indicates Motta as the author. BNCF refers to two editions (1949 and 1959) as being Motta’s and a 1991 edition as Salgari’s. MS and BNCF refer to Luigi Motta as the only author of the ST. BNP indicates Salgari and Motta as the ST authors. MS indicates Giovanni Bertinetti as its author, which is not confirmed by BNCF.

Table 10-2: Notes regarding the identification of Salgari as the author

Bibliography Andrade, Adriano da Guerra. 1999. Dicionário de pseudónimos e iniciais de escritores portugueses. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 2000. The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem. In The Translation Studies Reader. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 192-197. Gomes, Paulo Varela. 2007. Sonhar com piratas. Público, April 22, http://5dias.net/2007/04/26/sonhar-com-piratas/ (accessed in March 2011). Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Pym, Anthony. 1998. Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Rêgo, Manuela, and Miguel Castelo-Branco, coord. 2003. Antes das playstations: 200 anos de romance de aventuras em Portugal. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional.

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Rosas, Fernando, org. 1990. Portugal e o Estado Novo (1930-1960). Lisbon: Editorial Presença. Salgari, Emilio. 2009. A Rainha dos Caraíbas. Translated by António Vilalva. Introduction by Luís Torres Fontes. Porto: Via Óptima/Oficina Editorial. Salgari, Emilio. 2010a. O Corsário negro. Translated by A. Duarte de Almeida. Preface by Marçal Grilo. Lisbon: Clube do Autor, S.A. Salgari, Emilio. 2010b. Viagem sobre o Atlântico em balão. Translated by Vanessa Castagna. Parede: Sopa de Letras.

Online Resources A Colecção Salgari das edições Romano Torres, edited by Marques de Sá, http://salgari.com.sapo.pt/Coleccao.html. Intercultural Literature in Portugal 1930-2000: A Critical Bibliography, www.translatedliteratureportugal.org

Appendix B

Chapter Ten

1925

9 A Cidade misteriosa A Cimitarra de Buddah/ 10 A Cimitarra de Buda 1962 1939 [Pb]

11 A Cimitarra de Buda

12 A Conquista da lua

1928

192[8]

TT date 1979 1935 1950 (2nd ed.) 1960 (3rd ed.) 189- [1929] 1960 (2nd ed.) 1951 (3rd ed.)

8 A Cidade em chamas

7 A Cidade do rei leproso

6 A Cidade do ouro

5 A Cidade do ouro

4 A Caverna dos diamantes

3 A Caverna dos diamantes

TT title 1 A Capitã do Yucatão 2 A Caverna dos diamantes

ST title La capitana dell’Yucatan Le caverne dei diamanti

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique

João Romano Torres Alla conquista della luna

João Romano Torres La scimitarra di Budda

1892

João Romano Torres La scimitarra di Budda – I

Marques, Henrique

?

1892

1908

1904

1898

1898

1903

João Romano Torres La città dell’oro

João Romano Torres La città dell’oro

1899

1899

ST date 1899 1899

Alcobaça, Bernardo João Romano Torres La cittá del re lebbroso – I de Marques Júnior, João Romano Torres Cartagine in fiamme – II Henrique ? João Romano Torres I predoni del Sahara – III

Marques, Henrique

Marques, Henrique

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le caverne dei diamanti

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le caverne dei diamanti

Translator Publisher ? Fernando Pereira Ferreira, Leyguarda (Imp. Lucas)

Bibliography of the Portuguese translations of Salgari’s novels

178

1928 (2nd ed.) 1957 (3rd ed.) 19[34] 1942 [Pb] 1949 (1st ed.) 1950 (2nd ed.) 1960 (3rd ed.)

A Conquista do talismã/ A Cidade do rei leproso A Conquista do talismã/ A Cidade do rei leproso A Costa do Marfim A Derrota de Sandokan A Derrota de Sandokan/ O Rei do mar A Derrota de Sandokan/ O Rei do mar A Derrota de Sandokan/ O Rei do mar

26 A Esmeralda de Ceilão

23

A Destruição de Cartago/ Uma Aventura em Cartago A Destruição de Cartago/ 24 Uma Aventura em Cartago 25 A Esmeralda de Ceilão

22 A Desforra de Eanes

21

20

19

17 18

16

1959 (2nd ed.) 1931 1961 (2nd ed.)

1928

2001

1931 [Pb]

14 À Conquista do Pólo Norte

15

2000

13 À Conquista de um império

Marques, Henrique

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques, Henrique

?

?

1928

1928

João Romano Torres Lo smeraldo di Ceylan João Romano Torres Lo smeraldo di Ceylan

1908

1908

?

João Romano Torres Cartagine in fiamme – I

João Romano Torres Cartagine in fiamme – I

Círculo de Leitores

1906

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II Ribeiro, António J. Pinto

1906

1898 1906

João Romano Torres La Costa d’Avorio – I João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II

1904

João Romano Torres La cittá del re lebbroso – II

1906

1904

João Romano Torres La cittá del re lebbroso – II

1901

La stella polare e il suo João Romano Torres viaggio avventuroso II/Verso l’artide com la stella polare

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II

Alcobaça, Bernardo de Alcobaça, Bernardo de Marques, Henrique Ferreira, Leyguarda

Marques, Henrique

1907

179 Alla conquista di un Impero

Ribeiro, António J. Círculo de Leitores Pinto

From Periphery towards the Centre

19[28] 1964 (2nd ed.) 1943

29 A Estrela da Araucânia

31 A Estrela dos Afrídios

João Romano Torres La stella dell’Araucania – I

João Romano Torres La stella filante

João Romano Torres La statua di Visnù

João Romano Torres La stella degli Afridi

Rodrigues, Aurora Vilalva, António

1998 1927 1958 19[27] 1938 1963 (3rd ed.)

37 A Febre do ouro

38 A Febre do ouro

39 A Febre do ouro

40 A Filha do corsário negro

41 A Filha do corsário negro

M. A. M. Marques, Henrique Marques, Henrique Ribeiro, António J. Pinto Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos João Romano Torres

Jolanda la figlia del corsaro nero – I Jolanda la figlia del corsaro João Romano Torres nero – I

João Romano Torres I minatori dell’Alaska – II

João Romano Torres I minatori dell’Alaska – II

João Romano Torres I minatori dell’Alaska – II

João Romano Torres La favorita del Mahdi

João Romano Torres Il fiore del deserto (?) João Romano Torres Una sfida al Polo II João Romano Torres La favorita del Mahdi – I

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il fiore del deserto (?)

Marques Júnior, Henrique

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La stella dell’Araucania – I

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Thereza, Maria

Chapter Ten

36 A Favorita do Mahdi

33 A Fascinação do Sahará 34 A Fascinação dos gelos 35 A Favorita do Mahdi

32 A Fascinação do deserto

1966 (2nd ed.) 1960 19[30] 1929

1940

28 A Estrela cadente

30 A Estrela da Araucânia

1943

27 A Estátua de ouro

180

1905

1905

1900

1900

1900

1887

1896 1909 1887

1896

?

1906

1906

?

?

1980 (3rd ed.)

A Formosa judia/ Os Bandidos do deserto A Formosa judia/ Os Bandidos do deserto A Fuga do Marajá A Fuga do Marajá A Heroína de Cuba

56 A Montanha de luz

55 A Montanha de luz

52 A Insurreição do Sudan 53 A Legião estrangeira 54 A Montanha de luz

51 A Heroína de Porto Artur

50 A Heroína de Porto Artur

49 A Heroína de Cuba

46 47 48

45

44

L’eroina di Port-Arthur/ La naufragatrice Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres La favorita del Mahdi – II Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Sull’Atlante – I ? João Romano Torres La montagna di luce

1902 1902

Alcobaça, Bernardo João Romano Torres La montagna di luce de

1887 1922 1902

1904

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres La montagna di luce

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

1960 (2nd ed.) 1929 1930 1910 192[8] (2nd ed.) 1941 (3rd ed.)

1904

L’eroina di Port-Arthur/ La naufragatrice

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

1899

1903 1903 1899

Sul mare delle perle – II Sul mare delle perle – II La capitana dell’Yucatan

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La capitana dell’Yucatan

1903

1903

1905

1905

181

I predoni del Sahara

João Romano Torres I predoni del Sahara

Almeida, A. Duarte João Romano Torres de ? ? Marques, Henrique (Imp. Lucas) Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres

?

João Romano Torres Le figlie dei faraoni – II

Marques Júnior, Henrique

Jolanda la figlia del corsaro nero – I

João Romano Torres

Vilalva, António

192[9]

1937 (2nd ed.) 1923 1935 1936 1962 (2nd ed.)

1924

43 A Filha do sol/Um Filho do sol 192-

42 A Filha do corsário negro

From Periphery towards the Centre

70 A Pérola vermelha

69 A Pérola vermelha

68 A Pérola do rio vermelho

1960 (2nd ed.) 1921 1951 (2nd ed.)

192[9]

67 A Pérola do rio vermelho

1924 1935

A Pérola de Labuan/ Sandokan, o corsário

1955 (2rd ed.) 1963 (3rd ed.)

1924

1948 (2nd ed.) 1956 (3rd ed.)

1940

1950 (4th ed.) 1963 (5th ed.)

66 A Pérola de Manila

65

64 A Noiva do corsário negro

63 A Noiva do corsário negro

59

A Mulher de Sandokan/ A Mulher do pirata A Mulher de Sandokan/ 60 A Mulher do pirata A Mulher de Sandokan/ 61 A Mulher do pirata A Mulher de Sandokan/ 62 A Mulher do pirata

58 A Montanha de luz

57 A Montanha de luz

182

Falcão, Garibaldi

Marques, Henrique Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Falcão, Garibaldi

Marques Júnior, Henrique

Vilalva, António

Vilalva, António

Alcobaça, Bernardo de Alcobaça, Bernardo de Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique 1900

João Romano Torres Le tigri di Mompracem – III

Le stragi delle Filippine – II

João Romano Torres La perla sanguinosa – I

João Romano Torres La perla sanguinosa – I

João Romano Torres La gemma del fiume rosso

João Romano Torres La gemma del fiume rosso

(Imp. Lucas)

João Romano Torres Le tigri di Mompracem – I

João Romano Torres La regina dei Caraibi

1905

1905

[1904]

[1904]

1897

1900

1901

1901

1900

João Romano Torres Le tigri di Mompracem – III

João Romano Torres La regina dei Caraibi

1900

1900

1902

1902

Le tigri di Mompracem – III

(Tip. Mendonça)

João Romano Torres Le tigri di Mompracem – III

João Romano Torres La montagna di luce

João Romano Torres La montagna di luce

Chapter Ten

2000 1997 1977 (4th ed.) 1925 1938 2009 1955 (2nd ed.) 1963 (3rd ed.) 1935 2000 192[8] 1931 192[8] 1964 (2nd ed.)

72 A Queda de um império

73 A Rainha das Caraíbas

74 A Rainha das Caraíbas

75 A Rainha de Mompracem

76 A Rainha dos Caraíbas 77 A Rainha dos Caraíbas

80 A Revolta das Filipinas

81 A Revolta de Sandokan

82 A Rosa de Dong-Giang

83 A Soberana do campo de ouro

84 A Terra do fogo

85 A Terra do fogo

79 A Rainha dos Caraíbas

78 A Rainha dos Caraíbas

1957 (3rd ed.)

71 A Pérola vermelha

João Romano Torres La regina dei Caraibi – I e II

João Romano Torres La regina dei Caraibi – I e II

João Romano Torres La regina dei Caraibi – I e II Via Óptima La regina dei Caraibi – I e II

João Romano Torres Le tigri di Mompracem – IV

João Romano Torres La regina dei Caraibi – I e II

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La stella dell’Araucania – II

Marques, Henrique (Imp. Lucas) Le stragi delle Filippine – I Ribeiro, António J. Círculo de Leitores ? Pinto Marques Júnior, La rosa del Dong-Giang/ João Romano Torres Henrique Tay-See La sovrana del campo d’oro – Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres I Thereza, Maria João Romano Torres La stella dell’Araucania – II

Vilalva, António

Vilalva, António

Marques Júnior, Henrique Vieira, Duarte Vilalva, António

Rodrigues, Aurora

La regina dei caraibi

La caduta di un impero

João Romano Torres La perla sanguinosa

Ribeiro, António J. Círculo de Leitores Pinto Ribeiro, António J. Círculo de Leitores Pinto

Falcão, Garibaldi

From Periphery towards the Centre

1906

1906

1905

1897

1897

1901

1901

1901 1901

1900

1901

1901

1928

1905

183

A Última aventura de Sandokan A Última aventura de Sandokan A Última aventura de Sandokan A Vingadora A Vingança de Sandokan A Vingança de Sandokan

A Vingança do gigante/ O Subterrâneo da morte

1938 1938 1930

100 A Vitória do Águia Branca

101 A Vitória do corsário 102 A Vitória do Mahdi

98 A Vitória de Lepanto

97 A Vitória de Lepanto

99 A Vitória de Sandokan

192[7]

192-

1942 1950 1977 1939 [Pb] 1940 1977 1940 (2nd ed.) 1952 (2nd ed.) 1958 (4th ed.)

1958 (2nd ed.) 1980 (3rd ed.) 1977

96 A Vitória de Lepanto

95

94 A Vingança de Sandokan

93 A Vingança de Sandokan

92 A Vingança de Sandokan

86 87 88 89 90 91

184 João Romano Torres João Romano Torres Europa-América João Romano Torres João Romano Torres Europa-América

Addio, Mompracem! Addio, Mompracem! Addio, Mompracem! La scotennatrice I pirati della Malesia I pirati della Malesia

João Romano Torres Il leone di Damasco – II

João Romano Torres Il leone di Damasco – II

João Romano Torres Le stragi della China – II

Ferreira, J. Marques Júnior, Henrique Rodrigues, Aurora Marques, Henrique

?

João Romano Torres La crociera della Tuonante João Romano Torres La favorita del Mahdi

João Romano Torres L’Aquila Bianca

Europa-América

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Il leone di Damasco – II

Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres I pirati della Malesia

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres I pirati della Malesia

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres I pirati della Malesia

Ferreira, Leyguarda Ferreira, Leyguarda Ferreira, J. Ferreira, Leyguarda Ferreira, Leyguarda Saló, Eduardo

Chapter Ten

1910 1887

?

?

1910

1910

1910

1901

1896

1896

1896

1929 1929 1929 1909 1896 1896

19319[34] 1963 (2nd ed.) 1941 1950 (2nd ed.) 1933 [L.D.] 1961 (2nd ed.) Marques, Vasco

1902

1902

[1911]

[1911]

1911

1887 1911

185

1904

1898

1905

1905

1905

1921

1921

1909

João Romano Torres Al Polo Australe in velocipede 1895

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres I naviganti della Meloria

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres I naviganti della Meloria

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il bramino dell’Assam

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il bramino dell’Assam

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres I briganti del Riff – II

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres La favorita del Mahdi – III Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres I briganti del Riff – II

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Una sfida al Polo – I Meneses, José Le avventure di Simon 112 As Aventuras de Simão Wander 1960 João Romano Torres Carlos Wander Le avventure di Simon 113 As Aventuras de Simão Wander 192? João Romano Torres Wander Marques Júnior, 114 As Filhas dos faraós 1921 João Romano Torres Le figlie dei faraoni – I Henrique Marques Júnior, 115 As Filhas dos faraós 1960 João Romano Torres Le figlie dei faraoni – I Henrique 1951 Marques Júnior, 116 As Filhas dos faraós João Romano Torres Le figlie dei faraoni – I (2nd ed.) Henrique 117 As Guerreiras do Dahomé 1934 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres La Costa d’Avorio – II Marques Júnior, 118 As Maravilhas da China 193[0] João Romano Torres I Figli dell’Aria – I Henrique

110

Ao Pólo Austral em velocípede/ 1927 Uma Viagem ao Pólo Austral 111 Ao Pólo Norte em automóvel 193[0]

109 Ao Centro da terra

108 Ao Centro da terra

107 A Volta de Sandokan

106 A Volta de Sandokan

105 A Volta de Marrocos

103 A Vitória do Mahdi 104 A Volta de Marrocos

From Periphery towards the Centre

Iolanda, a filha do corsário negro

133 Mar de sangue

132

131 Duas repúblicas em guerra

127 Aventuras de Sandokan 128 Dois fugitivos na Malásia 129 Duas repúblicas em guerra 130 Duas repúblicas em guerra

126 As Panteras de Argel

Marques Júnior, Henrique Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Manuel, José da Câmara Manuel, José da Câmara

19[32]

1998

Círculo de Leitores

João Romano Torres I solitari dell’oceano – II

Saló, Eduardo Marques Júnior, Henrique

Jolanda la figlia del corsaro nero – I

I naufraghi del Poplador

Le tigri di Mompracem – II ? I naufraghi del Poplador I naufraghi del Poplador

Le pantere di Algeri – I

Le pantere di Algeri – I

João Romano Torres Le pantere di Algeri – I

João Romano Torres Sull’Atlante – II

João Romano Torres Le meraviglie del 2000

João Romano Torres Le meraviglie del 2000

João Romano Torres Le meraviglie del 2000

João Romano Torres I Figli dell’Aria – I

Chapter Ten

1951 João Romano Torres (2nd ed.) 1960 ? João Romano Torres (3rd ed.) 1924 ? João Romano Torres 1979 ? Fernando Pereira 19Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres 1930 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres 1962 Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres (2nd ed.)

1923

124 As Panteras de Argel

125 As Panteras de Argel

1931

123 As Montanhas ardentes

122 As Maravilhas do ano 2000

1949 (2nd ed.) 1958 (3rd ed.)

19[27]

120 As Maravilhas do ano 2000

121 As Maravilhas do ano 2000

1962 (2nd ed.)

119 As Maravilhas da China

186

1904

1905

1895

1895 1895

1900

1903

1903

1903

1922

1907

1907

1907

1904

1937 1964 (2nd ed.) 1942 1950 (2nd ed.)

139 Nos Mares da Índia

148 O Capitão Morgan

147 O Capitão Morgan

146 O Capitão fantasma

145 O Capitão fantasma

144 O Atlântico em balão

143 O Atlântico em balão

142 Nova vitória de Sandokan

141 Nova vitória de Sandokan

140 Nos Mares da Índia

Sull’Atlante

João Romano Torres Il capitano della Djumna

Círculo de Leitores

João Romano Torres Sulle frontiere del Far-West João Romano Torres Sulle frontiere del Far-West

João Romano Torres L’uomo di fuoco – I

João Romano Torres L’uomo di fuoco – I

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La rivincita di Yanez

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La rivincita di Yanez

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Il capitano della Djumna

Freitas, Beatriz Gonçalves de Freitas, Beatriz Gonçalves de Ferreira, Leyguarda Ferreira, Leyguarda Ribeiro, António J. Pinto Ferreira, Leyguarda

1933 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

Attraverso l’Atlantico in pallone 1966 Attraverso l’Atlantico in Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres pallone (2nd ed.) 1933 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Gli scorridori del mare 1957 Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Gli scorridori del mare (2nd ed.) Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro 1938 Rodrigues, Aurora João Romano Torres nero – II 1955 Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres (2nd ed.) nero – II

1999

138 No Atlante

135 Na Costa do Brasil

136 Nas Fronteiras do Far-West 137 Nas Fronteiras do Far-West

19[27] 1959 (2nd ed.) 1939 1940

134 Na Costa do Brasil

From Periphery towards the Centre

1905

1905

1900

1900

1896

1896

1913

1913

1897

1897

1922

1908 1908

1905

1904

187

1930 192[7] 1959 (2nd ed.) 1956

155 O Comboio aéreo

156 O Continente misterioso

157 O Continente misterioso

158 O Corsário das Bermudas 1937 1938 1937 1938

160 O Corsário do Rio Vermelho

161 O Corsário invencível

162 O Corsário negro

159

O Corsário do Pacífico/ O Filho do corsário vermelho

152 O Capitão Tormenta

151 O Capitão Tormenta

153 O Ceptro de Sandokan 154 O Ceptro de Sandokan

1926

150 O Capitão Tormenta 1958 (2nd ed.) 1980 (3rd ed.) 1942 1950

1963 (3rd ed.)

149 O Capitão Morgan

188 Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero – II Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero – II

João Romano Torres Capitan Tempesta

João Romano Torres Capitan Tempesta

João Romano Torres

?

Rodrigues, Aurora

João Romano Torres

Straordinarie avventure di Testa di Pietra João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – I

João Romano Torres Il corsaro del fiume rosso

Marques Júnior, Henrique

1898

1915

?

1908

1909

Agência Portuguesa I corsari delle Bermude de revistas João Romano Torres Il figlio del corsaro rosso

1894

1894

1901

1928 1928

1905

1905

1905

1905

João Romano Torres Il continente misterioso

Rodrigues, Aurora

?

Freitas, Beatriz Gonçalves de

João Romano Torres Lo scettro di Sandokan João Romano Torres Lo scettro di Sandokan La montagna d’oro/ Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Il treno volante Freitas, Beatriz João Romano Torres Il continente misterioso Gonçalves de

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Ferreira, Leyguarda Ferreira, Leyguarda

?

Vilalva, António

Chapter Ten

1975 1986 1989 1994 1996 1997 2004 2010 191955 (2nd ed.) 1977 (4th ed.) 19[29]

164 O Corsário negro

165 O Corsário negro

166 O Corsário negro

167 O Corsário negro

168 O Corsário negro

169 O Corsário negro

170 O Corsário negro

171 O Corsário negro

172 O Corsário negro

175 O Deserto de neve

174 O Corsário negro

173 O Corsário negro

1963

163 O Corsário negro

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – I

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – I

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – I

Clube do Autor, S.A. Il corsaro nero – I

1898

1898

1898

1898

1898

Público Il corsaro nero – I Comunicação Social

1898

1898

1898

1898

1898

Il corsaro nero – I

Il corsaro nero – I

Il corsaro nero – I

Il corsaro nero – I

Il corsaro nero – I

Círculo de Leitores

Verbo

Verbo

Verbo

Verbo

Marques, Vasco Al Polo Australe in velocipede 1895 [pseud. of Marques, João Romano Torres – II Henrique]

Rodrigues, Aurora

? Almeida, A. Duarte de Almeida, A. Duarte de Almeida, A. Duarte de Ribeiro, António J. Pinto Almeida, A. Duarte de Almeida, A. Duarte de ? Almeida, A. Duarte de

1898

Almeida, A. Duarte Círculo de Leitores de/Morais, João Il corsaro nero – I

1898

189

Almeida, A. Duarte João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – I de

From Periphery towards the Centre

1998 1957 (2nd ed.) 192[4] 1949 (2nd ed.) 1960 (3rd ed.) 1927

179 O Filho do corsário vermelho O Filho do corsário vermelho/ 180 O Corsário do Pacífico 181 O Filho do estrangulador

184 O Filho do leão de Damasco

189 O Filtro dos califas

188 O Filtro dos califas

187 O Filtro dos califas

186 O Filho do leão de Damasco

185 O Filho do leão de Damasco

183 O Filho do estrangulador

182 O Filho do estrangulador

1952 (2nd ed.) 1960 (3rd ed.)

1923

1958 (2nd ed.) 1980 (3rd ed.)

1955

178 O Filho de Sandokan

Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Marques Júnior, Henrique Manuel, José da Câmara Manuel, José da Câmara Manuel, José da Câmara

?

?

Il re del mare – III

João Romano Torres Le pantere di Algeri – II

João Romano Torres Le pantere di Algeri – II

João Romano Torres Le pantere di Algeri – II

João Romano Torres Il leone di Damasco – I

João Romano Torres Il leone di Damasco – I

João Romano Torres Il leone di Damasco – I

?

Il re del mare – III

1903

1903

1903

1910

1910

1910

1906

1906

João Romano Torres Il re del mare – III ?

1906

João Romano Torres Il figlio del corsaro rosso

Rodrigues, Aurora ?

1908

Círculo de Leitores

1908

1952

1929

1929

Saló, Eduardo

Sandokan Rajah della Jungla Nera Il figlio del corsaro rosso

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Lo schiavo del Madagascar

1961 (2nd ed.) Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Lo schiavo del Madagascar

176 19[32]

Chapter Ten

O Escravo de Madagáscar [romance póstumo] O Escravo de Madagáscar 177 [romance póstumo]

190

19[27]

O Juramento do corsário negro/ 1989 A Noiva do corsário negro

204 O Naufrágio da Medusa

203 O Leão de Damasco

1958 (2nd ed.) 1980 (3rd ed.) 1935 [L.D.]

1956

201 O Leão de Damasco

202 O Leão de Damasco

1926

200 O Leão de Damasco

198 O Juramento do corsário negro 191963 199 O Juramento do corsário negro (3rd ed.)

197 O Juramento do corsário negro 1996

196

195 O Juramento do corsário negro 1975

191 O Homem de fogo

1959 (2nd ed.) 192 O Inverno no Pólo 191956 193 O Juramento do corsário (2nd ed.) 194 O Juramento do corsário negro 1938

190 O Homem de fogo

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique ?

?

1898

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – II

João Romano Torres Il naufragio della Medusa

João Romano Torres Capitan Tempesta – II

[1926]

1905

1905

1905

Agência Portuguesa Capitan Tempesta – II de revistas João Romano Torres Capitan Tempesta – II

1905

João Romano Torres Capitan Tempesta – II

1898

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – II

1898

1898

1898

Il corsaro nero – II

Il corsaro nero – II

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – II

Verbo

Verbo

1898

1898

João Romano Torres Il corsaro nero – II

Il corsaro nero – II

1898

Tip. Henrique Torres Il corsaro nero

Marques, Henrique Almeida, A. Duarte de ? Almeida, A. Duarte de Almeida, A. Duarte de/Vilalva, António Almeida, A. Duarte de/Vilalva, António ? Almeida, A. Duarte de Marques Júnior, Henrique Círculo de Leitores

1904

1904

João Romano Torres L’uomo di fuoco

João Romano Torres L’uomo di fuoco – II

191

?

Freitas, Beatriz Gonçalves de

From Periphery towards the Centre

1958 (2nd ed.) 2000

208 O Rei da montanha

209 O Rei do mar

O Subterrâneo da morte/ A Vingança do gigante

O Tesouro do presidente do Paraguay

217 O Tesouro dos incas

216

215 O Tesouro da Montanha Azul

214 O Tesouro da Montanha Azul

213

212 O Sol da meia noite

211 O Rei dos caranguejos

Almeida, A. Duarte de Marques Júnior, Henrique Almeida, A. Duarte de Almeida, A. Duarte de Aguilar, J. Teixeira de Marques Júnior, Henrique Il re del mare – II

João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II

Círculo de Leitores

João Romano Torres Il re della montagna

João Romano Torres Il re della montagna

João Romano Torres La nave fantasma

João Romano Torres Il naufragio della Medusa

Chapter Ten

192- [1931] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

La sovrana del Campo d’Oro – II La stella polare e il suo 1931 Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres viaggio avventuroso I/Verso l’artide com la stella polare 1959 Meneses, José João Romano Torres Le stragi della China – II (2nd ed.) Carlos Il tesoro della Montagna 1927 Machado, A. Vítor João Romano Torres Azzurra – I 1960 Almeida, A. Duarte Il tesoro della Montagna João Romano Torres (2nd ed.) de Azzurra – I Il tesoro del Presidente del 192[8] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Paraguay – II Duemila leghe sotto 1933 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres l’America/Il tesoro misterioso

19[24]

192[7]

207 O Rei da montanha

O Rei do mar/ A Derrota de Sandokan

1942

206 O Navio fantasma

210

1964 (2nd ed.)

205 O Naufrágio da Medusa

192

1888

1894

1907

1907

1901

1901

1905

1906

1906

1895

1895

? (1945)

[1926]

1979 1931940 192(2nd ed.)

220 O Tigre da Malásia

221 O Tigre da Malásia

222 O Tirano da Abissínia

O Último elefante branco/ A Cidade do rei leproso O Último elefante branco/ 224 A Cidade do rei leproso O Último elefante branco/ 225 A Cidade do rei leproso

1966 (2nd ed.) 1929 1936 1964 (2nd ed.) 1930

227 O Último tigre

228 Os Aventureiros do Canadá

229 Os Bandidos da estepe

231 Os Bandidos da pradaria

230 Os Bandidos da estepe

192-

226 O Último tigre

1957

1930

193[0]

219 O Tesouro maravilhoso

223

1961 (2nd ed.)

218 O Tesouro dos incas

La tigre della Malesia

1904

La cittá del re lebbroso – I

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

Avventure fra le PelliRosse – II

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le aquile della steppa

1900

1907

1907

1907

1928

1928

1905

1904

?

?

?

[1901]

1888

193

João Romano Torres La cittá del re lebbroso – I

João Romano Torres Il re dei rei

João Romano Torres La tigre della Malesia

Fernando Pereira

La montagna d’oro – II

Duemila leghe sotto l’America

Alcobaça, Bernardo João Romano Torres La cittá del re lebbroso – I de L’ultima tigre: le grandi Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres cacce nell’India L’ultima tigre: le grandi Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres cacce nell’India Marques Júnior, João Romano Torres Il re dell’aria – II Henrique Ferreira, Leyguarda (Imp. Lucas) Le aquile della steppa

?

Meneses, José Carlos ? Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Alcobaça, Bernardo de

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

From Periphery towards the Centre

1935 192-

236 Os Caçadores de cabeças 237 Os Caçadores de focas Os Caçadores de girafas 238 (romance de aventuras na África Austral) 239 Os Caçadores do Far-West

1963 (2nd ed.) 1910 192[1] [2nd ed.] 1936 (3rd ed.)

Os Dominadores do Rife/ Os Bandidos do Rife 243 Os Dramas da escravatura

245 Os Dramas da escravatura

244 Os Dramas da escravatura

242

1999

1937 1964 (3rd ed.)

241 Os Dois tigres

240 Os Caçadores do Far-West

1930

235 Os Boémios

1929 [Pb]

1998

1934

191-

234 Os Bandidos do Sara

232

Os Bandidos do deserto/ A Formosa judia Os Bandidos do Rife/ 233 Os Dominadores do Rife

194

João Romano Torres La giraffa bianca

João Romano Torres Il fiore delle perle – II João Romano Torres I cacciatori di foche

João Romano Torres La bohème italiana

I predoni del Sahara

1896

? ? I drammi della schiavitù Alcobaça, Bernardo João Romano Torres I drammi della schiavitù de Alcobaça, Bernardo (Imp. Lucas) I drammi della schiavitù de

1896

1896

1921

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres I briganti del Riff – I

1904

1925

1925

1902

1901 1929

1909

1903

1911

João Romano Torres I briganti del Riff – I Círculo de Leitores

1903

Livraria Internacional I predoni del Sahara

? João Romano Torres I cacciatori del Far-West – II Almeida, A. Duarte João Romano Torres I cacciatori del Far-West – II de Aguilar, J. Teixeira Círculo de Leitores Le due Tigri de

Meneses, José Carlos

Ribeiro, António J. Pinto Meneses, José Carlos ? Marques, Henrique

?

Rosa, Morais

Chapter Ten

192[8] 1942

256 Os Filhos da lua

257 Os Fugitivos da Ilha do Diabo

João Romano Torres Le due tigri – II

João Romano Torres Le due tigri – II

João Romano Torres Gli schiavi gialli

João Romano Torres Gli orrori della Siberia

João Romano Torres Gli orrori della Siberia (?)

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique

João Romano Torres

Le novelle marinaresche di Mastro Catramme Le novelle marinaresche di João Romano Torres Mastro Catramme Il tesoro del presidente del Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Paraguay – II Marques Júnior, João Romano Torres L’isola del diavolo Henrique

Marques Júnior, Henrique

1950 (2nd ed.)

Marques Júnior, Henrique

?

?

Marques Júnior, Henrique

1929

João Romano Torres I drammi della schiavitù

Alcobaça, Bernardo João Romano Torres I drammi della schiavitù de Meneses, José Le avventure di Simon João Romano Torres Carlos Wander – II

?

192[4]

1961 (2nd ed.)

1942 [Pb]

1926

Os Estranguladores/ 252 Sandokan vence o Tigre da Índia Os Estranguladores/ 253 Sandokan vence o Tigre da Índia Os Fantasmas do Mar do Norte 254 (narrativas marítimas) Os Fantasmas do Mar do Norte 255 (narrativas marítimas)

251 Os Escravos amarelos

Os Dramas da Sibéria/ Um Drama na Sibéria

1938 (2nd ed.)

249 Os Dramas da Sibéria

250

19[28]

1950 (4th ed.) 1960 (5th ed.)

248 Os Dramas da floresta

247 Os Dramas da escravatura

246 Os Dramas da escravatura

From Periphery towards the Centre

?

1894

1894

1894

1905

1904

?

1900

1906

1921

1896

1896

195

1962 (2nd ed.) 1927 1959 (2nd ed.) 1927 1942

262 Os Gigantes do Himalaia

263 Os Horrores da China

264 Os Horrores da China

265 Os Horrores da China

Os Índios do Far-West (novela de aventuras)

1999

269 Os Mineiros do Alaska 270 Os Mistérios da selva negra

271 Os Mistérios da selva negra

268 Os Mineiros do Alaska

1958 [2nd ed.] 1979 1985

267 Os Mineiros do Alaska 192[7]

1930

261 Os Gigantes do Himalaia

266

189-

192[8] 1962 (2nd ed.)

260 Os Gigantes do Himalaia

259 Os Fumadores de ópio

258 Os Fumadores de ópio

196

Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos Marques Júnior, Henrique Meneses, José Carlos Meneses, José Carlos ? Pereira, Júlio Soares Aguilar, J. Teixeira de

?

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique

Círculo de Leitores

Fernando Pereira Presença

I misteri della jungla nera

I minatori dell’Alaska I misteri della jungla nera

João Romano Torres I minatori dell’Alaska

João Romano Torres I minatori dell’Alaska

João Romano Torres Fra gli indiani del Far-West

João Romano Torres Le stragi della China – I

João Romano Torres

Le stragi della China/ Il sotteraneo della morte Le stragi della China/ João Romano Torres Il sotteraneo della morte

João Romano Torres I figli dell’Aria – II

João Romano Torres I figli dell’Aria – II

João Romano Torres I figli dell’Aria – II

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres La scimitarra di Budda – II

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres La scimitarra di Budda – II

Chapter Ten

1895

1900 1895

1900

1900

?

1901

1901

1901

1904

1904

1904

1893

1892

2003

284 Os Náufragos do Spitzberg 285 Os Peles vermelhas 286 Os Pescadores de baleias

283 Os Náufragos do Ligúria

282 Os Náufragos do Hansa

281 Os Náufragos do Hansa

280 Os Mistérios do Pólo Norte

279 Os Mistérios do Pólo Norte

278 Os Mistérios do Pólo Norte

277 Os Mistérios do Pólo Norte

276 Os Mistérios do Oriente

275 Os Mistérios do Oriente

Vilalva, António

Alcobaça, Bernardo de Alcobaça, Bernardo de Alcobaça, Bernardo de Alcobaça, Bernardo de Ferreira, Leyguarda

?

?

1931 [L.D.]

Le due tigri – I

Le due tigri – I

1896

1949

1949

1898

1898

1898

1898

1904

1904

1904

1904

1895

197

João Romano Torres I naufraghi dello Spitzberg ? João Romano Torres Avventure fra le PelliRosse – I 1900 (Tip. H. Torres) I pescatori di Balene – I 1894

João Romano Torres I Robinson italiani – II

João Romano Torres I naufraghi dell’Hansa’

João Romano Torres I naufraghi dell’Hansa’

João Romano Torres Al Polo Nord

João Romano Torres Al Polo Nord

João Romano Torres Al Polo Nord

João Romano Torres Al Polo Nord

?

?

Aguilar, J. Teixeira Temas e Debates I misteri della jungla nera de Marques Júnior, João Romano Torres Le due tigri – I Henrique Marques Júnior, João Romano Torres Le due tigri – I Henrique

Meneses, José Carlos 193- [1929] Marques, Henrique 1929 Marques, Henrique 1932 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique

1930 (2nd ed.) 1950 (3rd ed.) 1960 (4th ed.) 1951 1960 (2nd ed.)

1921

1950 (2nd ed.) 1958 (3rd ed.)

1931

Os Mistérios do Oriente/ 1924 Sandokan vence o tigre da Índia

274 Os Mistérios do Oriente

273

272 Os Mistérios da selva negra

From Periphery towards the Centre

Os Tigres da Malásia/ A Derrota de Sandokan

301 Os Últimos flibusteiros

300 Os Últimos corsários

299 Os Últimos corsários

298 Os Tigres de Monpracem

297

296 Os Solitários do oceano

295 Os Selvagens de Ceilão

294 Os Salteadores do Rife

292 Os Piratas das Bermudas Os Piratas do deserto/ 293 A Formosa judia

291 Os Piratas da Malásia

290 Os Pescadores de Trépang

289 Os Pescadores de pérolas

288 Os Pescadores de pérolas

287 Os Pescadores de pérolas

198

Falcão, Garibaldi

Falcão, Garibaldi

Falcão, Garibaldi

192[7]

Marques Júnior, Henrique Aguilar, J. Teixeira 1999 de 1938 Rodrigues, Aurora 1957 Almeida, A. Duarte (3rd ed.) de Ribeiro, António J. 1999 Pinto 1935 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique Marques Júnior, 193[2] Henrique Marques Júnior, 192[4] Henrique Aguilar, J. Teixeira 1999 de 1937 Rodrigues, Aurora 1957 Ferreira, Leyguarda (2nd ed.) Ribeiro, António J. 1998 Pinto

1921 1951 (2nd ed.) 1957 (3rd ed.)

I briganti del Riff

Le tigri de Mompracem

Círculo de Leitores

Gli ultimi filibustieri

João Romano Torres Gli ultimi filibustieri

João Romano Torres Gli ultimi filibustieri

Círculo de Leitores

João Romano Torres Il re del mare – I

João Romano Torres I solitari dell’Oceano – I

João Romano Torres Sul mare delle perle – I

Círculo de Leitores

1908

1908

1908

1900

1920

1904

1903

1911

1903

João Romano Torres I predoni del Sahara

1896 1909

I pirati della Malesia

1896

1905

1905

1905

João Romano Torres I corsari delle Bermude

Círculo de Leitores

João Romano Torres I pescatori di Trepang

João Romano Torres La perla sanguinosa – II

João Romano Torres La perla sanguinosa – II

João Romano Torres La perla sanguinosa – II

Chapter Ten

1931 (2nd ed.) 1977 1977 (4th ed.)

1924

1939 1940 1926 1938 (2nd ed.) 1958 (3rd ed.) 1937 1964 (2nd ed.)

313

Sandokan conquista 1941 Monpracem 314 Sandokan conquista um império 1977 315 Sandokan conquista um trono 1941 1948 316 Sandokan conquista um trono (2nd ed.) 1961 317 Sandokan conquista um trono (3rd ed.)

Sandokan à conquista de um 312 império

311 Sandokan

309

Rei do mar/ A Derrota de Sandokan Rei do mar/ 310 A Derrota de Sandokan

308 Raptado por vingança

307 Raptado por vingança

306 Os Vencedores da morte

305 Os Vencedores da morte

302 Os Últimos selvas ardentes 303 Os Últimos selvas ardentes 304 Os Vencedores da morte ?

Gli orrori della Siberia – II

Il re del mare – II

Europa-América

Le tigri di Mompracem – I (?)

João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II

?

1907

1900

1906

1906

1925

1925

1900

1900

1910 1910 1900

199

1907 1907

Alla conquista di un impero

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Alla conquista di un impero

Ferreira, Leyguarda (Tip. Mendonça)

1907 1907

Brito, Cidália Europa-América Alla conquista di un impero Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Alla conquista di un impero

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La riconquista di Mompracem 1908

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Alla conquista di un impero

Saló, Eduardo

Marques Júnior, Henrique

?

Almeida, A. Duarte João Romano Torres Gli orrori della Siberia – II de ? João Romano Torres I cacciatori del Far-West – I Almeida, A. Duarte João Romano Torres I cacciatori del Far-West – I de

?

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le selve ardenti Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le selve ardenti ? João Romano Torres Gli orrori della Siberia – II

From Periphery towards the Centre

Sandokan e a pantera dos Sunderbunds 1955

327

Sandokan reconquista Mompracem Sandokan reconquista 328 Mompracem Sandokan reconquista 329 Mompracem Sandokan soberano da 330 Malásia

326 Sandokan o tigre da Malásia

319 Sandokan e o rei do mar

1950

1949 (2nd ed.) 1961 (3rd ed.)

1977

2000

1977 (4th ed.) 1976 320 Sandokan e os estranguladores (6th ed.) 321 Sandokan na ilha de Bornéu 1941 1948 322 Sandokan na ilha de Bornéu (2nd ed.) 1961 323 Sandokan na ilha de Bornéu (3rd ed.) Sandokan nas montanhas de 324 1942 cristal Sandokan nas montanhas de 1950 325 cristal (2nd ed.)

318

200

1907 ? ? ?

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Sandokan alla Riscossa Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La tigre della Malesia Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La tigre della Malesia Marques Júnior, Henrique

Europa-América

La riconquista di Mompracem 1908

1908 1929

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La gloria di Yanez

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres

La Riconquista di Mompracem

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La riconquista di Mompracem 1908

Marinho, Sampaio

Verbo

La tigre della Malesia

1907

Sandokan alla Riscossa

Ferreira, Leyguarda (Tip. Mendonça)

1907

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Sandokan alla Riscossa

1906 1906

João Romano Torres Il re del mare – II

?

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le due tigri – II (?)

Marques Júnior, Henrique

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La pantera delle Sunderbunds

Chapter Ten

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres I misteri della jungla nera

1945 (2nd ed.)

1940 [Pb] 1977 (4th ed.) 1977

341 Sandokan, o corsário

342 Sandokan, o duelo dos tigres

343 Sandokan, o rei do mar

333 Sandokan tem um rival

1900

Santos, Cândida dos/ Europa-América Rodrigues, Aurora

Le tigri de Mompracem

1904

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le due tigri (?)

João Romano Torres Le tigri de Mompracem – II

1900

1900

(Tip. Mendonça)

Le tigri de Mompracem – II

1904

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le due tigri

1900

1904

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le due tigri

João Romano Torres Le tigri de Mompracem – II

1904

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le due tigri

? Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique

1904

1895

1895

1895

1895

201

Meneses, José João Romano Torres I misteri della jungla nera Carlos Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres Le due tigri

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres I misteri della jungla nera

Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres I misteri della jungla nera

1940

1952 (3rd ed.) 1958 334 Sandokan tem um rival (4th ed.) 335 Sandokan vence o tigre da Índia 1941 1945 336 Sandokan vence o tigre da Índia (2nd ed.) 1952 337 Sandokan vence o tigre da Índia (3rd ed.) 1958 338 Sandokan vence o tigre da Índia (3rd ed.) 339 Sandokan, o corsário 1924 1948 340 Sandokan, o corsário (2nd ed.)

Sandokan tem um rival 331 (romance de aventuras no Oriente misterioso) Sandokan tem um rival 332 (romance de aventuras no Oriente)

From Periphery towards the Centre

1995

352 Sandokan: o tigre da Malásia

Sandokan: os mistérios de Assame Sandokan: os piratas da 354 Malásia Sandokan: os piratas da 355 Malásia 356 Than-Kiu, flor das pérolas Um Drama na Sibéria/ 357 Os Dramas da Sibéria

353

Ferreira, J.

1977

1935 1958 (3rd ed.)

Verbo

Europa-América

1896

I pirati della Malesia

Caruso, Bárbara

1900

1901

1896

1911

Il bramino dell’Assam

Público I pirati della Malesia Comunicação Social Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Il fiore delle perle – II Almeida, A. Duarte João Romano Torres Gli orrori della Siberia de

Caruso, Bárbara

1996 2005

Campos. M. de

1977

?

1929

1896

1895

1900

João Romano Torres Le tigri de Mompracem I misteri della Jungla Nera

1900

João Romano Torres Le tigri de Mompracem

Europa-América

1900

João Romano Torres Le tigri de Mompracem

1900 1900

Le tigri de Mompracem

João Romano Torres Le tigri de Mompracem

Europa-América

Santos, Cândida dos/ Europa-América I pirati della Malesia Rodrigues, Aurora Ferreira, Leyguarda João Romano Torres La gloria di Yanez Marques Júnior, Verbo La tigre della Malesia Henrique

Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique

1976 (5th ed.) 1977 (4th ed.) 1977 (6th ed.) 1977 (7th ed.)

1977

Ferreira, J.

Chapter Ten 1977

1942

344

Sandokan, o tigre de Mompracem Sandokan, o tigre de 345 Mompracem Sandokan, o tigre de 346 Mompracem Sandokan, o tigre de 347 Mompracem Sandokan, o tigre de 348 Mompracem Sandokan, os mistérios da 349 floresta negra Sandokan, os piratas da 350 Malásia 351 Sandokan, soberano da Malásia

202

1931

359 Um Drama no mar

1905 1905

João Romano Torres Le figlie dei faraoni – II João Romano Torres Le figlie dei faraoni – II

Marques, Vasco

L’ereditá del Capitano Gildiaz

1928

1928

1928

1929

João Romano Torres Al Polo Australe in velocipede 1895

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres

1895 1905

João Romano Torres

1895

1896

?

203

Un dramma nell’Oceano Pacifico – I Un dramma sull’Oceano João Romano Torres Pacifico – I ? Le figlie dei faraoni – II

João Romano Torres I Robinson italiani – I

João Romano Torres Un dramma nel deserto

L’ereditá del Capitano Gildiaz L’ereditá del Capitano Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres Gildiaz

? Marques Júnior, Henrique Marques Júnior, Henrique

Machado, A. Vítor

?

Marques Júnior, Henrique Meneses, José Carlos

Uma Viagem na Austrália 369 (romance póstumo) [revisto por 1932 [L.D.] Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres José il peruviano Nadir Salgari]

Uma Viagem ao Pólo Austral/ 1960 Ao Pólo Austral em velocípede (2nd ed.)

368

1961 (2nd ed.)

Uma Herança de 100 milhões (romance póstumo)

367

361 Um Drama no Oceano Pacífico

1959 (2nd ed.) 362 Um Filho do sol/A Filha do sol 1921 1951 363 Um Filho do sol/A Filha do sol (2nd ed.) 1960 364 Um Filho do sol/A Filha do sol (3rd ed.) Uma Herança de 100 milhões 365 1931 (romance póstumo) Uma Herança de 100 milhões 366 193(romance póstumo)

360 Um Drama no Oceano Pacífico 1927

1938

358 Um Drama no deserto

From Periphery towards the Centre

Uma Viagem na Austrália 1964 370 (romance póstumo) [revisto por (2nd ed.) Nadir Salgari] Viagem sobre o Atlântico em 371 2010 balão

204

Castagna, Vanessa

Sopa de Letras

Attraverso latlantico in pallone

Marques, Henrique João Romano Torres José il peruviano

Chapter Ten

1896

1929

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE POWER OF LOCALITY AND THE USE OF ENGLISH: A CASE STUDY OF NON-TRANSLATION IN THE PORTUGUESE BLOGOSPHERE ALEXANDRA ASSIS ROSA

1. (We)blogs and the Blogosphere Allegedly christened by Jorn Barger in December 1997 (Hewitt 2005, 67), the “weblog” is listed by the Oxford Dictionaries Online as a noun originating in the 1990s. Weblog is identified both as a blend of (world wide) web + log, and as the full form for the more widely used abbreviation “blog”. Besides its use as an abbreviation for the noun “weblog”, the search for “blog” also returns its use as a transitive verb, to which the derivational noun “blogger” is also added (used both for the software enabling the creation of such websites and for the blog author[s]). The Oxford Dictionaries Online define (we)blog as an online regular record of incidents or “a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis”. These websites “display in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually have links to comments on specific postings”, as stated by The American Heritage Dictionary of English. According to Netlingo. The Internet Dictionary Online, as an “open forum communication tool” blogs are used to self-publish or “post” e-journal-like entries, and have three main types: blogs that post links to other sources, those that compile news and articles and those that provide a forum for opinion and commentary. In the beginning of 1999, Cameron Barret published a list of about a dozen such websites as provided by Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz

206

Chapter Eleven

who sent him the data they had been collecting (Hewitt 2005, 67). Currently, as stated by Netlingo. The Internet Dictionary Online, a new weblog is created every second of every day, which causes the number of blogs to double in size every six months. In the 2003 BloggerCon Conference at the Berkman Center of Harvard Law School, Perseus Development Corporation estimated that 4.12 million blogs had been created in eight leading blog-hosting services (Hewitt 2005, 68), although more than half of them seemed to have been abandoned. Advertised as the world’s first and largest blog search engine, Technorati currently indexes 1 247 714 blogs in its directory, profiling this “new arm of the fourth estate”: the blogosphere, also known as blogland, blogistan, blogspace or blogdom. Despite announcements that the presence of English in the World Wide Web is declining, the internet still is a notorious channel of interference for the currently hegemonic lingua franca: English. In the opening session of the EMT-2010 conference, Piet Verleysen, acting Director-General of the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission (DGT), stated that the presence of English on the internet is waning due to multilingualism and translation. English use on the internet seems to be down to less than 40 %, when it used to be 80 % a couple of years ago (Verleysen 2010). How such numbers are obtained, how categories are defined and whether hybrid language use is also considered are just a few questions that seem worth further research in Intercultural and Translation Studies. This article reports on an exploratory study of the use of English—as chief hegemonic language in our contemporary globalized world—in the Portuguese blogosphere.

2. The Portuguese Blogosphere 2.1. Is it a “blog” or a “blogue”? Considering the sway of English over today’s globalized world, even the name used in Portuguese for this particular type of webpage is revealing in this regard. The authoritative database Vocabulário Ortográfico do Português (Ortographic Vocabulary of Portuguese, VOP),1 publishes a list of loanwords, where “blog” is included, without any type 1

The Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language (VOP) is developed by ILTEC (the Institute for Theoretical and Computational Linguistics) under the scientific direction of Margarita Correia, and is available online as part of the Portal da Língua Portuguesa (Portal of Portuguese Language: http://www.portaldalingua portuguesa.org).

The Power of Locality and the Use of English

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of adaptation to Portuguese spelling rules, and without mention to any Portuguese equivalent. This foreignizing loanword is interestingly used side by side with the alternative domesticated version “blogue”, again a loanword but in this case adapted to Portuguese spelling. If we carry out a fairly basic popularity ranking by using Google search for the use of both “blog” and “blogue” in Portuguese websites, the Portuguese preference is unequivocal: “blog” has 1 600 000 hits, whereas the Portuguese spelling of the loanword “blogue” only amounts to 606 000. Such a tendency is also mentioned by Freitas et al (2003) as characteristic of Portuguese mass media, which in a distinctly foreignizing pattern tend to uphold the foreign spelling of loanwords. Searching VOP for related words and expressions, it does not list the derivational Portuguese verb “blogar”, although it shows 46 700 hits on Google in Portuguese sites. It does list “postar”, which shows 267 000 hits on Google and can also be used for the verb “post”, although these figures also combine its reflexive use for “purposely standing somewhere”, “postar-se”. VOP includes “bloguista” for “blogger”, two words that return 5 310 and 228 000 hits on Google in Portuguese sites, respectively. Interestingly, VOP does not include the use of “post” defined as the name used for texts published or posted in blogs, although it is used 6 600 000 times together with the word “blog” in Portuguese websites.

2.2. Portuguese blogs and blog names The Portuguese Media Group Impresa publishes an online popularity top of Portuguese blogs (available at http://weblog.com.pt), which currently includes 2 341 blogs ranked by Blogómetro [Blogometre] according to the average number of daily visits. Considering the 100 list heads, 23% of these Portuguese blogs either have an English-only name (8 %) or include English words and expressions (15 %). In the top 100 list of Portuguese blogs, those with English names include: “obvious”, “Extralive.TV”, “Portuguese Celebrity Girls”, “Bestcine”, “Henricartoon” or “Freesoft”. Portuguese blogs whose names include English words are, e.g., “Jogos Online”, “Futebol Live”, “Blog da Mulher Feminina”, “Twilight Portugal”, or “LOL Tuga”. Only three names in the top 100 include words in other foreign languages, e.g. “Cachimbo de Magritte”, “De Rerum Natura” or “Ndrangheta”.

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2.3. Titles in a Portuguese blog This article selected for analysis the list of post titles by the Portuguese blog “É tudo gente morta” ([Everybody is Dead], available at http:// etudogentemorta.com), which is devoted to inspiring (mostly dead) people. In this forum for commentary and opinion, all fourteen bloggers are metaphorically buried in the cemetery when they start posting. Posts include texts, figures (ranging from photographs and paintings to X-rays), video clips, songs, music excerpts, and everything else that fits the editorial line, which encompasses: music, football, religion, sex, painting, literature, anthropology, politics, economy, mathematics, science, philosophy, trivia, and love, as published in an online introduction. Posts by the Deceased are also devoted to gastronomy, personal preferences and hatreds, pop culture, porn, news headlines, travelling, and original fiction. With such a wide range of topics, this blog seemed a good candidate for an exploratory study to assess the use and influence of English in the Portuguese blogosphere. Language English French Latin Italian Spanish German Brazilian Pt. Asian languages Danish Arabic Chinese Dutch Greek Hebrew Icelandic Japanese Russian Total

Full title 111 10 14 11 5 3 1

Part of title 127 10 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1

1

156

1 1 159

Total 238 20 16 13 7 5 4 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 315

Table 11-1: Presence of foreign languages in post titles by Etudogentemorta.com (1.1.2010—30.6.2010)

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Table 11-1 shows a quantitative analysis of the presence of foreign languages in post titles. It considers all 964 posts published from January to June 2010, and shows that Portuguese-only post titles account for 67.32 % of this total, which means that 32.68 % of post titles resort to foreign languages. Within this percentage, English is present in 24.69 % of the total number of post titles. English also accounts for an impressive 75.56 % of the 315 totally or partly foreign post titles. As stated, the numbers shown in Table 11-1 identify a clear majority of English among other foreign languages used in post titles. List heads also include French and, perhaps surprisingly, Latin and Italian. These figures may be explained by personal preferences (6 and 5 in a total of 14 Latin titles are by two bloggers) or perhaps also by the current location of some of these Portuguese bloggers (8 Italian-only titles are by one blogger, in a total of 11 including Italian). 2 Consequently, the use of sixteen foreign languages in these titles profile a considerably (not only quantitatively but also qualitatively) open Portuguese culture. The hybrid nature of cultural references in this blog is portrayed by the use of foreign languages in post titles but even more so in the published posts. An interesting analytical task would be to carry out a quantitative and qualitative study of the use of foreign languages in the texts of posts as well as the use of links, quotations and allusions considering not only titles but also and especially post texts. Allusions—generally defined as “reference to something” (Leppihalme 1997, 6) or as a mediated form of intertextuality (Nord 1991)—were also found, though excluded from analysis, in a few post titles considered for this survey. Titles such as “As Flores do mal” [The Flowers of Evil], or modified allusions as in “A minha montanha mágica #2” [My Magic Mountain #2] offer a fertile ground for the analysis of intercultural interference. Since this article focuses upon the unmediated use of foreign languages and foreign language patterns, within these three examples only “#2” was considered a token of the use of English, since the Portuguese convention for cardinal numbers is “n.º” followed by the cardinal. However, the either regular or modified allusion such titles make to famous literary works portrays a further degree of mediation within intercultural interference which though not considered in this article deserves further study. 2

As stated in the introductory note “Sobre o Blog” (“About the Blog” available at http://www.etudogentemorta.com/), this is a “nomad blog” whose bloggers, though mostly located in the triangle of Lisbon, Cascais and the Algarve, also live in the USA, Italy and Brazil.

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3. Understanding and Explaining Non-translation in Portuguese Blogs In an influential article entitled “The Politics of Non-Translation: A Case Study in Anglo-Portuguese Relations”, João Ferreira Duarte proposes the concept of “non-translation, in its different guises both textual and cultural”, which takes place either by omission or by repetition. Non-translation by omission is defined as “zero replacement” or non-replacement of a source text item by “a corresponding item in the target text, regardless of whether or not it is to be compensated for elsewhere”. Non-translation by repetition takes place when “a lexical or syntactic item in the source text is carried over unchanged into the target text” and is convincingly identified with cases that “often reflect the uneven relations between cultures” (Duarte 2000, 96-97). The following five categories suggested in the article correspond to different motivations for non-translation and are: language closeness, bilingualism, cultural distance, institutionalized censorship or ideological embargo, on which the article then focuses by considering the reception of Shakespeare in Portugal in the last quarter of the 19th century. The category of non-translation applicable to the use of foreign languages and especially English in Portuguese blogs is repetition or “nontranslated transfer”, given the alternative of translating such words and expressions into Portuguese. However, it is upon the possible motivations for such a non-translation strategy as well as upon a subcategorization of this phenomenon that this article will focus.

3.1. Ideological embargo vs. linguistic/ideological infatuation As stated, the Portuguese blog under analysis shows a considerable percentage of English-only titles for Portuguese language posts, as well as the use of English words and expressions. It also shows the interference of English spelling and even syntactic order rules. Let us consider two examples. The title “Prelúdio para vuvuzela tenor” [Prelude for a Vuvuzela Tenor] shows an English (or also German) word order by using the noun “vuvuzela” as modifier before the head “tenor”, whereas the unmarked word order in Portuguese would probably have the head “tenor” post-modified by a prepositional phrase such as “de vuvuzela” [of vuvuzela]. Titles such as “Passar a Outro e Não ao Mesmo” [Pass it on to Somebody Else not to the Same Person] apply an English-language rule on the use of capital letters to a Portuguese-language title. The Portuguese

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spelling rules would recommend the use of initial capital only (Passar a outro e não ao mesmo). A first explanation for both the high percentage of fully or partially English-language titles as well as for these perhaps subtler forms of linguistic interference suggests a seemingly unquestionable reflection of asymmetrical relations between an Anglophone hegemonic culture and the Portuguese target one, “owing to cultural, economic or political ascendancy” (Duarte 2000, 97). Following the linguistic rights rationale one might even speak of linguistic oppression and imperialism, as a result of globalization.3 In terms of the value systems involved in these particular forms of nontranslation, though, such a high percentage of titles resorting to English might be classified as the opposite of ideological embargo. Non-translation by way of repetition in these titles might be due to what might be called linguistic/ideological infatuation, as this article suggests. The use of international languages becomes attractive, on the one hand, as a means of accessing transnational spaces, networks and of course elites. Indeed, some languages or some resources allow mobility across situations. Just as prestige varieties allow mobility across a considerable range of situations, so the prestige of foreign languages and especially English may be considered a “high-mobility resource” (Blommaert 2010, 12). On the other hand, the use of English also becomes an attractive way of signalling belonging to such coveted prestigious groups. Just as the use of the new communication technologies offers “shortcuts to globalization” and to living a globalized life (mostly or only) open to the contemporary elites, so does the use of English seem to symbolically mark that one belongs to that elite club of educated and culturally proficient global citizens inhabiting the Portuguese blogosphere (Blommaert 2010, 3). However, there may be more to it than meets the eye. The use of the deterritorialized language of globalization by excellence may also bear the mark of the local belonging to a restricted group: the bloggers that publish in this particular Portuguese blog. The use of the global is of symbolic value for the local, signalling the difference between leading globalized or 3

The expression “linguistic imperialism” was initially suggested by Robert Phillipson as a subtype of cultural imperialism and is nowadays used to refer to a set of political and ideological views in opposition to the fact that English has become the world’s dominant language, or, in Phillipson’s words, to the fact that: “The British Empire has given way to the empire of English” (Phillipson 1992, 1). For further information and a different stance on “linguistic imperialism”, see e.g. Crystal 1997.

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un-globalized lives. It is within the local repertoire that especially English shows such high indexical value.

3.2. The power of locality and the use of English: indigenized linguistic hegemony or vernacular globalization 1.0 To pursue this analysis, Jan Blommaert’s 2010 work The Sociolinguistics of Globalization proposes a sociolinguistics of mobile resources which may prove helpful. Following John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Gunther Kress, Jan Blommaert proposes “an approach that looks at linguistic phenomena from within the social, cultural, political and historical context of which they are part; [...] and one that so examines language in an attempt to understand society”, and adds that “[a]n ethnographically formulated sociolinguistics, seen from that angle, is a critical social science of language” (Blommaert 2010, 3). Stressing the historicity and the stratified nature of the spaces in which language use “gives you away”, the author purports to analyse the use of English also in its potential for local identity formation. But before going into the author’s proposal, let us first consider the series editor’s foreword, a threshold to the text, where Salikoko S. Mufwene mentions the need to rethink the use of English in a globalized polycentric world: Some hegemonic languages, chiefly English, have spread world-wide but have not only become “global” but also indigenized, both adapted to new communicative habits and subjected to local norms. Consequently, their market values are not universally identical across national borders; in fact, not even within the same borders. It is more and more a question of whose English it is and where it is spoken. These factors determine [...] what social representations their communication in English conjures up of the speaker or writer. (Mufwene 2010, xi)

This indigenized use of English is, therefore, subject to local norms, corresponds to specific culturally determined market values and seems to be used not necessarily with a main communicative function but first and foremost as instrumental in projecting a distinct and (in the case of the blog under analysis) a distinguished social representation of the speaker or writer. As Jan Blommaert suggests, because language is not unaffected by globalization, new forms of individual and societal multilingualism give evidence of the use of apparently the same phrases from the same language, which because they are used in different settings actually may

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correspond to different ethnographic values. This approach, presented as a sociolinguistics of mobile resources, constitutes an interesting rebuttal of popular theses about English linguistic imperialism. As the author states: “Mobility is the rule, but that does not preclude locality from being a powerful frame for the organization of meanings” (Blommaert 2010, 22). For the purpose of understanding non-translation, the power exerted by locality in the use of globality may deserve further attention. Mastering a standard variety (say standard Portuguese) allows for mobility across situations. In the case of the corpus of blog titles under consideration, this article suggests that using albeit “little bits” of the current lingua franca allows for conjuring up the high indexical value associated with high spatial mobility in a globalized world. To a certain extent, this may also be associated with the concomitant communicative and cultural competence attributed to the initially 19th century prestigious profile of the cosmopolitan, educated, well-read, wealthy traveller, later to develop into its more recent democratized version, the tourist. Or as Jan Blommaert might put it these little bits of English as “translocal” “deterritorialized” forms signal the currently high indexical value of high spatial mobility associated with globalization: We now see that the mobility of people also involves the mobility of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources, that “sedentary” or “territorialized” patterns of language use are complemented by “translocal” or “deterritorialized” forms of language use, and that the combination of both often accounts for unexpected sociolinguistic effects. (Blommaert 2010, 45)

This use of English in otherwise Portuguese texts may also be interpreted as “jumping scales” or “outscaling” as a power tactic: it means lifting a particular issue to a scale-level which may be inaccessible to others, from the local use of Portuguese to a translocal use of English, the current lingua franca and language of globalization by excellence (Blommaert 2010, 36). In this regard, the use of idiomatic expressions not familiar to the average speaker of English as a foreign language may even be more effective. 4 This may also be interpreted as a token of Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) notion of “vernacular globalization”, presented in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization and defined by 4

For that matter, the high percentage for the use of Latin or Italian in post titles may even be a more interesting case in point, though not to be covered by this article.

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Jan Blommaert as “forms of globalization that contribute to new forms of locality” (2010, 32). As this article suggests, such instances may be classified as vernacular globalization 1.0. defined as the translocal use of English because of the high indexical value locality correlates with them, as tokens related to high spatial mobility in a globalized world.

3.3. Globalized bits of language: indigenized linguistic hegemony or vernacular globalization 2.0 However, and interestingly, this use of especially English as a highmobility resource with a corresponding high indexical value does not leave it unchanged: locality changes the very language it exhibits. Paradoxically, the local use of a high-mobility resource turns it into a local resource, which may also contribute for group identity recognition. As Blommaert mentions, this use sometimes causes unexpected sociolinguistic effects. It is not just a matter of changed language because of varying market values associated with forms and because of the social representations that people using them thereby create and project for themselves. Foreign-language expressions may be used with meanings no language dictionary would identify, because they are severely indigenized bits of foreign languages. Such indigenized bits of (mostly English) language are sometimes rendered to different degrees opaque by local use, or what Blommaert might call sociolinguistic abuse. This article suggests identifying them as vernacular globalization 2.0. To illustrate this, Jan Blommaert offers the very convincing example of the use of French for the name of a Japanese rather expensive chocolate shop in an up-market department store in Central Tokio: “Nina’s derrière”. Following Bourdieu’s analysis of language as a market of symbolic capital and power, “the use of French betray[s] an aspiration to considerable chic” even if, as the author confesses, he found “the thought of offering someone chocolate obtained from Nina’s bum intensely entertaining” (Blommmaert 2010, 29). This is not French, he adds. This word is not used as a linguistic sign: “Its Frenchness was semiotic rather than linguistic.” In a local framework where the linguistic knowledge of French is rare, this sign does not function linguistically (except for the occasional French-speaking visitor). It is rather used emblematically to conjure up a complex of associative meaning related to luxury goods and high indexical value related to “foreignness” and especially “Frenchness” and “chic”. This is what Jan Blommaert classifies as semiotic rearrangement, corresponding to local uses and abuses of sociolinguistic resources, which thus while still global become part of the local:

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The bits of language that are globalized are equally bits of culture and society. That means that they always become part of the local, while they are part of the global, and at the end of global processes of semiotic rearrangement we have local usage and abuse of sociolinguistic resources. (Blommaert 2010, 19)

Though by far not as colourful as the example quoted above, the analysis of the list of titles published by the Portuguese blog came up with a similar example. Among several group activities, bloggers were presented the challenge of writing a short story. On May 3rd, one reads the following post and post title: ST Desafio à bloga: escrevam uma short neste cemitério É Tudo Gente Morta | 3 de Maio de 2010 Lançamos um desafio à blogosfera: venham escrever neste cemitério. Sejam também Gente Morta. Explicamo-nos: está em curso um desafio lançado pela EV aos coautores de É Tudo Gente Morta, o de cada um escrever uma short-story tomando como pretexto esta imagem. (my emphasis)

[Gloss] Challenge to the Blogosphere5: write a short in this cemetery Everybody Is Dead | May 3rd 2010 We challenge the blogosphere: come and write in this cemetery. Be Dead too. Let us explain this: a challenge was launched by EV to co-authors of “É Tudo Gente Morta” [Everybody Is Dead], each one should write a short story, using the following image as pretext. [my emphasis; my translation]6

Inspired by the suggested picture, bloggers whole-heartedly accepted this challenge and started posting short stories which, following in the footsteps of this first post, were nicknamed “short”, in English, preceded by a Portuguese feminine marked indefinite article: “uma short” (a[+feminine] short). This case of non-translation might result from difficulties associated with the problem of finding an adequate alternative Portuguese version for “short story”. First, anthologies mainly published in the 1930s and 1940s did introduce this literary form to the anthology reading Portuguese as “conto” (short story) but sometimes felt the need to modify it with the 5

Blogosphere does not mark the same register as “Bloga”, where a very informal nearly slangy use of blog is marked by the suffix -a. 6 http://www.etudogentemorta.com/2010/05/desafio-a-bloga-escrevam-uma-shortneste-cemiterio/ (accessed December 10, 2010).

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adjective “moderno” [modern], so as to identify the literary form developed in the 19th century and thus distinguish it from other forms also encompassed by the broad term “conto”.7 “Escreva um ‘conto moderno’” [Write a Modern Short Story], though, would loose its punch, also associated with the shortness of “short”. Second, Portuguese academia has not bestowed its blessing on any Portuguese-language version for the English expression “short story” because both “narrativa breve” and especially “conto”, the most likely national candidate, appear too vague and broad. The latter covers the English “tale” and may also be used for oral, folk tales, and children’s stories. Academics, therefore, tend to use the English “short story”, thus acknowledging the North-American influence and excellence in this literary form and its poetics, and use it preceded by a masculine marked (in)definite article: “o/um short story” (see Flora 2003). Here too there is an emblematic nuance to this use, signalling you are conversant with Literature and Literary Theory, and follow the sometimes spoken and recommended (though disputed) rule of using masculine for loanwords.8 But most importantly for this argument, is this English? Should you look for “short” in an English language dictionary available in cyberspace, you would not find any helpful definition. You would be left fending for yourself trying to figure out what “short” as an adjective might stand for here (of little or lacking in length, height, distance, quantity or time? Uncivil?) or perhaps toying with the informal use of the singular noun “short” in cinema for a short film—which would make this blogger’s challenge grow into nothing short of a formidable contest.9 Of course the choice of “escrevam” (write) in the title disambiguates its use, but only to a certain extent. It surely does not stand for a short (drink), or a short (-circuit). But it is only the following post text that fully disambiguates “short”, because it reads “each one should write a short story”, and 7

The Portuguese Publisher Atlântida, e.g., published a collection entitled “Antologia do Conto Moderno” [Anthology of the Modern Short Story]. 8 However, the gender apparently tends to be attributed to loanwords based on their most frequently used Portuguese counterpart. In the case of “uma short”, the choice of feminine may be originated by its association with “narrativa breve” [short narrative], which is feminine: “uma/a narrativa breve”. It may also be chosen by analogy with the use of the English noun “short” for short film, which in Portuguese corresponds to “uma/a curta (metragem)”, also feminine. 9 Only in the twenty-volume print-version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) would you find the use of the ellyptical “short-short” for the literary form of the short short story (first used in 1940) (OED, 325) or the countable name “short/s” for short story (used 1912, 1937, 1965) (OED, 330).

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consequently the cataphoric use of “short” in the title is easily understood as short for “short story”. However, this disambiguating move is quickly left behind (or perhaps more accurately down, in a blog) because subsequent post titles just use “uma short”, sometimes in imaginative combinations such as: 1) “Uma short short com bibelot” ([A short short with bibelot], Title, 28 June 2010)10 2) “Pleonasmo: uma curta short” ([Pleonasm: a short short], Title, 1 October 2010)11 3) “Salta uma short bem fresquinha!” ([Here comes a very fresh short], Title, 4 December 2010)12 Either pre-modifying the noun “short” with the English adjective “short” (Example 1), or premodifying it with the Portuguese adjective “curta” [short] (Example 2), or using it within stereotyped expressions (which are thus modified) (Example 3), the creative uses of “uma short” begin to spread in this blog, which may be interpreted as an effect of semiotic mobility, signalling the growing opacity of “short” as linguistic sign and underline its emblematic function as semiotic resource. As used in this blog, “short” is both translocal (an English sign, a clipped version of “short story”) and local (a Portuguese sign). The power of the locality of this blog, this group of bloggers and their cyberspatial readers exerts a “micro-hegemony” and appropriates the “Englishness” and “foreignness” of “short” in an emblematic use, which also signals belonging to this group. It has become part of the semiotic repertoire of these bloggers and their readership, and has thereby acquired a different function.

4. Final Remarks on a Second Linguistic Relativity In short, if we consider not language but discourse, language use in context, and how messages are communicated by actual participants in 10

http://www.etudogentemorta.com/2010/06/uma-short-short-com-bibelot/ (accessed December 10, 2010). 11 http://www.etudogentemorta.com/author/ev/page/2/ (accessed December 10, 2010). 12 This is a twist either on a spoken expression by fishmongers, or ice-cream vendors or on a similar expression applied to a cold drink, probably beer (http://www.etudogentemorta.com/2010/12/salta-uma-short-bem-fresquinha/ [accessed December 10, 2010]).

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specific contexts, then it is not surprising to acknowledge that the same resources used in different contexts may either intentionally or unintentionally convey different messages. This may also happen because of the variable places (and the prestige which correlates with the places) such forms occupy in historically and culture-specific repertoires, which define a second linguistic relativity: [E]ven if similar features occur all over the globe, the local histories which they enter can be fundamentally different and so create very different effects, meanings and functions. This is an instance of what Hymes (1966; also Blommaert 2005, 70) called “second linguistic relativity”: even when linguistic structures are identical, their functions can differ, depending on the place of the linguistic resources in the repertoires. (Blommaert 2010, 24-25)

Therefore, treading a path that runs opposite the rationale of linguistic rights and English linguistic imperialism, Blommaert suggests we consider the power of locality in globalized uses. As defined by Duarte (2000), underlying ideological embargo as motivation for non-translation one finds a rationale of English (linguistic) imperialism. However, in a polycentric world marked by globalization, complex forms of mobility and an ensuing super-diversity, new categories seem to be needed in order to understand and explain intercultural communication and (non)translation. This also becomes apparent because Descriptive Translation Studies research projects are often faced with translation solutions that escape the well-trodden binary path of the “here” and “there” of the target and source cultures, because they are neither here nor there, neither fully domesticated here nor fully foreignized there, but rather seem to inhabit an “in-betweenness”, as suggested by Anthony Pym (1998). Following Blommaert’s proposals, this article suggests the consideration of further motivations for non-translation resulting from value systems at stake in intercultural communication and (non)translation, to be added to the typology initially suggested by Duarte (2000). And it does so within the framework suggested by Duarte (2000) and hopefully as a contribution for the “referential validation of the theory” (2000, 96). Ideological embargo is a motivation for non-translation resulting from value systems, which constrain intercultural communication because a source item has a low indexical value within a local target culture. This article suggests a further category that is the opposite of ideological embargo. Linguistic/ideological infatuation or vernacular globalization as a constraint for intercultural communication, because a translocal source

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item has a very high indexical value within a local target culture. In an attempt to break free from binarism in Translation Studies, this article also suggests vernacular globalization may correspond to different degrees of opacity resulting from the power of locality in the resemiotization of the global involving the abuse of sociolinguistic resources. The examples analysed in this article seem to be instances of a Hymesian second linguistic relativity because their sociolinguistic profile depends on the place they occupy in the local repertoire. As this article has tried to show, these categories seem applicable to the complex in-betweenness of some instances of intercultural communication in a multilingual globalized (non)space of the Portuguese blogosphere, and maybe also beyond it.

Bibliography Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Correia, Margarita, and Lúcia Lemos. 2005. Inovação lexical em português. Lisbon: Colibri. Crystal, David. 1997. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duarte, João Ferreira. 2000. The Politics of Non-Translation: A Case Study in Anglo-Portuguese Relations. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 13 (1): 95-112. É tudo gente morta, http://etudogentemorta.com (accessed December 10, 2010). Flora, Luísa Maria Rodrigues. 2003. Short Story: um género literário em ensaio académico. Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa/Edições Colibri. Freitas, Tiago, Maria Celeste Ramilo, and Elisabete Soalheiro. 2003. O Processo de integração dos estrangeirismos no português europeu, http://www.iltec.pt/pdf//warticles/2003-redip-estrangeirismos.pdf (accessed December 10, 2010). Hewitt, Hugh. 2005. Blog. Understanding the Information Reformation that is Changing your World. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Leppihalme, Ritva. 1997. Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2010. Series Editor’s Foreword. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Edited by Jan Blommaert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i-xii.

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Netlingo. The Internet Dictionary Online, http://www.netlingo.com/ (accessed December 10, 2010). Nord, Christiane. 1991. Text Analysis in Translation. Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Applications of a Model for Translation-Oriented TextAnalysis. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Oxford Dictionaries Online, http://oxforddictionaries.com (accessed December 10, 2010). Oxford English Dictionary. 1992. 2nd edition. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, Robert H. L. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pym, Anthony. 1998. Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. The American Heritage Dictionary of English, http://education.yahoo. com/reference/dictionary/ (accessed December 10, 2010). Verleysen, Piet. 2010. Opening Session of 2010-EMT Conference. 12.10.2010—Video, http://scic.ec.europa.eu/str/index.php?sessionno= 806beafe154032a5b818e97b4420ad98 (accessed December 10, 2010). Vocabulário Ortográfico do Português—VOP (Ortographic Vocabulary of Portuguese), http://www.portaldalinguaportuguesa.org (accessed December 10, 2010). Weblog.com.pt, http://weblog.com.pt/portal/blogometro/?pag=lista (accessed December 10, 2010).

CHAPTER TWELVE THE (UN)TRANSLATABILITY OF FRAILTY: ON DEAFNESS AND HUMOUR IN FOUR RENDERINGS OF DAVID LODGE’S DEAF SENTENCE ALEXANDRA LOPES

1. Avant Propos: Perpetuum mobile Misunderstand me correctly. Julian Barnes, “Silence” (2005, 204)

Like dreams, we are such stuff as metaphors are made of. Metaphors enable us to better understand both the world and ourselves, allowing us to construe meaning by relating what is novel to what is familiar. Metaphors link seemingly disparate concepts,1 thereby generating and displaying new understandings of a given reality. As far back as Aristotle’s conceptualization, metaphor has provided the means to grasp the foreign, and here is where, conceptually, metaphor meets translation:2 “It is metaphor [...] that gives perspicuity, and a foreign air, and it cannot be learnt from anyone else” 1

The classic definition of metaphor is, of course, Aristotle’s: “Metaphor is the transference of a term from one thing to another; whether from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy” (Aristotle 1987, 55). 2 As many have noted before, “metaphor” and “translation” share a common ground of semantic value, since both refer etymologically to processes of transference, of mobility of meaning. See Barnstone (1993, 15): “[B]oth words, metafora and translatio, have the root meaning of ‘carrying across’, their way of saying ‘transportation’. Yet translatio also means ‘translation’, and gave us our English word. Although the common word for translation in Ancient Greek is metaphrasis, metafora signifies not only carrying across but, in ancient rhetoric, transference of a word to another sense.”

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(Aristotle 1958, 355 [1405a]). Comparative at heart and hence fundamentally agile—every metaphor forces us to move intellectually from one plane to another—, metaphors may well represent the very conditions of human cognition. 3 “Cognition is recognition” (Steiner 1996, 142): every single impulse towards knowledge is comparative at the outset. Yet, as Jacques Derrida was keen to remind us, “metaphor is never innocent. It orients and fixes results” (Derrida 1978, 19). Transference often tends to slant the perspective towards the familiar, the recognizable—thus rendering us irredeemable hostages to preexisting conceptual grids, incapable of effectively “translating” ourselves and our worldview into other possibilities. Arguably, metaphors serve knowledge best if/while they retain their status, their metaphoricity (Attridge 2004, 96, 118), as the site where the well-known struggles with the unfamiliar in perpetual instability, thus bearing the possibility of (new) meaning(s). In other words, performing metaphoricity as knowledge involves an awareness of the transferral—of the movement—engendered and maintained by a metaphor. It is precisely the double bind of novelty and familiarity that resonates with possibilities of seeing the world in an unexpected light. If Paul Éluard is right in assuming that “we inhabit the forgetfulness of our metamorphoses” (2002, 58; my translation), metaphors are powerful reminders of our ever-present metamorphosis. And it is this ever-evolving mobility that brings us close to the act of translation: “So one sign breeds another, there is unending process of rewording, retelling, translation, transmutation, and wherever we turn, where meaning is sought, where mental activity takes place, we are living inescapably in the eternal condition of translation” (Barnstone 1993, 19). The previous considerations arose out of the perplexity—in the double sense of puzzlement and problem—with the title of the present volume, and its import to the objects I propose for discussion: four translations of David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence. My problem and puzzlement can be thus briefly summarized: periphery is part of a binary metaphor often applied to clarify the many shades and hues of the ongoing dialogue between translations and originals, thus transferring what was originally a geopolitical and geo-economic perception of reality to an intellectual mobility, for, as Susan Sontag so aptly (and metaphorically) puts it, “[t]ranslation is the circulatory system of the world’s literature” (2007, 3

Note that speech itself is, in its convoluted, meandering and (self-)referential patterns, already metaphorical. Ortega y Gasset, in a much quoted essay, argued that “[l]anguage is today a mere joke” (cited in Venuti 2000, 58) because we do not believe what we say, i.e., we speak metaphorically.

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177). While of undeniable importance to Postcolonial Studies, the centreperiphery metaphor is not without dangers when applied to translation, as it is susceptible to crystallize the objects into fixed positions, with source languages, texts and cultures seen as central and translated texts and cultures regarded as peripheral. 4 What this perception—often shared by scholars who insist on the secondariness of translation and those who “victimize” translation, in order to denounce its invisibility—eschews is, of course, mobility as meaning: “Instability—eternal transformation—may be uncomfortable, but it is best to live with it. Because the dream of capturing and stilling words must really be seen as an allegory for death, a bad JOKE, it is better to accept movement—translation—and live with peppy Proteus and Heraclitus, the two Greek JOKERS” (Barnstone 1993, 268; emphasis in the original). Rashly identifying the centre with the more obvious power locations (“originals”, canons) and peripheries with far more dispossessed landscapes (translations, rewritings) has all the (dis)advantages of a conceptual grid, and may prevent us from noticing one singular fact: no periphery ever perceives itself as being wholly peripheral. In other words, not only are the so-called peripheries central in their worldview, they also act as such in their own right, both within their borders and in the relations with their own peripheries. Peripheries and centres exist in co-dependency and, when seen historically, are anything but static. In short: centres and peripheries replicate themselves in always new patterns of power both chronologically and spatially. This is also true for translation. If we step out of rather limited and highly determined contexts, a translated text is, in cultural terms, not primarily a translation but the original in another language. Most readers believe they are reading David Lodge, not Maurice and Yvonne Couturier or Tânia Ganho. Of course, they too are speaking metaphorically (and metonymically), but for most of them the metaphor is lost, as the translation they are reading stands for the original, is the original, the only original most readers will ever know. Periphery (translation) thus becomes central in the host culture, and the incongruous double act that is translation takes place: in order to be widely read in France or Portugal, the author—David Lodge, in this instance—has to become peripheral, his words have to take second place to the translator’s 4

Pascale Casanova (2004, 2010) also explicitly rejects the metaphor and suggests replacing “the binary ‘centre/periphery’—which has only spatial or hierarchical implications—by the ‘dominating/dominated’ opposition, which implies a structure of domination and power struggles” (Casanova 2010, 289). The replacement does not, however, avoid a binary worldview, and, in general, tends to forget that power relations work in more than one direction.

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words. To some extent, the author has to disappear, so that the text can live on in the words/language of another—the dedicatee becomes the author.5 Whereas the concept of the “original author” is ubiquitous, his words have to vanish and be replaced by those of the translator, his/her “stand-in”. The latter, however invisible he/she may be, is the proponent of a new centre radiating new words with different histories and associations, thus necessarily creating a new text with different margins6 and different reading possibilities. For the purposes of the present reflection, I would like to suggest that the title of this volume, while thought-provoking, can only be answered with a new set of questions: what is periphery?, and why do we expect it to be nothing but peripheral? The following is an attempt to showcase the mobility that inhabits—etymologically, intellectually, metaphorically—the meaning of the word periphery when applied to translation, an activity (and a word) that seems to invite movement: [A] translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. (Benjamin 2000, 16; my emphasis)7

2. Transgressing Metaphors: Centres, Peripheries & other Fragilities periphery, n. pl. -eries. 1. the external boundary of any surface or area 2. the external surface of a body. 3. the edge or outskirts, as of a city or urban area. 4. the relatively minor, irrelevant, or superficial aspects of the subject in question... 5. Anat. the area in which nerves end. [1350-1400; < LL peripherƯa < Gk periphéreia circumference, lit., a bearing round, equiv. to peri- PERI 5 The novel to be analysed is dedicated to translators. For further discussion of this topic, see next section. 6 Although I would not care to suggest reducing the concept of “margins” in a text to the paratextual information, it is uncontroversial that the mere existence of footnotes changes the textual landscape as far as its content and structure are concerned. Footnotes exist beyond well-defined textual borders, usually in the form of a dividing line. To this effect, see the Portuguese and French versions. The Spanish version separates footnotes by means of a different lettering size. 7 I am well aware that mobility in translation has different implications for Benjamin than those I am highlighting here. However, it cannot be emphasized enough that translation—and metaphor—is an agent of movement, of change, of instability.

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+phér(ein) to BEAR + -eia -Y; r. ME peripherie < ML periferia, var. sp. of LL peripherƯa]—Syn. 1. circumference, perimeter.—Ant. 1. 2. center. (Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 1996, 1441)

David Lodge’s most recent work, Deaf Sentence, is simultaneously a homage to translators and a statement in defiance of translation. Because he is aware of the many (un)solvable difficulties his novel on a deaf professor purports to its translation into any other langu/age, Lodge chose to dedicate this work to translators, in general, and his translators, in particular. 8 Thus, the traditionally peripheral translation and translators take centre stage, as the text proffers linguistic and literary selfreferentiality as one of its focuses. By emphasizing both the difficulty and importance of translations, and particularly of the translation of his book, the author is making—one could argue—a case for reading translations.

3. How Centred is the Centre? Conscious that this novel, from its English title onwards, presents special problems for translators, I dedicate it to all those who, over many years, have applied their skills to the translation of my work into various languages... (Lodge 2007, 1)

Once the challenge presented by the dedication is accepted and different versions of the novel Deaf Sentence are read, 9 one aspect becomes self-evident for the reader and/or Translation Studies (TS) researcher: translating this book inherently requires upsetting any metaphors aiming to crystallize meaning, as well as clear-cut boundaries between traditional conceptions of centre and periphery. From its inception, Deaf Sentence is decentred, both linguistically and thematically. This is clear right from the beginning of the novel, as the detached, witty third-person narrator of the first four pages translates 8

The dedication marks a new and most interesting instance of self-referentiality in translation: the translators translate a book dedicated to them because the author had them in mind when writing a book that may very well be untranslatable, while knowing that it will most certainly be translated. The degree of self-referentiality increases in the cases of the translators mentioned by name in the dedication, as Maurice and Yvonne Couturier and Renate Orth-Guttmann. 9 The selection was determined, first and foremost, by the languages I read: Maurice and Yvonne Couturier’s La Vie en sourdine (2008), Tânia Ganho’s A Vida em surdina (2009), Renate Orth-Guttmann’s Wie bitte? (2009), and Jaime Zulaika’s La vida en sordina (2010).

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himself into a first-person voice who presents the reader with a journal of his mishaps and uncertainties as a deaf person trying to come to terms with his own handicaps—besides deafness, age and gender also signal fragility in the novel. The effect is one of zooming in on the main character, unexpectedly enlarging his shortcomings as well as his humanity. The protagonist—literally, the first combatant—could not be farther removed from etymology: owing to his deafness but also to his age and personality, Desmond Bates is someone whom things happen to, always in the periphery of conversations and intentions, always on the margins of understanding, never absolutely certain of what is going on around him (see, for instance, the first meeting with Alex Loom or the conversation with Sylvia Cooper). Hence, most of the subsequent entries in the journal reflect the (un)translatability of frailty, be it in the form of a physical disability (deafness), of the instability of meaning (humour, quips, misunderstandings), or even of the ever controversial attempt at making the other (people, language, texts) intelligible. At the heart of the novel is the concern with language as a means of mediating one man’s solitude and growing sense of isolation. The major difficulty the novel posits to translators may very well lie in the fact that it takes deafness as a pretext to bring the instability inherent to every form of communication to the fore, precisely because communicating is always, one way or another, dependent on small acts of translation. If we accept the hermeneutical principle that translation is prior to all communication,10 then the core of fragility will have to be allocated to understanding as translation. Novels, such as Deaf Sentence, that have language as their focal point simply render visible—ostensibly, hilariously visible—what we knew all along to be true but are likely to forget in everyday life (as in Literary Studies): that language shifts and changes perpetually, that meaning is unstable and communication is nothing if not fragile. Thus deafness becomes a means to discuss the (im)possibility of translating 10

See Friedrich Schleiermacher’s seminal text On the Different Methods of Translating: “And do we not frequently feel compelled to translate the speech of people who are quite like us but of a different cast of mind?—that is, if we feel that the same words in our mouth would take on a different meaning, or at least be weighed differently, more strongly or more weakly, in theirs, and if we wanted to say what they meant, we would have to use totally different words and phrases. It will then come to us, as we bring this feeling into sharper focus, incorporate it into our thinking, that we are translating. Sometimes we even have to translate our own words, when they feel alien and we want to make them truly our own once again” (Schleiermacher 1997, 226; emphasis in the original). See also Steiner (1998, 150).

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oneself through language. “In short: inside or between languages, human communication equals translation” (Steiner 1998, 49). Furthermore, the depiction of deafness in narrative terms implies many language-based misprisions and confusions which may be entirely lost in translation because they are dependent on the inner workings of the English language. The complexity unfolds from the very beginning with the novel’s title—Deaf Sentence—, a pun involving the near homophone “death” and “deaf”. The play on the words death/deaf pervades the entire text, as the protagonist acknowledges at the end of the novel: “‘Deafness is comic, blindness is tragic,’ I wrote earlier in this journal, and I have played with variations on the phonetic near-equivalence of ‘deaf’ and ‘death’” (Lodge 2007, 305). This is further complicated by the narrator’s penchant to misquote idioms—such as “[d]amn your ears” and “[t]here’s more than meets the ear”—, as well as children’s songs, in order to prove that deafness is indeed comic. It is not possible to include textual evidence of all the relevant cases, but puns, mistakes in English, linguistic exercises at the lip-reading class and near homophonous words abound in the novel. The translators’ options vary from total or partial omission to the inclusion of a footnote or recreation:11 Puns

ET: [Imaginary Viagra commercial] Rise again this Easter (174)

ST: “¿Resucita esta Pascua?” (202)

Loss of pun

Mistakes in English

ET: Father Christmas bringed Daniel an icicle (187)

PT: —O Pai Natal trazeu uma chiclete ao Daniel—disse ele. (206)

Halfway replication/ recreation

Exercises at the lip-reading class

ET: The clues were pretty easy: An egg encased in sausage meat... A famous explorer... A game played by children... One that foxed everybody was A customary tax. I pretended I didn’t know the answer: “a scot”.

FT: Les indices étaient assez faciles: tissu à carreaux de différentes couleurs... geste par lequel un certain légume se voit déshabillé... l’indice qui a intrigué tout le monde a été “consiste à enlever la côte des feuilles de tabac”. J’ai fait

Partial omission with different examples

11

Due to space constraints, it is not always possible to include examples of the four translations. The selection was based on the extract’s pertinence to illustrate the point at hand.

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Near homophonous words

Intertextuality

Chapter Twelve Nothing to do with Scotland of course—it’s Old English, now obsolete, though it survives in the expression “scot-free”. (261)

semblant de ne pas connaître la réponse: “écôter”. (350)

ET: There’s a lot of mutual kindness and compassion here on Deaf Row. (306)

FT: Il y a beaucoup de gentillesse et de compassion mutuelle ici. (410) ST: Hay mucha deferencia y compasión aquí, en el “corredor de los sordos”. (351) PT: Bondade e compaixão não faltam aqui, no Corredor da Surdez + FOOTNOTE (352)

Total omission/ Loss of pun

FT: (95) GT: Taubheit, wo ist dein Stachel? (85) PT: Onde está, ó surdez, o teu aguilhão? (77)

Omission

ST: (82)

Omission

ET: Deaf, where is thy sting? (67)

Loss of pun + Explanation

Footnote: Altered Bible quotation of “O death, where is thy sting?” (Cor 15:55)

Note: ET = English text; ST = Spanish translation; PT = Portuguese translation; FT = French translation

Desmond Bates, the main character, is a retired, self-deprecatory Linguistics professor who makes the task of translators all the more complex because he handles his deafness with a mixture of humour, sadness and erudition.

The (Un)Translatability of Frailty ET A poet called Larkin, too—it’s almost too funny in a black way, deafness and comedy going hand in hand, as always. (14)

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FT Un poète qui, en plus, s’appelle Larkin—c’est presque drôle, dans le genre humour noir, la surdité et la comédie allant main dans la main, comme toujours. + FOOTNOTE: Lark signifie “alouette”. (22)

The juxtaposition of humour and erudition compound the difficulty of translating all the witticisms and peculiarities of the comings and goings of the deaf professor who uninterruptedly quotes poets, writers and thinkers in order to come to terms with his frail condition: Jonson’s “Drink me only with thine ears...” (Lodge 2008, 14; emphasis in the original), Macaulay’s “To every man upon this earth,/Deaf cometh soon or late”, Dylan Thomas’s “After the first deaf, there is no other” (Lodge 2008, 21; emphasis in the original), “Deaf and the maiden” (Lodge 2008, 129), and Hemingway’s “Deaf in the Afternoon” (Lodge 2008, 224; emphasis in the original), are but a few. In the beginning, therefore, there was a novel. A novel often at odds with the very language in which it was written, and that language’s history and literary achievements, because, as George Steiner has deftly argued, “[w]hen using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history” (Steiner 1998, 24), and Deaf Sentence is a monument to the fears, the misunderstandings, and ultimately the joy of communicating, knowing too well that much can be lost in the act of translating meaning from one set of ears to another. The question is, of course: if translation— the idea of translation as well as translating in very mundane circumstances—permeates the novel, what will the actual translations of the work need to achieve to do justice to the text? How have different translators in various languages negotiated the information load, the humour, the many instances of intertextuality with English textual tradition, and the translational misunderstandings due to the protagonist’s deafness? Comparative at heart, these considerations will linger on the difference that each of the four translations represents, describing and discussing their options while searching for possible links to other translations. Thus, translation networks—and their changing centres and peripheries—are foregrounded in the conviction that mapping out the sites of interconnectedness in readings and renderings sheds important light on any translational work.

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4. The Heart of the Matter: Peripherality & Xenophilia The craft of the translator is [...] deeply ambivalent: it is exercised in a radical tension between impulses to facsimile and impulses to appropriate recreation. In a very specific way, the translator “re-experiences” the evolution of language itself, the ambivalence of the relations between “languages and worlds”. In every translation the creative, possibly fictive nature of these relations is tested. Thus translation is no specialized, secondary activity at the “interface” between languages. It is the constant, necessary exemplification of the dialectical, at once welding and divisive nature of speech. (Steiner 1998, 246)

According to George Steiner in the text just quoted, translation is akin to language itself, abiding in the core of linguistic processes—translators, therefore, must “re-experience” and re-enact the intricate history and inner workings of a given language. All the more so when the text to be translated is already evocative of such meanderings. Should we accept that translation dwells in the creative nucleus of language, then we have to admit that, far from being peripheral, translation is indeed central to communication, and each interlingual translation is, in a way, an outpost of this centrality. While its symbolic value may be socially inferior to the so-called originals,12 the peripheral nature of translation is nothing but a ruse, whose origins are multifarious.13 A very effective ruse, but one which erases—or wishes to erase—the fact that languages and cultures are built on a translational impulse, an impulse which could be described as a will to acknowledge the other, both inside and outside of the self: “A translation is an X-RAY, not a XEROX. A [...] translator is a XENOPHILIAC” (Barnstone 1993, 271; emphasis in the original). For reasons discussed in the previous section, comparing the French, German, Portuguese and Spanish renderings of Deaf Sentence offers a unique insight into the difference that necessarily inhabits translation, any translation. Peter Bush sums it up:

12

Bassnett is eloquent on this matter: “So pervasive is the hierarchical division between writing and translating that in the academic world scholars are discouraged from listing their translations as serious publications, and an article in an obscure theoretical journal can be ranked as superior to a translation of a work by Pushkin or Dante” (2006, 173). 13 See, for instance, Bassnett’s reflection on the perceived secondariness of translation in “Writing and Translation” (2006, 173-174).

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Translatory readings of literature provoke the otherness within the subject of the translator, work at a level not entirely under the control of rationalizing discourse of the mind, release ingredients from the subconscious magma of language and experience, shoot off in many directions, provoked by the necessity of the creation of new writing. A professional translator is one who is aware of this process, gives it full rein, and is able to hold it in check as one lateral lever for meaning and a source for potential language. [...] Translators’ subjectivities are tempered by style, interpretation and research within a professional strategy that is driven by an ethical and emotional engagement, they want readers to experience and enjoy some of what they feel when reading the original and naturally what is added by the translation, the new literary architecture. (2006, 25)

New literary architectures are exactly what each translation of the work offers its readers. Those who, beyond every reasonable presupposition, still expect/require translation to be an exact copy of the “original” would be confounded by the degree of individuality that each text presents. Each version clearly results from different approaches both to translation and to language and humour. This may be all the more puzzling as all four renderings share some relevant common ground: (1) they all appeared within two years of the publication of Lodge’s book (2008); (2) they were all produced in Western Europe; (3) three out of the four are translations into Romance languages; and (4) the five translators are experienced and have translated a wide range of English-speaking authors. Still, “difference” is the operating word when we look at the four texts as if the translators seemed keen to showcase the assumption that “it is absurd to see translation as anything other than a creative literary activity” (Bassnett 2006, 174). The different texts will now be briefly discussed. The starting point of the comparison was the marked Englishness of the novel and the obstacles it might represent for translators, particularly when deafness exponentially increases the weight of language as a carrier of Englishness, for example when using puns. The German translation (2009a) is a text which aspires to solve difficulties creatively without obvious recourse to the source text and language, whenever Renate Orth-Gutmann deems it feasible. The most obvious signs of this will to autonomy are the following: (1) the title of the book changes from an untranslatable quip, Deaf Sentence, to Wie bitte? [I Beg your Pardon?], probably the most repeated request of a deaf person; (2) this decision is almost immediately reinforced by the replacement, rather than the literal translation, of the epigraph—in English this is a definition of the word “sentence” taken out of The New Shorter Oxford

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English Dictionary 14 —by a dictionary definition of “taub” [deaf], followed by the reference to a German dictionary: “DUDEN—DEUTSCHES UNIVERSALWÖRTERBUCH”; (3) there is no recourse to the English language in the body of the novel, other than the odd—but widely accepted—Anglicism, almost everything else gets recreated in German; (4) the supplementary paratextual information by the translator is reduced to one footnote a propos the word “Deafies”, which directs the reader to a glossary; (5) at the end of the book, one finds the mentioned list— “Handreichungen für den deutschsprachigen Leser” (glossary [literally, helping hand] for the German-speaking reader) (Lodge/Orth-Guttman 2009a, 363-367)—comprising twenty-three references and/or explanations, mostly of works quoted in the novel and always alluding to existing German translations, thus effectively and literally creating a new web of intertextual relationships. Other than the footnote mentioned above, no other reference is made to these notes in the German-speaking novel. The French, Portuguese and Spanish translations all present variations on the same title, a title that was most probably borrowed from the French attempt at translating the untranslatable, as the French text precedes the other two—La Vie en sourdine, A Vida em surdina, La vida en sordina.15 The title shifts the focus of the novel, as it is both more serious and blander than the English title, and, most importantly, loses the pun. However, it signals the overall strategy the reader can expect from the three very different translations: even if they deal with their entanglement quite differently, they clearly remain hostages to the Englishness of Deaf Sentence. The French translation is best characterized by the dilemma of its first footnote. The footnote refers to the epigraph, which is translated literally, and proffers as way of explanation and/or justification the double-bind of its strategy—by wishing to remain close to the source text, the version becomes commentary on the limits of translation (and language):

14

In the English text, we can read: “Sentence noun. Middle English [Old French from Latin sententia mental feeling, opinion, philosophical judgement, from sentire feel] 1. Way of thinking, opinion, mind... 2b. The declaration in a criminal court of the punishment imposed on a person pleading guilty or found guilty... 5. A pithy or memorable saying, a maxim, an aphorism... 7. [...] A piece of writing or speech between two full stops or equivalent pauses” (Lodge 2007, 1). 15 La Vie en sourdine and its avatars are difficult to translate back into English. One possible translation could perhaps be “living a muffled life”.

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1. Le titre anglais du roman Deaf Sentence signifie littéralement: “sentence de surdité”, et joue sur la quasi-homophonie de deaf (“sourd”) et death (“mort”). Intraduisible en français cette homophonie est retranscrite telle quelle dans le texte. (Toutes les notes sont des traducteurs.) (Lodge/Couturier 2008, 7)

The translators surrender to the irrationality of languages, as Schleiermacher would put it: [T]he greater the distance between the two languages either chronologically or genealogically, the less true it is that any given word in one will correspond precisely to one in the other, or that an inflection in one will unify the same complex of relationships in the other. (1997, 227)

The proffered solution is twofold: (1) to include English words and phrases and poems in the French text, and translate them literally in the textual periphery of the footnotes, and (2) to omit every segment that can be cut without jeopardizing sequentiality: “Deafness is comic” proposition

ET One of the strongest curses in the English language is “Damn your eyes!” (much stronger than “Fuck you!” and infinitely more satisfying—try it next time some lout in a white van nearly runs you over). “Damn your ears!” doesn’t cut it. (14)

FT Une des injures les plus fortes dans notre langue, un peu démodée aujourd’hui, est: “Damn your eyes!” [FOOTNOTE: Littéralement “maudit soient tes yeux”] (beaucoup plus fort que “Fuck you!” et infiniment plus satisfaisant—essayez cela la prochaine fois qu’un butor dans une camionnette blanche essaiera de vous écraser.) “Damn your ears!” ne fait pas le poids. (23)

Inclusion of English words and footnote

What gets lost at times, though, is the singular combination of erudition and humour. Unlike the German text, the French version presents itself to the reader as an unequivocal translation, i.e., a text that invites its readership, right from the outset, to read it as a text that has its meaning partially elsewhere, and this partial elsewhereness is best represented by a textual incision in the form of footnotes.

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The Spanish version is close to the French in the conception of translation it reveals, though not as consistent. There are omissions—the epigraph is conspicuously missing—and eighteen footnotes added to the French version’s thirty two. Most important, though, is the incongruence of some of the choices. In fact, Jaime Zulaika seems to have had a change of heart during the translating process. Consequently, footnotes are the site either of the English text, which appears translated in the body of the Spanish version or of the translation into Spanish when the text is left in English. The explanation for this perceived inconsistency may lie in the fact that shorter quotations are inserted in the syntax of the novel and translating them may be a reader-friendly gesture, one that aims to keep the text flowing. However, this explanation is defeated by the awkwardness, later in the novel, of translating longer quotations—for instance, the poems by Tom Harrison and Philip Larkin in chapter 20— without any allusion to a source text. Along with the omissions, this lends the translation an air of inconsequence. The Portuguese translation is perhaps the most puzzling, as the translator seems overtly preoccupied with translating—not recreating— every word. Most of the time, the translator prefers to explain, rather than recreate, puns and other stylistic devices. To better pursue this goal, the translator resorts to a multiplicity of strategies which appear at times to be at odds with each other. The result is a “loud” text with forty-five footnotes, some of them perhaps unnecessary, 16 many intratextual explanations—a handful of which are very clever and might have successfully replaced some of the footnotes17—and some rather dubious replacements, as in the substitution in chapter 11 of a nursery rhyme by the Portuguese children’s song “Atirei o pau ao gato” [I threw a stick at the cat], which makes no sense on an Englishman’s lips. There is some inconsistency in the handling of the literary quotations, as some source texts are reproduced in the footnotes, and others are not. The overall impression is one of a laborious version by a translator who is clearly able but perhaps too keen to show she is up to the task. Consequently, the text is overburdened with paratextual information that may produce a version where erudition out trumps humour. That being said, this is a version that resists surrendering to the irrationality of languages and tries its best to prove translation is feasible. 16 See, for instance, the explanation of Bloomingdale’s (Lodge/Ganho 2009b, 113) or of Britannia (Lodge/Ganho 2009b, 198), and Buck’s Fizz (Lodge/Ganho 2009b, 206). 17 For example, while all other versions use a footnote to explain what Downside is, Ganho adds “colégio beneditino” [Benedictine private school] to its name, a highly economical solution.

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Globally, it should be noted that translating Deaf Sentence may be comparable to one of the labours of Hercules, and the differences between the four translations illustrate this abundantly. Not only does the number of footnotes vary—32 in the French text, 23 endnotes in the German version, 45 in the Portuguese translation, and 18 in the Spanish—, as they differ in kind and explanation. Let us take the “Deaf and the maiden” reference as an example. All translations present a footnote/endnote. Here is how different translators solve the conundrum:18 FT 1. Référence au titre d’une pièce de théâtre célèbre de l’écrivain chilien Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden. (176)

GT Anspielung auf “Death and the maiden”—“Der Tod und das Mädchen”; gängiges Motiv in Literatur, Kunst und Musik seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, u. a. Titel eines Streichquartetts von Franz Schubert (1824) und eines Films von Roman Polanski (1994). (366)

PT 1. Trocadilho com A Morte e a donzela, título do segundo andamento do Quarteto de Cordas em Ré Menor (1824) de Franz Schubert, e título também de uma peça do dramaturgo chileno Ariel Dorfman, mais tarde adaptada ao cinema. (N. da T.) (142)

ST 1. Referencia al título de la obra de Ariel Dorfman La muerte y la doncella. (N. del T.) (152)

ET: “The pastime of the dance went to pot,” Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, “so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows’ in-laws finding they stuttered. “What?” I said.

GT: “Es fetzte der letzte Zankscheich urlaut, war nur Scheiß...”—so jedenfalls verstand ich Sylvia Cooper... wir verbrachten die Eiszeit in unserem Pfandhaus, die Kollegen erschossen!” “Wie bitte?”, fragte

PT:—A última vez que fodi a franga tive tanto calor—disse aparentemente a Sylvia Cooper —que passámos a maior parte do tempo em brasa nas águas-furtadas. —Como?—disse

ST:—El pasatiempo del baile se estropeó— pareció que decía Sylvia—y pasamos casi todo el tiempo en nuestra mierda, descubriendo que los

18

Note the similitudes between the French and Spanish versions. It appears uncontroversial that the Spanish version (2010) leans partially on the French translation. Even so, the texts are very different, as I hope to have shown.

236 “I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gîte, cowering indoors behind the shutters.” “Oh, hot, was it?” I said. “That must have been the summer of 2003.” (114)

Chapter Twelve ich. “Ich sagte, der letzte Frankreichurlaub war zu heiß, wir verbrachten die meiste Zeit in unserem Landhaus, die Rolläden geschlossen.” “Heiß? Das muss dann der Sommer 2003 gewesen sein.” (139)

eu. —Eu disse que da última vez que fui a França esteve tanto calor, que passámos a maior parte do tempo em casa, escondidos atrás das portadas. —Ah, esteve calor, foi? — disse eu. —Deve ter sido no Verão de 2003. (125)

imbéciles suegros tartamudeaban. —¿Qué?—dije. —Digo que la última vez que estuvimos en Francia hacía tanto calor que pasamos casi todo el tiempo en nuestra fronda, cobijados bajo el techo detrás de los postigos. —Oh, ¿hacía calor?—dije— Debió de ser en el verano de dos mil tres. (134)

One further example of the diversity in the four translations is the manner in which they approach the quasi insurmountable difficulty of translating the misunderstandings occasioned by Desmond’s deafness, as these are often language-bound and cannot be changed without risking losing at least some content—the following example illustrates this point beautifully. Sometimes translators—notably the French and the Portuguese—resort to footnotes, while at other times the French and Spanish translators decide to avoid the problem by cutting the difficult segment. Mostly, though, all four translators force their languages into flexibility, in order to safeguard meaning. The text, therefore, becomes less plausible, as there are sounds that would not be mistaken in the various target languages. On the one hand, this is perhaps an instance that highlights peripherality for translation as, in this case, irredeemably constrained by the source text. On the other hand, this could be seen as a further illustration of translating as a passageway, a geography where mobility of meaning is at its most visible. Be that as it may, there are two instances at least when the translators felt compelled to change the source text, so that the novel would function in their respective languages: I am referring to the “non stick saucepan” episode in chapter 6 and the exercise with the words “Scot”, “Scotch” and

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“Scottish” in the lip-reading class described in chapter 17 already mentioned before. ET She was opening and shutting drawers and cupboards as she spoke, which didn’t help. “Sorry,” I said, “I haven’t got my hearing aid in—it’s upstairs.” She turned to face me and said more loudly what sounded like “long stick”. I said, “What do you want a long stick for?” [...] She came closer and said, “Saucepan. Long-stick saucepan.” “What’s a long-stick saucepan?” I said. “You mean a long-handled saucepan?” She raised her eyes to the heavens in despair, and went back to the stove. I thought about it for a minute or two, and then the penny dropped. “Oh, you mean non-stick saucepan!” (84)

ST No ayudaba mucho que ella estuviera abriendo y cerrando cajones y armarios mientras hablaba. —Perdona—digo—, no llevo el audífono..., está arriba. Ella se ha vuelto para mirarme de frente y me ha dicho más alto lo que me ha sonado como “farol”. —¿Un farol? […] —Se me acerca más y dice: —Antiadherente. Un farol antiadherente. —¿Qué es un farol antiadherente? ¿Te refieres a uno cubierto? Ella levanta los ojos hacia el techo, desesperada, y vuelve hacia la cocina. Reflexiono uno o dos minutos y por fin caigo. —¡Oh, quieres decir perol antiadherente! (100-101)  PEROL ANTIADHERENTE (non-stick pot) FAROL (lamp)

Unfortunately, it is not possible to transcribe all the excerpts in the different languages, but it is a fact that all the four translations, regardless of their overall strategy, are invited/forced to recreate, rather than replicate, the source text. Translations are testaments to the ebbs and flows of (im)possibility. And the translated texts too, have their centres and peripheries.

5. Eppur si muove—The Triumph of Mobility over Peripherality Le centre du monde est partout et chez nous. (Éluard 2002, 57)

Deaf Sentence might, to some extent, reinforce the assumption that literature is untranslatable. The task of translating might have appeared impossible, as Deaf Sentence appeared immovable. Eppur si muove. And it

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moves thanks to translation and the fact that it “dwells in imperfection, using equivalents, and shunning mechanical replicas—which is the dream of literalists who believe in truth. It gives us the other. Or under another name it gives us itself” (Barnstone 1993, 266), the epitome of movement. Imperfect, from the Latin imperfectus, unfinished. As life. “A translation is never an exact copy. It is DIFFERENT. In translation perfect mimesis is impossible” (Barnstone 1993, 266; emphasis in the original). I have tried to show how different translators tackle one text. The novel is recent, the author alive, and the translators contemporary— yet the four renderings display different readings. That this still surprises many is surprising in itself, and says more about our longing for absolutes than about translation. The comparative gesture was pivotal in this instance when language is exposed as a geography of uncertainty and self-questioning, thus exponentially enhancing the effect (and the perils) of translation. Should translation be, as Venuti claims, the “locus of difference” (1992, 13), then fragility—and the consequent need for assistance in the form of dialogue with other texts—must inhabit it at every turn. Indeed, I would argue that, contrary to traditional and popular belief, it is precisely the fragility at the heart of translation that makes it a most human endeavour as Ortega y Gasset put it (2000). As a “most human” activity, translation cannot be peripheral, however much academies, reviewers, canons and common perceptions may wish it. Translation has always been literally pivotal to the circulation of texts and ideas, and much of Western thought and creativity owes this most fragile activity a great deal. (World) Literature would simply not be the same without the always denigrated but irreplaceable translation, that is to say, without movement, metamorphosis, and indeed fragility. One is tempted to conclude (mis)quoting Hamlet in a typical Lodgean way: Frailty, thy name is translation. Which is perhaps only another way of saying, human. And hopefully humane.

Bibliography Aristotle. 1958. The Art of Rhetoric. Translated by John Henry Freese. London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann Ltd/Harvard University Press. —. 1987. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. London: Duckworth. Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

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Barnes, Julian. 2005. The Silence. In The Lemon Table. London: Picador, 201-213. Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The Poetics of Translation. History, Theory and Practice. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bassnett, Susan. 2006. Writing and Translating. In The Translator as Writer. Edited by Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush. London and New York: Continuum, 173-183. Benjamin, Walter. 2000 [1923]. The Task of the Translator. In The Translation Studies Reader. Edited by Lawrence Venuti and translated by Harry Zohn. London and New York: Routledge, 15-25. Bush, Peter. 2006. The Writer of Translations. In The Translator as Writer. Edited by Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush. London and New York: Continuum, 23-32. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2010. Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange. In Critical Reading in Translation Studies. Edited by Mona Baker. London and New York: Routledge, 287-303. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge. Éluard, Paul. 2002. Derniers poèmes d’amour. Paris: Seghers. Lodge, David. 2007. Deaf Sentence. London, New York, Toronto, Dublin, Victoria, New Delhi, Rosedale and Johannesburg: Penguin Books. —. 2008. La Vie en sourdine. Translated by Maurice and Yvonne Couturier. Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages. Lodge, David. 2009a. Wie bitte? Translated by Renate Orth-Guttmann. Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag. —. 2009b. A Vida em surdina. Translated by Tânia Ganho. Alfragide: Edições Asa II. —. 2010. La vida en sordina. Translated by Jaime Zulaika. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama. Ortega y Gasset, José. 2000 [1937]. The Misery and the Splendor of Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader. Edited by Lawrence Venuti and translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller. London and New York: Routledge, 49-63. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1997 [1813]. On the Different Methods of Translating. In Western Translation Theory. From Herodotus to Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Douglas Robinson. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 225-238.

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Sontag, Susan. 2007. The World as India. The St. Jerome Lecture on Literary Translator, http://www.susansontag.com/prize/onTranslation. shtml (accessed April 24, 2013). Steiner, George. 1996. No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996. London and Boston: faber and faber. —. 1998 [1975]. After Babel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Introduction. In Rethinking Translation— Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 1-17. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2000. Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. 1996. New York: Gramercy Books.

PART III PERIPHERY ON THE FRINGE OF ENCOUNTER

[...] a tradução constitui no interior da cultura de chegada uma arena discursiva no interior da cultura de chegada uma arena discursiva privilegiada para a confrontação com o Outro, a potencial invasão do Mesmo pelo estranho/estrangeiro, que ameaça violar os códigos e as convenções, contaminar o sistema de representações da comunidade que a acolhe e perturbar inteligibilidade estabelecidas. João Ferreira Duarte. 2003. Línguas cortadas: Lady Chatterley e o amante dela em português. Cadernos de literatura comparada— literatura e identidades 8/9: 155.

[...] in the target culture translation becomes a privileged discursive arena for the confrontation with the Other, the potential invasion of the Self by the strange/foreign, threatening to violate the codes and conventions, to contaminate the system of representations of the community that hosts the translation as well as disturb established intelligibilities. [Editors’ translation]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN DIABOLICAL MIRRORS, EXACT ARTS: GEORGE STEINER’S HERMENEUTIC MOTION AND JOÃO FERREIRA DUARTE’S VIEW OF TRANSLATION AS THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE1 RICARDO GIL SOEIRO

In Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959), the literary critic George Steiner notes that “[l]iterary criticism should arise out of a debt of love” (1959, 3). Similarly, in what I hope to be an analogous grateful gesture of the heart, I wish to situate the present contribution on a personal ground, by choosing to write out of a debt of love and of admiration. On the one hand, there is George Steiner to whose work a great deal of my personal research has been devoted, a kind of a modern and brilliant Orpheus uneasily looking back at Eurydice only to find flickering shadows and a heap of ruins brought by the collapse of high culture during the holocaust. On the other, there is João Ferreira Duarte, my PhD supervisor at the University of Lisbon and a brilliant theorist and practitioner of translation, whose inspiring and groundbreaking work can only be paralleled to his kindness and unflinching support throughout these years of common friendship. If throughout what follows I remain truthful to my risky and imprudent task, 1

The title of the present essay alludes to a) João Ferreira Duarte’s 1989 book O Espelho diabólico: construção do objecto da teoria literária (which in its turn echoes Roland Barthes’ statement that “changing the level of perception multiplies objects as in a sort of diabolical mirror” [Barthes 1971, 45]), and b) George Steiner’s essay “An Exact Art”, in No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996 (1996, 190-206). The subtitle alludes to the following work: A Tradução nas encruzilhadas da cultura. Translation as/at the Crossroads of Culture. La Traduction aux carrefours de la culture, edited by João Ferreira Duarte (1999).

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this essay will not so much aspire to present a systematic appraisal of the complex endeavour upon which both of these thinkers have chosen to embark, but rather will give renewed voice to those particular aspects which, to my mind, offer the most significant answers to the overriding question of what translation is all about. To arrive at a satisfying (albeit never-ending and never restful) reply to that query, let us first consider George Steiner’s approach, following then by tracing João Ferreira Duarte’s footsteps through his enchanted forest.2 Refractory to the dominant scientific schemes which in recent decades have flourished within the field of humanities in general and within the field of Literary Studies and Translation Studies in particular, George Steiner is an essayist who, throughout his intellectual and academic career (from Tolstoy or Dostoevsky to Grammars of Creation, from Real Presences to The Death of Tragedy), has always been alert to the unsettling diversity and complexity of literary, artistic, cultural, and social fields and perspectives. Tragedy, the myth of Antigone, the real presence of meaning, the sadness of thought, the mystery of creation, the paramount importance of language and translation, all these are compelling themes and seminal topics of research that constitute landmarks of his journey in thought. In spite of this myriad of interests which will subsequently stimulate his passion for different theoretical approaches, Steiner has been particularly engaged in the subject of translation on which he has written widely. From his “magnum opus” After Babel (1975) to the essay “An Exact Art” (included in No Passion Spent, 1996), from a key essay such as “Homer in English” to chapter seven of Errata: An Examined Life (1997), he has never ceased to approach and to draw near to the phenomenon of translation. Unsurprisingly, thus, his thought has been characterized as being in a permanent state of becoming, constantly circulating and intersecting with distinct fields of research. Running the risk of being theoretically entrapped in what João Ferreira Duarte himself has referred to as the excessive semantic expansion of the concept of translation (2008, 175), Ronald Sharp has nevertheless persuasively argued that the notion of translation remains operative and forceful when applied to the Steinerian conceptual framework. In the telling essay “Interrogation at the Borders: George Steiner and the Trope of Translation”, he states: 2

I am here referring to the edited volume Floresta encantada. Novos caminhos da literatura comparada [Enchanted Forest. New Paths of Comparative Literature] (2001), organized by João Ferreira Duarte, Manuel Gusmão, and Helena Carvalhão Buescu.

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For it is the ideal of translation, in the radical sense that Steiner develops in After Babel as a carrying across from one field or locus or realm into another—it is translation in that fundamental sense that is not only Steiner’s model for all hermeneutic acts but also his most pervasive trope for comprehending experience, in both his fictions and his essays. [...] To see him [Steiner] whole we need to understand just how deeply this notion of translation informs his vision and his sense of his work as an agent of movement or exchange across borders—from one language to another, from field to field, across cultures and historical periods and genres, across the fuzzy but important boundary between the creative and the critical, and, most significantly in his recent work, from the secular world of immanence to what he often calls the “mysterium tremendum” of transcendence. (Sharp 1990, 134)

From the outset, then, it could be argued that the hermeneutical notion of an underlying meaning of meaning and translation clearly go hand in hand. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) (originated in the Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation which was edited in 1966 and then televised in 1977 as The Tongues of Men) is undoubtedly one of Steiner’s most challenging books, as it has explored a great deal of previously uncharted territory and as it allows the reader to glimpse into his multifaceted and intricate notions on translation. In the preface to his collection of essays George Steiner: A Reader, Steiner even sustains that “what is at stake in After Babel is nothing less than a ‘poetics of meaning’, an attempt to propose a model for the act of understanding itself via an investigation into the motions of meaning inside and between languages” (1984, 16). In fact, as stated, After Babel does sponsor a hermeneutical stance, pursuing a “poetics of meaning”, whilst at the same time it clearly rejects a “theory” per se of translation. Steiner embraces translation as an “exact art” (Wittgenstein’s rubric). In No Passion Spent, when discussing the need of preserving the effectiveness of the source text in the target text, Steiner claims: “Such preservation, serva, is the yield of an exact art. Exact in its ideals of precision: ‘exacting’ in its demand, both moral and technical, that the translator make of his pursuit a paradox of creative echo, of metamorphic mirroring. There is no more necessary response, in the life of letters” (1996, 206; my emphasis). Wittgenstein’s dictum (taken from the book Vermischte Bemerkungen, published in 1977 and later translated into English in 1980 under the title Culture and Value) could also be viewed as an echo of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical approach to language and translation: so much so that to the German philosopher’s claim Das Verstehen ist eine Kunst [Understanding Is an Art] (1993, 80)

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Steiner will joyfully reply: “What we are dealing with is not a science, but an exact art” (1998, 311). 3 Reflecting upon the several attempts to “theorize” the field of Translation Studies, Steiner does not shy away from expressing his profound distrust over such scientific schemes. In the article “Translation as conditio humana” (2004) (a telling formulation which will resurface in the text “De la Traduction comme ‘condition humaine’”, 2006), he uncompromisingly makes his case: The plethora of diagrams meant to theorize acts of translation, the boxes, arrows, dotted lines between “source” and “target” are nothing but more or less pretentious gestures. In the humanities, in litterae humaniores, theory is intuition or common sense grown impatient. A serious inquiry into translation is, necessarily, descriptive. It draws on documentation subjectively offered and subjectively examined. The main instrument is that of historical narrative. There is no laboratory. What is an always provisional issue, can only be “an exact art”. (2004, 5; emphasis in the original)4

The hermeneutic motion (which may very well be taken from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, 1819) forms the core of Steiner’s description, which consists of four parts: (1) initiative trust; (2) aggression; (3) incorporation; and (4) compensation. The translator’s initial move is “an investment of belief”, a belief and trust that there is something in the source text that can be understood. This first movement is modelled on Steiner’s discussion of the wager on the meaning of meaning put forth in Real Presences: This study will contend that the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence. (Steiner 1989, 4; emphasis in the original)

Secondly comes aggression, which is seen as an incursive, extractive, and invasive move (Steiner has even used the term “penetration” which has been strongly criticized by feminists for its violent male-centric sexual

3

Wittgenstein’s phrase is scattered throughout Steiner’s oeuvre, namely: Errata: An Examined Life (1997, 98), and After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (1998, vii, xvi). See also: George Steiner. 1982. On an Exact Art (Again). The Kenyon Review 4 (2): 8-21. 4 In all fairness, it should not go unmentioned that this view is overtly dogmatic in its inflexibility.

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imagery5): “The relevant analysis is that of Heidegger when he focuses our attention on understanding as an act on the access, inherently appropriative and therefore violent, of Erkenntnis to Dasein. [...] The translator invades, extracts, and brings home” (1989, 313-314). Incorporation is the third movement in Steiner’s hermeneutics: The import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a vacuum. The native semantic field is already extant and crowded. [...] The Heideggerian “we are what we understand to be” entails that our own being is modified by each occurrence of comprehensive appropriation. No language, no traditional symbolic set or cultural ensemble imports without risk of being transformed. (1989, 314-315)

The dialectic of embodiment and the different types of assimilation, ranging from complete domestication to permanent strangeness and marginality, 6 is then completed by an act of compensation—the fourth movement also defined as the enactment of reciprocity: The final stage or moment in the process of translation is that which I have called “compensation” or “restitution”. The translation restores the equilibrium between itself and the original, between source-language and receptor-language which had been disrupted by the translator’s interpretative attack and appropriation. The paradigm of translation stays incomplete until reciprocity has been achieved, until the original has regained as much as it had lost. (1989, 415)

No doubt translation, as seen through Steiner’s prism, is always a philosophical and anthropological 7 phenomenon. In the brilliant essay “Real Presences: George Steiner and the Anthropology of Reading”, Graham Ward hints at this openness to the Other, to the absolute singularity of alterity: 5 See Lori Chamberlain’s “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation” (2004, 306) in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, as well as Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (1996, 144). 6 This discussion will later influence the work of Antoine Berman. See his L’Epreuve de l'étranger: culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique (1984). In his book On Translation (2006), Paul Ricoeur compares Berman’s and Steiner’s perspectives on translation. See, particularly, chapter II “The Paradigm of Translation” (2006, 11-29; originally published in 1999 as “Le Paradigme de la traduction” in Esprit 6: 8-19). 7 One of the most recent Steinerian pieces on translation is a case in point in this regard: Steiner 2006, 41-43.

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Chapter Thirteen Moving between the confident universalism of early Chomsky and the hermetically sealed “thought worlds” suggested by Whorf’s comparative linguistics, After Babel searches for a middle ground between “every individual us[ing] an idiolect” [...] and meaning as “a function of socialhistorical antecedent and shared response” [...]. It accepts the syntactic, semiotic particularity of any language but presses home that great “art, poetry that pierces, are déjà-vu, lighting for recognition places immemorial, innately familiar to our racial, historical recollection” [...]. There remains an anthropological and linguistic a priori, this openness to the Other, the strange. 8 But a choice is involved: we can clothe our nakedness and rebuke the strange. That is our freedom, the freedom by which we are individuated; it is also our tragedy. What we do with our language involves an ethics. (1990, 33)

As we have seen, Steiner’s framework (here merely sketched) clearly rests on a set of philosophical and literary assumptions and towering figures; together with names of the like of Herder, Hamann, Humboldt, three other writers are seen as touchstones for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of translation, defining them as our modern Kabbalists: W. Benjamin, Kafka, and Borges. But for what remains of this essay, I wish to consider a more cultural approach to Translation Studies provided by João Ferreira Duarte’s view of translation as crossroads of culture in which concepts such as power, manipulation, and ideology are not erased from the debate. Contrary to Steiner’s hermeneutical stance (whose importance I dare not deny, but whose assertive intransigence towards different modes of grasping the experience of translation seems to me somewhat unsatisfactory and incomplete), Duarte succeeds in offering us a holistic approach which values the dynamic richness and diversity of linguistic, literary, historical, and cultural approaches. It is in this light that he will choose to stress the cross-disciplinarity of Translation Studies, focusing on the principle of flux epitomized by this “interfacing domain where thought becomes nomadic, where multiplicity of language-games can coexist, clash, intermingle and cross-fertilize” and where “unceasing intersections and realignments” may and indeed flourish (Duarte et al 2006, 4). Tellingly enough, whereas Steiner is engaged in “Topologies of Culture” (chapter six of After Babel), Ferreira Duarte will avidly favour fluid cartographies.9 8 This Other, however, remains undefined throughout Steiner’s work. I discuss this nuanced and complex issue in my book Iminência do encontro: George Steiner e a leitura responsável (Lisbon: Roma Editora, 2009). 9 As I have argued elsewhere, in the past few decades, we have witnessed what has been fittingly called a topographical turn in literary and cultural studies, dominated

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For several decades, João Ferreira Duarte has been one of the leading scholars in Translation Studies (both in Portugal and abroad), working on topics ranging from Genre Studies, Comparative Literature, and Postcolonial Studies. A prolific translator (Christopher Marlowe, A. Gramsci, William Blake, W. Wordsworth, T. L. Peacock, P. B. Shelley, W. C. Williams, W. B. Yeats, E. Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, R. Burns, and Allen Ginsberg), Professor Ferreira Duarte has also taught Critical Theory to undergraduate students and Translation Studies in a post-graduate programme in Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon. He has published extensively in the field of translation and has edited numerous volumes, including Europe in Black and White. Immigration, Race, and Identity in the “Old Continent” (2011) and Stories and Portraits of the Self (2007), as well as special monographic issues, such as Fluid Cartographies— New Modernities (2011). Always deploying a graceful, ironic, yet substantive and rigorous style, João Ferreira Duarte is certainly a postmodern thinker, deconstructing crystallized totalities and unproblematic identities, loosening them up in terms of diversity, disruptions, and productive fissures—according to the deconstructive lesson of Jacques Derrida.10 In this vein, I find the title of the present tribute volume—How Peripheral is the Periphery?—rather fortunate, not only because, in its interrogative mode, it suitably mirrors Ferreira Duarte’s restless spirit (I feel it is no accident that the driven force of his essays is, recurrently, the suggestiveness of complex and pertinent questions which further challenge our assumptions and demand that we by topographical concepts such as Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” (1992), Frederic Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), H. Bhabha’s postcolonial Location of Culture (1994), J. Hillis Miller’s Topographies (1995), or Irit Rogoff’s Terra Infirma (2000), to name but a few. Interestingly enough, it could be equally argued that the same tendency has taken place within Translation Studies. In this regard, see the following three examples: Emily S. Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006); Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (1992); Judy Wakabayashi’s and Rita Kothari’s Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond (2009). On this general turn in Literary and Cultural Studies, see: Sigrid Weigel. 2009. On the “Topographical Turn”: Concepts of Space in Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaften. A Cartographic Feud. European Review 17 (1): 187-201. On the several turns of Translation Studies, see: Mary Snell-Hornby. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints?. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 10 Rather significantly, João Ferreira Duarte has translated into Portuguese the following interview with Derrida: 1991. Entrevista com Jacques Derrida (conduzida por Christopher Norris). Vértice 41 (II series) (August): 89-98.

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probe more deeply, thus urging us to be open to the “wounds of possibility”—Kierkegaard’s incandescent phrase), but also since it quite aptly reverts to his long-standing concern about the centre-periphery debate within humanistic disciplines.11 While there are too many stimulating and thought-provoking examples of Ferreira Duarte’s modus operandi to mention here, and which would deserve further critical attention, I want at least to draw the reader’s attention to the following cases in point. Firstly, consider the co-edited volume Europe in Black and White (2011) which, offering new critical perspectives on race, immigration, and identity on the Old Continent, succeeds in presenting a decentralized and centrifugal snapshot of the variety of encounters with difference, such as multiculturalism and hybridity, thus addressing the cartography of postcolonial Europe, as well as its relation to the production of “difference” and “race”, while also not neglecting the need to deal with issues of national identity politics and its dependence on linguistic practices inherited from imperial times.12 Consider as well the recent essay “The Narrator in the Contact Zone: Transculturation and Dialogism in Things Fall Apart” (2010) which revolves around what is undoubtedly one of the greatest masterpieces of postcolonial literature, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Ferreira Duarte’s standpoint is unequivocal: I want [...] to focus on the greatly uneven power relations involved [...], and in so doing, explore one key aspect of Things Fall Apart which, to my 11

The 7th EST Congress, held from 29 to 31 August 2013 in Germersheim (University of Mainz, Faculty for Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies), was devoted to the theme Translation Studies: Centres and Peripheries. At its core was a framework for discussing centre-periphery relations within the discipline from a multifaceted angle: centre-periphery relations concerning the objects of research, concerning the discourses in Translation Studies, as well as the links between Translation Studies and other disciplines. 12 My review article “Mapping Untold Stories”, which was published in Journal of Romance Studies on “Fluid Cartographies and New Modernities”, was generously commissioned by Professor João Ferreira Duarte. My analysis, based on my reading of Andreas Huyssen’s Other Cities, Other Worlds. Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (2008) and Irene Ramalho’s and António S. Ribeiro’s Translocal Modernisms. International Perspectives (2008), tried to follow the spirit of the question How Peripheral is the Periphery? by means of positing the notion of plural and alternative modernities, in which multiple centres interact with each other on a complex global landscape; in so doing, this standpoint hopes to bring a decentring of the West or, more accurately, a certain western Eurocentric diffusionism.

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knowledge, has not so far received the critical attention it calls for, namely the novel’s depiction—and its far-reaching implications—of what Mary Louise Pratt famously called contact zone. (2010, 143)

By taking power relations as the inevitable jumping-off point of analysis and by claiming that Achebe’s novel can be fruitfully and coherently read as a transcultural object, Ferreira Duarte argues that the Nigerian writer was bound to employ the concept of “heteroglossia” defined as “the multiplicity of socio-ideological discourses making up the life of language in society that constitutes for Mikhail Bakhtin the distinctive trait of the genre” (2010, 150). It is precisely this concept that is wisely explored by Ferreira Duarte in the article “O Destronar do original” (1999), in which, tackling John Phillips’ translation of Cervantes’ Don Quijote, he not only draws upon Paul de Man’s and André Lefevere’s notion of desacralization and decanonization, but also upon Bakhtin’s notions of “polyphony”, “heteroglossia”, and “carnival” (“polyphony” is discussed in the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “heteroglossia” in “Discourse in the Novel” from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, and “carnival” in Rabelais and His World). Significantly, and precisely in order to challenge and to undermine the binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has viewed Bakhtinian hybridization as a rhetorical process of cultural negotiation, choosing instead to lay emphasis on the negotiations across the colonial divide (see Bhabha 1994. For a critical appraisal of Ferreira Duarte’s view on Bhabha’s perspective on translation, see Duarte 2005a).13 Although maintaining his allegiance to literary theory under the spell of phenomenology which will always influence him (O Espelho diabólico, for example, is a well-documented attack on the naïve empiricism and the epistemological innocence of those who deal with literary texts14), Ferreira Duarte nevertheless remains truthfully committed to a compelling culturalistic approach. Trying to document the history of the cognitive and disciplinary encounter between Ethnography and the field of Translation Studies (axiomatically put, Ethnography has textualized itself whereas Translation Studies has been culturalized, and it was from this encounter 13

In the article “Do Binarismo em tradução” (2005b), João Ferreira Duarte challenges binarism in translation. 14 In this book, one finds rigorous theoretical analysis embracing a fresh vividness of reflection. Consider, for example, Ferreira Duarte’s discussion of thinkers such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, but also his exciting analysis of The Purloined Letter (1845), by Edgar Allan Poe.

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that the concept of cultural translation was born), the volume A Cultura entre tradução e etnografia [Culture between Translation and Ethnography] constitutes ample evidence of this allegiance. To support my argument, I now turn to the introductory text to the volume A Tradução nas encruzilhadas da cultura, where João Ferreira Duarte (1999, 7-9) deconstructs in a neo-pragmatistic vein concepts such as fidelity, spirit, and truth, thus emancipating himself, and the view of translation that he espouses, from the rhetoric of fidelity and from the ideology of equivalence (the functionalist approach to translation, for example, sought to liberate translators from an excessively servile adherence to the source text, perceiving translation as a new communicative act that should be purposeful vis-à-vis the target culture). In fact, new developments in Translation Studies since the late 1980s and early 1990s (including different theoretical outlooks, namely the polysystem theory, the Manipulation School, skopostheorie, culturally-oriented research, poststructuralism, feminism and gender-based approaches to translation, postcolonial translation theory, or even the so-called corpus Translation Studies paradigm, as well as a fresh geographical enlargement of landscapes where pioneering research is currently taking place, namely Quebec, Hong-Kong, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, and Portugal15) have prismatically contributed to an indelible historicization, 15

Let me just briefly mention two pioneering research ventures on this field in Portugal. The first one, under the guidance of Alexandra Assis Rosa, is entitled “Reception Studies and Descriptive Translation Studies”. It was launched in 2007 and focuses on Reception Studies and Descriptive Translation Studies in Portugal in three main areas by: (1) participating in a joint project with the Centre for Studies in Communication and Culture of the Catholic University of Portugal, namely “Translating Europe across the Ages”; (2) providing a forum for the development of individual projects that comprise research into translational norms regarding linguistic variation in literary and audiovisual texts, the influence of paratexts in translation reading strategies, the role played by translation in importing literary genres or the profile of translators in contemporary Portuguese society; and (3) comprising projects related with the dissemination in Portuguese language of both short stories in English and essays on the short story as a literary genre, working in close cooperation with the Centre of Portuguese Language Literatures of the Universities of Lisbon (CLEPUL) and the Society for the Study of the Short Story. The second project, “TETRA (Teatro e Tradução): Towards a History of Theatre Translation in Portugal, 1800-2009”, proposes under the guidance of Manuela Carvalho to undertake a historical and critical survey of theatre translation practice in Portugal from the 19th century through to the present day, considering both linguistic and intersemiotic translation, and attempting to explain its meaning, relevance and reception at a given historical and social

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pragmaticalization, and culturalization of the phenomenon of translation. Translation Studies is, thus, seen as a “transdiscipline, capable of mobilizing knowledge from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, historiography, etc., in order to critically assemble a new object by way of a multiplicity of epistemological protocols” (Duarte 1999, 7; my translation). Unambiguously, it is undisputable that Ferreira Duarte’s loyalties lie with the cultural turn championed by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere: “Not only does translation need to be seen as a cultural fact (and no longer as merely a linguistic one), but also as something which permits the crossings (in a quasi-biological metaphor) of cultures, something that simultaneously defines and suppresses borders between cultures” (Duarte 1999, 8; my translation).16 In its turn, the introduction to the collective volume Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines brings to fore the complex issue of disciplinary status, reflecting upon Translation Studies’ ongoing process of self-reflexivity; the editors see this “ghostly” academic discipline (interdiscipline? transdiscipline?) “as product of the contemporary knowledgescape, not a discipline, not even an interdiscipline, but rather a principle of flux [...]: a ghost-like presence to haunt us out of enclosures and rigidities” (Duarte et al 2006, 4). Continuing to draw cultural maps and chart social spaces, Translation Studies remains a cartographic enterprise,17 restlessly operating “in-between”, amidst flux and movement. To conclude let us turn to Steiner and to the following much-quoted passage: What a truly inspired [...] act of translation offers [...] is something new that was already there. [...] Poetry, in particular, is so manifold in its potentialities of significance and suggestion across time, is so resistant to any total anatomy and paraphrase, that it contains, in a state both latent and active (quantum), energies which the translator can elicit, release, bring into clarified play. When Valéry translates Virgil, when Leyris translates Hopkins, when Celan renders Valéry or Ungaretti, the Latin, French, or Italian texts are left, in some palpable sense, richer, more fulfilled than before. [...] Where it is wholly achieved, [...] translation is no less than felt context, focusing on processes such as acculturation and interculturalism. This approach takes into account the role of theatre translation in the constitution of theatre repertories and in the transformation of local and national artistic practices as a result of contact with foreign models. 16 João Ferreira Duarte is here referring to the following work: Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. 1998. Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. 17 See footnote number 8.

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In typical Steinerian fashion, the author of Errata embraces the wonder of Babel with an intellectual audacity, verbal brilliance, and an exceptionally wide range of cultural reference which remain incomparable. But even though I believe the translator researcher could draw valuable and worthy lessons and greatly benefit from the prescient critical writings of Steiner on the subject, I nevertheless find that João Ferreira Duarte is compelled to think and ask otherwise: never ceasing to inquire how peripheral is the periphery, he is irresistibly drawn close to Spivak’s unremitting question: can the subaltern speak?18 Be that as it may, to return to my preliminary captatio benevolentiæ of utmost personal fragility, both of their work remains to me an invaluable source of inspiration. Although coming from different perspectives, both of them are resolute in their steadfast attempt to avoid provincialism in the affairs of the mind, resembling, to use Arendt’s image, pearl divers who descend to the bottom of the sea “not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface” (Arendt 1968, 205). In this sense, translation will always remain a messianic quest, an illumination (in Benjamin’s sense), beautifully contingent yet deeply necessary, like a sweet madness.19 Could it be otherwise?

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt: Brace & World. Barthes, Roland. 1971. A Conversation with Roland Barthes. In Signs of the Times. Introductory Reading in Textual Semiotics. Edited by Stephen Heath. Cambridge: Instantprint, 41-51.

18

A question almost completely absent from Steiner’s concerns. In this regard, see the following passage from My Unwritten Books in which he shows lucid awareness of this absence: “Those generous enough to be interested in my work or adverse to it have often posed the same question. After reading my books, during seminars, following on public lectures, either with hesitant politeness or with reproach: ‘What are your politics? In all your writings on history and culture, on education and barbarism, why is there no frank statement of your own political ideology? Where do you really take your stand?’” (Steiner 2008, 175). 19 See Blanchot’s testimony: “Traduire est, en fin de compte, une folie” (1971, 73).

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Benjamin, Walter. 1972 [1921]. Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. Gesammelte Schrifte IV (1): 9-21. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Blanchot, Maurice. 1971. Traduire. In L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 69-73. Chamberlain, Lori. 2004. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 306-321. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. Des Tours de Babel. In Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 203-235. Duarte, João Ferreira. 1989. O Espelho diabólico: construção do objecto da teoria literária. Lisbon: Caminho. —. 1999. O Destronar do original: tradução carnavalizada. In Literatura e pluralidade cultural. Edited by Isabel Magalhães. Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 539-548. —. 2005a. Para uma crítica da retórica da tradução Homi Bhabha. In Estudos de tradução/Estudos pós-coloniais. Edited by Ana Gabriela Macedo and Eduarda Keating. Braga: Centro de Estudos Humanísticos, 89-100. —. 2005b. Do Binarismo em tradução. Relâmpago: revista de poesia (a tradução de poesia) 17 (October): 21-45. —. 2006. A Lição do cânone. Uma Auto-Reflexão dos estudos literários. Lisbon: Edições Colibri. —. 2008. A Cultura entre tradução e etnografia. Translated by Sara Ramos Pinto. Lisbon: Nova Vega. —. 2010. The Narrator in the Contact Zone: Transculturation and Dialogism in Things Fall Apart. Diacrítica—Dossier literatura comparada 24 (3): 141-156. Duarte, João Ferreira, Alexandra Assis Rosa, and Teresa Seruya, eds. 2006. Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Duarte, João Ferreira, ed. 1999. A Tradução nas encruzilhadas da cultura. Translation as/at the Crossroads of Culture. La Traduction aux carrefours de la culture. Lisbon: Edições Colibri. Duarte, João Ferreira, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Fernando Clara, and Leonor Pires Martins, eds. 2011. Europe in Black and White: Immigration, Race and Identity in the “Old Continent”. Bristol, UK, and Chicago: Intellect. Duarte, João Ferreira, Manuel Gusmão, and Helena Carvalhão Buescu, eds. 2001. Floresta encantada. Novos caminhos da literatura comparada. Lisbon: Dom Quixote.

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Hartmann, Geoffrey H. 1975. Review of After Babel, by George Steiner. New York Times Book Review, 8 June, 21-23. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. On Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1993. Hermeneutik und Kritik: Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Sharp, Ronald A. 1990. Interrogation at the Borders: George Steiner and the Trope of Translation. New Literary History: A Journal of Theory & Interpretation 21 (1): 133-162. Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. Steiner, George. 1959. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. New York: Knopf. —. 1961. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1966. To Traduce or Transfigure: On Modern Verse Translation. Encounter 27: 48-54. —. 1984. George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1989. Real Presences. Is There Anything Real in What We Say? London and Boston: Faber and Faber. —. 1996. No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1997. Errata: An Examined Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. —. 1998 [1975]. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2004. Translation as conditio humana. In Überzetzung Translation Traduction. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, Paul Fritz in association with Juliane House and Brigitte Schultze. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1-11. —. 2006. De la traduction comme “condition humaine”. Un texte inédit de George Steiner. George Steiner. La Culture contre la barbarie. Le Magazine Littéraire 454: 41-43. —. 2008. My Unwritten Books. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Steiner, George, int. and ed. 1996. The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation. Harmondsworth: Penguin (later reedited under the title Poem into Poem). Ward, Graham. 1990. Real Presences: George Steiner and the Anthropology of Reading. Cambridge Review 111 (March): 32-35.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN TRANSLATION AND THE PROJECTION OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE CONCEIÇÃO LIMA

Over the past thirty years or so, academic projects in Translation Studies have been put forward worldwide, and the discipline has grown as an increasingly autonomous multidisciplinary field, while it is now frequently understood as a cross-cultural event. However, there was still a long way to go before Translation Studies were properly established as a discipline in its own right. For centuries, translation was thought to occur between languages, and former approaches by linguists (based on the key concept of equivalence) drew a strict dividing line between language and all that was considered to be the extra-linguistic reality. However, studies have emphasized that language does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, in a vacuum, but as an integral part of culture. The connection between two different languages inevitably leads to the encounter of two cultures. Since culture is associated with the observance of expectations and norms, it ultimately encompasses much of what we need to know and to feel so as to be able to judge when people’s acts conform with or diverge from the social roles they are expected to perform. The concept of culture, being related to the concepts of expectation and norm, bears a close relationship not only with social behaviour but also with language use. Translation Studies have thus emerged as an independent discipline that takes account of translation as a communicative act involving texts that are embedded in both source and target cultures. I was first given this background knowledge while attending the seminar “Translating Texts, Constructing Identities”, conducted by Professor João Ferreira Duarte, as part of a Masters’ Degree in English Studies. Any reference to the contribution of Portugal to the ongoing development of Translation Studies should certainly include the name of Professor João Ferreira Duarte, not only for the time he has spent sharing his experience and research work on the field of translation, but also for

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the accuracy of the knowledge he imparts and ultimately the way he was able to motivate those who attended his seminars and decided to further research this particular form of intercultural communication. For all the support I was given while writing my thesis, I am deeply indebted to Professor Duarte. As my supervisor and given my cultural background, he suggested I developed my research in the field of translation, namely on the creative language use by the Angolan shortstory writer Luandino Vieira, for he retrieves Angolan cultural values by building up a record of oral literature. Luandino Vieira has a peculiar way of writing: he adopts a hybrid language by mixing Portuguese (the official language inherited from the colonizer) and Kimbundu (a national Angolan language, spoken widely in Luanda). And this is what I aim to bring forward in this article: to provide evidence of culture-specific items, illustrative of the textual presence of a cultural Other, that are transposed through a double translation process, involving, first and foremost, a cultural transfer insomuch as one needs to come to terms with the interpretation of the Other’s culture. The main issues to be considered are how to grasp objectively the items we perceive as being strictly Other, and how to define our historical reality and that of the Other. By this course of action, the borders of the cultures put together are effectively constrained. The cultural preceding the interlingual is explained by the fact that the hybrid language in postcolonial texts is inherently limitative in terms of interpretation. These kinds of texts, involving a multiform (and multi-layered) cultural and linguistic structure, “represent the Self in the language of the Other” (Bandia 2008, 3). The interpretation of such texts reveals subtleties characterized by new meanings and connotations. This is the case, for example, of the translation—that we here term cultural translation—of slang terms and hybrid expressions into standard Portuguese preceding the interlingual translation. The interlingual or translation proper (into English) is, then, the second form of translation which takes place after such terms have been normalized (re-written according to standard Portuguese). As Bandia points out, hybridity raises questions about the very notion of a “foreign text” or the original, and its implied status as the starting point of a translation. [...] Other issues are also put to test, such as the implied hierarchy or diglossic relation between languages and the translation of what is essentially a linguistically multi-layered or translated source text into another language. (2008, 8)

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These ideas converge with the topic of this volume to the extent that it focuses on the literary position of Portugal, as well as with the reappropriation of the Portuguese language by Angolan writers as a means to subvert social and linguistic conventions. As Pratt puts it, “[w]hile subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for (1992, 6). Through this approach, we will be able to relate translation, otherness and interculturality. A Dupla tradução do Outro cultural em Luandino Vieira [The Double Translation of the Cultural Other in Luandino Vieira] (Lima 2009), which is based largely on my Masters dissertation, stands as my “statement of intent” as regards research work in Translation Studies. Focusing on the hybrid language characteristic of the postcolonial text, the book describes the way culture-specific items are relocated through translation. As for the main feature of the postcolonial text, its hybrid nature, I find it useful to start with some ideas put forward both by Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha. For Bakhtin, hybridity delineates the way in which language, even within a single sentence, can be double-voiced: What we are calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical [syntactic] and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two “languages”, two semantic and axiological belief systems [...]. It frequently happens that even one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that intersect in a hybrid construction [...]. (cited in Young 1995, 20)

Homi Bhabha, in turn, laid down the principle of “in-betweenness” when analysing creative potentialities of hybrid texts, which he considers to be constructed in the difference. With regard to Luandino’s writings, I would say this happens because both a linguistic and a cultural tension takes place between African and colonial language. When Luandino depicts everyday life in “musseques”1 and describes the sorrows of people by means of a specific variant of Portuguese, which is modelled not only on the intonation of Kimbundu but also on its phonetic rhythm and morphological and syntactic structure, he effectively enriches the Portuguese language with new terms that translate different experiences. Luandino was one of the first writers to creatively adapt the colonial language to the African reality. Through this specific use of a colonial language—Portuguese—to express Angolan sociocultural reality, Luandino’s 1

Luanda’s poor neighbourhoods.

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writings reveal this language’s flexibility to absorb aspects of the African experience. It thus gives rise to a peculiar discursive terrain, a tangential named interstitial space, as described by Homi Bhabha: We should consider that it is the inter—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national and nationalist histories of the “people”. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves. (Bhabha 1994, 38-39)

Focusing my analysis on linguistic and culture-specific items in Luandino Vieira’s work, the purpose of A Dupla tradução do Outro cultural em Luandino Vieira was to show the strategies available to English-language translators who needed to transpose such elements to a very different linguistic and cultural context. Of significance in Luandino’s work is the use of intralinguistic culturebound elements, as they entail indirect or implicit messages or connotations, which suggest that the meaning of the source text is scarcely accessible to target language receivers. Moreover, extralinguistic items, bound mainly to natural elements like fauna and flora, are also included; in this case translation problems might involve the non-existence, in the target context, of a given element mentioned in the source text. As I will attempt to show, Luandino’s distinctive writing helps to develop new insights into the better understanding of one crucial means by which alterity is projected and textualized. Making a parallel with Bandia (2008, 4), when he states that colonial languages can be perceived “as part and parcel of the African linguistic reality postcolonial writers grew up in, and as tools in the hands of Africans to express and assert African identity on the world stage”, I would say that when the cultural Other is projected, the Other’s identity is also constructed and thus translating texts becomes a process of identity construction. Culture-specific items are described (according to Álvarez and Vidal 1996, 58) as such items which are actualized in texts, and whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem when transferred to a target text. This results from: (a) the non-existence of such an element or (b) its different intertextual status in the cultural system of the target-text readers. Examples of such language variance are revealed in the course of Luandino’s narratives as consequence of the overlapping of Portuguese and Kimbundu (for example, muxoxou). By describing scenes reflecting the everyday life of Luanda’s inhabitants, the author often uses both slang

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terms (such as banzo) and traditional proverbs (such as a-mu-beta-kua mundele). Additionally, references to Angola’s fauna and flora are also predominant, which illustrates the African people’s strong connection to nature. Therefore, in the work of Luandino, two different categories of culture-specific items are discernible: on the one hand, there are intralinguistic and pragmatic phenomena (the use of idioms or of ways of speaking typical of oral communication—monas escondidos nos panos; os zincos, virando chapas de assar castanhas, os furos, muitos) and, on the other hand, the extralinguistic (involving nature-bound references— cambomborinha). We will come back to these examples shortly. All these factors are problematic for translators, in their effort to make the meaning of the source text accessible to recipients in the target language. This is also the case with the use of allusions, considering that “culture-bound concepts, even where the two cultures involved are not too distant, can be more problematic for the translator than the semantic or syntactic difficulties of a text” (Leppihalme 1997, 2). Ritva Leppihalme, author of Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, argues that allusions are often translated literally, largely ignoring their connotative and pragmatic meaning. Such event frequently leads to culture bumps,2 which, according to Leppihalme, are puzzling or impenetrable wordings. Her work explores this problem and how to deal with a culture-specific source-text allusion in a way that enables readers of the target text to understand the function and meaning of the allusive passage. I argue that this model may be applied to Luandino Vieira’s hybrid language, which is full of culture-specific references. Since these elements (allusions included) transmit a meaning that goes, as a rule, beyond the mere spoken words, it follows that, in the broad range of the intercultural communication that takes place via translation, a culture bump occurs, in fact, as a result of a sudden contact with a different culture. My aim is thus to analyse the translation strategies from Portuguese into English adopted for Luandino’s particular writing. I will focus on the 2

Leppihalme presents the concept the following way: “The term ‘culture bump’ has been used by Carol M. Archer (1986, 170-171) in relation to problems in faceto-face intercultural communication which are milder than culture shocks: ‘A culture bump occurs when an individual finds himself or herself in a different, strange, or uncomfortable situation when interacting with persons of a different culture’. I have extended the use of her term to translation, for a situation where the reader of a target text has a problem understanding a source-cultural allusion. Such an allusion may well fail to function in the TT, as it is not part of the target language reader’s culture” (Leppihalme 1997, 4).

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translations of Luuanda—Estórias (1972) [Luuanda, Short Stories of Angola (1980), translated by Tamara Bender], João Vêncio: os seus amores [The Loves of João Vêncio (1991) translated by Michael Wolfers] and A Vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (1974) [The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (1978), translated by Richard Zenith], the only translations made into English as far as I know. I have decided to take a fairly representative model of linguistic and culture-specific items, according to their strictly cultural or pragmatic origin. The examples here presented are excerpts of Luandino Vieira’s “Vavó Xíxi e seu neto Zeca Santos” [“Grandma Xíxi and her Grandson Zeca Santos]—the first short story of Luuanda, Short Stories of Angola—, The Real Life of Domingos Xavier and The Loves of João Vêncio, and their corresponding translations.3 The phrases in bold will be later discussed in detail. Examples from Luuanda (“Grandma Xíxi and her Grandson Zeca Santos”) Vavó muxoxou na desculpa, continuou varrer a água no pequeno quintal. Tinha adiantado na cubata e encontrou tudo parecia era mar: as paredes deixavam escorregar barro derretido; as canas começavam aparecer; os zincos virando chapa de assar castanhas, os furos muitos. (p. 17)

Grandma Xíxi smacked her lips against her teeth with annoyance at the excuse and went on sweeping water into the little back yard. She had got back earlier to the shanty and found everything looking like it was in an ocean: loosened clay slipping from the walls, reeds beginning to show the walls, reeds beginning to show through, and the tin roof so full of holes it could be used for roasting cashews. (p. 3)

Examples from The Real Life of Domingos Xavier Rodearam na cubata de sô Miguel, e, em frente, onde já se aglomeravam algumas mulheres com seus monas escondidos nos panos, viram o homem que fazia esforços para descer de uma carrinha,

They went round Mr Miguel’s hut and, in front, where already some women with babies hidden in their cloths were gathering, they saw the man—he was making attempts to get down from

3 The Real Life of Domingos Xavier is the first English translation of a complete work by Luandino Vieira. “It is in fact his second book, written in 1961 in Portuguese, but not available until it was published in a French translation in 1971. It was finally legally published in Portuguese in 1974” (Wolfers 1978, back cover), after the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship.

Translation and the Projection of Cultural Difference debaixo das pancadas de dois cipaios. (p. 7)

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a truck, amid a hail of blows from two cipaios. (p. 1)

Examples from The Loves of João Vêncio Mas o Salviano decretou um dia minha defesa oficiosa, a quimbundice: a-mubeta kua mundele... Juiz banzo não percebeu e me deu seis meses—minha mais doce cadeia, cambomborinha. (p. 14)

Dr. Salviano was once appointed to defend me, and he recited this Kimbundu saying: “If a white man strikes you, don’t protest to another white man.” That boggled the judge and he gave me six months – cushiest jail I ever did have. Pure cake. (p. 2)

These written tales, a set of hybrid narratives, are textualizations of an already hybrid identity. The way these passages are translated challenges most of the elementary theoretical principles regarding translation: Translation, by its very nature, entails a basic dichotomy between source and target languages, literatures and cultures—a dichotomy with, moreover, a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. To harmonize the demand of unity and the fact of dichotomy, the translator must resort to a game strategy of illusionism: accepting the dichotomy as inevitable, he must map out a general strategy of selecting from his retentive and recreative possibilities those which will induce the illusion of unity. (Holmes 1994, 50; emphasis in the original)

A translator’s task involves deciding on the translation strategies to be used, aiming to make a text work within the target context. As stated by Nord (2005, 32), “[t]ranslation is the production of a functional target text maintaining a relationship with a given source text that is specified according to the intended or demanded function of the target text”. From this perspective, functionality is one of the most important criteria for a translation. Therefore, let us see what translation procedures were used by these translators in order to enable a communicative act to take place.

1. Examples from Luuanda (“Grandma Xíxi and her Grandson Zeca Santos”) This short story tells us about the everyday life of a poor family in the Luanda slums during colonial times.

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“Muxoxou” Simple Past of “muxoxar”, a verb with a Kimbundu root and Portuguese ending. Like in many verb formations, we can speak of a “portuguesization” 4 of Kimbundu words. “Muxoxar” corresponds to a smacking sound made with the teeth, denoting annoyance. In standard Portuguese there is not a single verb corresponding to “muxoxar”; it is obvious that its translation presupposed a double process. The intralingual (cultural) translation preceded the interlingual translation. This story is the kind of plurilingual text that in many ways places the readers, as Abdelkebir Khatibi suggests (cited in Mehrez 1992, 122), at the “threshold of the untranslatable”. A general idea on the matter of untranslatability was expressed by Ovidi Carbonell, when he argues: This untranslatability sometimes results in the “new” appearing [...] and in the displacement of the subject thus negotiated. However, it is in this interstitial passage where all processes of cultural difference come into conflict, and therefore become visible, that the “migrant” historical experience (temporal and spatial) relocates its own self, creates a new fabric of cultural difference. The “foreign element”, cultural and therefore but not exclusively so, linguistic, becomes the element of change in any culture. Communication between cultures involves, by a translational process, not only a redefinition of the Other’s meaning according to one’s own representational context, but also a transformation of one’s own articulation of representation, the construction of a “third space” of meaning. (1996, 91)

“Cubata” “Cubata” is a small house in Luanda’s poor neighbourhoods (named “musseques”), made from mud, on a structure of entwined reeds. Shack and hut are the closest English terms in the target culture, although the use of cubata (not translated and italicized) with an explanation in a footnote, in an endnote or included in a glossary could also be a strategy.

4 This was Tamara Bender’s view in her preface (1980, vii) to the translation of Luuanda.

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“Os zincos, virando chapas de assar castanhas, os furos, muitos” The house (“cubata”) illustrated here is a very old one, so the roof is full of holes. The description is made through an analogy with the tool used to roast cashew nuts—a tin with holes—, which is a rudimentary method in rural areas. It is not the tin of the roof itself that could be used to roast cashew nuts. Facing a very different culture and different habits, the translator does not always find it easy to allow the communicative act to take place.

2. Examples from The Real Life of Domingos Xavier This is a narrative of a young tractor driver, who, due to political activities, was arrested, tortured and murdered by the Portuguese colonial police due to his political activities.

“Monas escondidos nos panos” This is one of the ways mothers carry small children: on their backs, covered with a piece of cloth which is tied around the chest. The children are covered in such a way that only the head remains uncovered. In the source text, Kimbundu (“mona” = children) is used in a construction with Portuguese words, which require monolingual readers to be at once capable of reading and translating. For the target-text readers, the whole passage remains opaque.

“Cipaio” In the context of colonial repression, this was the term for a subaltern African official, who served the Portuguese colonial police (it derives from sepoy, a common term for a soldier in India, under an imperialist power, namely Great Britain). The translator says, in the preface, that all the key words associated with colonial repression and popular resistance remained untranslated. A note was added, with a brief explanation of their meaning.

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3. Examples from The Loves of João Vêncio This is a story about the imprisoned João Vêncio (due to an attempted homicide, amongst other life stories), who tells his life’s multiple stories, for a written record, to another prisoner (a literate man). João Vêncio’s discourses include, among other codes, those of standard and popular Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole, which characterize his colonized hybrid identity.

“a-mu-beta-kua mundele...” This is a Kimbundu proverb, which, apart from being untranslated, remains incomplete, for the source-text readers to complete it. In this case, for the writer of the source text, “the process is one where the language of the Other comes to encode messages which are not readily decoded by the monolingual reader whose referential world continues to exclude, ignore, and deny the existence of other referential worlds that are crucial to a more ‘global’ rather than ‘colonialist’, ‘imperialist’ reading of the text” (Mehrez 1992, 122). The translation into English (with a previous Kimbundu-Portuguese translation) was made according to the whole sense of the original phrase.

“Banzo” This is a slang term. Mixing standard and popular Portuguese was a characteristic of Luandino’s narratives, which is not an easy task for a translator to cope with.

“Minha mais doce cadeia cambomborinha” This is a metaphorical expression (although the metaphorical sense does not appear in the translation). For João Vêncio, a “six months” in jail is the mildest sentence he ever had. He compares it to a “cambomborinha”, a small variety of cashew5 (small and sweet). Again, this is not standard Portuguese. As Luandino explained, “he wrote his estórias for the very people whose language he 5

In his narratives, Luandino refers quite often to cashews. By the time they were written (or that the scenes occurred), cashew-trees were spread all over Luanda “musseques”; some of these areas have been urbanized afterwards.

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used” (Bender 1980, vii). Not “surprisingly very few Portuguese, whether or not they had lived in Luanda, could completely understand the language of Vieira’s [stories]” (Bender 1980, vii). A similar argument is sustained by Samia Mehrez, when she writes: “Indeed, the ultimate goal of such literature was to subvert hierarchies by bringing together the ‘dominant’ and the ‘underdeveloped’, by exploding and confounding different symbolic worlds and separate systems of signification in order to create a mutual interdependence and intersignification” (1992, 122). To sum up, I find it convenient to add some lines of the Translator’s Note to The Loves of João Vêncio: I have chosen to make the entire text to read in English, believing that it would be a greater infidelity to mix English together with Kimbundu, which in the voice of the narrator (and many Angolans) is not spoken as a purely separate language but forms a kind of hybrid with Portuguese. The book’s Creole and slang terms likewise contribute to its linguistic complexity, and English-language equivalents must necessarily be specious, since they have no organic relation to the cultural reality of Angola. (Zenith 1991, vii)

Since translation is seen as a means through which people interact, it can only be regarded as a useful piece of communication if the message is successfully transmitted to a target audience. Nevertheless, translation as communication (a cross-cultural transfer, as considered by Hans Vermeer [cited in Bassnett and Lefevere 1995, 82]), does not involve solely “the communication of messages across a cultural-linguistic border”, but also “the subsequent functioning of the translated text as communication within the target cultural-linguistic context” (Toury 1980, 15-16). Furthermore, as translation involves coping with literary and pragmatic aspects, signification, in this case, has to be seen as non-universal and non-transferrable, with the result that translation is “production within an interactive structure” (Hewson and Martin 1991, 37). At this point, and in order to acquire more insight into the terms this particular cross-cultural event generates, I find it useful to refer to Saussure. He considers language as a set of phonemes and signs which are independent of and exterior to the individual. Besides, the connecting point of the static moment of language as an independent collective product and the dynamic creative moment of speech (as a result of the everyday use of language) is individualized by Saussure in the distinction between langue and parole. While langue represents the social component,

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the collective product which is therefore common to the members of a linguistic community, parole combines a particular form with a concrete meaning. Thus, language is being constantly renewed in accordance with different communication situations. The linguistic system is endlessly changing, indeed, having among its causes the influence of oral practice. Luandino Vieira is amongst those writers that “insist on the story telling of the oral tradition as providing a context, as bearing on and influencing the writing of their novels, poems, stories, or autobiographies” (Ashcroft 2006, 178). As such, Luandino Vieira’s speech strategies strive to decentralize the Portuguese norm and for the assertion of an “Angolan” norm. Most of Luandino’s narrative texts were written while he was imprisoned at the Portuguese camp for political prisoners at Tarrafal, Cape Verde. By constructing a literary language which reflects Angolan cultural tradition, his fiction negates colonial identity, with examples that textualize the Angolan nation. His form of expression represents the conscious construction of a specific literary aesthetics. That was, as some authors point out (among them, Peres 1997, 24), a way to discover an Angolan national culture that represents a break from assimilationist strategies of past Angolan intellectual movements. His narrations open the margins of the written text to practices of orature within traditional Kimbundu culture. In this way, he forces the Portuguese language to carry the burden of African discourse markers. He even incorporates Kimbundu words untranslated, thus echoing Homi Bhabha’s hybridity. Hence, “like the oral tales that have informed much of contemporary Angolan fiction, these narratives are for retelling; they are multivoiced and multilayered as are their textualizations of nation” (Peres 1997, ix). As a form of cultural contestation, his work participates, on the one hand, in radical critiques of imposed patterns of acculturated identity; it seeks to discover, on the other, the borders of a collective Angolan selfhood. As Peres underlines, this is a way of preserving and ultimately redefining the cultural images that underwrite collective action, which he termed as strategies of “transculturation” 6 : “Generally speaking transculturation describes the process through which oppressed, colonized or peripheral cultures transform imposed metropolitan or dominant cultural practices and 6

Mary Louise Pratt explains in her work on travel writing that the concept “transculturation” was developed in 1947 by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his study on Afro-Cuban culture. The term was incorporated into Literary Studies by Angel Rama in the 1970s. She further states that “the concept of transculturation is used to introduce questions about the ways in which modes of representation from the metropolis are received and appropriated by groups on the periphery” (1992, n.p. [Introduction]).

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elements” (Peres 1997, 10). Transculturation is then understood as a process that takes place when cultures meet (deriving, however, from unequal basis) and is characterized as a “space” of multiplicity, interchange and discontinuities. According to Mary Louise Pratt, transculturation is a phenomenon of the “contact zone”: [The term] which I use to refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. [...] “Contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. [...] A “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized [...] in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (Pratt 1992, 6-7)

The notion of transculturation as a conceptual framework for understanding the process by which Angolan narratives both appropriate and transform dominant Portuguese discourse gives rise to ideas concerning not only the place of the Portuguese language, but also its importance within the Lusophone space. In fact, the big project of a community of Portuguese-speaking countries does include initiatives for the language to go beyond the area of mere communication and involve mainly social, cultural and economic relations and interests. The Portuguese language is considered a vehicle towards an “encounter between cultures” (with the example of Portuguese citizens rambling abroad)7. It is, at the same time, a symbol for a “natural bridge” linking Portugal to the other Lusophone countries.8 Reflecting on cultural issues within the Portuguese-speaking space, with literature playing the part of an important cultural and political tool, we can try to grasp the basis for a better understanding of literary production emerging from Portuguesespeaking African countries. In their variety, they contribute to the strengthening of the communicative ties amongst “Lusophony”. Related to 7

See: Mário Soares. 1992. Prefácio (8/3/1992). In Intervenções 6. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 22; Boaventura de Sousa Santos. 1994. Onze teses por ocasião de mais uma descoberta de Portugal. In Pela Mão de Alice. O Social e o político na pós-modernidade. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 49-67. 8 On this matter, see Francisco Lucas Pires. 1997. Schengen e a comunidade de países lusófonos. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora.

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the literary diversity within Lusophone space, although the language is basically the same, it can assume, as stressed by Cármen Maciel, “the expression of the European Portuguese, the symbolic innovation of the everyday language in Brazil, or even the syntactic or morphological combinations proposed namely by Mozambique, Angola or Cape Verde” (2004, 4). Such forms of expression were made possible thanks to the Portuguese proneness to “expansion and Creolization processes” (Lourenço 1999, 128). In an era when countries are keen on negotiating and projecting their uniqueness to the world, Portuguese language has to be prepared to rival the numerous regional or vernacular African languages or even English and French (Léonard 1999, 439). We would add that it is time to thoroughly rethink the centrality of Portugal and the Portuguese language, which are, in turn, on the periphery of the European literary system, with the Lusophone literary system thus bridging the gap between two historically- and linguistically-connected worlds. In the postcolonial context of translation, such important issues as the relationship between translation and the metonymic representation of a culture, and translation as an approach towards cultural contact, are, therefore, to be stressed. Postcolonial writing abrogates the centrality of European languages by employing language variance, the “part” of a wider cultural whole. Language variance is based on a cultural experience whose difference is validated by the new situation and, in this sense, is directly metonymic of that cultural difference which is imputed by the linguistic variation (see Ashcroft et al 1989, 51-53). This is a key concern (Tymoczko 1999, 17),9 with translation being considered a significant means through which one culture represents another. Apart from being a symbol of the difference between two cultures, both the retention of Kimbundu words and the constructions typical of the orality in Luandino’s texts are demonstrative of the language variation, thus causing the metonymic function of transcultural text to prevail: “For these texts written by postcolonial subjects create a language ‘in between’ and therefore come to occupy a space ‘in between’” (Mehrez 1992, 121). Cultural contact, through translation, does occur, in this case, under a set of hybrid circumstances, and this provides the starting point for an analysis of narrations of nation in contemporary Angola. Bhabha describes hybridity as a disturbingly ambiguous liminal state of tension between colony and the imagined nation-space. That liminal space is the 9

Tymoczko refers to Andrew Hadfield and Mc Veagh (1994, 3-8), who “take up some of the theoretical problems in the representation of nations and national cultures, particularly as Ireland is concerned”.

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site of continued negotiations of hybridity that have emerged in the textualizations of Angolan nationness (Bhabha 1994, 113). If nations are “imagined communities”, inevitably representations of nations will shift as they are constructed through translation by different groups with their own senses of identity, groups both internal and external to a nation. In turn identities themselves depend on a perception of difference for their articulation, difference often established by translations. (Tymoczko 1999, 17-18)10

Besides (as alluded to in Tymoczko 1999, 17), “increasingly, it has been recognized that as it facilitates the growth of cultural contact and a movement to one world, translation is paradoxically the means by which difference is perceived, preserved, projected and proscribed.

Bibliography Álvarez, Roman, and M. Carmen-África Vidal, eds. 1996. Translation, Power, Subversion. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Archer, Carol. 1986. Culture Bump and beyond. In Culture Bound. Bridging the Cultural Gap in Language Teaching. Edited by J. M. Valdes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 170-178. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin, eds. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill. 2006. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Bandia, Paul. 2008. Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere, eds. 1995. Translation, History and Culture. London and New York: Cassell. Bender, Tamara. 1980. Preface. In Luuanda, Short Stories of Angola, by Luandino Vieira. London: Heinemann, i-x. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Carbonell, Ovidi. 1996. The Exotic Space of Cultural Translation. In Translation, Power, Subversion. Edited by Roman Álvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 79-94. 10

These ideas are referred to in Tymoczko, who cites both A. Hadfield and Mc Veagh (1994) and Niklas Luhmann ([1984] 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press).

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Hadfield, Andrew, and Mc Veagh, eds. 1994. Strangers to that Land: British Perceptions of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine. Gerrards Cross & Bucks: Colin Smythe. Hewson, L., and J. Martin. 1991. Redefining Translation: The Varational Approach. London: Routledge. Holmes, James S. 1994. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Léonard, Yves. 1999. As Ligações a África e ao Brasil. In História da expansão portuguesa, vol. V. Edited by F. Bethencourt and K. Chaudhuri. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 421-441. Leppihalme, Ritva. 1997. Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Lima, Conceição. 2009. A Dupla tradução do Outro cultural em Luandino Vieira. Lisbon: Edições Colibri. Lourenço, Eduardo. 1999. A Nau de Ícaro, imagem e miragem da lusofonia. Lisbon: Gradiva. Maciel, Cármen. 2004. Língua portuguesa: diversidades literárias—o caso das literaturas africanas, http://www.ces.uc.pt/lab2004/pdfs/Carmen Maciel.pdf (accessed November 13, 2010). Mehrez, Samia. 1992. Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text. In Rethinking Translation (Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology). Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 120-139. Nord, Christiane. 2005. Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translationoriented Text Analysis. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Peres, Phyllis. 1997. Transculturation and Resistance in Lusophone African Narrative. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Toury, Gideon. 1980. In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics/Tel Aviv University. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Post-colonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Vieira, Luandino. 1977 [1974]. A Vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier. Lisbon: Edições 70. Vieira, Luandino. 1978. The Real Life of Domingos Xavier. Translated by Michael Wolfers. London: Heinemann. —. 1980. Luuanda, Short Stories of Angola. Translated by Tamara Bender. London: Heinemann.

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—. 1987 [1979]. João Vêncio: os seus amores. Lisbon: Edições 70. —. 1991. The Loves of João Vêncio. Translated by Richard Zenith. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publisher. —. 1997 [1972]. Luuanda, estórias. Lisbon: Edições 70. Young, Robert J. C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge. Zenith, Richard. 1991. Translator’s Note. In The Loves of João Vêncio, by Luandino Vieira. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publisher, i-viii.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN WILL THE ALIENS COME HOME? DIASPORA AND TRANSLATION IN PORTUGUESE-AMERICAN LITERATURE MARGARIDA VALE DE GATO

1. Introduction The novel The Keepsake, by Kirsty Gunn, a London-based English writer born in New Zealand, starts in a Portuguese café, where the female protagonist is seduced by the foreigner who will be her sadistic lover. His power over her is exerted through an attraction to the unknown, exacerbated by alliterative foreign words in minimal verbal interactions, some of these in Brazilian Portuguese. When translating it, I wrote to the author asking what should be done to preserve the tension of code switching. “I meant Portugal as an exotic place, faraway”, the author replied. We turned him into a character of no definite origin (as in the source text), occasionally speaking Spanish and Russian. The Portuguese translated text was thus able to convey to the target audience an experience of linguistic alienation akin to that sought for its source-language readership. However, there is no such simple displacement strategy when we ponder how this degree of strangeness might be maintained when the very theme of the literary text is the cross-cultural exchanges between a nation of the language we translate from and the nation and language we are translating into. What I propose to do in this article is to examine problems of translation in literary works that deal with Portuguese immigrants and their descendants in North America, where linguistic interference emerges in the very book covers, with the names of authors and/or titles: Katherine Vaz’s Saudade (1994) and Fado and Other Stories (1997), respectively translated by Alberto Gomes (1999) and Isabel Alves (2003); Frank Gaspar’s Leaving Pico (1999), translated by Manuela Porto

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as Deixando a Ilha do Pico (2002); and Anthony de Sa’s Barnacle Love (2008), translated by Maria Eduarda Colares as Terra Nova (2009). Besides this corpus, I shall occasionally refer to poems by Frank Gaspar recalling his childhood in the Portuguese community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, which have been translated by Vamberto Freitas. Translated into Portuguese, titles lose the foreignizing linguistic juxtaposition that constitutes the initial element of literary defamiliarization in the source texts. Fado e outras histórias and Deixando a Ilha do Pico are indicative of the inevitable overturning of the culturallinguistic forces at play when what was showcased as foreign by a sourcetext overlaps with the target, or language of translation. The accentuated domesticity that results from these circumstances concerning the Portuguese-English pair has already been analysed by Alexandra Lopes as “overtranslatability” (2006), the contrary of Walter Benjamin’s “untranslatability”. Lopes focused on a text written by an assumed foreigner (though currently staying in Portugal for long periods), Robert Wilson, author of A Small Death in Lisbon (1999), whose Portuguese translation begs the question, “how does one translate the self as seen through the eyes (and language) of the other?” (2006, 173). In the examples of Portuguese-American literature I wish to discuss, this difference between “self” and “other” is less clear-cut: “otherness” is only a partial version of the “self”, trying to reclaim its origin from an idealized descent culture that faces, through translation, the challenge of “hitting home”, both in the idiomatic and literal senses. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is rather unexpected. North American writers of Portuguese descent are not primarily aiming to be read in the old country, but in their country. The translated title of the Portuguese-Canadian novel by Anthony de Sa redirects the aim of fiction according to target expectations, blatantly negating any possibility of the translation being “read as” the original. If the title Barnacle Love hinted at a comparison between Portuguese men and “barnacles”, encapsulating the impression of the strong grip held by the ethnic community no matter how far one has drifted from the “same kind” (2008, 108), the Portuguese translation Terra Nova clearly appeals to a rather different audience, emphasizing the New World illusions of the emigrant instead of his homeland recollections. The title, “I Am not a Keeper of Sheep”, from a poem by Frank Gaspar (2004), raises yet another translation problem. Rendered as “Eu não sou um guardador de rebanhos” by Freitas, it makes explicit the intertextuality with a poem by Alberto Caeiro, a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa, wellknown to Portuguese readers. However, the use of intertextuality referring to the culture of descent may also have a refreshing effect. In both

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Saudade and Fado and Other Stories, Katherine Vaz quotes these lines from a “Portuguese fado”: “Navegar é preciso/Viver não é preciso” [One needs to sail/One does not need to live] (1994, 233; 1997, 101-102). The more learned Portuguese reader will identify the lines from Fernando Pessoa’s “Palavras de pórtico”,1 whereas the common reader will rather recall the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso’s rendition of the song “Os Argonautas”. In fact, Fernando Pessoa, while equating the phrase with the “o misticismo da nossa raça” [mysticism of our race], states that it is an ancient navigators’ saying; more rigorously, it was ascribed by Plutarch to the Roman general Pompey (106-48 BC). The interesting point is not that Vaz fails to correctly track the source of the inter-text, but that she stresses in it the ambiguity of the Portuguese word “preciso”—which can mean “necessary” and “precise”/“exact”—valuing the lines for an ambivalent interpretation that was not contemplated in Pessoa’s explanatory remark and is philologically untraceable to the original Latin. By doing so, she opens up new directions for “mysticism” taken from the Portuguese. The discussion of instances of heterolingualism in diasporic narratives raises complex questions about translation (literary and cultural) and about the geopolitics of nations constructed through linguistic (mis)representation. In the context of a volume setting itself to discuss the supposed condition of Portugal as periphery, I can think of no better subject to pay my deeply felt tribute to João Ferreira Duarte. The challenging of target and source categories, the emphasis on the switching positions of original and translated texts and languages, undermining a dualistic polarization, is a lesson I was fortunate to receive both in the classes and in the essayistic work of this eminent scholar and kind friend (Duarte 2001, 2005).

2. Theory For all the exuberance of crossing linguistic, cultural or normative disciplinary foundations that Diasporic Studies has to offer, we should be reminded of two caveats. One concerns the neo-liberalist appropriation of diaspora to an agenda of transnational fluidity, which—masking the cogency of boundaries, of feeling inside vs. coming from the outside, and thriving in the “in-betweenness”—may cater to the spread of globalization, the dismissal of historicity, the overlooking of insufferable conditions: ideological geopolitical repression; socio-economic context-bound struggles 1

In “Palavras de pórtico”, postumously integrated as opening words to Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem in the Brazilian edition of his Obra poética (1960).

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involving the decision of exodus; ghettoization in specific territories; language politics enforcing the immigrant’s denial of a mother tongue or incapacity to voice any fluent demands. 2 Secondly, we should not undermine the risks of fuzzy terminology—starting with the very term diaspora, but continuing on to heteroglossia, translation itself, and subtle gradations of code-switching, inter-, hetero- and intralingualism or bi- and multilingualism—glossing over cultural encounters, especially when dealing with their fictional representations. Additionally, diaspora is a metaphor that literature cannot help getting its hands on: for its substance is about what moves the human across liminal spaces, and its aesthetic pull rests on controversial degrees of distance, displacement, defamiliarization. This comes to bear on the realization that although the three authors of this study write literatures of the diaspora—defined by Françoise Král as texts that “explicitly engage with issues related to displacement, migration and relocation and address the issues of imaginary geography of language” (2009, 5)—they are not diasporic subjects. Anthony de Sa is the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. Katherine Vaz has a Portuguese father born on the island of Terceira and a New-Yorkian mother who was the offspring of a Portuguese-Irish mix. Frank X Gaspar is the grandson of immigrants from the islands of São Miguel and Pico. 3 Contradictorily, they fall prey to Král’s injunction that the diasporic genre should be defended from embracing “sometimes quite opportunistically [...], novels by writers who only have a distant connection to the diasporic experience” (2009, 12). One may extrapolate from this observation that in the context of Anglophone literatures such opportunism ensues from the rising demand for ethnicity in literature, notably in North America, and Katherine Vaz, on her part, even deigns to mock and voice this suspicion in the discourse of one of her characters: Nowadays people like to claim that they’re the product—and I mean exactly that—of the land of their ancestors; it suggests ceremonies and royalty and flights of fancy, more glamorous than the shopping lists we make of our days. I’m like that myself. My parents wanted to be American,

2

Accusations of depoliticization are generally the same that have of lately soured the postcolonial field. Sober assessments of criticism on Diaspora Studies can be found in much scholarly literature about the field, notably Robbins (1995), Braziel and Mannur (2003, 6-7), or Král (2009, 16-20). 3 Descent from the Azores, an archipelago that is equidistant from the Portuguese mainland and North America, further unsettles these authors’ claim to Portuguese origins, while stressing the peripheral conditions of these.

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but people my age want to take the most exotic portion of their blood and paint themselves a character out of it. The problem is that we collect quick impressions and pretend that they’re sensations we’ve earned. (1997, 20)

Vaz’s character also avows his long dismissal of the “link to what I was on my father’s side”, except for rare interactions where he would speak “broken Portuguese with him now and then” (1997, 19-20), and touches on a point that is extremely pertinent to the history of the Portuguese diaspora in North America, with significant consequences on the coming of age of Portuguese-American literature. Ability to make fiction out of the land of ancestry relies on American acculturation provided for by parents who were either too busy trying to live the American dream, or, despite all their efforts, could not achieve sufficient linguistic proficiency or acquire the literacy skills required to write about their experience themselves. Back in 1978, Francis M. Rogers had already argued that: Almost by definition, ethnic literature normally has to be written by immigrants resident here for many years and by descendants born here. The ethnic literature of Americans of Portuguese descent and birth forms part of American literature, not of Portuguese literature. (1978, 425)

Whether writers like Vaz, Gaspar and Sa—along with an increasing number of North American authors of Portuguese descent (Charles Reis Felix, Erika Vasconcelos, Julian Reis Silva or Roberto Christiano)— should be considered hyphenated or just straightforward Americans, it is generally agreed that they are the first to achieve critical mass and constitute an identifiable generation of accomplished writers in English (Almeida 2005; Cid 2005). The great majority of Portuguese who emigrated to North America came from the fringes of the country—mostly the islands of the Azores and Madeira, but also inland regions of the mainland—verged on utter poverty and illiteracy, took up menial jobs as whalers, fishermen, fish canners or workers in farms and in the dairy industry. Plagued by “ethnic invisibility” (Ladeira 2009), if they ever wrote—when they were not too obstinate in silencing their loquacity because of the foreign tongue’s constraints or the defectiveness of “Portenglish” (Dias 1997, 105)—they would do it in Portuguese, thus incrementing its popular literature. From the 1930s onwards, with the enforcement of Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, there was a different wave of emigration to North America constituted by political refugees or intellectual exiles. Some of them wrote excellent literature, notably José Rodrigues Miguéis or Jorge de Sena, but

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were already emergent writers when they left Portugal and continued to write in their language. Apart from Alfred Lewis, the honourable exception with Home Is an Island (1951), we can in fact date from the 1980s the emergence of literature in English about the dislocation of Portuguese into North American communities, whether in Provincetown, Massachusetts (Gaspar), Lodi, CA (Vaz), or Toronto, Canada (Sa).

3. Bilingualism, Bilanguaging, Heterolingualism Françoise Král’s ambivalence regarding the legitimacy of diasporic literature written by authors untouched by exile revolves around her concern with the linguistic implications of the cultural encounter. The discussion of these has been distorted by considering communication to be the primary and almost sole function of language, which fortunately literature does not. For Král, communication is just one of the things that language does. Her strongest argument about the diasporic subject’s interactions in “mother tongue” and adopted language(s) is that these languages are not “mixed”, but assigned “different functions, or rather they [the migrants] find themselves using different languages in different areas of their lives and activities” (2009, 146). Maintaining that no individual can relate to two languages in the same way, Král finds the terms bi- or multilingualism as inaccurate as code-switching, a linguistic descriptor that suggests alternative speeches but does not stress enough the cultural implications in their difference. After Mignolo (2000), she opts for the term bilanguaging, attaching to it gradations of “location” and “degree” in the merging of languages that the speech of certain diasporic communities materializes—Chicano Spanish in the Mexican community of the U.S., “dread talk” by some groups of the Caribbean. Bilanguaging must thus be distinguished from bilingualism, which is the condition of potential proficiency in two languages. Král can sustain the value of the coincidence between the categories of diasporic subject/author and diasporic literary matter because her corpus deals with authors from ethnicities that either have a privileged exposure to the English language even in their “homelands” (India, Jamaica, Kenya, Francophone Canada) or are natives of a language that has gained learning status in the diasporic destination, Spanish. Only thus can she uphold the primacy of the mother tongue, meaning the language of ancestry, and the diasporic individual’s claim to it through bilanguaging in literature. However, for our Portuguese-descent authors, English is their mother tongue, and all confess to not being fluent speakers of the Portuguese language, for which at best they feel the fondness of grandchildren. In their literature, they use

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Portuguese sparingly, and often in the more predictable contexts, even if, as language artists, they are well aware of the potential of evoking a primordial old tongue of attachment. The relative paucity of linguistic interference in literary texts by Portuguese descendants can also be explained as a consequence of the minority status of the population and its language. If even Spanish or hybridized Hispanic speeches cannot always expect to find a readership (Anzaldúa 2007), the Portuguese-American literature here analysed adheres in general to the three main conventions Brian Lennon finds in the management of languages other than English in U.S. trade-publishing books: containment (confinement to single words or brief exchanges), typographic tagging (as the use of italics, to mark the foreign) and translation (Lennon 2010, 10). Although the intrusion of the descent language in current PortugueseAmerican literature is scarce and does not fully correspond to the inbetweenness ascribed to the concept of bilanguaging, it will still be useful to look at instances of heterolingualism in these texts when they switch from native English into “Portuguese-as-would-be-mother tongue”, projecting certain roles, modes and functions onto the latter. I take the term heterolingualism as it has been used for the past decade in Translation Studies, referring “to the use of foreign languages or social, regional, and historical language varieties in literary texts” (Meylaerts 2006, 4), and I find it better suited to my corpora than the term “multilingualism” which implies a “co-presence” (Grutman 2008, 182).4 What I propose to do for the remainder of this article is to categorize such instances and describe the kind of alterity they represent, with comments on how they have been translated (back) to Portuguese.

4. Relevant Features of Heterolingualism 4.1. Proper nouns The great majority of characters created by the three authors have Portuguese names. Many, however, agree with English phonetic rules: spelling is anglicized (“Theophila”, “Josey”, “Joachim” in Gaspar’s Leaving Pico) and accents are dropped—most symptomatically, the first-person 4

I should rather like to stress the interruption which occurs with the shift from one language to another, which is why I considered to opt for “interlingualism” but discarded it since it might also convey a wrong impression of interchangeability between codes, and unnecessary confusion with the term “interlingual translation”, used to describe any translation involving foreign tongues.

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narrator of Barnacle Love, “Antonio”, still a recognizable Portuguese translation of the author’s name, Anthony). Katherine Vaz is the most resistant to this tendency—“Glória”, “José Francisco”, “Conceição”, “Eugénio” in Saudade, all keep their phonetic accents, although somehow “Mario” and “Helio” lose theirs. On other occasions, sometimes such phonetic accents are incorrectly used, as in “The Sete Cús Family” in the novel Saudade. This last instance points to another tendency, the recourse to picturesque nicknames: “Afonso Alfacinha” [Afonso Little Lettuce— “little lettuce” being a nickname for a person from Lisbon] (Vaz) or “Francisco Golfinho” [Francisco Dolphin] and “Manuel Boneco” [Manuel Puppet] (Sa). In Leaving Pico, funny nicknames are generally in English, signs of acculturated or hybridized identities: Johnny Squash, Mooney Prada, Skinny Henrique. It is also in this novel that we find the greatest number of Anglo-Portuguese names, some of them bearing traces of a time when these would be registered according to the phonetic perception of the Ellis Island official who wrote down the names uttered by the illiterate emigrants (Almeida 2008, 350-351, 381-386): “Ramao” (for Romão), “Enos” (for Inácio), “Sheika” (probably Chica). The translated texts in general are not sensitive to the nuances and gradations of acculturation contained in these forms: they put accents and spellings back in their current Portuguese forms. The most extreme case is the translation Deixando a Ilha do Pico that even translates into Portuguese names that were acculturated as mainstream English: thus “Joe Dias” becomes “Zé Dias”, and “Magdelena” becomes “Madalena”. Because this strategy is not consistent—Sheika, Josey Carvalho or Petey Flores retain their hybridized names—, the translated text maintains some of the strangeness derived from the juxtaposition of linguistic codes in the naming of characters, but it runs the risk of misrepresenting one central character: “John Joseph”, grandfather of the narrator, who likes to revel in the past grandeur of the Portuguese Discoveries, is translated as “João José”, and therefore his stereotypical traits do not clash with the foreign identification he has adopted. Other proper names worthy of commentary are toponyms, which sound exotic in English and are, of course, too predictable in the Portuguese translation. Names of boats, notably in Leaving Pico—“Amor de Deus” [Love of God], “Coracao de Jesus” [sic] [Heart of Jesus] and “Caravella” [sic]—denote two traits that, in the end, resonate characteristics long associated with the Portuguese in North America: attachment to the seatrade and to the Catholic religion, bound by a superstitious imagery.

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4.2. Emotional-affective language—naming relatives All the fictional pieces selected from the Portuguese-American authors display a complex network of family relations that are called by common Portuguese appellations. Incidences of these vary according to story plot: thus, in Barnacle Love, “mãe” [mother] is the most used Portuguese word in the book, with over 20 occurrences, either addressing the main character Manuel’s mother or Antonio, his son’s. In Leaving Pico, where, besides the child-narrator, Josey, the main character is his grandfather, “avo” (unmarked by the Portuguese accent, the correct form being “avô”) is the most salient term. Katherine Vaz, on her turn, is fond of the terms of endearment “Papai” and “Mamãe”, which are mostly used in Brazilian Portuguese. Other forms denoting familial relationship are “Tio” [uncle], “Tia” [aunt], “(meu) filho” [(my) son], “Vovô” [grandpa], “Avó” [grandmother], “Irmão” [brother]. At times, the use of Portuguese is clearly intended to express positions of affection, as in the series of letters Manuel writes to his mother after fleeing to Canada, in Barnacle Love. They all start in Portuguese with “Cara Mãe” [Dear mother], but end in English with “Your loving son”, “Your son”, “Merry Christmas”, or simply signed “Manuel”. The distinctive gradation of the mother-son/sonmother relationship is still perceptible in the Portuguese translation by Maria Eduarda Colares, as the translator chose to solve the problem of linguistic interference by italicizing all words that are in Portuguese in the source-text, explaining this in an initial footnote in the first occurrence of such case. Despite creating a fissure in the fictional pact, this footnote does the reader the service of rendering the “voice of the translator” (Hermans 1996), which in this kind of literature can only be left out at the cost of many omissions and a sense of fluency that is contrary to the intentionality of diasporic literatures. On the other hand, a single initial footnote may not be enough to alert the reader to the conflicting languages in the source text, and the choice of italics risks being confused with instances when these are used for citations or emphasis. An alternative strategy would be one of compensation, switching from Portuguese into English in instances displaying a converse affectionate value—for instance, in this case, “Your son”. However, such a strategy should, whenever possible, be discussed with the author, as it risks emphasizing phrases that would better be left unmarked. Portuguese is used with emotional connotations also in exclamations of wonder (“mas que maravilha” [how wonderful!]—Sa 2008, 197), greetings (“Boas festas” [Season’s greetings]—Sa 2008, 56), desperation and appeal to divine intercession (see below, religion/superstition), or, most frequently, anger expressed by insult. The latter is marked by the use

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of slang, and the word that most often crops up, “puta” [whore] (used in the fiction of all three authors), indicates the sexist bias of the descent culture.

4.3. Food Arguably the most basic cultural identifiers, several food items are represented in the selected literary pieces as distinctive of the Portuguese culture, more or less untranslatable: “bacalhau”, “chouriço”, “pão torrado”, “queijo” in the first pages of Sa’s novel (2008, 4, 10, 14); “moule vino d’ahlo” [sic], “linguica” [sic] and “sopas” (meaning soups with bread) in Gaspar’s Leaving Pico (1999, 15, 25, 35); “morcela”, “nógado”, “abrótea”, “pão”, “hortelã”, “queijada”, “cracas” in Vaz’s Saudade (1994, 5, 14, 23, 28, 37), or “vinha d’alhos” and “torrêsmos” [sic] in the title story of her Fado and Other Stories (1997, 100). Some terms are connoted with seafood meals, and others are specific of the Azorean diet (the case of Vaz’s “cracas”, marine mussels of the same kind of the “barnacle” that figures in the title of Anthony de Sa’s novel). A significant number are connected with the eating of pork in the Portuguese style, i.e., processing all possible parts that derive from the traditional, almost ritualistic pig slaughter (the “matança”, featured both in Barnacle Love and in Leaving Pico). In Barnacle Love, the abuse of alcohol, namely wine and brandy (significantly, rendered in the Portuguese “vinho” and “água ardente”) is the most evident sign of Manuel’s failure to live up to his dream of “fazer uma América” (2008, 62, 202). It is also a prominent feature of life in the Portuguese community of Provincetown in Gaspar’s Leaving Pico, and represented as a vice hindering the promising careers of some PortugueseAmerican characters in Vaz’s Fado and Other Stories. Consumption of wine and filthy pork, together with chauvinistic cursing, comply with the prejudices of dirtiness, mischievousness, laziness and primitive hot temper that some commentators have identified in mainstream American literature representations of the Portuguese—or “portagees” or “gees”, as in the infamous description of a short piece by Melville (see Monteiro 1979; Silva 2008, 29-38). However, as depicted by the sympathetic perspective of Portuguese-American descendants, these characteristics stand out as dramatic expressions of deficient integration in the American way, debunking the myth of the new land as harbour to industrious paupers, and pressing upon the iron walls of the melting pot, be it filled with food or culture.

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A possible strategy for translating the incompatibility of food styles would be to retain in English names of meals or products that are distinctively American, and this occurs at times in the Portuguese translations, though not consistently. For instance, “sopas made from Royal Lunch crackers”, in Gaspar’s Leaving Pico (1999, 35) is rendered by Manuela Torres as “sopas de flocos [corn flakes] Royal Lunch” (2002, 47); however, the same “Royal Lunch crackers” will later on become “biscoitos [cookies] Royal Lunch” (2002, 76). Choices in this respect are always subjective, depending on the translator’s perception of habits that are recognizably North American.

4.4. Religion/superstition All fictional works considered in this study contain moments of prayer, sometimes punctuated by pleadings, exclamations or imprecations in Portuguese, somewhat stereotypical and meeting reader’s expectations of popular versions of Roman Catholic bigotry, but denoting also an emotional use of the language: “O Nosso Senhor” repeated as in singsong through the distress of Vaz’s story “Fado” or “Madre de Jesus!”, “Gracas [sic] a Deus!” and “Velha me Deus!” [sic] in Gaspar’s novel. In some cases Catholicism is positively seen as a way to support the poetic subject’s quest for divine spirituality, complementing the experience of American transcendentalism, namely in the poetry of Frank X Gaspar, or as a source of transrational power, blending with superstition to give spiritual courage/protection (also in Gaspar, the mysterious properties of the taleigas made by the bruxa Ernestina, the shoemaker’s wife). 5 Typically, in Vaz, Catholic icons are filtered through the double-vision that permeates the narration: “figuras de cera” [wax dolls], or paintings of “morte-macaca” [monkey-death, metaphor for particularly unfortunate deaths] assume totemic and transfigurative properties. Not uncommonly, Roman Catholicism is questioned or violently rejected by certain Portuguese immigrant characters, who are strongly anticlerical, trying to exorcise haunting memories related to Catholic indoctrination, notably involving sexual harassment by predatory Church officials. Manuel, in Barnacle Love, vents his drunken aggressiveness against a woman collecting money for the neighbourhood church: 5

This character first appeared in the poem “Enestina, the Shoemaker’s Wife” of Frank Gaspar’s Holyoke and was recovered in the novel Leaving Pico, where she is called upon to make her taleigas, little bags with charms against the evil eye. About the quest for a religious path at the crossroads of several cultures in Gaspar’s poetry, see Alves (2007, 743-750).

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The Portuguese translation of this excerpt, by Maria Eduarda Colares, opts for an erasure of heterolingualism, but tries to retain the effect of Manuel’s imperfect speech through a lame Portuguese which supposedly the reader will read “as though” it were the English in which the novel was originally written: “Para você lavar no meio das pernas, para a pinta cheira fresco no sexo com padre Costa?” (2009, 172). The strategy relies on a presumption that makes the reader an accomplice of translation as artificial discourse. This idea might merit a special article developing the already cited reflection on the “translator’s voice” by Theo Hermans. But for the moment we shall be content with adding a few more cases that defy and belie the discourse of translation in such complex cases where the target language is used at the source.

4.5. Misspellings, “broken” English and Portuguese There are several spelling and syntactic mistakes in the Portuguese used in these texts, especially by Frank X Gaspar who, out of four Portuguese words introduced into the body of poetry we chose to analyse, adds an initial “h” to the word “erva”, possibly due to the English “herb”, a mistake he repeats twice in Leaving Pico (2007, 10; 1999, 89, 95). According to Silva, “[t]his example both attests to his unfamiliarity with the ancestral language and indicates his ready assimilation into the American mainstream” (2007, 189). In some cases, there might have been a more or less conscious drive to turn the Portuguese into a Latin language more easily recognizable by a North American reader, accounting perhaps for incorrect use of the “ll” by Gaspar in “Caravella” and “canailla” [instead of “canalha”, scoundrel], or Sa’s Italian-sounding “delicata” (2008, 103). There is still another possible reason for these mistakes, the influence of “Azorean Portuguese”. In fact, although “Azorean” does not have the linguistic status of a dialect, it varies from standard continental Portuguese, mostly in phonetics, and, as these writers’ schooling in the written language of descent is admittedly restricted, it would be logical for them to write “by ear”, which could well account for some funny spellings, such as “moule vina d’ahlos” (Gaspar 1999, 15) for “molho de vinha d’alhos”, or the use of unrecognizable words, such as “rafada” (Gaspar 1999, 32, translated as “safada” [mean] by Torres 2002, 45).

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Katherine Vaz writes: “Some of my references such as ‘sonhos cor-derosa’ are Azorean blended with Californian culture, variations my Californian family used, and to be honest, I haven’t read my books in Portuguese” (email message, 12.22.2010). In fact, “sonhos cor-de-rosa” is a common Portuguese idiom for wishing sweet dreams, but in her first novel, Saudade, Vaz uses a syntactical variant, “sonhos na cor-de-rosa” (1994, 12). This atypical use is “corrected” in the Portuguese version, as in fact are all spelling mistakes in the translations from Vaz and Gaspar. By insisting on a faultless standard Portuguese, these translations erase the disruptive patterns present in the source text, maintaining on the contrary the ingrained illusion of a homogeneous language, which in the Portuguese imagery is contiguous to that of a country with the oldest frontiers in Europe.6 Although I could not find any instances of misspellings or unusual constructions in Barnacle Love, the text that presents more and longer phrases in Portuguese, its author also referred to his Azorean background when asked by me about linguistic hybridity: “My speech is tinged with Azorean dialect that is even further removed from my parents’ speech. Words have changed, and the expressions that are inherently ‘açoreano’ have changed gradually over time, adopting a more ‘Anglo’ sensibility” (email message, 12.27.2010). Even if this is not altogether evident, there are interesting intersections of English and Portuguese in Sa’s novel that use strange collocations of the latter language to frame the Azorean’s immigrant dream as an heroic myth (see, on this, Fernandes 2009): “I come to be someone in this world. If you are going to fazer uma América [make an America] then let this country shape you” (2008, 205). Once again, Colares translates broken English for broken Portuguese: “Eu vem para ser alguém neste mundo” [Me comes to be someone in this world] (2009, 207). Sa wrote, in the same email, that he “would have liked to see those words that Manuel insists in speaking remain English”, which could be an interesting choice to restore heterolingualism, although, Manuel’s allocutions being far too many, such option might impair the comprehension of important parts of the novel by less proficient readers. Nor would they be able to identify the passages as corrupted, and as the tragic sign of an identity whose self-censorship results in a lifelong imperfect expression in an alien tongue. By imposing upon himself and his family the rule of English-only conversations, Manuel gives himself over to the subaltern “silence of the polyglot” (Kristeva in Král 2009, 141). 6

Traditionally dating from the Alcanizes treaty in 1297, though clearly this ignores the expansion through the Discoveries and the addition of new territories, such as the islands of the Azores first spotted in 1427.

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4.6. Prosody and glossolalia Confirming the use of the foreign tongue as a strategy to enhance the unfamiliarity of literature, there are instances where Portuguese words or phrases seem to be used not to add any semantic or even emotional value but because of the aesthetics of their strategic resonance. This seems to me to be the case in Gaspar’s lines from the poem “Ernestina the shoemaker’s wife”, when the lyric voice recalls childhood and sitting “among the sharpsmelling hervas” (2007, 10); obviously the exotic synesthesia of memory would be less acute with the English equivalent, and maybe the poet even felt he needed the misspelled “h” to invoke this mystery of grass. Katherine Vaz, for her part, often uses Portuguese words randomly chosen for their sound, beauty or awkwardness, and for which no English paraphrase is offered in the source text. They function like charms and acquire the mystic and transrational qualities of glossolalia (meaningless syllables from an unknown verbal code received as an enchantment). They whispered words over the crib to open their daughter’s ears—mão, pão, sim, mim, latim, nó, farol, girassol 7 —and any words with the swallowed letters and hummed endings that would mix with air to create a chiming cloud. (1994, 14)

Vaz is appealing to a magic of the foreign tongue, which inevitably gets lost in overtranslatability: kept in Portuguese in the existent translation, such words attach themselves to actual meanings.

4.7. Culturemes According to Christiane Nord’s functional category, a cultureme is a social phenomenon regarded as relevant by members of a certain culture that, when submitted to comparison to corresponding phenomena in another culture, is considered specific to the first (1997, 34). From the point of view of diasporic literatures, a cultureme can be identified as a term pertaining to the descent culture and embodying a cultural identity found to be lacking in the host culture, therefore in need of translation. The most recurring such terms in the selected texts are the two timehonoured “untranslatables” of the Portuguese culture: “fado”, cropping up in the work of the three analysed authors, and “saudade”, for which tentative definitions are offered by both Katherine Vaz and Anthony de Sa.

7

[Hand, bread, yes, me, latin, lighthouse, sunflower.]

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Saudade, by Katherine Vaz, starts, even before the title page, with an epigraph presented as a dictionary entry: Saudade (SOW DAHD’) A Portuguese word considered untranslatable. One definition: Yearning so intense for those who are missing, or for vanished times or places, that their absence is the most profound presence in one’s life. A state of being, rather than merely a sentiment.

In the beginning of Barnacle Love, we read: The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land—all things born of the soul that can only be felt. (2008, 2)

In both these literary definitions, the fixity of the stereotype is reinforced by a certain static morbidity (“vanished times”, “the way things were”) that reifies the culture of descent. This seemingly contradicts the transgressive power for which linguistic hybridity is often celebrated, suggesting rather that, because the use of the foreign language is most often contained and strategic, instead of crossing borderlands it might well reinstate superficial encapsulations of culture. This can even confine the persona of the writer, according to Teresa Cid’s caveat in relation to the use of “cultural translation” in diasporic literatures: “[T]he risk of overplaying it, as well as of overplaying the differentiating ethnic element of one’s past as the cornerstone of identity” (2002, 254). If, moreover, we direct our attention to the effect of such passages when translated to a target culture that is identical to the origin boasted by the narrator, we may face disturbing reactions resulting from, besides overtranslatability, a sort of overstatement of a legend one would rather see dispelled. In Barnacle Love the predictable culturemes are part and parcel of Sa’s stated purpose: [M]aking this a complete experience for the reader—that they felt somehow they were living in a Portuguese Community for the 200 and odd pages that they were reading this, and that they could actually walk out... down the streets of Toronto and look at things in a very different way [...] recalled stories... tend to be exaggerated in every way. (interviewed in 2008)

The act of inviting the reader to “walk out” implies regarding the ethnic community as something eccentric, even if adjacent, to his own, and

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hence the tendency to exoticize. One should remark that heterolingualism here foregrounds insulation, not because of any literary flaw but precisely because it is strategically used to underline its main character’s difficulty in finding the means of expressing his unmoored identity, plagued with the ties to a native environment he seeks to flee but keeps coming back to him in the conservative fashion of something that is transplanted and not organically grown. Happy intermarriage and linguistic miscegenation is perhaps less characteristic of the immigrant experience than the exclusion of non-integration. However, Katherine Vaz attempts to map out the celebratory pathway, which is not “inter”, but “trans” (availing itself of characteristics from both cultures without the need to bridge between them or make them connect), and can adapt to climatic changes. It is not insignificant that Clara, in Saudade, should fall in love with a grafter of plants, or that she was born mute and made her first claims to language after arriving at Lodi, California, and meeting another woman who helped her to utter English words disguised in Portuguese sentences. Language is a central theme in Saudade, and both in this novel and in the short-story collection Fado and Other Stories, the use of Portuguese is also exoticized, but rather as a privileged means for unravelling the mysteries of the self and releasing poetic revelation, often in combination with other forms of “languaging” (speaking in sugar traces, for instance, or dots and equations on a page). This seems to run contrary to the rather conservative initial gloss of the word Saudade. Nonetheless, it purports to be only “one definition”—in fact, the whole novel and how language is grafted onto it sheds new light and adds new nuances to that same concept, which is thus transformed and explicitly redefined two more times throughout the novel. As Teresa Cid remarks: The fact that worn out iconic words such as “saudade” and “fado” are given a new freshness and intensity of meaning is also, for Portuguese readers, to become aware of another kind of loss experienced by those that stayed at home, namely the often pervasive lackluster of our Portugueseness. In her work, those words do not refer to a stale sensibility, but to a vital spiced-up one, allowing readers to embark on a voyage of discovery or recovery of themselves. (2002, 253)

This linguistic revitalization of Portuguese terms also manifests itself by forming, as it were, new culturemes, some of which are prone to baffle the very Portuguese readers. In one symbolic moment of Saudade, when Clara tries to teach language over again to a child who had been imprisoned in a chicken coop, the words that do the trick, “naming unseen

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things” (1994, 186), are Portuguese. Among these, we find a verb that is quite unusual, albeit registered in the dictionary: “Rascar—to scratch, but also to woo” (1994, 194). The author creatively seeks words that might release entangled threads of meaning, in a text where the holed net is the favourite metaphor for life. How does this work in the translated version? Rather feebly, given the tendency to domesticate and naturalize. The translator seems to act upon the presumption of the unintelligibility of this term to the common Portuguese reader, and chooses another one: “arrastar”—a verb that can only be connoted with “to woo” in the idiom “arrastar a asa” (1999, 173). Here as elsewhere, Gomes keeps the Portuguese words in italics, as does Isabel Alves in similar examples from Fado and Other Stories. However, because unlike the translator of Barnacle Love, none of them inserts a footnote or other paratextual device informing about the use of Portuguese in the novel, such italics will probably not trigger linguistic reflexivity deriving from the use of ethnic lexis. Through what kind of compensation could this denotation of the cultural specificity of language be translated? Lisa Rose Bradford, facing the same problem in translating Latino U.S. poets into Spanish, suggests ingenious solutions in which some words of the translated text are maintained in English as Anglophone cultural references. The only problem to this is that the underpinning of cultural specificity is highly subjective; when, for instance, Bradford translated “fuck you like Americans know how” for “te cogeria con American know-how”, on the grounds that it was reasonable to underscore the “U.S. work ethic and progress” (2009, 27), she ran the risk of reorienting textual intentionality, slightly altering the implications of sexual politics and stressing something which was left unstressed in the source-text. It would be wise to check with the author on this imbalance of cultural emphasis, and preferably get him or her involved in the process of rewriting the terms of cultural difference attached to heterolingualism. When used to express the cultural specificity of the other, the cultureme, a term coined in the area of Functional Translation Studies, can hardly be translated to the other’s language with functional equivalence.

5. Concluding Remarks The necessary readjustment of the literary text’s function when diaspora literature is translated into the culture of descent is the corollary of one of this essay’s lines of inquiry: what happens when heterolingualism, a strategy of literary defamiliarization used to undermine

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culture-centric presumptions of identity, is translated into the language that contaminates and competes with the source text’s main literary language. Another line of research pursued in this article relates to the ways in which the use of multiple languages, and hence of forms of translation inside an “original” text, affect the representations of source cultures, their influences and targets, selfness and otherness, centre and peripheries. Specifically, we have tested the thesis of linguistic hybridity in contemporary literatures as transgressing and transforming not only monolingual minds but mononational representations of culture. We found that this is not always quite true. In Leaving Pico and especially in Barnacle Love, the emergence of the descent language, sometimes corrupted, stresses isolated difference rather than adaptive heterogeneity. Portuguese is certainly a form of emotional release for the characters, but the fact that it is only called for in extreme situations, or when the values of self do not match those of the adoptive homeland, stresses its exoticism and inadequacy to acculturation. The Portuguese that is retained encapsulates fixity, it did not evolve or mix with the language of the larger community, and much of its remains are fragments of stereotype. Although a strategically typified use of the Portuguese is also a feature of Vaz’s novels and of some poems by Frank Gaspar, in their literature the use of the descent language is given a different treatment, intent on exploring the suggestiveness of the signifier. In Vaz, especially, Portuguese snippets are not retained as pieces of identitarian cultural information but as props in the performance of the self’s creativity through language. The other option, however, is nonetheless valid: using strategic words whose confined meanings demonstrate the alienation which the “old tongue”, and those who spoke it, suffered at a historical moment when the immigrants’ dream of success in a new land was curtailed by inarticulateness of identity. Moving across borders, as one does in translation, can entail both the rewarding challenge of re(in)stution and painful severance.

Bibliography Almeida, Onésimo Teotónio. 2005. Portuguese-American Literature— Some Thoughts and Questions. Hispania 88 (4): 733-738. —. 2008. Comunidades portuguesas dos EUA: identidade, assimilação e aculturação. In Portugal intercultural: razão e projecto, vol. IV. Edited by Artur Teodoro de Matos and Mário Lages. Lisbon: Alto Comissariado para a Imigração e Diálogo Intercultural, 339-422.

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Alves, Teresa Ferreira de Almeida. 2007. Acordes medievais e renascentistas em Frank X. Gaspar. In “And Gladly Wolde (S)he Lerne and Gladly Teche”: Homenagem a Júlia Dias Ferreira. Edited by Teresa F. A. Alves, Maria Isabel Barbudo, J. Carlos Viana Ferreira, Alexandra Assis Rosa, Rita Queiroz de Barros, and Isabel M. F. Mealha. Lisbon: Colibri/Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 735-752. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Meztiza. 3rd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Benjamin, Walter. 2000 [1923]. The Task of the Translator. In The Translation Studies Reader. Edited by Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge, 15-25. Bradford, Lisa Rose. 2009. Uses of the Imagination: Bilanguaging the Translation of U.S. Lationo Poets. TranscUlturAl 1 (2): 13-34. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur, eds. 2003. Theorizing Diaspora: a Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Cid, Teresa. 2002. Reading Katherine Vaz: Re-thinking the Portuguese Diaspora. In Feminine Identities. Edited by Luísa M. Flora, Teresa F. A. Alves and Teresa Cid. Lisbon: ULICES/Colibri, 249-269. —. 2005. A Escrita luso-americana: da auto-rasura à visibilidade. In Literatura e migração. Edited by Teresa Seruya. Lisbon: Colibri, 6180. Dias, Eduardo Mayone. 1997. Miscelânea LU.S.A.landesa. Lisbon: Cosmos. Duarte, João Ferreira. 2001. Representing Translation in the Colonial Encounter. In Ultimas corrientes en los estudos de traducción y sus aplicaciones. Edited by Anne Barr, M. Rosario Martín Ruano and Jesús Torres del Rey. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidade de Salamanca, 191-199. —. 2005. Do Binarismo em tradução. Relâmpago: revista de poesia (a tradução de poesia) 17 (October): 21-45. Fernandes, Frederico. 2009. A Poética da migração: narrativas orais açorianas na província de Ontario. Cerrados 18 (28): 85-97. Gaspar, Frank X. 1999. Leaving Pico. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. —. 2002. Deixando a Ilha do Pico. Translated by Manuela Torres. Lisbon: Salamandra. —. 2004. Night of a Thousand Blossoms. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books. —. 2006. A Noite dos mil rebentos. Translated by Vamberto Freitas. Magma 3 [offprint].

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—. 2007 [1988]. The Holyoke. 2nd edition. Dartmouth: Centre for Portuguese Studies and Culture/University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Grutman, Rainier. 2008. Multilingualism and Translation. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha. London and New York: Routledge, 182-185. Gunn, Kirsty. 1997. The Keepsake. New York: Grove Press. —. 2001. A Recordação. Translated by Margarida Vale de Gato. Lisbon: Editorial Notícias. Hermans, Theo. 1996. The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative. Target 8: 23-48. Král, Françoise. 2009. Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literatures. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Ladeira, António. 2009. Literaturas da diáspora lusófona nos Estados Unidos da América e no Canadá. Paper presented at the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 6 November, http://www.socgeografialisboa.pt/ wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Literaturas-da-Diaspora-nos-EUA-eCanad%C3%A1.pdf (accessed November 13, 2012). Lennon, Brian. 2010. In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lopes, Alexandra. 2006. An Englishman in Alentejo: Crimes, Misdemeanours and the Mystery of Overtranslatability. In Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines. Edited by João Ferreira Duarte, Teresa Seruya and Alexandra Assis Rosa. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 169-185. Meylaerts, Reine. 2006. Heterolingualism in/and Translation. How Legitimate Are the Other and His/Her Language: An Introduction. Target. Heterolingualism in/and Translation [special issue] 18 (1): 115. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local History/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Borderthinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Monteiro, George. 1979. “The Poor, Shiftless, Lazy Azoreans”: American Literary Attitudes towards the Portuguese. In Proceedings of the Fourth National Portuguese Conference: the International Year of the Child. Providence: The Multilingual Multicultural Resource and Training Centre, 166-197. Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Pessoa, Fernando. 1960. Obra poética. Edited by Maria Aliete Galhoz. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar.

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Robbins, Bruce. 1995. Some Versions of U.S. Internationalism. Social Text 45: 97-123. Rogers, Francis M. 1978. The Contribution of Americans by Portuguese Descent to the U.S. Literary Scene. In Ethnic Literatures since 1776: The Many Voices of America, vol. 2. Edited by W. T. Zyla and W. M. Aycock. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 409-432. Sa, Anthony de. 2008. Barnacle Love. [N.p.]: Doubleday Canada. —. 2008. Interview with Anthony de Sa, Author of Barnacle Love. YouTube by BookLounge, March 27, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7ow8IYR5bpM (accessed December 26, 2010). —. 2009. Terra Nova. Translated by Maria Eduarda Colares. Lisbon: Dom Quixote. Silva, Reinaldo. 2008. Representations of the Portuguese in American Literature. Dartmouth: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Portuguese Studies and American Culture. Vaz, Katherine. 1994. Saudade. New York: St. Martin’s Press. —. 1997. Fado and Other Stories. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. —. 1999. Saudade. Translated by Alberto Gomes. Lisbon: Asa. —. 2003. Fado e outras histórias. Translated by Isabel Alves. Lisbon: Asa.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN PERFORMATIVE IDENTITIES AND INTERWOVEN ART PRACTICES: PAULA REGO, MENEZ AND ALBERTO DE LACERDA ANA GABRIELA MACEDO

This is how I always work—drawing on my own life and dreams and feelings [...]. Interweaving is like knitting. (Rego in McEwen 1997, 125)

1. Foreword This essay addresses an intricate network of personal and professional relations created and nurtured within a close circle of friendship and artistic cross-fertilization which are at the roots of the work of three formidable artists—the painters Paula Rego and Menez, and the poet Alberto de Lacerda. As I hope it will become clear throughout my text, despite the fact that this somehow unusual case of positive contamination of different semiotic discourses is certainly not an issue of literal translation, it is however my conviction that at the core of this complex process of artistic and emotional “interweaving” (sic Rego) lies a strong case of intersemiotic translation. Therefore, I wish to make it my own personal tribute to the ample scholarship of João Ferreira Duarte, hereby invoking the benevolent eye of the expert in Translation Studies and, likely more adequate in the present situation, his devotion to and expertise in yet another contaminating and contaminated field, that of Comparativism. The tip of the thread that first lead me to Paula Rego1 was, curiously 1

As always I am deeply indebted to the artist Paula Rego for giving me permission to reproduce in my work her paintings and drawings. I also wish to thank the Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito, in Algés, which I contacted concerning the work of Menez.

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enough (since Rego is Portuguese by birth and therefore should have been closer to my cultural universe), my fascination with Angela Carter— Carter’s overt and daring commitment to a gendered aesthetics, her personal aloofness and the vibrant contemporaneity of her writing, her risky crossing over the edges of the permissible and her naughty upsetting of the “commandments” of political correctness, her blurring of opposite cultural norms, disrespectful of borderlines between mass, popular and experimental canons of the literary, in sum, her transgressive blending of aesthetics and politics. Not surprisingly then the first text I ever wrote on Rego’s work (a commentary of her illustrations of “The Nursery Rhymes” [1989]) links the literary, the visual imagination and the mythography of both artists (Macedo 1999, 245-254). Not much later, I found the third link in this knot of women artists, the writer and critic Marina Warner, the three artists similarly engaged in the “demythologising business”, 2 the fearless and risky practice of, in Carter’s words, “decolonising our language and our basic habits of thought” (Carter 1983, 75). Warner, herself a devoted admirer of the two previous artists, as a mediaevalist deeply interested in Carter’s rewriting of myths and fairy-tales, the editor of Carter’s second volume of Fairy Tales (after the premature death of the writer in 1992), and also a sensitive hermeneutist and connoisseur of Rego’s art. She wrote the introduction to Rego’s Nursery Rhymes in 1994, as well as the introduction to the Jane Eyre edition by Enitharmon in 2003, besides innumerable review articles on the artist’s work for journals and magazines. Like Carter, Warner has herself produced a vast and complex revisitation of myths, both classical and contemporary, issued from high and popular culture. (See for example her Managing Monsters. Six Myths of Our Time [1994], From the Beast to the Blonde [1995], or even Indigo [1993].) John McEwen, till today not just Rego’s pioneering critic, but also so far the author of the most exhaustive study of her life and work, in the opening pages of his book, Paula Rego (1992), underlines that undeniable connection between Rego’s depiction of the “‘human comedy’ from a female point of view” (McEwen 1997, 17) and Carter’s parodic narratives, her uncomely revisitation of respected past forms—fables, legends, myths, and of subliminal female whims and desires, which she relentlessly upsets and where she inscribes her dedoxifying commentary. As McEwen remarks, many of the tributes paid to Carter (1940-1992) could equally well be applied to Rego. And he quotes from Marina Warner’s “Obituary” 2

“I’m in the demythologising business. I’m interested in myths [...] just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree” (Carter 1983, 71).

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of Angela Carter: “[T]hrough her daring, vertiginous plots, her precise yet wild imagery, her gallery of wonderful good-bad girls, beasts, rogues and other creatures, she causes readers to hold their breath as a mood of heroic optimism, forms against the odds”.3 Rego, as quoted by McEwen, equally admired Carter’s art, having however met the writer only once: “We talked about the cats in Venice—the disgusting things they get up to and the smallness of their heads. I was thrilled by the vividness of her conversation” (McEwen 1997, 274). Henceforth, in the process of the research I have been developing on Rego’s work and its “interweaving” with other art forms, namely literature, it suddenly dawned on me that it is yet to be designed the mapping of her affinities, both aesthetic and emotional, with the Portuguese artists, painters and writers, and largely with the Portuguese culture and history which is so pervasively, even obsessively, inscribed in her art. Paula Rego openly reclaims that fact and her critics in Britain such McEwen, T. Rosenthal or Marco Livingstone have systematically pointed out that fact, while it is often graciously ignored in Portugal. Two important works should however be signalled in this context: the book by Maria Manuel Lisboa, Paula Rego’s Map of Memory (2003),4 which gives a rigorous historical contextualization and consequent political interpretation of an aesthetics that is too often wrongly assumed to be majoritarily grounded in the canons of the absurd; more recently, Ruth Rosengarten’s Contrariar, esmagar, amar. A Família e o Estado Novo na obra de Paula Rego [To Counter, to Smash, to Love. Family and Estado Novo in the Work of Paula Rego] (2009). The possibility of connecting both cultural universes, the British and the Portuguese, through the trajectory of a group of expatriates in London, following the intricate pattern of their emotional and artistic relationships, is, it seems to me, a wonderful key to enter this “interwoven” world, to use Rego’s own metaphor, of lives and cultures in transit.5 3

Marina Warner. 1992. Angela Carter, Obituary. The Independent, February 18 (in McEwen 1997, 274). 4 The main object of this fascinating Portuguese Map of Memory is, as claimed by the author, the understanding of “the complex political and ideological palette into which she [Rego], has been dipping her brush for over forty years” (Lisboa 2003, 6). 5 I wish to thank Paulo de Medeiros for the incentive he gave me to pursue this new inflection in my previous research on Rego, through an invitation to participate in a colloquium he organized at Utrecht University, named Mapping the Feminine: Inhabiting the Periphery, where an earlier version of this text was presented. This essay is published in Portuguese in my book Paula Rego e o poder

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I want thus to propose that we concentrate on two artists, oddly close to each other (both enigmatic, almost spectral figures with a leading role in the renovation of the Portuguese art in the second half of the 20th century, and both now slightly ignored or absent from the canon of their respective art). I am referring to the visual artist Menez (Maria Inês Ribeiro da Fonseca) and the poet Alberto de Lacerda. They were two pivotal figures around whom one can see and feel the centripetal force that firmly ties Rego (though often intermittently and not in an uncomplicated manner) to her culture of origin, her blood roots and one might even say, her “genetic code”. They form an alluring, albeit tragic Portuguese triangle.

2. Menez In fact, Rego had since our first meeting in 1998 mentioned Menez’s importance in her career as the most striking inspiration of the work she had ever done. Despite the fact that Menez (1926-1995) was awarded the Prémio Pessoa in 1990, the artist had not had a large retrospective exhibition in Portugal since 1994 at the Galeria 111. The 2006 exhibition at the Palácio dos Anjos, in Algés, which coincided with the official opening of the new Art Centre,6 revealed to me that haunting proximity in all its beauty and magnitude. Undecided he reemerges from the sunset Haloed with amazement and disaster In the quest for a body torn apart All the shadows rise from the corners And slowly follow him down the green lanes Like dogs on the scent of his steps A door opens to a sullen somber room And the spaces waver in the windows. (Andresen 1954)7

About Menez, the writer, critic and also long time expatriate in London Helder Macedo, who belonged to the same circle of friendship, wrote in a moving text in 1998: “I think I could never tell Menez, the enlightened da visão. “A minha pintura é como uma história interior” (Lisbon: Cotovia, 2010). 6 Menez. Exposição antológica. Inaugural exhibition of the Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito’s collection, Palácio dos Anjos, in Algés, 2006. 7 Translation by Ana Maria Chaves, unpublished.

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innocence who painted listening to music, from the high trapeze which was her gesture of artist close to the abyss” (1998, 10).8

Fig. 16-1: Untitled by Menez

Menez started painting at the age of 26; her first exhibition was at the Galeria de Março in 1954, then directed by José Augusto França.9 Her 8

When not stated otherwise, all translations included in this text are my responsibility. This same catalogue holds a poem by Sophia de Mello Breyner (reedited from the catalogue of Menez’ first exhibition in 1954, at the Galeria de Março); an essay by António Ramos Rosa, “A Aridez fértil da pintura de Menez” (reedited from the catalogue of the 1987 exhibition at the Galeria 111), and an essay by José Luís Porfírio, “Menez”. 9 Amongst the reviews of Menez’ work, see Salette Tavarez, “Menez”, Colóquio Artes 50 (September 1981); the Calouste Gulbenkian catalogue for the 1990 exhibition with a large selection of original and reedited essays by (amongst others) Fernando Gil, Helder Macedo, Maria Helena de Freitas, Fernando Pernes, José Augusto França, Vic Willing, José Luís Porfírio, Alexandre Melo, António Ramos Rosa, João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, João Pinharanda, Ruth Rosengarten (“Em Busca do tempo perdido”, Artes e leilões, 1989).

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early paintings are influenced by Impressionism; Goya, Klee, Kandinsky, Matisse, Bonnard, Pissarro, Vieira da Silva and De Chirico are her masters. Following the Abstractionism period, she enters a phase of figurativism and portraiture. The feminine figure starts dominating since the 1970s. Ruth Rosengarten wrote of her: “One day she told me that she had gone from abstraction to figurativism because happiness is abstract but sorrow has a specific physiognomy.” 10 From 1965-1969 she lives in London and becomes part of the group of friend artists amongst Alberto de Lacerda, Paula Rego, Vic Willing, Mário Césariny, Helder Macedo and João Vieira. Between 1976 and 1977 two of her children die. Throughout the 1980s she lives in Lisbon and works in a wonderful atelier overlooking the Tagus river, which Rego envies. In 1990 she has a major retrospective exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation which brings her the full recognition of her worth; in that same year she is awarded the Prémio Pessoa. Soon afterwards however, tragedy hits her again and her third child dies. She had been invited to paint the metro station of Marquês de Pombal in Lisbon, for which she produces an elaborate study of 18thcentury Portuguese life and historical events (the 1755 earthquake, the figure of the Marquês de Pombal, etc.). She dies in April 1995. In the “Obituary” which the London newspaper, The Guardian published of her, the following could be read: [Menez] was a precursor of Portugal’s new wave of modern painters who came into their own after the 1974 revolution. A major influence on Paula Rego—the best known of them—she was part of a tradition of women painters, which reaches back to the 17th century Baroque artist Josefa of Óbidos. [...] Her intense, intuitive works were an obvious influence on Paula Rego. Both women lived in Portugal in the twilight of the Portuguese dictatorship, but whereas Rego’s psychological explorations often glowed with humour and wit, Menez’s work had a sense of tragic foreboding, which came from her own life. (Jolliffe 1995)

Menez very seldom gave interviews. “Never complain, never explain” was the motto that introduced the visitor to her retrospective exhibition at the Gulbenkian in 1990.11 Somehow, those very words seem to contain her whole life and serve as the perfect introduction to a work traversed by silence and theatricality—the staging of History enmeshed with the artist’s 10

Ruth Rosengarten. 1995. Um Anjo singular. Visão, April 20 (in Porfírio 1998, 242). 11 See in this context one of the rare interviews, “Os Lugares (in)comuns de Menez”, by Ana Paula Dias, published in Jornal de Letras (1990, 24-25).

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own (tragic) story. She used to say, “[i]t’s not the reporters’ fault, I’m not good material for interviews. [...] And words are never right” (Dias 1990, 24).

2. Alberto de Lacerda Exile Exile is this and nothing but this In its most perfect shape: Today in my parents’ land Nothing but the light isn’t a suspect. (Lacerda 1963, 106)

Born in Mozambique in 1928, Alberto de Lacerda, poet, translator, editor of poetry magazines, lived since 1951 in London, where he first started working for the BBC. 12 He remained in London with short intervals to teach in Brazil (1959-60) and the United States (Austin, New York and Boston) until his recent death in August 2007. He lived in a close circle of writers, artists and intellectuals in London (e.g. Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, William Walton), the city he named his new homeland: “This land/Paradise of human dignity/Will be my beloved homeland/While the other/Denies light love liberty” (“Londres reencontrada—1963” in Lacerda 1984, 413). His first book of poems, 77 Poems, was published in London in 1955 (in a bilingual edition by Allen & Unwin, translated by Arthur Waley). He became progressively more isolated, his house transformed in an unusual sort of museum of relics, poems, artworks. In Portugal his death was acknowledged at the highest circles (as by the former President Mário Soares and the Minister of Culture), too late, however, as it is often the case; Eduardo Pitta, who had accompanied the poet closely, wrote an emotional obituary for the newspaper Público (“O Poeta expatriado” [The Expatriate Poet], 28 August 2007), praising his work and exceptional personality; in Britain, John McEwen (Rego’s biographer and also the poet’s close friend) wrote an essay for The Independent, which came out later in Portuguese in Jornal de Letras (2008, 14-16). The poet’s artistic legacy is held by Luís Amorim de Sousa, a life long friend who in 2009 organized the exhibition

12

His Obra poética was published in five volumes by the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda: Oferenda, volumes I and II, Átrio, Horizonte, and Elegias de Londres.

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Alberto de Lacerda. Um Olhar [Alberto Lacerda. A Regard] at the Mário Soares Foundation, in Lisbon.13 Paula Rego praises the central role played by Alberto de Lacerda in her career both in Portugal and in Britain. He acted as a kind of impresario to her. In fact, Lacerda had given her his support since her first exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1961. Following Rego’s first exhibition at the SNBA [National Society of Fine Arts], by invitation of Fernando Pernes, who was then a member of the Society Board of Directors, Lacerda (who had already written the introductory text in the exhibition pamphlet), in an interview for the Diário de Notícias, called her, then 29 years old, “an exceptional artist [...] [whose desperate vision] came to enrich our collective imagination” (1965, 3). “My painting is like an interior story. [...] To paint is a way of facing, of destroying reality [...]. It comes from a disgust, a revulsion (‘nojo’) for reality”, Rego tells Alberto de Lacerda in this interview (1965, 3). Miró, Max Ernst, Arthur Miller are important influences in her work, she admits, while denying any exclusive affiliation to a particular art movement. She claims: “[M]y inspiration comes from things which have nothing to do with painting: caricature, daily news, street events, proverbs, nursery rhymes, children’s games, nightmares, desires, fears” (1965, 4). Why does she paint, inquires Lacerda, and Rego plainly replies: “I’ve been asked that before and my answer was: ‘To give fear a face’, but there is more beyond that: I paint because I cannot help painting” (1965, 4). The key work in the SNBA show was The Dogs of Barcelona, which was renamed for the exhibition as Stray Dogs to avoid censorship, since there was a direct allusion to Franco and the Spanish dictatorship. Almada Negreiros, Cruzeiro Seixas and Mário Césariny, key figures in the Portuguese modernist and avant-garde art scene, were amongst the first to show enthusiasm for Rego’s work, which also inspired shock and even

13

The catalogue of the exhibition, Colecção Alberto de Lacerda. Um Olhar (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2009), reproduces many of the photos, poems, paintings and memorabilia that had been shown in the 1987 exhibition Alberto de Lacerda, o mundo de um poeta [Alberto de Lacerda, a Poet’s World], which had taken place at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, organized by Lacerda himself. The 2009 exhibition organized by Luís Amorim de Sousa with the support of former President Mário Soares was meant as a tribute to the poet, as stated in the introductory note of the catalogue. Recently, Luís Amorim de Sousa published a volume entitled Às Sete no Sa Tortuga. Um Retrato de Alberto de Lacerda (2010) offering a close account of the poet’s life and artistic milieu in London.

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hatred, as McEwen mentions. 14 Lacerda, in a review of the exhibition Portuguese Art since 1910 at the Royal Academy, commented: Her paintings, even when the meanderings seem most private, reveal a profound revolt, moral, social, and political, as is the case with that masterpiece Stray Dogs. This picture (in which the word “Franco” appears) was originally entitled the Dogs of Barcelona to avoid trouble with the Portuguese fascists. She manages to be convulsive and fluent, dream-like and ferocious. It’s not at all a child-like world, but it knows all the ligaments of innocence twisted by perversity and oppression. She said once that she painted to give fear a face. Her work shows both the terror and the courageous triumph.15

Fig. 16-2: Stray Dogs/Os Cães de Barcelona by Paula Rego

14

See in this context John McEwen’s commentaries on the painting and its reception at the time (1997, 76-83). 15 Alberto de Lacerda, review of Portuguese Art since 1910, at the Royal Academy, in London, Art Monthly 120 (October 1978): 12 (in McEwen 1997, 83).

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These declarations should be put in their historical context, the situation of Portugal in the 1960s, the toughest years of Salazar’s dictatorship and the rise of the colonial war. Rego was painting a schizophrenic Portuguese reality which both exposed and confronted it. The text by Lacerda referred to above was “homely” printed for the SNBA exhibition pamphlet, and obscurely named “Fragments of a Poem Entitled Paula Rego”; the text was in fact only a “fragment”, because it had been previously censored (or rather cut or self-censored by Rego’s father and Lacerda) in order to avoid a more drastic action from the fierce state censorship. 16 In fact, many of the paintings then exhibited had an immediate political message, difficult to elude, the themes were violence, fear, exile (“Trilogia do medo” [Fear Trilogy], “O Exilado” [The Exiled], “Violência infantil” [Childhood Abuse], etc.). Lacerda writes here an elegiac text, a prose poem, praising the young “Portuguese artist from Camden Town”, “Portuguese from tip to toe”, “the owner of an enduring anger and rebellion, which won’t defeat her”, as he claims prophetically: “Your rebellion lies in bed. Not to give up. But to love. Then it rises. And you are a song—erect, decisive, rough. Full of a most mysterious compassion. Possessed with the terror Blake spoke about, Henry Miller’s oblivion and Mário de Sá Carneiro’s lightness of being—you give yourself to painting.” The 1965 Rego exhibition at SNBA in Lisbon was greeted by critics with enthusiasm and had the effect of a revelation. Pernes, selecting the young artist as the one with the highest potential amongst those exhibiting there (names such as Conduto, Pomar and Sá Nogueira), makes the following claims of her art: “Facing spectres, monsters, nostalgia, Paula Rego overlaps them with the memories or sources of her origins and affirms them through countless signs corporealized in a myriad of frenetic forms of sensuality...” (1966, 60). In 1987, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation hosts a singular exhibition, Alberto de Lacerda, o mundo de um poeta [A. L., a Poet’s World]. In its preface, José Sommer Ribeiro sheds light into the reasons which presided over this exhibition (which aptly John McEwen, in a text published in the catalogue, calls “A Poet’s Visual World”). In fact, it is Lacerda’s private collection which is here exhibited, mostly acquired 16

As stated by Alberto de Lacerda in an interview to Jornal de Letras 102 (19 July 1984): “One of the horrors of censorship was self-censorship. We reached the conclusion that my text would have to be cut. Here are the original and the censored versions of the catalogue.” The complete, uncensored version is transcribed by Ruth Rosengarten in Compreender Paula Rego: 25 perspectivas (2004, 8).

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through personal and engaging friendship and aesthetic complicity with the artists here represented. Therefore, it is two artistic worlds in a dialogue which meet here, the poet’s choices establishing a silent commentary upon the exhibited material, and the reciprocal happening as well. Besides paintings, there were books, photos, autographs, a world of intimacy generously made public. The catalogue opens with a manuscript by Vieira da Silva dedicated to the poet. The itinerary of the memories evoked is wide-ranging and its profusion and variety somehow tantalizing: texts by Luís Amorim de Sousa, Eduardo Lourenço, John McEwen, António Ramos Rosa, photos, portraits and paintings by Arpad Szenes, Vic Willing, Paula Rego, Jean Hugo, Pomar, Menez and Vieira da Silva, illustrations of the poet’s books and numberless testimonies celebrating a dialogue of the arts and vindicating the poet’s exile. As Eduardo Lourenço writes in his text for the catalogue, “A Poetics of Redeemed Exile”, “Africa, Lisbon, London, traverse his strangely spectral errance in a submerged dialogue between absence and memory...” (1987).17 Equally, John McEwen writes of the “collection born of love” owned by the poet, overflowing from the stacked books, LP records, “pictures not just framed and on the walls, but framed and leaning in stacks, pictures under a bed, loose leaf in folders, under rafts of brown paper in heaps, in drawers” (McEwen 1987). McEwen also mentions the fact that “Paula Rego had never met Vieira da Silva before Alberto introduced them recently in Paris”, which would almost seem unimaginable and which McEwen affectionately calls “a vital by-product of Alberto’s collecting” (1987). Seemingly, on a personal level, the critic speaks of his own “innumerable debts” to the Portuguese poet, “not least the inspirational and sustaining friendship of his close friends Paula Rego and her husband Victor Willing”. And he adds: “Perhaps Alberto’s collection of collages, drawings and paintings by Paula Rego is the single most astonishing representation he has, marking as it does the entire development of one of the finest of contemporary artists” (McEwen 1987). Eduardo Pitta in an interview with Alberto de Lacerda for Jornal de Letras, apropos the Calouste Gulbenkian exhibition, refers to it as “the exhibition of a very peculiar world of image, writing and memory” (1987, 9). A. Lacerda’s Elegias de Londres [London Elegies] (1987) has printed on the cover a drawing by Paula Rego from 1969, with the following inscription: “To my dear Alberto very affectionately.”

17

The catalogue is unnumbered.

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Fig. 16-3: Portrait of Alberto de Lacerda by Paula Rego

3. Rego’s “Interweaving” Praxis An issue of the journal Colóquio Artes (no. 83, December 1989) following Rego’s retrospective exhibitions in 1988, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), the Casa de Serralves (Porto), and the Serpentine Gallery (London), is especially dedicated to the artist and gathers two crucial essays in the context we are here analysing. One of them, simply entitled “Paula Rego”, is by John McEwen, as already mentioned, a fundamental figure in the kernel of these Portuguese-British network of professional and emotional relations, and the art critic who has most closely accompanied the artist’s career in the UK, and who, significantly, was introduced to the artist by Lacerda.18 18

In a previous text, “Letter from London”, also published in Colóquio Artes of 1981 (no. 50), and which we may now consider historical, McEwen writes the following prophetical words, commenting on Rego’s first large exhibition in

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Fig. 16-4: The Dance by Paula Rego

In the 1989 text for Colóquio Artes mentioned above, McEwen comments on Rego’s painting The Dance (1988) (Fig. 16-4) mentioning that it was the last subject suggested to Paula Rego by her husband Vic Willing (who died that same year), an “elegiac painting”, as McEwen says, evoking her native Portugal, the artist’s own process of growth and maturity—through the figures of the little girl, the young woman and the aging woman dancing together—and her allegiance to Vic Willing, represented through the idyllic couple dancing: On a floodlit dance floor overlooking a moonlit sea the couples revolve to the music. This coast has the wildness of the coast near Ericeira. [...] The mood is overwhelmingly elegiac; and yet the recognition of the end of things is tempered by the gratitude of acceptance and the expectations of love. In the mysterious and often antagonistic relations of men and women

London, at the AIR Gallery (1981): “Paula Rego’s first solo exhibition in London—at the Arts Council sponsored AIR Gallery—proved one of the highlights of the artistic season. Considering her standing internationally this might be thought to have gone without saying but her appearance in miscellaneous group shows over the years [...] has been too intermittent to make its mark, so that the AIR exhibition must be considered her English début if its revelatory effect is to be understood. [...] Overall, therefore, the show both established and consolidated her position, and marks her forthwith as a star of the English, as well as the Portuguese and international, art scene” (McEwen 1981, 58-59).

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Chapter Sixteen so profoundly touched on in all PR’s art [...] here is testimony to the enduring power of love. (McEwen 1989, 17)

Fig. 16-5: Departure by Paula Rego

Similarly, the painting Departure (Fig. 16-5), also from 1988, was dedicated to Vic Willing and meant as an endearing farewell gesture. It shows a young woman wearing an apron who is fully engaged in (lovingly) combing a young man’s hair, on a terrace by the sea, where a large trunk casually lies set aside as if ready for any imminent journey. Tragically, this was one of the paintings which was destroyed in the fire that burnt down one of the storehouses of the Saatchi Gallery in London, and one whose loss (in May 2004) Rego most deeply laments. The other essay published in this December 1989 special issue of Colóquio Artes on Paula Rego is by Alberto de Lacerda, entitled “Paula Rego e Londres” [Paula Rego and London] (1989, 18-23). A beautiful text, full of lively and emotional reminiscences, crucial to understand the meanders of this interwoven pattern of friendships and complicity: “We

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met in the glorious 1960s, the decade where it seemed to us that Utopia was finally about to gain momentum, to settle in. It didn’t get that far, but there certainly was a forward push, impossible to turn backwards” (Lacerda 1989, 18). And this is how Lacerda perceives the young Paula Rego: To talk about Paula Rego is, amongst other difficult things, to talk about a number of contradictions; mysteriously unified contradictions. This woman—eternally young, eternally beautiful—maybe more beautiful today than twenty five years ago when I met her—found herself, found her hub as a child, and has never since then left it. [...] Paula is always at ease, always free—nothing, never, no one has ever chained her—even when she feels shy or says she is embarrassed. “Oh Alberto! It’s shameful to exhibit these things” [...]. She was to me, since the very moment I knew the work and the creature—a paragon of freedom, “free freedom” as the Other would have said it; and this happened in the horrendous years of the dictatorship [...]. (1989, 18)

And further on in the text Lacerda continues describing Paula and the couple Rego-Willing: We were introduced by Menez.19 At first I found the ménage improbable: that racée young woman, with impeccable manners, always dressed in an elegant and relaxed fashion, simple, kind, affectionate. And besides, speaking a beautiful, rich, fluent Portuguese—and without the “you know?” affectation. And other foolish ticks of the social milieu where she came from. On the walls—and there lay the strongest contrast—her paintings were ultra complex, tormented, violent, disturbing. Her husband, the artist Victor Willing—slightly formidable in his enigmatic presence, a vivid intelligence, heavy silences, uncharacteristic accent. (1989, 18; emphasis in the original)

Lacerda compares the complicity and mutual support of the RegoWilling couple to that other mythic couple Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes, and the likening strong personalities of both women artists (1989, 20).20

19

Menez’s complicity with Lacerda is also signalled by the silent testimony of her paintings in Lacerda’s Calouste Gulbenkian’s exhibition A Poet’s World. 20 “A very similar presence, an encouraging presence, a guide without weight, both of them knowing that they were dealing with women with a very strong personality. In Vic’s case, with a very different vision of the world and very different plastic universe.”

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Rego’s atelier is “her universe”, he claims, “no windows, artificial light, intense pop music on the radio. A closed universe, though not narcissist”, he says, whose “explosion and constant opening up is inwards. An oneiric world par excellence” (1989, 22). What Paula was doing in those early years, the poet continues, was not fashionable: Abstractionism was then taking the lead; but Paula continued, patiently and obstinately, until one day, “what she had always been doing, coincided with what became accepted”, he says. “But I could not do otherwise—that’s how Paula justifies her obstinacy, her integrity”, the poet claims (1989, 23).21 Lacerda also underlines the fact that John McEwen befriended the Rego-Willing couple through his intercession, and that McEwen had repeatedly thanked him for that. “He claims that their example has altered his own life and world vision” underlining the unremitting and unconditional devotion of each of them to their art (Lacerda 1989, 20). On her turn, he adds, Menez had told him how this group of friends had been important for her. Menez had been responsible for the friendship between Lacerda and Rego. The two women painters would be likely to share a lot of common ground, despite the slight age difference of a decade. Paula had her public début in Portugal in 1961 with her collages exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation, though the SNBA exhibition in 1965 marks her most notorious start, as already mentioned. The year 1954 is recognized by critics as the year of Menez’s first public exhibition at the Galeria de Março in Lisbon.22 The last name mentioned by Lacerda in this elegiac essay is again John McEwen, another key element in this constellation—“but it was the Scottish critic John McEwen, now one of the who most considered art critics in Britain and the United States, who had a crucial role in the artistic promotion of Rego, by bringing her and her husband to the limelight of the aesthetic world”, he underlines (1989, 23). Lacerda ends his essay praising Rego’s inspiring energy, her complete surrender to her art without the slightest trace of solemnity, he claims 21

“In Paula’s case there was stubbornness, but there was also relentless patience and intransigence. She did not play along with trends, she never made the least concession. She continued on her path, hers alone. Little by little or one day—one never knows how these things happen—what was becoming accepted coincided with what she had been doing all along. [...] ‘But I didn’t know to do anything else’—this is how Paula explains her stubbornness, her integrity.” 22 See among other critics, Fernando Pernes’s review in Colóquio Artes 24 (July 1963): 69. Here reference is made to the artist’s “unquestionable talent”, her notoriety within “Portuguese modernity”.

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(1989, 22). 23 Words which find a powerful echo in Vic Willing’s own appreciation of Rego’s “Art poétique”, as stated in the early essay “The Imagiconography of Paula Rego”: “An orgiastic manner of working, making, dismembering and remaking things into a new totality” (1971, 44).

4. Conclusion Finally, I would like to get back to the inaugurating sentences of my essay. What is it that draws these three artists together? What is at the core of their relationship? Merely the resonance of their art or a debt of gratitude and reciprocal influence? I believe it goes far beyond this. I see this intricate network of professional, emotional and artistic “interweaving”, the various forms of dialogue established and the consequent intersemiotic translations created as set in a much larger frame. The performative agencing that each of these artists invests in their specific art form is an historically situated, emotionally asserted and reclaimed praxis, which openly claims to be anchored in an “interior story”, as much as in the challenge to a reality that often assumes the provocative face of “disgust, or revulsion”. Moreover, the artists under consideration in this essay share yet another revealing circumstance—they inhabited what one might adequately call the “periphery of Europe”, and each of them felt the urgency to set out into larger horizons, even if for different lengths of time, which allowed them the full development of their talent and an escape from the atmosphere of claustrophobia Lacerda so pungently describes in the poem “Exile”, earlier on quoted in this text. Even though the poet Lacerda was born in Mozambique (yet another geopolitical “periphery”) and he carried with him forever that nostalgia, he lived most of his life in the city he called “Paradise of human dignity”, Menez only lived in London for a few years in the mid 1960s but, as I argue in this essay, she played a major role as mediator in this web of relationships, and Paula has all her life been “in-between” Portugal and the UK, the three artists left in their work the tangible imprint of the specular relation between centre and periphery. In the case of Paula Rego, her deep attachment to Portugal has been emphatically proved and even “graved in stone” in the choice of Lisbon, or better, Cascais, for the setting up of her own museum, the Casa das Histórias, inaugurated in September 2009. 23

“Such a creative energy, such a devotion, without any kind of solemnity, to her vocation. For those who are around her these cannot help being something profoundly inspiring and exciting.”

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Bibliography AA.VV. 1987. Alberto de Lacerda: o mundo de um poeta. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Centro de Arte Moderna. —. 2009. Colecção Alberto de Lacerda. Um Olhar. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim. Andresen, Sophia de Mello Breyner. 1954. Catálogo da Galeria de Março. Lisbon: [n.p.] (unnumbered). Carter, Angela. 1983. Notes from the Frontline. In On Gender and Writing. Edited by Michele Wandor. London: Pandora, 69-77. Dias, Ana Paula. 1990. Os Lugares (in)comuns de Menez. Jornal de Letras, December 18, 24-25. Jolliffe, Jill. 1995. Tragic Figures in a Landscape. The Guardian, April 18. Lacerda, Alberto de. 1963. Exílio. Lisbon: Portugália Editora. —. 1965. Paula Rego nas Belas Artes. Diário de Notícias, December 25, 3-4. —. 1984. Oferenda I. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. —. 1989. Paula Rego e Londres. Colóquio Artes (December): 18-23. Lisboa, Maria Manuel. 2003. Paula Rego’s Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics. Aldershot and Hants: Ashgate. Lourenço, Eduardo. 1987. Uma Poética do exílio redimido. In Alberto de Lacerda: o mundo de um poeta (unnumbered). Macedo, Ana Gabriela. 1999. From the Interior: Storytelling, Myth and Representation. The Work of Paula Rego and Angela Carter. In Literatura e pluralidade cultural—Actas 3.º Congresso da APLC. Lisbon: Colibri, 245-254. —. 2010. Paula Rego e o poder da visão. “A minha pintura é como uma história interior”. Lisbon: Cotovia. Macedo, Helder. 1998. Menez ou das presenças ausentes. In Menez. Exhibition catalogue, Galeria 111. Lisbon: Quetzal Editores, 10. McEwen, John. 1981. Letter from London. Colóquio Artes 50 (September): 58-59. —. 1987. A Poet’s Visual World. In Alberto de Lacerda: o mundo de um poeta (unnumbered). —. 1989. Paula Rego. Colóquio Artes 83 (December): 15-17. —. 1997 [1992]. Paula Rego. London: Phaidon. —. 2008. Retrato do poeta. Jornal de Letras, January 2, 14-16. Pernes, Fernando. 1966. Paula Rego, Conduto, Pomar, Sá Nogueira. Colóquio Artes 38 (April): 60-64. Pitta, Eduardo. 1987. A. Lacerda, a criação é um acto sagrado. Jornal de Letras 261 (6): 9.

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Porfírio, José Luís. 1998. Menez. In Menez. Exhibition Catalogue, Galeria 111. Lisbon: Quetzal Editores. Rego, Paula. 1989. Nursery Rhymes. Marlborough Graphics: London. Rosengarten, Ruth. 2004. Alberto de Lacerda. Poema (em prosa) intitulado Paula Rego. In Compreender Paula Rego: 25 perspectivas. Porto: Fundação de Serralves. —. 2009. Contrariar, esmagar, amar. A Família e o Estado Novo na obra de Paula Rego. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim. Sousa, Luís Amorim de. 2010. Às Sete no Sa Tortuga. Um Retrato de Alberto de Lacerda. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim. Willing, Vic. 1971. The Imagiconography of Paula Rego. Colóquio Artes (2nd series) (April): 43-48.

PART IV LOOKING BACK INTO THE PERIPHERY

TRANSLATION STUDIES IN PORTUGAL AND INTERVIEW WITH JOÃO FERREIRA DUARTE RITA BUENO MAIA, MARTA PACHECO PINTO AND SARA RAMOS PINTO

In a volume discussing the position and role assumed by translation in a semi-peripheral system such as Portugal, it seemed relevant to reflect upon the development of Translation Studies as a discipline and include the testimony of one of its most prominent scholars, to whom this volume intends to be a tribute. This final article will thus include an overview of the central moments behind the assertion of the discipline of Translation Studies within the Portuguese academy, followed by the discussion of the institutional space occupied by the discipline. Finally, it includes an interview to Professor João Ferreira Duarte. The discussion around translation issues has been receiving attention from Portuguese scholars for over three decades. We believe it finds itself at a crossroad where more than asserting itself as a discipline in its own right, it needs to reflect on where it is going. For that to happen it is important to first reflect on the path taken as well as revise the discussion developed by scholars that made it all possible. João Ferreira Duarte is undoubtedly one of the most prominent scholars to which Translation Studies and younger scholars will be forever indebted. The interview here included started as a pleasant conversation in a café and gives us crucial information on how Translation Studies came to being a discipline on its own within Portuguese academia, the reasoning behind certain events and projects as well as the path that it seems to be taking.

1. The Institutional Space of Translation On October 24th 2011, different Translation scholars met in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon to discuss “that strange

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object named translation”.1 Gone are the days when translation was not even worth discussing, and that was exactly the starting point for another unsettling lecture by João Ferreira Duarte. Both young and older scholars were united in the expectation that Ferreira Duarte would once again shake everyone’s assumptions by problematizing the very own foundations of the discipline in an already characteristically polemic discourse. In this lecture, Ferreira Duarte drew attention to an apparent paradox that has underlined Translation Studies overall: how have Translation Studies managed to develop as a successful academic discipline when it has low symbolical capital, that is, when its object of study is traditionally perceived as inferior, derivative, secondary? If this is a pertinent question to be posed regarding Translation Studies in general, it is even more so when considering the development of Translation Studies in Portugal. Given the fact that this strange object has been discussed in Portugal for more than three decades now, this volume intends to ponder on the path taken, and its apparent peripheral condition within a system usually assumed as equally peripheral. It is possible to identify two very different and autonomous circuits regarding translation in Portugal: one dedicated to the training of professional translators and another focused on translation as a product of which norms, function and context should be studied. The need for professional translators and specific training was increasingly noticeable in the 1950s and 1960s, most probably due to an increasing number of tourists in Portugal which ended up not only promoting the cultural contact between Portugal and other European countries, but also fostering interest in commercial products and literature from the rest of Europe. In 1962, the Higher Institute of Languages and Administration (ISLA) opens its doors and, even though other institutions opened degrees on translation in the following years, its pioneering role should be acknowledged. Looking at the curricula of these different degrees, their focus on technical and legal translation becomes clear and it is possible to pinpoint a clear separation in training and status between technical translation and theatre and literary translation. While specific and technical training was taught at these institutes (not universities), theatre translation was left in the hands of actors and directors the same way

1

Lecture entitled “Esse Estranho objecto chamado tradução” [That Strange Object Named Translation] given by João Ferreira Duarte in the context of ETC... Monthly Talks on Translation Studies (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies—ULICES) at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon.

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literary translation was assumed by writers or university scholars, most of the times specialized in the author they were translating. This is in fact how universities first started to have translation under consideration. In the 1970s it is already possible to distinguish academic work being developed on translation in the Germanic and Romance departments as well as Linguistics. The former focused on literary translation and history of translation; the latter, on the linguistic aspects of translation and formal equivalence. The increasing interest in translation by the academic community is met by a parallel increase in the number of translations now possible with the abolition of censorship after the Carnation Revolution in 1974. It is nevertheless in the 1980s that one can say Translation Studies gives its first steps as an academic discipline in Portugal. In 1983, GUELF—the University Group on French Literature Studies—organizes their second meeting, now entirely dedicated to Translation Studies, and consequently a book publication entitled Problemas de tradução: escrever, traduzindo [Translation Problems: Writing, Translating], including essays of prominent scholars such as Maria Alzira Seixo and João Almeida Flor.2 It is also in the 1980s that the figure of the translator sees rightfully recognized its presence in the dominion of text production and publishing companies, through the inclusion of the translator in the Authorship Rights Law and the creation of the Portuguese Translators Association (APT). Simultaneously, one could also say that it was in the late 1980s that the scholars in Translation Studies (and Translation Studies as a discipline in itself) became visible. In 1986/87 a group of scholars establishes the Portuguese Association for Comparative Studies (APLC) and, in its first international congress in 1989 in Lisbon, an entire section was dedicated to Translation Studies. The fact that scholars such as José Lambert, Lieven D’hulst and Armin Paul Frank were invited to participate denounces a clear development of Portuguese Translation Studies along the same lines as the Cultural Turn proposed by Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, EvenZohar, Gideon Toury, among others. This recognition of the discipline in the 1980s seems to be confirmed by the growing number of publications solely dedicated to translation, namely in journals such as Dedalus, and, finally, by the promotion of the first Masters Degree in Literary Translation at the University of Coimbra (within the department of Germanic Studies) in 1982-1983. A publication came out in 1986 entitled Problemas da tradução literária [Problems of Literary Translation] collecting students’ final year essays. 2

See Chapter Two.

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If the 1980s were the moment of recognition of translation as an area of study, one can say the 1990s were the moment when it became progressively independent from both Comparative Literature and Linguistics while strengthening its position in higher education institutions. In the context of what could be called the “institutionalization of Translation Studies”, several courses in Translation were made available in different institutions. In 1990, the University of Lisbon opens for the first time a two-year specialization course in Translation [CET: Curso de Especialização em Tradução] with two source languages and covering Translation Theory, Textual Analysis, and Translation History. In 1995, the Institute of Accounting and Administration of Porto (ISCAP) opens a course on specialized translation. Also different research centres start including specific research lines dedicated to Translation Studies. Two good examples are the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) at the University of Lisbon and CECC—Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) at the Portuguese Catholic University. The number of articles on translation by Portuguese scholars grew exponentially and it is important to distinguish four important publications coming out in this same period: Tradução em Portugal [Translation in Portugal] published in 1992 by Gonçalves Rodrigues, Teoria diacrónica da tradução portuguesa: antologia (séc. XV-XX) [Diachronic Theory of Portuguese Translation: An Anthology from 15th to 20th Centuries] published in 1997 by Carlos Castilho Pais, O Tradutor dilacerado. Reflexões de autores franceses contemporâneos sobre tradução [The Translator Torn Apart. Reflections by French Contemporary Authors on Translation] also in 1997 published by Guilhermina Jorge, and O Discurso sobre a tradução em Portugal. O Proveito, o ensino e a crítica: antologia (c. 1429-1818) [The Discourse on Translation in Portugal. Benefits, Teaching and Critics: an anthology (c. 1429-1818)] published in 1998 by José Antonio Sabio Pinilla and María Manuela Fernández Sánchez. The need for translation and the effort of institutionalization of Translation Studies in Portugal has only been confirmed and reinforced in this first decade of this new century. Now more central than ever before, translation is present in almost all higher education institutions and both teaching and research are diversifying their scope. Besides literary and technical translation, we are now witnessing the development of projects in theatre translation, audiovisual translation and accessibility and translation. There are journals solely dedicated to translation—such as Babilónia: línguas, culturas e tradução (published by the Lusophone University) and Confluências: revista de tradução científica e técnica (an independent and transdisciplinary publication available in open source

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although no longer published)—and different research centres have projects on translation. Conferences such as Translation (Studies). A Crossroad of Disciplines (November 2002, University of Lisbon) and EST 2004: Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies (September 2004, University of Lisbon), not to mention annual colloquiums on Translation Studies (Catholic University of Lisbon), have given visibility to Portuguese researchers and placed Portugal in the map of the Translation Studies discipline. We would like now to take a closer look at the institutional side of translation and what we can learn from that regarding Translation Studies in Portugal.

1.1. Degrees on translation in Portuguese higher education institutions One cannot but notice a drastic change in the universities’ attitude towards translation, not just in the increase and diversification of translation degrees and areas of specialization, but also in the increase in research programmes and projects. This growing interest has, however, not been paralleled by a complete institutional recognition of Translation Studies as an independent area of study and the fact that there is no translation department in any Portuguese higher education institution is a clear evidence of that. As a direct consequence, we can still find Translation Studies caught in the unfruitful dispute between Literature and Linguistic departments. The first aspect calling one’s attention regarding the degrees in translation is that the majority of them were open for the first time in the first years of the 21st century and that most of the BA programmes are not solely dedicated to translation, but promote a combination of translation and a myriad of other areas of study instead (e.g. translation and multimedia interpretation). Regarding post-graduate courses, it is worth noticing that most institutions offering undergraduate programmes also offer post-graduate specialization courses and that these are mainly in Audiovisual Translation, still taken as a more specialized and technical type of translation. At the same time, it is curious to notice that some postgraduate programmes denounce a notion of the translator as communicator (a multi-skilled communicator in fact) and offer combined programmes of Translation and Communication, Translation and Languages or Terminology. Another area worth mentioning, although it has not yet deserved enough attention, is the area of applied technologies and

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translation, only offered by the University of Lisbon and the Polytechnic of Porto by 2012.

1.2. Research in Translation Studies Even though there are no research centres in Portugal entirely devoted to Translation Studies, there are several research centres which have maintained continued research lines in Translation Studies and nurtured a myriad of research projects as well as MA and PhD programmes. It would be impossible to mention all the publications coming out in the last three decades; nevertheless, when looking at the titles of those publications as well as the research projects being developed, five main research areas can be outlined: 1.2.1. Translation history Traditionally, this line of research has focused on literary translation, but in recent years the scope has widened to include theatre translation, for example. It maintains as its central aim to define the dominant translation norms of each period, the position of translated literature in the history of Portuguese literature, and the dominant viewpoints in Translation Studies in Portugal. A few major projects have been developed in this context, namely Notes for Cartography of Literary Translation History in Portugal (1998-2005, CECC—Catholic University of Lisbon, coord. Teresa Seruya), TradBase: Portuguese Bibliography in Translation Studies (CEC—University of Lisbon, coord. João Ferreira Duarte), Intercultural Literature in Portugal, 1930-2000: A Critical Bibliography (ULICES and CECC, coord. Teresa Seruya, Alexandra Assis Rosa and Maria Lin Moniz), TETRA-Theatre and Translation: Towards a History of Theatre Translation in Portugal, 1800-2009 (CEC—University of Lisbon, coord. Manuela Carvalho). 1.2.2. Text-based analysis Following Toury’s proposal of a descriptive approach, this research line has assumed a bottom-up methodology as it tries to identify the strategies assumed by translators and the contextual aspects mediating their choices. It starts with the text and moves up to macro-structural constraints of production and reception. This line of research has mostly been developed by individual article publications and doctoral theses. However, two larger projects should be mentioned in this respect: Modern

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and Contemporary German-speaking Literature in Portuguese Translation (Research Centre for Germanistic Studies [CIEG]—Catholic University of Lisbon, coord. Maria António Hörster), Modern and Contemporary Portuguese Literature in German Translations: Theory, History and Criticism (CIEG—Catholic University of Lisbon, coord. KarlHeintz Delille). 1.2.3. Translation as metaphor In the context of this research line the focus has been on how the concept of translation has been used by other disciplines, namely ethnography, to describe their own work. Two larger projects should be mentioned: Intercultural Translation [Tradução Intercultural] (Centre for Humanistic Studies [CEH]—University of Minho, coord. Ana Gabriela Macedo) and Dislocating Europe: Post Colonial Perspectives in Literary, Anthropological and Historical Studies (CEC—University of Lisbon, coord. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches). 1.2.4. Translation and censorship The first studies came to light in the context of research in Translation History and later in the context of text-based studies. However, the already considerable number of researchers and publications allows us to consider this as an autonomous research line. It is relevant to mention the project Censorship and Translation in Portugal during the “Estado Novo” regime (1930-1974) (CECC—Catholic University of Lisbon, coord. Teresa Seruya). These research areas come clearly in line with the development in translation theory in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the background of many of the scholars involved: areas such as Translation Theory, Philology, Postcolonial Studies or Theatre Studies. Other areas have, nevertheless, received growing attention in recent years and one can foresee that the future research in Translation Studies will cross areas such as translation and accessibility, reception of translation, specialized languages in translation, localization, translation and world literature, translation sociology, audiovisual translation and translation and the media.

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2. Interview to Professor João Ferreira Duarte Q: The first question has necessarily to be: why Translation Studies? A: In this respect my academic story may not be so much different than many other scholars’ stories around the world. I found myself doing Translation Studies basically for three reasons. First, to help reflect on my own practice as a not-too-prolific literary translator; second, as a follow-up of my involvement with Comparative Literature; finally—as I was quick to realize—the study of translation in Portugal, particularly from a historical point of view, was still back in the 1980s next to uncharted territory ready to be discovered and mapped out. It was hard not to be excited and attracted by the newness of it, by the extent to which studying translation made it possible to see literary history in a totally new light. In short, you know, there’s a twofold side to my answer to your question: a “respectable” academic one and a “darker” emotional one! Q: Looking at the overall of your publications, it is possible to distinguish three main areas of interest: Literary Theory, Translation Studies, and what we can call “Defence of Humanities”. Let’s initially talk about the first two. Was it a natural progression going from Literary Theory to Translation Studies? A: I didn’t really move from Literary Theory to Translation Studies, and what do you mean by “natural”? In fact, after teaching critical theory for a long time, my “progression” to the study of translation was all but natural and linear. Rather, it involved what at the time looked like a leap into the new, as I told you, perhaps something like a paradigm shift. Having said that, I must add that Translation Studies, as is well known, has borrowed from approaches that first emerged in the field of Literary Studies, therefore a good schooling in theory facilitates the move. When I came across the early writings of Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury, for instance, concepts, arguments and sources were familiar references to me who had read and taught for years the Russian formalists and Czech structuralism. Q: That movement can be recognized in other researchers now working in Translation leading to the discussion in the 1970s of where to place Translation Studies: Literary Studies or Linguistics? Comparative Literature or Cultural Studies? Where do you think the discipline is nowadays? Still split between disciplines or a discipline in

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its own right? Would you currently maintain the title Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines? A: One should first be clear about the context in which the term “discipline” is used. If we are talking about the internal organization of academic institutions, then Translation Studies has a disciplinary status alongside all the other disciplines. On the one hand, it can not help but follow the logic of slotting knowledges into a hierarchy of compartments—faculties, departments, programmes, courses—whose function is to legitimate and certify individual skills and competencies, to regulate the circulation of people: teachers, students and researchers. On the other hand, from an epistemological point of view, Translation Studies can hardly be considered a discipline—pretty much like its twin, Cultural Studies—and unlike, say, Sociology or Psychology. I do not want to go into the vexed discussion of the boundaries between Humanities and Social Sciences, but to my mind what distinguishes these two disciplines (among others) from Translation Studies is the fact that they have their own genealogies, they have constructed over time their own conceptual toolkits and repertoires of arguments and, most importantly, they have their own objects of knowledge. None of this applies to Translation Studies, which in an age that privileges flows and hybrids over fixities and purisms as sites of creativity and productivity is indeed an asset rather than a liability and as such goes a long way to account for the extraordinary and swift success of the “discipline”. There is in fact no specific object of the “science” of translation—its coherence stems not from internal, cognitive procedures but from its outside, that is, from processes and products that take place in the social, or, if you like, empirical world; and its conceptual apparatus comes wholly from elsewhere. “Interface” may very well be an apt metaphor for the (shifting) location of Translation Studies within the current disciplinary structure. I once argued that Cultural Studies could be seen as the model of a non-discipline and the same may be argued as regards Translation Studies. Anyhow, the status of “non-disciplinarity” or “interfaciality” has a crucial consequence: scholars are not constrained by historical agendas or protection of territory and hence the feeling that the sky is the limit is what pushes research forward. Q: Throughout your articles one can notice an honest commitment to placing theories, texts and authors in context, referring several times to the discipline’s own internal discussion of its limits and purposes. Why that insistence? Do you think it is important to keep ourselves reminded of how we got here?

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A: As you know, Translation Studies started out as a descriptive and historical approach. Texts can be exhaustively described but in order to interpret them you have to contextualize, that is, you must show how they were shaped by which historical agents and forces. The breakthrough that launched the study of translation as an autonomous field and therefore legitimized it occurred when it became apparent that what you can do with originals also applies to translated texts and the age-old marginalization of translation was seen as an ideological rather than an essential fact. In this sense it is certainly important that we never lose sight that Tanslation Studies is a true child of its time, of the early 1980s (re)turn to history even if it is our own contemporary historical situation that is at stake. Q: Do you think Translation Studies might be running the risk of becoming too focused on particular aspects and small case studies not giving enough attention to context and its own pathways? A: Not at all! The more information we can get about particular stories the more clear-cut we see the contours of the bigger picture. What you call “small case studies” only add up to more accurate knowledge and better theories to account for them. Bottom-up research, so to speak, is what allows us to perceive differences and similarities between, say, Western and non-Western translation histories and practices, between past and present and ultimately to better understand and act out “the time of the now”, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s translated concept. Q: You have not only participated in the general discussion to establish Translation Studies as a discipline in its own right, but you have also worked to place Portugal on the map of Translation Studies through the organization of conferences (both national and international), the establishment of the database TradBase and a course in Translation Studies within the Master and Doctoral Programmes in Comparative Studies. Why did you decide to develop TradBase? Why a course in Translation Studies for students in Comparative Studies? A: TradBase is an online bibliography of translation and Translation Studies published in Portugal and/or by Portuguese scholars. By the mid1990s quite a lot of stuff on translation was already published: theses, books and articles, many of them scattered in little-known publications. It dawned on me then that it might be a good idea to collect them under the form of a database to be made available online (it can be accessed at http://tradbase.comparatistas.edu.pt/). My aim was twofold: on the one hand, I wanted to provide a tool to help researchers, as expected from a

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database, but at the same time a broader objective was self-consciously— and perhaps too ambitiously—stated: I wanted to contribute to the construction of a kind of “scientific community”, that is, to help to foster among all those who were working on translation a sense of taking part in a collective project which was both national and international. In short, TradBase was supposed to address scholars and students and interpellate them, like here is what we have been doing and as such signals out our identity. A course in Translation Studies was a natural off-shoot of the emergence of Comparative Literature in the Portuguese academy in the 1980s. The Portuguese Association of Comparative Literature was founded in 1987, held its first congress in 1989 and two years later the first issue of its official journal, Dedalus, came out. In the same year an MA programme in Comparative Literature (later evolving to a fully-fledged postgraduate programme and re-named Comparative Studies) was set up at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. This was indeed a pioneering move in that the programme was independent from the existing departmental structure, had its own board and managed its own budget. That is how the teaching of Translation Studies started out in Portugal. However, a scholarly interest in the study of translation can be traced back to the early 1980s: to my knowledge, the first publication dealing with translation topics was a slim volume collecting four articles (one by a linguist) that came out in 1983 published at the Faculty of Letters. Q: As your former students who took that same course, we cannot help but consider the broader picture and reflect upon Portugal and its “peripheral condition”. We invited several other scholars to participate in this discussion and we would like to extend the invitation to you. How would you answer the question posed by the title of this volume: how peripheral is the periphery? A: The binary opposition centre/periphery is a tricky one. It reflects a geopolitical and essentialist representation of the world by means of which certain cultures, societies or regions are deemed “peripheral” and therefore subject to domination. As the authors of The Empire Writes Back put it, these categories are at the heart of colonialist discourse, in fact an ideological ploy to arrest history in the interests of those who hold power over those who do not. I must say that I have little use for this opposition, unless as encouragement to resist.

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Q: There is a general agreement among Portuguese scholars that all the initiatives you have encouraged have helped to maintain a community of Translation Studies scholars in Portugal. How important is it to nurture this community? A: I do not think I had ever that influence and opportunity to “maintain” a community of Translation Studies, as you very generously accredit me with. It’s true, though, as I told you before, that a sense of community is crucial, particularly when you work in a new or developing field. And I do not mean an “imagined” community but a situation where you meet people in the immediacy of workshops, seminars, lectures, congresses, and so on. This is how you exchange views, test your hypotheses, start projects, and ultimately guide students into members of the community thereby contributing to its growing. This is how it works everywhere in all scientific and humanistic fields; but one must be aware of what today is taken for granted, that the referent of “community” reaches beyond national borders: a truly effective and productive community is always international. Q: In the beginning we mentioned your commitment to what we called the “Defence of Humanities”. How do you see your contribution in this area? What challenges are the humanities facing at the moment? A: A few decades of wholesale deregulation and casino economy brought us where we stand now, on the brink of disaster, and the Humanities may very well be one of its casualties. Look at the recent announcement by the Dutch government that it is going to close down about 30 humanities programmes in universities all over the country. But this is a move that has been going on for a long time: downsizing, closing down departments, for instance, of Philosophy, Classical Studies and Comparative Literature. The functionaries of neoliberal capitalism in power almost everywhere have ruled that there is not a fast enough turnover of investment in the humanities, or worse, no profit to be made. It is not a win-win business, no good leverage for the economy. The prospect then would be of a future world run by functionally illiterate technocrats, a dystopian nightmare. I believe, though, that we should not be unduly pessimistic. Our current predicament is not the end of history and besides there are signs that point to an awareness at the highest level of decisionmaking that the humanities must be “defended”: I am thinking of the research programme “Cultural Encounters” that HERA—Humanities in the European Research Area, of the European Commission, is launching with a funding budget of € 18.5 million. And there are other pockets of

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resistance to the neoliberal onslaught against the humanities, most importantly, people: students and young scholars who are proactive, intelligent, creative, and serious hard-workers; they too have a vision and are contributing to the accumulation, not necessarily of capital, but rather of knowledge which adds up to the critical self-understanding of society. Q: We need to bring this interview to an end by asking you: what do you foresee in the future of Translation Studies? What can we find under the topic doubts and directions in Translation Studies seven years after it was proposed for reflection to the entire Translation Studies’ community? A: “The future’s not ours to see”, as in the famous pop song of the 1950s! I do not presume to foresee the future, although recent developments in the field make it clear that at least one of the possible “directions” is already being signalled. I am hinting at the much welcome information on the history and theory of translation in non-Western cultures as illustrated by books such us Translation in Asia and Chinese Discourses in Translation, published by St. Jerome, or Decentering Translation Studies and Interpreters in Early Imperial China, published by John Benjamins, among others. We need to know much more about these and other non-Western traditions and practices, lest our views of translation become bounded and therefore distorted by Eurocentric conceptual frameworks. But even as regards Europe itself we must realize that a lot of ground has yet to be covered. Hardly any research has been carried out on the role of translation in intercultural relations between cultures and languages other than the dominant ones. What do we know about the translation, say, of Hungarian literature into Portuguese? Or of Romanian literature into Dutch? And, on a different level, how does migration impact translation in our increasingly super-diverse societies? So, you see, paths to be trodden by Translation Studies scholars branch out in several directions; we are not sure where they will lead us to, but this is the beauty of it, is it not? November 2012

CONTRIBUTORS

Fernando Ferreira Alves Lecturer in Translation, University of Minho/Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho (Portugal) Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham (United Kingdom) Susan Bassnett Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Warwick (United Kingdom) Karen Bennett Lecturer, University of Coimbra/University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (Portugal) Helena Carvalhão Buescu Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Lisbon/Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon (Portugal) Manuela Carvalho Senior Researcher, Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon (Portugal) Margarida Vale de Gato Assistant Professor, University of Lisbon/University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (Portugal) Rui Carvalho Homem Professor in English Studies, University of Porto (Portugal) Maria Eduarda Keating Professor in Romance Studies, University of Minho/Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho (Portugal)

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Contributors

Conceição Lima Lecturer, Catholic University of Luanda (Angola) Alexandra Lopes Lecturer in Translation Studies, Catholic University of Lisbon/Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Catholic University of Lisbon (Portugal) Ana Gabriela Macedo Professor in English Studies, University of Minho/Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho (Portugal) Rita Bueno Maia Lecturer, Universidade Europeia, Laureate International Universities/ Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (Portugal) Maria Lin Moniz Researcher, Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Catholic University of Lisbon (Portugal) Marta Pacheco Pinto Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon (Portugal) Sara Ramos Pinto Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Leeds (United Kingdom) Alexandra Assis Rosa Tenured Assistant Professor in English Studies and Translation, University of Lisbon/University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (Portugal) Teresa Seruya Professor in German Studies and Translation, Catholic University of Lisbon/Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Catholic University of Lisbon (Portugal) Ricardo Gil Soeiro Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon (Portugal)

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Christine Zurbach Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies and Translation, University of Évora/ Centre for Art History and Artistic Research, University of Évora (Portugal)

ONOMASTIC INDEX

Aaltonen, Sirkku, 46, 47 Almeida, Onésimo Teotónio, 279, 282 Álvarez, Roman, 260 Anderman, Gunila, 47 Angelelli, Claudia, 64 Arendt, Hannah, 254 Ashcroft, Bill, 268, 270

Casanova, Pascale, 24, 25, 35, 43, 77, 160, 161, 223 Chamberlain, Lori, 247 Chesterman, Andrew, 66, 69, 157 Chomsky, Noam, 248 Cid, Teresa, 279, 289, 290 Cronin, Michael, 4 Crystal, David, 211

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 251, 259 Bandia, Paul, 258, 260 Barrento, João, 27 Barthes, Roland, 136, 243 Bassnett, Susan, 46, 47, 139, 141, 144, 230, 231, 253, 267, 321 Bell, Aubrey, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 106 Benjamin, Walter, 144, 224, 248, 254, 276, 328 Bennett, Karen, 5 Berman, Antoine, 247 Bhabha, Homi K., 249, 251, 259, 260, 268, 270, 271 Blanchot, Maurice, 254 Blommaert, Jan, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218 Bourdieu, Pierre, 77, 212, 214 Braga, Teófilo, 86, 87, 89, 90, 97, 105 Brissett, Annie, 47 Bush, Peter, 140, 141, 144, 230

D’hulst, Lieven, 321 Davie, Donald, 124 Delabastita, Dirk, 32, 33 Derrida, Jacques, 222, 249 Duarte, João Ferreira, 22, 23, 27, 31, 43, 48, 83, 102, 210, 211, 218, 241, 243, 244, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 258, 277, 297, 319, 320, 324, 326

Camões, Luís de, 86, 90, 96, 97, 102, 142 Carbonell, Ovidi, 264 Caria, Telmo, 66, 67 Carter, Angela, 298, 299 Carvalho, Paulo Eduardo, 35, 48, 51, 55

Eliot, T. S., 124, 132, 136, 144, 303 Éluard, Paul, 124, 222, 237 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 32, 34, 43, 137, 166, 167, 172, 173, 321, 326 Fadda, Sebastiana, 41, 42, 48 Flor, João Almeida, 22, 48, 321 Flynn, Peter, 63, 71 Foucault, Michel, 136, 212 Fukari, Alexandra, 76 Gaspar, Frank X, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 292 Gile, Daniel, 66 Gonçalves, Maria Eduarda, 5 Grutman, Rainier, 281 Gunn, Kirsty, 275

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Onomastic Index

Heaney, Seamus, 130, 138, 139 Heidegger, Martin, 247 Heilbron, Johan, 76, 77 Hermans, Theo, 25, 166, 167, 283, 286 Hertog, Erik, 64 Holmes, James S., 32, 263 Hughes, Ted, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 139, 145

Odber de Baubeta, Patricia Anne, 51, 94, 101, 106 Ortega y Gasset, José, 222, 238 Pessoa, Fernando, 97, 102, 111, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 276, 277 Pound, Ezra, 124, 145 Pratt, Mary Louise, 249, 251, 259, 268, 269 Pym, Anthony, 29, 72, 97, 218

Inghilleri, Moira, 63, 64 Koskinen, Kaisa, 63, 64, 66 Král, Françoise, 278, 280, 287 Kristeva, Julia, 287 Lacerda, Alberto de, 297, 300, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313 Lambert, José, 22, 32, 33, 321 Lefevere, André, 251, 253, 267, 321 Leppihalme, Ritva, 209, 261 Lodge, David, 221, 222, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234 Lopes, Alexandra, 276 Lourenço, Eduardo, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 270, 307 Macedo, Ana Gabriela, 298, 325 Macedo, Helder, 105, 125, 126, 130, 131, 300, 301, 302 Machado, Antonio, 145, 146 McEwen, John, 297, 298, 299, 303, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312 Mehrez, Samia, 264, 266, 267, 270 Meylaerts, Reine, 281 Mignolo, Walter, 280 Morão, Paula, 126, 127, 128 Nord, Christiane, 209, 263, 288 Nunes, João Arriscado, 5

Rebello, Luiz Francisco, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 Rego, Paula, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302, 303, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313 Ricoeur, Paul, 153, 160, 247 Rodrigues, António Gonçalves, 23, 24, 25, 26, 322 Rosa, Alexandra Assis, 252, 324 Rosengarten, Ruth, 299, 301, 302, 306 Rushdie, Salman, 26, 137 Sa, Anthony de, 276, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 289 Sá-Carneiro, Mário de, 110, 111, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130 Salgari, Emilio, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 3, 15, 50, 160, 269 Sapiro, Gisèle, 76, 77 Saraiva, António José, 46 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 226, 233, 245 Seixo, Maria Alzira, 151, 157, 158, 321 Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet, 71 Seruya, Teresa, 29, 50, 55, 98, 171, 324, 325

How Peripheral Is the Periphery? Shakespeare, William, 38, 41, 48, 53, 121, 141, 210 Shlesinger, Miriam, 71 Sontag, Susan, 222 Steiner, George, 222, 226, 227, 229, 230, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 253, 254 Toury, Gideon, 25, 27, 32, 37, 267, 321, 324, 326 Tymoczko, Maria, 4, 270, 271

339

Vidal, M. Carmen-África, 260 Vieira, Luandino, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267, 268, 270 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 3, 75 Weissbort, Daniel, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 136 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 245, 246 Wolf, Michaela, 76 Young, Robert J. C., 259

van Leeuwen, Theo, 68, 69 Vaz, Katherine, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292 Venuti, Lawrence, 65, 120, 121, 123, 124, 129, 222, 238, 247

Zatlin, Phyllis, 47 Zenith, Richard, 151, 152, 155, 157, 159, 160, 262, 267 Zurbach, Christine, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 48, 51, 156