Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English [1 ed.] 9780415361040, 0415361044, 0415872901, 9780415872904, 9780203873953

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Style and Ideology in Translation

Routledge Studies in Linguistics

1. Polari - The Lost Language of Gay Men Paul Baker

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6. The Communication of Leadership Leadership and Metaphor beyond the West Jonathan Charteris-Black

7. Semantics and Pragmatics of False Friends Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez

8. Style and Ideology in Translation Latin American Writing in English Jeremy Munday

Style and Ideology in Translation Latin American Writing in English

Jeremy Munday

New York

London

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

© 2008 by Jeremy Munday Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Transferred to Digital Printing 2009 International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-36104-0 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Munday, Jeremy. Style and ideology in translation : Latin American writing in English / Jeremy Munday. p. cm. -- (Routledge studies in linguistics ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-36104-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Spanish language--Translating into English. 2. Spanish American literature--Translations into English--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PC4498.M86 2007 428’.0261--dc22 ISBN10: 0-415-36104-4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-87290-1 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36104-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-87290-4 (pbk)

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2007025256

To Marina, who grew faster than this book

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Author Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations and Texts Introduction

ix xi xiii xv 1

1

Discursive presence, voice, and style in translation

11

2

Ideological macro-context in the translation of Latin America

43

3

The classic translator pre-1960: Harriet de Onís

65

4

One author, many voices: The voice of García Márquez through his many translators

95

5

One translator, many authors: The “controlled schizophrenia” of Gregory Rabassa

125

6

Political ideology and translation

151

7

Style in audiovisual translation

173

8

Translation and identity

197

Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

227 233 239 253

List of Tables and Figures

Table 0.1

Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard”

5

Table 0.2

Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” II

5

Table 1.1

Parameters of Register analysis following Halliday (1978, 1994)

22

Types of point of view (after Uspensky, Fowler and Simpson)

24

Different levels of stylistic expression related to ideology

47

Table 3.1

Examples of Onís’s rich lexicon in The Lost Steps

82

Table 3.2

Lexical economy strategies in Carpentier translations

85

Table 4.1

First publication dates of García Márquez fiction

96

Table 4.2

First publication dates of García Márquez non-fiction

97

Table 4.3

Hyphenated or compound pre-modifiers in One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa

105

Table 7.1

No se lo digas a nadie, book and film versions

178

Table 7.2

Joaquín and father fight, No se lo digas a nadie, novel

179

Table 7.3

Joaquín and father fight, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles

181

Table 1.2

Table 2.1

x List of Tables and Figures Table 7.4

Joaquín and Gonzalo, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles

182

Joaquín and father on the hunting trip, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles

183

Alfonso and Joaquín, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles

183

Table 7.7

Strawberry and Chocolate, book and film versions

184

Table 7.8

Comparison of TT screen play and subtitles of Vargas Llosa book scene

190

Idiomatic lexical equivalents in Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North (HSLN ST) and Rumbo al sur deseando el norte (HSLN TT)

207

Table 7.5

Table 7.6

Table 8.1

Figure 1.1

Common narratological representation of the narrative process

11

Figure 1.2

Narratological representation of translation

11

Figure 1.3

Parallel narratological lines of translation

12

Figure 1.4

Levels of the realization of style

39

Author

Jeremy Munday is senior lecturer in Spanish Studies and translation at the University of Leeds, UK. His main research interests are in translation theory, discourse analysis, corpus-based translation studies, and the translation of Latin America writing. He is author of Introducing Translation Studies (Routledge, 2001) and Translation: An Advanced Resource Book (with Basil Hatim, Routledge 2004).

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support of the University of Surrey, who granted me a semester sabbatical in Spring 2005, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose generous Research Leave Scheme (Project title “Style and Ideology in Translation,” Award number RL/18799) gave me a matching semester’s sabbatical in Autumn 2005. The University of Surrey, School of Arts, also made a small award for a research assistant, Ms. Montserrat Rodríguez Márquez, in Spring 2005. The first part of chapter 4 builds up and updates an article that appeared in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Glasgow) (Munday 1998a). The Rodó analysis in chapter 6 was originally given in 2005 as part of an invited paper at the Translation of Political Ideology and Concepts conference, City University, New York, attendance at which was kindly supported by both CUNY and a British Academy Overseas Conference Grant. An earlier version of the Strawberry and Chocolate analysis in chapter 7 was given in 2005 as an invited paper at a conference in Rieti, Italy. It was published as “Style in Audiovisual Translation,” in Nigel Armstrong and Federico M. Federici (eds.) (2006) Translating Voices, Translating Regions, Rome: Aracne Editrice. It is reprinted by permission of the editors and publishers. My thanks also for the support of many translation studies colleagues around the world, including the anonymous reviewers of the proposal, from colleagues at the University of Surrey, especially Professor Margaret Rogers, Head of the Centre for Translation Studies, and at the University of Leeds. Invaluable support, and patience, came from Routledge Research editors Terry Clague and Max Novick. Most importantly, I thank my family, Cristina, Nuria, and Marina, whose patience and love have been enduring. It would not have been possible without them. Jeremy Munday

List of Abbreviations and Texts

SL

Source language

ST

Source text

TL

Target language

TT

Target text

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS TO ANALYSED TEXTS BC

Machado de Assis Bras Cubas ST

BC Rabassa

Machado de Assis Bras Cubas TT Rabassa

BC W Grossman

Machado de Assis Bras Cubas TT W Grossman

CC ST

García Márquez Miguel Littín

CC TT

García Márquez Clandestine in Chile

Cmlo En

Cisneros Caramelo English

Cmlo Sp

Cisneros Caramelo Spanish

CU ST

Fuentes Cristóbal Nonato

CU TT

Fuentes Christopher Unborn

CubCt ST

Ortiz Contrapunto Cubano

CubCt TT

Ortiz Cuban Counterpoint

DD ST

Dorfman Cómo leer al pato Donald

DD TT

Dorfman How to Read Donald Duck

DSS ST

Güiraldes Don Segundo Sombra ST

DSS TT

Güiraldes Don Segundo Sombra TT

xvi

List of Abbreviations and Texts

ES ST

Guzmán El águila y la serpiente

ES TT

Guzmán The Eagle and the Serpent

HS ST

Cortázar Rayuela

HS TT

Cortázar Hopscotch

HSLN ST

Dorfman Heading South, Looking North

HSLN TT

Dorfman Rumbo al sur deseando el norte

JS Int ST

Marcos interview with Julio Scherer ST

JS Int TT

Marcos interview with Julio Scherer TT

KW ST

Carpentier El reino de este mundo

KW TT

Carpentier The Kingdom of This World

LS ST

Carpentier Los pasos perdidos

LS TT

Carpentier The Lost Steps

MB

Parra Mamá Blanca ST

MB Fornoff

Parra Mamá Blanca TT by Fornoff

MB Onís

Parra Mamá Blanca TT by Onís

MI

García Márquez Isabel’s Monologue ST

MI Rabassa

García Márquez Isabel’s Monologue TT by Rabassa

MI Southern

García Márquez Isabel’s Soliloquoy TT by Southern

MP Int En

Zapatista Reading List TT

MP Int Sp

Zapatista Reading List ST

MS En

Cisneros Mango Street (English)

MS Sp

Cisneros Mango Street (Spanish)

OHY ST

García Márquez Cien años de soledad

OHY TT

García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude

OL ST

García Márquez Del amor y otros demonios

OL TT

García Márquez Of Love and Other Demons

PRD ST

Lezama Paradiso ST

PRD TT

Lezama Paradiso TT

TC ST

García Márquez El coronel no tiene quien le escriba

TC TT

García Márquez No One Writes to the Colonel

List of Abbreviations and Texts xvii TG ST

García Márquez El general en su laberinto

TG TT

García Márquez The General in His Labyrinth

TS

Bondy “The Suitcase” TT

TTT En

Cabrera Infante Three Trapped Tigers TT

TTT Sp

Cabrera Infante Tres tristes tigres ST

TW ST

Marcos Chiapas: Dos vientos

TW TT

Marcos Chiapas: Two Winds

Introduction

“Style is the result of choice—conscious or not,” asserts Leo Hickey (1989: 4) in his introduction to The Pragmatics of Style. The subject of this book is how and why style differs in translations, how we might approach the subject of style and choice by centring on the translator and the composition of the target text (TT). The famous story of the translation of the Pentateuch relates that 72 translators gathered in Alexandria worked solidly on the text for 72 days, commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the third century BCE. Each translator, tells the letter of Aristeas, worked individually in a small cell. However, when their work was completed and their different translations came to be examined, it was apparently discovered that the text of all 72 translations was identical. This was taken as proof that the word of God was true and unchanging, which allowed it to be uncorruptedly transmitted through translation. Of course, most consider this account to be symbolic; it is a cliché or a given that no two translations, or indeed any two pieces of writing, let alone 72, will be identical. When this does happen, we assume that something extraordinary or untoward lies behind it—if a higher authority is not ensuring the transmission of the word, then there must have been collaboration or copying between translators or, in modern-day technical translation, a computerized database, termbank, or machine translation must have been used to ensure consistency. Were two pieces of writing to be textually identical, the process by which they have been constituted would still differ as would their significance. This is the premise behind Jorge Luis Borges’s famous story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” where, after painstaking struggle, the French scholar of the title reproduces extracts of Cervantes’s work in Nîmes in 1939. Menard’s Quixote is verbally identical to Cervantes’s, yet, argues Borges in the story, the text is “almost infinitely richer” since it is written from a different perspective with the knowledge of all the literary, philosophical, and historical developments of the three hundred years that had elapsed since the publication of Cervantes’s text. The Pierre Menard tale is central to arguments surrounding notions of authorship and originality and for this reason it occupies a firm place in the canon of writings in translation studies (e.g., Steiner 1998; Venuti 2004). Of course, Borges’s work itself exists

2

Style and Ideology in Translation

in multiple translations. The story first appeared in English in 1962 in two distinct translations by two different academics: one translated by James E. Irby, then assistant professor at Princeton, in the collection Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions 1962) and the other in Ficciones (Grove Press 1962), translated by Anthony Bonner. A re-translation, by the Puerto Rican-based professor Andrew Hurley, featured in Collected Fictions (Viking 1998), which brought together the vast bulk of Borges’s work in a new translation. In contrast to Menard’s word-for-word matching of Cervantes’s Quixote, between the English translations of Borges’s “Menard” there are, unsurprisingly, stylistic differences. An illustration is the following authorial comment on Menard’s musings on the futility of intellectual activity: ST Borges (p. 58) Nada tienen de nuevo esas comprobaciones nihilistas; lo singular es la decisión que de ellas derivó Pierre Menard. Resolvió adelantarse a la vanidad que aguarda todas las fatigas del hombre; acometió una empresa complejísima y de antemano fútil. Dedicó sus escrúpulos y vigilias a repetir en un idioma ajeno un libro preexistente. Multiplicó los borradores; corrigió tenazmente y desgarró miles de páginas manuscritas. No permitió que fueran examinadas por nadie y cuidó que no le sobrevivieran. En vano he procurado reconstruirlas. Back translation [Nothing have of new those nihilistic verifications; the singular [thing] is the decision that from them derived Pierre Menard. [He] resolved to anticipate the vanity which awaits all the fatigues of man; [he] undertook/attacked a very complex undertaking and in advance futile. [He] dedicated his scruples and vigils to repeating in a different language a pre-existing book. [He] multiplied the drafts; [he] corrected tenaciously and [he] tore up thousands of pages manuscript/handwritten. [He] did not allow that [they] be examined by anyone and [he] cared that [they] should not survive him. In vain [I] have tried to reconstruct them.] TT1 Irby There is nothing new in these nihilistic verifications; what is singular is the determination Menard derived from them. He decided to anticipate the vanity awaiting all man’s efforts; he set himself to an undertaking which was exceedingly complex and, from the very beginning, futile. He dedicated his scruples and his sleepless nights to repeating an already extant book in an alien tongue. He multiplied draft upon draft, revised tenaciously and tore up thousands of manuscript pages. He did

Introduction 3 not let anyone examine these drafts and took care they should not survive him. In vain have I tried to reconstruct them. (49 of 100 items are consistent in all TTs) TT2 Bonner (p. 50) The nihilistic arguments contain nothing new; what is unusual is the decision Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to outstrip that vanity which awaits all the woes of mankind; he undertook a task that was complex in the extreme and futile from the outset. He dedicated his conscience and nightly studies to the repetition of a pre-existing book in a foreign tongue. The number of rough drafts kept on increasing; he tenaciously made corrections and tore up thousands of manuscript pages. He did not permit them to be examined, and he took great care that they would not survive him. It is in vain that I have tried to reconstruct them. (49 of 112 items are consistent in all TTs) TT3 Hurley (p. 95) Those nihilistic observations were not new; what is remarkable was the decision that Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights “lit by midnight oil” to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed. His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages. He would allow no one to see them, and took care that they not survive him. In vain have I attempted to reconstruct them. (49 of 105 items are consistent in all TTs) Highlighted in bold1 (are those elements that are consistent in all three TTs. Determining consistency is not such an easy exercise as it might appear: thus, nihilistic and new do appear in the first sentence of all three TTs, yet the collocations differ and the word order relation is altered, the Irby translation foregrounding new (or nothing new) but Bonner and Hurley leading with nihilistic. In the extracts above a decision was made to highlight word-forms such as awaits and awaiting that share the same semantic root but appear in slightly variant grammatical forms; on the other hand, not highlighted are those which share grammatical or syntactic but not semantic forms: tenaciously and stubbornly, and tore and ripped, for example. In the last sentence, in vain is selected because even though the same wording appears in all three TTs, the positioning in the sentence and the grammatical structure are quite different (verb-subject in TT1 and TT3, as the marked theme of a cleft sentence in TT2). In other words, a stylistic analysis based purely on repetition of word forms cannot

4

Style and Ideology in Translation

be a scientifically grounded analysis. Nonetheless, the exercise does neatly elicit several nuggets. One is the surprising variation of up to twelve percent in the length of the three TT extracts: TT1 contains 100 word-forms, TT2 112 and TT3 105, so it is possible that Bonner in TT2 might be using explicitation more than the other two. Secondly, the number of forms that are identical across all three texts is less than half: from 49 percent in Irby to 47 percent in Hurley, and 44 percent in Bonner: does this mean that Bonner, by varying more, is more ‘creative’ in some way? Thirdly, major punctuation marking clause and sentence boundaries (that is, semi-colons and full stops) do not in fact vary: in all three TTs they occur in exactly the same places as in the ST, with one exception, the replacement of a semicolon by a comma after He multiplied draft upon draft in TT1. If repeated elsewhere, this would suggest that such punctuation breaks exert considerable influence over translators, perhaps representing a unit of translation and a demarcation of cognitive processing. However, for me the most striking point of this crude abacus of word-forms is that there is so much variation. The highest number of consecutive word-forms repeated in the three TTs is five, Menard derived from them. He, at the transition from the first to the second sentences. Even the argument that Hurley, working on a later revision, might have had more cause for varying precisely in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism of extant translations does not improve matters since the variation between TT1 and TT2 is just as evident. Other passages routinely show similar variation. The kinds of differences illustrated in these extracts encompass a wide range of stylistic phenomena. The very first sentence is a good example: TT1 Irby There is nothing new in these nihilistic verifications; what is singular is the determination Menard derived from them. TT2 Bonner The nihilistic arguments contain nothing new; what is unusual is the decision Pierre Menard derived from them. TT3 Hurley Those nihilistic observations were not new; what is remarkable was the decision that Pierre Menard derived from them. As we noted above, there is a change of information structure in the first clause as well as a collocational shift (nihilistic verifications/arguments/ observations); after the semi-colon, the variation is above all lexical (see Table 0.1):

Introduction 5 Table 0.1. Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” what is

evaluative epithet

copula

the

noun

relative pronoun

TT1

what is

singular

is

the

determination

(ø)

TT2

what is

unusual

is

the

decision

that

TT3

what is

remarkable

was

the

decision

that

subordinate clause

Here, the lexical variants are singular/unusual/remarkable and determination/decision, slight variations within the same semantic field; the grammatical variations involve tense (is/was), and the presence or omission of the relative pronoun. Such variation will abound throughout any TT. There is a semantic and syntactic core to the stylistic choices but this does not mean that any one translator is totally systematic. The next sentence in the TTs illustrates this:

Table 0.2. Variation in translations of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” II He

verb, past tense

to

verb infinitive

article

vanity

relative pronoun/ gerund + await

TT1

He

decided

to

anticipate

the

vanity

(ø) awaiting

TT2

He

resolved

to

outstrip

that

vanity

which awaits

TT3

He

resolved

to

anticipate

the

vanity

that awaits

all

abstract noun plural + man/mankind possessive

TT1

all

man’s efforts

.

TT2

all

the woes of mankind

.

TT3

all

the labors of mankind

.

full stop

6

Style and Ideology in Translation

Once again, there are choices made on the paradigmatic axis; that is, variant selections at a given place in the text; for example, decided/resolved or anticipate/outstrip. There is also another relative clause introduced by which/that or indeed omitted and replaced by a gerund (awaiting). Interestingly, Irby’s (TT1) is the translation that omits an equivalent again; Bonner’s (TT2) this time uses which rather than that; Hurley’s (TT3) repeats that. Gradually, very gradually, a general pattern may emerge and always within a context where variation is permissible. The question as to why there is so much variation between translators working in related geographical, historical, and social settings is the central preoccupation of this book. It sets out to study and classify these differences in an attempt to identify features of style in translated texts and of the style of specific translators. More than a stylistic inventory of translation, the book is most concerned with the possible causes of variation and with the theoretical implications for translation of work that has been carried out within (mainly monolingual) stylistics and critical discourse analysis. In translation studies, issues of style are related to the voice of the narrative and of the author/translator and are notoriously difficult to pin down. Gideon Toury’s seminal Descriptive Translation Studies—and beyond (Toury 1995) sets out the theoretical framework for the descriptive comparison of a source text (ST) and a target text (TT), or of multiple TTs, with the aim of determining possible linguistic ‘shifts’ in translation or patterns of choices made by a specific translator and thence the underlying ‘norms’ of the process. However, despite the now large number of case studies of specific ST-TT pairs, the discussion of the nature of style and voice in translation and the methodological issues at stake has been relatively neglected. Isolated small-scale studies, for example Hermans (1996a), Shiavi (1996) and Baker (2000), have very recently been supplemented by Boase-Beier (2004a, 2006), Cockerill (2006) and Bosseaux (2007), but there has traditionally been, and still often remains, a somewhat tenuous theoretical and methodological link between the close stylistic analysis and the social and ideological environments in which the texts operate (Hermans 1996b). Our particular interest is in the close examination of the linguistic choices of the translators in an effort to identify patterns and to map these to the macro-contexts of ideology and cultural production. It is our contention that only close linguistic examination of large amounts of thematically related material allows stylistic tendencies to emerge and some of the important variables associated with the translation process to be uncovered. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on translation studies, narratology, (translational) stylistics, critical discourse analysis, and corpusbased studies, the present work specifically sets out to investigate the ‘style’ (defined as characteristic linguistic choices) and ‘voice’ (understood as the abstract narrative point of view) of English language translations of twentieth-century Latin American writing, including film and political writing. In particular, the following specific questions are central:

Introduction 7 • What are the prominent characteristics of the style, or ‘linguistic fingerprint’, of a translator in comparison with the style of the ST author and of other translators? • Given that texts function within specific sociocultural and ideological contexts, what is the relationship of the style of the translation to the environments of the target texts, with specific reference to modern Latin American writing? In other words, how far is it possible to determine the impact of external factors on the translators’ decision-making? • What insights might our model of analysis provide into major issues of translation theory, such as the general patterns or ‘universals’ of translated language, variation of the voice of an author translated by different translators or manipulation of political ideology in translation? The present study is located generally within descriptive translation studies but goes further by discussing more precise means of evaluating style and relating it to the ideological context. In certain instances, the study is computer-assisted, with recourse to representative corpora for the evaluation of markedness.2 The book is thematically linked by a specific geographical, historical, and cultural location, namely the translation of key Latin American texts from the twentieth century. This has the advantage of building up a more comprehensive picture of translation style in a specifically delineated context and allows contrastive analyses of works by the same author or same translator or indeed of variations between translators. We should start by acknowledging the complexity of the task and by admitting that this book, while tackling some of the theoretical issues, will doubtless raise more questions than it can possibly answer. This is due to the multiplicity of factors concerned in style, allied to the variables of the translation process. However, the hope is that it will prove to be a useful reference point in the theoretical discussion on style and voice in translation and that it will point the way to areas that might benefit from other, increasingly precise studies. The title, Style and Ideology in Translation, immediately enters a terminological minefield since the abstract concepts ‘style,’ ‘ideology,’ and even ‘translation’ are the subject of critical divisions over their definition and scope. The book focuses above all on the perspective of translation and on the analysis of the work of different translators. Thus, ‘style’ will be discussed in the context of the linguistic fingerprint of an individual translator or of translations, those linguistic elements that make a translated text or series of texts identifiably the work of a particular individual or indeed genre.3 These linguistic elements, conscious or subconscious on the part of the translator, obvious or concealed, are the result of the translator’s ‘idiolect,’ understood in both the sociolinguistic sense of “speech habits of an individual in a speech community [ . . . ] the equivalent of a fingerprint” (Wales 2001: 197) and in the sense of

8

Style and Ideology in Translation

“a system of individual stylistic features” (ibid.: 230), more akin to what Hoey (2005) has called ‘lexical priming’ (see chapter 1). Distinguishing between these two senses of idiolect in the work of a translator is more or less impossible in the absence of a large control corpus of the translator’s speech and writing in their target language or of the speech of the community (or communities) in which they have lived, against which to gauge differences in relation to the translations. However, a close comparison of the work of different translators active in similar fields may give a pointer to some of the main characteristic features of the individual’s style. Here it is important to emphasize that our main interest is in trends, in repeated patterns, the way these are representative of the individual translator’s translation style and how they may also affect the overall narrative ‘voice’ of the ST author which echoes through the translator’s voice. The other questions of major interest are the cause and motivation of these trends, questions which lie behind the term ‘ideology’ in the title. Thus, how does the ideology of the translator and of the translator’s location affect the TT that is produced? Ideology here is to be understood not in the Marxist sense of the struggle of ideas of a political or economic class or system but in a wider, semiotic sense to mean a system of beliefs that informs the individual’s world view that is then realized linguistically. This is a current that can be traced from Bakhtin to Halliday to critical discourse analysis and to semioticians such as Van Dijk. The orientation of such studies is succinctly expressed by Paul Simpson in his Language, Ideology and Point of View: “the motivating principle behind these analyses is to explore the value systems and sets of beliefs which reside in texts; to explore, in other words, ideology in language” (Simpson 1993: 5, emphasis in original). The starting premise of the present study is that the language of all translators, as with all individuals, is revealing of the ideology (in terms of value systems and sets of beliefs) that is part of their background. The language of particular textual instances is also moulded from particular circumstances that exert ideological pressure on the text as it is transferred into the target culture. These encompass the type of sociocultural and historical circumstances that are discussed in chapter 2, where the environment of our corpus of translated texts is introduced and where the background and roles of the publishers, institutions and some of the key translators of Latin American writing are discussed. Finally, the word ‘translation’ in the title is also to be understood relatively widely, covering not only the interlingual translation of written texts into English but also the intralingual and intersemiotic adaptation and subtitling of film and the various new translation contexts of Latino and Chicano border writing in the United States, where the language is a hybrid of English and Spanish. The thematically linked corpus that forms the subject of the case studies in chapters 3 to 8 comprises a range of major works of Latin American writing translated during the twentieth century. Hence the book’s subtitle: Latin American Writing in English. The wording of this

Introduction 9 subtitle also deserves comment: ‘Latin American’ has been selected because it encompasses work mainly in Spanish but also in Brazilian Portuguese, and from South, Central, and North America; ‘in English’ delimits the scope to one particular language direction, which makes the analysis and findings more cohesive and will allow these to be compared in future with translations into other languages and cultural contexts; and ‘writing’ is preferred to ‘fiction’ since some of the texts selected are examples of sociological studies, political speeches and tracts, and film scripts as well as novels and short stories. Since the most prominent cultural phenomenon associated with translated Latin American writing in the twentieth century was the so-called Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, a major focus of this study is the translations of the novels and political writings associated with the movement at that time. Finally, the selection of Latin American writing in English translation above all means the English of the United States and this brings us to a very particular and significant ideological context: we are talking of translation within a power imbalance, since linguistically and economically the power in this relationship has resided with the United States. The study gives us a chance to examine how far the stylistic choices, involving both the selection of texts and the translation strategies employed, may reflect this ideological imbalance and struggle. The book is divided into two theoretical chapters followed by six studies of translators or translation contexts associated with Latin America. Chapter 1 discusses theoretical issues of authorship, notably of style, voice, and point of view, and the crucial differences between (monolingual) stylistics and ‘translational stylistics,’ to use the term coined by Kirsten Malmkjaer (2003, 2004). Chapter 2 then discusses ideology and links possible ideological consequences of stylistic choices to the peculiarities of translation of Latin American writing over the past century. Chapter 3 presents a case study of the style of an early translator, Harriet de Onís, who worked on major fictional and historical texts from 1930 to the late 1960s. Chapter 4 looks at what happens when an author is translated by many translators: the case in question is that of García Márquez, the most successful author of the Boom. Chapter 5 examines perhaps the most famous of all translators of Latin American writing, Gregory Rabassa; it considers whether an identifiable ‘Rabassa style’ emerges and whether this has an effect on the presentation of a range of authors in English. The last three chapters consider variables of genre and translator contexts: political texts in chapter 6, audiovisual texts in chapter 7, and, in chapter 8, “Translation and Identity” texts where the notion of source and target is blurred. The results and comparisons of the different case studies will assist in developing the concept of style in translation, its characteristics, function, and the factors which impact upon it. Although the corpus comprises English translations of Latin American texts, the form of analysis should also be relevant to translation studies scholars working in any language combination. For this reason, back translations of the Spanish and Portuguese are provided to assist the reader unfamiliar with those languages.

1

Discursive Presence, Voice, and Style in Translation

The first important theoretical question is how the role of the translator relates to that of the author since the presence of the translator upsets the narratological representation of the narrative process commonly depicted as in Figure 1.1 (following Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 2002): Author—implied author—narrator—text—narratee—implied reader—reader

Fig. 1.1. Common narratological representation of the narrative process

‘Author’ here is the biographical author; ‘implied author,’ a concept introduced by Booth (1961) for the image of the author and his or her beliefs built by the reader from reading the narrative. The ‘narrator’ is the ‘teller of the tale,’ sometimes addressed to a specific narratee in the text. The ‘implied reader’ (Iser 1974) is the counterpart of the implied author, namely the image of the reader or readership constructed by author or the real reader from reading the text. Finally, the text is, one hopes, indeed read by a real reader. However, as Schiavi (1996) and Hermans (1996a) point out in a pair of important themed papers published in Target in 1996, narratology tends to treat original texts and translations identically in the type of schema illustrated in Figure 1.1 above. Schiavi (1996: 14) proposes a modification to take into account the role of translation which completely alters the second half of Figure 1.2: author—implied author—narrator—narratee—implied reader—real translator— implied translator—narrator of translation—narratee of translation—implied reader of translation—reader of translation

Fig. 1.2. Narratological representation of translation

In this Figure, the first translation component is the ‘real translator,’ who is associated with the ‘implied reader’ of the ST because he or she is “aware of the kind of implied reader presupposed by a given narrative” (ibid: 14); that is, the translator will be aware of the possible or likely audience of the text and will be able to compensate (or otherwise) for any lacunae in their sociocultural knowledge of the source language or culture. This awareness is expressed in the linguistic choices made in the translated text. Schiavi’s justification for

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Style and Ideology in Translation

the subsequent inclusion of an ‘implied translator’ follows that for the implied author above: A translator will in fact build a set of translational presuppositions according to the book to be translated and the audience envisaged. It is also a useful concept for all those that are made by putting together bits and pieces of existing translations of the same book; in that case there may not be a translator’s name on the cover, but there certainly is a ‘translation intent,’ obeying given norms and producing a new text. (Schiavi 1996: 15) The evident mediating role of the translator and the effect this may have on style will be discussed further below, but for the moment let us consider the complexity of Schiavi’s diagram. It may be true that the concept of an implied author can be used to explain the fact that the beliefs expressed in a novel may not be those of the biographical author; it may also be true that the theoretical concept of the ‘implied translator’ may usefully reflect that a TT is the outcome of collaborative work of translator, copy editor, and editor and may cover those cases of multiple or anonymous translations or indeed retranslations where the work of an earlier translator informs the new TT.1 Nevertheless, Schiavi’s schema is not necessarily of enormous benefit in understanding what goes on in the translation process. A first step towards clarification would be to produce two parallel narratological lines linked by the identification of the real translator as a real reader of the ST who interprets presuppositions concerning the implied reader of the ST (Figure 1.3):

For ST author—implied author—narrator—narratee—implied reader—ST reader For TT ST reader/ real translator—implied translator—TT narrator—TT narratee—TT implied reader—TT reader

Fig. 1.3. Parallel narratological lines of translation

As well as identifying the real translator with a real ST reader,2 the parallelism of the diagram also emphasizes the links (1) between the implied author (of the ST) and implied translator (of the TT) and also (2) between the author (of the ST) and the translator (of the TT). That is, in the process of creating the TT the implied translator and translator to some extent take over the role of the ST implied author and ST author. One consequence, in Schiavi’s words, is that a reader of translation will receive a sort of split message coming from two different addressers, both original although in two different senses:

Discursive Presence, Voice, and Style in Translation

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one originating from the author which is elaborated and mediated by the translator, and one (the language of the translation itself) originating directly from the translator (Schiavi 1996: 14). This is critical for the interpretation of the linguistic analysis of style as well as for any suggestion of manipulation and distortion in translation: the translated text is a mix of source and target, an amalgam of author and translator, a ST mosaic overlaid with TT tesserae that is the result of the translator’s conscious and unconscious decision-making. Whereas, for many reviewers and readers, the TT mosaic is the ST and the translator merely a layer of transparent varnish, the difficulty for translational stylistics is in determining the pieces that are characteristic of the style of the particular translator and those that are visible signs from the ST underneath. This “split message” is directly related to the question of authority over the text. Although the words of the ST are a basic constraint against which the TT choices may be measured, the translator may deliberately choose to subvert them or may unconsciously distort them by patterns of low-level lexical choices. At the very least, the message coming from the translation is relayed in a different code that bears the translator’s print. That Schiavi, despite the complexity of her schema, focuses above all on the author and translator (as both reader and mediator/re-writer) suggests that these are indeed core roles in the actual translation process. This is borne out by the approach adopted by Michael Toolan, in his Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, which treats the author and narrator as core participants in the production of (ST) narrative, and the reader as the core participant in the reception (Toolan 2001: 67). Similarly, Rachel May in her book The Translator in the Text, a study of Russian literature translated in English, uses the terms ‘author in the text’ and ‘reader in the text’ in place of ‘implied author’ and ‘implied reader’ because her concern “is less with actual or potential readers than with the various ways the reader and author may be encoded within the text and, above all, with the way the translator alters the codes” (May 1994: 167, note 2). Even though we choose not to adopt May’s terms, her assertion about the shifting power relations within ST and TT does chime with our main focus. For May: [t]he evidence suggests that translators traditionally engage in rivalries not only with editors and authors but with the voices in the text, particularly with the voice of the narrator. [ . . . ] The translators are subtly altering all the power relations in and around the text—between character and narrator as well as between author and text or text and reader. (May 1994: 115) The translator, or implied translator if we consider others involved in the production of the TT (such as the publisher, editor, and copy-editor), is in a powerful position. He or she may deliberately re-mould the TT to fit a

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Style and Ideology in Translation

pre-existing personal or public ideological framework or narrative (Baker 2006); alternatively, the more subtle and even unconscious stylistic rewordings which occur in any text have the potential, because they come from a different code and different writer, to alter the voices of the ST author and narrator, as noted by May above. No TT narrative can ever be a true calque of the ST. Just as there may be reliable or unreliable narrators, so may there also be reliable and unreliable translators. An unreliable translator may deliberately manipulate the message; even reliable translators alter stylistically because of their mere presence. This is not ‘betraying,’ in the image of the aphorism traditore tradutore, but creating something new with a subtly distinct voice. Our interest is in what traces and voices these translators insert in the text. In narratology, ‘voice’ normally refers to the narrative voice (RimmonKenan 2002: 87–106); “who speaks?” in Genette’s terms); in other words, it relates to the author’s voice(s) or presence as perceived through the act of narration (Booth 1961: 18). This may manifest itself in many different forms: direct authorial address to the reader, comments from supposedly ‘reliable’ narrators, a shift of point of view and character within the narrative, alteration of ‘natural’ sequence or duration and even the very choice of material and the decision to write (ibid.: 16–20). “In short, the author’s judgement is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it” (ibid.: 20). If the author’s judgement is always present, then in translation so is the translator’s. That is a crucial starting point of this volume. There are three elements of narrative fiction that are commonly presented in contemporary narratology: the ‘story’ (i.e., the basic events and characters), the ‘text’ (the way these events are presented, ordered, and focused) and the ‘narration’ (the levels and ‘voices’).3 Although authorial judgement may affect all three elements, it is only the text that is immediately visible (Rimmon-Kenan 2002). Therefore, any construction or reconstruction of narrative and authorial voice needs to be primarily based on an analysis of the text, on the linguistic choices visible to us. In a descriptive translation analysis, this means a comparison of both ST and TT. For Booth, following Sartre, the author’s voice is a “manipulating presence” (Booth 1961: 19), introducing evaluation at all levels. In translation, this finds its counterpart in the translator’s “discursive presence” (Hermans 1996a) or “mediating presence” (Malmkjaer 2004). Such a presence may be evident, in the case of translator footnotes and prefaces, but most commonly it will be realized in the words of the translated text that, by many, will be read in isolation and judged as the unmediated words of the ST author. Any alteration, muffling, exaggeration, blurring, or other distortion of authorial voice will remain hidden until and unless some element of the TT reveals the mediation or until the TT is compared to its ST. To use Hermans’s words, the authorial voice needs to be “confronted” with “the translator’s voice, as an index of the translator’s discursive presence” (Hermans 1996a: 27). Hermans contends

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that “a ‘second’ voice” is always present in translated discourse and that this may be manifested in one of three ways: 1. by displacement caused by the specific historical or ‘cultural embedding’ of the original text. When translated for a new readership, this requires the adaptation or even introduction of cultural allusions. Nevertheless, inevitably the trace of the ST implied reader is not totally erased; 2. by ‘self-referentiality,’ where the form of the language of the ST is emphasized with word-plays or even specific commentary. Hermans (ibid.: 29–30) gives the example of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode, discussed by Derrida (1991), where the French ST declares it is written in French not Latin. This sentence is omitted in the Latin translation but in English becomes an obvious marker of translation through its contradiction: “And if I write in French . . . rather than Latin . . . it is because . . .” (Descartes 1968: 91, cited in Hermans 1996a: 30); 3. by ‘contextual overdetermination,’ where the context and form of the ST do not allow for translation. Hermans gives the case of the initials of a character in a Dutch novel4 which spell out the fi rst letters of a well-known and relevant Dutch proverb and are dealt with in a translator’s footnote. These are perhaps points at which the translator’s voice becomes loudest, where the translator is most ‘visible’ (Venuti 1995) even without comparison with the ST; other points are paratexts, material outside of the text, such as a critical introduction, evaluative footnotes, book cover, and the like (Genette 1997), which Baker (2006) describes as framing the narrative of translation. Other phenomena which show the translator’s presence are omissions (the silencing of the ST author can speak volumes), rewriting, or summarizing, the latter only ascertained by comparing the TT to the ST. We shall see examples of all these strategies in the following chapters. However, the most interesting, because it is the most subtle and least immediately visible, are shifts in linguistic style. Hermans implies this when he stresses the need for “a model of translated narrative which accounts for the way in which the translator’s voice insinuates itself into the discourse and adjusts to the displacement which translation brings about” (1996a: 43). The choice of the verb ‘insinuates’ hints at the concealment of the act.5 In a recent study entitled “Hearing Voices: James Joyce, Narrative Voice and Minority Translation,” Carmen Millán-Varela (2004) tries to build on the work of Hermans and Schiavi by investigating the translator’s voice in the Galician translation of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” One finding of interest is that of “a hidden mediating presence,” that of a Spanish TT, a translation by the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which seems to have provided a syntactic and lexical model for the Galician TT (ibid.: 47). Other changes to the narrative voice involve the omission of certain

16 Style and Ideology in Translation reporting clauses (turning direct speech into free indirect speech) and of evaluative adverbs (the equivalents of ‘surely,’ ‘literally’). Millán-Varela feels that the narrator’s voice is thereby “suppressed” (ibid.: 50). Nevertheless, although she contends (ibid.: 52) that “the linguistic and stylistic study of translated texts can provide crucial information about the agents involved, their ideology and motivations,” it is not carried through in her paper. Indeed, a problem facing any such paper is that of how to generalize from a particular case study. The advantage of studies such as May’s, and our own, is that many related case studies can be brought together, confronted, and consolidated in a bid to advance the study of style and of descriptive translation studies in general. Logical starting points are the study of translations linked by time, place, translator, or literary movement, conforming to some of the subcategory restrictions of descriptive studies indicated by Toury (1995: 10) in his extension of Holmes’s famous mapping of translation studies (Holmes 1988). In the case of the present book, that will be (mainly) translations of Latin American writing in English in the second part of the twentieth century. The concept of voice itself is ideological since the possibility of a consistent voice presupposes a single unified self, which has been challenged by postmodernism and most notably in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). Bakhtin’s view of narrative as polyphonic (multi-voiced), dialogic (orientated towards a response, mixing characters and styles), and founded in the variety of heteroglossia,6 removes the absolute boundaries between both source and target and between the intra- and extralinguistic features of the text. Bakhtin thus links voice, style, and discourse in the dialogic intermeshing of characters, groups, and points of view. This has profound implications for our analysis of style with its contingent influences of ideology and narrative point of view and its impact for the identity of the text, translator, and author. Bakhtin’s ideas indeed underpin May’s analysis of English translations of major Russian writers. May’s contention is that: translators incline, by and large, to replace the inner dialogism of a text with discrete voices, and the heteroglossia “from below” with greater literariness “from above.” [ . . . ] Even more significantly, translation changes the author’s own relation to the novel. Whereas Bakhtin describes the author as interacting with the play of voices in the text, sculpting from the raw material of “someone else’s speech,” for the translator the entire work is someone else’s speech into which all its once-alien voices are subsumed. All too often this means that the translator redefines the work from above, asserting boundaries between voices and replacing a fluid narrating voice with one more authoritative. It would seem that the translator, having less “authorship” over the text, asserts more authority rather than playing with the boundaries of that authority. Words that were “half someone else’s” for the author are, for the translator, all someone else’s; in the process of taking control

Discursive Presence, Voice, and Style in Translation

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of them, the translator commonly re-evaluates them as all his or her own. (May 1994: 4–5) The assertion that translators tend to separate out the voices in the text and impose a more literary norm on the non-standard varieties in a text requires further investigation to see if this is always the case and what external constraining factors are at play. The questions of authority over the text and ownership of the words are also more problematic than May might suggest. The translator reworks the already sculpted material of the author’s words into new words in the target language which, as discussed above, may bear the fingerprint of the translator’s idiolect or preferred translation strategies. The translator certainly filters the voices and may alter them by doing so. Evaluation or re-evaluation takes place at points of ambiguity where interpretation is essential, but it is not uncommon in translation for the ST author’s lexis or syntax to show through, otherwise there would be no discussion of phenomena such as interference, one of Toury’s probabilistic ‘laws’ of translation (Toury 1995). A further complicating factor is that literary translators themselves often use the concept of a unified (rather than polyphonic) authorial voice as a key guiding element for their work. ‘Voice’ is generally used in the singular, to reflect the consistent form of expression of an author and the aural value of the source words. Thus, for Margaret ‘Petch’ Peden, the renowned translator of Latin American literature, voice defines the translator’s task: How do I begin a translation? To me the overall most important key to the translation is to find its voice. Who is telling? Who is narrating? Who is singing? (Peden 2002: 76) The aural, singing quality which directs the translator is emphasized by Peden in an earlier article published in Translation Review in 1987 entitled “Telling Others’ Tales”: By ‘voice’ I mean the way something is communicated: the way the tale is told; the way the poem is sung. Who is reflecting, narrating, composing, explaining, describing, transcribing, communicating, obfuscating— telling? Whose voice is creating the Spanish sounds that in my mind’s ear begin to change into English? (Peden 1987: 9) As well as the aural metaphor of voice, sounds absorbed by “my mind’s ear,” what stands out in this description is the way Peden reads a text she is translating, the focus being on communication and on telling, and the range of verbal processes employed to highlight the narrative role of the text. Peden then describes the “reforming” or “recreating” of the words into the translated text, a phase which, she claims, distinguishes the work of the translator from that of the reader and the critic. Here, the translator

18 Style and Ideology in Translation must listen to the tentative voices of the text until one becomes dominant and coherent: “In this stage, voice is determinant, guiding all choices of cadence and tone and lexicon and syntax: all the things we know compose a narrative” (Peden 1987: 9). Although Peden is aware of the polyphonic nature of the text, what she says ties in with May’s assertion that the translator tends to bring voices together. Peden’s description of “voice” even abrogates some of the authority May considers the translator to have over the TT, since it renders all decisions subject to this other voice. This is perhaps most likely to occur on those occasions when a translator works with a single author with whom he or she feels at home. Giovanni Pontiero, the acclaimed translator of the Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the Portuguese Nobel-prizewinner Jose Saramago, felt that this was actually a distinct advantage. On receiving the 1993 Independent Foreign Fiction Award in the UK for the translation of Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss, Pontiero reflected that: The nicest thing that’s happened to me is that I’ve been able to stick to one author [ . . . ] It’s enabled me to listen to this one voice, work out what’s compelling about it—a bit like an actor getting into a part—and try to carry that into English. (in Winder 1993: 28) Yet there are clear difficulties with an abstract and uni-dimensional view of ‘voice’ associated with a single author. At odds with the Bakhtinian dialogic or polyphonic conception of the genre of the novel, it runs into trouble even for a translator who works on several works of the same author who may find modifications over time or caused by the changes in subject matter or by narrator: Peden herself has commented on the shift in the style of Carlos Fuentes in the years she worked on his novels, from Terra Nostra (translation 1978) to The Old Gringo (translation 1986). For Pontiero (1992: 301), the author’s voice would carry the translator along like an actor and the responsibility for transmitting this voice would remove freedoms from the translator to self-expression. This is not the case with all translators, though. Edith Grossman, the translator of Colombian Nobel laureate García Márquez since the mid-1980s, believes that “my primary obligation as a literary translator is to recreate for the reader in English the experience of the reader in Spanish” which, in her translation of Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote, meant recreating the “crackling, upto-date Spanish” of the early seventeenth-century out of modern American idiom (Cervantes 2003: xix). Grossman’s conception amounts to a macrolevel strategy that overrides the lower-level linguistic choices: For me this is the essential challenge in translation: hearing, in the most profound way I can, the text in Spanish and discovering the voice to say (I mean, to write) the text again in English. Compared to that, lexical difficulties shrink and wither away.(Grossman in Cervantes 2003: xix)

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In other words, for Grossman, as for other translators, the task of translating is concerned more with hearing and recreating the voice which then guides the lexical selections.

THE NATURE AND ANALYSIS OF STYLE So many translators use the term ‘voice,’ and ‘ear’ it must play a central role in the translation process. Often the translator understands the concept as an aural image encompassing rhythm and sound rather than in the broader, more critical narratological sense of ‘teller of the tale.’ A classic example of the link between translation and sound is provided by William Weaver, the renowned translator from Italian, whose training was actively in music and who has translated opera librettos. In relation to his work on Italo Calvino’s novels, Weaver observes: Translating Calvino is an aural exercise as well as a verbal one. It is not a process of turning this Italian noun into that English one, but rather of pursuing a cadence, a rhythm—sometimes regular, sometimes wilfully jagged—and trying to catch it, while, like a Wagner villain, it may squirm and change shape in your hands [ . . . ]. Frequently, I would get up from my desk, pace my study, testing words aloud, listening to their sound, their pace, alert also to silences. (William Weaver n.d.). This physical description of the translator’s struggle to grasp the voice, to secure the sound, not only marks this out as something different from the narratological description but in fact constructs a bridge between the concepts of voice and style. Whereas we shall use voice to refer to the abstract concept of authorial, narratorial, or translatorial presence, we consider style to be the linguistic manifestation of that presence in the text. Since the text is the only immediately visible part of the narrative, it is only by studying the language of the text that the style of the author or translator might really be identified and hence the voice(s) present in the discourse be determined. Voice is therefore to be approached through the analysis of style. This concurs with the linking of voice to style in Willis Barnstone’s The Poetics of Translation (Barnstone 1993). Following Schleiermacher (1813/2004), Barnstone, a poet and academic, considers that there are two possibilities: the voice of the SL author is retained in the TT, and the translator’s is thus “suppressed (in deference to author)” or else the translator’s voice comes to dominate (Barnstone 1993: 28–29). Our contention is that the translator’s voice generally mixes more subtly with that of the author, ‘insinuating itself’ into the discourse, as Hermans puts it, and generally passing unnoticed unless the target is compared to its source. But we do agree with Barnstone that there is a cline of replication/originality in translation representing varying degrees of authorship

20 Style and Ideology in Translation from the translator. The potential for “remarkable areas of artistry” (ibid.: 94) is important for our discussion, since for us the translator’s presence may be measured by creative linguistic choices as well as by repeated linguistic selections. Both, creative or standardizing, relate to the idiolect of the translator and are manifestations of individual style. However, style itself is a very problematic concept. Roger Fowler (1986/96: 185–186) rejects style as a technical term because of its imprecision and proposes instead ‘register’ plus a range of other sociolinguistic terms such as ‘dialect’ and ‘idiolect.’ Leech and Short in their groundbreaking and still seminal Style in Fiction themselves give a very general definition: “It refers to the way in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on” (Leech and Short 1981: 10). Despite such a broad definition, they go on to make several crucial points about the nature of style, or styles. In particular, style may refer to “the linguistic habits of a particular writer . . . genre, period, school [ . . . ]” (ibid.: 11). Following this, style can thus be individual (specific to the particular author, such as García Márquez) or collective (specific to a genre, such as the novel) or refer to a period (such as the Latin American Boom of the 1960s). While we accept that style may be understood in these different ways, we follow Bakhtin in supposing that the individualistic element is always present in all genres: Any utterance—oral or written, primary or secondary, and in any sphere of communication—is individual and therefore can reflect the individuality of the speaker (or writer); that is, it possesses individual style.[ . . . ] The most conducive genres [to reflecting the individuality of the speaker] are those of artistic literature; here the individual style enters directly into the very task of the utterance, and this is one of its main goals. (Bakhtin 1981: 276, emphasis added) The individual element in authorship is crucial. Each writer, and therefore each translator, has an individual style. This goes for any genre, although Bakhtin considers literary works, and thus literary authors, as possessing the greatest degree of individualism. If anything, this complicates matters for the analysis of style in literary translation since from the outset the translator is likely to be faced with a highly individual ST style. Analysis therefore has to take into account the markedness of the ST before determining the markedness and individuality of the TT. The task is facilitated if there is more than one TT of the same ST piece (such as the Borges translations in the Introduction), since the multiple TTs can be compared to each other, the controlled variable being the unchanging ST. Variations between the TTs must be due to translator choice and style. However, such comparison is not generally possible; copyright restrictions permit only one translation. This is by far the most frequent scenario with modern Latin American literature. In such cases, examination of a broad

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range of related translations by the same translator, of the same author, of similar or different genres is one means of controlling the analysis. The variation of stylistic patterns according to the situational context may indicate the relative importance of the different variables. In order to ascertain stylistic patterns we obviously need to have an idea of what we are looking for. Leech and Short (1981: 15–18) reject what had been the traditional views of style, ‘dualist’ or ‘monist’ depending on whether form and meaning were deemed to be divisible or not. The so-called dualist tradition, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle in Ancient Greece (Kelly 1979), presumes that there is some specific ‘truth’ content identifiable and separable in a text and sees style as ornament, pertaining to the ‘manner’ of verbal presentation alone. This thinking is pursued by structuralist, or post-structuralist, theorists (e.g., Bally, Riffaterre, Barthes), who see style as the expressive or emotive element of language, and by stylisticians in the transformational-generative tradition, such as Richard Ohlmann (1964). Opposed to dualism is monism, a tradition supported by the Anglo-American New Critics of the 1920s to 1940s (e.g., Richards 1924; Empson 1930; Ransom 1941), which considers that the language in which a text is produced is an integral part of the meaning. This holds particularly for poetry, but also in prose where all types of tropes and poetic devices may be found (metaphor, parallelism, and alliteration, for instance). Many novelists have adopted a monist view, including most prominently David Lodge, in Language of Fiction (1966: 18–34), where he describes prose as sharing with poetry both the impossibility of paraphrase and translation and the inseparability of literary value and style. However, the purity of theoretical untranslatability need not detain us.7 In one sense it may easily be dismissed since, were it true, no fiction, or poetry, would ever be translated, which is obviously a nonsense. Our interest is descriptive, based on the analysis of existing translations. If a TT exists, then we are interested in its relation to the ST and to other TTs. The aim is to investigate the style of translation and translators in the particular context of Latin American writing in the twentieth century to identify characteristics of style and the factors that constrain style. We share Leech and Short’s view (1981: 18) that “style is a property of all texts.” We follow them in adopting a functional and pluralistic view of style, distinguishing various strands of meaning according to context (ibid.: 29 ff.). In this we are pursuing J. R. Firth’s conception of meaning as function in context developed by Michael Halliday, whose functional grammar has had an important influence on modern stylistics (see below).8 The key question, of course, is how exactly to investigate style. Leaving aside impressionistic studies, this is the realm of stylistics, a simple definition of which is “the (linguistic) study of style” (Leech and Short 1981: 13). Focusing systematically on the language choices in the text, stylistics seeks to answer why and how a work functions as it does. As an area of

22 Style and Ideology in Translation study, it grew from the 1960s as a counterbalance to what was considered to be an overly impressionistic tradition of literary appreciation. Its main, but not exclusive, centre of attention has been literary texts. However, stylistics is not a homogenous field; it is noted for its adoption of a wide range of linguistic models as well as trends in literary theory. Most importantly for our interest in style and ideology, modern-day stylistics has adopted the tools and metalanguage of (critical) discourse analysis and text linguistics to uncover patterns of meaning that are revealing of the power relations between the participants in any communication. Stylistics aims at a more comprehensive and accurate descriptive analysis, allowing replicability of existing studies and extension on further texts (Carter 1982: 9). Its aims coincide in part with those of descriptive translation studies (Toury 1995), the major sticking point of which concerns the form of the comparison of the ST-TT segments, which Toury conducts on an ad-hoc basis according to the text in question, thus inevitably jeopardizing the replicability and comparability of findings. It is here that stylistics has had most to offer translation studies, namely a ‘toolkit’ (Fowler 1996: 8) for the analysis and description of texts. The basis of Fowler’s toolkit are elements common to many stylistic approaches: the concept of defamiliarization introduced by the Russian formalists; the Hallidayan analysis of Register; narrative point of view or perspective which is crucial in orientating or manipulating the reader of the text (see the detailed discussion below); all within a context of culture (to use Halliday’s term) or world view where ideology is reflected and conveyed. Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics views language as communication in context, a ‘meaning potential’ (Halliday 1978) expressed by the selections made by the author (or, indeed, translator) at every point throughout the text. Every choice can have meaning. It provides the building blocks of the stylistic toolkit in the form of the parameters of Register analysis, clearly related to the discourse semantics of a text and the lexical and grammatical forms (such as transitivity, modality and cohesion) which ‘realize’ (perform) these semantic functions. This relation can be represented as in Table 1.1:

Table 1.1. Parameters of Register analysis following Halliday (1978, 1994) Register Dimension

Field (Subject Matter)

Tenor (Writer-Reader Relationship)

Mode (Structure And Formality)

Discourse semantics

ideational function

interpersonal function

textual function

Lexicogrammatical realization

transitivity structures, terminology, denotation

modality, pronouns, evaluative epithets/ appraisal

cohesion, thematic and information structures

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The variable Register dimensions together form what Halliday calls the context of situation: these variables are Field (what is the topic of the text), Tenor (the writer-reader relationship), and Mode (what linguistically holds the text together and helps to give it its cohesion and helps to produce psychological coherence). In this model, analysis is mainly centred on the lexicogrammatical realizations (i.e., surface-level linguistic choices) categorized according to the three metafunctions or strands of meaning that co-exist in any text. These strands are (1) ideational (the representation of experience or events in the world); (2) interpersonal (relating to the exchange of communication between writer and reader); and (3) textual (the structure of the message). In stylistic studies, these are linked to the representation of narrative point of view, the perspective from which a narrator, or author, portrays events (Simpson 1993: 2; Fowler 1996: 8). ‘Point of view’ is here a technical term in narratology, meaning “different authorial positions from which the narration or description is conducted” (Uspensky 1973: 5), which is often crucial for the reader’s interpretation of the story (Bal 1985: 6). It is also called “focalization” (Genette 1980), or “the angle of vision” (Rimmon-Kenan 2002) or “perspective” (Fowler 1977), which “is a mode of controlling information according to whether or not it is viewed through the consciousness of the narrator or (usually main) characters” (Wales 2001: 295). The stylistician Paul Simpson, in his influential book Language, Ideology and Point of View, describes point of view in the following terms: In the context of narrative fiction, point of view refers generally to the psychological perspective through which a story is told. It encompasses the narrative framework which a writer employs [ . . . ] and accounts for the basic viewing position which is adopted in a story. Narrative point of view is arguably the very essence of a story’s style. (Simpson 1993: 4–5, emphasis added) Simpson (ibid.: 11) builds on the seminal work of Uspensky and of Fowler, identifying specific ‘planes’ of point of view (spatial, temporal, psychological, and ideological) together with the typical linguistic markers associated with them. However, Uspensky (1973: 17) had considered spatial and temporal point of view as part of the same phenomenon. This makes sense since there is much in common in the presentation of these phenomena. This would help explain comparative stylistic differences between languages of the type noted by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995) in their work on French and English, which shows differences in the use of time and space to refer to the same phenomenon.9 In addition, Uspensky (ibid.: 17–56) proposes another plane, ‘phraseological,’ linked to naming, speech representation (direct or indirect discourse, monologue, and so on) and the use of standard or non-standard forms, which has much in common with the concept of authorial voice discussed above. Our representation of the four planes of point of view is set out in Table

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Table 1.2. Types of point of view (after Uspensky, Fowler, and Simpson) Planes of point of view

Linguistic markers

Psychological (‘mind style’)

Type of narrator, ideational function, transitivity structures, denotational lexical items; cohesion (part of the textual function)

Ideological

Interpersonal function, modality structures, evaluation, linked to authorial voice and implied author

Spatio-temporal

Textual function, particularly tense, deixis, sequencing

Phraseological

Naming, pronouns, speech representation, use of foreign and non-standard forms

1.2, where they can be seen to link to the metafunction categories from Table 1.1. There is some overlap between the different planes of point of view. However, in general the choice of type of narrator (first or third person, a character within the story, overt addressing of the reader, etc.) and cohesion (paratactic or hypotactic structures, see below) affect the psychological point of view or ‘mind style’ (Fowler 1977: 76), while explicit judgement revealed in value-biased language, which has come to be known under the term ‘appraisal’ (Martin and White 2005), affects the ideological viewpoint and world view portrayed (Leech and Short 1981: 272–287; Fowler 1996: 165–173). Those elements of the textual function that relate to sequencing (thematic and information structures and word order, especially of adjuncts of place and time) and pointing (deixis) determine the spatio-temporal point of view. The following sections indicate examples of each type of point of view:

THE IDEATIONAL FUNCTION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW The ideational function, principally realized through denotational element of the lexical items and the transitivity structures, helps form the ‘mind style’ of a text. This is defined by Fowler (1996: 214) as “the world-view of an author, or a narrator, or a character.” A classic study of this type is Halliday’s (1971) analysis of William Golding’s The Inheritors, described by Simpson (1993: 109) as “in a number of respects [ . . . ] the blueprint of modern stylistics.” Halliday’s study focuses on comparative transitivity clause types in three different passages from the novel. In the passage depicted from the point

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of view of Lok, a Neanderthal character, there is a predominance of action verbs, often intransitive, in the simple past (“Lok steadied by the tree [ . . . ] grabbed at the branches [ . . . ] the branches twitched,” and a large number of static circumstantial adjuncts, particularly of spatial adjuncts (such as “at their farthest,” “at the end”). After detailed analysis, Halliday (ibid.: 353) suggests that the pattern produced by this kind of process verb helps to create a picture of a life where things simply happen, where there is no realization of the link of cause and effect. This constitutes Lok’s mind-style. The type of mind style of the narrative is indicative of the psychological point of view—it reveals how the author-narrator perceives and interprets reality. Halliday (1978: 117) has called it the “observer” function. It is also related to point of view on the ideological plane since it can be used, especially in political, argumentative, or advertising genres, to put forward a particular argument. Trew (1979), for example, demonstrates how press reports of police killing Blacks in what was then Rhodesia differed according to choice of lexical items and transitivity structures. The reports which blamed the police highlighted their active participant role (“Police shoot 11 dead in Salisbury riot”), whereas less condemnatory reports placed them in a passive role (“Rioting Blacks shot dead by police”).

THE INTERPERSONAL FUNCTION AND IDEOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW Halliday (1978: 117) has called the interpersonal function the “intruder” function. Realized principally by the modality structures, it enables the writer/speaker to give evaluation on the events. The modal structures are principally the use of modal auxiliaries (of obligation, possibility, wanting, or needing), verba sentiendi (verbs of feeling, believing, and opinion), evaluative adverbs (apparently, surely, unfortunately), evaluative adjectives or epithets (beautiful, best), the selection of detail which is inherently evaluative, and generic sentences where the absence of modality presents as fact something which is really only opinion (e.g., “There is no doubt that the government is correct in going to war”). Based on these expressions of modality, Simpson (1993: 46-85) advances a “modal grammar of point of view in narrative fiction” to aid analysis of the degree of authorial presence in a narrative and the evaluative role played by any character-narrator. He categorizes narratives according to their form of narration (e.g. first or third person) and viewing position and depending on the intensity of the modality patterns, of how much evaluation is being expressed, of how reliable the narrator is. Since, as we shall discuss below, it would be extremely unusual for a translator to alter the global narrative form (for example, by changing a third to a first person narration), evaluation in translation is more likely be expressed in shifts to the lexicogrammatical realizations of modality or to some other feature of the text.

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THE TEXTUAL FUNCTION AND SPATIO-TEMPORAL POINT OF VIEW Spatio-temporal point of view relates the location from which an event is narrated together with its sequence. The linguistic realizations of the textual function are perhaps the most obvious indicators of spatial and temporal points of view, which Simpson (1993: 12) sees as interacting to “designate the viewing position assumed by the narrator.” For the writer, techniques of spatial point of view can be closely related to the workings of camera angle in films (Uspensky 1973: 60), and, for the reader, this spatial focus is important because it “provide[s] a window and vantage point on the action” (Simpson 1993: 15). Apart from the tense choices made by the author, the most obvious linguistic markings of spatio-temporal point of view are deixis (see below) and the sequencing of elements. Sequencing covers the themerheme and information structures (which often boils down to the order of presentation in a clause). The order of presentation defines the order in which the reader perceives the events—in a narrative based around spatial point of view, the readers will be led, as they scan from left to right (in European languages),10 from place to place suggesting an initial and developing viewing position (Uspensky 1973: 77; Fowler 1996: 164). The same can be said of temporal point of view—we should normally expect events to be related in the chronological order in which they occur, but there are many occasions when an author may rearrange this sequence of adjuncts, or even whole events, so as to change the perception of events. Deixis is the other obvious marker of spatio-temporal point of view. Locative and temporal adverbs and adjuncts, demonstrative pronouns, motion verbs such as bring and take, all serve to designate the position of the narrator and the viewpoint of the narrative. They are basically decided by the author-narrator (Fowler 1996: 173) and can either be proximal (bringing events closer to the reader) or distal (distancing them) (Simpson 1993: 72). In general, the more definite or ‘concrete’ the temporal or spatial coordinates of the work, the more important this framework is for the fixing of the observer’s concrete point of view. Both Simpson (ibid.: 43) and Uspensky (1973: 58) consider spatio-temporal point of view to be linked to and even to be a subsystem of psychological point of view, since it guides the reader’s perception of events. The general cohesive texture of a work will also be indicative of a certain style and world view. Leech and Short (1981: 246) point out that cohesion often involves the reduction and condensation of messages. It is also known to vary across texts and genres. Thus, parataxis (often involving the use of conjunctives such as and, then, and so to link elements of equal status, rather than using more structurally complex hypotactic clauses) is described as “a definite literary style” by Fowler (1996: 229), “traditionally and widely associated with plain, simple, often naive narration” including children’s stories. In general, though, Leech and Short (1981: 250) see latter-day fiction to be

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marked by an absence of linkage, with connections having to be inferred by the reader. On the other hand, an “unusual prominence of cohesion” is far more typical of philosophical “truth-seeking” texts (ibid.: 253). The fourth plane of point of view proposed by Uspensky is the phraseological. Phenomena covered by this plane are related to naming and addressing of characters, speech representation and the use of foreign and non-standard forms. Uspensky draws extensively on War and Peace for examples, where, for instance, the French-Russian mixture is deliberately used, French being a marked term, indicative of the way of speaking and point of view of different characters. A fusion of perspectives (narrator and character) is achieved by the use of non-standard forms, as in the following: Prince Vassily, who still filled the same important position, constituted the connecting link between the two circles. He used to visit ma bonne amie Anna Pavlovna and was also seen dans le salon diplomatique de ma fille. (quoted in Uspensky 1973: 37) The choice of the name ‘Prince Vassily,’ compared to simply ‘Vassily,’ denotes distance and respect. At the same time, the italics foregrounds the use of the French, and we can ascertain that these are the words of the character, Prince Vassily. The first-person possessive pronoun ma strengthens this identification. The combination of the character’s words inserted into the narration makes for a more complex form of speech representation, a kind of delayed Free Direct Speech (cf. Leech and Short 1981; Semino and Short 2004). The treatment of non-standard forms makes phraseological point of view attractive for the analysis of translations. We have opted to maintain the phraseological plane of view for another reason, linked to the concept of voice. For Uspensky (1973: 19), “the shift from one point of view to another is a common phenomenon with authorial narration, though it is often inconspicuous, almost as if it were being surreptitiously introduced into the narrative.” It is in phraseological point of view that Uspensky teases out the different voices and it is voice that most translators consider to be a prime guide in their selection of linguistic choices. Furthermore, the ‘surreptitious introduction’ of the point of view of the character into the narration seems to parallel the insinuation of the translator’s discursive presence into the TT, as presented by Hermans (1996a, above). Non-standard and foreign forms are part of phraseological point of view. These have direct relevance for a translator working between a foreign and a native tongue. Finally, and most importantly, the concept of speech and thought representation may arguably include the very work of the translator, where the TT is reporting the discourse of the ST (Mossop 1998). Here, the translator, when working at the level of chunks of language (Nida 1964), will constantly be altering the phrasing and idioms of the ST as he or she strives to recreate the voice and rephrase the idiom in the TT. Shifts of point of view at the phraseological

28 Style and Ideology in Translation level may therefore occur very frequently in translation, making the foreign, and the translator, more or less visible. This does not of course discount the possibility that such shifts may affect other planes of point of view. We have thus far considered style as a series of patterned lexical selections that are indicative of the voice of the author. These selections have meaning since they are made from the possibilities offered by the language system at any given point in the text. They may also be categorized according to the strands of meaning and the representation of narrative point of view. Although the choices may be characteristic of a given school or genre, the major element of stylistic analysis is set on identifying individual style, based on the prominent or foregrounded lexical choices. We hypothesize that an individual element of style exists in the language of translators as well as of authors. However, unveiling that style is extremely difficult as it is dependent on and intertwined with the style of the individual source author or authors. We shall now turn to what translation theory has to say about the analysis of style.

STYLE IN TRANSLATION THEORY Style periodically, and even frequently, appears in discussions in translation theory but for long was merely linked to the age-old debate on literal vs. free translation, and to the opposition of content and form or style.11 In the West, modern translation theory from the 1960s continued to adopt a strict dualist view of style within a more audience-oriented framework. Thus, Nida and Taber’s The Theory and Practice of Translating gives the following division of translating: Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style. (Nida and Taber 1969: 12) This uncomplicated hierarchy places ‘meaning’ or content first, ‘style’ or form second. Yet, interestingly, the entry for “style” in Nida and Taber’s glossary remains quite durable: Style: the patterning of choices made by a particular author within the resources and limitations of the language and of the literary genre in which he [sic] is working. It is the style which gives to a text its uniqueness and which relates the text personally to its author. (Nida and Taber 1969: 207) The phrase patterning of choices emphasizes the repeated patterns associated with style (i.e., we are not talking about one-off occurrences) and the relation of linguistic realizations to the choices available to the author within

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a particular language and (literary) genre. In the “classification of features of style” listed by Nida and Taber (ibid.: 145–157) are categories of formal and lexical features designed for “efficiency” and for “special effects.” Formal features include discourse markers, sentence structure, clause order, and parallelism; lexical features include the frequency and familiarity of words, combinations of words, archaisms or modern usage, appropriateness for the audience. The whole thrust of Nida and Taber’s work, in the context of training Bible translators, is towards teaching or directing in what is ‘good’ style particularly in spoken language, since the translations were primarily intended to be read aloud. However, one flaw in the definition given above which differs from later work on style is the absence of a link between these choices and social function and meaning. Nida and Taber’s concern with functional equivalence is limited to examples where stylistic calquing (e.g., of the Semitic Greek conjunction kai—‘and’—in the Revised Standard Version of Mark’s gospel) results in an inappropriate ‘childish’ text in English (ibid.: 14). This is brought out clearly in Nida and Taber’s urging for a “fit between semantic categories and grammatical classes. [ . . . ] [T]he text in which events are expressed by verbs rather than nouns is usually both more efficient and more vivid than the one which has many events expressed by nouns” (ibid.: 147). Nida and Taber worked within a transformational grammar framework. A systemic functional or critical discourse analysis, which we favour, based on Halliday’s conception of linguistic choice as representing ‘meaning potential,’ would instead emphasize that nominalization tends to be preferred in cases where the intention is to conceal the responsibility of the actors. The generally random nature of the discussions on style in translation often amount to interpolations within volumes that approach translation theory in a broad sense (e.g., Kelly 1979) or as part of a relatively marginalized movement, such as the Czech-based scholars of the 1960s and 1970s Levý, Popovič, and Miko who were enthused by the earlier Russian formalists. Popovič, in his Dictionary of Literary Translation defines style as “[a] unique and standardized dynamic configuration of expressive features in the text represented by topical and linguistic means” (1976: 17–18) and has separate entries for individual style, the style of a period, and, importantly, style in translation, suggesting that translated texts can be distinguished as a genre from non-translated texts (cf. Hatim and Mason 1997; Baker 2000). It is the expressive features which, for these scholars, are the core of style. Indeed, Miko even goes so far as to claim exaggeratedly that “The translator has no other goal but the preservation of the expressive character, that is the style, of the original” (Miko 1970: 66, my translation).12 Yet he gives few specific examples of how this is supposedly to be achieved and the movement fizzled out. Despite valuable insights, this would seem to bear out Mary Snell-Hornby’s contention (1988/1995: 119) that “style is nominally an important factor in translation, but there are few detailed or satisfactory discussions of its role within translation theory.” Snell-Hornby

30 Style and Ideology in Translation follows Leech and Short in understanding style as “a system of choices in language use by the individual user” (ibid.: 123), and makes the theoretically brave proposal to remove the distinction between literary language and other types of language (ibid.: 50). This is justified if we consider that many typically literary devices are common in other genres such as advertising, while tropes such as metaphor and parallelism abound in all kinds of genres including political speeches and financial texts. This blurs the distinction between genres. Fiction and poetry may push language to its limits, but they are by no means the sole sites of stylistic innovation.

TRANSLATIONAL STYLISTICS In her introduction to the special issue of Language and Literature devoted to translation, guest editor Jean Boase-Beier speaks of “the natural affinity of the disciplines of stylistics and translation studies” (Boase-Beier 2004b: 10, see also Boase-Beier 2006). This might be traced back to Vinay and Darbelnet’s classic Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (1958/1995). Stylistic choice belongs to what they call option (1995: 15), as opposed to servitude which are the grammatically imposed rules of the target language, and to the plane of message, or utterance, involving imprecise notions such as ‘tone,’ ‘emphasis,’ and ‘context’ (ibid.: 30). Despite Vinay and Darbelnet’s excessively complex categorization and their focus on decontextualized phrases with little regard for the functional or socio-cultural environment in which translation takes place, they made a valuable contribution by providing a basic terminology to describe translation shifts that later informed taxonomies by Levý (1969), Vázquez Ayora (1977), van Leuven-Zwart (1989, 1990) and others and which continues to influence translation analysis. ‘Borrowing,’ ‘calque,’ ‘literal translation,’ ‘transposition,’ ‘modulation,’ ‘équivalence,’ ‘adaptation,’ ‘explicitation,’ ‘amplification,’ ‘economy’ and so on have provided the analyst with a metalanguage specifically tailored to ST-TT comparisons, which complements the terminology from narratology, stylistics, and critical discourse analysis that tends to have an English-language bias. Despite these advantages, it must be recognized that there is no standard approach to the analysis of stylistics in translation, illustrated by the fact that the editor of the special issue of Language and Literature noted above admits that the papers represent “an extremely eclectic mix of views and approaches” (Boase-Beier 2004b: 10). This is a weakness in that it renders comparability between studies very difficult, although on the other hand it does allow for a range of theoretical insights derived from other disciplines such as cultural studies, gender studies, and postcolonialism. There is also the problem that the goal of many of these studies is not explicitly stated beyond the short-term one of a specific ST-TT comparison. Malmkjaer (2003, 2004) has proposed a methodology for analysing writer motivation in a translated text that she terms ‘translational stylistics,’ “concerned to

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explain why, given the source text, the translation has been shaped in such a way that it comes to mean what it does” (2003: 39, emphasis in original). She examines various translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, including those by Henry William Dulcken in nineteenth century Britain, and shows by close textual analysis and enumeration of occurrences that the translator often avoids using religious terminology where the ST refers to God: for instance, in the Dulcken TT of the story, “The Little Match Girl,” of 101 ST instances only fifty-two are translated and even eighteen of these use an alternative such as Providence or the Almighty. In this and a related article on another Andersen fairytale, Malmkjaer speculates on possible reasons for this translation strategy, suggesting that the pervasive religious belief of Victorian Britain affected Dulcken’s view of what was suitable reading for children (Malmkjaer 2004: 22–23).

POINT OF VIEW AND TRANSLATION The use of a systemic-functional model in descriptive translation studies is based on the hypothesis that small shifts at the lexicogrammatical level might, in certain passages or over the course of a whole translation, shift the higher level framework of the text (e.g., Van Leuven-Zwart 1989, 1990, see footnote 5). If a pattern of lexicogrammatical shifts or an inconsistency in the treatment of point of view is identified, this could affect the discourse semantics and alter the larger point of view framework from which a story is told. In some cases, shifts in point of view and narrative have been seen to be motivated by the need to adapt to the ideological or literary conventions of the target system: for example, Toury (1995: 147–165) analyses a German fairy tale that has been turned into a more epic genre in its Hebrew translation. On the other hand, such shifts may be unintended: Puurtinen (1998) analyses children’s stories translated into Finnish and finds that the greater syntactic complexity of the target texts seems to increase the competency required to read them. Cultural or genre conventions also play a role in the translation of, for example, recipes, which adapt to TL norms (van den Broeck 1986). Nor should the translator’s own literary values be ignored—Levenston and Sonnenschein (1986: 51–53), in one of the few early studies of point of view in translation, show how a passage from the first French translation of Joyce’s The Dead reveals the translator’s preference for standardizing the informal non-standard vocabulary of the narrator, thus altering the focalization and narrative style. More dramatic is the fate, reported by Kuhiwczak (1990), of Milan Kundera’s The Joke, whose first English translator, working jointly with the editor, decided to unravel the ST’s intentionally distorted chronology in an attempt to clarify the story for the readers. That Kundera was sufficiently shocked to demand a new translation has probably deterred subsequent translators from adopting a similarly extreme method unless the author is

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long dead and the goal of the translation is not limited to conventional accuracy to the source. Hence, Stephen Mitchell, in his poetic ‘version’ of the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh, openly recognizes that he omits what he calls “some of the quirks of Akkadian style,” such as repetitions and enumerations, adds links between passages and occasionally alters their order to create a supposedly more coherent poem “faithful to the original Akkadian text” (Mitchell 2005: 66). The coherence to which Mitchell refers adheres to twenty-first century target culture norms of what an epic story should be. We should also not forget that omissions are just as likely to affect the narrative point of view as additions. Publishers sometimes insist on these in an attempt to reduce the length of the book (therefore reducing the printing costs) or to remove what they consider to be less relevant material (thus making the TT more attractive to the TL audience). There are many case studies showing this phenomenon, one of the best-known being Robyns’s (1990) study of American detective fiction translated into French in the 1950s and 1960s, where a major feature was omission of background location detail which both made the TTs less foreign to the audience and allowed publication in a 180- or 240-page format. As we shall see in chapter 3 onwards, omission is a strategy that perhaps more frequently occurs in non-fiction translation. In general, however, the kind of shifts that generally affect point of view and style in modern-day translation are likely to be more subtle, though still potentially distorting. Dan Shen (1988: 132–133), comparing three English translations of a passage from the Chinese novel Honglou Meng (A Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xuegin, does find striking distortions of modality (primarily attitudinal epithets and modal adverbs), which affect the authorial depiction of a character. A description which one translator closely renders as ‘grasping and ruthless’ another shifts to ‘unfortunately with a certain cupidity and harshness,’ and a third to ‘ambitious and overbearing.’ Dan (1992: 149) feels that literary translators suffer from “an inadequate awareness of the function of language in [traditional realistic fiction]” with a tendency to concentrate on the ‘events’ portrayed rather than the manner of presentation. Dan identifies the ST author’s intentional deviations from the norms of syntax and word order (especially manner adjuncts) as tending to be ‘normalized’ by translators.13 Similarly, analysis of German translations of Japanese fiction by Wienold (1990) suggests that point of view in the translations is standardized and more objective, intentional ambiguities of the STs being clarified in the TTs by explicitation of subject pronouns and of the directionality of verbs of motion. However, as Wienold admits (ibid.: 185), this may partly be caused by inherent differences between the languages, Japanese having a greater variety of forms of deixis, for example. More recent studies of the translation of point of view include work by Bosseaux (2004a, 2004b, 2007). Using electronic versions of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and To the Lighthouse, Bosseaux examines different

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lexicogrammatical realizations of point of view in various French translations and finds notable differences in the translation of modals and deixis particularly. Her conclusions highlight the benefit of computer-assisted searches as a time-saving device but also to the crucial need for qualitative analysis of individual examples to assess their relevance and importance. This is particularly the case with literary features such as Free Indirect Discourse (Bosseaux 2004a: 120). Stylistics-based investigations have continued to arouse some controversy from those who view literary creativity as an inherently subjective process. For instance, in his volume Translating Style, in which he examines translations of modernist writers in Italian, the well-known novelist and translator Tim Parks attacks those [theorists] who, in the general anxiety to present their area of interest as a science of demonstrable proof, increasingly consider literature as a branch of linguistics and shrink from anything that might resemble the ‘anachronism’ of a value judgement. Ironically, nothing could be more present to the translator, forced to choose between various options, than an awareness of value judgements based on sensibility (Parks 1998: vi). Yet this sensibility is something Parks seeks to instil in his readership by examining errors (mainly) in published translations. And he does so by assessing the impact of linguistic formulations—lexical choice, connotation, collocation, word order, sentence structure, etc.—although they are not presented in a broader theoretical framework. Parks’s is an integrative view of style—deviations from standard discourse in a passage from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love give “a demonstrably tighter unity between style and content than is to be found in the standard locutions of the translation”(ibid.: 10).14 But there is little theoretical foundation or attempt to analyse the socio-cultural and ideological context of the production of the translation as we shall attempt in chapter 2. Contrary to Parks’s assertions, it should not be thought that stylisticians are naively unaware of the inherent element of subjectivity in their enterprise. In his important edited volume Language and Literature (1982), Ron Carter admits that “objectivity can only be purported because there is an ideology at work in whatever literary critical or linguistic pursuit we follow” (Carter 1982: 16, note 2). That ideology is the ideology both of the analyst’s background and the in-built presumptions of the model that is employed. Major stylisticians admit that full objectivity of description is impossible. However, they do claim that it is a means of validating or at least adding further insight to intuition: One major concern of stylistics is to check or validate intuitions by detailed analysis, but stylistics is also a dialogue between literary reader

34

Style and Ideology in Translation and linguistic observer, in which insight, not mere objectivity, is the goal. Linguistic analysis does not replace the reader’s intuition [ . . . ] but it may prompt, direct, and shape it into an understanding. (Leech and Short 1981: 5)

Similarly, Fowler (1996: 9) is careful to warn that “there is by no means an invariant relationship between linguistic structure and critical significance. Purely linguistic analysis cannot reveal this significance: only a critical analysis which realizes the text as a mode of discourse, which recognizes pragmatics and social and historical context, can do so.” This is very important and immediately overturns the simple binary opposition between linguistics and “sensibility” projected by Parks.

DEVIANCE, FOREGROUNDING, PROMINENCE AND MARKEDNESS The problem that has dogged stylistics is addressed by Leech and Short (1981: 3): “In prose, the problem of how to select—what sample passages, what features to study—is more acute, and the incompleteness of even the most detailed analysis more apparent.” No analysis, however detailed, can be fully comprehensive. What stylistics attempts to do is to analyse the language of a text systematically and identify significant patterns. This presupposes that there is a norm of some kind against which to measure the patterns. The question of norms in quantitative analysis is related to style as deviation, based on a statistical analysis of the frequency of occurrence in the text compared to the frequency of occurrence in what we would now call a reference or control corpus (see below). Leech and Short (ibid.: 48–49) see a close relation between deviance and the psychological notion of prominence or salience, which refers to the fact that these features come to the attention of the reader. Finally, Leech and Short follow Halliday in distinguishing the artistic function of foregrounding, or literary relevance. Foregrounding, also known as defamiliarization, concepts taken from the Russian formalists and Prague school of linguistics, is “artistically motivated deviation” (ibid.: 48) or “prominence that is motivated” (Halliday 1971: 339). It is also psychological (Van Peer 1986). For Halliday (ibid.: 344) foregrounding cannot be expressed statistically since “[we] need to know the rules.” By this, he means that foregrounding cannot be determined merely by examining a list of word frequencies in a text, nor indeed by determining statistical deviation from a norm, since artistic motivation is inherent to the definition and is beyond the immediate scope of quantitative analysis; hence the need to supplement it with close critical analysis. For this reason, Halliday claims that “a rough indication of frequencies is often just what is needed,” a claim that has often be repeated by other theorists (e.g., Leech and Short 1981).15 The use of

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specific discourse-oriented categories of analysis such as transitivity and modality structures and point of view would seem crucial in uncovering how the text “means” and how the author, and translator, are interacting with the reader. It is Hatim and Mason (1990: 8–10) who propose a redefinition of style in translation in Hallidayan terms, as “motivated choices made by text producers” (emphasis added). This is a crucial step in linking stylistic choice with functional and discoursal meaning. It thus links with other work in monolingual, English, stylistics (e.g., Fowler and Kress 1979, Hodge and Kress 1979; Carter 1982; Carter and Simpson 1989; Carter and Nash 1990) which see style as relational, discoursal, and multi-dimensional operating under context-specific constraints. The idea of motivated choices being related to markedness and salience also links to the important concepts of prominence and foregrounding. But Hatim and Mason’s re-definition towards motivation does mean that they exclude idiolect and conventional and subconscious/non-motivated patterns of expression, which we shall treat as important aspects of style. For us, style involves motivated and unmotivated patterns of selections in the TT that reveal the concealed or disguised discursive presence of the translator. The selections may be part of the translator’s idiolect, they may be creative uses, they are prominent or foregrounded in some way and they may impact on the narrative point of view. We shall now consider how electronic corpora may help in an analysis of such patterns in translation.

THE USE OF CORPORA IN THE ANALYSIS OF STYLE As we have seen, Kirsten Malmkjaer’s work represents a bridge between stylistic analysis in monolingual and translational contexts. However, it must be said that her ‘translational stylistics’ is really far more a theoretical term than a methodology since the actual form of ST-TT analysis is scarcely discussed. Her speculation on translation strategy also centres on the motivated choices (Hatim and Mason 1990, above), whereas the other interesting fuzzy boundary involves the unconscious selections that are also typical of stylistic fingerprints. This is an area of translator style that deals not so much with ST-TT comparison as with SL-TL comparison in an attempt to identify characteristics of the very genre of translation itself, a distinction between what Baker (2000) calls “style in translation” and “style of translation.” Baker’s paper is entitled “Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator,” a title that betrays its work-in-process nature. Baker understands style as a kind of thumb-print [to use Leech and Short’s term] that is expressed in a range of linguistic—as well as non-linguistic—features [ . . . ] it involves describing preferred or recurring patterns of linguistic

36

Style and Ideology in Translation behaviour, rather than individual or one-off instances of intervention [ . . . ] subtle, unobtrusive linguistic habits which are largely beyond the conscious control of the writer and which we, as receivers, register mostly subliminally. (Baker 2000: 245)

In other words, rather than the consciously foregrounded patterns of style which we have considered above, Baker is interested in the unconscious preferences that mark the translator’s language. She makes the important point (p. 246) that “we do not [ . . . ] have a methodology for isolating stylistic features which can be reasonably attributed to the translator from those which are simply a reflection of the stylistic features of the original.” Baker’s small-scale study, which admits that the questions asked are “large” and “will take time to answer satisfactorily given the current lack of large-scale descriptive studies in the discipline” (ibid.: 248), uses corpus-based methods to count mainly the use of the lemma SAY in extracts of translations by Peter Bush (from Spanish and Portuguese) and Peter Clark (from Arabic) in the Translational English Corpus,16 comparing the results to a reference corpus (the British National Corpus, see below). In the study, Baker finds that SAY occurs twice as often in the Clark translations than the Bush translations and that the combination of the past tense with the relative pronoun (i.e., said that) are particularly frequent. However, as Baker herself admits, the high frequency of SAY in Clark’s translation may be due to the generally higher frequency of the Arabic verb qaal. Here, indeed, is the rub with Baker’s study, since, although it claims to be developing a methodology, there is very little consideration at all of the STs, which, if we are to give any credence to Toury’s law of interference (Toury 1995), must have some effect on the TT. Although it may be possible in this way to build up a picture of characteristics of the unconscious choices used in translated English, the absence of ST comparison makes it very difficult if not impossible to move beyond speculation when it comes to translator motivation. Nevertheless, Baker’s paper is useful in highlighting the implications of the many variables involved in the study of style, notably the key question: “how can we best distinguish stylistic elements which are attributable only to the translator from those which simply reflect the source author’s style, general source language preferences, or the poetics and preferences of a particular subset of translators?” (ibid.: 261). The methodology used by Baker therefore centres around the analysis of electronic texts (corpora). Corpus-based tools have become increasingly popular given the availability of user-friendly programs (e.g. Wordsmith Tools, Paraconc) and of more texts in electronic format. However, despite the promise, there are still many difficulties with computer-assisted studies. Olohan (2004: 153–160), for instance, looks at contractions in the translations of Peter Bush and Dorothy Blair of biography and narrative using computerized versions of the texts but finds that the ST influence is perhaps

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greater than the style of the translator. The focus on contractions may be guided more by the facility with which the computer can analyse them than by any stylistic peculiarity. Olohan’s second case study (ibid.: 160–167) is more fruitful, using Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2003) to analyse the keywords in translations from Italian by Lawrence Venuti compared to keywords in a subcorpus of fiction in the BNC. Although many of the most frequent keywords will be related to the subject matter of the specific text, Olohan does identify certain words which are prominent in the translations, helped by consideration of Venuti’s avowed aim of producing an archaicizing translation. These words include wherein, sentence-initial yet, toward (rather than towards), nor+subject inversion and borrowings (adieu¸ amour propre). While this is useful, it should be pointed out that some of these findings (e.g., yet and nor) are only possible by close critical analysis of the individual occurrences and that the existence of the ST is downplayed. Focus is exclusively on assessing the style of the TT compared to source texts in the TL. Our study in translational stylistics necessarily involves a comparison of ST-TT pairs in an attempt to ascertain prominent and foregrounded choices made by the different translators. That is, repeated patterns and also idiosyncratic (and creative) uses. For this reason, the main resort to corpus-based tools will revolve around the use of comparable reference corpora of English and Spanish in an attempt to ascertain the norms of the lexical items under consideration. For example, to check whether a prominent TT lexical item or structure (such as a time adjunct in first position) is prominent in the TL as a whole and whether the ST equivalent is correspondingly prominent in the SL. Likewise, to check the frequency of what strikes the analyst as a foregrounded or creative form in the TT. In this we are following techniques originally developed for monolingual lexicographical analysis of language (see Sinclair 1991) and adapted for translation by Kenny (2001). Kenny examines what happens to creative (i.e., rule-breaking) language in the translation of modern German-language fiction. Using a reference corpus in German (the Mannheim corpora), Kenny investigates the realizations of hapax legomena (lexical items occuring once only) in German STs to ascertain which seem to be writer-specific instances and then compares these to the realizations in the corresponding English TTs, again checked for originality against the British National Corpus. The tentative results (Kenny 2001: 210) showed that normalization of creative lexis varies greatly between translators. Additionally, current reference corpora, while giving access to a baseline of language and being particularly useful for picking out common patterns, are still limited in their scope. They provide new insights into lexical and syntactic patterning (e.g., Hunston and Francis 2000; Hunston 2002; Hoey 2005, see below) and are impressive in showing typical collocational and colligational patterns (e.g., if an adjunct such as at three in the morning tends to occur in sentence-initial or sentence-final position) but

38

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inevitably less conclusive when it comes to infrequent lexical items. The fact that a candidate creative form does not appear in a corpus in no way proves that it does not exist. This applies even to reference corpora such as the British National Corpus (BNC) and Spanish Real Academia Corpus (CREA/CORDE) that amount to hundreds of millions of words and set out to be representative of the language as a whole.17 Another way to check for unusual forms is to use the Internet as a corpus since it is so vast. Although Internet search engines such as Google are relatively disordered at present, developments are underway to enable more delicate and sophisticated processing of random samples. One promising example is the interface developed by Serge Sharoff at the University of Leeds and which enables the production of concordance lines and collocation information from Internet corpora in English and other languages (Sharoff 2006). We shall be using this interface (which we shall call the “Leeds Internet corpus”),18 as well as the British National Corpus19 and the Real Academia Española’s CREA contemporary corpus,20 as representative corpora against which to evaluate some of the stylistic choices in the texts investigated in our case studies. For the determination of creativity, we shall make use of basic searches of the Internet using Google, similar to the way in which practising translators make use of it to check the existence of potential candidate translation equivalents. The advantage of this is that it will at least suggest whether a TT item is a neologism, or conversely very frequent. With low-occurrence items it is also possible to examine the individual occurrences to determine the genres associated with it. But we need to acknowledge that such searches are currently a crude mechanism, even for raw frequency scores where the genre or text type could play a large role. Furthermore, the Internet is skewed towards contemporary language and will not necessarily reflect the language of translators working in earlier decades. But this could be said about almost any reference corpus and the Internet certainly contains more texts from those decades, and more genres, than any of those reference corpora. Access to corpora, particularly a corpus of newspaper language and travel writing, lies behind the new theory of ‘lexical priming,’ persuasively advanced by Michael Hoey (2005). In this theory, the central plank of language acquisition and use is lexis rather than grammar; words are ‘primed’ to occur in certain patterns which we learn through our encounters with the words in reading and listening. We thus perceive these patterns as ‘natural.’ The most pervasive priming is collocation but Hoey gives a list of ten forms of priming that range from semantic associations to pragmatic functions to grammatical roles and colligations (functions and positions within discourse).21 In travel writing, for example, Hoey finds that place names are colligationally primed for the structure place name+is+evaluation and that the place name is also primed for first position in a sentence or paragraph, for instance,

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Madrid is one of the world’s favourite meeting destinations. (Hoey 2005: 149) Priming is a relative concept: when an item is ‘primed,’ this refers to typicality of occurrence rather than universality. Not all place names will appear in sentence-initial position. In Hoey’s corpus, approximately 44 percent of place names occur in paragraph initial position, which is a strong priming. Hoey assumes (ibid.: 181) that “everybody’s language is different, because all our lexical items are inevitably primed differently as a result of different encounters, spoken and written,” though primings are “harmonized” to a great extent by education, shared literary and religious traditions, and the mass media (ibid.: 181–183). This theory has much to offer our analysis of style since it allows for and explains the variation between each individual’s experience of language and therefore their ability for individuals’ productive output of primings as small chunks of language in the way that many translators are thought to work (Nida 1964) or indeed the way that language is said to operate according to the ‘idiom principle’ (Sinclair 1991).22 Whereas the systemic-functional theories of language can explain the conscious, targeted use of language for specific aims, Hoey’s lexical priming “leads to a speaker unintentionally reproducing some aspect of the language” (Hoey 2005: 9), thus accounting for unconscious patterning. Hoey assumes that we store a “mental concordance” of every word; perhaps it is more specific to say that we store what we feel are typical example concordances of words with which we are more or less familiar. This would then explain the role of intuition in language production, making use of this mental concordance. Variation comes from the different experiences and evaluations of the text producer, for us, the translator. That is, the lexical primings of each translator would vary slightly. This would lie behind some of the inevitable variation in small lexical choices between different translations of the same text. SYNTHESIS AND METHODOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS This detailed discussion points to several levels of realization of style, depicted in Figure 1.4: 1. Context of Situation/Register (ideational, interpersonal, textual) 2. Lexicogrammatical choices (a) narrative point of view (psychological, ideological, spatio-temporal)

(b) lexical priming (phraseological)

conscious?

Fig. 1.4. Levels of the realization of style

unconscious?

40 Style and Ideology in Translation The figure shows macro- and micro-levels affecting style: 1. a macro-level context of situation or Register that overlays the discourse semantics of a text, producing the communication; 2. the lower-level lexicogrammatical word and syntax choices that comprise the text on the page, realizing the discourse semantics and responding to the variables of Register. These lower-level choices: (a) form the narrative point of view in what may be more or less conscious narratological decisions such as the type of narrator and the focalization of the story; and (b) are a function of the writer’s own lexical primings, experience of language, idiolect, and often unconscious preference for individual words, expressions, or syntactic structures. Phraseological point of view straddles (a) and (b), covering all types of naming, representation of speech and thought and the use of non-standard, foreign and creative forms. In translation, the TT is mapped onto the existing ST configurations. There is an existing context of situation, an existing narrative framework, and existing lexicogrammatical choices with which the translator works. The stylistic peculiarities of translators, or indeed of translation itself, are likely to lie in departures from the ST patterns and in marked (prominent and foregrounded) features in the TT. We may hypothesize that at the higher-level context of situation and in the choices of narrative framework (first or third person narrator, the perspective from which the story is told, etc.) major changes are less easily effected by the translator. By contrast, since translation involves the replacement of the SL code by the TL code at every point, changes must inevitably happen due to different lexical priming and phraseological preferences of the translator or due to any inconsistent renderings of the lexicogrammatical realizations of the metafunctions that affect point of view—for example, transitivity patterns affecting the psychological point of view, or shifts in deixis or adjunct placement affecting the spatio-temporal perspective. It is at these points that the translator’s discursive presence will be visible. However, the problem remains: how are we to possibly know or measure the individual input of the translator? The variables are many, including the ST author, genre, and subject matter, and the resources and conventions of the SL compared to the resources of the TL. The concept of markedness (and deviance, prominence, and foregrounding) must necessarily play a role, with some consideration given to the relative markedness of ST and TT items. Thus, greater markedness in the ST may suggest that in the TT the translator has standardized the poetic creativity of the source author’s language, amounting to “translator jargon,” or “translatorese,” where the TT is often “weak, colourless and grey” (Levý 1969: 109). A more marked TT may be due to interference from the ST that has produced abnormal

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TL patterns, or it may indicate the translator’s creative fingerprint. Such markedness is not necessarily on the same level of discursive presence as that discussed by Hermans and Schiavi nor the same as the shifts of narrative point of view and focalization. We are talking here of generally low-level linguistic or syntactic preferences of the translator which are characteristic of the translator’s voice and indicative of his or her presence even if they do not singularly or cumulatively add up to a significant shift of narrative voice or discourse semantics (see the Borges translations in our introduction). The translator’s unconscious stylistic preferences, if this is what they are, will colour the TT, but the surface mosaic of language will not necessarily alter the underlying base. What it may do, though, is to reduce or amplify the differences between authors translated by the same translators. The case studies of ST-TT pairs from chapter 3 onwards will examine a wide range of translations of Latin American fiction, specifically focusing on prominent and foregrounded items in the TT, with the shifts classified according to the effects on narrative point of view affected or the results of lexical priming differences. In this way, as well as seeing stylistic differences between translators, and indeed different genres, it should be possible to ascertain at which level the stylistic shifts most generally occur. At the same time, and notwithstanding the individuality of the individual translator’s work, we may hypothesize that there may also be a translation style, a ‘third code’ (Duff 1981); that is, patterns that repeat themselves across translations, projected probabilities, or ‘universals’ such as explicitation, disambiguation, standardization, interference (Toury 1995; Baker 2000). Therefore, analysis of style in translation may show differences between translators but also coincidences in the style of translation. However, despite the focus above on the conscious or unconscious functional linguistic realization of style and narrative, it is important to remember that this is only part of the whole picture. A link needs to be made to a broader discursive framework in order to understand the representation and therefore construction of realities and power relations that form part of (the communicative process of) a text (Nash 1982: 112). Halliday does acknowledge this explicitly with the notion of context of culture, or sociocultural environment, which impacts on the context of situation. However, the link is far more detailed and theoretical in areas such as “critical discourse analysis” (e.g., Fairclough 1989/2001; 2003). Critical discourse analysis looks at how socially constructed discourses are ideologically influenced by power relations through society and its institutions and serve to support or alter the social structures in their environment (Fairclough 2001: 14). It is to ideology, power relations, and the detailed socio-cultural environment that we shall now turn in chapter 2.

2

Ideological Macro-Context in the Translation of Latin America

The discussion of style that we carried out in chapter 1 centred on linguistic and narratological factors. However, a literary work does not appear in an informational vacuum and the functional conception of style developed in this book is also linked to the socio-cultural environment and ideology of which translation is a part. For the link between discourse, language, and the environment, we follow systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysts in considering language as “social semiotic” (Halliday 1978), in other words “language as social practice determined by social structures” (Fairclough 2001: 14), with the potential to express and realize the ideology of the speaker/writer and the society in which he or she lives. For Fairclough (2001: 3), working mainly on political texts, “ideology is the prime means of manufacturing consent” and it functions best when disguised (ibid.: 89; see also Fowler and Kress 1979: 196). Critical discourse analysis functions as a means of uncovering the implicit ideology encoded in language. An example would be the modern management-speak use of euphemistic nominalizations such as restructuring to mean a process of reorganization and redundancies aimed at cutting costs; the pervasive use of restructuring by all, including the workers and their representatives, serves to manufacture the kind of consent alluded to by Fairclough. Theorists such as Fairclough have focused on the expression of (dominant) ideology in political texts, but this is by no means the only domain, as is made clear in Ideology and Modern Culture, John Thompson’s critical analysis of ideology, culture, and the mass media (including film and image), where ‘cultural phenomena’ are considered as symbolic forms/goods that are exchanged in structured contexts. Like Fairclough, Thompson’s analysis of ideology is aimed at describing and uncovering the links between symbolic forms and dominant power relations in society, how symbolic forms mobilize meaning in support of those in power (Thompson 1990: 56). Most importantly, Thompson considers that it is the social-historical setting and interpretation that invest symbolic forms with ideology “in so far as they serve, in particular circumstances, to maintain relations of domination.” (ibid.: 57, see also 293).

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Style and Ideology in Translation

The term ‘ideology,’ or ‘ideologies,’ itself needs to be interrogated since it has several uses and definitions, generated by the critic and his/her environment or orientation.1 We shall follow the stylistician Paul Simpson (1993, see chapter 1) and the Dutch semiotician Teun van Dijk in broadening the notion of ideology away from purely a political sense to encompass the knowledge, beliefs, and value systems of the individual and the society in which he or she operates. In this book, ‘ideology’ is therefore to be understood as “a pervasive, unconscious, world-view” (Wales 2001: 196) arising from “the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs and valuesystems which are shared collectively by social groups” (Simpson 1993: 5).2 Van Dijk, much of whose work centres on the analysis of the discourse of racism, proposes what he calls a multidisciplinary theory of ideology. Ideology is defined as: the basis of the social representations shared by members of a group. This means that ideologies allow people, as group members, to organize the multitude of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad, right or wrong, for them, and to act accordingly. (Van Dijk 1998: 8, emphasis in original) Van Dijk’s theory of ideology encompasses three main elements (ibid.: 5): 1. society (group interests, power and dominance); 2. discourse (language use which expresses ideologies in society, often involving concealment and manipulation). 3. cognition (thought and belief which go together to create ideas); If we adapt this for the analysis of translation, we can see that, in (1), a translator will be operating in a social setting, interacting with publishers, editors, and agents who often have greater power. Of course, the translator will be working on the discourse (2) of others, of the ST author, commissioned and remunerated by the TT publisher. This discourse, the result of cognitive processes and linguistic choices from the ST author, expresses the ideology of that author. Crucially, however, the translator brings his or her own cognitive processes (3) to the task of translating the ST author’s discourse. The value for us of this cognitive element and the broadness of ‘social representations’ in the definition of ideology is that it allows a certain degree of autonomy for the individual translator to operate according to his or her specific ideological or ethical beliefs and preferences. The communicative situation does not pre-determine every aspect of the translator’s decision-making, of the linguistic or stylistic selections. For Van Dijk (1998: 203), style is functional and dependent on the individual’s context model. The model, used to interpret a context and to act in a specific communicative situation, is influenced by society and the ideology (that is, the thoughts and beliefs) that underpin it. The stylistic structures noted by Van Dijk are

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generally drawn from critical discourse analysis: pragmatic stylistic features include syntactic ordering and hierarchical clause relations, agency and transitivity, pronouns, which indicate identity and power relations and politeness. Stress is also placed on lexical style as lexical choice (ibid.: 205–207), with the typical example given of freedom-fighter vs. terrorist, depending on the speaker’s perspective. Lexical choice is therefore significant, in the sense that it ‘signifies’ the writer’s perspective and evaluation. Overwhelmingly, critical discourse theorists describe the relations between writer and reader as imbalanced in favour of the writer: Language and text conventions create asymmetrical relations between writers and readers which ensure that certain of the meanings mobilized prove difficult to resist. In this important sense style is political; questions of language and style are ideological. (Carter and Nash 1990: 21) It is the writer who has the upper hand, since his or her stylistic choices point the reader towards a preferred reading of the events. This is a key point about author, and indeed, translator style. Just as the conscious choices made by the author direct the reader, so the conscious choices made by the translator serve to channel the reader of the TT. However, the imbalance in the relations between writer and reader also potentially exist in the relations between writer and translator. The author is most often the visible entity, the translator working behind the scenes concealed, unrecognized, or undervalued (Venuti 1995). However, the translator is a special reader of the text, an intermediary who modifies all the words of the ST author. If we take up the concept of the implied translator (see Figure 1.2 and 1.3, chapter 1) and incorporate all those interested in the translation process (sponsors, publishers, editors, agents, and reviewers as well as translators), then the power relations become more complex, increasing the potential for altering or distorting the lexical choices and the ideas of the ST. These choices, and therefore the conscious element of style, have an ideological import because they derive from and reflect the intent, values, beliefs and socio-cultural background and training of author and translator. Emphasizing the link between style and ideology in a monolingual setting, Carter and Nash go on to stress that: to study ideology and its representation requires close attention to language and style. The particular focus, however, needs to be on the intermeshing of language and style in the context of social systems and institutions. Ideologies cannot be unmasked by linguistic analysis at a single level or with reference only to decontextualized sentences. (Carter and Nash 1990: 21) Instead, Carter and Nash propose examining complete texts within the ‘context of communication’ of the writer and reader. There are two problems

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here: one is how to determine which elements to describe in the context of communication, the second is the relation of the context of communication to the actual lexicogrammatical choices of the writer and translator. Halliday sees two discrete levels, context of situation and context of culture, terms borrowed and developed from Malinowski (Malinowski 1923, 1935; see Halliday and Hasan 1989: 5). The context of situation is “the environment of the text” (Halliday and Hasan 1989: 6), which is the context of the utterance that covers more than merely the written or spoken words. Context of situation is analysed in Halliday’s works according to the three dimensions of Register—Field, Tenor, and Mode—which we discussed in chapter 1. The context of situation is the “immediate environment” of the text. Context of culture, on the other hand, is the “broader background,” such as the institutional framework and the assumptions which the participants bring to the communication, which “determine the way the text is to be interpreted in its context of situation” (Halliday and Hasan 1989: 46–47). However, Van Dijk argues that the systemic-functional approach to context is “theoretically inadequate” since, were the realization of the communication directly mappable and predictable solely in terms of the situational and even cultural properties of the context, then such a theory would be deterministic: “all people in the same situation would talk or write in the same way” (Van Dijk 2005: 2). Deterministic assumptions underlie the early work of theorists such as Fowler and Kress (1979: 188) and to a lesser extent the work of Halliday himself, who sees a predictive relationship between text and situation (Halliday and Hasan 1989: 36), interpreted by some as a “predictable and systematic relationship” between situational variables and lexicogrammatical patterns (Eggins 1994: 76). However, Halliday and Hasan are careful to avoid such a strongly predictive claim3 and this finds its echo in Hatim and Mason’s rejection of a strictly deterministic relation between ideology and language in translation. Instead, they set about “observing the behaviour of text users (writers, readers, translators) and inferring the assumptions which underlie expression [which] leads to observation of patterns and trends; these may then be related to the assumptions made above concerning the mutual influences of individual text users, discourses, ideologies and society” (Hatim and Mason 1997: 144). This is the approach we shall adopt in the case studies on the present book. Instead of a genre-based framework for context of culture (Eggins 1994), Van Dijk proposes a cognitive context model based on participants’ mental models or “experiences” through which they “understand and represent” what is going on and what is then expressed in the discourse (Van Dijk 1998: 3; see also Van Dijk 2006). Van Dijk’s context model operates at both micro and macro levels, which is an attempt to theorize what he sees as the blurring between context of situation and the broad context of culture in Halliday’s model as is the case with questions of social identity and institution. Van Dijk considers the exact form of the influence of the macro on the micro context as being the prime task of discourse analysts. For us, working

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Table 2.1. Different levels of stylistic expression related to ideology SystemicFunctional Dimension Macro-level

Micro-level

Ideology

Stylistic Expression

Context of culture

Ideology of society/ Discourse

Expression of dominant power relations

Context of situation/ Register

Ideology and context model of translator—story as interpreted by author/translator from experience, thought and beliefs

Determination of overall narrative point of view or perspective

Lexicogrammar

Realizations of narrative point of view, perspective and discourse semantics

‘Conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ fingerprint in lexical and syntactic choices, from lexical priming and phraseology

on translated texts, the question relates to the micro-features of the style of the translator and many possible macro-factors affecting it. This is an appropriate moment to expand on Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1 from chapter 1 and to incorporate ideology, in Van Dijk’s use of the term, to link the systemic-functional framework and the stylistic expression (see Table 2.1). The macro-level context of culture, related to the predominant ideology of the society, is communicated through the variables of Register as they are interpreted by the author or translator. This allows for some element of personal decision-making, even within the constraints of the overriding socio-cultural environment. Stylistically, the Register configuration of a text prepares the overall narrative point of view of a piece of fiction or the ideological perspective of non-fiction. At the micro-level, the lexicogrammatical choices realize this narrative point of view or perspective and discourse semantics (the intended ‘meaning’ of the message). The stylistic expressions associated with this level represent the fingerprint of the individual author or translator. It is the findings in this highlighted box of the table that are of particular interest to the linguistic analysis of style. Furthermore, any patterns in this box emerging from a corpus of varied translations would be useful pointers towards any generalizations or descriptive or probabilistic ‘laws’ (Toury 1995) of translation. Interaction between the central ‘ideology’ column and the different levels of analysis will point to possible causal links between the translator’s ideology (in the sense of the translator’s experience, thoughts, and beliefs as an

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actor in a particular socio-cultural and historical site) and stylistic expression. However, it is important to stress that ideology cannot simply be read off a certain configuration of linguistic or contextual variables: for instance, the use of nominalization may tend to relate to an avoidance of agency and responsibility but does not automatically equate to a strategy of concealment of the role of the powerful institution and of acceptance of the process as fact; similarly, translation of writing in the modern Anglo-American tradition may tend towards a strategy of domestication, of concealing the fact of translation, of making the translator “invisible” (Venuti 1995), but this does not happen with every translation. There is obviously room for individual decision-making. This is behind Van Dijk’s claim (1998: 212) that “it is not the context itself (whether or not it ‘exists’ objectively) that influences text and talk, but rather the context models of language users.” These context models are dependent on the experience of the participants in previous communicative events. Each individual therefore responds to the contextual factors slightly differently, whether it be for the purposes of production or interpretation of text. It is also a dynamic model that allows for evaluation and adjustment by the participant, which means that producers or receivers may adjust their behaviour before a repeated event. This both coincides with and opposes the linguistic tendencies we focused on in chapter 1. Thus, if experience of other events is a key feature in the cognitive context model, informing the translator’s response to the micro- and macro-context, experience in terms of linguistic resources (which we understand as lexical priming) is also crucial on the plane of phraseology, of the individual’s expression of discourse. On the other hand, the context model allows for variability of response from different translators and even of response from the individual translator. That is, the world-view of one translator may differ from another even if they live in a similar historical and cultural environment, while their lexical priming will depend on their individual lexical experiences even if their education is similar; hence, just as two writers will express themselves differently, so one translator will translate differently from another. Furthermore, since both the cognitive model of ideology and the experiential model of lexical priming are not fully stable they allow for modification of the translator’s choices over time; hence, it is not a given that a translator will adopt the same stylistic decisions at two different moments in a translation career—nor indeed within one and the same text. In translation theory, ‘ideology’ has been an increasing concern for theorists. In the 1980s and early 1990s, André Lefevere explored translation as a form of rewriting, with inherent manipulation depending on: 1. the professionals within the system, including editors, publishers, and the translators and revisers themselves; 2. patronage outside the literary system from powerful individuals or institutions, which has a predominantly ideological though also economic element; and

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3. the dominant poetics, often determined by the professionals, which can dictate which works are translated and the style adopted (see Lefevere 1985, 1992; Bassnett and Lefevere 1990). These factors all need to be taken into account, but one must agree with Hermans (1999: 131) when he argues for closer examination of the role of the institutions and of how exactly the ideology is mediated, in Van Dijk’s terms, how the macro-context influences the micro-context. This will be realized differently according to the scenario. One excellent example of this in action is given by Rachel May (1994: 59–62), who discusses the national significance of literary style in the former Soviet Union, where colloquialisms and peasant speech were more or less banned in fictional writing for many years and where hardline Marxists insisted on the dualism of content and form in artistic works, the duty of which was to disseminate the ideology of the party in ‘neutral’ language. Greater discussion of the macro-context is indeed essential in order to place the translator’s stylistic choices within a coherent framework. This involves greater elaboration of the role of the institutions and the political and cultural environment in which they operate and also of the creation of cultural images of the Other that affect a whole range of cultural transfers. In the case of twentieth-century Latin American writing, this analysis will centre on the relationship between the countries of Latin America and their powerful neighbour, the United States. As we shall see in the present chapter, the promotion of cultural activity, including translation, has been used for political as well as economic and cultural ends. Furthermore, there is considerable advantage in investigating style in translation of a corpus of writings and books from across the continent rather than restricting studies to individual works or authors. Style in translation may have a strong intertextual element, dependent on genre and on the selection of STs to translate (often by the same group of translators) and on the image that is portrayed and expected of the foreign work. To use a concept from reception theory coined by Jauss (1982: 23), there is a constant establishment and alteration of the ‘horizon of expectation’ among the readers (and, we should stress, among the translators themselves) as to what a text should be, based on previous texts. That horizon is shaped by the literary experience of the participants and by the socio-cultural and educational systems as well as by the peculiarities of the literary context (Gartet 1992). In the case of translations, we can say that the horizon of expectations is dependent on the way previous texts (of a similar genre, time, tradition, etc.) have been translated. Thus, from the 1920s onwards the pervasiveness of a ‘transparent’ style for Latin American non-fiction texts translated into English, along with an acceptance of both drastic pruning and framing through paratextual elements such as pseudo-scholarly introductions and glossaries, established a norm and a horizon of expectation for later texts that sanctioned the continuance of this type of translation method. A work which disregards or

50 Style and Ideology in Translation flouts prior norms would lead to a ‘disappointment of expectations’ (Jauss ibid.: 41) or possibly to a ‘horizonal change’ (ibid.: 25) if it marked a seachange in literary form or taste. For Latin American fiction texts, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude constituted a horizonal change both in Spanish and English since, to most readers, it launched magic realism, a tradition that was to dominate the Boom and beyond and achieve international prominence.

MACRO-CONTEXT OF LATIN AMERICAN WRITING IN ENGLISH The horizons of translation are related to the macro-context in which the translations are commissioned and produced and where they function. As we saw above, the macro-context will cover a whole host of historical, social, cultural, literary, and educational factors that have affected the translation process. These include institutional patronage and the role of professional players in deciding the dominant poetics (Lefevere 1992). There are two other points that should not be overlooked when it comes to the analysis of the translations: one is the training and education received by the translators themselves, which, together with their social background, help to determine their lexical priming, poetic sensibility, and hence the stylistic strategies they employ. The networks and associations set up by translators are also a way by which these strategies might be disseminated and consolidated within the group: for instance, Gregory Rabassa recalls advice received from Harriet de Onís (see chapter 3) and he in turn has given translation workshops to the next generation of translators including Suzanne Jill Levine. The second point is the ideological construction of the identity of the Other which may become self-perpetuating. Thus, the image of the exotic, natural Latin America for many years runs through the selection and packaging of texts, the consolidation of certain genres in translation and the reception as seen in the reviews in the press. It is only really in the past decade that publishers have begun to shift the focus to translations of other genres from Latin America, such as detective fiction. The story of translation of Latin American writing over the course of the twentieth century shows that it was the basis for ideological struggle and intercultural encounter and often mixed up with the political upheavals of the hemisphere. A first point to comment on is the term ‘Latin American’: as well as collapsing the national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries and identities of more than twenty countries located across the Americas, it excludes reference to the indigenous Amerindian traditions. Translation from that continent has been almost exclusively from Spanish and Portuguese, less often from French. Translation direct from Nahuatl, Quechua, or other Amerindian languages into English is almost unheard of, though we shall mention briefly cases such as Arguedas, whose Spanish was infused with

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Quechua. More recently, there has been growing interest in other modes, such as the painted books of pre-Columban and post-conquest Mexico (e.g. Brotherston 1996, 2002). However, in terms of modern literature, ‘Latin American’ was an external construct, viewed from a foreign perspective, since, as the Chilean author José Donoso points out in his Historia personal del Boom (1982), until the 1960s communication between writers in the different countries of the continent was modest and publishers tended to meet local rather than continental markets. Donoso describes modern Latin American literature as a “mestizaje” [metissage] (p. 20), with different traditions being brought together and influenced by European and North American writing. The power relations are almost always tipped in favour of the English language and most specifically of the United States (Rostagno 1997). Before 1930, very few works from Latin America were translated into English. Interest in such texts in the United States was more or less limited to academics such as Federico de Onís, head of Spanish at Columbia University and later Director of the Hispanic Institute in New York, the fulcrum of Spanish-speaking cultural life in New York, and Isaac Goldberg, writer, critic, editor, and translator of fiction and drama from Yiddish and various European languages. Early translations from Latin America dealt with political or regional issues: José Rodó’s essay Ariel on Latin America’s view of the north and Mariano Azuela’s semi-fictional The Underdogs about the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. These were in many ways typical of the regional writing up to that time (see Gollnick 2005: 57). From the late 1920s onwards, however, a series of figures and, later, institutions promoted Latin American writing for a variety of different ends. The two main early promoters were the writer and journalist Waldo Frank and the publishers Alfred and Blanche Knopf. The stereotypes and opposites of the natural and exotic Latin America and the materialist and puritanical United States, an opposition that forms the basis of the philosophical essay Ariel by the Uruguayan José Rodó that is discussed in chapter 6, are visible in the role of Waldo Frank, who had personal experience of Mexico and Argentina through his travels in 1929. Frank was editorial advisor to Doubleday, Doran & Company in New York and then for Farrar & Rinehart’s Latin American series. The latter published two books about gaucho life in Argentina: Tales From the Argentine (1930), a collection of short stories translated by writer Anita Brenner, for which Frank wrote a preface, and Ricardo Güiraldes’s landmark Don Segundo Sombra (1926), translated by Harriet de Onís, wife of Federico (see chapter 3). However, Frank claims that he himself rewrote the English, spicing up a “flat . . . bland” translation (Rostagno ibid.: 18). Although Frank’s main interest seems to have been in more traditional rural literature rather than the imaginative new writing of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, he did play an important role in encouraging wealthy Argentine writer and socialite Victoria Ocampo to found the literary journal Sur as is described by Ocampo herself in issue one of summer 1931 (Ocampo 1931;

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see also Rostagno 1997: 21). Under Ocampo’s editorship until 1955, Sur was to become a major outlet for Latin American writers including Borges. To a certain extent, it evaluated Latin American writing against the barometer of European literature. In that very first issue, Ocampo, who had spent considerable time in Europe, notably Paris, had intimated as much by describing Latin America as an infant in an adult world and revealed that even the name of the journal was proposed by Frank and selected by the Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset (Ocampo 1931). Even more important institutional patrons were New York publishers Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Alfred had founded his publishing company in 1915 and set out to publish key new works of world (mainly European) literature in high quality editions. Knopf’s wife Blanche, who was fluent in French and spoke some Spanish and Italian, frequently travelled to Europe and signed up and made the reputation of new authors such as Gide and Mann (and later Camus and Sartre). She thus played a key role in determining the success of some of the prominent figures of world literature. In 1922 Knopf published Isaac Goldberg’s Brazilian Literature4 and in 1930 Martín Luis Guzmán’s The Eagle and the Serpent, a fictionalized autobiography set in the Mexican revolution and translated by Harriet de Onís. It was during the Second World War that Knopf’s focus shifted more firmly towards Latin America. With the European authors and publishers caught up in the war, in 1942 Blanche undertook a trip to Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil to scout for writers for a new Latin American series (Rostagno ibid.: 31). Blanche was especially enthusiastic about Brazil where, amongst others, she met the leading novelist Jorge Amado and anthropologist Gilberto Freyre. Both Amado’s Terras do Sem Fim (1943; The Violent Land, 1945) and Freyre’s Casa grande e senzala (1930; The Masters and the Slaves, 1946) were translated by Samuel Putnam, a Brazilianist and publisher. When Putnam died in 1950, Harriet de Onís became the principal translator of Latin American books. For many years she also wrote readers’ reports for Knopf and scouted for new works, which meant, as José Donoso was to put it, that she was “quien manejaba las esclusas de la difusión de la literatura latinoamericana en Estados Unidos y, a través de Estados Unidos, en todo el mundo” (Donoso 1982: 71).5 In other words, Harriet de Onís’s reports and recommendations were often enough to decide which authors, and which ideas, were deemed acceptable and projected onto a wider stage. This is an example of a translator’s preferences helping to decide the most crucial translation decision, namely whether a work should be translated at all, and is a reflection of the exertion of power in discourse where only specific forms of knowledge and opinions may be circulated (Van Dijk 1998: 162). As far as the dominant poetics of the professionals is concerned (Lefevere 1992), just as Waldo Frank tended to favour books which emphasized the regional and exotic, so Knopf tended to publish works either of anthropology or sociology, such as Freyre’s studies of Brazil or Fernando Ortiz’s seminal Contrapunto Cubano (1940; Cuban Counterpoint, 1947),

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or novels, such as Jorge Amado’s early work, which dwelt on the characteristics of the landscape. Thus, despite Onís’s promptings, Knopf decided against publishing the unknown Borges in the early 1950s (Donoso 1983: 71). This constructed image of the continent is apparent even in original work in English: an important early success in the Knopf list was the British naturalist W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forests (1916, originally published by the International Collectors library in 1904),6 a romantic novel set in South America. The novel fixes the image of the exotic gaucho and the beautiful natural surroundings and its impact is recalled by, amongst others, Gregory Rabassa (2005: 76). In Hudson’s book, the North American is seen to take a superior anthropological interest in the lives of Latin America. This continued in later publications: in the foreword to Goldberg’s 1922 volume on Brazilian literature, J. D. M. Ford, Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages at Harvard University, considers that the volume is a gift to Brazil upon its centenary, allowing the citizens of the United States “an opportunity of viewing aspects of the soul of a noble Southern land, their constant ally”; two decades later, the anthology of writing by various authors put together by the Colombian Germán Arciniegas with the assistance of Harriet de Onís, entitled The Green Continent (1944), hoped to make Latin America more widely known (see chapter 3), while in 1972 Rita Guibert published a collection of interviews in English with prominent authors in order “to give the American people a broader and deeper view of what’s going on in Latin America” (Guibert 1973, no page). Such collections attest to a perceived ignorance on the part of the United States audience but also respond to a desire, from active cultural participants, to project their own constructed image of the unknown for the new audience. The beliefs and experiences of the anthologizers thus help establish the horizons of the readership and to some extent probably guide future translation decisions; for instance, the reinforcement of an exotic image of a natural paradise would impact especially on the selection of authors and texts and in the paratextual presentation (Genette 1997) of the translated product, cover illustration, blurb, advertising, and related matter (see Brown 1994). After the Second World War there was a general trend to translate more existential and less sociological texts (Rostagno 1997: 36). Even so, it should be stressed that Latin American books generally sold poorly even when, as with the novels of the Cuban Alejo Carpentier in the 1950s, they were critical successes (Rostagno 1997: 33, 51; Cohn 2004) and attested to the “exuberance and vitality” of the Caribbean (King 2005: 67). Nevertheless, the Knopfs were particularly supportive of Brazilian literature, especially of Jorge Amado who, by the 1960s, was the most translated writer from Latin America and who gave Knopf the first major commercial success of the series with his Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; translated as Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1962). This was helped in part by the review in the New York Times Book Review written by Juan de Onís, Harriet’s son, that

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encouraged readers to see it as an exotic romantic novel and certainly less political than Amado’s earlier books: “Gabriela represents undoubtedly the artistic liberation of Senhor Amado from a long period of ideological commitment to Communist orthodoxy” (Rostagno 1997: 38). Harriet de Onís herself was enthusiastic in Saturday Review, also propelled by political and ideological considerations. In a letter pressing the magazine’s editor to include the review, she wrote: It seems to me so important at this moment for the book to have good coverage, first of all because of its intrinsic value, and because every Latin American writer who receives due recognition at our hands is a potential ally. I don’t have to tell you how much more important a role writers play in influencing public opinion there than on our side of the border. (quoted in Cohn 2004: 96) The same year, 1962, also saw the first comprehensive publication in English of the major works of Jorge Luis Borges. Despite the early publication dates of the Spanish Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949), and indeed their French translations by the writer and editor Roger Caillois who had spent the Second World War in Buenos Aires, their later English translations meant that Borges came to prominence in the UK and USA more or less at the same time as the Boom authors mentioned below, creating a false sense of artistic simultaneity in English (Payne 1993: 2). This is an important consideration when discussing variation in translation style: even though the Boom writers may be considered to be the “direct descendants of writers such as Borges, Sabato, Asturias, Carpentier, Onetti who challenged the naturalistic-regionalistic novel” (Rostagno 1997: 90), in English all of the above were published within a few years of each other. This chronological distortion meant that in the 1960s especially major translators were often working on very different authors at one and the same time.

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION AND THE LITERARY BOOM The crucial event that raised awareness about Latin American politics and writing was the Cuban Revolution of 1959 which toppled the dictatorship of Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power. It promoted the continent’s politicization as well as the creation of a common identity through literature. Philip Swanson (2005: 84) describes how the Revolution made Latin America “fashionable and marketable”: both political coincidence and marketability then led to increased interest in translation, to transferring from Latin America ‘cultural capital,’ to use Bourdieu’s term (1991) (see also Thompson 1990). It is also true that this led to an intensification of the ideological context surrounding translation. It brought together a number of politicized authors, from various Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America who shot

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to fame in the 1960s and 1970s in what became known as the Boom:7 within the space of a few years, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes published his groundbreaking La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964), the Argentine Julio Cortázar produced his masterwork Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966), the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa made his debut at the age of 26 with La ciudad de los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966) and Gabriel García Márquez attained world-wide acclaim for Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). These are the four dominant figures of the movement; importantly for the purposes of a stylistic analysis, they are all characterized by an experimental style, though heavily influenced by modernist influences from Europe and the United States such as Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner and realists such as Updike and Dos Passos. These works and writers, and indeed the Boom itself, have become canonized institutionally through promotional marketing and literary and academic acceptance through inclusion on university and school syllabuses, particularly in the United States where they have often been read in translation (Luis and Rodríguez Luis 1991) and where Latin American studies really took off in the 1960s. In this respect, the prestigious award of the second edition of the International Publishers’ Formentor Prize to José Luis Borges in 1961 (jointly with Samuel Beckett) and the Nobel Prize in 1967 to Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias, placed Latin American literature firmly on the map. García Márquez’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 cemented the reputation of the Boom and its emblematic One Hundred Years of Solitude. José Donoso (1982) considers that the emergence of the major authors of the Boom allowed the creation of a fully Latin American literature which began to counteract the previous regionalistic isolation that had manifested itself thematically in the choice of local, naturalistic topics, and geographically in the distribution problems for the novels themselves; Donoso frequently cites cases where he could only get hold of key new texts, such as Cortázar’s Rayuela, through friends in Europe or the United States. The new writers, whose figurehead and prime mover was the Mexican diplomat and writer Carlos Fuentes, were given great impulse in Europe by Carlos Barral of Catalan publishers Seix Barral, who provided an outlet for Latin American fiction from the 1960s and who instituted the Premio Biblioteca Breve prize (see Herrero-Olaizola 2000). Of course, it has also been argued (e.g., Rama 1984; Payne 1993) that the movement they fostered was an exercise in self-publicity and marketing which stifled other talents and styles for years afterwards. Indeed, Doyle’s country-by-country study of translated works from Latin America showed that, in 1988, whole areas of Latin American literature were untranslated and that the scene was dominated by a select few (Doyle 1988). Well-established authors, such as García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, both of whom lived in the Catalan capital in the late sixties and early seventies until their friendship broke, teamed up with prominent literary agent Carmen Balcells. Other examples of individual movers and shakers are Thomas Colchie, who offered his services as literary agent,

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and then translator, for young Brazilian writers, and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who befriended Borges during the latter’s time as guest lecturer at Harvard in 1967–1968 and who thereafter promoted and co-translated with him. From the publishers’ side, Farrar, Straus & Giroux had full-time Spanish and Portuguese editors and saw the economic advantage of establishing contacts between their Latin America writers such as Fuentes and leading U.S. authors such as Styron and Miller; Gabriela Brufani, the wife of Harper & Row’s editor Cass Canfield, was kept informed about Latin American writing by Victoria Ocampo’s godchild whom she had met when living in Peru (Rostagno 1997: 113). Such individuals to some extent must have set the parameters of dominant poetics for the selection of authors and works to be translated, guided by their literary sensitivities and nose for commercial success. Interestingly enough, almost all the contacts were in the United States; until the 1980s, UK presses if at all would import the translations already published in the United States in their own editions.

INSTITUTIONAL PATRONAGE The spectacular success of the Boom primarily involved systematic “institutional patronage,” to use Lefevere’s term (Lefevere 1992), to promote certain cultural values or images for political purposes. Deborah Cohn (2003; 2006) discusses the major forms of institutional sponsorship, namely from various Foundations, presses, and journals which launched Latin American series as part of the United States’ response to the Cold War. Thus, from 1960 to 1965 the Rockefeller Foundation gave the Association of American University Presses $225,000 to publish Latin American authors: in that time, 83 books were approved across 20 presses, although not all of them came to fruition (Levine 2005: 304; Cohn 2006: 146). The University of Texas Press, under the then editorship of the poet and translator Lysander Kemp, received financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pan American Sulphur Company for a ten-year translation programme. Individual translators were also recipients of institutional support: Gregory Rabassa, for example, received a Fullbright-Hays grant in 1965 to spend time in Rio working on Clarice Lispector’s novel A maça no oscuro (1961; The Apple in the Dark, 1967). Important support was provided by the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts (IAFA), established in 1962 by, amongst others, Rodman Rockefeller, with Alfred Knopf featuring on the Board. The implicit goal was to counter Cuba’s cultural revolution (Rostagno 1997: 103). The main events were intellectual symposia of Latin American writers and U.S. publishers and authors held in the Bahamas and Puerto Rico in 1962–1963 and in Chichen Itzá, Mexico in 1964. Donoso (1982: 36) also describes a Congress of Intellectuals in Concepción in 1962 at a time when many of the Boom names were hardly recognized. In 1967 the IAFA joined with

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the new Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), established by David Rockefeller. Until the mid-1980s, when it became the Americas Society, the CIAR, with funding mainly from the Rockefellers and the Ford Foundation, organized a major programme that funded many translations, most notably Gregory Rabassa’s translation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a spectacular success upon its publication in 1970. In the words of the current director of literature, David Shapiro, the Center and the Society, which have received institutional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as private sources, “was to be dedicated to promoting awareness in the U.S. about the societies and cultures of our Western Hemisphere neighbors” (Shapiro 2002). Shapiro proudly claims (ibid.) that “[t]he Americas Society [and the CIAR] is largely responsible for introducing the work of the Boom writers and many others to readers in the United States, from the time of the organization’s inception to the present day.” In addition to providing a subsidy of half and occasionally all the translation costs (between $2,000 and $5,000 according to Rostagno 1997: 107), the translation programme also matched translators and publishers and had a selection committee that included the Uruguayan academic and critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, professor of Spanish at Yale, prize-winning translator and academic Gregory Rabassa, and Alastair Reid, a Scottish writer and translator who worked as a reviewer on The New Yorker. The selection of books to translate, and the selection of translators, was therefore to a large extent institutionalized in the hands of critics and academics who were often translators themselves and whose own poetic sensibility imposed itself by their status. Thus Alastair Reid, an early translator of Borges (his translation of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” appears in the 1962 Fictions edited by Anthony Kerrigan et. al) and later of Neruda, assisted Rodríguez Monegal and the Venezuelan sculptor/entrepreneur José Guillermo Castillo in creating a list of Latin American works ‘worthy of translation’ and in setting standards for translation through his reviews in the New Yorker (Rostagno 1997: 112). Gregory Rabassa’s involvement in the literature programme enhanced its prestige with his receipt in 1967 of the National Book Award for his translation of Cortázar’s Hopscotch and put him in a position to advance lesser-known writers. The funding provided by the CIAR programme gave work to a large number of translators of the time including Rabassa, Anthony Kerrigan, Helen Lane, Margaret “Petch” Peden, Ronald Christ, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Thomas Colchie (Levine 2005: 308). One other important point to remember is that many of these translators also held, and continue to hold (even those who are now retired), academic positions typically in Spanish or comparative literature departments: Rabassa at Queen’s College and the CUNY Graduate Centre in New York, Peden at the University of Missouri, Christ at Rutgers University, Levine at the University of California, Santa Barbara, amongst others.

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Institutionalized academic input was also visible with the publication of magazines such as Odyssey Review, launched in 1961 and edited by, amongst others, Rabassa when a graduate student at Columbia (see chapter 5), and the CIAR’s own high-profile Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, founded in 1968, which is still a prominent outlet for Latin American writing in English translation. In 1970, Ronald Christ, Director of the Center’s literature programme, was appointed as editor of Review and by the mid-1970s the Center was being asked for ideas for promising books by the publishing houses (Rostagno 1997: 108). After Christ’s resignation in 1977 following opposition to his acceptance of a Fullbright lectureship in Chile, subsequent editorial appointments were also academics: until 1982 Luis Harss and, from 1984, Alfred MacAdam, later translator of Fuentes. The best known and now most controversial institutional patron was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist lobby founded in New York 1950.8 At its height, it had centres in thirty-five countries. Amongst its (clandestine) ventures were the publication of the journal Preuves in Paris from 1951 to counter Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, the campaign against the award of the Nobel Prize to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the 1960s, and the publication of high-profile literary journals such as Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender in London, and its counterpart Mundo Nuevo in Paris. The latter, which appeared from 1966 to 1971, was a self-styled “revista de diálogo” [journal of dialogue] that set out to bring original Latin American writing and comment to a wider audience. This has been a general trend behind the translation of Latin American writing throughout the period we are investigating and may go some way to explaining the propensity towards explicitation and a fluent translation strategy in many TTs; this is hardly surprising, since translation of a minority literature into the language of the United States automatically generates a wider audience and potential success on an international level. Mundo Nuevo was a mix of literature and political and social commentary and was, in its heyday from 1966 to 1968, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, whose crucial influence is attested by many writers and translators, including Cabrera Infante, Alastair Reid, Alexander Coleman, Alfred MacAdam, and Suzanne Jill Levine (Homenaje a Emir Rodríguez Monegal, 1987). In the acknowledgements to her book The Subversive Scribe, Levine describes Rodríguez Monegal’s “inspirational presence in my life” and that he introduced her to the work of Manuel Puig and Cabrera Infante which she was later to translate (see chapter 8). He even introduced her to Cabrera Infante in person on a trip to London (Levine 1991: viii–ix). Through Mundo Nuevo, Rodríguez Monegal promoted the careers of many writers of the Boom, publishing extracts from their work; Carlos Fuentes’s well-known essay lauding García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, along with extracts from the novel, appeared in the magazine prior to the book’s publication in 1967 and helped create a horizon of expectation for a novel

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that was in fact to produce the horizonal change among Latin American literature which we noted above. Through Rodríguez Monegal, Mundo Nuevo became “the voice of Latin American literature” (Donoso 1983: 85). However, it received funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Even before Mundo Nuevo’s publication, the Congress had been heavily criticized by some elements of the Latin American left, including the Cuban critic Fernández Retamar, head of the Cuban Casa de las Américas, which had its own journal. Later, press revelation in the New York Times (from 27 April 1966) and the London-based Sunday Times and Observer (14 May 1967) that the funding behind the Congress of Cultural Freedom came in part from the CIA sparked a furore from which the publication never recovered. Rodríguez Monegal resigned in 1968 and the journal, which was moved to Buenos Aires, ceased publication in 1971. The Cuban Revolution produced a sense of solidarity and collective identity among many Latin American writers. María Eugenia Mudrovcic, in her analysis of the role played by Mundo Nuevo as a liberal cultural organ of the Cold War, quotes from a letter written on 24 June 1966 by Rodríguez Monegal to Herbert Weinstock, chief editor at Knopf, at the inception of the journal: “Latin American writers are contaminated with politics . . . we need to give space to political articles. But this space will only be a small fraction of the journal” (Mudrovcic 1997: 48, my translation).9 This would seem to confirm both Mudrovcic’s opinion that Mundo Nuevo deliberately set out to ‘depoliticize’ Latin American writers and to ‘neutralize’ their culture (ibid.: 15) and the view of Angel Rama, the Uruguayan Marxist critic regarded as perhaps the most prominent commentator of modern Latin American literature, who saw the Congress as covertly enticing such writers with comfortable positions in the United States academy (ibid.: 60) in a kind of ‘ideology of consent,’ to use Fairclough’s term, where the writers were encouraged to share the dominating group’s ideology in order to gain recognition and resources (Van Dijk 1998: 183). Thus, two models are presented for the Latin American intellectual: 1. that of the militant supporter of the Cuban Revolution (Cortázar, for example, refused from the beginning to be involved with Mundo Nuevo); and 2. the Mundo Nuevo modern international superstar, typified by Carlos Fuentes who moved in the highest circles of New York publishing, and where the Boom was represented as a coherent, homogenous movement irrespective of the differences of nationality, language and prose style (Rostagno 1997: 65). The models also reflect two different views about the promotion of the Boom: (1) as part of a CIA-inspired plot to win over the writers and minds of the Latin American cultural élite, thereby squashing Cuban attempts at spreading cultural revolution; and (2) as a policy to open cultural doors

60 Style and Ideology in Translation to more contact and understanding throughout the Americas. However, despite the objectives of individuals, even translators such as Harriet de Onís (see above), it would seem simplistic to consider that the financial funding for literary translation from philanthropic sponsors was driven purely by ideological motives or that this imposed strict translation strategies. Cohn points out that CIAR funding secured publication for authors such as García Márquez and Julio Cortázar “whose politics often ran counter to those of the Center’s political and philanthropic sponsors” and who would probably not otherwise have been published in English (Cohn 2006: 152). Furthermore, the CIAR acted as a kind of literary agent, matching authors with experienced translators, who also promoted the books by securing reviews in prominent publications. The translation programme of the American Association of University Presses, based on small editions of works that were less commercially attractive and often using graduate students as translators, also accounted for a doubling in the number of translations published from Latin America in the early 1960s (Cohn 2004). The two models were not necessarily mutually exclusive: García Márquez remains a staunch supporter of Castro and at the same time an international superstar, for example. The political commitment of the Boom group extended to a trip to the Soviet bloc undertaken by García Márquez, Cortázar, and Fuentes in 1968 and described by Garcia Márquez in his De viaje por los países socialistas (1981). However, the solidarity occasioned by the Cuban Revolution was not long-lasting. Even by 1962, Cuban state control of the media had forced a young Cabrera Infante abroad, first to Belgium and then to London. Then, in 1971 the poet Heberto Padilla was arrested in Cuba for the counter-revolutionary content of his Fuera de juego (1969) and forced to recant. This split the cohort of Boom writers, with García Márquez and Cortázar remaining loyal to Castro while Donoso, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and others called for the release of Padilla. The recriminations shattered the close friendship of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. The former has continued to call for Latin American unity (for example, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech and has defended Cuba in the face of the U.S. embargo in his journalistic pieces such as the article on the case of the shipwrecked boy Elián González (Munday 2002). He has also shown continued interest in socialist and grass-roots movements, as shown in his interview with subcomandante Marcos in Mexico in 2001 (see chapter 6). On the other hand, Vargas Llosa became increasingly conservative and even ran for President of Peru on a conservative ticket in 1990.

POST-BOOM SHIFTS The moment of shift in literary focus between the Boom and post-Boom has been subject to much discussion amongst Hispanists, but the problems

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of determining a cut-off point between the two need not detain us here. Of more importance for our analysis is the realization that the predominant themes and forms of writing have altered considerably. The success of Borges and the Boom writers may be put down to their preference for more universal themes and their divergence from the realist and regional themes of earlier writing (Swanson 2005). The writing of Boom writers themselves has shifted over the years: the sparse style of García Márquez’s El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1958) is often compared to Hemingway, while his One Hundred Years of Solitude is a drastic and spectacular reworking of a regional and political theme in what Rabassa calls “Cervantine” language (Hoeksema 1978; see chapter 5); García Márquez’s later work moves to themes of romance (Love in the Time of Cholera), detective novels (Chronicle of a Death Foretold and News of a Kidnapping), and memoirs (Living to Tell a Tale). After the experimental prose of some of the Boom writers, the chief feature of the post-Boom may be reader friendliness (see Shaw 1998: 49) while the male-oriented club of the Boom has been challenged by women writers such as Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, both of whom have sometimes been dismissed for being best-sellers. Other new genres have appeared such as testimonial writing, most notably by the Guatemalan winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rigoberta Menchú, and, as we shall see in chapter 8, the memoirs of Ariel Dorfman. Pop culture and gay identity inform a range of cultural products, including the film versions of books discussed in chapter 7: Senel Paz’s Strawberry and Chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea 1993) and Jaime Bayly’s Don’t Tell Anyone (Lombardi 1998). The prominence of gay themes itself marks an important shift in the Latin American cultural context. The changing physical and geographical environments of Latin America have also informed new ways of writing. The migration from country to city may account for the urban interest and detective-style plots of modern Colombian novelists such as Santiago Gamboa as well as the writing of the self-styled Crack generation of Mexicans led by Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla. They too have strong connections to Europe, and the plot of Padilla’s bestselling Amphitryon (2000; translated as Shadow without a Name, 2002) is even based around a Holocaust story. Finally, a whole new hybrid form of writing has come from Latinos living in the United States (many having been born there), writing in English but displaying their roots through the Latin themes and the syntactic or lexical influence of Spanish. These writers include the best-selling Sandra Cisneros, Julia Álvarez, and Junot Díaz. They exemplify a key new feature of the macro-context, the growth in the U.S. Hispanic community in excess of 40 million whose language and culture is very visible in many cities of the United States. Levine (2005), surveying the modern history of Latin American literature in translation, emphasizes that this minority houses a large bilingual readership that did not exist in 1970 when translations of the Boom were being produced. In contrast, she considers that “the translation of Latin American literature

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is becoming less necessary to a new public mostly interested in the Latino experience in English” (Levine 2005: 311). Whether this is strictly true or not, what cannot be denied is the existence of a new Latino community in what Homi Bhabha (1994/2004) terms a Third Space, an in-between postcolonial culture that is making visible the hybridity of a community that is negotiating its new place and role within fluctuating borders of language and identity: The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. (Bhabha 1994/2004: 10) Bhabha gives the example of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the performance artist who lives on the Mexico/U.S. border and writes in a new mix of languages with newly-minted hyphenated, “incommensurate,” in-between names for identity in the transnational world: thus, “Chica-riricuas, who are the products of the Puertorican-mullato and Chicano-mestizo parents” (Guillermo Gómez-Peña “The new world (b)order” 1992–1993, quoted in Bhabha 1994/2004: 313). For the purposes of our stylistic analysis of translation of modern Latin American literature, the important point is that the macro-contexts of the participants have altered: the movement of peoples to the North has created a new hybrid community that expresses itself in works published in the United States in English infused with Spanish. Bilingualism is a feature of both the writers and of a proportion of the readership, which means that some of the audience can be expected to recognize linguistic and cultural items that would previously have been considered foreign to the mainstream United States. In such a context, the very notion of ‘translation’ needs to be seen in a different light (see Gentzler 2006). These writers straddle two cultures, the Hispanic and the Anglo-Saxon, often geographically if they live in the United States but have family in the South; they live between two languages and in their work to a greater or lesser extent they mix the two. It becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain where exactly the act of translation is located, what any ‘source’ language is, if what is produced is creative interlingual translation (between two distinct languages) or a form of intralingual rephrasing in a new hybrid language. This new language is also sometimes ‘conventionally’ translated into Spanish (e.g., Ariel Dorfman’s memoirs, Sandra Cisneros’s novels). Our interest in chapter 8 will be to see how this directionality may affect the translation strategies employed given that the TL community will necessarily be familiar with the linguistic, cultural, and historical references in the hybrid text that is being translated. It also means a shift from the earlier European frame of reference to a transnational literature embedded in the Americas themselves.

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TRAINING AND PRACTICES OF THE LITERARY TRANSLATORS The immediate working contexts and practices of the literary translators themselves have also altered considerably over the course of the century. Translation was, and still is in some circles, considered to be a secondary and derivative activity. Thus, early pioneer translators, such as Harriet de Onís, would have practised translation of Greek and Latin only as a form of language learning and mental training. In the Second World War, the national need for language experts led to the recruitment of people such as Helen Lane, who worked as a cryptographer for a government agency in Los Angeles (Christ 2004), and Gregory Rabassa, who was also enlisted into the intelligence services, decoding and encoding messages. It was only much later, from the 1960s onwards, that there commenced more formal translation workshops teaching translation skills along the lines of creative writing workshops promoted at the University of Iowa (see Gentzler 2001). In 1980, institutional support for literary translation saw the setting up of a Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. The Center is home to the national office of the American Literary Translators Association and to the twice-yearly Translation Review journal, both founded in 1978. Since that date, the Translation Center in Dallas itself has organized translation workshops allied to creative writing. The current website of the Center10 describes the teaching methodology in the translation workshop, starting with intralingual tasks and also including the analysis of multiple translations of the same text. The aim is that students “begin to understand the nature of establishing an interpretive perspective in light of the linguistic, cultural, and historical forces that shape a literary text in a particular language.” In the workshops themselves, students are encouraged to aim for the same “tone and level of language” as the ST, to defend their translation choices, and to “strive to translate intentions and concepts.” Such translator workshops are important for training and practice in translation method, although the focus is very much on interpretation rather than on linguistic analysis. Literary translation is viewed and studied as a form of very close reading and linked to creative writing. This is brought out by many of the prominent translators who have contributed to the workshops, including Gregory Rabassa, even though he claims that he works instinctively and that literary translation cannot really be taught (Hoeksema 1978: 9; Rabassa 1991; Bach 2005). A number of master’s level translation programmes now exist. These teach an element of translation theory so it is likely that younger translators today are more cognizant of linguistic and cultural theories of translation than was the case in the past and are encouraged to reflect on their work. Institutionalized training has meant that experienced translators pass on their methodology to new translators more systematically rather than relying on informal links. It may therefore be possible that the desired

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translation style becomes reinforced educationally, especially as most of the most prominent translators of Latin American writing themselves hold, or have held, academic posts. So, for instance, Canadian translator Anne McLean studied for a master’s degree in literary translation under leading British translator Peter Bush, which later led to their collaboration on the translation of Ignacio Padilla’s Amphitryon. At the very least, translation process and style has become an object of serious discussion: books by Levine (1991) and Rabassa (2005) are merely the most prominent of an ever-increasing corpus of such writing.

CONCLUSION In chapter 2 we have discussed possible links between ideology and translation and have outlined some of the various factors impacting on the translators whom we shall consider in the next chapters. There have been other studies of the ideological factors that have influenced the translation of Latin American literature, particularly the Boom, but these have not tended to combine linguistic analysis of the texts with the impact on the translators themselves.11 The interesting question for us is to investigate how far different types of ideological factors (external and internal) may have impacted on the translation style of key works of the Boom. The following chapters will therefore present a series of case studies of Latin American writing in translation to explore this area. Rather than a fully comprehensive presentation of all translations of the period and individuals in question (a task which would be far beyond the scope of the present volume), these case studies are designed to focus on questions of the individuality or variability of the style of the translator in various key areas and to consider the impact that ideology may have exerted on the decisions that have been made.

3

The Classic Translator Pre-1960 Harriet de Onís

This chapter will analyse the style of a specific translator, in this case, samples of the work of a major early translator, Harriet de Onís (1895–1969). Onís’s background is discussed in some detail in an article in the Americas magazine by Trudy Balch (1998): Harriet, née Wishnieff, was born in New York City, the daughter of Russian Jewish émigrés but she grew up in rural Illinois. She read English at Barnard College in New York, although her studies also encompassed other languages: Latin, French, German, and Italian in common with other liberal arts students. She only learned Spanish after the First World War when she worked as a Spanish book importer; according to Balch (ibid.: 48), Onís seems to have picked up Portuguese later and mainly through reading. She therefore had no formal training in translation and her untheoretical approach is summed up in advice she gave to graduate student Gregory Rabassa when he began to translate for a new literary magazine Odyssey Review (see chapter 5): “Don’t stick too close to the text,” said Onís, “but at the same time don’t be too free and easy” (Balch ibid.: 48). This reflected the fuzzy parameters of ‘literal’ and ‘free’ translation that had dominated Western writing on translation.1 Encouraged by her Spanish husband, academic Federico de Onís, Harriet translated a vast range of over forty Latin American works, from both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. These included the work of many of the leading new novelists of the mid-twentieth century, for example the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and the Brazilian Jorge Amado, as well as major sociological or historical volumes, such as Fernando Ortiz’s writing on Cuba, Germán Arciniegas’s histories of the new world, and Gilberto Freyre’s work on the social history of Brazil. Several important points need to be made about Onís’s work, which justify the focus of this chapter. Firstly, the aim of publisher Alfred Knopf, as we saw in the previous chapter, was to bring new writers to the attention of readers in the United States. Knopf and his editors had a clear idea of what the text of the finished product should be like, which meant that the editors often imposed changes on Onís’s manuscripts (Balch ibid.: 48). Secondly, Onís worked as a scout and reader, and sometimes editor, for Knopf, thus filtering the image that would be portrayed of Latin America by the selection or presentation of material (Donoso 1982,

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see Chapter 2). Cohn (2004) also indicates that Onís was conscious of the political and ideological objectives of the CIAR translation programme in appealing to and controlling Latin American writers (see chapter 2). Above all, though, Onís was the first major translator of Latin American literature into English, pioneering and dominating the field, but this meant that there were no predecessors on whom she could base her work and few contemporaries with whom she could collaborate. This makes her achievements all the more remarkable. This chapter will look at a selection of some of her main translations, selecting from various genres and illustrating key moments of Onís’s translation career. Onís’s assertive interpretation of an image of Latin America is evident in collections such as The Green Continent (1947), comprising twenty extracts from major books and essays by leading figures in Latin American literary and cultural life. The book’s editor, the historian, novelist, and diplomat Germán Arciniegas, acknowledges Onís’s input in selecting and either translating or overseeing the translations. Importantly, in the front matter Arciniegas affirms that “the purpose of this book is to present a picture of Latin America as seen by Latin Americans” (Arciniegas 1947: no page). This is true, but of course mediated by the words and perspective of Harriet de Onís and the other translators. In another case, Gilberto Freyre’s Casa grande e senzala 1933), a sociological study that appeared in English as The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil (1963), the book was drastically shortened in Onís’s translation, apparently at the instigation of the publisher (Balch 1998: 51). Even the prefaces to Freyre’s book were abridged and by Alfred Knopf himself, as Knopf explains with a note in the preliminary matter of the TT: “I am responsible for the abridgements, but in making them I have consulted Harriet de Onís and Frank Tannenbaum [Professor of Latin American history at Columbia University and writer of the introduction], who have approved my text, as has also my friend, Gilberto Freyre” (Freyre 1963: xiii). However, this did not stop Freyre’s complaining that his lack of success in the United States was down to Onís’s translation, specifically because of her interpretation of his writing through a strict classificatory prism that had led to a genre shift in translation: “She sees nothing in me besides a social historian,” he told Knopf (quoted in Rostagno 1997: 41). Similar editing and pruning had occurred with Onís’s first translation, Martín Luis Guzmán’s The Eagle and the Serpent (1930), a first-person semi-fictionalized narrative set during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The translation was awarded to Onís through a personal contact at Knopf, a former co-student of hers at Barnard College who was aware of her work as editor of the magazine World Fiction (Knopf 1995: 201–202). It was a text that underwent extensive editing in translation. When published, it was barely two-thirds the length of the ST and had entire sections omitted, including the very first chapters. Brief additions were made in an attempt to cover the omissions and maintain coherence. This forces a condensed style.

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For instance, the following paragraph, at the beginning of a chapter entitled “A Revolutionary’s Journey,” summarizes a whole 38-page section omitted from the ST: Soon afterwards I reached Nogales safely and went on to New York, where I had some affairs to attend to. Upon my return to Nogales, I asked permission to serve with Obregón, but Carraza arbitrarily ordered me to Ciudad Juárez, where at that time I had no wish to go. (ES TT 84) On the other hand, the TT is framed by a short introduction to the events of the Mexican Revolution for the benefit of U.S. readers for whom the background events might well require clarification. The writer of the introduction, anonymous in the first edition, was in fact none other than Federico de Onís, Harriet’s husband, who provides academic support for the publication. This is an indication of the complex relations underlying such paratexts that are appended to the translations and which serve to add status to the text as well as to guide interpretation. Just as author style may alter over the course of a writer’s whole oeuvre, so it is that a translator’s style can change as he or she becomes more confident or finds empathy with a particular writer, as happened with Onís in her later translations of Amado and Carpentier. Nevertheless, there are some stylistic traits in this first translation by Onís, at the age of thirty-four, which we shall see are repeated in later translations. The very beginning of the TT offers a description of the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez in comparison to its neighbour across the Río Grande in the United States: El espectáculo de Ciudad Juárez era triste; triste en sí; más triste aún si se le comparaba con el aliño luminoso de la otra orilla del río, extranjera e inmediata. Pero si frente a él nos ardía la cara de vergüenza, eso no obstante, o por eso tal vez, el corazón iba bailándonos de gozo conforme las raíces de nuestra alma escapaban, como en algo conocido, tratado y amado durante siglos, en toda incultura, en toda la mugre de cuerpo y espíritu que invadía allí las calles. ¡Por algo éramos mexicanos! ¡Por algo el resplandor siniestro de las escasas lámparas callejeras nos envolvía como pulsación de atmósfera que nutre! (ES ST 66) [Literal Translation: The spectacle of Ciudad Juárez was sad; sad in itself; still sadder if one compared it with the bright orderliness of the opposite river-bank, foreign and immediate. Yet if opposite it our faces burned with shame, that notwithstanding, or for that reason perhaps, the hearts were dancing us with joy as the roots of our soul escaped, as into something known, treated and loved for centuries, in all its unculturedness, in all the filth of body and spirit that invaded there the

68 Style and Ideology in Translation streets. For something were we Mexicans! For something the sinister gleam of the scarce street-lights enveloped us as in a pulsation of atmosphere which nourishes!] Ciudad Juárez is a sad sight; sad in itself, and still sadder when compared with the bright orderliness of that opposite river-bank, close but foreign. Yet if our faces burned with shame to look at it, nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, it made our hearts dance as we felt the roots of our being sunk into something we had known, possessed, and loved for centuries, in all its brutishness, in all the filth of body and soul that pervades its streets. Not for nothing were we Mexicans. Even the sinister gleam of occasional street-lights seemed to wrap us round in a pulsation of comforting warmth. (ES TT 3) The narrative perspective from which Ciudad Juárez, and by extension the whole of Mexico, is portrayed is similar in the two texts: the spatial point of view located in the city, looking over towards the United States, the retention of the first person plural pronoun nosotros (we), part of the ideological and phraseological points of view, the affirmation of Mexican identity (Not for nothing were we Mexicans). However, the changes produced by the highlighted linguistic choices to the temporal point of view subtly, yet consistently, denigrate the poorer country: the present tense of is, in line one, and pervades, rather than the imperfect past tense of the ST era and invadía, in addition to adding immediacy to the narrative suggest that this is a continued state of affairs in Mexico; the interpreted cohesion of the conjunction close but foreign (rather than the ST extranjera e inmediata—‘foreign and immediate’) introduces a paradox that is not overtly present in the original; the omission of the positive de gozo (‘with joy’) after dance, the addition of the modal verb of perception with seemed to wrap us, and the shift from dynamic process nutre (‘nourishes’) to a more passive comforting all serve to convey a picture of Mexico that is less active and less positive than in the ST. This is all the more so with the reversal of linguistic perspective (Not for nothing were we Mexicans [ . . . ] rather than ¡Por algo eramos mexicanos!) and with the omission of the exclamation marks of the Free Indirect Discourse which act as an affirmative marker of proud identity in the last two sentences of the ST extract. As well as this subtle shift in point of view, the translator’s style and idiolect comes through with other choices. These include the idioms, highlighted below, that are vivid evaluative additions in the TT: allí podía haber algo, cuando no posible, sí creíble (ES ST 416) [there might be something, if not possible, certainly credible] the thing might not be so incredible as it appeared at first blush (ES TT 241)

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se salvan de milagro, créanmelo (ES ST 419) [you (plural) save yourself by miracle, believe me] You can thank your lucky stars that you got off safe, believe me (ES TT 244) Consultation of the Leeds Internet corpus shows that at first blush occurs fifty-two times. More interesting is the observation from the concordance that it is primed to occur in sentence-initial position (thirty-five instances) as a signal of an upcoming contradiction and, on a smaller number of occasions, with a modal verb of appearance (appear, seem, etc.). A typical example from the corpus is: At first blush, it might seem pedantic to distinguish between “necessary” and “desirable.” However, having read all the papers, I have formed the view that the distinction is absolutely crucial.2 Although we of course cannot discount a drift in priming over the intervening period of seventy years, Onís’s translation does coincide with the standard contemporary priming in its collocation with a modal verb of appearance (appeared/seemed) and in the contrast that forms the basis of the sentence (things may have seemed incredible and impossible, but this proved not to be the case). However, the thematic structuring has been altered to a main clause+subordinate clause pattern in the TT. The other example, You can thank your lucky stars, is placed in the mouth of Pancho Villa speaking to the narrator and a companion after their release from gaol. Intuition might suggest that it is not the type of idiom Villa might use since the colloquial, and sometimes profane, forms of address are a prominent feature of the interpersonal language of Villa and his cohorts. Villa’s dialogue is dotted with instances of amiguito [literally, ‘little friend’], a diminutive typical of some forms of Latin American Spanish and a perennial problem for translators (Enkvist 1993). Onís resorts variously to the more standard boy (ES TT 11) and friend (ES TT 87) and the familiar Americanism buddy (ES TT 87). As far as expletives are concerned, however, the English surprisingly tends to explicitate euphemisms: el muy jijo de tal (ES ST 420, [‘the very son of such-and-such’]) is translated as son of a bitch (ES TT 246, 248). Other negative epithets used for villains are shifted in the English, such as: este gaucho traidor (ES ST 421) [this treacherous gaucho] this dirty double-crosser of a gaucho (ES TT 246)

70 Style and Ideology in Translation este sordo traidor e ingrato (ES ST 439) [this treacherous and ungrateful deaf person] the treacherous, ungrateful cur (ES TT 248). Leaving aside subjective issues such as the relative pragmatic strength of the expressions in the two cultures, we can focus on the possibility that the lexical selection of such epithets and evaluative noun phrases in the translation, quite different from the possible literal translation, may be significant markers of the translator’s style on the phraseological point of view. The insult dirty double-crosser . . . , is now most often associated with jokes in English and certainly its collocation with gaucho is novel. The other example, treacherous, ungrateful cur, is relatively infrequent and therefore not reliably assessable using any of the available reference corpora: fourteen examples of cur/curs in the BNC, none with treacherous or ungrateful, though there are others in similar semantic fields (insolent, greasy, cowardly, etc.); there are fifteen instances in the Leeds Internet corpus, the closest collocations to the one above being wretched and ill-tempered cur. Despite the limitations of Internet search engines outlined in chapter 1, consultation of examples using Google does produce useful results. Thus, the double epithet traidor e ingrato, not present at all in the Real Academia Corpus, occurs seven times in the Spanish Google; traidor, ingrato occurs ninety-five times, many in Spanish Golden Age drama, including an instance from Calderón’s famous play La vida es sueño (1635). In the English Google search engine, there were 735 examples of ungrateful cur and 226 of treacherous cur, which shows that there is considerable strength to the collocations. The combination treacherous, ungrateful (without cur) appears 221 times, collocating often with bastard but also with Biblical references thanks to the influence of John Wesley’s explanatory notes to the Bible for Exodus 32:31: “This treacherous ungrateful people, they have made them gods of gold.”3 There is a single example of ungrateful cur, in a romantic novel from Indiana in the early twentieth century.4 While this is in no way conclusive, it is suggestive of the genres in which the epithets may tend to occur and which may have affected the lexical primings of the translator: Biblical influences and romantic novels will surface again as we consider other Onís translations. Although these epithets might seem more appropriate to romantic heroines than to the participants of the Mexican revolution, it is worth pointing out that Onís bravely, for 1930, does translate ¡Porquería! (ES ST 344) [‘rubbish,’ ‘pig (filthy) things’] as Shit! (ES TT 185), a crossing of what Gregory Rabassa (2005: 102) was later to term “the shit-barrier” when relating the first publication of the word in the New York Times in an extract from his translation of García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch from the mid-1970s. These examples of non-fiction or fictionalized biography reveal heavy editing and cuts that affect the ideational and textual functions and

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transcend shifts in point of view. However, the editing of non-fiction does not always follow the same pattern. For instance, there are no such obvious cuts in Onís’s translation of a crucial book on the sociology and history of Cuba, Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunto cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940; Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 1947) which is distinguished for the neologism transculturación, borrowed or calqued by Onís as transculturation, to describe the dual process of loss of one’s own culture and acquisition of another. Ortiz uses it in place of the Western sociological term acculturation and with the explicit backing of the internationally renowned anthropologist Branislaw Malinowski, who contributes a preface to the book. Transculturation has more recently come to prominence in the discussion of intercultural and even translation issues (e.g., Pratt 1992) and is an example of how a translational borrowing can become established in the foreign language and culture. The academic and sociological conventions of the book are intensified in some of the linguistic and discursive choices. Thus, the new term transculturation is more prominent throughout the TT than the ST. When first introduced (CubCt ST 99/CubCt TT 98), it is compared to other already existing Spanish terms such as aculturación, deculturación, exculturación, and inculturación, yet the TT omits mention of the last two, which have now fallen into disuse. Later, transculturation functions autonomously in the English text while it is accompanied by what is really a tautologous gloss in the Spanish: en trance doloroso de transculturación a un nuevo ambiente cultural (CubCt ST 103) [on the painful path of transculturation to a new cultural environment] the painful process of transculturation (CubCt TT 102). This suggests that the technical term in English is more firmly fixed than in the Spanish. As we shall discuss in chapter 6, something similar occurs in the translation of the neologism deslatinizada in José Rodó’s Ariel, so it may be a feature of these genres where there is a lag in the production of the STs and TTs. Further evidence of the increased fixedness of ideational terminology in the TT is provided in the description of the arrival of all types of different ethnic groups, where the term transculturation is used in the TT in place of a ST metaphor transplantation and reform: un proceso de transplantación y reforma más o menos hirviente (CubCt ST 103) [a process of transplantation and reform more or less boiling/fervent] a more or less rapid process of transculturation (CubCt TT 102).

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The added uses of this new central sociological term ‘transculturation’ distil the argument in that it becomes an unqualified umbrella-term for a potentially more open debate. Thus, in the last example Onís interprets proceso de transplantación y reforma as the equivalent of transculturación, even though it is arguable that the ST focuses more on the physical displacement of the peoples concerned than on the cultural consequences. The introduction of a new item such as transculturation into the terminology of a discipline is the site for shifts in the stylistic choice that affect the ideational metafunction and psychological point of view. By contrast, despite critical discourse analysts’ concentration on patterns of transitivity that reflect power relations (see chapter 1), such patterns do not generally seem to be affected in this translation. For instance, Ortiz relies on the status of Malinowski to bestow his approval on the neologism. As is pointed out by Fernando Coronil in his introduction to the new Duke University Press edition of the translation in 1995, this is described impersonally and tentatively by Ortiz in deference to the internationally renowned authority of Malinowski: Sometido el propuesto neologismo transculturación, a la autoridad irrecusable de Bronislaw Malinowski, el gran maestro contemporáneo de etnografía y sociología, ha merecido su inmediata aprobación. (CubCt ST 104) When the proposed neologism, transculturation, was submitted to the unimpeachable authority of Bronislaw Malinowksi, the great figure in contemporary ethnography and sociology, it met with his instant approbation. (CubCt TT 103) Onís chooses a conjunction of time plus a passive (When [ . . . ] was submitted) for the more complex and succinct past-participle construction in the Spanish (sometido, ‘submitted’). However, significantly, she does not choose any active process form, such as ‘When I proposed the neologism,’ which might challenge the dominant power structure. The major stylistic changes in potentially controversial texts studied in these case studies do not often lie in the transitivity system. The translators, or editors, do not seek to subvert that power structure in that way. In fact, it could be argued that in the last example Onís rather shares the dominant power status with Malinowski because of her ideological background in the United States of the 1940s; hence, she is less likely to alter the linguistic structures that underpin that superiority. This is an extremely difficult but potentially rich area to investigate, to discover the location of power shifts in translation if they are not to be found in the transitivity structures, which Halliday, Fairclough, and others see as constructing the representation of an event. Possible answers lie in the investigation of markers of identity and belonging. The noun cubanidad refers to the fact of being Cuban and to the Cuban identity, to ‘Cubanness’ in the words of

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the debate in Senel Paz’s Strawberry and Chocolate written in the 1990s (see chapter 7). Onís translates it as evolution of Cuba: No hubo factores humanos más trascendentes para la cubanidad (CubCt ST 102) [There were no human factors more transcendent for cubanidad] There was no more important human factor in the evolution of Cuba (CubCt TT 101). The TT shifts from a marker of identity to an indicator of process and movement, which ties in coherently with the use of the term transculturation by stressing the process of cultural change and appropriation. On the other hand, in this book Onís does not alter deictic markers of authorial or narrative location. The following example contrasts the European and Cuban experience. Ortiz is writing from the spatio-temporal point of view of aquí, ‘here,’ Cuba, and this is retained in the translation, even if the contrapuntal allí, ‘there,’ is explicated to Europe and even though the translator occupies a different geographical location compared to the ST author: Toda la escala cultural que Europa experimentó en más de cuatro milenios, en Cuba se pasó en menos de cuatro siglos. Lo que allí fue subida por rampa y escalones, aquí ha sido progreso a saltos y sobresaltos. (CubCt ST 100) [All the cultural scale that Europe experienced in more than four millennia, in Cuba took place in less than four centuries. That which there was raised by ramp and steps, here has been progress in leaps and bounds.] The whole gamut of culture run by Europe in a span of more than four millenniums took place in Cuba in less than four centuries. In Europe the change was step by step; here it was by leaps and bounds. (CubCt TT 99) However, while the spatial point of view may be retained, the psychological point of view is sometimes more blurred and the ideological frame of the translator is superimposed on the text. The following example discusses the psychological and cultural impact on the arriving slaves violently transported from Africa: Los negros trajeron con sus cuerpos sus espíritus, pero no sus instituciones, ni su instrumentario. Llegaron arrancados, heridos y trozados

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Style and Ideology in Translation como las cañas en el ingenio [ . . . ] Se traspasaron de una cultura a otra más potente, como los indios. (CubCt ST 102) The Negroes brought with their bodies their souls, but not their institutions nor their implements. [ . . . ] They arrived deracinated, wounded, shattered, like the cane of the fields [ . . . ] They were transferred from their own to another more advanced culture, like that of the Indians. (CubCt TT 101–102)

On the phraseological plane, the use of Negroes (sic) for Spanish negros corresponds to the common 1940s U.S. usage, a priming that has since shifted. Moreover, the choice of souls to translate espíritus (‘spirits’) represents the application of a Western religious terminology; more importantly and arrestingly, the more advanced culture, instead of the ST ‘another more powerful [culture],’ is evaluative rather than descriptive and cannot be explained away purely by norms of linguistic usage; here, surely, we see an expression of the embedded superiority of the representative of the target culture, the translator who, maybe subconsciously, has been trained to view those caught up in the slave trade as belonging to a more primitive culture. Although she was the translator of such key works of non-fiction, Harriet de Onís more often worked on a range of different fiction; the stylistic extremes of this work are represented by Don Segundo Sombra (1926, translated 1935), a story of gaucho life by the Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes, and Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929; Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs, 1959) by Teresa de la Parra, the tale of girlhood on a late nineteenthcentury Venezuelan sugar plantation. Both short novels were masterpieces of the time and place in which they appeared, in 1920s post-colonial Argentina and Venezuela respectively. Despite the differences in subject matter and geographical location of the two texts and, indeed, despite belonging to different chronological points in the translator’s career, there are various stylistic traits in the translation that remain common. One is the framing of the texts with other paratextual matter. The Güiraldes book is notable for Onís’s own editing work, different in form from the editorial pruning and omissions of the Guzmán translation but still highly significant: hence, Onís provides an afterword, evaluating the author’s oeuvre as a whole and discussing her approach to this work in particular. That it is an afterword rather than a preface may signify the translator’s subordinate role; certainly, afterwords are relatively rare and their role is different, a ‘corrective’ of the reading rather than a guide (Genette 1997: 237–239). Onís’s strategy has involved a genre shift since she explicitly considers the story to be a “kind of fairy tale . . . not a realistic work [ . . . ]. Güiraldes has captured the poetic truth, the eternal quality of the scenes and personages he describes, which is the highest form of reality” (DSS ST 217). Regarding the author’s style, Onís speaks of “a blend of the precise, sober, yet colorful speech of the gaucho and Güiraldes’s sensitive, scintillating prose” (DSS TT 219). To assist the reader

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through the cultural and linguistic world of the gaucho, a glossary of terms is provided, italicized in the text, and pencil drawings by Güiraldes’s own brother, Alberto, are inserted at various points throughout the book. The glossary gives an explanation of culture-specific terms as varied as mandinga [‘devil’] and quebracho, a type of wood. On the other hand, some other terms of colonial origin receive translations in the glossary, such as estancias, which is explicated and domesticated as big ranches. As we noted in chapter 2, although published in Onís’s name the translation was in fact revised by editor Waldo Frank who had been unhappy with the “flat” and “bland” manuscript submitted. Although we might hypothesize that these changes could have led to some inconsistencies, both internal (i.e., throughout the book since the translation blends the style of Onís and Frank) and external (i.e., compared to other Onís translations that were all or principally her own work), there are certain stylistic characteristics that repeat themselves from other translations. Thus, there is the occasional shift in speech and thought representation, with exclamation marks emphasizing Free Indirect Discourse. This occurs at the very end of the translation of the Guzmán book as the narrator sets off towards the United States: Ahora el tren corría, veloz entre las sombras de la noche. ¡Que grande es México! Para llegar a la frontera faltaban mil cuatrocientos kilómetros . . . (ES ST 578) [Now the train was running, speedily among the shadows of the night. How big is Mexico! To reach the border there remained one thousand four hundred kilometres . . . ] The train began to speed away through the shadows of the night. Mexico was so big! A thousand miles to the border! (ES TT 359). The final sentence in the TT substitutes an exclamation for the suspension marks that indicate an unfinished and ongoing thought process in the ST. In the TT, the condensed, verbless structure contributes to the excitement of the moment. There is a similar example in the Güiraldes translation, where the first-person narrator is the gaucho: A las tres de la mañana, despertóme mi propia impaciencia. Cuando fuera día saldríamos, llevando nuestra tropa, camino al desconocido. (DSS ST 71) [At three in the morning, woke-me my own impatience. When it was day we would leave, taking our herd, on the road to the unknown.] My own eagerness wakened me at three in the morning. Starting at daybreak with the herd! Headed for the Unknown! (DSS TT 43).

76 Style and Ideology in Translation Again, the addition of exclamation marks and of the capitalized Unknown signals excitement, while eagerness provides positive evaluation in place of the more negative impaciencia [‘impatience’]. The second ST sentence is divided in the TT. Together with the concision of the noun daybreak (instead of “when it was day”), the absence of any main verb but the addition of purposeful material processes of movement Starting . . . and Headed for . . . , this all combines to delineate the scene and the narrator as very active in the TT. At the same time as this increased immediacy of the speech representation on the phraseological level, which heightens the drama of the scene, there is a standardization of spatio-temporal point of view in the first sentence, the process wakened being left-shifted and the time adjunct at three in the morning being moved from its orienting thematic first position in the ST to a sentence-final position in the TT. That this is standardization in the English can be shown with reference to corpora: in the BNC and Leeds corpora combined there are forty instances of the specific adjunct at three in the morning, of which twenty-six are clause-final. There is not a single instance of the phrase occurring in sentence-initial position in English. In Spanish, a las tres de la mañana occurs in sentence-initial position in approximately ten percent of cases in the CREA. The other main characteristic of the Argentine narrative is on the phraseological level with the attempt to replicate the speech of the gauchos. Onís opts for American English colloquialisms, now rather dated as illustrated by the following examples: Andá decile algo a Juan Sosa—proponíame alguno—que está mano, allá, en el boliche. (DSS ST 15) [Go say something to Juan Sosa—suggested to me someone—who is buddy, over there, in the bar.] “Go take a dig at Juan Sosa,” someone would suggest; “he’s there at the bar stewed to the gills.” (DSS TT 10) Go take a dig at is a colloquial interpretation of the Spanish colloquialism andá decile algo, while stewed to the gills is a synonym for ‘drunk.’ A few lines later, the narrator uses another colloquial expression, ‘ta que tranca tenés, translated as the more neutral Lord, you’re drunk. There is generally a pattern in the book for downplaying strongly colloquial or dialectal ST expressions. Indeed, colloquial language and regionalisms tended to be normalized by Onís in general. This occurs most famously late on in her career when, with James L. Taylor, she took on the experimental novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956; The Devil to Pay in the Backlands 1963) by the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa, a novel of outlaws in northern Minais Gerais that was marked by regionalisms, neologisms (including those with roots in Latin and in Amerindian languages), and wordplays. This translation has

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received substantial criticism (see below) and the novel is currently being retranslated by Gregory Rabassa. In contrast to Don Segundo Sombra and Grande Sertão, Teresa de la Parra’s Las memorias de Mamá Blanca is a refined portrait of middle-class girls growing up on a sugar plantation in Venezuela. The narrative technique, too, is more complex and polyphonic (Sommer 1993). Harriet de Onís’s translation of 1959 is of particular interest in that it was published as part of the UNESCO collection of representative works and has subsequently been revised by Frederick Fornoff in a University of Pittsburgh edition (de la Parra 1993). Comparing the two TTs gives us the opportunity to see where Fornoff has altered Onís’s style and where Onís’s fingerprint may be visible and where it has been challenged. However, it should be emphasized from the outset that the revisions were generally relatively minor, with the notable exception of the title, altered from Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs to Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. Features of Onís’s style seen in earlier works reappear here: the domesticating translation plantation rather than the borrowing of the colonial word hacienda (compare the translation of estancia as big ranches in the Don Segundo Sombra) and the idiomatic, but now slightly dated, translations of relatively simple Spanish verbs: se había dado a malgastar su fortuna (MB 22) [(she) had given herself to wasting her fortune] she had made ducks and drakes of her fortune (MB Onís 7). There are over 700 instances of make ducks and drakes of in Google. Even though there are over forty collocations with money, there is not a single collocation with fortune. It is a slightly dated expression that seems to be found most frequently in adventure novels. One typical example, from 1834, appears in Captain Marryat’s Japhet in Search of a Father.5 Interestingly, this idiom is altered by Fornoff to the less colourful but more standard “she had set about squandering her fortune” (MB Fornoff 9), showing that it was not part of Fornoff’s lexical priming. Another unusual and marked idiomatic translation equivalent is: las piernas quemadísimas del sol (MB 33) [legs very burned by the sun] legs tanned to the color of saddle leather by the sun (MB Onís 15). In Google, there are just four instances of tanned [to] the colo[u]r of saddle leather. Once again, the uses seem to conform to a pattern taken

78 Style and Ideology in Translation from action or romantic fiction. Thus, one example comes from a 1938 U.S. detective story,6 one from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and one recent HarperTeen novel.7 The saddle-leather example is part of the self-presentation of one of the narrators, Blanca Nieves, whose incongruous name (meaning Snow White, even though she is very darkskinned) is not translated by Onís and thus remains an opaque borrowing to the TT reader.8 Fornoff, in contrast, does give the English equivalent as a gloss when the name first appears. This is not to say that Onís does not interpret characters’ actions or feelings: the following example shows that her narrative strategy is to add stereotypical evaluation in the form of a modal adverb, in this case blushingly: tengo que confesarlo humildemente, sin merecer en absoluto semejante nombre, Blanca Nieves era yo. (MB 33) [I have to confess humbly, without deserving at all such a name, Blanca Nieves was I.] I must blushingly confess that, wholly undeserving of such a name, Blanca Nieves was I. (MB Onís 15) Blushingly confess is a fixed collocation (156 examples in Google); the alternative humbly confess, which would be a literal translation for the Spanish confesarlo humildemente, is in fact far more frequent in English (14,500 examples), especially linked to Catholic confession. Importantly, Fornoff omits the adverb, suggesting that he is operating to other criteria and restricting his intervention in the text: I must confess that, wholly undeservingly of such a name, Blanca Nieves was I. (MB Fornoff 17) This is not an isolated case. In the following example, depicting the encounter of the child narrator with the now aged Mama Blanca, Onís also adds an adverb of manner, evaluation on the ideological plane that stereotypes the delicate lady: Allá, más lejos aún, en el cuadro de una ventana abierta, dentro de su comedor, la dueña de la casa con cabeza de nieve y bata blanca se tomaba poco a poco una taza de chocolate mojando en ella plantillas y bizcochuelos (MB 18) [There, further away still, in the frame of an open window, in the dining room, the mistress of the house with her snow head and white morning robe was taking little by little a cup of chocolate dipping in it sponge/ lady fingers and sponge cakes.]

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Farther off, framed in the open window of the dining room, sat the mistress of the house, hair and morning robe snow white, daintily dipping lady fingers and cookies in a cup of chocolate. (MB Onís 4, emphasis added) Daintily dipping can only be a translation of poco a poco (‘little by little’), the sense transferred from the sipping of the drink to the action of dipping the cakes in the liquid. The addition of the adverb of manner, daintily, absent in the ST, would seem to be an interpretation and explicitation by the translator of the main characteristics of the character in this scene. For Onís, the action of Mama Blanca is stereotypically lady-like. She again superimposes her own interpretation of the scene, notably with addition of the alliterative daintily and the stative verb sat that shifts the main process to a material process and present participle, dipping. It is interesting that Onís is willing to add such evaluation and indeed domesticate the names and forms of the cakes (lady fingers and cookies) while at the same time once again absorbing the cohesion at the higher level of spatio-temporal point of view. This is particularly evident in such ‘cinematic’ shots, where, despite some rewordings, the order of the progression of the main elements of the original is maintained, from initial location (Farther off. . . ) to the frame of the open window to the view of Mama Blanca (sat the mistress) and then to the activity (daintily dipping). This is even enhanced in Forloff’s minor revision, which, like the ST, begins There, farther back, framed in the open window . . . (MB Fornoff 6). Speech and thought representation also undergoes modification in Onís’s TT. However, unlike some of her other translations, here it is less expressive than the ST. Thus, in the following example, Mama Blanca reflects on the past when, as a child, she had played with the little girl’s grandparents: pero en otro barrio y en unos tiempos que ya iban quedando lejos, ¡tan relejos! . . . (MB 19) [but in another district and in times that were now/then remaining distant, so very distant!] But that was in another part of town and long, long ago. (MB Onís 5, MB Fornoff 16–17) This time, elements indicative of Free Indirect Discourse (the emphatic exclamation mark, the augmentative prefix re- [relejos] and the attitudinal particle ya) disappear in the translation. In this TT, there is a general tendency to remove assertive ST exclamations and replace them with other means. The next example, uttered by the narrator’s mother and concerning Evelyn, the governess, gives further proof of this:

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Style and Ideology in Translation “¡Evelyn es mi tranquilidad! ¡Que sería de mí sin ella! (MB 34) [Evelyn is my tranquility! What would become of me without her!] “Evelyn is my rock of Gibraltar. What would I do without her?” (MB Onís 16, MB Fornoff 18)

In place of the exclamation marks of the ST, the core of the translation is an idiom or fixed expression based rather incongruously on the British colony of Gibraltar followed by a rhetorical question. This is not altered in Fornoff’s revision. The only conclusion from these and the earlier examples is that speech and thought representation changes in Onís’s translation, but not consistently. The translator was clearly unconscious of the linguistic formulation performing the narrative construct. While the analysis of these various TTs reveals some inconsistency in the style, there does seem to be a major trend for Onís to build and adapt sentences around a structural idiomatic core. Her translation technique in fact seems to have matured over the years, reaching its high point in her translations of the novels of the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the major Latin American novelist of the post-war era and a direct precursor and influence on those novelists of the Boom. We shall look here at Onís’s translations of two of Carpentier’s major novels: El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of This World, 1957), the story of the late eighteenth century slave revolts in Hispaniola (modern Haiti), and Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps, 1956), which juxtaposes modern and ‘primitive’ values and ways of life and centres around an orchestra conductor’s physical and spiritual journey up the Orinoco river and into the jungle. First of all, there are also some crucial changes to the narrative structure and paratextual editing which have a lasting impact on the psychological point of view of the two translations as a whole. In addition to its rich and dense language, Los pasos perdidos is characterized by extremely long paragraphs typically running for whole chapters of 1200 to 1500 words. This mirrors the labyrinths of the narrator’s mind and of his journey through the jungle and through time. Whether by choice of the translator or the editor, or a decision taken by the two in collaboration, the paragraphs of the English are much shorter, rarely exceeding 300 words, simplifying the cohesive patterns and making the text much easier for the reader to digest. In The Kingdom of this World, the ST prologue is omitted, in which Carpentier had rejoiced at the energy of the Caribbean (compared to a tired Europe) and coined the term lo real maravilloso, a forerunner of the term magic realism that was so associated with the Boom. Perhaps ironically in this regard, the Frenchness of the context is emphasized in the TT: this extends beyond the replacement of Spanish names for geographical points on the island with their French equivalents (the Cap Français, la rue des Espagnols, the Auberge de la Couronne, the

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Plaine du Nord, the Bois Caïman) to include the French spelling of characters’ names (Ti Noël, Pauline Bonaparte), the French version of political terms (ancien régime, culture oblige), items of food (pots of tripe à la mode de Caen) as well as English calques from French for non-cultural items (the men made pell-mell for the Great Gate, KW TT 123). Creole songs are left in the original in the TT, but an English translation is given of French quotes from works by Madame d’Abrantes and Racine which appear in French alone in the Spanish ST. There therefore seems to have been a macro-stylistic decision taken to emphasize certain foreign elements in the TT, although the choice is more complex than it might seem at first sight: since the setting is mainly the French part of Hispaniola and since there are links with the French Revolution and the French colonizers, Carpentier’s ST itself involves a domesticating Spanish translation of French toponyms and other names. The TT is therefore restoring these proper nouns into French. Similarly, in The Lost Steps there are frequent insertions of italicized foreign words into the TT. Examples are: Doppelganger (LS ST 31); au courant (LS ST 63); coup de grâce (LS ST 223); ipso facto (LS ST 113); vean vide (LS ST 244); plus the borrowing of the names of the Spanish card suits bastos, copas, oros, espadas (KW ST 64). The use of the additional, italicized, non-English words listed above would seem to attest to a cultured translation style that foregrounds the foreign but at the same time probably expects the reader to be familiar with what are fixed expressions borrowed from French and Latin. These may be foreign words in the English TTs, but they are in fact common borrowings primed to occur in certain genres among an educated readership of Onís’s age: Doppelganger in philosophical or psychiatric texts, ancien régime in historical texts, and so on. With the exception of the Creole songs, retained in the SL in Kingdom of This World, all foreign language quotations (rather than individual expressions) are translated. Thus, in The Lost Steps there are translations added of the first line of the Latin mass (LS ST 178, LS TT 159) and of a line in German from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (LS ST 100, LS TT 87–88). It appears that readers are assumed to be able to absorb individual words or compounds but not longer or less common pieces of foreign text. The TT contains foreign elements and occurs in a foreign setting, but cannot be said to be foreignized, a vital distinction. This is further illustrated by the explicitation of historical and cultural allusions in the TT: Increíbles Floridas de poeta alucinado (LS ST 125) [Incredible Floridas of [the] hallucinated poet] the Incredible Floridas of Rimbaud (LS TT 111) un pirata hereje (LS ST 171) [a heretic pirate]

82 Style and Ideology in Translation a Protestant pirate (LS TT 152) la Doctora de Avila (LS ST 171) the ‘Doctor of Avila,’ St Teresa (LS TT 152). However, what is most salient in the TT is Onís’s rich and varied lexicon. The abundant list in Table 3.1 below is merely illustrative: Table 3.1. Examples of Onís’s rich lexicon in The Lost Steps ST phrase

Literal translation

TT equivalent

un fragor de creación (LS ST 113)

a clamor of creation

the clangor of creation (LS TT 99)

cirros (LS ST 113)

cirrus clouds

cirri (LS TT 100)

revuelo (LS ST 114)

mass (of birds)

covey (LS TT 101)

salomas (LS ST 114)

priests (formal)

chantry (LS TT 101)

anunciadores de paisajes distintos (LS ST 171–172)

announcers of different landscapes

harbingers of a different landscape (LS TT 152)

espectros (LS ST 247)

spectres

wraiths (LS TT 219)

una suerte de alivio a mi irritación (LS ST 274)

a sort of relief to my irritation

a kind of surcease from my irritation (LS TT 245)

la prueba decisiva (LS ST 272)

the decisive test

the acid test (LS TT 243)

una abstinencia inhabitual en mí (LS ST 263)

an unusual abstinence in me

an unwonted abstinence (LS TT 234)

sin interesarse mayormente (LS ST 142)

without being interested especially

without showing more than a perfunctory interest (LS TT 126)

los peristilos habitados por las cabras (LS ST 156)

the peristyles inhabited by the goats

the peristyles where the goats drowse (LS TT 140)

se atorbellinaban las nubes (LS ST 82)

whirled the clouds

the clouds scudded by (LS TT 71)

el aire removido por una hélice (LS ST 234)

the air stirred by a propeller

air churned by a propeller (LS TT 208)

me quita toda fuerza moral (LS ST 258)

removes from me all moral strength

sapped my moral strength (LS TT 231)

me hace mirar atrás (LS ST 228)

makes me look behind

whirled me round (LS TT 203) (continued)

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Table 3.1. Examples of Onís’s rich lexicon in The Lost Steps (continued) ST phrase

Literal translation

TT equivalent

buscando la resquemante verdad a través de palabras (LS ST 273)

seeking the resentful truth through words

winnowing the bitter truth from words (LS TT 243)

la selva se está llenando the jungle was filling de noche with night (LS ST 115)

night was sifting through the jungle (LS TT 116)

pastores (LS ST 259)

pastors

men of the cloth (LS TT 230)

los jueces de la nación (LS ST 259)

the judges of the nation

the public bar of justice (LS TT 230)

Most of these examples are marked by greater formality in the target language. The nouns and noun phrases are generally technical or associated with more literary genres. For example, surcease is a highly formal and unusual translation of alivio (‘relief’): there are only two examples of surcease in the BNC, seven in the Leeds corpus, but a staggering 158,000 in Google. However, this is still only four percent of the number of hits for the ST alivio. A more refined search for the specific collocation produces sixty-four instances of alivio de la irritación in Google but not a single example of surcease from [ . . . ] irritation. The most common collocation for surcease is surcease from pain, in medical and popular literary texts, which does occur on 2,580 occasions, including two examples from Jack London’s White Fang of 1906.9 Onís has thus produced a novel and more formal collocation for surcease (surcease from irritation) in the semantic field and colligation for which it is lexically primed (surcease from pain). Other examples in Table 3.1 combine formality with rhythm. The translations men of the cloth (for ‘pastors’) and public bar of justice (for ‘the judges of the nation’) both give a pattern that is rhythmically similar, built around a combination of noun+of+noun, indicating that sound might play a guiding role. Public bar of justice is particularly uncommon and literary, only five examples being found in Google, one dating from the eighteenth century.10 Almost all the verbs in Table 3.1 above are active material processes that are translated by more formal, more metaphorical, and more dynamic verbs in the TT in a strategy of lexical enrichment even if this means a distancing from the ST lexical structure as in the peristyles where goats drowse (instead of ‘inhabited by goats’), whirled me round (rather than ‘makes me look behind’). The Kingdom of This World reveals similar examples, such as:

84 Style and Ideology in Translation la selva se está llenando de noche (KW ST 115) [the jungle is filling with night] night was sifting through the jungle (KW TT 116). Sometimes in Onís’s translation such lexical enrichment goes hand in hand with syntactic modifications: mis dineros habían subido mucho al cambio con la moneda local (LS ST 77) [my moneys had risen much in exchange with the local currency] the exchange value of my funds had skyrocketed (LS TT 68). The verb skyrocketed follows the pattern noted above of being more dynamic than subido mucho and is also a frequently used metaphor in financial contexts even today.11 At the same time, the adjunct al cambio con la moneda local is condensed into the noun phrase the exchange value and becomes the grammatical subject and actor of the process. The condensing of noun and modifying phrases is another firm trait of Onís’s style on the phraseological level, illustrated by Table 3.2 which takes examples from both Lost Steps and The Kingdom of This World. There is a clear predilection for pre-modifying descriptive epithets, often hyphenated (see the first three examples in Table 3.2). The most striking example is branch-arched, of which there are no examples at all in the BNC and only one, unhyphenated, example in Google—branch arched starry skies.12 Although pasadizo abovedado de ramas itself is a novel collocation in the ST, the interesting stylistic point is that the creative solution adopted by Onís fits into a very clear pattern of a hyphenated or compound pre-modifier that translates an adjective+de+noun phrase from the Spanish. The following example, from The Kingdom of This World, shows that this occurs in other TTs too: la noche arbolada de las cumbres (KW ST 109) [the wooded night of the peaks] the tree-dense night of the mountains (KW TT 120). Although not strictly speaking condensation (the number of word-forms is the same in ST and TT), the choice of tree-dense fits the pattern of hyphenated pre-modifiers seen above and is from the same descriptive domain as branch-arched. Tree-dense is also an extremely unusual compound, there

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Table 3.2. Lexical economy strategies in Carpentier translations ST Phrase

Literal Translation

TT Equivalent

retratos de monjas profesas coronadas de flores (LS ST 45)

portraits of devout nuns crowned with flowers

pictures of flowercrowned nuns (LS TT 39)

páginas amarillas, picadas de insectos (LS ST 123)

yellow pages, bitten by insects

yellow, worm-holed pages (LS TT 109)

el pasadizo abovedado de ramas (LS ST 267)

the passage vaulted with branches

the branch-arched passage (LS TT 238)

paredones resquebrajados y cubiertos de hongos (LS ST 121)

walls crumbled and covered with fungus

crumbling, lichened walls (LS TT 107)

viejos terciopelos mordidos por los hongos (LS ST 130)

old velvets eaten by fungi

old mildewed velvets (LS TT 116)

una guerra sin ventajas (LS ST 123)

a war without advantages

a stalemate war (LS TT 109)

suelos sin huella de hombre (LS ST 234)

lands without trace/ mark of man

uninhabited regions (LS TT 107)

las cañerías sin agua, llenas de hipos remotos (LS ST 58)

the water pipes, full of remote hiccups

out of the gurgling, waterless pipe (LS TT 51)

un mundo ya sin caminos (LS ST 123)

a world now without paths

a pathless world (LS TT 109)

famosa novela moderna (LS ST 103)

famous modern novel

bestseller (LS TT 90)

enormes ranas (LS ST 147)

enormous frogs

bullfrogs (LS TT 132)

en espera de una muerte (KW ST 93)

in wait of a death

in a death watch (KW TT 101)

esa aristocracia entre dos aguas (KW ST 130)

that aristocracy between two waters

this spurious aristocracy (KW TT 142)

en el colmo de la emoción (LS ST 244)

at the height of emotion

hysterically (LS TT 216)

la gente de la aldea (LS ST 267)

the people of the village

the villagers (LS TT 238)

los que habían iniciado el saqueo (KW ST 125)

those who had initiated the sack

the ringleaders in the sack (KW TT 136)

la gente que me rodea (LS ST 243)

the people who surround me

my travelling companions (LS TT 215)

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being but two examples discovered in Google, tree-dense Hillside Street, from a real estate’s particulars of a property,13 and tree-dense hills from a modern romantic short story.14 Of the other premodifiers in Table 3.2, we might note the concealed intertextuality of two: mildewed velvets appears fifty-two times in Google (compared to none in the BNC and one in the Leeds Internet corpus), showing that it is an uncommon but not an original collocation. Most interestingly, it appears in the American nineteenth-century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s horror story Old Esther Dudley from 1839.15 The 475 instances of pathless world in Google include a prominent line from a reflection on nature by the nineteenth-century Canadian poet Pauline Johnson.16 The coincidence of occurrences in North American writing from the nineteenth century is noteworthy. We are not claiming that Onís has deliberately taken these collocations from these specific texts. That would be unlikely, though not impossible. What we might begin to hypothesize is that these kinds of texts containing these kinds of linguistic patterns may have been part of Onís’s reading, her educational and ideological background, and may therefore have contributed to her lexical primings. In this way, the intertextuality would be subliminal. The last item in Table 3.2, the travelling companions example, is both a condensed noun phrase in the TT and an instance of syntactic reduction with the suppression of the ST relative clause. The translator’s preference is for the substitution of a pre-modifier in English (travelling) together with the selection of a more specific noun (companions). Other examples are ringleaders and villagers, which adopt an even more condensed pattern, again suppressing a relative clause (que habían iniciado) or prepositional phrase (de la aldea). Syntactic suppression involving ST relative clauses is generally a common pattern in the TT. It affects cohesion and the mind style (Fowler 1996, see Chapter 1), and is illustrated in the following: las mujeres indias, que aúllan de miedo en sus chozas (LS ST 234) [Indian women, who howl with fear in their huts] Indian women howling with fright in their huts (LS TT 208) las guerras que se ciernen sobre el orbe (LS ST 245) [the wars which hover over the globe] the wars menacing the world’s very existence (LS TT 217) el Apocalipsis que sobre todo aquello se cierne (LS ST 268) [the Apocalypse which over all that hovers] the Apocalypse gathering over it all (LS TT 239).

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The last two examples, which involve the translation of the Spanish verb cernerse by a present participle structure rather than in a subordinate clause, in fact produce a naturalized colligational pattern in English as has been suggested in a corpus study of the semantic prosody of cernerse and its English equivalents (Munday forthcoming). In that study, the most common lexical equivalent was seen to be threatening and gathering over, in present participle constructions. Onís’s choice of the more formal menacing belongs to the same semantic field and syntactic structure, thus conforming to standard TL primings. Economy or concision is really central to Onís’s style, although there are occasional counter-examples (i.e., of expansion) involving the non-cognate verbalization of a nominalized ST mental process (e.g., mis evocaciones LS ST 121, the scenes I had been evoking LS TT 107; tales cavilaciones LS ST 204, those ideas running through my head LS TT 180). Furthermore, Onís is sometimes happy to amplify when this allows her to reproduce a fixed idiom or metaphoric phrase: amargado por sus meditaciones (KW ST 48) [embittered by his meditations] weary of chewing the bitter cud of his reflections (KW TT 52) Contempló largamente la cabeza de Bouckman (KW ST 54) [Contemplated-he lengthily the head of Bouckman He feasted his eyes on Bouckman’s head (KW TT 59) This translation equivalent is repeated a few pages later: contemplaba el cuerpo de Paulina Bonaparte (KW ST 64) [(he) contemplated the body of Pauline Bonaparte] the body he was feasting his eyes on was Pauline Bonaparte’s (KW TT 70). In all these examples, the relatively common ST word is translated by a less common but more idiomatic TT idiomatic phrase. Feasting/feasted his eyes on occur 525 and 580 times respectively in Google, while there are just thirty-seven hits of chewing the bitter cud (thirty-two with the preposition of ).17 Again, corpus examples of the latter reinforce the image of Onís’s style as based on well-established and formal genres. Instances include writing by Washington Irving18 and from popular nineteenth-century fiction.19

88 Style and Ideology in Translation These examples suggest that Onís’s translation unit seems to be what we would call the phraseological level of point of view, based on similar criteria to what Sinclair (1991) later called the “idiom principle” (see chapter 1); that is, linguistic selections based on “semi-preconstructed phrases” (Sinclair ibid.: 110). There is also further indication that Onís combines work on the idiom and collocation levels with poetic rhythm, especially of descriptions of the landscape or natural phenomena. All three examples below introduce alliteration absent in the ST: los riscosos perfiles de Morne Ridge (KW ST 43) [the rocky profiles of Morne Ridge] the rocky ridges of Morne Ridge (KW TT 47) la constante presencia del aguacero (KW ST 43) [the constant presence of the downpour] the pervading presence of the rain (KW TT 47) El mar era verdecido por extrañas fosforencias (KW ST 63) [the sea was greened by strange phosphorescences] The sea glowed green with strange phosphorescence (KW TT 69). It is worth pointing out that none of the cases of alliteration is at all original: a Google found 48,100 instances of rocky ridges; 11,900 of pervading presence; and 16,300 of glowed green. Intuitively or deliberately, Onís is thus introducing into her TTs what is another fixed formula or common priming, based on phonological or aural principles. Shifts on the phraseological level, particularly condensation, idiom, and sound, are the keystones of Onís’s style. On the other hand, analysis of Onís’s translations shows that, even though she would not have had such linguistic and narratological training, ideological point of view realized by modality structures does not significantly shift in her TTs. In fact, the same goes for many of the other TTs which we investigate in this book. In the Carpentier translations, we found just one example of probable being translated by possible and one instance of muy probable (‘very probable’) by may be. This requires further research but there are several possible reasons, the most obvious being that the Spanish and English modal and evaluative systems are a relatively close match, so a translator who adopts a default literal rendering is likely to satisfactorily calque the modality structures in the TT. Shifts on the ideological point of view, which in any case a translator may well wish to conceal if they are deliberate, are perhaps

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more likely to entail shifts in evaluation (e.g., attitudinal epithets) or higherlevel editing, selection, and presentation of the TT. So, evaluation is added through the paratextual commentaries (foreword, afterword), stereotyping and, as we shall see below, the application of a religious veneer at the phraseological level. For spatio-temporal point of view, which in part has to do with the sequencing of elements, common stylistic strategies in The Kingdom of This World do include the maintenance of word order in sentences with marked first-position elements, including VS order in complex sentences. Witness the description of the drums beating in the night prior to one of the revolts: Nunca habían golpeado sus tambores con más ímpetu los encargados de ritmar el apisonamiento del maíz y el corte de las cañas. De noche, en sus barracas y viviendas, los negros se comunicaban con gran regocijo, las más raras noticias. (KW ST 24) [Never had-they beat their drums with more impetus the responsibles for providing the rhythm for the grinding of the corn and the cutting of the canes. At night, in their huts and dwellings, the Blacks communicated with one other with great rejoicing, the strangest news.] Never had those whose task it was to set the rhythm for the corn-grinding or the cane-cutting thumped their drums more briskly. At night in their quarters and cabins the Negroes communicated to one another, with great rejoicing, the strangest news. (KW TT 27) Here, in the first sentence, Onís retains the adverb Never in first position followed by the auxiliary had before introducing the grammatical subject those whose task it was. In the second sentence, the order of the circumstantial adjuncts is retained very closely: thus, the time adjunct At night remains in thematic position followed by the adjunct of location (in their quarters and cabins) and the translation even preserves a rather marked order by postponing the direct object the strangest news to the end of the sentence. However, although this is a general trend, counterexamples can once again be found, suggesting that the translator’s strategy is either intuitive or inconsistent and that she does elsewhere use a standard English order of SV+circumstantial adjunct, as in: A lo lejos sonó una descarga de fusilería. (KW ST 52) [In the distance sounded an unloading of rifles.] A burst of gunfire came from a distance. (KW TT 56) Of ninety-three examples of from a distance in the Leeds corpus, sixty-four occur in sentence-final or clause-final position and just two in sentence-initial

90 Style and Ideology in Translation position. Here, the selection in translation conforms to the standard priming. This is an area worthy of further investigation to see in more detail the patterns which are produced in translation and which adjuncts tend to be more commonly shifted. A second major change, crucial for spatio-temporal narration, involves tense selection. Very often, at intense points in the Los pasos perdidos, such as the fierce storm (LS ST 171, LS TT 183) or the murder of Nicasio, the present tense is used for dramatic effect or to bridge the gap between temporally distant events, such as the recollection of childhood (LS ST 84, LS TT 96). On all these occasions the translation resorts to a normalized simple past tense even when the relation to the present is explicitly expressed in the narration. Thus, the narrator’s realization of the significance of living with an Amerindian tribe is expressed in a long stream-of-consciousness monologue, present tense in ST, past tense in TT, culminating in: vislumbro ahora la estupefaciente posibilidad de viajar en el tiempo (LS ST 181) [glimpse-I now the stupefying possibility of travelling in time] I now saw the breathtaking possibility of travelling in time (LS TT 161). The proximal deictic marker ahora [now] in the ST combines with the present tense to link the present with the possibility of travelling back in time. This combination disappears in the translation, where saw firmly locates the narrative in the past. Later on his temporary return to the metropolis, before attempting the return journey to the ‘primitive’ jungle life, the narrator muses on the relation between times: Yo vivo aquí, de tránsito, acordándome del porvenir—del vasto país de las Utopías permitidas, de las Icarias posibles—. Porque mi viaje ha barajado, para mí, las nociones de pretérito, presente, futuro. No puede ser presente esto que será ayer antes de que el hombre haya podido vivirlo y contemplarlo. (LS ST 258) [I live here, in transit, remembering the future—of the vast country of permitted Utopias, of possible Icariases—. Because my journey has shuffled, for me, the notions of past, present, future. Cannot be present this which will be tomorrow before man has been able to live it and contemplate it] I was here tonight as a bird of passage, remembering the future, the vast land of possible Utopias, the possible Icarias. Because my trip had upset my ideas of past, present, future. This could not be the present, which would be yesterday before man had been able to live and contemplate it. (LS TT 229)

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The shift from present and future in the ST to past and conditional in the TT invalidates the intentional blurring of time frames linked to the narrator’s current context and illustrates how curiously insensitive Onís and her editor seem to have been in this case to the overarching narrative devices of the book. It is also reminiscent of the description of Ciudad Juárez from the beginning of Guzmán’s The Eagle and the Serpent, discussed earlier in this chapter, where the temporal point of view was shifted, on that occasion towards a present tense, with ideological consequences. This shows that Onís does not adopt a systematic translation strategy at the higher level of discourse and narrative point of view, but that those levels are very open to shifting in translation. In The Lost Steps there are also a number of instances where the stylistic choices imply an ideological filter in the translation since they imply judgement based on stereotypical images, in similar fashion to the additions of daintily and blushingly confess in the translation of Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs we discussed earlier. Thus there is the narrator’s stereotypical addition of shrewd to classify Rosario’s peasant way of thinking (shrewd peasant logic LS TT 228, la campesina lógica LS ST 203) and the interpretive addition of gracefully in the ironic description of his wife Ruth’s waiting for his return (standing mournfully and gracefully LS ST 215, irguiendo una silueta plañidera LS TT 243—‘raising a plaintive silhouette’). In the TT a politically left-wing group possesses extremist tendencies (LS TT 47) rather than advanced tendency (la tendencia avanzada LS ST 54) and a tribe in the forest is described as savage Indians rather than fierce (LS TT 264, for indios bravíos LS ST 235). These last two indicate a shift on both the phraseological and ideological planes since they involve naming and evaluation of an Other—in one case political, in the other racial. Savage Indian is in fact a phrase used by Europeans from the beginning of the conquest of the Americas. Onís also adds in a veneer of evaluation based on Christian terminology which seems incongruous in The Lost Steps where one of the central ideas is the value of the forest people’s civilization: an uprising in the main city sets an Austrian conductor on edge, imprecando contra los agitados (LS ST 60), breathing fire and brimstone against the malcontents (LS TT 52), a phrase associated with the Apocalypse and perhaps justified here since it appears as part of the detailed allegorical vision of glory and hell at sunset. On other occasions, the African mandinga (LS ST 99) is domesticated simply as devil (LS TT 86) and the three-plumed serpent gods of the Amerindians, una triada in the ST (LS ST 270), are referred to in Christian terms as the great trinity (LS TT 241). Although some voodoo words in The Kingdom of this World are maintained, it is also true that examples of Christian terminology run through Onís’s translations. In Don Segundo Sombra, for instance, the young narrator is described by the people of the village as un perdito (‘a little lost boy’) which becomes immeasurably stronger and more sinister in the translation, especially as uttered by ‘decent’ people:

92 Style and Ideology in Translation Decía la gente que era un perdidito. (DSS ST 17) [Said the people that I was a little lost boy] The decent people called me a limb of Satan. (DSS TT 11) Finally, religious terminology is even adopted for a political context in Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs. The pro-European Choncho writes off the prospects of the youthful Venezuela of the late nineteenth century with a phrase which Onís (and Fornoff) renders as the Biblical beyond hope of redemption: país perdido ya para la civilización, sin esperanza de remedio alguno (MB 91) [country lost already for civilization, without hope of any remedy] a country beyond hope of redemption (MB Onís 59, MB Fornoff 54).

CONCLUSION We must make clear that this is an analysis of only a selection of Onís’s huge translation effort. Nevertheless, there are certain stylistic trends that have been identified and which may be tested in a more comprehensive analysis at a future date. First of all, through the many reader’s reports she submitted to Knopf Onís played a key role in the major stylistic parameter that is the selection of texts for translation. The whole image of Latin America in English was affected by Onís’s evaluations and preferences (Donoso 1983). On the level of the corpus of texts examined, paratextual framing has been seen to be very important. Prefaces or afterwords are added (e.g., Guzmán, Güiraldes, Freyre) or omitted (Carpentier) and glossaries of cultural terms are often inserted, domesticating and explicating SL items, some of which are borrowed into the TTs. There are other examples of blatant editorial interference in the translation process. This is most notable in the abridgement of many texts, particularly in non-fiction work such as Gilberto Freyre’s The Mansions and the Shanties, where publisher Alfred Knopf himself made the cuts, but also in the fictionalized story of the Mexican Revolution by Martín Luis Guzmán. In this way the texts are remoulded to meet the presumed expectations of the TT audience. In the case of the translation of Don Segundo Sombra, editor Waldo Frank even claims to have rewritten the whole translation. This shows the difficulty of attributing stylistic selections to the translator alone; the text that is placed before the TT reader is an amalgam of inputs that comprise the concept of implied translator. It is only by comparing the STs and TTs that some of these major factors can be uncovered.

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As far as the lower-level stylistic patterns are concerned, Suzanne Jill Levine (2005: 301) considers Onís’s translation of Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão to be a “glaring example” of a standardization strategy in translation that she sees as a typical feature of early translations of Latin American literature: “[Onís] was not terribly accurate and tended to normalize (with flowery language) both the regionalisms of some novels and the original experimental language of others” (2005: 301). However, this verdict, offered with no close analysis of Onís’s work, perhaps more readily betrays a late twentieth-century shift in literary sensitivity and fails to give full due to the sometimes very creative literary renderings which Onís did produce. The translation of Alejo Carpentier’s novels in particular demonstrate Onís’s remarkably rich lexicon, her propensity towards dynamic verb choices, compound pre-modifiers that condense the TT, and poetic devices such as rhythm and alliteration. She sometimes seems to focus the translation on the idiomatic core of a lexical choice, making collocations and structure conform. Initial corpus-based analysis suggests the tentative possibility that some of these stylistic choices are primed to appear in literary genres and adventure stories from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century century North America. The importance of selections on the phraseological plane in Onís’s translations is further emphasized by the treatment of specialized language varieties: this is evident in the privileging of borrowings from French and Latin in the Carpentier texts, compared to the domesticating translations of Spanish colonial terms in various TTs. Strongly dialectal speech, whether from Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico, tends to be standardized into American colloquialisms, although there is some evidence that expletives are sometimes more explicit. Less standard representations of speech and thought are more often dramatized, with the addition of exclamations, than standardized. The spatial point of view of the narrators tends to be retained, which includes the pronoun selection that identifies a narrative with a Mexican narrator, for example, in the Guzmán text. However, the temporal perspective sometimes shifts, especially between past and present. Tenses are selected seemingly to fit the overriding time patterns of the texts irrespective of subtleties of variation in the ST. Most tellingly, there are a number of important shifts of evaluation on the ideological plane. These manifest themselves with the stereotyping of certain characters through the addition of details not present in the ST (as in the portrayal of the dainty Mama Blanca), the periodic use of a moral veneer of religious vocabulary, and the occasional but evident evaluation of politics (extremist tendencies) and civilization (advanced society). These may reveal the ideological base that underpins Onís’s lexical primings and we should recall that Onís had a clear idea of the translator’s responsibilities in the ideological environment in which she worked in the Cold War period (Cohn 2004: 96, see chapter 2). Compared to these, there is very little evidence of shifting

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of psychological point of view through transitivity patterns, even though critical discourse studies in monolingual contexts tend to emphasize transitivity as the key to expressing power relations. Onís was an example of an outstanding translator in the early period of the translation of Latin American writing into English. In chapters 4 and 5 we shall move on to see how the style of translation later shifted at the time of the Latin American Boom, when authors from that region shot onto the world stage.

4

One Author, Many Voices The Voice of García Márquez Through His Many Translators

Chapters 4 and 5 are mirror images of each other in that they consider the author–translator relationship from opposite perspectives. Chapter 4 examines the voice and style of a single author, García Márquez, as it appears in English translation, the result of intervention by various translators; Chapter 5 will then choose the most prominent of those translators, Gregory Rabassa, and investigate how throughout his career he has tackled the voices of a range of different authors. One hypothesis is that the voice of the single author may be fragmented by variation, while in contrast the single translator may impose some homogeneity on the polyphony of voices of the authors he has translated. In chapter 2 we spoke of the prominent influence of a small number of writers in the Latin American Boom, ‘The Big Five’: Borges, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa. In translation, the work of a major author is almost always the output of a range of translators and the Boom authors are no exception. Thus, Borges has been translated and variously re-translated, most recently by Andrew Hurley (Borges 1998, see Introduction); Carlos Fuentes has had several translators, starting with Sam Hileman (Where the Air is Clear 1960, The Death of Artemio Cruz 1964, A Change of Skin 1968) and continuing with Margaret Sayers Peden (Terra Nostra 1976, Burnt Water 1980, Distant Relations 1982, The Old Gringo 1986) and Alfred MacAdam (from Christopher Unborn 1989, onwards). Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels have also been translated by MacAdam as well as by the poet Lysander Kemp, Gregory Rabassa, the late Helen Lane, and more recently by Edith Grossman. However, in the present chapter we shall focus on the writer who has for years been regarded internationally as the leading figure of the Boom generation, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, who stands out in English language publishing because of his huge commercial and literary success. A “phenomenon” in the words of Dan Franklin, his UK editor at Jonathan Cape, Márquez received world-wide acclaim when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Between 1967 and 1983 his One Hundred Years of Solitude sold over twelve million copies in thirty languages (Payne 1993: 18), and even decades later its English translation and the translation of his other best-known novel, Love in the

96 Style and Ideology in Translation Time of Cholera, each continued to sell around twenty thousand copies a year in the UK (Munday 1998a). One Hundred Years of Solitude even featured as one of the twenty-five Landmarks of Modern Literature at the New York Public Library in 1995–1996 and in the UK came eighth in a prominent national vote to choose the best books of the twentieth century.1 Love in the Time of Cholera was voted forty-third in the same contest. García Márquez is therefore the prime example of Latin American success in the Anglo-Saxon world. The focus in this chapter will be on how far the style and voice of the single author, Márquez, is muffled or fragmented in translation. There is certainly fragmentation on the macro-level since his work has been translated by several different translators whose own voices mingle with his (Table 4.1). Table 4.1. First publication dates of García Márquez fiction Title

First publication

Translator

Spanish

English

Eyes of a Blue Dog

1947

1972

Rabassa

Leaf Storm

1955

1972

Rabassa

No one Writes to the Colonel

1958

1968

Bernstein

In Evil Hour

1962

1979

Rabassa

Big Mama’s Funeral

1962

1968

Bernstein

One Hundred Years of Solitude

1967

1970

Rabassa

Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories

1972

1978

Rabassa

The Autumn of the Patriarch

1975

1976

Rabassa

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

1981

1983

Rabassa

Love in the Time of Cholera

1985

1988

Grossman

The General in His Labyrinth

1989

1990

Grossman

Strange Pilgrims

1992

1993

Grossman

Of Lover and Other Demons

1994

1995

Grossman

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

2004

2005

Grossman

One Author, Many Voices 97 As we discussed in Chapter 2, García Márquez’s big breakthrough in Spanish was in 1967 with Cien años de soledad. The translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was funded by the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR) and was undertaken by Gregory Rabassa, contracted on the recommendation of Julio Cortázar, for whom Rabassa had already translated Hopscotch (1966). But in 1967 Rabassa was busy on the novels of the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias and so Garcia Márquez had to wait (Rabassa 2005: 94). An unusual instance of translator power! In the meantime, Alfred Knopf brought out a translation of the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the short stories of Big Mama’s Funeral, both translated by J. S. Bernstein of Cornell University. However, Márquez was apparently dissatisfied with these translations. After One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rabassa continued to translate Garcia Márquez’s fiction until Love in the Time of Cholera, when the translation went to Edith Grossman. In the two decades in which Grossman has been García Márquez’s primary translator, two notable changes have been the speed with which the English translations are published, helped by the fact that Grossman works from pre-publication proofs (personal correspondence), and the translation of some of Márquez’s non-fiction newspaper articles by the same translator. Prior to that time, as can be seen in Table 4.2, much of Márquez’s non-fiction, particularly his journalism, had not been translated into English at all or else had been given to other translators such as Ann Wright, Randolph Hogan, or Asa Zatz: Table 4.2. First publication dates of García Márquez non-fiction Title

First publication Spanish

García Márquez habla de García

Translator English

1979

Márquez De viaje por los países socialistas

1981

Obra periodística

1982

Fragrance of Guava

1982

1983

Wright

Diary of a Shipwrecked Sailor

1970

1986

Hogan

Clandestine in Chile

1986

1987

Zatz

News of a Kidnapping

1996

1997

Grossman

A Country for Children

1998

1998

Grossman

Living to Tell the Tale

2002

2003

Grossman

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The non-translation of some of these texts is a form of censorship, above all as it concerns early political writings. This suggests that the non-fiction genres, though crucial for understanding García Márquez’s left-wing political and ideological background, were not deemed as important by the English-language publishers. However, Edith Grossman now does translate journalistic articles that appear in the English language press, such as the Elián González story which hit the international press headlines in 2000. An additional complicating factor is that Garcia Márquez’s works have tended to represent a mix of fact and fiction. These even include even One Hundred Years of Solitude, where scenes such as the massacre of the United Fruit Company banana workers are identifiably historical. More overt is the fictionalized account of the last days of revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar (El general en su laberinto 1989, translated as The General in His Labyrinth 1990) and the reportage of Noticia de un secuestro (1996, translated as News of a Kidnapping 1997), which in fact was considered to be purely fictional in the UK (Grossman 2003). More recently, García Márquez has published the first volume of his literary memoirs, Vivir para contarla (2002, translated by Grossman as Living to Tell the Tale 2003).

ASSIMILATION INTO THE KNOWN UNIVERSE OF EXPERIENCE It is important to emphasize that the presentation of the English translations of the magic realist Boom authors reinforces the earlier Knopf-inspired image of exotic Latin America. That stylized image that can be seen in the paratextual packaging of the Boom works as well as in the peritextual reviews (Genette 1997), which give an insight into the reception of these books in the English-speaking world. Thus, if we look at the reception of García Márquez in the United Kingdom as an example, up until the publication of El amor en los tiempos del cólera in 1985, he is consistently categorized in the reviews and in the coverage of his award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 merely as a magic realist and a writer of fabulous tales and there is scant attention paid to his political writings. Each new book is compared to Cien años de soledad and his Caribbean is depicted as an exotic and exciting new world. Yet at the same time, this exoticism is mitigated by the common tendency to compare this foreign writing to already assimilated classics of the past: for instance, Jean Franco’s review in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement of the Spanish El otoño del patriarca sets the author’s style alongside that of The Arabian Nights and Alice in Wonderland.2 The reviewer is locating the new works within the readers’ horizon of experience and determining the horizon of expectation (Jauss 1982) regarding the style of the author in this and future works. The reader will go to the book expecting to see traces of already assimilated authors. It is possible that the reviews also affect the translator’s horizons too.

One Author, Many Voices 99 It should be remembered that many of the Boom writers—Cabrera Infante, Donoso, Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa—were based in Europe during the late 1960s or early 1970s and Rodríguez Monegal ran Mundo Nuevo from Paris from 1966 to 1968 (see chapter 2). As well as promoting new Latin American writing in Europe, this helped to place the Boom writers within the framework of the known classics. Thus, in the first major summary of new Spanish American fiction published in the Times Literary Supplement in London (30 September 1965: 867–868) in an article entitled “Southern Crosses,” the new movement is compared to a mix of Balzac and Butor (a comment attributed to Carlos Fuentes himself), García Márquez’s El coronel no tiene quien le escriba acts with “Quixotesque dignity,” the influence of Sherwood Anderson and the American short story is emphasized for the work of Cabrera Infante, and Cortázar’s Rayuela, described as “the first great novel of Spanish America,” is compared to Ulysses. As well as assimilating the writing into the known literary landscape of the English-language readers, the peritext of Latin America also fixes the image of the exuberant natural world, exotic, foreign, and magical. Two years after the “Southern Crosses” article, García Márquez hit the bestseller lists in South America with Cien años de soledad, published in Buenos Aires by Sudamericana. The Spanish ST and the author received a half-page review in the Times Literary Supplement where the main features of the novel were perceived to be its fantasy, exoticism, and comic exaggeration that were considered to be characteristics of the whole Latin American continent: Everything that happens in Macondo is a fantasy reflection of what has happened in Latin America [ . . . ] Cien años de soledad is primarily about the wonder and strangeness of a continent within which the fantastic is the normative. Comic exaggeration is the keynote of the style. (Times Literary Supplement 9 November 1967: 1054) This interpretation of the book and the consequent critical stereotyping of Latin America is heightened by the title of the piece, “Stranger in Paradise,” itself an allusion to a British film. The allusion squares with the article’s attempts to situate García Márquez within the known literary world of the reader—just as the colonel of his earlier work was compared to don Quixote, the García Márquez of Cien años de soledad is compared to Faulkner and Thomas Mann, influences Márquez himself acknowledges. In subsequent reviews, there is then a strong reinforcement of the categorization of García Márquez as a writer of fabulous tales and of the Caribbean as an exotic and exciting world: thus, for the reviewer of the Spanish Eréndira (Times Literary Supplement 29 September 1972: 1140), there is “the apparatus of a fairy tale” at work and the setting “could only be the Caribbean, that fantastic crossroads of race and adventure.” The exotic image sets up a horizon of expectation that is reinforced in Garcia Márquez’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, for which

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Payne (1993) criticizes him for pandering to the stylized, exoticized “outsized” image of Latin America abroad. Horizonal change is only really seen with El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), a book which Dan Franklin, Publishing Director of foreign fiction at Jonathan Cape, considers to have been extremely important in “expanding the market” for García Márquez’s works (personal communication). Of course, although García Márquez has generally enjoyed a positive reception in these reviews published in the United Kingdom, his translators have all been from the United States. This has sometimes led to a clash between the poetics of the translators and that of the reviewers concerning which form of English should be used. One spectacular example of this is the hostile review of J. S. Bernstein’s translation of García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, his first full-length work to appear in English. It was criticized for the use of one word, rooster for gallo, called a “mistranslation (Americanization?)” (Times Literary Supplement 13 August 1971). Two decades later, Edith Grossman’s translation of The General in His Labyrinth was taken to task for the use of expletives such as asshole and prick which made the nineteenth-century revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar “sound like a cop from the Bronx” (Williamson 1991). In contrast, comments on style in reviews from the United States do not mention the American English used but instead treat the language of the TT as if it were the original, in common with the pattern of reviews in English in general where the translator is “invisible” (Venuti 1995). This sometimes leads to bizarre interpretations: a New York Book Review article (Bayley 1994) on the short story collection Strange Pilgrims quotes as a “typical Márquez sentence” one of the few examples in the whole book where Edith Grossman had actually altered the cohesive links by splitting a ST sentence. The site of publishing patronage therefore underpins decisions on the style of the translation and to some extent conditions the reception of the text. In the United States, García Márquez is a world literary superstar whose language could be English. To British reviewers and readers, García Márquez’s voice in translation seems identifiably from the United States. Yet these generalizations conceal the style and variation of several translators. Examples will be taken from the three translators of his fiction work, J.S. Bernstein, Rabassa and Grossman, and from non-fiction texts.

J. S. BERNSTEIN J. S. Bernstein’s translation No one Writes to the Colonel (1968) is notable for its close maintenance of lexical and syntactic structure, adjunct position, sentence breaks, and even intra-sentence punctuation, such as the commas and dashes in the following: Después de afeitarse al tacto—pues carecía de espejo desde hacía mucho tiempo—el coronel se vistió en silencio. (TC ST 13)

One Author, Many Voices 101 [After shaving-self to-the touch—since lacked-he of mirror since was much time—the colonel self dressed in silence] After shaving himself by touch—since he’d lacked a mirror for a long time—the colonel dressed silently. (TC TT 4) The example shows more or less inevitable slight adjustments to take into account the systemic differences between the languages, notably the obligatory change from ST imperfect+length of time (carecía . . . desde hacía mucho tiempo) to TT past perfect+length of time (he’d lacked . . . for a long time) and there is an optional change from preposition+noun phrase (en silencio—‘in silence’) to an adverbial (silently). Apart from this, the lexis and structure of the sentence are very closely calqued, even where this produces the infrequent English expression shaving himself by touch. The calquing of such syntactic structures is a common thread throughout the translation. This is important for the cohesion and mind style of the book, since, unlike later García Márquez works such as El otoño del patriarca (1975, translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch 1976), the Coronel text often groups short, relatively simple paratactic sentences. The next example illustrates Bernstein’s close adherence to the ST structure including sentence breaks and punctuation over the course of several sentences: El médico rompió el sello de los periódicos. Se informó de las noticias destacadas mientras el coronel—fija la vista en su casilla—esperaba que el administrador se detuviera frente a ella. Pero no lo hizo. El médico interrumpió la lectura de los periódicos. Miró al coronel. Después miró al administrador sentado frente a los instrumentos del telégrafo y después otra vez al coronel. (TC ST 30) The doctor broke the seal on the newspapers. He read the lead items while the colonel—his eyes fixed on the little box—waited for the postmaster to stop in front of it. But he didn’t. The doctor interrupted his reading of the newspapers. He looked at the colonel. Then he looked at the postmaster seated in front of the telegraph key, and then again at the colonel. (TC TT 12) Commonly, therefore, little or no shift occurs in these aspects of cohesion on the psychological plane of point of view. In contrast, Spanish VS order is frequent in this ST and it is noticeable that Bernstein prefers to make adjustments to create a normalized SV order in the TT, rather than modifying the choice of verb or using a different syntactic construction, for example a passive. The following is a good illustration: “Si Agustín tuviera su año me pondría a cantar,” dijo, mientras revolvía la olla donde hervían cortadas en trozos todas las cosas de

102 Style and Ideology in Translation comer que la tierra del trópico es capaz de producir. (TC ST 37, emphasis added) [“If Agustín had his year me would-start to sing,” said-she, while stirred-she the pot where boiling-were cut in pieces all the things to eat that the land of the tropic is capable of producing] “If Agustín’s year were up, I would start singing,” she said while she stirred the pot where all the things to eat that the tropical land is capable of producing, cut into pieces, were boiling. (TC TT 15, emphasis added) Here, the difficulty for the translator surrounds hervían, cortadas en trozos (‘boiling-were, cut in pieces’). Bernstein prefers to maintain the lexical core of the intransitive process boiling even if this means delaying it to sentencefinal position and locating it after a very long subject all the things to eat that the tropical land is capable of producing and after a parenthetical adjectival complement cut into pieces. One alternative, maintaining the information structure of the ST, would have been to have made the colonel’s wife the grammatical subject of the last part of the sentence with a transitive form of boil and to have idiomatically translated cortadas en trozos as the single main verb diced, perhaps even using economy in the translation of cosas de comer (‘things to eat’). This would have given a translation along the lines of: she stirred the pot where she had diced and was boiling all the edible things the tropical land is capable of producing. As it stands, the TT information structure is reversed, affecting the sequencing (part of spatio-temporal point of view) and cohesion (part of the psychological point of view). Translation has been carried out on the lexical level, although not in the idiomatic fashion of Onís’s translations analysed in chapter 3. Tellingly, Bernstein’s general concern for lexical and syntactic structure is not maintained at some higher textual levels. The Spanish publication includes page breaks between the seven sections that in the English run on in an almost continuous and deliberate monotony. At the character level, the colonel’s wife is asthmatic and cannot give a rising intonation to her questions. In the ST the absence of intonation is indicated graphically by leaving the intended questions as assertions, but the TT normalizes and explicates them by adding in the question mark: Cual es el apuro de salir a la calle-preguntó. (TC ST 27) [Which is the hurry to go out to the street- (she) asked.] “What’s your hurry to go out?” she asked. (TC TT 10)

One Author, Many Voices 103 Other punctuation that alleviates the formality of the sentence structure in the TT are contractions that are not restricted to dialogue. Two random examples are he’d been taught at school (TC TT 29) and She thought he didn’t (TC TT 5). Interestingly, the latter, a translation of ST Pensó que no (TC ST 15), includes the TT omission of the relative pronoun que (‘that’), a typical device of naturally occurring English rather than translated English (Olohan and Baker 2003). Hence, Bernstein’s language seems to be a mixture of formal lexical and syntactic calquing and the rather less frequent informality of surface-level cohesive ties. Bernstein’s general approach to cultural items, part of the phraseological plane, is to domesticate them, with the exception of accented names such as Buendía and Agustín. This takes various forms: the slimy don Sabas loses his honorific title in the TT and becomes simply Sabas; the colonel’s patched-up clothes make him look like a woodpecker in the ST (TC ST 42) but a magpie in the TT (TC TT 18); the cent by cent spending of money by the old couple becomes penny by penny (TC TT 18); a local Caribbean sancocho de gallo dish (TC ST 44) is generalized to rooster stew (TC TT 19). As we saw above, it was Bernstein’s choice of the word rooster for the main animal character in fact provoked criticism amongst British reviewers for its Americanism. This is hardly a tenable criticism of the translation of a Latin American novel since a narrative set in the Americas and written by a Colombian would doubtless have greater affinity with a U.S. audience than a British one. Indeed, Gregory Rabassa (1984: 37) makes this point and later (2005: 97) specifically states that in his view Márquez needed to be translated for “American readers.”

GREGORY RABASSA It was Gregory Rabassa who was responsible for the ground-breaking translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1970. Like Bernstein, Rabassa often calques the syntax of the original, if not so much the lexis. The following lengthy example illustrates how Garcia Márquez’s own Spanish prose, “Cervantine” according to Rabassa (Hoeksema 1978: 13), lends itself to a relatively trouble-free transfer into English. The following TT passage is virtually a word-for-word translation, with the mere amplification of the verb forms highlighted in bold: Un obstáculo mayor, tan insalvable como imprevisto, obligó a un nuevo e indefinido aplazamiento. Una semana antes de la fecha fijada para la boda, la pequeña Remedios despertó a media noche empapada en un caldo caliente que explotó en sus entrañas con una especie de eructo desgarrador, y murió tres días después envenenada por su propia sangre con un par de gemelos atravesados en el vientre. (OHY ST 139)

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Style and Ideology in Translation A greater obstacle, as impassable as it was unforeseen, obliged a new and indefinite postponement. One week before the date set for the wedding, little Remedios woke up in the middle of the night soaked in a hot broth which had exploded in her insides with a kind of tearing belch, and she died three days later, poisoned by her own blood, with a pair of twins crossed in her stomach. (OHY TT 77)

In these passages, such syntactic calquing, Vázquez-Ayora’s grado cero (1978), is even more evident than in Bernstein’s work (see chapter 5). There is an even longer instance in the painstaking and ironically humorous detail of the path of the trickle of blood from José Arcadio’s wound (OHY ST 182 and OHY TT 113–114), containing fifteen main process verbs, all syntactically calqued to preserve the overwhelmingly paratactic structure of the ST. On occasions, Rabassa even adds formality. This is manifested sometimes in the calquing of lexical structure (e.g., they fired without cease; the colossal troop; deflagration, OHY TT 301) and sometimes through the syntax, as in the description of a complaint about José Arcadio: A los campesinos que no había despojado, porque no le interesaban sus tierras, les impuso una contribución que cobraba cada sábado con los perros de presa y la escopeta de dos cañones. (OHY ST 165) [To the peasants whom (he) had not despoiled, because not to-him interested their lands, to-them (he) imposed a contribution which (he) collected each Saturday with the dogs of prey and the rifle of two barrels] On the peasants whom he had not despoiled because he was not interested in their lands, he levied a contribution which he collected every Saturday with his hunting dogs and his double-barrelled shotgun. (OHY TT 99) Here, the English TT retains the marked first-position indirect object On the peasants and uses the formal object pronoun whom and the formal verb processes despoiled and levied. The amplification of words forms in the above example highlights one major area where Rabassa departs from calquing. This is frequently seen with the translation of Spanish adjectival clauses and occurs from the very first to the very last page: frente al pelotón de fusilamiento (OHY ST 59) [opposite the firing squad] as he faced the firing squad (OHY TT 9)

One Author, Many Voices 105 un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes (OHY ST 59) [a bed of polished stones, white and enormous] a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous (OHY TT 9) hablaba el español cruzado con jerga de marineros (OHY ST 142) [(he) spoke Spanish crossed with slang of sailors] he spoke a Spanish that was larded with sailor slang (OHY TT 80) Macondo era ya un pavoroso remolino de polvo y escombros centrifugado por la cólera del huracan bíblico (OHY ST 447) [Macondo was already/by now a fearful whirl of dust and rubble centrifuged by the wrath of the biblical hurricane] Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane (OHY TT 336). This tendency lightens the syntactic structure and psychological point of view, facilitating the reader’s absorption of the text. On the ideational and lexical level, there is very much a trend towards concision in the TT in the use of compound noun phrases or premodifiers. Some of these are standard translation equivalents, such as hunting dogs and doublebarrelled shotguns, in the peasants example above. However, the illustrative list in Table 4.3 of descriptive hyphenated or compound phrases is reminiscent of some of the lexical features of Harriet de Onís’s work (chapter 3): Table 4.3. Hyphenated or compound pre-modifiers in One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa ST phrase

Literal translation

TT equivalent

un mediodía ardiente (OHY ST 60)

a burning midday

a burning noonday sun (OHY TT 10)

la llanura de amapolas (OHY ST 333)

the plain of poppies

the poppy-laden plain (OHY TT 240)

la luz del alto cielo de sequía (OHY ST 343)

the light of the high sky of drought

un compromiso ineludible (OHY ST 350)

an unavoidable compromise

an ironclad promise (OHY TT 246)

las serenas tardes de naipes (OHY ST 366)

the serene afternoons of cards

breezy card-playing afternoons (OHY TT 268)

the light of the droughtstricken sky (OHY TT 249)

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With the exception of poppy-laden (which still records 190 hits in Google, including poppy-laden head from Oscar Wilde’s poem “Ravanna”), none of the individual compound forms is uncommon. What Rabassa has achieved, however, is to give these pre-modifiers new life in collocation: drought-stricken sky (two hits), breezy, card-playing afternoons (two hits) and poppy-laden plain (zero hits, apart from this book) are evidence of that. Rabassa plays with the rhymings in a very creative way. A particularly noticeable characteristic of Rabassa’s Márquez is the creativity and energy of the lexis and rhythm: noonday sun, poppy-laden, drought-stricken, ironclad in Table 4.3 are all very concrete terms and there are frequent recurrences of this phenomenon throughout the book. This represents an interesting counterpoint to Harriet de Onís’s language, where a key feature was the dynamic choice of verbal process forms. Rabassa’s language is much more creative than J. S. Bernstein’s, using a range of less common vocabulary such as the chancre of blind obedience (OHY TT 246, el incordio de la obediencia ciega, OHY ST 340) and, again like Onís, often words or expressions which seem to have been chosen for their alliteration, sound, or rhythm: los médanos de Singapur (OHY ST 391) the sands of Singapore (OHY TT 289) la azarosa caridad (OHY ST 435) chancy charity (OHY TT 325) los más felices sobre la tierra (OHY ST 436) the most happy on the face of the earth (OHY TT 326). Although marked by some formal lexis, Rabassa’s translation also contains recognizable lexical and syntactic Americanisms. It thus seems more localized than Bernstein’s language, which, notwithstanding the latter’s use of the central term rooster discussed above, used non-dialectal means of adding informality to the text, such as contractions. Examples from Rabassa are: bunch of hoodlums (OHY TT 248); hoodlums (OHY TT 252); decided to go see what was going on (OHY TT 261). Modern uses in Rabassa also include vulgar expressions and exclamations, God damn it! for ¡carajo! and fucks himself up (OHY TT 109) for joderse (OHY ST 179). As well as domestication through the use of modern Americanisms, Rabassa’s One Hundred Years contains examples of domestication through explicitation or adaptation of cultural items on the phraseological

One Author, Many Voices 107 plane. The symbolism of the name of the commander of the firing squad, Captain Roque Carnicero, is made clear with the addition of the phrase which meant butcher (OHY TT 104); the duendes, or spirits, that torment Fernanda and the Catalan bookstore owner Alfonso (OHY ST 433), are the homely Northern elves (OHY TT 323); the card-reading predictions of Pilar Ternera see the replacement of the Spanish pack by international suits, the caballo de oro (OHY ST 384, ‘horse of gold’) card turning into the queen of diamonds (OHY TT 284). This is a noteworthy contrast to Harriet de Onís’s borrowings of the names of the suits in the Carpentier translations. Measurements, too, are translated by Rabassa into approximate imperial units (e.g., ocho litros de café [OHY ST 298] are eight quarts of coffee [OHY TT 210]), with a surprising number of slips: cincuenta naranjas (OHY ST 298) become forty (rather than fifty) oranges (OHY TT 210) and seis kilos de carne (OHY ST 358) become three pounds of dried meat (OHY TT 262) rather than the more exact thirteen pounds (approximately equivalent to the ST six kilos). But there is more to these translations than mathematics: the radius of 122 metres given by Pilar Ternera as a prediction of the location of the treasure (OHY ST 358) is translated by the figure of 388 feet (OHY TT 262), presumably to suggest a precise location rather than a more accurate conversion of 400 feet. Finally, there is the significant choice of naming term to translate the two references to the Spanish creole Papiamento, which is spoken in Carribean islands, principally Curaçao. Whereas the Blacks in the Spanish ST sit outside their houses singing hymns in su farragoso papiamento (OHY ST 271, ‘their dense/muddled papiamento’), in the TT this becomes their disordered gabble (OHY TT 188). With this translation equivalent, the creole spoken by these people, already devalued in the ST, is denied even the status of a dialect or language in the TT. This may be a functional interpretation of the ST item, where the epithet farragoso (‘dense/muddled’) indicates strong disapproval. Although it is true that for a later occurrence of the word (OHY ST 418, OHY TT 311) the translation does retain Papiamento, the initial translation gabble is quite striking in its negative connotations for a creole that has been the object of academic study since at least the 1920s (see Lipski 1994: 111).

EDITH GROSSMAN García Márquez’s other main translator has been Edith Grossman, who took over from Rabassa in the mid-1980s with the translation of Life in the Time of Cholera. Born in Philadelphia, Grossman studied at the University of Pennsylvania followed by a PhD in Latin American literature at New York University. She worked as a university professor and occasional literary translator before her work with García Márquez allowed her to

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devote herself full-time to translation in her early fifties. For an analysis of her style, we shall look at another epic text, the fictionalized account of the last days of the early nineteenth-century Latin American political and military hero, Simón Bolívar (El general en su laberinto 1989; The General in His Labyrinth 1990). There is a range of particularities that mark Grossman’s translation, differentiating it from Rabassa’s work, especially on the phraseological level. First is the large number of foreign words that are retained in the TT. These include local dishes and foodstuffs (tamales TG TT 35, masato TG TT 43, sancocho TG TT 119, hervido TG TT 119, TG TT 184) and other cultural references (Quiteña TG TT 6, TG TT 19, vicuña TG TT 7, papeluchas TG TT 13, bambucos TG TT 72) but also other words which, though not very common, are accepted borrowings in English (imbroglio TG TT 61, fandango TG TT 193). These non-standard forms retain some of the local colour of a semi-historical text but affect the phraseological plane and also the psychological plane, since most of the above are denotational lexical items, some of which might be unknown to the reader. No glossary is provided, in contrast to some of the earlier Latin American translations we considered in chapter 3. A similar tendency can be seen in Grossman’s translation of Del amor y otros demonios (1994, translated as Of Love and Other Demons 1995): foreign words retained, italicized but without glosses, include carreto (OL TT 13), cumbé (OL TT 20), pesos (OL TT 21), real (OL TT 21) mangú (OL TT 32), yarumo (OL TT 47), cuartillos (OL TT 63). Proper names, such as María, also retain the Spanish spelling. The foreignness, or perhaps the modernity, of The General translation is also conveyed in the retention of measurements in the metric system: “His official height was one meter sixty-five centimeters” (TG TT 138). As the last example indicates, American spellings are retained even in the British editions of this work. Other examples of such spellings are: plateaus (TG TT 48), saber (TG TT 53) offense (TG TT 58) and neighboring (TG TT 61). Expletives, an integral part of General Bolívar’s speech and character, are also Americanized and modernized: motherfucker (TG TT 96), pricks (TG TT 131), cunt of a country (TG TT 193), asshole (TG TT 139), bullshit (TG TT 203), the last two being described as pure Caribbean. It is these expletives that were criticized in the Times Literary Supplement review for their Americanisms (see above). However, the use of contemporary, modern idiom is a constant in Grossman’s translations, a cornerstone of her style stretching far beyond García Márquez and even encompassing her approach to the translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote from the seventeenth century.4 Less geographically-specific characteristics of Grossman’s translation are the preference for hyphenated or compound pre-modifying phrases. These are generally even more prominent than in Rabassa’s translations. The following is a small selection from The General in His Labyrinth:

One Author, Many Voices 109 ST phrase

literal translation

TT equivalent

el indio taumaturgo (TG ST 50)

the thaumaturge/ magician Indian

the miracle-working Indian (TG TT 45)

dos troncos esculpidos a golpes de hacha (TG ST 85)

two trunks sculpted with blows of axe

two rough-hewn logs (TG TT 79)

el bergantín de velas cuadradas, bien conservado (TG ST 248)

the brigantine of square sails, well preserved

the well-maintained, square-sailed brigantine (TG TT 244)

discutiendo entre bromas y veras (TG ST 239–40)

discussing/arguing between jokes and truths

during a half-serious conversation (TG TT 236)

ventanas de cuerpo entero (TG ST 140)

windows of full body/ section

the floor-to-ceiling windows (TG TT 133)

There is even an example of a hyphenated noun (the poverty-stricken TG TT 170, for la pobrería TG ST 176) and a compound modifier in the translation of the preface (the distant, fogbound city of Bogota TG ST 271, for la ciudad de Bogotá, lejana y turbia TG ST 273—‘the city of Bogotá, distant and gloomy’). Of Love and Other Demons exhibits a similar phenomenon, for example: an ash-gray dog (OL TT 5) for un perro cenizo (OL ST 13, ‘a dog ashen’) ash-colored dog (OL TT 16) for el mismo perro ceniciento (OL ST 27, ‘the same ashy dog’) centuries-long tupor (OL TT 16) for marasmo de siglos (OL ST 26, ‘stagnation of centuries’) unweighted corpses (OL TT 5) for cadáveres sin lastre (OL ST 14, ‘corpses without ballast’). Single premodifiers also realize syntactic economy, not infrequently incorporating a whole relative clause: las únicas reliquias personales que le quedaban de él (TG ST 266) [the only personal relics which to her remained of him] Her only momentos of him (TG TT 261)

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Style and Ideology in Translation En el interrogatorio preliminar que le hizo a solas (TG ST 252) [In the preliminary interrogation which he made to him alone] In the initial private interview (TG TT 248).

With verb forms, there are examples of economy through the choice of an idiomatic and dynamic equivalent: El doctor Gastelbondo lo llevó de urgencia a la antigua Barranca de San Nicolás (TG ST 237) [The doctor Gastelbondo took him with urgency to the old Barranca de San Nicolás] Dr Gastelbondo rushed him to Barranca de San Nicolás (TG TT 233) le hicieron una grave herida de sable en el brazo (TG ST 58) [he made him a serious wound of saber on the arm] [he] slashed the arm of Captain Andres Ibarra with a saber (TG TT 53). But economy is not systematic, and discrepant tendencies may also be noted. There are frequent instances of amplifications, two-word units (bigrams) comprising pre-modifier+noun that stand as equivalents for a single ST noun. Sound and rhythm seem to be a common factor in these translations with the typical pattern being 2–3 syllables+1–2 syllables: truchimán (TG ST 73) slippery bastard (TG TT 67) bandazos (TG ST 77) lurching swings (TG TT 71) travesura (TG ST 86) clever sally (TG TT 80) bolinche (TG ST 142) noisy mob (TG TT 135) ráfaga (TG ST 261) violent windstorm (TG TT 256) inmundicias (TG ST 264) obscene filth (TG TT 260) vaina (TG ST 271) damn business (TG TT 267).3 One might speculate that the reason for the translation equivalents in this group is a desire by Grossman for semantic comprehensiveness. Where the translator is unable to find an equivalent one-word term in the TL, she

One Author, Many Voices 111 unpacks the sense as modifier+noun: thus, the sense of bolinche comprises noise and disturbance, each reflected in one part of the two-word unit noisy mob. None of the collocations in the list is new, though lurching swings occurs a mere eight times in Google. On the other hand, with the exception of truchimán/slippery bastard, none of the TT equivalents is more frequent in the corpora than its ST counterpart. Unpacking the sense into two common lexical elements does reduce lexical variety but it does not necessarily produce a more standardized or ‘normal’ TL expression. It is unclear whether the examples in this list result from Grossman’s lexical primings (i.e., they are part of her idiolect) or from her translation strategy (i.e. they reflect strategies for circumventing difficult lexis in the ST). We might hypothesize the latter since none is a frequent collocation. Overall, the ST sentence structure in Grossman’s translation is mostly retained and sometimes closely calqued, as in Bernstein and Rabassa. This seems to be a general constant in many translations analysed for this book and is not really surprising as many translators operate on the basis of trying a literal translation first and only modifying if they feel that for some reason it is unsatisfactory. The interesting question is the conscious or subconscious criteria used to determine satisfactoriness. In Grossman’s case, there are three main exceptions to the syntactic calquing norm: (1) the very occasional simplification, division or expansion of sentences; (2) a preference for a cause-result information structure, sometimes reversing the ST pattern; and (3) the movement of circumstantial adjuncts, all of which slightly affect narrative point of view, particularly the spatio-temporal plane and to a lesser extent the psychological plane. 1. Two examples of the division of sentences occur within one page, the first when the General gives advice to his confidant, Iturbide: “Ni tampoco se vaya con su familia para los Estados Unidos, que son omnipotentes y terribles, y con el cuento de la libertad terminarán por plagarnos a todos de miserias.” (TG ST 229) [“Nor go (you) with your family to the United States, which are omnipotent and terrible, and with the tale of liberty will finish by plaguing us all with miseries”] “And don’t go with your family to the United States. It’s omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.” (TG TT 223) As well as evidencing a shift in the syntax and cohesive device, with the ST relative pronoun (que) being replaced by a TT full-stop and subject pronoun It, this example also demonstrates that there is no obvious censorship of ideological content critical to the target culture in the United States!

112 Style and Ideology in Translation The second example illustrates the simplification of a complex clause structure, joined in the ST by en una de las cuales, the equivalent of ‘in one of which’: De modo que Iturbide se fue a principios de diciembre con dos cartas para Urdaneta, en una de las cuales decía que . . . (TG ST 229) [So that Iturbide went off at the beginning of December with two letters for Urdaneta, in one of which (he) said that . . . ] And so Iturbide left at the beginning of December with two letters for Urdaneta. In one of them the General said that . . . (TG TT 224) These occasional simplifications make the style at these points somewhat less dense. Although the number of instances is relatively small, this does represent a difference compared to the work of Bernstein and Rabassa, who more closely calqued the sentence structure. Rabassa often resorted to the converse strategy of syntactic amplification in One Hundred Years and this is seen, but less rarely, in Grossman, as in the following example which concerns the medical assistance that is provided for the ailing General. The TT fills out the syntax with an additional discourse marker (in fact), two added relative pronouns+relational processes (who were and that was), an added modal and a lexical verb (did so and they arrived): Mandó dos [especialistas] con toda clase de recursos, y con una rapidez increíble para su tiempo, pero demasiado tarde. (TG ST 254) [(He) sent two [specialists] with all kinds of resources, and with incredible speed for their time, but too late] He in fact sent two [specialists], who were very qualified, and he did so with a speed that was incredible for the time, but they arrived too late. (TG TT 250) Syntactic amplification is a conventional translation strategy that any translator may employ. That it is less frequent in Grossman than Rabassa reflects a possible difference in style affecting cohesion and the psychological point of view. 2. Grossman shows an occasional tendency for the transposition of clauses from ST result-cause pattern to TT cause-result order. The first two examples below, where the left-shifted clause is highlighted, both involve the construction because of as a translation of the ST por:

One Author, Many Voices 113 El general la tenía por la más bella de la ciudad, pero le resultaba demasiado húmeda para sus huesos por la cercanía del mar (TG ST 184) [The general held it for the most beautiful in the city, but it ended up too wet for his bones on account of the nearness of the sea] The General thought it the most beautiful [house] in the city, but because of its proximity to the sea it was too humid for his bones (TG TT 178) y todos se dieron cuenta de su mal estado de ánimo por las canciones que solicitaba (TG ST 189) [and all realized his bad state of spirit/mind by the songs which (he) requested] [ . . . ] and because of the songs he requested, all of them realized he was in a bad humor (TG TT 183) Analysis of reference corpora suggest that because of is typically primed to occur in the rheme of a clause, no matter what the genre. For example, On March 19, 1574, she established a foundation at Segovia, where the Pastrana nuns had been transferred because of conflicts with the Princess of Eboli.5 In the BNC, eighty percent of occurrences of because of are in rheme position; similarly, in the Leeds Internet corpus just six percent are located in clause-initial position. The translations noted above are certainly marked. Indeed, this TT trend for cause-result shifting is not restricted to the because of construction and involves the fronting of a long appositional phrase, as in the following example, where Wilson accepts the General’s apology: El coronel Wilson se le rindió una vez más, acostumbrado a sus penitencias gallardas, sobre todo después de una borrasca de naipes o de una victoria de guerra. (TG ST 73) [The colonel Wilson yielded to him one more time, accustomed to his gallant repentances, above all after a storm of cards or a victory of war] Accustomed to his gallant repentances, above all after a stormy card game or a victory in battle, Colonel Wilson yielded to him one more time. (TG TT 68)

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The TT cause-result order indicates a preference on the part of the translator for an explanation-fact presentation which affects the psychological plane of point of view of the narration again. However, the most frequent shifts in The General occur with the sequencing of circumstantial adjuncts, particularly of time and place that can have a significant effect on the spatio-temporal point of view. Most commonly, time adjuncts are fronted in the TT, even though ST adjunct positioning could have been retained and even though corpus data shows that sentence-initial position is less common in English. In the sample below, these adjuncts are highlighted: El general Montilla se fue a confirmárselo esa misma tarde (TG ST 155) [The general Montilla went off to confirm it to him that same afternoon] That same afternoon, General Montilla went to confirm the report in person (TG TT 148, emphasis added) El conde de Raigecourt fue esa noche a decirle al general . . . (TG ST 177, emphasis added) [The count of Raigecourt went that night to tell the general] That night the Count de Raigecourt came to tell the General . . . (TG TT 171, emphasis added) Fue ella quien cubrió de flores el camino y dirigió los cantos cuando el cura de la vecina aldea de Mamatoco con el viático a la prima noche del miércoles. (TG ST 267, emphasis added) [It was she who covered with flowers the way and directed the chants when the priest of the neigbouring village of Mamatoco with the viaticum at first night of Wednesday] Just after dark on Wednesday it was she who scattered flowers along the road and led the chanting when the priests from the neighboring village of Mamatoco arrived with the viaticum. (TG TT 263, emphasis added) In general, such adjuncts are primed colligationally to occur in clause-final position in English but are more fluid in Spanish, where clause-/sentence-initial position is frequent. However, there are also genre differences. In travel and history texts, or in narratives where the thematic patterning is based around spatio-temporal point of view, such adjuncts may tend to occupy first position in English (Hoey 2005). The reason for the fronting of adjuncts in The General in His Labyrinth may be because it is a partly historical text

One Author, Many Voices 115 or because of an idiolectal or narratological preference of Grossman’s. It may be that for narratological frameworks Grossman’s conscious or subconscious priming is for the placement of time and space adjuncts in first position. This does tally with findings in an early computer-assisted study of Grossman’s translation of Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992, Strange Pilgrims 1993) (Munday 1998b) and with an example from the beginning of Of Love and Other Demons: Bernarda Cabrera, madre de la niña y esposa sin títulos del marqués de Casalduero, se había tomado aquella madrugada una purga dramática (OL ST 15) [Bernarda Cabrera, mother of the girl and wife without titles of the marquis of Casalduero, had taken that early morning a dramatic purge] Earlier that morning, Bernarda Cabrera, the girl’s mother and the untitled spouse of the Marquis de Casalduero, had taken a dramatic purge (OL TT 6). The left-shifting pattern occurs more commonly for time than space adjuncts. Yet conflicting constraints such as the presence of consecutive time and place adjuncts or a Spanish VS order that is difficult to absorb into English may lead to a different displacement, as in the following example with the place adjunct on the horizon: Hacia las cuatro de la tarde se perfiló en el horizonte el viejo convento del cerro de la Popa. (TG ST 174, emphasis added) [Towards four in the afternoon itself-outlined [V] on the horizon the old convent of the hill of la Popa [S]] At about four o’clock in the afternoon the old convent on La Popa hill was outlined on the horizon. (TG TT 168, emphasis added) The thematic time adjunct At about four o’clock in the afternoon remains in first position, the Spanish VS order has been standardized into SV order (La Popa hill was outlined). What has also been changed is the cinematic viewpoint of the camera which in the ST foregrounds time (Hacia las cuatro de la tarde), process (se perfiló), place (en el horizonte) and only then the realization of what is visible (el viejo convento del cerro). What option does the translator have in such cases to preserve this order? Perhaps only the selection of a very marked VS structure along the lines of: Towards four in the afternoon there could be seen/there came into view on the horizon the outline of the old convent on La Popa hill.

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Such an alternative word order would challenge the reader, but Grossman, like many other translators, prefers to normalize to a SV thematic pattern and then has the problem of where to fit in the place adjunct on the horizon. Perhaps a further conflicting stylistic constraint, which leads to the adjunct being placed in sentence-final position, is a wish to avoid ending the sentence with the verb was outlined. It is on the phraseological plane that Grossman does challenge the reader in this TT, particularly with the phenomenon of naming. The most striking instance is the translation of the noun criollo, a word originally meaning a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas and now used of a person or custom that is local or national to a country of Spanish America (i.e., not foreign). On all occasions in the TT this is translated as American, a word which aptly reflects Bolívar’s vision of a united continent but which challenges the English TL audience’s ideological framework as they will almost certainly be accustomed to associating that term with the United States alone. The translations are: la generación de criollos ilustrados que sembraron la semilla de la independencia (TG ST 84) the generation of enlightened Americans who sowed the seeds of independence (TG TT 78) la flor de la aristocracia criolla (TG ST 169) the flower of American aristocracy (TG TT 161) hija clandestina de una rica hacendada criolla con un hombre casado (TG ST 158) illegitimate daughter of a wealthy American landowner and a married man (TG TT 151). Grossman is creative and challenging with the use of American. Criollo, like other racial and ethnic terms, is a sensitive item. Other translators treat it differently, though the context of situation may exert a strong impact. Thus, Lysander Kemp, poet and translator of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, gives a footnote for criollo as “a person of pure Spanish blood living in the Americas” (Paz 1961/85: 21) to contrast it with mestizo. The translation of the third example in the list also tests the reader’s expectations of gender: there is no ambiguity in the ST since una rica hacendada criolla is feminine and thus necessarily refers to a woman. However, the choice of the non-gender-specific landowner in the TT may trigger the frame or stereotype of a man. This is overturned by the subsequent words,

One Author, Many Voices 117 a married man, which indicate the landowner to be female. These kinds of phraseological choices demonstrate that Grossman is prepared to surprise the reader. Yet, ironically, wealthy American landowner is a known collocation (seven examples in Google, all referring to males), lexically primed to fit the co-texts above. Despite these natural English patterns, the foreignized effect results from their combination in their wider contexts. Lexical priming therefore here has to be considered both at the micro-level of co-text (more or less corresponding to collocation) or semantic prosody and at the higher level of context above genre. Grossman’s choices are not marked at co-text level but they are at context level.

NON-FICTION When we turn to some of García Márquez’s non-fiction, differences of style in the translation are immediately noticeable. First, of course, it is important to remember that not all of his non-fiction work has been translated, though this has changed over time (see Table 4.2). The mid-1980s did see a flurry of non-fiction publications in English, perhaps the most prominent of which was Clandestine in Chile, translated by Asa Zatz. It relates the clandestine return to his native land of the Chilean film director Miguel Littín with the object of filming life under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Complicating the ST is the fact that it was based on a rewriting of a series of interviews conducted with Littín by García Márquez. As far as ‘voice’ is concerned, the preliminary matter sets out to emphasize that it is the Nobel prizewinner’s voice that we shall be reading: “a writer’s voice is not interchangeable” (CC TT, no page). The cover of the TT published by Granta in the UK and Henry Holt in the United States (1987) stresses this again, presumably for marketing purposes since García Márquez’s name sells: “Garcia Márquez retells, in the voice we know from the novels, the adventures of Miguel Littín, clandestine in Chile.” This may give a clue to the style of the TT, since the focus here is clearly on the genre of the adventure story rather than the critique of Pinochet’s Chile conveyed by the detailed cover of the Sudamericana and Plaza & Janés editions in Spanish. The latter classifies the style of the book as “el más puro del reportaje periodístico” (“the purest style of journalistic reporting,” my translation) while the Granta TT includes detective-type questions: “What kind of man trades his own identity for an invented one? What compels an exile to return to the country where he is on the wanted list?” It is the personal quest that is foregrounded rather than a reportage. The genre-shift in translation is again shown to occur in non-fiction. The textual function of the TT is more oriented towards a thriller than to a piece of investigation. Analytical discourse markers are sometimes omitted: on ST 109-TT 58 there is an omission of en realidad (in fact), sin embargo (however), desde luego (of course), and sentence-initial allí

118 Style and Ideology in Translation mismo (right there). Sentence splits are more frequent than in the translation of García Márquez’s fiction and on several occasions whole sentences are displaced, amounting to a significant reordering of the narrative. As an illustration, the following example describes the tense questioning of Littín by customs officers at Santiago airport where he is separated from his underground contact, Elena: Sin saber qué hacer, busqué a Elena con ojos angustiados, ya la encontré impasible en la fila de inmigración, inocente del drama que ocurría tan cerca de ella. Por primera vez fui consciente de cuánta falta me hacía, no solo en aquel momento, sino en el conjunto de nuestra aventura. Iba a revelar que ella era la dueña de la maleta, sin pensar siquiera en las consecuencias de mi decisión aturdida, cuando la supervisora me devolvió el pasaporte y ordenó revisar el equipaje siguiente. Entonces me volví a mirar a Elena y ya no la encontré. (CC ST 27) Not knowing what to do, I looked around for Elena and saw that she was still in the queue, standing solidly, unaware of the tragedy that was brewing so close to her. I was about to announce that she was the owner of the suitcase without considering the consequences of my panicked decision when the supervisor returned my passport and proceeded to someone else’s suitcase. I turned to look for Elena again but couldn’t find her. For the first time I realized how much I needed her, not just at that particular moment but for our entire adventure. (CC TT 12) The second sentence of the ST describes the state of mind of the panicstricken narrator; at that point the reader does not know if Miguel Littín’s recognition of the importance of Elena will be followed by further interrogation or even his arrest and the early end of the mission. The TT rationalizes the description of this scene by displacing that whole sentence, postponing the mental processing until the end of the scene once the immediate danger is over and once the customs officer has passed to the next passenger. It therefore acts as a kind of coda to the episode. In this way, the narrative flow is not interrupted but the suspense is reduced. In this passage, the changes to sequencing and cohesion lead to a standardization of point of view on the spatio-temporal and psychological planes. In fact, stronger cohesion seems to have been a priority in the TT and some extra sub-headings are added and word order shifts are also made to ease the transition between different sections of the book as in the following example describing the preparations for filming: Fue la parte mas fácil, que yo resolví con un breve viaje a los países de origen de cada equipo. Los tres, acreditados en forma y con sus contratos

One Author, Many Voices 119 en regla, estaban ya dentro de Chile y esperando instrucciones la noche de mi llegada. El drama de convertirse en otro En realidad, el proceso mas difícil para mí fue el convertirme en otra persona. (CC ST 12) I managed to arrange this with one short visit to the country of origin of each group. Before I arrived in Chile, the three film crews, formally authorized and with their contracts in order, were already there awaiting instructions, ready to begin filming immediately. That was the easiest part. The Drama of Becoming Somebody Else Becoming another person was the hardest part, more difficult than I could have imagined. [CC TT 3–4] In this example, That was the easiest part is placed at the very end of its section, which facilitates cohesion with the semantically related and contrastive the hardest part on the first line of the subsequent section. Two phrases have also been added in the TT: Before I arrived in Chile and ready to begin filming immediately. These seem to be explicatory additions designed to facilitate the reader’s absorption of the facts. They have the effect of simplifying the mind style. Indeed, other additions, of ideational and evaluative interpersonal material, are not infrequent in this text. Some offer the TT reader extra background material about the 1973 coup that would be useful for interpreting the text: early on, the dictadura militar (CC ST 11, ‘military dictatorship’) is amplified to General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (CC TT 2); a few pages later (CC TT 7), Pinochet’s threat that “If this continues, we will have another 11 September” is explained with the addition of the words “in an ironic reference to the day in 1973 when he had toppled Salvador Allende’s government in the midst of economic chaos”; there is also an added footnote to explain the word momio, italicized in the TT with the note “Momio: a person so resistant to change that he might as well be dead—a mummy” (CC TT 5). Yet these explanations and definitions are of course evaluative simply by the selection of added detail and the phrasing of the definitions. The paratext contains the translatorial presence. At other times there are omissions, of whole paragraphs: two notable instances comprise around a hundred words honouring the assistance of Clemencia Isaura (CC ST 140, CC TT 75) and, potentially more interesting, the non-translation of two sentences (CC ST 125, CC TT 67) about

120 Style and Ideology in Translation the copper industry that indicated that it was nationalized under Allende and re-privatized to its U.S. owners under Pinochet: Cuando Allende subió al poder, su medida más importante, y la más peligrosa, fue la nacionalización del cobre. Una de las primeras de Pinochet fue su restitución a los dueños tradicionales. (CC ST 125) [When Allende rose to power, his most important measure, and the most dangerous, was the nationalization of copper. One of the first [measures] of Pinochet was its return to the traditional owners.] These examples show just how much textual manipulation and editing there is in this TT, affecting the psychological point of view. The question is whether this phenomenon is due to the variable of the particular translator (Asa Zatz) or the genre (non-fiction) or some other factor. The non-fiction samples of other authors translated by Harriet de Onís, analysed in chapter 3, and the analysis of other García Márquez non-fiction in this chapter suggest that it may be a characteristic feature of the genre. This is supported by comments from Zatz himself, whose recollections of the translation are that he played no part in the editing or revision of the manuscript once submitted.6 The Allende example above, omitted from the TT, represents evaluation— positive towards Allende and negative towards Pinochet—suggesting that the latter was merely doing the bidding of his foreign imperial masters. Shifts in evaluation, and modality as a whole, form a pattern in this TT, much more so than in the other translations we have analysed and with a significant effect on the ideological point of view of the narrative. Other added evaluative epithets concerning Chilean events or references can be seen in: la realidad de Chile después de doce años de dictadura militar (CC ST 11) [the reality of Chile after twelve years of military dictatorship] the increasingly desperate situation in Chile after twelve years of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (CC TT 2) el campo de concentración de Pisagua (CC ST 84) [the concentration camp of Pisagua] the notorious Pisagua concentration camp (CC TT 43). The Pisagua example would seem to be an explicitation of the connotation of a cultural reference (the TT audience would probably lack the background knowledge that Pisagua was especially bad), while increasingly desperate in the

One Author, Many Voices 121 first example can be regarded as either dramatization or an indication of political point of view (Chile in crisis under Pinochet). However, another example, describing Allende’s death, shows that the strategy is mixed since the emotive and revolutionary language of the original is sometimes played down: un presidente glorioso había tenido que morir peleando a tiros (CC ST 59, emphasis added) [a glorious president had had to die fighting with shots] a president had to die, gun in hand (CC TT 30). Here, the positive epithet glorioso, attached to the emblematic president, is omitted while the form of his death is left ambiguous in the TT, enabling the interpretation of suicide that was asserted by the dictatorship and is now generally accepted. In addition, there are some instances of added modality which tone down categorical statements from the ST. The first relates to the lack of time to arrange credit cards to support Miguel Littín’s new identity: ésta fue una falla peligrosa (CC ST 22) [this was a dangerous fault] possibly a dangerous omission (CC TT 8). The second refers to Pinochet’s desire to erase the memory of the revolutionary leaders of the past: éste es el fracaso más grave del régimen militar (CC ST 100) [this is the most serious failure of the military regime] this could be the military regime’s gravest failure (CC TT 52). It is uncertain why these changes should have been made but, again, it is not totally consistent and therefore very probably not a conscious strategy. Thus, the following counter-example adds drama to the TT when Littín thinks he is about to be caught: Pensé que era el fin (CC ST 185) [I thought that [this] was the end] Now I had no doubt: this was it (CC TT 101).

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Many of the differences that we have noted in this TT—greater readiness for addition, omission, restructuring, the attempt to turn the genre of the text into more of a thriller and less of a political critique, the shifts of metafunctions other than the textual, thereby affecting the psychological and ideological planes—are also to be found in other of García Márquez’s non-fiction translations even though these are the product of other translators. Relato de un náufrago was published in Spanish in 1970 but not in translation (Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Randolph Hogan) until 1986. Amongst other things, the TT restructures the last paragraph of the prologue and omits García Márquez’s granting of the royalties to “the person who deserves them,” one of the survivors of the sinking. Changes of transitivity, and therefore mind style, are also far more frequent than in the fiction texts we have examined in this chapter. More recently, in March 2000, García Márquez’s short account of the politically sensitive Elíán González story, about the battle over custody of a Cuban boy who had been found afloat off the coast of Florida, appeared in translation by Edith Grossman in The New York Times (USA) and The Guardian (UK) and, in a different translation, on the official Cuban State Granma website. This gives the opportunity to see how the ideological and political context might affect the translation. Interestingly, analysis (see Munday 2002) shows that the ST of 3,146 words is more or less fully translated by Granma (2,998 words) but drastically pruned by The Guardian (2,396) and, most particularly, by The New York Times (1,621). The omissions may partly be due to the space constraints, but it is notable that the rather conservative New York Times especially omits a lengthy discussion of the history of Cuban–U.S. relations. In addition, the occasional political sentiment is altered in the published Grossman translations (la Revolución of 1959 becomes Castro’s Cuba, for instance) and the transitivity structures are quite frequently altered with the result that responsibility is obscured for the wrecking of the boat and of the subsequent tug-of-war over the child’s future. Thus, the serious error committed by the trafficker owners of the boat is passed over by translation into an agentless passive: los responsables del viaje desmontaron el motor desahuciado (ST El País) [those in charge of the trip dismantled the broken-down engine] the engine—a write-off—was dismantled (TT Guardian/NY Times). Furthermore, the role of the Florida relatives in changing the child’s behaviour is also concealed, shifted from a transitive material process lo habían cambiado (‘they had changed him’) in the ST to an intransitive form he had changed in the TT where Elián is the agent of the process:

One Author, Many Voices 123 De modo que [las abuelas] volvieron a Cuba escandalizadas de cuánto lo habían cambiado. (ST El País) [So [the grandmothers] returned to Cuba scandalized at how much [they] had changed him] They [the grandmothers] returned to Cuba outraged at how much he had changed. (TT Guardian/NY Times) 7 These shifts of ideational function affect the psychological point of view of the story and also have an implicit evaluative function that affects the ideological plane: so, for instance, whether Elián changed of his own free will or was changed by his Miami-based relatives will have an important bearing on the reader’s evaluation of the propriety of the boy’s possible return to Cuba.

CONCLUSION García Márquez is the most widely known and most successful of the Latin American Boom writers. Throughout his career he has also been a consistent supporter of Fidel Castro and his non-fiction writing and journalism is a key part of his work. The analysis in this chapter has shown that his nonfiction texts have often been downgraded in translation into English, either not being translated at all or else subject to editing and attempted genre shifts that are not imposed on his fiction. Despite Edith Grossman’s involvement in later years, a key finding is that the translation style of Márquez’s non-fiction has differed from that of his fiction. With regard to the three translators of the fiction works, there is a constant trend towards Americanization, noted in the United Kingdom press reviews, which suggests that Márquez fictional voice and style have some coherence in English. Nevertheless, among the three translators themselves, all academics, there are stylistic differences: (1) Bernstein’s lexical and syntactic calquing; (2) Rabassa’s lexical core, syntactic amplifications, concrete creativity, and colloquial Americanisms; (3) Grossman’s non-standard foreign forms, strong expletives, compound pre-modifiers and adjunct displacement, and her willingness sometimes to challenge the expected norms of the TL. In chapter 5 we shall now consider in more detail the style of perhaps the most celebrated of these translators, Gregory Rabassa.

5

One Translator, Many Authors The “Controlled Schizophrenia” of Gregory Rabassa

This chapter is the mirror image of chapter 4. Just as a single author may be translated by many translators, so the major literary translators described in this book have all translated a wide range of authors. This was the case with Harriet de Onís, whom we considered in chapter 3 and who was the major translator of Latin American literature until the 1960s. When the Boom brought Latin American literature to the forefront of world attention, it was initially through the work of Gregory Rabassa and his translation of the two landmark works of the 1960s: Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Analysis of Rabassa’s style, and implications for the ‘voice’ of his many authors, will form the basis of this chapter, but it must be remembered that Rabassa is a case study and that it is common for literary translators to modulate an array of voices: Helen Lane, who died in 2004, worked from Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and translated authors including Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Amado, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Nelia Piñón and Marguerite Duras; Margaret Sayers “Petch” Peden is the translator of the middle novels of Carlos Fuentes as well as much of the work of Isabel Allende and classics by Juan Rulfo and Horacio Quiroga from an earlier era; and Edith Grossman, a New Yorker like Rabassa, has translated novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, Severo Sarduy, Eliseo Alberto, and Mayra Montero, in addition to García Márquez. Translators are routinely asked, or choose, to cope with very many different ‘styles’ from a range of authors. In his memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Gregory Rabassa discusses the twentyseven authors whose book-length works he has translated in a career beginning in the early 1960s and spanning more than four decades: This varying array of personalities, styles, languages (Portuguese and Spanish), and nationalities all funneled into the work of one translator reveals how this last must in some way undergo a kind of controlled schizophrenia as he marshals his skills at mutability. (Rabassa 2005: 49)

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This “controlled schizophrenia,” and the effect it has on translator, author, and reader, is the subject of this chapter where we consider a sample of the work of Rabassa, who, perhaps more than any other translator, has shaped Latin American writing in English. Yet narratology would suggest that the interplay of voices is theoretically far more problematic than Rabassa claims in the passage that follows the above quote: My own experience in this matter has not been all that complex or worrisome. As I have said before, I follow the text, I let it lead me along, and a different and it is to be hoped proper style will emerge for each author. This bears out my thesis that a good translation is essentially a good reading; if we know how to read as we should we will be able to put down what we are reading in another language into our own. (Rabassa ibid.: 49–50) This shows how Rabassa views the translator’s role as essentially passive, being led by the author and revelling in what he later describes as “my casual lack of system” (ibid.: 68), sometimes in fact claiming to have read the source text for the first time as he was translating it. Like Margaret Sayers Peden (1987: 9, see chapter 1), Rabassa says that the translator must listen to voices, in his case the characters’ (ibid.: 173), but he views himself as even more invisible than most other translators. Speaking of his pleasure in translating the work of two Portuguese novelists, João de Melo and António Lobo Antunes, he says “I must never offend this unique grace with any hint in my translations that I am lurking behind the originators” (ibid.: 171). Rabassa was born in New York in 1922, the son of a Cuban sugar broker and a New York/Manchester mother. His undergraduate degree was in Romance languages. His master’s thesis was on the poetry of the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno and his doctoral dissertation on the representation of black characters in Brazilian fiction (ibid.: 22–23). Apart from those classes that were part of his undergraduate course, his translation training amounted to interlingual paraphrase in his encoding and decryption work for the intelligence services during the Second World War (ibid.: 37–38) and his contact with Federico and Harriet de Onís at Columbia. Rabassa had studied there for his master’s and doctorate and was subsequently given a teaching post by the department head, Federico, whom he terms his “mentor” (Rabassa, quoted in Bach 2005). When it came to his first steps in translation, Rabassa recalls that it was Harriet de Onís who gave him advice (Balch 1998: 48, see chapter 3). As a graduate student at Columbia, Rabassa played an active role in presenting Latin American writing when he was one of the three assistant editors of the literary journal Odyssey Review when it was launched in December 1961 in Richmond, Virginia, by the newly formed Latin American and European Literature Society. The front matter of the journal stated that its mission was to publish newly translated writing “to strengthen

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existing literary and cultural ties and to establish new ones between the United States and the countries of Latin America and Europe.” As well as overseeing the publication of material from Latin America, Rabassa also translated for the review, at first under a series of pseudonyms (Rabassa 2005: 24). The first translation which bears his name, in Volume 2.1 (March 1962), was of the Peruvian playwright Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s one-act play The Suitcase (Bondy 1962). Even so early in Rabassa’s translation career, it is interesting to see the prominence of colloquial American idioms, suggesting a very domesticating strategy yet one that is much more distinctive than Onís’s translation of spoken language. The shifts here occur on the phraseological plane of point of view with the use of non-standard, idiolectal forms of English: I could damned well use a drink (TS 192) You’re a genius at hitting the nail on the head (TS 193) You’re a hobo then? (TS 193) Phooey! (TS 195) They’re ramrod types (TS 198) By George you’re right (TS 199) Holy smokes! (TS 204) A regular hoodlum (TS 204). In 1967 Rabassa was awarded the National Book Award for Translation for his translation of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966) which led to the commission to translate García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which appeared in Spanish in 1967. Thus, the two great masterpieces of the Boom were translated by a single translator. A previous study of Rabassa’s style, based on excerpts of these two books plus his translations of El otoño del patriarca (1967; Autumn of the Patriarch, 1970) and Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La catedral (1969; Conversation in The Cathedral, 1975), was conducted by the translation theorist Gerardo Vázquez-Ayora and published in the International Federation of Translators’ journal Babel in 1978. Based on the translation procedures model of Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/95), adapted for Spanish-English translation by Vázquez-Ayora himself (Introducción a la traductología, 1977), the main findings were that Rabassa’s style was marked by “brilliant equivalences at the level of the smaller sign [i.e., word level] and outstanding skill at syntactic normalization which is higher up the scale

128 Style and Ideology in Translation of idiomaticity” (Vázquez-Ayora 1978: 8, my translation).1 An example of this from Cortázar’s Hopscotch is the “amplificatory normalization” of the following reference to a proverb, where the added TT material is highlighted in bold: Pero también podía ser que su punto de vista fuera el de la zorra mirando las uvas. [But also could be that your point of view were that of the vixen looking at the grapes] But it’s also possible that your point of view is the same as that of the fox as he looks at the grapes. (in Vázquez-Ayora 1978: 9, emphasis added) Nevertheless, Vázquez-Ayora classifies the majority of Rabassa’s translation procedures as belonging to the grado cero (or zero degree) of translation, that is limited to a lower linguistic level, not mechanical but still restricted to what Vinay and Darbelnet had classed as “direct translation.” Furthermore, while his analysis (ibid.: 15–17) shows Rabassa’s “exaggerated” use of amplification, including explicitation, VázquezAyora says there are scarcely any instances of omission and very few of concentration. He also counts a high number of “lexical imprecisions,” claiming seventy-four (!) in the first three chapters of Autumn of the Patriarch alone, including the translation of depurativos as condoms, rather than depuratives or blood cleansers, and a las tres as two times, rather than three). At the higher levels of stylistic analysis, of Vinay and Darbelnet’s “oblique translation” and Nida’s “dynamic equivalence” (Nida 1964; Nida and Taber 1969), Vázquez-Ayora feels that Rabassa overly adheres to the discursive order of Spanish and does not exploit the full dynamism of English idiom, such as in verbs of movement: “if a Spanish-English translation is not very vigorous, it is because it has not made use of the resources of compression, compactness and the expressive strength of English” (Vázquez-Ayora 1978: 14, my translation). No evidence is given for this assertion of Spanish-English contrast, even if, intuitively, it feels plausible. It might explain the strength of the translations from Harriet de Onís observed in chapter 3, where ‘common’ Spanish verbs were often translated by more dynamic English equivalents. However, it should be noted that Vázquez-Ayora does actually give a (smaller) number of counter-examples of what he terms stylistic gain in Rabassa’s work through compensation or concentration, including the following two from Hopscotch: tirado en un rincón [thrown in a corner]

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flung into a corner (emphasis added) llorando a gritos [crying in shouts] sobbingly. Vázquez-Ayora’s identification of translation shifts (for this is what it amounts to) is a useful close textual analysis of extracts from some of Rabassa’s works, but suffers from the same deficiencies inherent in this kind of approach: namely, the problem of classifying phenomena that are multi-faceted and often fuzzy, the lack of a link to the function of language, or even the context of the passage, and no consideration at all as to the literary qualities of a phrase nor any attempt to justify subjective judgements by reference to an external language norm, which, as we discussed in chapter 1, is nowadays more feasible with the development of reference corpora. Our analysis, based around translational stylistics and narrative point of view, would consider the syntactic amplifications of the fox as he looks at the grapes type as affecting cohesion and the psychological plane since it strengthens and explicates cohesive ties that are left implicit in the ST. The lexical verbal shifts occur on what we, following Uspensky, classify within the phraseological plane. The grado cero occurs on various narrative planes since it may represent a calquing of a range of lexicogrammatical features affecting all metafunctions and thus all planes; based on a contrast between ST and TT, it is a central feature of Rabassa’s translational stylistics. Despite the differences in the model of analysis, we can compare Vázquez-Ayora’s findings with our own from the investigation of Rabassa’s One Hundred Years of Solitude carried out in chapter 4. Our findings support Vázquez-Ayora’s grado cero in the prominent syntactic calques and in syntactic amplifications (as he faced the firing squad). This is perhaps ironic given the perception expressed by García Márquez himself that the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the original because “the language, as it is compressed in English, gains in strength” (García Márquez and Apuleyo Mendoza 1982: 81). The analysis in chapter 4 also shows that there is explicitation and domestication of cultural items on the ideological level, sometimes with a pejorative tone (Papiamento-gabble). What Vázquez-Ayora calls the “brilliance” of some of Rabassa’s lexical equivalents corresponds to some extent to our examples of creative, concrete translations (ironclad promises, chancre of blind obedience). However, some of the features identified in chapter 4 were different. Hence, we identify compound adjectives, some of which are also examples of strong energy and rhythm and concrete language (poppyladen, drought-stricken, etc.), creative vocabulary that often plays with

130 Style and Ideology in Translation sound (the sands of Singapore) and the force, informality, and, to some extent, personal idiosyncrasy of the colloquialisms (bunch of hoodlums) and vulgarisms (God damn it). The objective of the present chapter is to compare these findings with other work from Rabassa to see whether he employs similar strategies, thereby reducing the difference between authors, whether there is an identifiable style that he lays over the ST words. We will start with a comparison with the translation of Cortázar’s slightly earlier Hopscotch. Although they are both experimental, Hopscotch and One Hundred Years differ enormously with regard to content and setting of the narrative: the first part of Hopscotch is located in the bohemian life of Paris, the second in Buenos Aires, while One Hundred Years draws on the myth, history, and colour of the Colombian Caribbean. These are multiple variables that complicate comparisons of the translation style: the most obvious are Cortázar’s Argentine slang and experimental prose, the more contemporary and artistic context, and the location of the first half of the novel in Europe. Additionally, the ST and TT of Hopscotch are perhaps less differentiated if we are to believe Rabassa that, as they worked closely together, Cortázar at times actually altered his ST to fit a particularly interesting translation solution (Rabassa 2005: 43). One noticeable change, not commented on by Rabassa, concerns the choice of jazz lyrics that dot particularly the first half of the book, set in Paris. Rabassa and Cortázar shared a love of jazz and developed a long friendship (Bach 2005). As in One Hundred Years, grado cero in the form of syntactic calque is certainly prominent again. In Hopscotch, such calques can even extend for half a page or more (HS ST 142, HS TT 121; HS ST 324, HS TT 325). Despite this, there is a noticeable difference in the way Rabassa treats the cohesive structure of Cortázar’s work compared to One Hundred Years. There are more sentence breaks added in Hopscotch, which at certain points affect the experimental psychological point of view—seven in the first three pages of the TT. The example below is from the very first page. The narrator, Oliveira, describes how he used to meet up in the street with his girlfriend, La Maga: De todas maneras subí hasta el puente, y la Maga no estaba. Ahora la Maga no estaba en mi camino, y aunque conocíamos nuestros domicilios, cada hueco de nuestras dos habitaciones de falsos estudiantes en París, cada tarjeta postal abriendo una ventanita Braque o Ghirlandaio o Max Ernst contra las molduras baratas y los papeles chillones, aun así no nos buscaríamos nuestras casas. (HS ST 21) [Anyway I went up until the bridge, and the Maga was not [there]. Now the Maga was not in my path, and although we knew our addresses, each hollow of our two rooms of false students in Paris, each

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post card opening a little Braque or Ghirlandaio or Max Ernst window against the cheap mouldings and gaudy paper, even thus we would not seek our houses.] In any case, I went out onto the bridge and there was no Maga. I did not run into her along the way either. We each knew where the other lived, every cranny we holed up in in our pseudo-student existence in Paris, every window by Braque, Ghirlandaio, or Max Ernst set into cheap postcard frames and ringed with gaudy posters, but we never looked each other up at home. (HS TT 3) In the TT segment corresponding to the second sentence of the ST, there are three important changes: (1) the omission of the sentence-initial spatiotemporal deictic marker Ahora (‘Now’), indicating the location of the narrator; (2) the change of transitivity from la Maga no estaba en mi camino (‘the Maga was not in my path’) to I did not run into her along the way, which makes the narrator a more active participant; and (3) the replacement of the hypotactic construction y aunque (‘and although’) by the full stop before We each knew, altering the cohesion and the psychological point of view. The result is a more simplified narrative structure, somewhat surprising in view of the fact that a grado cero translation is far from impossible here and that, in One Hundred Years, Rabassa seems to make a special effort to calque the syntax of the original as far as possible. On the other hand, the dynamism of his Hopscotch does pervade this extract, especially in the pattern of amplified verb forms, many of which are colloquial phrasal verbs: went out onto, run into, holed up in, set into, ringed with, looked each other up. This is an interesting difference on the phraseological plane compared to Onís’s work discussed in chapter 3 and also partially contradicts Vázquez-Ayora’s assertions about Rabassa’s style: for Rabassa, we are talking of verbal processes which achieve dynamism through amplification and colloqualism rather than Onís’s condensation and literary collocation. In both cases, the English is more varied than the Spanish and this area of phraseological contrastive difference between two languages would seem to be one that would benefit from much more detailed investigation in future studies. Many changes occur to textual function and spatio-temporal point of view, notably the sequencing of circumstantial adjuncts of space which Rabassa often shifts to clause-final or sentence-final position. A number of examples are to be found of this occurring with place adjuncts which are right-shifted from the sentence-initial position where their function was to mark location as the textual theme of the sentence: En Montevideo no había tiempo, entonces (HS ST 78) [In Montevideo, there was no time, then]

132 Style and Ideology in Translation There was no such thing as time in Montevideo in those days (HS TT 60) En Odessa también me han hablado de tiempos así. (HS ST 85) [In Odessa too [they] have told me of times thus] They told me about times like that too, in Odessa. (HS TT 66) The example below involves more than a simple right-shift of the matter (hyaline glass) through which the phenomenon is sensed: A través del vaso hialino Gregorovius admiró el desapegado arder de las dos velas, tan ajenas a ellos y anacrónicas como la corneta de Bix entrando y saliendo desde un tiempo diferente. (HS ST 60) [Through the hyaline glass Gregorovius admired the listless burning of the two candles, as foreign to them and anachronistic as the cornet of Bix entering and leaving a different time] Gregorovius admired the listless burning of the candles through the hyaline glass, it was so foreign to all of them and so out of their time, like Bix’s cornet, coming and going from a different time. (HS TT 42) Here, the visual point of view is altered; the ST guides the viewer’s eyes through the glass to the candle, whereas the TT sentence begins with a standard English SVO-circumstantial adjunct order with the glass in final position in the clause. Yet this example is especially interesting because Rabassa includes a syntactic abnormality. Following the adjunct, a comma introduces a parallel main clause it was so foreign, which itself replaces a ST adjectival clause (tan ajenas . . . ). This shows that Rabassa is not unwilling to experiment with the cohesive structure, but any experimentation is non-systematic. There is also a desire here to avoid formal Latinate vocabulary (anacrónicas is diluted as out of their time rather than anachronistic) and there is the syntactic calquing of the noun form burning (for el arder). We are now beginning to build a picture of features that mark Rabassa’s translations. The identifier that is most obvious, perhaps, is his propensity to use modern colloquialisms in the dialogue, affecting the phraseological plane. These colloquialisms are specifically contemporary Americanisms (a very broad term, admittedly), or at least part of Rabassa’s idiolect, since the forms he uses are inevitably conditioned by his age, social, geographic, and educational backgrounds and, in the case of groovy, whatever was the

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rage in the 1960s. We have already listed some from his early translation of the Bondy play in Odyssey Review. The following is merely a selection that appears in Hopscotch: el canto se iba al diablo (HS ST 33) [the singing was going to the devil] her singing went to pot (HS TT 15) Te falló, pibe, qué le vas a hacer. (HS ST 144) [[He] failed you, kid, what are you going to do about it] I [sic] crumped out on you, baby, what you going to do about it. (HS TT 124) Que macana, che, yo en realidad me estaba mandando la parte. (HS ST 306) [How [expression of approval], [filler], I in reality was ordering the part] Groovy, hey, I really had it made. (HS TT 278) Déjate de jorobar (HS ST 172) [Stop being a nuisance] Quit belly-aching (HS TT 150) ha sido un día padre (HS ST 174) [[it] has been a terrible [lit. father] day] it’s been a daddy of a day (HS TT 151) Lo que nos va a escorchar, madre mía. (HS ST 277) [How [she] is going to bug us, my mother] She’s going to ball things up, damn it. (HS TT 250) Related to colloquialisms are the translations of vulgarisms and expletives. In Hopscotch, Rabassa uses God damn it (HS TT 18) for carajo (HS ST 36). The exclamation Jesus is used for madre mía (HS TT 91, HS ST 111) and for the Argentine expressions Que barbaridad (HS TT 225, HS ST 251; HS TT 265, HS ST 239) and che, as in the following:

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Style and Ideology in Translation Che, pero pibe, qué manera de estropearse el día. (HS ST 234) [[Interjection], but kid, what a way to ruin the day] But, Jesus, old buddy, what a way to piss away a day. (HS TT 260)

The use of the American colloquial transitive phrasal verb piss away is much more informal than estropearse, thus compensating (even overcompensating) for any loss of informality elsewhere. Rabassa does not tone down strong profanities and this may well be a conscious strategy since it is known that to Knopf editor Herbert Weinstock he expressed “concern about the genteel translations we get of gutsy Latin American stuff” (quoted in Rostagno 1997: 47). Examples in Hopscotch include: “Joder,” pensó Oliviera. “Joder con el programa.” (HS ST 122) [“Fuck,” thought Oliviera. “Fuck with the programme”] “Shit,” Oliviera thought. “What a fucking program.” (HS TT 102) podía irse a la puta que le parió (HS ST 226) [could go to the whore that bore him] could go fuck the whore that bore them (HS TT 201) la puta que te parió (HS ST 259) [the whore that bore you] motherfucker (HS TT 233). One curious aspect that seems to reveal the translator’s stylistic preferences concerns the semantic field of madness, particularly important in Hopscotch since the final part of the book deals with the running of a psychiatric institution. Rabassa several times prefers variations on the word nut: ese chiflado (HS ST 138) this nut (HS TT 117) es demasiado idiota (HS ST 144) it’s all been too nutty (HS TT 124) el manicomio (HS ST 296) the nuthouse (HS TT 268) There were also a range of other terms:

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un cretinacho (HS ST 245) a boob (HS TT 219) un tipo raro (HS ST 257) an oddball (HS TT 231) estás completamente chiflado (HS ST 369) you’re completely off your rocker (HS TT 339) el loquero (HS ST 371) the whole loony-bin (HS TT 341) no sea idiota (HS ST 378) don’t be an ass (HS TT 348). Further evidence for these terms being part of Rabassa’s idiolect is provided by the fact that Rabassa actually uses one of them in his own memoirs in the description of the process of translating Cortázar’s later 62: Modelo para armar (1968; translated as 62: A Model Kit, 1972): “The oddballs of Hopscotch here become true weirdlings” (Rabassa 2005: 56), providing further evidence for the strange finding that the semantic field associated with madness may be a useful area for the study of idiolect. It encompasses several planes: phraseological, certainly, but also ideological, with the inherent evaluation that underpins the choice of epithet. Non-standard language of various kinds is key to the Cortázar ST. In an interview with Thomas Hoeksema in 1978, for the first issue of Translation Review, Rabassa mentions the difficulty of translating the Argentine dialect although he claims that, since in its local context it is not exotic, exoticizing translation should be avoided (Hoeksema 1978: 13). In Rayuela, it is characteristically illustrated by the filler che which punctuates the dialogue, for example Soy un incurable, che. (HS ST 42). Rabassa’s main strategy is to omit it (e.g., I’m incurable HS TT 24)2 or to use the English filler eh (Hablemos, che . . . HS ST 203, Let’s talk, eh . . . HS TT 178) or huh (Quién llora, che? HS ST 73, Who’s crying, huh? HS TT 93). Presaging his later translation of the creole Papiamento as gabble in One Hundred Years (see chapter 4), Rabassa translates Cortázar’s reference to el peor lunfardo (HS ST 75) as the basest slang (HS TT 94), erasing the culture-specific reference of the Buenos Aires lunfardo. However, the French expressions which often appear in the conversations in the Spanish text, above all in the first part in Paris, are generally retained in the TT: hubo un interludio de cierraparaguas comment ça va a ver si alguien enciende un fósforo está rota la minuterie qué noche inmunda ah oui c’est vache (HS ST 56) there was an interlude of umbrella-closing, comment ça va, who’s got a match, the minuterie is broken, what a lousy night, ah oui c’est vache (HS TT 38, emphasis in the original).

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Rabassa (2005: 54) is at pains to point out that this was what we would call a deliberate macro-strategy on his part to retain the French and not to “dumb down” the text for the English audience. Importantly, though, the italicization in the TT makes the French phrases more prominent and more foreign. Graphology is here used to convey markedness. The insertion of commas similarly ensures the French is separated from the narrative whole, rendering a deliberately hybrid and experimental stream-of-consciousness of the ST conversation as a more conventional exchange in the TT. At other points, Rabassa even adds some extra italicized borrowings from French, calques of the ST Spanish. Some of these are standard borrowings in English: el golpe de gracia (HS ST 70) le coup de grâce (HS TT 52) agente provocador (HS ST 198) agent provocateur (HS TT 173). Others are more indicative of cultural concepts and terms that are significant for Parisians but are not standard borrowings in English: el sexto distrito (HS ST 224) the sixième (HS TT 199). At the macro-stylistic level, there is definitely a hierarchy of language borrowing. Just as in Onís’s Carpentier translations, French terms in an English text are deemed more acceptable, perhaps because many readers would be expected to have a knowledge of that language from school, thus mitigating the foreignization; Spanish terms are borrowed less frequently, even though the second half of the book takes place in Buenos Aires, one exception being the drink mate, a cultural tradition of Argentina and Uruguay. When it comes to the frequent passages in the novel that play with language, Rabassa employs various strategies. The example below plays with the word pureza / pureness and renders Damn the language in the Spanish ST as the Spanish Maldita lengua in the English TT to preserve a foreign element amidst the word play: Pureza. Horrible palabra. Puré, y después za. [ . . . ] Entender el puré como una epifanía. Damn the language. Entender. No inteligir: entender. (HS ST 93, emphasis in original) Pureness. Horrible word. Pea-your, then ness. [ . . . ] Pea-your, understand it like an epiphany. Maldita lengua. To understand. Not to make sense: to understand. (HS TT 73–74, emphasis in original) Rabassa’s solution is to maintain the sound of the word pureness, creating a syllable that is a food (pea in the TT, puré in the ST), even if the

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whole makes little sense. This solution is on a lexical and phonological level rather than the discourse level of the later mould-breaking hybrids and alterations used by translators such as Suzanne Jill Levine which we shall examine in chapter 8 and which manifest a much stronger presence of Spanish. The manipulation of sound, especially the use of alliteration and, sometimes, rhyme, is a frequent creative and poetic trait in Rabassa’s language. This occurs even more frequently than was the case Harriet de Onís’s work. The following are all instances of added sound effect in Rabassa’s Hopscotch: una vaga universidad para perros sabios (HS ST 92) [a vague university for wise dogs] some hazy university for grubby grinds (HS TT 72) una especie de cacareo alternado que confundía las palabras y las interjecciones (HS ST 142) [a kind of alternated cackling which confused words and interjections] a kind of cackling counterpoint that alternated between words and interjections (HS TT 121) estaba viendo grandes fosfenos verdes, entresueño recapitulador de la velada (HS ST 225) [[he] was seeing great green phosphenes, recapitulating half-dream of the party] he was seeing great green phosphenes in a half-sleep remembrance of the party (HS TT 200) las prometizaciones augurales (HS ST 323) prophetic promissorations (HS TT 295) mantenerse a flote contra viento y marea, contra el llamado y la caída (HS ST 355) [to keep oneself afloat against wind and tide, against the call and the fall] keeping afloat against wind and tide, against call and fall (HS TT 326).

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The creativity of Rabassa is highlighted by the first two examples in this list: both grubby grinds and cackling counterpoint are extremely unusual collocations (only two other instances of each to be found in Google), whereas the Spanish perros sabios and cacareo are well-known (254 and 35,000 hits respectively). Even call and fall stands out because of its use as a noun-phrase; the 110 instances in Google are all verbal uses. Rabassa has to be creative as well with glíglico (Gliglish), the invented, private language of Oliveira and La Maga, a mélange of invented content words and real syntactic and morphological elements, for example in the description of La Maga’s love-making: —¿Pero te retila la murta? [ . . . ] ¿Y te hace poner con los plíneos entre las argustas? —Sí, y después nos entreturnamos los porcios hasta que él dice basta basta [ . . . ] (HS ST 105, emphasis added) “Does he retilate your murt? [ . . . ] And does he make you put your plinnies in between his argusts?” “Yes, and then we trewst our porcies until he says he’s had enough [ . . . ]” (HS TT 85, emphasis added). In his discussion of his work with Cortázar, Rabassa suggests that he based the translation of such passages on the sound of the words and also the inspiration of his young daughter Clara’s own invented language (Rabassa 2005: 55). This personal element of language should not be overlooked: the translator has an idiolect but also emotive connections with specific words and strategies. In the ST example above, the invented element is the lexical content of some of the verbs and nouns (highlighted) but the syntactic structure and the endings of these words conform to standard patterns. Rabassa mimics rather than recreates this in the TT, retaining the same lexical root and changing the endings to an English pattern: retila becomes retilate, murta becomes murt, and so on. ST and TT are thus both operating at lexical and even morphological levels. The most creative translation is the word trewst, with its strong hints of an Anglo-Saxon archaism. However, this is followed by normalization of speech and thought representation, shifting from the free direct speech of the ST hasta que él dice basta basta, albeit incorporated within the framework of the La Maga’s words, to the more standard reported speech of the TT until he says he’s had enough. Lexical creativity is therefore countered by syntactic standardization in an informal mechanism of checks and balances. In other works where Rabassa has to deal with non-conventional syntax, there is a tendency for him to normalize. Cuban author José Lezama

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Lima’s baroque novel Paradiso (1968, translated as Paradiso, 1974) is full of intricate, complex imagery and syntax. Indeed, Rabassa himself likens Lezama’s writing to that of Proust (Rabassa 2005: 108). However, the long, hypotactic sentences are quite frequently divided in the TT, leading to some simplification. This can be illustrated by the following extract from the beginning of the book, where the servant Baldovin is becoming desperate at the illness of the five-year-old boy in her charge: En ese momento, las doce de la noche, se apagaron las luces de las casas del campamento militar y se encendieron las de las postas fijas, y las linternas de las postas de recorrido se convirtieron en un monstruo errante que descendía de los charcos, ahuyentando a los escarabajos. Baldovina se desesperaba, desgreñada, parecía una azafata que, con un garzón en los brazos iba retrocediendo pieza tras pieza en la quema de un castillo, cumpliendo las órdenes de sus señores de huida. Necesitaba ya que la socorrieran, pues cada vez que retiraba el mosquitero, veía el cuerpo que se extendía y le daba más relieve a las ronchas; aterrorizada, para cumplimentar el afán que ya tenía de huir, fingió que buscaba a la otra pareja de criados. El ordenanza y Truni, recibieron su llegada con sorpresa alegre. Con los ojos abiertos a toda creencia, hablaba sin encontrar las palabras, del remedio que necesitaba la criatura abandonada. Decía el cuerpo y las ronchas, como si los viera crecer siempre o como si lentamente su espiral de plancha movida, de incorrecta gelatina, viera la aparición fantasmal y rosada, la emigración de esas nubes sobre el pequeño cuerpo. Mientras las ronchas recuperaban todo el cuerpo, el jadeo indicaba que el asma le dejaba tanto aire por dentro a la criatura, que parecía que iba a acertar con la salida de los poros. La puerta entreabierta adonde había llegado Baldovina, enseñó a la pareja con las mantas de la cama sobre sus hombros, como si la aparición de la figura que llegaba a una postura semejante a un monte de arena que se hubiese doblegado sobre sus techos, dejándoles apenas vislumbrar el espectáculo por la misma posición de la huida. (Paradiso Sp 7) [At that moment, twelve at night, out went the lights of the houses of the military camp and on went those of the sentry posts, and the torches of the sentry rounds turned into a wandering monster which was coming down from the ponds/puddles, frightening the beetles. Baldovina was becoming desperate, disheveled, seemed an attendant who, with a boy in her arms was withdrawing room after room in the burning of a castle, fulfilling the orders of her master and mistress in flight. She needed now that they helped her, since each time she drew back the mosquito net, she saw the body which was stretching out and gave more emphasis to the welts; terrified, to complement the eagerness which now she had to flee, she pretended that she was seeking

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Style and Ideology in Translation the other pair of servants. The orderly and Truni, received her arrival with cheerful surprise. With eyes open to all belief, she spoke without finding the words, of the cure which needed the abandoned creature. She said the body and the welts, as if she could see them grow still or as if slowly her spiral of moved sheet, of incorrect gelatine, saw the ghostly and rosy apparition, the emigration of those clouds over the small body. While the welts recovered all the body, the panting indicated that the asthma left the creature as much air inside that it seemed that it was going to manage to exit from the pores. The half-open door through which had arrived Baldovina, showed the couple with the blankets of the bed over their shoulders, as if the apparition of the figure which was arriving to a posture similar to a mound of sand which had folded over their roofs, letting them scarcely glimpse the spectacle from the same position of flight.] Just then, at the stroke of midnight, the lights went out in the houses on the military post and went on in the sentry boxes. The lanterns of the patrolling sentries created a flickering monster that rose up out of the puddles, scaring the black-beetled shadows. Baldovina was desperate, disheveled. She needed help now: each time she drew back the mosquito netting, she saw the body lying there and the welts on it more prominent. To assuage her terrified urge to run away, she pretended to search for the servant couple at the other end of the house. She looked like the royal wet nurse in charge of the little prince, retreating room by room through the burning castle, obedient to the orders of her fleeing master and the mistress. The manservant and his wife greeted her arrival with carefree surprise. Baldovina—her eyes opened, ready to believe anything—babbled about a cure for the forsaken boy. Body and welts, she said, as if she could still see them growing, or as if the spiral movement of her swabs and questionable ointment were making their rosy and ghostly striations on the little body. While the welts covered his body, and his panting showed that the asthma left so much air inside the poor creature that it seemed ready to burst from his pores. Through the half-open door, Baldovina saw the servant couple in bed with the bedclothes drawn up over their shoulders. To them her appearance at the door meant some urgent summons and forced them into a posture as if a pile of sand had fallen over their heads, allowing them to view things only in a position of flight. (Paradiso En 3–4)

On the six occasions highlighted in bold, the TT simplifies the ST syntax: five of these involve sentence division and the other the use of a colon (before each time she drew back the mosquito netting). The whole of the long sentence commencing She looked like the royal wet nurse . . . has also been displaced from its original ST position (also highlighted).

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This means that the explanatory sections (she needed help . . . to assuage her terrified urge to run away . . . she pretended to look . . .) are now grouped together before the vivid image of panic. Also noteworthy is the paragraph division, far more prominent in the TT than in the Spanish ST. The overall result is a TT that is syntactically simpler and more readily digestible. In other words, there is a shift of cohesion that affects the psychological point of view. In this extract, the trend is reinforced by certain lexical choices that strengthen cohesive ties: El ordenanza y Truni, recibieron su llegada con sorpresa alegre. Con los ojos abiertos a toda creencia, hablaba sin encontrar las palabras, del remedio que necesitaba la criatura abandonada. [The orderly and Truni, received her arrival with cheerful surprise. With eyes open to all belief, [she] spoke without finding the words, of the cure which needed the abandoned creature.] The manservant and his wife greeted her arrival with carefree surprise. Baldovina—her eyes opened, ready to believe anything—babbled about a cure for the forsaken boy. Here, ambiguity or surprise is reduced by the form of reference to the characters: the name Truni, which has not been mentioned before, is altered to her role as wife of the manservant, while the potentially ambiguous hablaba (‘she spoke’) is explicated by the addition of the name Baldovina in first position in the second sentence. This extract also illustrates trends of Rabassa’s work we have seen elsewhere. There is the brilliant idiomatic reduction of babbled, for hablaba sin encontrar las palabras (‘spoke without finding the words’), and also the two contradictory and balancing trends towards syntactic amplification (ready to believe) and condensation of a subordinate clause (a cure for the forsaken boy). Syntactic simplification may be introduced at the level of the implied translator, that is, by an editor or copy-editor as well as by a translator himself, which we saw in the discussion of Harriet de Onís’s work in chapter 3. Rabassa describes this happening in the serialization of García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch in The New Yorker, where additional paragraphs and punctuation were added which were later removed for the book version (Rabassa 2005: 101). Although syntactic simplification often marks Rabassa’s work, the variant of ST author is crucial. With García Márquez, whom Rabassa once claimed to be the easiest author he has translated (in Hoeksema 1978), the tendency is to calque the syntax (see chapter 4). This also generally occurs with his translation of the Brazilian Clarice Lispector’s A Maçã no Escuro (1961; The Apple in the Dark 1967); Rabassa says that “Clarice goes smoothly into English” (Rabassa 2005: 48). However, The Apple in the Dark still appeared with

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an introduction by Rabassa, ironically requested by Knopf through fear that readers would not understand the book (Rabassa ibid.: 74). In some of the more experimental novels there are also simplifications at the narrative macro-level: a full-page diagram listing the family relationships was added to the translations of both Lezama Lima’s Paradiso and to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel where the repetition of names in each generation is functionally crucial. And it is not always indicative of the style of the individual translator. The Lezama Lima addition was at the request of the editors (Rabassa 2005: 99). In such cases, the theoretical construct of the implied translator is useful for a descriptive study in bringing together the different phenomena and influences that lie behind the production of the finished TT. However, it is also useful to attempt to distinguish between the various elements that comprise the implied translator in order to try and isolate features specific to Rabassa. One way of doing this is to look at those relatively few works of Rabassa’s that are retranslations or where other English translations of the same text exist. The ST remains constant, allowing points of divergence between the TTs to be identified that might reveal distinguishing stylistic features. In Rabassa’s case, we shall examine two such texts here: his retranslation of the nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1880; The Posthumous Memoirs of Blas Cubas, 1997) and an alternative translation of García Márquez’s short story Monólogo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (1966). Machado de Assís’s novel was originally translated with an introduction by William L. Grossman as Epitaph of a Small Winner, with drawings by Shari Frisch (Machado/Grossman 1952/1985). The original title is a domesticated and poetic style, while the Rabassa re-translation is closer to the original wording of the Brazilian title. In chapter 3 we saw a similar move in the re-translation of Teresa de la Parra, from Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs to Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. This may suggest that the translation of titles in the 1950s was more geared towards a functional, domesticating strategy while by the 1990s translation style and norms had shifted to accepting a more foreignized linguistic packaging. The intentional and highly experimental disorientation of narrative by Machado is generally maintained by Rabassa if this is possible on the phraseological level. Thus, the epitaph on the tombstone in chapter CXXV is calqued word for word in the retranslation, contrasting with the Grossman translation that attempts to conform to the typical conventions of this genre in English: AQUI JAZ DONA EULALIA DAMASCENA DE BRITO MORTA

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AOS DEZENOVE ANOS DE EDADE ORAI POR ELA! (BC 270) HERE LIES DONA EULALIA DAMASCENA DE BRITO SHE DIED AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN YEARS REMEMBER HER IN YOUR PRAYERS (BC W Grossman 194) HERE LIES DONA EULALIA DAMASCENA DE BRITO DEAD AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN PRAY FOR HER! (BC Rabassa 172) But when it comes to a staccato and strikingly direct addressal of the reader by the narrator, we do see stylistic changes: LXXI O senão do livro Começo a arrepender-me deste livro. Não que ele me canse; eu não tenho que fazer; e, realmente, expedir algunos magros capítulos para esse mundo sempre é tarefa que distrai um pouco da eternidade. Mas o livro é enfadonho, cheira a sepulcro, traz certa contracção cadavérica; vício grave, e aliás ínfimo, porque o maior defecto deste livro és tu, lector. Tu tens pressa de envelhecer, e o livro anda devagar; tu amas a narração directa e nutrida, o estilo regular e fluente, e este livro e o mue estilo são como os ébrios, guinam à directa e à esquerda, andam e param, resmungam, urram, gargalham, ameaçam o céu, escorregam e caem . . . (BC 208, emphasis added) 71 The Defect of This Book I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, the reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like

144 Style and Ideology in Translation a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall . . . (BC W Grossman 131–132, emphases added)

LXXI The Defect of This Book I’m beginning to regret this book. Not that it bores me, I have nothing to do and, really, putting together a few meager chapters for that other world is always a task that distracts me from eternity a little. But the book is tedious, it has the smell of the grave about it; it has a certain cadaveric contraction about it, a serious fault, insignificant to boot because the main defect of this book is you, the reader. You’re in a hurry to grow old, the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration, a regular and fluid style, and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble, and fall . . . (BC Rabassa 111, emphases added). Comparison of the two translations shows that Rabassa’s introduces more punctuation shifts, with both informal contractions (I’m beginning, You’re in a hurry) and, more importantly, with the omission of semicolons (highlighted in bold above): thus, the second sentence of the TT omits two of the formal semi-colon pauses, while, later on, a full stop is introduced before the phrase You love . . . and a comma before they stagger. Apart from the shift away from semi-colons, Rabassa generally maintains intraclause cohesive ties (underlined in the extracts above): the three instances of the conjunction and highlighted in Rabassa’s extract reproduce the paratactic structure of the ST, including the omission of the subject pronoun for the series of verbal processes that end the extract. In contrast, William Grossman explicates links with discourse marker indeed, the contrastive conjunction but and the insertion of the subject pronoun they. This shows somewhat greater intervention from Grossman affecting the mind style, a trend that occurs most noticeably elsewhere in the book with occasional footnotes to explain wordplays: thus, the interjection Pela coxa de Diana! (BC 161) is translated by both Grossman and Rabassa as By Diana’s thigh! (BC W Grossman 86, BC Rabassa 66) but Grossman includes a footnote indicating that “the Portuguese word for thigh is also the feminine form of lame.” In the case of a play on the sense of the surname Cubas, Grossman italicizes the Portuguese word and adds an equivalent in square brackets (“cubas [vats]” BC W Grossman 22) while Rabassa inserts a gloss in apposition into the flow of the sentence (“Since the surname Cubas, meaning kegs, smelled too much of cooperage”

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BC Rabassa 10). Rabassa therefore is less obviously intrusive in the interpersonal function, and therefore ideologically. The García Márquez story “Isabel viendo llover en Macondo” was translated by Rabassa as “Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo,” published in 1972 in the Leaf Storm and Other Stories collection. A previous translation, by the Englishman Richard Southern, had been published as “Isabel’s Soliloquy: Watching the Rain in Macondo” in a Penguin parallel text in 1966 (i.e., before the publication even of No-one Writes to the Colonel), though it is quite possible Rabassa was unaware of this earlier work. Comparison of the two translations shows that Rabassa’s style is characterized by more syntactic calques and word-for-word translations, eschewing any attempt at a more target-language oriented idiom. The two examples below are typical of the pattern and are compared to Richard Southern’s more idiomatic version: Y almorzó con buen apetito (MI 66) [And (he) lunched with good appetite] And he ate with a good appetite (MI Rabassa 130) And he ate up his lunch with gusto (MI Southern 67) Llovió durante toda la tarde en un solo tono. (MI 68) [Rained during all the afternoon in a single tone] It rained all afternoon in a single tone. (MI Rabassa 130) It rained solidly throughout the afternoon. (MI Southern 69) An insight into Southern’s translation strategy is provided by an endnote to the last part of this sentence which indicates the ‘literal’ meaning as “monotonously, in one tone or shade” (Franco 1966: 199, emphasis in original). In fact, there are five footnotes to the Southern translation which point out divergences from the literal meanings. This must have to do with the fact that we are dealing with a parallel text where readers are able to compare ST and TT and might well prefer to do so if they are using it as a means of accessing or checking their knowledge of the Spanish. Indeed, the blurb on the back page points out that “the literal English translation, together with the notes and biographies, are intended to help English-speaking students of Spanish.” Parallel texts are another instance of what Díaz-Cintas (2003), in his work on subtitling (see chapter 7), has termed “vulnerable translation.” That is, the translator is more open to criticism because the TT reader also has access to the ST and may identify any unusual translation equivalents,

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assuming them to be errors. A closer calquing of lexical and syntactic patterns may be anticipated and accepted. This leads to greater formality in the parallel text, the most prominent of which is the following: en un atardecer triste y desolado que dejaba en los labios el mismo sabor con que se despierta (MI 72) a sad and desolate sunset which left on your lips the same taste with which you awaken (MI Rabassa 132) a sad and desolate dusk that left on the lips the same taste with which one wakes (MI Southern 73) The footnotes for Southern’s translation would therefore serve as a justification for any possible criticism of non-literal translation in the sense of departures from ST structure. Stylistic analysis of sentence structure shows that, in the case of Isabel’s soliloquoy, it is actually Rabassa’s TT that follows a generally more literal strategy. At the level of lexis, Rabassa’s translation sometimes reproduces more closely the Latinate structure of the ST: un crepúsculo prematuro, suave y lúgubre (MI 74) [a twilight, premature, soft and lugubrious] a premature dusk, soft and lugubrious (MI Rabassa 133) an early dusk, soft and sorrowful (MI Southern 75) el pitido prolongado y triste del tren (MI 78) [the whistle prolonged and sad of the train] the prolonged and sad whistle of the train (MI Rabassa 135) the long, sad whistle of the train (MI Southern 79) Aterrorizada, poseída por el espanto y el diluvio . . . (MI 76) [Terrorized, possessed by the horror and the flood] Terrified, possessed by the fright and the deluge . . . (MI Rabassa 134) Terrified, overwhelmed by the horror and the deluge . . . (MI Southern 77)

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This last example shows how the force of lexical calquing in possessed helps retain the strength of a metaphor. However, the more common pattern in Rabassa is for an avoidance of Latinate vocabulary particularly in adjectives of perception, which in some ways ties in with the tendency towards ‘concrete’ non-Latinate translations in One Hundred Years: hongos viscosos y blandos (MI 74) soft, sticky toadstools (MI Rabassa 133) viscous and soft fungus (MI Southern 75) una substancia gelatinosa y gris (MI 66) [a] gray, jellyish substance (MI Rabassa 129) [a] gelatinous, grey substance (MI Southern 67) una cosa física y gelatinosa (MI 78) a physical, jellylike thing (MI Rabassa 135) a solid gelatinous substance (MI Southern 79). The unsystematic nature of the patterns is further illustrated by the last two examples above: gelatinosa is translated first by jellyfish and then by jelly-like. Such variation recalls William Weaver’s comments on the role of taste and mood when choosing translation equivalents from Italian (Weaver 1989). Literary translation is not subject to the same standardizing criteria that obtain in terminology databases that are often used to impose translation equivalents consistently throughout a document. The analyst seeks patterns but always subject to the caveat that there will almost certainly be counterexamples. Syntactic economy and amplification is another case in point: on the one hand, Rabassa’s translation contains a considerable amount of infrasentential condensing at the phrase level involving the substitution of pre-modifier+noun for the structure article+head noun+de [‘of’]+modifying noun: un promontorio de arcilla (MI 70) a clay promontory (MI Rabassa 131) a promontory of clay (MI Southern 71) la pordiosera de los martes (MI 74)

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Style and Ideology in Translation the Tuesday beggar woman (MI Rabassa 133) the beggar-woman who always came on Tuesdays (MI Southern 75) Al mediodía del miércoles (MI 74) on Wednesday noon (MI Rabassa 133) at noon on Wednesday (MI Southern 75).

Conversely, there is also a general trend towards syntactic amplification of a conjunction or nominalized process: El invierno se precipitó un domingo a la salida de misa (MI 66) [The winter rushed one Sunday at the exit from mass] Winter fell one Sunday when people were coming out of church (MI Rabassa 129) Winter began suddenly one Sunday just after Mass (MI Southern 67) se oía caer el agua como cuando se viaja toda la tarde en un tren (MI 68) [one could hear fall the water as when one travels all the afternoon in a train] you could hear the water fall, the way it is when you travel all afternoon on a train (MI Rabassa 130) one could hear the water falling, as when one travels all the afternoon in a train (MI Southern 69) These findings tie in with the pattern towards syntactic amplification noted in the translations of Hopscotch and One Hundred Years. Here the consistency is due more to Rabassa’s translation strategy than any stylistic quirk of the STs. Loss of variation comes when features of experimental prose are erased, as we saw in the translations of writers such as Lezama Lima and Machado de Assis, though not with Lispector. That loss of variation manifested itself above the sentence level. Cohesion or experimental narrative structures below the sentence level may be retained or are occasionally augmented: the following example of interior monologue from Isabel’s soliloquy shows a shift from ST punctuation (inverted commas) to TT graphology (italics) which has the effect of blurring the separation of direct and reported thought (cf. Semino and Short 2004):

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«Debe haber escampado en alguna parte», pensé (MI 78) It must have cleared somewhere, I thought (MI Rabassa 135, emphasis in original) ‘It must have cleared up somewhere,’ I thought (MI Southern 79) «Estoy muerta—pensé—. Dios. Estoy muerta.» (MI 80) I’m dead, I thought. My God, I’m dead. (MI Rabassa 136, emphasis in original) ‘I’m dead,’ I thought. ‘Oh, God! I’m dead.’ (MI Southern 81) The alteration of speech and thought representation here is on a higher level than the mere lexical or graphological changes that realize it. Shifts at that level potentially affect the whole presentation of the story; the move to a more experimental style in this Rabassa text is significant and belies claims that translation is always standardizing.

CONCLUSION In chapter 4 we had noted some of the key stylistic features of Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude as being on the phraseological level: the identifiably American colloquialisms, perhaps part of Rabassa’s lexical priming, the concrete lexical realizations, and the syntactic amplifications being noteworthy translation strategies within a macro-strategy of syntactic calquing. The analysis of further texts in this chapter has reinforced these findings in some respects and suggested other features such as the lexis of madness, the personal element of playful language, which we might term borrowed lexical primings from his daughter Clara, and creative collocations partly based on sound and rhythm. Explicitation and domestication of cultural lexical items was also noted, with the exception of French items in Hopscotch that were deliberately foregrounded. Finally, analysis of two texts where alternative published TTs exist suggest that there explicitation and intervention from Rabassa may be less than in other translators. On the psychological plane, there is more evidence of syntactic calquing, but with the important variant of author: the translation of more experimental and complex prose such as Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Lezama’s Paradiso exhibits some syntactic simplification and the fronting of space adjuncts affecting spatio-temporal point of view in Hopscotch may possibly be an effect of Rabassa’s lexical priming. Speech and thought representation is occasionally more unconventional in Rabassa’s translations than in the STs,

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but there are too few examples of such shifts to draw more than tentative conclusions. Rabassa is a giant figure in the translation of Latin American literature and so his style of translation conveys an image of a continent that transcends the individual author. The idiolectal colloquialisms and concreteness of the translations may be one reason for their success in an English-speaking world that is generally resistant to translation, but the absence of obvious ideological intervention from the translator would cast doubt on any strong link between the aims of the translation programmes of the 1960s and the style of the translation, except for a trend to lexical domestication that means that the TTs generally conform to the TL norms of fluency. Over such a long career of more than forty years, it is also likely that Rabassa’s own style and lexical primings have altered (cf. Rabassa 2005: 125). Yet he claims a certain stability, albeit in the past: “I still feel quite anchored in my own time, which is quite gone” (Rabassa 2005: 175).

6

Political Ideology and Translation

Political and other sensitive texts are instances where ideology in its purest, or crudest, form may be at the centre of the translation process. As we indicated in chapter 2, in the Latin American macro-context covered by this book, huge political upheavals and traumas transpired in the second half of the twentieth century. This includes most notably the Cuban Revolution of 1959 which has had a marked influence on North-South relations in the Americas ever since. Stylistic analysis of the translation of the words and ideas of some of the major political leaders, thinkers, and movements could easily fill many books on its own, so we shall restrict ourselves to certain key and revealing examples as case studies of the various stylistic and ideological shifts that occur in such translations. Although this chapter is entitled “Political Ideology and Translation,” it would be misguided to suggest that this meant that there is a clear dividing line between political and non-political texts and authors. Many novels present manifestly political topics: Miguel Angel Asturias’s El señor presidente (1946, translated by Frances Partridge, 1964 under the same title)1 and García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975, translated by Gregory Rabassa as The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976) are just two novels of dictatorship which unveil the brutality behind such regimes. Many of the central literary figures have themselves been heavily involved in the political struggle. In the blossoming of the Cuban Revolution, the Boom writers initially demonstrated a new Latin American solidarity that was later to influence politics and culture (see chapter 2); for instance, work by García Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa figures among the key formative texts cited by the Chiapas rebel leader subcomandante Marcos (Gabriel García Márquez and subcomandante Marcos 2001). The younger Ariel Dorfman, now the figurehead of Hispanic writing in the United States, was an active militant in the Chilean Ministry of Culture under Salvador Allende. These authors continue to write political articles in the press, García Márquez remaining a close friend and supporter of Castro. Politics is therefore inextricably mixed with literature in Latin American writing. Moreover, institutional patronage has played a significant role in both north and south; while, in the 1960s, translation programmes were set

152 Style and Ideology in Translation up in the United States through the Center for Inter-American Relations and the American Association of University Presses to promote U.S.–Latin America exchange as part of a general Cold War strategy (see chapter 2), the translation of many political texts from countries such as Cuba and now Venezuela has been controlled by direct political patronage in the source countries. For groups such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico, this control and dissemination now takes place thanks to the development of the Internet. Yet the translations of political texts are often unattributed or undertaken by translators who are less prominent than the major literary translators. Since the number and range of political texts is huge, the examples discussed in this chapter can be no more than illustrative of the type of patterns and changes that may be seen in the translation of various kinds of prominent political texts from Latin America over the course of the twentieth century. Yet it is hoped that the types of texts analysed and the patterns identified might be relevant for future studies of different macro-contexts. Any study of the translation into English of political texts from Latin America must inevitably take into account the relative strength of the two languages and most particularly the power of the United States that lies behind the English language. This is especially important when the translated text itself deals explicitly with power relations within the Americas, as is the case with the first two texts in this chapter, both of which had lasting political resonance: the philosophical essay Ariel written by José Enrique Rodó, which was the subject of two complete translations in the course of the century, and the best-selling anti-imperialist reading of the Disney enterprise, Cómo leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelat, a book first published in 1971 by the Allende government in Chile. Ariel, addressed to “the youth of America,” is the best-known work of the Uruguayan essayist and political thinker José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917). First published in Spanish in 1900, it adapts the story of Shakespeare’s Tempest to represent the opposition between the demagogic democracy of the masses (the character of Caliban) and the cultured, intellectual, and spiritual values of Ariel. The essay made an immediate impact as a clarion call for the unity of Latin America in the face of its overpowering neighbour, the United States: section five, in particular, has been the most controversial and has been interpreted as a scathing attack on the United States for the growing cultural and political influence it was exerting on Latin America. The essay is of particular relevance to our study because the different editions and translations published in English over the years reveal much about the way political concepts may be rewritten or manipulated by different forms of translation, most notably by the paratextual features of introductions and footnotes. We shall look at two interlingual translations (1922 and 1988) plus a 1929 annotated University of Chicago Press edition of the Spanish

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text for students of Spanish which demonstrates considerable rewriting. It is perhaps significant that both interlingual translations were instigated by U.S. diplomats who realized the importance of the text for understanding Latin America: the first, in 1922, was carried out by F. J. Stimson, former U.S. ambassador to Argentina who, in his introduction, admits to a less than perfect understanding of the Spanish language; the new translation of 1988, by the established and respected translator Margaret Sayers Peden and published by the University of Texas Press, was instigated by James W. Symington, chief of U.S. protocol for the Johnson delegation to the Conference of American Presidents in Uruguay in 1967, where he had been struck by the Ecuadorian president’s reference to Rodó’s text in his keynote speech. Ariel exerted decades-long political and philosophical influence on Latin American states and yet the number of complete translations that have been published is small. Those that have appeared have been framed with detailed introductions or footnotes that seek to impose an interpretation. Here, these paratextual elements seem to play the role attributed by Genette (1997) to both original prefaces, namely “to ensure the book gets read properly,” and also to later prefaces, one of the main functions of which is to answer the critics of the earlier edition. Translation is indeed halfway between the two, since the TT presents a new edition for English-language readers but at the same time seeks to correct any prejudices or biases they may bring to a text from having read reviews or commentaries of the Spanish ST. This is particularly the case in an interesting form of rewriting, William F. Rice’s 1929 editing of a version of the Spanish text for U.S. learners of the language, where he refashions Rodó’s writing through a North American political and moral prism and deflects and answers criticisms of the United States. In his many English footnotes, Rice, Chair of the Spanish Department at the University of Southern California, frequently inserts blatantly evaluative comments relating to his quasi-moralistic attitude towards Latin American culture and society as a whole: for instance, he describes Rodó as being “absolutely free from any allusion of an objectionable nature so common to many writers of Spanish prose” (Rodó 1929: 11, note). Descriptions of Latin America are also presented from the superior viewpoint of the North American tourist or anthropologist, surprised, for example, at “a highly developed appreciation of art” in the South (ibid.: 12, note). Typical is the way Rice deals with Rodó’s neologism deslatinizada that appears as follows: Es así como la visión de una América deslatinizada por propia voluntad, sin la extorsión de la conquista, y regenerada luego a imagen y semejanza del arquetipo del Norte, flota ya sobre los sueños de muchos sinceros interesados por nuestro porvenir. (Rodó 1900/1929: 75, emphasis in original) [[It] is like the vision of an America delatinized by its own will, without the extortion of the conquest, and regenerated then in the image

154 Style and Ideology in Translation and semblance of the archetype of the North, floats now on/above the dreams of many sincere interested [individuals] in our future.] Here, Rodó is worried about the growing trend amongst his compatriots towards what he terms nordomanía (later translated by Margaret Sayers Peden as USA-mania [Rodó/Peden 1988: 71]) which he feels is distancing them from their Latin roots. In the footnote which accompanies the above example in the Chicago Spanish edition, Rice agrees with Rodó, but only insofar as the Latin roots signify “artistic taste, and air of ease and leisure,” an unproblematized stereotype of the South: deslatinizada: Rodó’s contention that there are elements in the social structure that are in danger of being lost, and which ought to be preserved, is justified, as all who travel in those countries will testify. Most evident among these qualities are the politeness, artistic taste, and air of ease and leisure; while there are subtle, elusive qualities of these peoples that give them a poise and power which the North American may well envy. (Rice 1929: 75, note) In this example, the language used by the North American Rice emphasizes the interest as being anthropological and almost akin to viewing a primitive tribe. Thus, the phrase these peoples is above all primed to occur in political or social science texts to refer to ‘primitive’ groups in developing countries.2 The concept deslatinizada is italicized in the ST, indicating the word’s novelty and foreignness. Ironically, in the 1988 translation Peden follows a translation strategy of calquing the new term but not foregrounding its otherness graphically: And this is why the vision of an America de-Latinized of its own will, without threat of conquest, and reconstituted in the image and likeness of the North, now looms in the nightmares of many who are genuinely concerned about our future. (Rodó/Peden 1988: 71) However, Peden does maintain the ideological narrative perspective with the choice of personal pronoun our future. The changes in this extract occur in evaluation on the ideological perspective, through a shift in the interpersonal and rhetorical force and connotation of lexical items: the extorsión de la conquista is downplayed to threat of conquest but the dangerous atmosphere is foregrounded since the vision which flota sobre los sueños [‘floats above the dreams’] turns into the menacing looms in the nightmares. The semantic prosody of the lemma LOOM is predominantly negative (see Munday forthcoming), but the collocation with nightmares and the colligation in the+noun are very rare in the corpora we have examined. Indeed, only one close example, from creative writing, was found in a Google search.3 This suggests that, for Peden, the macro-stylistic criterion

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of rhetorical and emotive force is the main factor behind the selection of LOOM and that this has outweighed other considerations of collocation and lexical priming. A final, and significant, example from Ariel may serve to illustrate how the style of a text is conditioned by the perspective of the translator. It relates to Rodó’s understanding of the essence of Americanism, specifically as it refers to the United States: La concepción utilitaria, como idea del destino humano, y la igualdad en lo mediocre, como norma de la proporción social, componen, íntimamente relacionadas, la fórmula de lo que ha solido llamarse en Europa el espíritu del americanismo. (Rodó 1900/1929: 74) [The utilitarian conception, as an idea of human destiny, and the equality in the mediocre, as a norm of social proportion, comprise, intimately related, the formula of that which has tended to be called in Europe the spirit of Americanism.] The Stimson and Peden translations of this sentence are as follows: The utilitarian conception as the idea of human destiny, and equality in the mediocre as the norm of social proportion, make up the formula which in Europe they call the spirit of Americanism. (Rodó/Stimson 1922, quoted in Torres Ríoseco 1963: 41) The inextricably linked concepts of utilitarianism as a concept of human destiny and egalitarian mediocrity as a norm for social relationships compose the formula for what Europe has tended to call the spirit of Americanism.(Rodó/Peden 1988: 40) We can see that the differences are to be found in the syntactic patterning, the choice of equivalents for abstract nouns, and, in Stimson, the omission for no obvious reason of two phrases: íntimamente relacionadas—‘intimately related,’ and solido—‘tended to’). Stimson has followed the wording and syntax of the ST so closely he has produced a TT that is actually very difficult to understand in the English. It corresponds to the rhetorical and syntactic complexity of Spanish. On the other hand, Peden deliberately normalizes the word order and “untangles” the syntax in English in a strategy aimed at rendering Rodó more accessible and intelligible to English-language readers, as she explains in an interview in Translation Review (Peden 1987: 12). One important element is the translation of abstract concepts: Peden standardizes the translation of la concepción utilitaria and la igualdad en lo mediocre (utilitarian conception and equality in the mediocre respectively in Stimson) with the more common philosophical or sociological forms utilitarianism and egalitarian mediocrity; she also

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prefers the everyday social relationships for proporción social instead of the less common but accepted sociological term social proportion. ‘Untangling’ Rodó thus sometimes means interpretation and standardization on the phraseological and psychological planes. If we turn for a moment to the footnote to this section in Rice’s Chicago edition, we see a totally different rendering and interpretation of these expressions: The very widespread opinion that the basic ideals of our civilization in the United States are gross materialism and dead-level mediocrity, resulting from our theory of equality, unfortunately fails to recognize that we mean only ‘equality of opportunity.’ Still worse, it utterly ignores the fact that the great spiritual forces and purposes are at the back of our great material achievements. (Rice 1929: 74, footnote) In this paratextual comment, the act of translation is concealed. In order for Rice to comment on the argument, an interlingual translation of key terms has been essential and it is here that we see the ideological interpretation. Thus, Rice exaggerates the charge, thereby undermining it. In place of utilitarian conception and equality in the mediocre, he uses a compound of an emotive and exaggerated negative epithet and an abstract noun: gross materialism and dead-level mediocrity. The evaluation lies in collocation, emotive in these common fixed expressions, and syntax, since the terms are presented as a predicate to verbal processes of relation (the basic ideals [ . . . ] are gross materialism and dead-level mediocrity). This makes them virtually unchallengeable English equivalents of the less emotive and more balanced terminology of the ST. Yet, because this occurs in a paratext, the reader may well be unaware of the interpretation that lies behind it. This ridiculing of anti-American criticism is strengthened by the contrast with the positive term our civilization, itself a loaded concept and one which depends on perspective—Rice’s ideological alignment with the United States is made clear by the first-person plural pronouns (our theory, we mean, our great material achievements); opinion is signalled by modal adverbs unfortunately and still worse, but in the final sentence Rice uses a categorical assertion of zero modality (it utterly ignores the fact that . . . ) to present as an undeniable truth what can only be opinion. The second controversial text we shall consider is very different in scope and content: Cómo leer al Pato Donald by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1971). A barbed critique of the exploitative colonialist mentality underlying the Walt Disney cartoons, the book was published as part of the Allende Popular Unity government’s ideological publishing campaign during its three years in office. Sensationally, it became a cult book of its time and was translated into over a dozen languages. After the military coup of 1973, Dorfman was exiled and the book banned in Chile, although it continued

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to be published for a while in Argentina. An English translation, How to Read Donald Duck, was published by International General in New York in 1975, translated with an introduction by David Kunzle, an art historian and subject specialist who himself had written on comic strips and the art of revolutionary Chile.4 Several non-textual elements affect the reception of this text in English: first of all, very poor-quality paper and print, including the illustrations taken from the comic books, suggests that this is a mass or cheaply produced book without significant financial resources, much like the Spanish original. Secondly, a legal motivation lurks behind the addition of a mock copyright page among the front matter which states: The name “Donald Duck” is the Trademark Property and the Cartoon Drawings are the Copyrighted Material of Walt Disney Productions. There is no connection between I.G. Editions Inc. and Walt Disney and these materials are used without the authorization or consent of Walt Disney Productions. The Spanish ST had been publicly burnt by the military authorities in Chile, while the translation was also banned in the United States and seized by U.S. Customs in 1975 for an alleged violation of Disney’s copyright. The Centre for Constitutional Rights won the release of the copies under the ‘fair use’ rule which allows limited reproduction for comment. International General Editions were well aware of the threat of legal action, all the more so since in his introduction Kunzle cites an example of an underground parody of a Disney poster (“The Disneyland Memorial Orgy”) that had triggered a lawsuit from Disney against a pirated version in Japan. Kunzle’s introduction further sets the context for the work by describing the Popular Unity government’s valiant struggle against the U.S.-dominated media in Chile which culminated in Pinochet’s bloody coup and the suppression of all art that supported the government. The TT is further framed by the addition of a selected and annotated bibliography “to assist the reader in locating additional Marxist studies on the two principal themes treated in this book: cultural imperialism and the comic book” (DD TT 100), a clear attempt at guiding the reader’s interpretation and later actions. Just as we saw with the very different Ariel, so with How to Read Donald Duck the paratexts are decisive in delineating the preferred and expected reading strategy, for channelling the audience’s response. When it comes to the body of the TT, the translation of political concepts tends to show a shift to more intense Marxist and philosophical language: las “visiones del mundo” (DD ST 151, inverted commas in the ST) becomes Weltanschauung (DD TT 95, italicized in the translation, rather than ‘visions of the world’); una sociedad pos-industrial (e.g., DD ST 153) is several times translated as advanced capitalist society (DD TT 96), rather

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than ‘post-industrial society,’ and there is the occasional addition of an obvious ideological component in abstract concepts such as ideological manifestations of its economic-cultural system (DD TT 96–97) and the bourgeois concept of entertainment (DD TT 97). This shift of the denotational elements of Field and therefore of the ideational function affect the phraseological and psychological planes of point of view, increasing cohesive ties and heightening the mind style of the TT. It is part of what seems to be a strategy of explicitation of political and economic concepts, rendering them more evident in the translation than in the original. This does not only occur with Marxist terms. In the following example, Kunzle adds explicatory glosses for the basic economic terms primary, secondary, and tertiary: Disney expulsa el sector secundario de su mundo, de acuerdo con los deseos utópicos de la clase dominante de su país. Pero al hacerlo, crea un mundo que es una parodia del mundo del subdesarrollo. Sólo hay sector primario y terciario en el universo Disney. (DD ST 156–157) [Disney expels the secondary sector from its world, in accord with the utopian desires of the dominating class in its country. But by doing it, it creates a world that is a parody of the underdeveloped world. There is only a primary and tertiary sector in the Disney universe.] Since the Disney utopia eliminates the secondary (productive) sector, retaining only the primary (raw material) and tertiary (service) sectors, it creates a parody of the underdeveloped peoples. (DD TT 98) Such explicitation would suggest that the translator considers the TT audience to be less familiar with the theoretical and technical vocabulary of economics than the ST audience, which would originally have been principally supporters of Allende’s cultural programme. However, syntactically the TT extract is far more complex than the ST, with three ST sentences being conflated into one in the TT. This is partly compensated by the argumentative link expressed through the conjunction Since in first position. Thus the resultant TT is more explicative even though the syntactic complexity is greater. The TT mind style thereby simplifies the ideas but retains or even intensifies the syntax of academic argumentation. There are also stylistic shifts in the area of gender-specific and sexist language that can only have been introduced out of a concern for the sensitivities of the U.S. audience. The most glaring instance is to be found in the final pages of the book, where Dorfman and Mattelart insist on the importance of the Disney world view as a reflection of overarching ideas and values of the society which produces and consumes that product: Poner al Pato en el tapete es cuestionar las diversas formas de cultura autoritaria y paternalista que impregnan las relaciones del hombre

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burgués consigo mismo, con los otros hombres y con la naturaleza. Es [ . . . ] una interrogación sobre la relación social que establece el padre con su hijo. (DD ST 159) [Putting the Duck on the carpet is to question the various forms of authoritarian and paternalistic culture which impregnate the relations of bourgeois man with himself, with other men and with nature. It is [ . . . ] an interrogation about the social relation which the father establishes with his son.] Putting the Duck on the carpet is to question the various forms of authoritarian and paternalist culture pervading the relationship of the bourgeoisie among themselves, with others, and with nature. It is [ . . . ] to scrutinize the social relations which a father establishes with his son. Obviously, this is equally the case for mothers and daughters as well. (DD TT 98–99) The phrase las relaciones del hombre burgués consigo mismo, con los otros hombres Kunzle renders into the gender-neutral language of the bourgeoisie [ . . . ] with others. Even more striking is the addition of an extra sentence in the TT which attempts to correct the male-oriented view of society portrayed by the example of father and son: Obviously, this is equally the case for mothers and daughters as well. This is one of the few occasions when we see an addition of the modal adverb obviously, the function of which must be to pre-empt possible criticism of the authors for their insertion of a comment which for TT readers of the time would have been self-evident and which might have been interpreted as patronizing. This instance is all the more prominent because of its rarity. Very frequently the translator in fact omits to translate sentence-initial discourse markers such as Por lo tanto (‘For this reason’) and Tal es así (‘This is the case’). The reader is then left to infer discourse relationships that have been explicated in the ST. To some extent the additional processing demand is compensated by the explicitation of ideological and technical terminology discussed above. The translator’s focus shifts from discourse patterns to political and sociological precision. We saw above that very considerable changes had been made especially to the format and presentation of the TT, with a new introduction and a bibliography to aid willing readers in their quest for further Marxist truths. This is common in those texts presented in traditional book format as the macro-contextual circumstances may change dramatically over time. This happened to Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunto Cubano (1940), translated by Harriet de Onís and analysed in chapter 3. The eighth edition of Ortiz’s ST, published in 1963 in the early years of the Castro regime, is considerably altered. A whole section is inserted dealing with then recent medical findings linking tobacco to cancer, claiming that Cuban tobacco, being low in

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nicotine, is safe; other insertions include a suggestion that the priest Bartolomé de las Casas, defender of the indigenous, would today be classified as “Communist.” Onís’s translation has not been updated, so the English TT remains embedded in the macro-context of 1947. However, with the growth of the Internet, today important political communiqués or tracts may be part of breaking news and a dynamic site for political struggle. The translations of the words of the modern-day Mexican cult rebel figure subcomandante Marcos, for instance, are presented in a very different fashion. First of all, some of the translations of his work and speeches are exclusively available on the website of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) (http://www.ezln.org.mx) and thereby function as propaganda tools in the revolutionary struggle. The Zapatista movement has overseen the production of these translations and can thus control the presentation of their arguments. The translators’ identities are also concealed, in the same way as Marcos’s real identity has been hidden behind a ski-mask; thus the name of the translator of his speech at the Zócalo in Mexico City on 11 March 2001 is given as simply la irlandesa [“the Irish woman”]. This has the advantage of protecting the translator, and the EZLN contacts, from possible reprisal or investigation. The translations are sometimes clearly not the work of professionals. For instance, Marcos’s key manifesto, Chiapas: El sureste en dos vientos , una tormenta y una profecia (1992, translated as Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds: A Storm and a Prophecy, 1994), which is available on the ELZN website in French and Italian in addition to Spanish and English, contains a few very basic errors of translation in the English: ingresos is translated as taxes rather than income, fiscal as committee not prosecutor and there are two instances of misreading of the Spanish source: hambre [‘hunger’] being translated as people, probably a confusion with the generic hombre [‘man’], and incitar [‘incite’/‘encourage’) rendered as initiating [Spanish iniciar]. Culture-specific items relating to the situation of the poor of Chiapas are dealt with by a mixture of domestication and borrowing that appears to be non-systematic even though the macro-strategy throughout is the intensification of anti-globalization and centralization arguments. Thus, there are many terms that describe the Mexican agricultural system and which are resonant of the colonial system of the sixteenth century onwards: the word hacienda, which in chapter 3 we saw domesticated as plantation by Harriet de Onís in Carpentier’s work on the Caribbean, is here both domesticated and explicated, through amplification, as large-landed estate, more appropriate than plantation for the Mexican context; on the other hand, other words relating to the rural economy, such as campesinos (‘peasants’) and ejidos (a system of communal farming) are simply borrowed into the TT, which might suggest that the translator expects the reader to be familiar with these terms that are crucial for creating solidarity with the Chiapas indigenous. This contrasts with the bracketed glosses marking an intrusion by the translator in the interpersonal function, making visible her voice:

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SECOTUR [Department of Tourism], Pemex [the national oil company] and Carlos Salinas de Gortari [President of Mexico 1988-present]. These glosses, giving background information on Mexican institutions, are clearly aimed at covering knowledge gaps for an English-speaking international audience. It is also intriguing that a partially domesticating strategy seems to be used for these modern corporations or politicians which are considered alien to the interests of Chiapas, whereas the examples of foreignization above (campesinos and ejidos) both relate to elements inherent to the Chiapas world view. This opens up the possibility in this text that on the phraseological plane domestication and foreignization may be operating with unexpected underlying ideological significance. This text is fascinating not least because of the mixture of genres employed. The first chapter describes the economics and geography of Chiapas: the reader is taken on the journey that could come straight from a guidebook or travel book, with the use of direct formal personal address and a visual spatio-temporal orientation of a drive through the landscape that is maintained as a core macro-stylistic feature of the TT narrative. Later, when Marcos presents Zapata as the bringer of the promised land, the writing segues into Biblical parallelism with sentence-initial additive conjunctions that disappear in the TT: Y cuentan estos ancianos que no ha muerto, que Zapata ha de volver. Y cuentan los viejos más viejos que el viento y la lluvia y el sol le dicen al campesino cuándo ha de preparar la tierra, cuándo ha de sembrar y cuándo cosechar. Y cuentan que también la esperanza se siembra y se cosecha. Y dicen los viejos que el viento, la lluvia y el sol están hablando de otra forma a la tierra, que de tanta pobreza no puede seguir cosechando muerte, que es la hora de cosechar rebeldía. (TW ST) [And these elderly people tell that he hasn’t died, that Zapata is to return. And the oldest people tell that the wind and the rain and the sun tell the campesino when he is to prepare the land, when he is to plant and when to harvest. And they tell that also hope is planted and harvested. And the old people say that the wind, the rain and the sun are speaking in a different way to the earth, that with so much poverty death cannot continue to be harvested, that it is the time to harvest rebellion.] These old campesinos say that Zapata didn’t die, that he must return. These old campesinos also say that the wind and the rain and the sun tell the campesinos when to cultivate the land, when to plant and when to harvest. They say that hope is planted and harvested. They also say that the wind and the rain and the sun are now saying something different: that with so much poverty, the time has come to harvest rebellion instead of death. (TW TT)

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The repetition of Y cuentan (‘And they tell’) in the Spanish is a device that mirrors the use of the additive kai in the Greek translation of the Bible (Nida 1964, see chapter 1). In the English King James Version of 1611,5 and the Spanish Reina Valera Bible of 1909,6 kai is strictly and repetitively rendered as the sentence-initial And and Y. This unusual stress may give the impression of child-like language since it is functionally redundant in modern English but equally it connotes the lyricism and solemnity of the Bible (Nida 1964, see chapter 1). In a political text, it is further associated with the rhetoric of speech. The translation retains repetition and parallelism with They say but not the more poetic ‘They tell’ nor the additive ‘And.’ Cohesion is therefore maintained at the formal level and the political rhetoric remains; however, at the higher discourse level the solemn Biblical connotation evaporates. A similar pattern occurs at the lyrical conclusion of the text which brings together the key motifs of storm and prophecy: Ya llega la hora de despertar . . . LA TORMENTA . . . . . . la que está Nacerá del choque de estos dos vientos, llega ya su tiempo, se atiza ya el horno de la historia Reina ahora el viento de arriba, ya viene el viento de abajo, ya la tormenta viene . . . así será . . . LA PROFECIA . . . la que está Cuando amaine la tormenta, cuando lluvia y fuego dejen en paz otra vez la tierra, el mundo ya no será el mundo, sino algo mejor. (TW ST)

[Now arrives the time to wake up . . . THE STORM . . . . . . the one which is here Will be born from the clash of these two winds, arrives now its time, is poked now the oven of history

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Reigns now the wind from above, now comes the wind from below, now the storm comes . . . thus will be . . . THE PROPHECY . . . the one which is here When calms the storm, when rain and fire leave in peace once more the earth, the world will no longer be the world, but something better.]

Now it is time to wake up . . . The storm is here. From the clash of these two winds the storm will be born, its time has arrived. Now the wind from above rules, but the wind from below is coming . . . The prophecy is here. When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country in peace, the world will no longer be the world but something better. (TW TT) The layout of the Spanish emphasizes the motifs through capitalization and centring, through the parallelism of la que está [‘the one which is (here)’], the suspension marks and the repetition of the emphatic interpersonal modal particle ya, which occurs six times in this section. Thus, stylistic markedness is produced by layout and graphology and not just by lexical and syntactic choices and repetitions. Yet much of this markedness vanishes in the English: the lowercase storm and prophecy fade into the rest of the TT, while the centring and foregrounding of la que está disappears since the equivalent is here merges into the rest of the paragraph. The parallelism and rhythm of the Spanish VS order (seven examples in this section) and the resultant information structure patterns are also lost, the only attempt at compensation occurring in the second line with the reordering of the circumstantial adjunct to a marked first position From the clash of these two winds the storm will be born. However, there is no inversion of verb and subject, which would have been possible, though strongly marked and rhythmically poor (‘From the clash of these two winds [there] will be born the storm’). The third element of the birth of the storm is even omitted: se atiza ya el horno de la historia (‘the oven of history is now being poked’). One can only hypothesize that the translator may have felt that this striking image would have been out of place or even faintly ludicrous in the English, but no attempt to compensate or create a related image is made. In a way this is surprising since the major metaphors, such as the storm, which structure

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the text, are otherwise rigorously maintained and even intensified in the translation. One of these structural metaphors, that of Chiapas being bled dry by the beast of capitalism and politics, runs through the first chapter and colours the translation of the surrounding co-text: Por miles de caminos se desangra Chiapas (TW ST) [Through thousands of roads bleeds Chiapas] Chiapas loses blood through many veins. (TW TT) Here, the thousands of roads of the ST become many veins, reinforcing the blood metaphor. The intensification of the metaphor takes precedence over the preservation of syntactic markedness, which here is standardized from circumstantial adjunct+VS to SV+circumstantial adjunct. Another example of embroidery of metaphor occurs in the prophecy that the viceroy (the local government leader) will be haunted by nightmares: el virrey manda matar y encarcelar y construye más carceles y cuarteles y el sueño sigue desvelándolo (TW ST) [the viceroy orders to kill and imprison and builds more prisons and barracks and the dream continues to keep him awake] the viceroy orders killings and kidnappings and he builds more jails and Army barracks. But the dream continues and keeps him tossing and turning and unable to sleep (TW TT). Apart from the shift from kill and imprison to the more emotive and alliterative killings and kidnappings, the effects of the dream are much more graphic in the translation. Whereas the ST has the dream desvelándolo [‘keeping him awake’], in the TT it keeps him tossing and turning and unable to sleep. The overall translation strategy in this text operates more on the macro-level, heightening some of the key evaluative motifs but normalizing the more unusual rhetorical and textual devices. The evaluative metaphors are structural and form part of the ideological plane of point of view. These stylistic choices suggest this takes priority over the textual cohesion associated with the psychological point of view (the VS normalization) and spatiotemporal point of view which should be a major consideration in political texts since the location of the narrator helps to condition the appeal of the message. This is suggested in a small stylistic detail hidden in the description of the agricultural exploitation of the region in chapter 1 of the tract: Del maíz, más de la mitad producida aquí va al mercado nacional. (TW ST)

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[Of the corn, more than half produced here goes to the national market.] Of the corn produced in Chiapas, more than half goes to the domestic market. (TW TT) The spatial location of the ST is indicated by the word aquí (‘here’), showing that the writer, Marcos, places himself squarely in the region of Chiapas (in the Lacondon forest) and is looking outwards towards Mexico City. The translation, on the other hand, alters this to in Chiapas, a more detached and neutral description of the location. This contrasts to the treatment of similar markers of spatial deictics in the translation of Ariel (above) and of Castro’s communiqué (below), and the use of the first person plural pronoun, which are scrupulously maintained even in those texts which do not share the narrator’s ideological perspective. This would be a fruitful area for future study, to see in which texts the translator preserves the narrative location of the political figure. Many of the other Marcos documents available online are communiqués or interviews. In the case of the latter, some have been published more formally for the printed press as well as on the website. This occurs with two major interviews he gave in Mexico City at the time of the highprofile ‘caravan’ march to the Zócalo in 2001. One is an interview with Julio Scherer García, founder of the respected Mexican left-wing political magazine Proceso, which was aired on the Televisa television channel on 10 March 2001 and published in Proceso the following day. The second interview was with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo, published in the Mexican magazine Cambio on 28 March 2001. In both cases, the translations of these interviews were later published in the printed press. The translation of the Scherer interview appears online at http:// www.zmag.org, the translators named as Donald Holoch and Lenore von Maltzahn Rinehart; the García Márquez interview was published in English in the United States in New Left Review May–June 2001 in an unattributed translation. Excerpts of the Márquez interview in a different translation were published on 2 July 2001 as “A Zapatista Reading List” in The Nation, a key left-wing publication in the United States. In all these cases, the translations are clearly based on the ST transcriptions rather than on any access to the original recordings. The same subheadings are used and there is no obvious difference between ST and TT in the transcription of features of spoken language and in the imposition of written punctuation on the spoken mode. Thus, fillers and suspension marks are inserted at the same points and there is no indication of false starts, hesitations, or self-corrections. This is perhaps unsurprising due to time and cost constraints. Although Marcos’s Scherer interview does contain the same divisions in ST and TT and close translations of the inserted section headings (e.g., “Opposed Worlds,” “If Fox is serious, there will be results,” “Marcos’

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Mistakes,” “The Story of the Caravan”), the ST is framed by an informal introduction describing some pertinent details of the historical background7 and of the phone call which set up the Marcos interview. This framing, and the title La entrevista insólita (“The Unusual Interview”), guides reception by tempting the public and designating the subject matter in a way that the translation, with its very neutral title “Interview between Julio Scherer Garcia and Subcomandante Marcos,” does not (cf. Genette 1997: 76ff. for a discussion of the functions of titles). When it comes to the language of the interview itself, it is a little surprising in the ST transcription to see Marcos using Anglicisms such as timing and rating, both of which are italicized as borrowings in the ST. In the TT they are transferred back into English without comment or compensation. However, translators Holoch and von Maltzahn Rinehart do make an effort to imitate some degree of orality, including interjections such as dammit (for coño, used as a filler) and hey (for vean). Typical is the following passage which in the TT shows the use of phrasal verbs (pick up on it), colloquial idioms (needs a good talking to) and the colloquial modal particle sure: Y si un movimiento armado está diciendo ahí va esta parte, vean, a esto estamos dispuestos, y no lo lee, entonces ya de plano necesita la clase politica una gran lección. (JS Int Sp 14) [And if an armed movement is saying that there goes this part, see, this is what we are ready for, and [it] does not read it, then the political class really simply needs a big lesson.] And if an armed movement is saying this leads that way, hey, we’re prepared for this, and they don’t pick up on it, then the political club sure needs a good talking to. (JS Int En 16) The interpersonal evaluative function of modals such as sure is also replicated in the translation of metaphors, just as we saw in the analysis of The Southeast from Two Winds above, even when these are new or surprising metaphors: El hecho de que algunos de los personajes que saltan a la vida pública tengan un lastre de criminalidad no quiere decir que eso sea parejo para todos. (JS Int Sp 5) [The fact that some of the personages who leap into public life have a ballast of criminality does not mean that that is the same for all.] The fact that some of the VIPs who vault into public life carry a ballast of guilt doesn’t mean that it’s the same for all of them. (JS Int En 4)

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In the TT, vault is a stronger, more specific and literary equivalent of saltan (‘leap’/‘jump’) and ballast is a literal translation of lastre (‘burden’ would be a more common alternative). There are no other examples of lastre de criminalidad in Google. The expression ballast of guilt (rather than ‘ballast of criminality’) is not an original metaphor, to use Newmark’s term (Newmark 1988), but nor is it so common that it could be classed as ‘stock’; a Google search shows merely two other instances, one in a piece of melodrama from a creative writing course8 and the other in a music blog.9 The result of these TT choices is therefore a very forceful evaluative metaphoric style that succeeds in communicating Marcos’s distinctive and targeted message. The TT even strengthens the coherence of some of the metaphors. The following example, explaining why Marcos rejected an offer of a meeting with President Fox, is coherent in contrasting the opposites stood tall and the formal belittled, both referring to height, whereas the ST comparison had revolved around se levantó (‘stood/rose up’) and sería trivializado (‘would be trivialized’): todo el movimiento que se levantó finalmente sería trivializado (JS Int Sp 15) [any movement that rose up finally would be trivialized] a movement that stood tall would end up belittled (JS Int En 18). Metaphors are also intensified in the translation (unattributed) of the García Márquez interview. The following extract employs the key structural metaphor of the clock, as Marcos responds to a question of how he viewed the political scene in Mexico at that time: Como una lucha y una disputa entre un reloj que chequea el horario de ingreso de los empleados de una empresa, que es el reloj de Fox, y el nuestro que es un reloj de arena. La disputa es entre que nosotros nos acomodemos a ese reloj de chequeo y Fox se acomode al reloj de arena. (MP Int Sp 7) [As a struggle and a dispute between a clock which checks the time of entry of the employees of a company, which is [President] Fox’s clock, and ours which is an hourglass [lit. sand clock]. The dispute is between that we should adapt ourselves to that clock of checking and that Fox should adapt himself to the hourglass.] As a struggle between a clock operated by a punch card, which is Fox’s time, and an hourglass, which is ours. The dispute is over whether we bend to the discipline of the factory clock or Fox bends to the slipping of the sand. (MP Int En 4)

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Here, the intensification revolves around a stylistic strategy of lexical condensation—a ST extract of fifty-seven words is reduced to forty-four TT words, clearly illustrated by the rendering of a clock operated by a punch card for un reloj que chequea el horario de ingreso de los empleados de una empresa [‘a clock which checks the time of entry of the employees of a company’]. In addition, the metaphorical bend to translates the more neutral nos acomodemos a [‘should adapt ourselves to’], the effects of the two clocks is explicated with the discipline of the factory clock and reinforced by alliteration and rhythm in the slipping of the sand. So, in political texts, too, the phonological level can predominate. The existence of a second translation (also unattributed) of an excerpt of this interview permits us to make further observations regarding the style. As the title “A Zapatista Reading List” (The Nation, 2 July 2001) conveys, the piece moves the ground away from the immediate declaration of political struggle. The extract comprises approximately the final third of the interview, precisely that part which focuses on Marcos the person, his background, family, education and reading, which, he stresses, includes writers of the Latin American Boom, books given to him at the time by his parents to explain the political situation of Latin America. Despite the title of the extract, which connotes the philosophy of the movement, it contains not a single explicit mention of the Zapatistas. This represents a genre shift, or at the very least a presentational shift. Interestingly, the Scherer interview contains a similar move by emphasizing a philosophical interpretation as opposed to a political one, even if this is more concealed since it arises from linguistic or orthographic choices in the body of the translation. Thus, Marcos warns against indigenous fundamentalismo, which is translated by the philosophical or cultural term essentialism (JS Int En 12). Furthermore, speaking of the establishment’s inability to grasp that the Zapatista movement is not a conventional political organization, he says, in the TT, “It will be difficult to make this understood by the Other, because his schemes are nothing but outdated” (JS Int En 9). A later TT repetition of Other refers to the federal government (JS Int En 17). This capitalization (Other for ST lower case otro) links the interpretation to the philosophical concept of alterity. These relatively minor changes on the phraseological plane may indicate a higher-level interpretation by the translator or editor, potentially shifting the focus of the political argument from that of a political tract to that of a philosophical treatise. Such terminological concentration by the translator occurs with some frequency in non-fiction texts: it was also seen in Peden’s translation of Ariel and Dorfman’s Pato Donald and now in this translation of Marcos’s interview. Such stylistic choices in the translation may be subtle, even subliminal. Furthermore, the whole interview is an exercise initially in intralingual and intersemiotic translation, the spoken interview being transcribed for publication. It is thus the Mexican transcriber and editor who have made the

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interpretation of otro in the ST. In the TT, the significance of the priming of Other for philosophical texts may pass almost unnoticed by the reader. On other occasions, it can be most blatant, as in the naming of controversial key figures in a very polarized press. An outstanding case is the treatment of the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez in the United States press. A search of the archive of the conservative Geopolitical Review10 reveals a range of naming that becomes increasingly strident and negative, ranging from the more neutral Venezuela’s Leftist Leader Hugo Chavez (14 March 2005), to the disrespectful scare quotes of Venezuelan ‘President’ Hugo Chavez (17 January 2005), to the inherent negativity, in a modern U.S. context, of Venezuela’s Communist/Socialist Leader Hugo Chavez (31 May 2005) to the undisguised attack of Venezuela Despot Hugo Chavez (24 June 2005). The function of such phraseological naming is to present an inherently negative and threatening image of Chávez no matter what he says or does and irrespective of any conventional translation of his words. Critical discourse analysts get excited about ‘manipulation’ in such politically sensitive texts, but this may not happen in the expected ways. For instance, as we saw in chapter 1 the phenomenon of transitivity is functionally related to the ideational function and to the psychological plane since it is a representation of reality. Concealment of the actor, through the use of a passive or a nominalization, is normally a sign of a concealment of responsibility. Yet transitivity selections do not always follow the expected pattern. The following extract is the first paragraph of a proclamation to the Cuban people signed by Fidel Castro and read out on Cuban state radio on 31 July 2006. It informs listeners of the handing over of temporary power to Castro’s brother Raul because of Fidel’s impending operation. It is thus a politically significant moment and therefore a highly sensitive text since it was carefully examined across the world for indications of the imminent fall of the regime: ST Castro Proclama del comandante (Castro 2006a) Con motivo del enorme esfuerzo realizado para visitar la ciudad argentina de Córdoba, participar en la reunion del MERCOSUR, en la clausura de la Cumbre de los Pueblos en la histórica Universidad de Córdoba y en la visita a Altagracia, la ciudad donde vivió el Che en su infancia y unido a esto asistir de inmediato a la conmemoración del 53 aniversario del asalto a los cuarteles Moncasa y Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, el 26 de julio de 1953, en las provincias de Granma y Holguín, días y noches de trabajo continuo sin apenas dormir dieron lugar a que mi salud, que ha resistido todas las pruebas, se sometiera a un estrés extremo y se quebrantara. The translations published in English were quoted and analysed in the press as if they were Castro’s own words. The translation published

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on the BBC World Service website perhaps unsurprisingly adheres very closely to the transitivity patterns and indeed to many types of structure, including lexical, cohesion, and information structure: TT1 Castro Proclamation BBC World Service (Castro 2006b) As a result of the great effort exerted to visit the Argentine city of Córdoba, to participate in the Mercosur meeting, the closing of the People’s Summit in the historic University of Córdoba, and to visit Alta Gracia, the city where Che [Guevara] grew up, together with my participation in the commemoration in Granma and Holguín provinces of the 53rd anniversary of the assaults on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Garrisons on 26 July 1953, days and nights of nonstop work with hardly any sleep led my health, which has withstood every test, to undergo extreme stress and a breakdown. The ST conceals Fidel’s participation by omitting the mention of the first person. This is most startling in the first line where there is no mention of the actor, Fidel. The process is instead realized by a past participle, realizado/exerted and by infinitive forms to visit, to participate and so on. Even the use at the end of the paragraph of mi salud [ . . . ] se quebrantara (my health [ . . . ] to undergo [ . . . ] a breakdown ) is a concealment because the actor is health rather than Castro himself. The text carefully shies away from an admission that I suffered a breakdown of health. The BBC translation is notable in studiously reproducing the transitivity pattern everywhere except in the choice of my participation (for asistir, ‘to attend’). These transitivity choices are marked since they have clearly been taken to avoid the admission of weakness entailed by a phrasing such as ‘As a result of the great effort which I exerted when I visited . . . .’ That this interpretation nevertheless remains implicit can be seen in the translation published in the Miami Herald of 1 August 2006 where the translator has felt it necessary to reinstate the omitted first-person pronoun but within square brackets, an extremely unusual stylistic choice: “As a result of the enormous effort [I] made to visit the Argentine city of Cordoba [ . . . ]”. The proclamation is unusual because of the existence of several different TTs in addition to that disseminated by Granma, the official Cuban state organ. This is due to the importance of the news, causing the BBC, Miami Herald, New York Times, and ABC to produce their own translations for readers who wanted immediate access to the full text rather than an edited or commented version. Normally, Castro’s speeches are quoted through the Granma translation, made available on the website, together with a full archive of Castro’s speeches and press releases. What is even more remarkable in this case is that it is the Granma translation that makes Castro a far more explicit actor in the illness:

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Castro TT2 Castro Proclamation Granma (Castro 2006) As a result of the enormous effort entailed by my visit to the Argentinean city of Córdoba, my participation in the Mercosur meeting and in the closing ceremony of the People’s Summit at the historic University of Córdoba, and my visit to the city of Altagracia, where Che spent his childhood, as well as the fact that immediately after this I attended the celebrations for the 53rd anniversary of the attacks on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes garrisons, which took place on the 26th of July 1953, held in the provinces of Granma and Holguín, and after days and nights of non-stop work with barely any sleep, my health, which has withstood every test, was put under extreme stress and submitted to the pressure. The highlighted stylistic choices show that on three occasions TT2 includes the possessive pronoun my with the nominalized process and on one occasion (I attended) even foregrounds Castro’s involvement with a first-person pronoun and a finite material process. The one point in the translation where the gravity of the situation is reduced is at the very end of the extract: “my health, which has withstood every test, was put under extreme stress and submitted to the pressure.” Here the transitivity choice was put under extreme stress does tally with the goal of covering up Castro’s condition, the passive emphasizing that external pressures have caused this illness rather than its being the result of a chronic weakness. Translations provided by Granma are commonly cited verbatim by the world press and often come to take the place of the Spanish ST words. Thus, Raúl Castro’s explanation of a heightened military alert in Cuba in an interview granted to Granma on 17 August 2006 (“We could not rule out the risk of somebody going crazy, or even crazier, within the U.S. government”) appeared in press reports throughout the English-speaking world. In other circumstances, where dissemination is less tightly controlled, the press may indicate the constraints under which the TT has been produced by signalling that it is a “rush translation.” With the growth of the Internet, it is also becoming increasingly common for the words of political figures to circulate in translations produced unofficially and even by individuals who confess that their translation competence is doubtful. One such example is Carlos Fuentes’s essay “¡Viva Chile mierda!” (Fuentes 1998), translated by a fan who admits “I’m not a professional translator and my spanish is not very good—i hope i haven’t made too many mistakes!”11 The translation of political ideology is therefore becoming more democratized, particularly where texts concerned are in some way marginal even if this means that the conventional quality of the translation is not guaranteed.

172 Style and Ideology in Translation CONCLUSION The sensitive political texts analysed in this chapter, while varied, show some remarkable stylistic patterns in translation. The most evident are the paratextual framing, not only introductions and glossaries and bibliographies but also the titles (particularly in newspapers) and footnotes. The latter may even conceal the evaluative and interpretive act of translation, as we saw in Rice’s edition of the Spanish Ariel text. Although the translator’s voice can be seen in the use of metaphor, parallelism, and phonological translation, the clearest evaluation is to be found in naming and terminology, related to phraseological and psychological points of view. This most often happens when the translator shares an ideological affinity with the ST or author: Kunzle’s translation of How to Read Donald Duck sharpens the Marxist terminology; the U.S. attitude to Hugo Chávez is most keenly expressed in the extreme evaluative descriptions of his political position. The use of the Internet is leading to the increased use of translation to spread a political message, whether by marginalized groups such as the EZLN and subcomandante Marcos or by the governments of states such as Cuba or Venezuela. They are able to give direct access to their texts and thus control the paratextual framing that mediates them in the mainstream press in the English-speaking world. This represents a rich source of stylistic analysis, although the results of the Castro communiqué analysed in this chapter suggest that the patterns of, for example, transitivity to indicate power relations do not necessarily materalize in the expected form.

7

Style in Audiovisual Translation

This chapter focuses on style in audiovisual translation, specifically film subtitling and film adaptation. The study of audiovisual translation is a relatively new field in translation studies but it is becoming increasingly prominent with the explosion of new media, including DVD. It is an example of what Titford (1982) termed “constrained translation,” where the linguistic form of translation is restricted and shaped by the existence of a non-verbal medium. This applies above all in cases where the TT is in some way superimposed on the ST format. Examples are: adverts which maintain the same visual in the TT, changing only the written or spoken word; comic books, where again the visuals remain the same and the TL translation must fit into the same space on the page; and film translation, where the dubbing or subtitling must match the visual and bow to a series of practical constraints, notably lip synchronization in dubbing and reading speed and caption length for subtitles. Mayoral, Kelly, and Gallardo (1988), drawing on the related concept of synchrony originally used by Fodor (1975) for the analysis of dubbing, describe subtitles as being constrained due to space, time, and image synchrony: that is, the subtitles are constrained by the image on the screen, by the space allocated to subtitles (in many Western languages a maximum of two lines, each of approximately 37 characters) and by the duration of appearance onscreen. The subtitle normally needs to coincide with the spoken words and avoid frame cuts. Although these constraints do not exist in the same way in conventional written translation, we can see that they coincide with various concerns of spatio-temporal narrative point of view which we discussed in chapter 1. From a translational stylistics perspective, the main interest lies in comparing the patterns of subtitles and the corresponding SL spoken word. But, as we shall see in this chapter, the object of investigation is more complex since the film versions are often adaptations of novels or novellas in the SL and considerable rewriting takes place in the move from ST to screen play to film to subtitle. Most work on film style from a film studies perspective equates style purely with aesthetics. For instance, David Bordwell’s influential book On the History of Film Style defines style as follows:

174 Style and Ideology in Translation In the narrowest sense, I take style to be a film’s systematic and significant use of techniques of the medium. [ . . . ] Style is, minimally, the texture of the film’s images and sounds, the result of choices made by the filmmaker(s) in particular historical circumstances. (Bordwell 1997: 4) In discussing the techniques of mise en scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, Bordwell is here referring to a single film, but he also uses ‘style’ to refer to an individual director (e.g., Hitchcock) or group (Hollywood). This approach matches the stylistics of written fiction, which deal with the individual book, the author’s oeuvre, or the style of the genre or school. There are three other elements that are of particular importance: 1. The concentration on the aesthetics of fi lmmaking involves a dualist understanding of form and content similar to that discussed with regard to the stylistics of written texts. Style tends to be seen as a matter of form, since, in Bordwell’s “post-theory,” there is little or no discussion on the script or on narrative techniques. However, again echoing the monist/dualist debate within stylistics, Bordwell attempts to underline the central, formative role of cinematic style: “style is not simply window-dressing draped over a script; it is the very flesh of the work” (ibid.: 8); 2. The emphasis placed by Bordwell on the meshing of image and sound is obviously crucial to the success of fi lm and of other modern media. However, sound, which Bordwell acknowledges remains under-developed in his book, is limited to music with no attention being paid to the words uttered by the characters and how those words might be translated either by dubbing or subtitling; 3. The focus on the film as “the result of the choices made by the filmmaker(s) in particular historical circumstances,” and the linking of these to causes that are “cultural, institutional [or] biographical” (ibid.: 6), is a crucial element that can be found also in stylistics and in descriptive translation studies, where the text (or film) is studied in an attempt to reconstruct the norms and motivations underlying the decisions which have produced the surface-level choices visible in the text. Even though we reject a purely aesthetic view of film style, and even though the prime interest in translation (including audiovisual translation) studies has inevitably been the transfer of the spoken word, by dubbing or subtitling, we must agree with Bordwell (1997: 8) that there is much more to ‘reading’ a film than merely treating it as a literary text. Gibbs and Pye speak about film-making in words that are very close to our functional model of style in written texts: Style is more than an accumulation of material decisions; it is a web, a network, a texture, a pattern, or, more mechanistically, a system. These

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terms all insist that style involves relationship within and between the various areas of choice available to the novelist, painter or filmmaker. It is patterned, systematised decision-making that achieves significance. (Gibbs and Pye 2005: 11) Amongst others, this can be seen in the construction of narrative point of view and the extent to which ideological and institutional pressures are behind the writer’s, and translator’s, choices. For written fiction, point of view (see chapter 1), regarding the positioning of the narrator and the reader, is a visual metaphor that has been transferred to the two-dimensional written text. For film, point of view is truly visual and can be manipulated by the filmmaker by the use of camera angle, framing, silent characters, and techniques which Bordwell describes as “intuitive” and even “transcultural” (ibid.: 164), not therefore affected by the SL environment. Bordwell also refers to the evolution in technology and production techniques (of anything from the development of camera lenses to the availability of steadycam and the digitization of editing) that has an effect on the narrative techniques such as depth staging (ibid.: 269). Evolving technologies have also affected the presentation of subtitles: the decision to centre titles in cinema productions was initially determined by the better image obtained against the early flat screens and by the seating arrangement of the audience (Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 49), whereas television subtitles, not subject to these constraints, have tended to be left justified, at least in Western countries. Socio-cultural factors affecting translation in general are also pertinent, such as censorship under totalitarian regimes or the banning, or admittance, of films portraying sex and violence for moral reasons. Although norms may be established by institutional or societal practices, Bordwell emphasizes that there is an “indefinitely large array of social factors” acting upon individuals, even when those individuals are acting within institutions or strict ideological and cultural circumstances. Yet these factors cannot dictate every decision made by the filmmaker: “Ideology or culture cannot prepare every detail in advance, and style is a matter of details” (ibid.: 269). This is very important for translation too. The translator operates within a specific context of culture or ideological environment and is subject to the formative influences and constraining pressures of the local environment and institutions. However, this cannot account for every stylistic choice, and, as we have already seen in the analysis of more conventional written texts in other chapters, these choices themselves may not be totally consistent. Although they share the ideological environment, there are some major, and frequently commented, differences between interlingual subtitling and written translation. These are notably that the translation process involves a move from oral to written language, and, due to space and time constraints on the screen and controlled reading speeds, a reduction in the number of words becomes necessary (de Linde and Kay 1999: 3). De Linde

176 Style and Ideology in Translation and Kay also emphasize the other obvious additional constraints of the image on the screen, which is normally inviolable, and the sound track in the source language which is retained in a subtitled version. The subtitler must therefore try to respect aspects of the cinematography such as camera cuts and match the duration of the subtitles to the rhythm of the dialogue. The task is further complicated because of the technical nature of audiovisual translation which is much more susceptible to prescriptivism than is conventional literary translation. An example of this is the Code of Good Subtitling Practice, drafted by Ivarsson and Carroll and adopted by the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST). Among the ‘rules’ are: Translation quality must be high with due consideration of all idiomatic and cultural nuances [ . . . ] Straightforward semantic units must be used. Where compression of dialogue is necessary, the results must be coherent. [ . . . ] The language register must be appropriate and correspond with the spoken word. The language should be (grammatically) “correct” since subtitles serve as a model for literacy. [ . . . ] There must be a close correlation between film dialogue and subtitle content; source language and target language should be synchronised as far as possible. (Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 157–159) Given the stress on following such ‘rules,’ what stylistic characteristics might differentiate the work of different translators? For Ivarsson and Carroll (1998: 57), “personal style” in audiovisual translation may be mainly limited to the timing and division of subtitles, the use of one- or two-liners, and the selection of the essence of a complex passage (where there are several overlapping speakers, for example). It would seem to be essential to test this claim with further studies, but the main point at issue here is that there is a clash of cultures. On the one hand, certainly when we are speaking of film adaptations, the origin of the text is literary and, in some cases, the art of the original novel may lie in its very incoherence or hybridity, its explanation or exploration of the limits of language. The film adaptation transfers some of this literariness from written to spoken and non-verbal language. On the other hand, the subtitler is reversing the

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process, moving from the oral representation of the written back to a condensed written form. The Ivarsson and Carroll ‘rules’ attempt to impose a prescriptive written format on the subtitles. While this may be valuable from a practical point of view (and the aims of ESIST are primarily directed at establishing professional standards), at the same time the Code dangerously oversimplifies the nature of language: for instance, it calls for ‘correct’ language (a term fraught with ideological overtones) yet at the same time a language which “correspond[s] with the spoken word.” However, as is well-known, the spoken word is notoriously difficult to pin down and transcribe. Indeed, Luyken et al., in Overcoming Language Barriers in Television: Dubbing and Subtitling for the European Audience (1991) identify the problems of spoken language that they see as problematic for any translator but particularly subtitlers: dialects, puns and jokes, ambiguities, and localisms. It should be added that these are of particular difficulty where they represent a constituent part of character or story; for example, where dialect or idiolect is indicative of social status or an integral part of a community. It may be argued that audiovisual translation has as much in common with interpreting as with written translation, since the subtitling constraints encourage omission, reduction, and gist translation. However, despite this, and despite the obviously crucial role of the visual in film, there is no inherent reason why the linguistic element of film and written translation should not be analysed in similar fashion even if the results of the stylistic analysis eventually demonstrate differences between the media. This is all the more so in the case of multiple versions and subtitles, since the manipulation (in a non-judgemental sense) of the verbal language is central to the process. At each stage the linguistic element can be compared and, in the case of the film, supplemented by an analysis of the visual or phonological. Much has been written on the technical and linguistic aspects of subtitling, but less attention has so far been paid to the integration of subtitling and broader analytic models which may be useful for a stylistic analysis. Christopher Taylor (2003) has proposed a model inspired by Hallidayan linguistics and the visual grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/2006) for the description of image, sound, dialogue and subtitle, which will partly be taken up in the analysis of the film dialogues below; Frederic Chaume (2004) proposes a combination of translation studies and film studies in the investigation of audiovisual translation and discusses various ‘codes’ (paralinguistic, musical, iconographic, editing) that supplement the linguistic. Chaume’s main focus is on a model that has pedagogical applications, teaching trainee subtitlers the techniques. Since there seems to be quite general agreement on the relatively restricted number of such techniques and issues in audiovisual translation (reduction, omission, register variation, humour, punctuation, etc., see Gambier 2003: 153), it might not be excessive to suggest that real progress in stylistic and descriptive issues

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can only be made by bringing together the results of systematic and close analysis of a large number of subtitled films and by taking up Jorge DíazCintas’s (2003: 32) call for macro-level incorporation of those aspects of power, culture, and ideology that for some time have been common in ‘mainstream’ translation studies. This is just the framework adopted here for the analysis of written translation. The two Latin American films that form the case studies in this chapter are film adaptations of written fiction: No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone] (Lombardi 1998), an adaptation of a novel by Miami-based Peruvian novelist and TV host Jaime Bayly, and Fresa y chocolate [Strawberry and Chocolate] (Gutiérrez Alea and Tabio 1993), based on a short story by the Cuban writer Senel Paz. Both these films centre on the experiences of gay men in a macho or repressive society and both are good examples of the multiple forms of rewriting that are inherent in film adaptation and translation. In each case the various constraints have some bearing on the stylistic choices.

DON’T TELL ANYONE No se lo digas a nadie (Bayly 1994) tells the story of Joaquín, a young, upper-middle class Peruvian whose gay identity emerges within a very macho society and paternal structure. No translation of this novel has been published, although it has at least twice been offered to a British publisher of gay fiction. The Spanish film adaptation was directed by Francisco Lombardi. Subtitled as Don’t Tell Anyone, it was shown, amongst others, at the 1999 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. The cover of the DVD version distributed in the United States focuses the plot on the search for sexual identity and on what it tells us about Latin American society: “Don’t Tell Anyone is the groundbreaking story of a Peruvian man’s search for his sexual identity in an intolerant society. [ . . . It] is a powerful and unique portrait of the dichotomous world that exists in much of Latin America.” From the outset, therefore, we are apparently to understand the story as representative of an issue that affects a whole continent. The different versions we shall consider are illustrated in Table 7.1:

Table 7.1. No se lo digas a nadie, book and film versions Spanish ST

English TT

Novel by Jaime Bayly (1994) Film version by Lombardi (1998)

Film with English subtitles (1998)

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At the macro level, there are major differences of plot between the novel and the film; the latter notably omits or simplifies a large number of scenes, distilling and sometimes almost caricaturing Joaquín’s homosexuality and adding some degree of reconciliation within the family at the end. At times, the film even appears to be a sexual comedy. Importantly for the narrative technique, the novel is very oral, full of dialogue, steeped in Peruvian idiom, macho-speak and references to homosexuality. Central to the plot is the tension between Joaquín and his traditionalist father, Luis Felipe, a macho man whose actions are aggressive and whose own language is full of expletives. A typical example is the following scene (Table 7.2) where the father tries to teach the 15-year-old Joaquín how to fight: Table 7.2. Joaquín and father fight, No se lo digas a nadie, novel No se lo digas a nadie, novel, (Bayly 1994: 18–19)

Literal translation

Ya, arranca, muévete—dijo Luis Felipe-. Now, start, move—said Luis Felipe-. Imagínate que soy un pendejito de tu Imagine that I am an idiot from your colegio. school. Joaquín se puso en guardia. Luis Felipe Joaquín took guard. Luis Felipe began comenzó a bailotear alrededor de él. to dance around him. Joaquín got the Joaquín se animó a tirarle un par de enthusiasm to give him a couple of golpes a la barriga. Su padre los desvió punches in the stomach. His father con las manos. fended them off with his hands. —Muy lento—dijo, moviéndose alrededor suyo—. Más fuerte. Más rápido. Más rápido.

—Very slow—he said, moving around him—. Harder. Faster. Faster.

Joaquín trató de darle un buen puñete en la barriga, pero su padre desvió el golpe y le contestó con una bofetada. Joaquín se rió nerviosamente.

Joaquín tried to give him a good punch in the stomach, but his father fended the punch and answered with a slap. Joaquín laughed nervously.

—No te rías—dijo Luis Felipe—. Sigue mechando. Concéntrate.

—Don’t laugh—said Luis Felipe—. Carry on fighting. Concentrate.

—Pero me dijiste que tú no me ibas a pegar, papi.

—But you told me that you weren’t going to hit me, Daddy.

—Mecha nomás. No pierdas aire hablando.

—Just fight. Don’t waste breath speaking.

Joaquín trató de darle un puñete en la cara, pero su padre se movió a tiempo, esquivó el golpe y le dio un par de bofetadas. De nuevo, Joaquín sintió la cara caliente, ardiéndole.

Joaquín tried to punch him in the face, but his father moved in time, dodged the blow and gave him a couple of slaps. Again, Joaquin felt his face hot, burning him. (continued)

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Table 7.2. Joaquín and father fight, No se lo digas a nadie, novel (continued) No se lo digas a nadie, novel, (Bayly 1994: 18–19)

Literal translation

—Ya no quiero seguir mechando —dijo.

—I don’t want to fight any more —he said.

—No vale tirar la toalla. No te me mariconees, muchacho. Te estoy enseñando a mechar como hombre.

—You can’t throw in the towel. Don’t play the fairy with me, lad. I’m teaching you to fight like a man.

De pronto, Luis Felipe le tiró una cachetada más. Joaquín se enfureció y le dio dos golpes en la barriga.

Suddenly, Luis Felipe gave him another smack. Joaquín became furious and punched him twice in the stomach.

—Carajo, te me amotinas—dijo Luis Felipe, sonriendo.

—Dammit, you’re having a go —said Luis Felipe, smiling.

Entonces le tiró dos bofetadas más Then he gave him two harder slaps fuertes que las anteriores. Joaquín le than the previous ones. Joaquín dio la espalda, se sacó los guantes y los turned his back on him, took off his tiró al suelo. gloves and threw them to the ground. —Así no vale, pues, papi—dijo.

—Like that’s not right, then, Daddy —he said.

Estaba llorando. No podía evitarlo.

He was crying. He couldn’t help it.

—Ponte los guantes, carajo—dijo Luis Felipe-. No me vengas con mariconadas.

—Put your gloves on, dammit—said Luis Felipe—. Don’t come to me with gay [pej.] tricks.

Dialogue accounts for about one third of this scene in the novel. The father’s language is full of imperatives, with the occasional interjection of carajo and pejorative reference to homosexuality. The raw aggression of Luis Felipe’s words is a prime index of his character. Translation into the film dialogue involves much reduction but transfers some of the dialogue directly (Table 7.3). Those sections of screen dialogue retained from the book are marked in bold in the first column. They are three interventions from Luis Felipe and one from Joaquín. In each case, the transferred elements form the basis of the utterance in the film dialogue. However, to each of Luis Felipe’s is added an interpersonal, evaluative vulgar element: de esos que te joden la paciencia, huevón, carajo. On the other hand, Joaquín’s intervention shows a reduction, with the omission of the informal mechar (‘to fight’). Stylistically, the film dialogue is a distillation of the character traits of the two characters. The added dialogue in the film emphasizes this in the interpersonal

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Table 7.3. Joaquín and father fight, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue (dialogue transferred from book is in bold)

Literal translation

No se lo digas a nadie, subtitles

LUIS FELIPE Imagínate que soy un pendejito del colegio, de esos que te joden la paciencia.

Imagine that I am an idiot from school, of those who fuck up your patience

Imagine I’m an idiot from school, a kid that gets on your nerves

No te rías, huevón

Don’t laugh, you jerk

Don’t laugh

No mariconees, hombre

Don’t fairy about, man

Don’t be a pussy

No te asustes, hijo

Don’t be frightened, son

Don’t be a wimp, boy

JOAQUÍN Yo no quiero seguir mechando

I don’t want to continue

I quit

LUIS FELIPE No vale tirar la toalla, no mariconees, carajo

It’s no good throwing in the towel, don’t fairy about, dammit

You can’t throw in the towel, you fairy

Abandonar una pelea es una mariconada

Giving up a fight is a gay [pej.] trick

What are you, a faggot?

[To mother, who intervenes] . . . Tiene 15 años, carajo

He’s 15, dammit

He’s 15, dammit!

¿No te das cuenta?

Don’t you realize?

Can’t you see that?

¿Qué quieres, que acabe siendo maricón? ¿Eso es lo que quieres?

What do you want, that he should end up being a gay [pej.]? That is what you want?

What do you want, a faggot?

¿Mi hijo, maricón?

My son, a gay [pej.]?

Is that what you want?

¿Un roquete que no sabe defenderse, que tiene miedo a todo?

A fairy who can’t defend himself, who is scared of everything?

An indefensive and scared little fairy?

function affecting the ideological plane of point of view, with Luis Felipe’s imperatives towards Joaquín and the question forms and many references to homosexuality in his address to his wife. When we turn to consider the subtitles, we see that the principal reductions are precisely those interpersonal elements that had been added in the

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film dialogue: que te joden la paciencia is translated by the more neutral gets on your nerves, and no translation is provided of either huevón or carajo. This raises the possibility that translated subtitles may have more in common with the speech representation in novels than by the sometimes more spontaneous speech norms of film dialogue. In the subtitles for those interventions that are added in the film dialogue, this trend is sometimes repeated (No mariconees, hombre, is subtitled Don’t be a pussy, omitting the interpersonal hombre) but it is not a hard-and-fast rule—the next intervention, No te asustes, hijo is rendered as Don’t be a wimp, boy, and carajo is once translated as dammit). Aggressive language is not restricted to the father. Table 7.4 is the scene where Joaquín’s first gay partner, Gonzalo, is responding angrily to the suggestion that he should tell his fiancée he is gay. The tone and volume of voice and the body language will convey some of the anger, but the actual words in the subtitles give no indication of anything but conventional, bookish use. Space constraints push the subtitler to a constant strategy of reduction or selection of ‘core’ meaning. Taboo language might be considered to be non-central to the main meaning of the passage, or subtitlers may be reluctant to give status to the expletives by transcribing them and making them visible on screen. Viewers have come to accept this strategy as a convention. However, there would seem to be no space or time constraint to stop the subtitler giving a translation of “le haría un daño de carajo” as “I’d hurt her like hell,” while in the last intervention the omission of En su puta vida . . . (‘In her fucking life. . . ’) could be remedied by the judicious addition of fucking before crossed or mind. Nevertheless, this might mean that the first line of the subtitle could no longer accommodate a single syntactic or idiomatic unit; the interpersonal element here loses out to the space constraints. These changes of naming and interpersonal function relate to the phraseological and ideological points of view. The macro-structure of modality is retained (imperatives, questions) but the evaluative interjections disappear and the emotion is transmitted non-verbally and by the retention of

Table 7.4. Joaquín and Gonzalo, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue

Literal translation

No se lo digas a nadie, subtitles

¿Estás cojudo?

Are you crazy?

Are you crazy?

Le haría un daño de carajo I would hurt her like hell

I’d hurt her

En su puta vida se le ha pasado por la cabeza que yo tengo mi punto gay

It’s never crossed her mind I’ve got a gay side

Never in her fucking life has it gone through her head that I have my gay side

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Table 7.5. Joaquín and father on the hunting trip, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue

No se lo digas a nadie, subtitles

Y yo que pensé que eras incapaz de matar una mosca.

And I thought you couldn’t kill a fly

¡Ca-ra-jo!

That’s my boy!

the disrespectful naming. It seems that in film subtitles it is the expression of the phraseological point of view through the naming selections that compensates for other reductions in the interpersonal function. One interesting exception is where the interjection stands on its own and where its pragmatic force needs to be conveyed more explicitly. In Table 7.5 on a hunting trip, the father shows his excitement, incorrectly assuming that Joaquín has killed a deer. The exclamation, each syllable pronounced slowly and emphatically, is accompanied by a slap on Joaquín’s back. This merits and even requires a separate subtitle: That’s my boy! conveys the pragmatic intent of the Spanish, though not, of course, the aggression and the vulgarity. The desire for grammatical standardization also seems to be so great here that the subtitle becomes a full syntactic unit, although there is an attempt to suggest the informality of speech with the contraction That’s and the exclamation mark. There is the other constant running through this film, which is the foregrounding of homosexual identity in the denotational lexical items that constitute Field. Alfonso, talking to his friend Joaquín, laments the intolerance towards homosexuality that is prevalent in Peru:

Table 7.6. Alfonso and Joaquín, No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue and subtitles No se lo digas a nadie, film dialogue

Literal translation

ALFONSO En este país puedes In this country you can ser coquero, ladrón, be a coke-head, thief, mujeriego o lo que te dé womanizer or what appeals to you la gana

No se lo digas a nadie, subtitles Here, you can be a cokehead, a thief, a womanizer or whatever

pero no te puede dar el rico de ser maricón

But you can’t afford to be a faggot

but you can’t be a faggot

JOAQUÍN No puedo dejar de ser maricón

I can’t stop being a faggot

I can’t stop being a faggot

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As in the example of the fight in Table 7.1, the word maricón is translated (here with the equivalent faggot) on each occasion it appears. Rather than an interpersonal element, here it is central to the meaning of this extract, part of Field and of the ideational function. If we look back at Table 7.1, we see that those items with a pejorative sense that appeared in the subtitles (e.g., fairy, wimp, faggot, pussy) are all noun forms. What is omitted in the subtitles of this film are the evaluative epithets and the interpersonal interjections, with the result that the weight of the subtitles falls on other grammatical classes of items. It would be useful to pursue this finding in more delicate analysis of other films in order to ascertain the form of the language of subtitles. Combining this with investigation of the socio-cultural environment through interviews with audiovisual translation agencies and the subtitlers themselves, it may be possible to make progress in determining the relative power of spatio-temporal and ideological constraints. For instance, are expletives omitted because of space constraints or because of moral squeamishness?

STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE The other film we shall consider here also deals with gay issues in Latin America. The film Fresa y chocolate, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio, was released in 1993. Its English subtitled version used the title Strawberry and Chocolate. It was based on a novella, El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo, by the Cuban writer Senel Paz, who also adapted the story for the initial film script. Set and shot in Cuba, the film follows the relationship between a young Communist student, David, and a homosexual writer, Diego. David is initially hostile towards Diego. However, instead of following the instructions of his Communist party mentor Miguel, he becomes real friends with Diego, won over by his interest in literature and art and Cubanía. Diego is hounded by the state because of his homosexuality, his

Table 7.7. Strawberry and Chocolate, book and film versions Spanish ST

English TT

Novella (El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo) by Senel Paz (1991)

TT1 (The Wolf, the Woods and the New Man) by Peter Bush (1995) TT2 (The Wolf, the Forest and the New Man) by Thomas Christensen (1996)

Published screen play (Fresa y chocolate), version by Senel Paz (1994)

Translated by Peter Bush (1995)

Film (Fresa y chocolate) directed by Gutiérrez Alea and Tobio (1993)

Film (Strawberry and Chocolate) with English subtitles (1993)

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art, and his open condemnation of the system, and is finally forced to leave the country. The film explores the tension between different aspects of his identity (between his identity as a homosexual, as an artist, and as a Cuban) and, perhaps surprisingly, it was allowed to be filmed and released in Cuba and even received state funding (Paz/Bush 1995: 143). The film is the result of a series of rewritings, from the original short story to screen play to film and subtitled version, which is even more complex than was the case with No se lo digas a nadie (see Table 7.7). The evolution of the story from novella to film through various phases is an example of what Gambier (2003, 2004) has termed “tradaptation.” There is also chronological distortion in the publication: it was only once the international success of the film became clear that the novella was published in English, in two different translations: one by the prominent British translator Peter Bush as The Wolf, the Woods and the New Man (Paz/Bush 1995) and the other in the United States in the journal Conjunctions (vol. 27, 1996) by Thomas Christensen (co-translator of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, 1992). The Christensen translation uses the title The Wolf, the Forest and the New Man (Paz/Christensen 1996). According to Paz himself (Paz/Bush 1995: 73) the script for the film went through eleven drafts, a process of modification in performance that is well-known in theatre and film adaptations. Although Paz claims that “the variations between film and script, generally few in number, derive from the act of creation and not from any kind of censorship or ‘betrayal’”, it is also true that there are a number of omissions (of whole scenes) in the film, while the dialogue is often altered. Peter Bush’s translation of the film script, published in the book, was based on the ‘original’ script, which differs considerably from the final film version with the omission of several scenes, including a number based around the Havana Concert Hall. The unattributed English subtitles for the film also differ from Bush’s translation not only because of the changes in the script but also because, of course, Bush’s translation was not subject to the same severe space and time constraints as the screen titles. All these different versions serve to multiply the strands of the story, blurring any notion of an original source text. They also provide a useful basis for comparisons, between the two translations of the novella, between novella and screenplay, between screenplay and film. These allow stylistic insights not available when we deal with a single, static text. It should be pointed out that Peter Bush has himself commented on his work on this film, in the introduction to the book version of the novella and screenplay published by Bloomsbury (see Paz/Bush 1995), at an international translation conference at Norwich in 1996 and in an article in Traduire (Bush 2002). However, Bush’s main focus is on the political context for the production of the film and the limited textual analysis is restricted to his translation of the screenplay. Surprisingly, even in the later article he makes no reference whatsoever to the subtitles used in the final version, nor any note of Christensen’s

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translation of the novella. This raises the possibility that intertextual reference is limited in audiovisual translation; that is, that there is little overt cross-reference, influence, or interference noticeable between the linguistic selections in the TT book and in the subtitles. An example of the shifts in narrative structure and story line can be illustrated with reference to the famous Coppelia ice cream palace scene, at the beginning of the story and early in the film, where Diego sits down next to David and tries to engage him in conversation.1 The description of the scene in the novella is as follows: ST Novella Nos conocemos precisamente aquí, en Coppelia, un día de esos en que uno no sabe si cuando termina la merienda va a perderse calle arriba o calle abajo. Vino hasta mi mesa, y murmurando «con permiso» se instaló en la silla de enfrente con sus bolsas, carteras, paraguas, rollos de papel y la copa de helado. Le eché una ojeada: no había que ser muy sagaz para ver de qué pata cojeaba, y habiendo chocolate, había pedido fresa. (Paz 1991: 10) [We met precisely here, in Coppelia, one of those days on which one does not know if when one finishes tea one will lose oneself up the road or down the road. He came up to my table, and mumbling “sorry” sat down on the chair opposite with his bags, briefcases, umbrella, wads of paper and ball of ice cream. I threw a look at him: it was not necessary to be very wise to see from which leg he limped, and there being chocolate, he had ordered strawberry.] TT Bush We met right here at the Coppelia, on one of those days when you’ve finished your bite to eat and can’t decide where to take a stroll. He came over to my table, mumbled ‘scuse me’ and sat down in the chair opposite with his bags, briefcase, umbrella, bundles of paper and helping of ice cream. I glanced at him: you didn’t have to be a genius to see which way the wind blew; there was chocolate on the menu, he’d ordered strawberry. (Paz/Bush 1995: 41) The story is clearly told from David’s point of view. Evidence can be seen in the use of the first person singular, the deictic marker here (We met right here; Christensen actually translates as the spatially distant there), the deictic verb came which shows Diego approaching the viewer from a distance, the verb of perception glanced, and the knowledge and world-view which the narrator assumes he shares with the reader. This shared world-view is conveyed by

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the repetition of a generic you, a stylistic trait in Bush’s translation, and the unexplicated inferences of the Coppelia ice cream palace. It is “the site of most gay encounters in Havana” according to Quiroga (2000: 131), but there is no explicitation in the passage or indeed in the film. It is presumed that the reader is aware of or can deduce the significance of the choice of ice cream flavour— chocolate is usually for ‘real’ men, strawberry for women and gays. This narrative point of view is maintained in Paz’s screenplay. However, sometimes the descriptions of action are turned into stage directions and thus obviously still remain verbal instructions to the actors regarding tone of voice, attitude, ways of looking, and so on, even if the goal is to translate it into a visual effect or performance on screen. In the screen play adaptation of this scene, the homosexual overtone becomes obvious in the dialogue and stage directions: Screen play ST Se escucha la voz de Diego: Con permisso. David vuelve a la realidad. Mira al que ha hablado y queda de una pieza. Frente a él está Diego, con una copa de helado de fresa. Su facha de homosexual resulta escandalosa a los ojos de David. DAVID (Para sí): Dios mío! Diego sonríe a David, deposita el helado sobre la mesa y comienza a acomodar sus numerosos bultos, que terminarán por copar las dos sillas vacías y parte de la mesa. Entre sus cosas, un ramo de girasoles y una cámara fotográfica. David mira hacia los lados. Ve una mesa libre a dos pasos. Vemos a Germán al fondo, atento a la escena. (En el transcurso de la secuencia habrá uno o dos intercuts de Germán). Diego termina de instalarse. David observa que su copa de helado de chocolate está intacto. Diego lo mira muy amistoso y almibarado y le dice refiriéndose al helado pero en tono ambiguo. DIEGO: No pude resistir la tentación . . . Adoro las fresas. (Paz 1994: 18) Screen play TT DIEGO’s voice: Scuse me, sweetie. DAVID comes down to earth. Looks at the person who has just spoken to him and is taken aback. DIEGO is opposite him, with a dish of strawberry ice-cream. His homosexual get-up is obvious and shocks DAVID.

188

Style and Ideology in Translation DAVID (to himself): I don’t believe it! DIEGO smiles at DAVID, places his ice-cream on the table and starts arranging his numerous packages, that in the end take up two empty chairs and part of the table. They include a camera and a bunch of sunflowers. DAVID looks around. He sees an empty table nearby. We can see GERMÁN in the background, looking intently on. (During the sequence there are one or two intercut images of GERMÁN.) DIEGO finally settles in. DAVID notices his dish of chocolate icecream is intact. DIEGO looks at him, very friendly and dreamy-eyed, and then talks about his ice-cream but in a very ambiguous tone of voice. DIEGO: I couldn’t resist the temptation . . . I adore strawberries. (Paz/ Bush 1995: 85–86)

In the actual film, the viewpoint or “cinematic gaze” (Ortega 2000: 133) is almost totally David’s, which mirrors the first person narrative of the novella. However, the medium of the camera obliges cuts between the two characters in the dialogue; some of the action is therefore seen through Diego’s eyes, although the close-ups of David serve to suggest the reactions and perceptions explicated in the written text and stage directions. It is worth pointing out that the technical limitations of the camera equipment played an important role throughout the filming. According to Quiroga (2000: 135), the jerky movement of the cameras, the result of an absence of steadycam, was used to give the impression of natural filming. The camera positions were in part decided by the freedom of movement given to the actors. Later in the same scene, Diego changes tack and tempts David with foreign books that are banned in Cuba, since he knows David’s passion is literature. In the novella, this is presented as: Novella ST Y cuando comprendió que la vaciladera no le daría resultados, colocó otro bulto sobre la mesa. Sonreí para mis adentros porque me di cuenta de que se trataba de una carnada, y no estaba dispuesto a morderla. Sólo miré de reojo y vi que eran libros, ediciones extranjeras, y el de arriba-arriba, por eso mismo, por ser el de arriba, quedó al alcance de mi vista: Seix Barral, Biblioteca Breve, Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo. ¡Madre mía, ese libro, nada menos! Vargas Llosa era un reaccionario, hablaba mierdas de Cuba y el socialismo donde quiera que se paraba, pero yo estaba loco por leer su última novela y mírala allí: los maricones todo lo consiguen primero. (Paz 1994: 12)

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[And when he understood that the messing around would not give him results, he placed another package on the table. I smiled for my insides because I realized that it was a bait, and I was not ready to bite it. I just looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that they were books, foreign editions, and the one on the very top, for that reason, for being the one on top, was within my view: Seix Barral, Biblioteca Breve, Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World. My mother, that book, no less! Vargas Llosa was a reactionary, spoke shit of Cuba and socialism wherever he went, but I was crazy to read his latest novel and look at it there: queers get everything first.] Novella TT—Bush And when he realised the tricksy stuff wouldn’t deliver, he placed another bundle on the table. I smiled to myself because I realised it was bait, and no way was I prepared to bite. I just looked at him out of the corner of my eye, and saw they were books, foreign editions, and the one right on top I could make out, because it was on top: “Seix Barral, Biblioteca Breve, Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo.” Amazing! He had that book! Vargas Llosa was a reactionary who poured shit on Cuba and Socialism wherever he went, but I was desperate to read his latest novel and there it was: queers get to everything first. (Paz/Bush 1995: 42) A comparison between this scene in the novella, the film script, and the filmed version reveals, amongst other things, dramatic shifts in the level of explicitation and the amount of information supplied. The novella describes very clearly Vargas Llosa’s criticism of Cuba and the reader can easily infer David’s enthusiasm from the interior monologue of Free Direct Thought (Leech and Short 1981; Semino and Short 2004): Amazing! He had that book! In the screenplay (column 1 in Table 7.8), David’s reaction is explicated in the stage directions (DAVID is enthused by the title) and the potential consequences of possessing the book are spelt out in the dialogue (Our police are really cultured. If one comes by and catches us with this lot we’ll be cutting cane tomorrow). Paz also takes the opportunity to correct a chronological anomaly, changing the book from La guerra del fin del mundo, which was not published until 1981, to Vargas Llosa’s earlier Conversación en La Catedral, which fitted with the late 1970s setting. However, in the final film version the scene is dramatically reduced and there are just two brief shots of the book, interspersed with David’s surprised gaze. Inevitably, the significance of the book and its author, who had moved progressively to the right, would escape many non-Spanish speaking viewers of the film. Explicitation of such visual cues at that point would only be possible with an extremely intrusive subtitle on screen. Nevertheless, the medium allows some visual compensation through the lingering

190 Style and Ideology in Translation Table 7.8. Comparison of TT screen play and subtitles of Vargas Llosa book scene Translation of film script (Paz/Bush 1995: 89–90)

Literal translation of film dialogue2 (in italics) and analysis of visuals (in bold)

DAVID, irritated, eyes DIEGO: pose, appearance, wardrobe. Then he looks at the books. With interest. They are goodquality foreign editions. He looks at DIEGO, who seems absorbed in his magazine, and strains to read the titles of the books. DIEGO turns a page and returns to his ice-cream. Then DAVID goes back to the books. Shot of a front-cover upside down in relation to DAVID: Conversación en la catedral, Mario Vargas Llosa. DAVID is enthused by the title. When he looks up, DIEGO is eyeing him keenly.

Quality and nature of the books unlikely to be evident from the very brief shots

DIEGO: I’d better put them away, hadn’t I? Scuse me.

Two shots of the book, interspersed with shot of DAVID’s gaze.

Film subtitles

DAVID acts as if he’s not interested and returns to his ice-cream. DIEGO puts the books away in a bag. DIEGO: That was unforgivably rash of me. You know what’ll happen? Our police are really cultured. If one comes by and catches us with this lot we’ll be cutting cane tomorrow. DAVID looks daggers at him. DIEGO: No joking. The things this gentleman says about Communism! If you want I’ll lend it to you. . . . At home I’ve got the complete works of Severo Sarduy and Goytisolo. DAVID scowls at him. DIEGO: Is Vargas Llosa the one you’re interested in?

Are you interested in Vargas Llosa?

Interested in Vargas Llosa?

This one’s dedicated to me, but I’ve got another copy.

This one’s dedicated. But at home I have another copy

This one’s dedicated to me. I’ve another copy at home (continued)

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Table 7.8. Comparison of TT screen play and subtitles of Vargas Llosa book scene (continued) Translation of film script (Paz/Bush 1995: 89–90)

Literal translation of film dialogue2 (in italics) and analysis of visuals (in bold)

Film subtitles

Shall we go and get it? I only live round the corner.

Also I have Severo Sarduy and I’ve also got the works Goytisolo complete of Severo Sarduy and Shall we go and get them? Goytisolo Want to come and see them?

DAVID: I don’t visit the houses of strangers.

I don’t go to the house of [pause] people I don’t know

DIEGO: Don’t miss out, darling, don’t be foolish.

Shot of DAVID from behind DIEGO. Take advantage, boy

I don’t visit [pause] strangers

Where else will you get these books?

Where are you going to find these books?

You should Why miss an opportunity?

DAVID moves his red membership card of the Young Communists from one shirt pocket to the other. DIEGO registers the action and looks around as if to make sure nobody is listening.

DIEGO smiles.

DIEGO (Confidentially) I get it. You can only read books authorised by the Young Communists.

I got it ! You can only read the books which they authorize you in the Youth

I see ! You can only read books passed by the Young Communist League

Put a cover on them, honey, use your imagination!

You cover them, man Have imagination

Put covers on them Be imaginative

DAVID: I don’t have to put a cover on anything, I can read whatever I want.

I don’t need to cover anything. I read whatever I please ...

I don’t need to cover books. I read what I please . . .

And I don’t feel like talking. Get it? That’s that

. . . and I have no wish to talk. That’s fine

. . . and I don’t want to talk

DAVID moves his red membership card to another pocket.

shot of the cover of the book and the depiction of David’s obvious nervousness, glancing around to see who might be watching. There is a difficulty with the cultural information, which has both an ideational and evaluative function, not only in this scene but throughout the film. Viewers unfamiliar with Latin American literature may not realize who Vargas Llosa is, that he had once supported Castro but that at the time the story is set (1979) he had long been banned in Cuba for his

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anti-revolutionary stance. Even more unfamiliar would be the two gay writers mentioned: the Cuban Severo Sarduy, who, based in Paris, oversaw for Editions Seuil the translation of much Latin American literature into French, and Juan Goytisolo, exiled Spanish novelist. The reader needs to infer that these writers are banned from Diego’s comment that David only reads books approved by the Young Communists. In many ways, the viewer’s lack of cultural knowledge approximates to David’s, which has been conditioned by the state apparatus. This increases association with David’s point of view psychologically, although not ideologically, as both he and the viewer learn about the riches of Cuban culture through Diego’s teaching. It is worth pointing out that this also occurs visually later in the film. The novelist José Lezama Lima is an iconic figure for Diego, representing both the height of Cuban culture and the triumph of the gay writer. His photo is depicted on the ‘altar’ in Diego’s apartment, but only gradually does David learn more about Lezama before taking part in a sumptuous meal in the author’s honour, where there are rich and numerous intertextual references to Lezama’s Paradiso, a novel banned in Cuba for its sexual imagery (translated by Gregory Rabassa, see chapter 5). Comparison of the film dialogue (column 2) and the subtitles (column 3) of this extract reveals the type of linguistic reductions that occur: these can be categorized as (1) cohesion, with the subtitles tending towards non-standard or abbreviated syntax, often in questions (Interested in Vargas Llosa?; Want to come and see them?; Why miss an opportunity?) and avoidance of relative clauses (I don’t visit [ . . . ] strangers; books passed by the Young Communist League). These changes affect the psychological point of view; (2) phraseological elements, specifically affectionate forms. The interventions You should and Put covers on them omit a translation of the names niño (‘boy’) and viejo (lit. ‘old man’), rendered as darling and honey in Bush’s translation of the screenplay. These affect the phraseological point of view and reduce the interpersonal interaction, related to the ideological perspective of the narration. Despite the film’s great success in Cuba and abroad, some theorists, including Paul Julian Smith (1994), criticized the film because it did not tackle the issue of homo-erotic love. Unlike the novella and the original screenplay, in the film David has a heterosexual relationship with Diego’s friend, Nancy. José Ortega sees the representation of homosexuality as being specifically “a question of style” (Ortega 2000: 136). In this, Ortega is referring to film style, to the “thoroughly controlled environment” of the film, as determined by director Gutiérrez Alea’s decisions as to how to portray homosexuality. It is certainly true that the film version is much more restrained in its criticism of the Cuban state and that Gutiérrez Alea seemed overly concerned about possible repercussions to voice any criticism of the regime in the interviews conducted with Bush (Bush 2002). In the phraseological choices of the film and the subtitles, there is clearly a move to tone down much of the camp language. Naming is a central aspect of homosexual identity in the story.

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Indeed, it is so important it occupies a full two-page section of the novella with Diego explaining the different categories of homosexuals, queers, queens, drag-queens, etc. (see also the discussion in Ortega 2000: 140). This section is not transferred to script or film, where naming is reduced either to insults or to terms of endearment. David even stresses to Diego that he does not wish to be addressed in such terms: Screen play ST Y lo correcto es que me llames David. No ‘mi amor,’ ‘niño,’ ‘pequeña fiera’ (Paz 1994: 48) [And the correct thing is that you call me David. Not ‘my love,’ ‘boy,’ ‘little beast’] Screen play TT And I’d rather you’d call me David. Not “darling,” “dearie,” “‘honey” or “wild little thing.” (Paz/Bush 1995: 116) Film dialogue Y yo preferiría que me llamaras David, no mi amor, mi niño, ni papito, ni . . . [And I would prefer that you called me David, not my love, my boy, nor papito, nor . . . ] Film subtitles And I’d rather you’d call me David. Not my love, baby, or anything. Whereas in the translation of the screen play Peter Bush even has David adding to the terms Diego has used, it is worth noting that in the subtitles some of these affectionate names have been omitted anyway. The interpersonal is again watered down in the subtitles. Another example occurs in an earlier scene, when David is about to flee Diego’s flat. Diego cautions: Screenplay ST Muchacho, espérate, no te pongas así. (Paz 1994: 36) [Lad, wait, don’t get like that]

194

Style and Ideology in Translation Screenplay TT Hold it sweetie, don’t get into a sweat. (Paz/Bush 1995: 103) Film dialogue Oye, ¿por qué se pone así, eh? Oye, muchacho, ¿qué es eso? [Listen, why are you getting like that, eh? Listen, lad, what is that?] Film subtitles Hey, kid, tell me, what is all this?

Here, muchacho, literally ‘lad,’ is translated as the affectionate sweetie by Bush, but as the harsher kid in the subtitles. Naming is an important feature of phraseological point of view and also has a strong evaluative interpersonal component that affects the ideological plane. It is central to gay identity and includes terms of endearment, particularly female terms, identified as crucial by Keith Harvey in his work on the French translation of the American gay (Harvey 1998, 2003). Other features Harvey notes are the reversal of gender, the use of metaphor and of an overly formal register in dialogue, all of which challenge standard language norms. Interestingly, these are features that do appear in the novella and screenplay but are omitted in the film. They particularly occur in the speech of Diego’s artist friend, Germán. The following are two examples from the screenplay, the first describing a possible escape to Mexico: We’ll get in through Mérida, darling [ . . . ] Once we’re in the land of the Mayas we’ll take the world on: two Caribbean termites heading for the top. (Paz/Bush 1995: 130) The second is a pointed barb at Diego for spending too much time with David: Communism’s really giving you a hard time, duckie. Give my regards to your young commissar. (Paz/Bush 1995: 131) In both cases, Bush manages to convey an awareness of these features of camp talk that go well beyond the use of diminutive forms which he himself describes (Bush 2002). Thus, in addition to the terms of endearment darling

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and duckie, Bush also maintains the creative metaphor typical of camp talk (two Caribbean termites heading for the top) and the alliteration and strong rhythm of your young commissar. Few of these speech patterns are retained in the film; indeed, these specific examples do not feature either in the Spanish dialogue or in the film subtitles. A similar picture emerges when we turn to the novella and compare the two independent translations, Bush’s and Christensen’s. The first example below shows Diego’s imagining walking with David and being spotted by a neighbour: ST novella Dirá: ‘Mira a esa loca y su garzón.’ (Paz 1994: 42) TT Christensen He’ll say: “Look at this queen with his boy.” (Paz/Christensen 1996: 76) TT Bush He’ll say: “Look at that queen with her young attendant.” (Paz/Bush 1995: 58) Paz uses the feminine form of loca3 and the formal garzón. Bush’s translation reproduces the reversal of gender (her) and the overly formal noun phrase (young attendant), typical markers of camp that are absent in Christensen’s work. Later, near the end of the story, Diego takes the emotional decision to leave Cuba. Diego and David meet in the street in a scene narrated by the latter. Again, comparison between the Bush and the Christensen translation is insightful: ST novella [Diego] se puso a describirme un vestido precioso que acababa de ver en una vidriera y que me podía quedar pintado. (Paz 1994: 59) TT Christensen he [Diego] began to describe an expensive outfit he had just seen in a window display that would really just suit me. (Paz/Christensen 1996: 85) TT Bush [he] started describing a divine dress he’d just seen in a shop window which would suit me to a T. (Paz/Bush 1995: 68)

196 Style and Ideology in Translation Bush’s translation is infused with language that might be more commonly associated with female talk: the adjective divine, the alliterative choice of divine dress rather than expensive outfit, and the idiomatic but slightly oldfashioned suit me to a T. Stylistically, what is equally interesting is the ambiguity of the speech representation here, so we are not sure if the phrase divine dress is David’s own or, as is more likely, his reporting of Diego’s words. Christensen’s translation expensive outfit is much more neutral and seems more likely David’s own evaluation of the clothes.

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed some of the ways in which style may vary in various forms of adaptation: between novella, film script, film, and subtitles, and between the various translations at different points in this chain. The existence of so many interlinked but variant texts offers the possibility of identifying strategic and tactical choices that serve to mark out the identity of each text. Most interesting are the stylistic choices in the translation of camp between the two translations of the novella and between the screen play and actual subtitles. Peter Bush’s translation of the novella has managed to retain more features of this language than does Thomas Christensen’s translation, while the adaptation to screenplay is a kind of halfway house in which some of these features are removed and others are encoded within stage directions designed to provide the basis for the filming. The further adaptation involved in the incorporation of the visual element on the screen leads, even in the Spanish, to the omission of some important indicators of gay identity, such as the concert house scene, retaining merely certain terms of endearment. The final point of adaptation, the subtitles that appear on the screen, forced to comply with constraints of time and space, remove even these realizations of the interpersonal function. However, some of the linguistic features that are ‘lost’ in the film may be compensated by visual elements on the screen. Indeed, this may well be the reason why a very (some would say overly) stereotypical caricature of the homosexual is represented in the film by the figure of Diego. In view of this, one line of research that would be well worth following, and which would benefit from interdisciplinary work within translation and film studies, is the relation between the visual and the subtitles to attempt to determine the stylistic strategies adopted by subtitlers as they evaluate the possible compensatory value of the image on the screen.

8

Translation and Identity

Earlier chapters considered the interplay of voice and style between author and translator in the context of the translation of a series of works by the same author or by the same translator. However, such research is based on the dualist and essentialist premise of a clearly defined ST and TT. Such oppositions have increasingly been called into question in recent years and ‘identity’ and the factors that may affect its perception and construction are seen to be much more problematic. In particular, to quote the critical theorist Paul du Gay, identity now “is regarded in some sense as being more contingent, fragile and incomplete and thus more amenable to reconstitution than was previously thought possible” (Gay 2000: 2). That is, specific categories (man, black, work, nation, for Gay; source, target, translator, author, for us) are no longer hermetic. A study of the marker of the identity of the translator requires investigation of how this marker is constituted linguistically (by patterns in the TT) within the historical, cultural, and ideological frameworks of the publications and the translators themselves. Gay (2000: 280) speaks of the “formation of persons (in the plural) as historico-cultural achievements,” in other words formed as individual products of a cultural and historical environment where, as Van Dijk stresses (1998), they cannot be divorced from the ideologies of belief systems and the institutions with which they interact. Important emphases are placed on the porousness of the traditional categories of identity (see above), on the impracticality of a single unified identity (Hall 2000: 15) and on those elements of identity that an individual ‘acquires’ through interrelation with social institutions (Gay 2000: 280). If we transpose this into the realm of translation, it means that the most pertinent issues may not be whether, for instance, what were previously thought of as relatively fixed qualities of gender and nationality are influential in the style of a translator but rather those places where the boundaries of source and target, author and translator become most blurred. This shifts the focus to an interrogation of the concept of translation itself, and away from questions such as the difference between a translation performed by a U.S. translator and that by a British translator; whether a male translator translates differently from a female translator; what happens when a male translator translates a female author; or a female translator a male author.

198 Style and Ideology in Translation This chapter concentrates on translation and identity, or, more precisely, translation and shifting identity, where it is not so clear what is original and what is translation, or where the author-translator division is complicated in some way. Three different scenarios will be examined: (1) author–translator collaborations, specifically those between Guillermo Cabrera Infante/ Suzanne Jill Levine and Carlos Fuentes/Alfred MacAdam; (2) self-translation, Alfred Dorfman’s translation into Spanish of his own memoirs Heading South, Looking North; (3) translation where the languages involved form a hybrid, notably in Chicano and other Latino literature where Spanish and English are intermingled from the start. Each of these different scenarios is illustrative of different power relations.

AUTHOR-TRANSLATOR COLLABORATIONS The input to the translation from the ST author can vary enormously, depending on the author’s level of competence in English and interest in the process. Gregory Rabassa (in Hoeksema 1978: 9), for example, recalls that, whereas García Márquez would more or less give him free rein, Vargas Llosa would constantly propose amendments to the translation, in Rabassa’s opinion overestimating his command of English. Cortázar worked more closely with him since they shared many interests and affinities including jazz (Bach 2005, see chapter 5). There have been several high profile author-translator collaborations where the author participates strongly in the process of creating the TT, including that between Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who befriended Borges during the Argentine’s visiting Fellowship at Harvard in 1967 and served as his agent and translator for five years, “re-creating” Borges’s writing in English (di Giovanni 2003). Although di Giovanni referred to Borges as “the master,” he secured half the royalties on the projects on which they worked. This is very different from another collaboration, that between the Cuban exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante and translator-academic Suzanne Jill Levine, described in detail in the latter’s book The Subversive Scribe (Levine 1991). Here, the power imbalance was at the very heart of the creative process. We shall concentrate on the first text on which they worked together, Three Trapped Tigers (1971), the translation of Tres tristes tigres (1967). Levine, who says she had been mentored in translation by Gregory Rabassa at Columbia (Levine 1987: 103; Levine 2005: 308), considers herself to be the ‘translator-collaborator’ of the book. She and Cabrera Infante had even proposed adding the neologism ‘closelaboration’ to the title page to describe their method of working, but this was vetoed by the publisher Cass Canfield Jr. (Levine 1991: 47). In fact, Levine had taken over the project after a failed initial attempt by Donald Gardner, a London-born poet who apparently knew little Spanish but who happened to coincide with the author in London in the late 1960s.1 Cabrera Infante eventually opted for an American ‘voice’ for the translation, according to

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Levine (ibid.: 8) in order to match the vibrancy of the Cuban dialect of the original, which was novel at the time. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing Levine’s point about the influence of the language and style of American cinema on subsequent Latin American authors who distanced themselves from the ‘European’ style of Borges and Cortázar. The intertextual references, and even quotations, from American film originals that appear in Cabrera Infante thus immediately complicate the notion of source and target since the Spanish ST is constantly being formed through reference to other English-language texts. However, Levine–Cabrera Infante is an exceptional instance of author– translator collaboration since in many places the text is completely remodelled in English, especially in its word plays, puns, and humour. Cabrera Infante played the senior role in the partnership—at the time Levine was a doctoral student in her twenties—as they went through the entire text. In addition, the subject matter of the book, a machista look at Cuban nightlife in 1958 just before the Revolution, was completely at odds with Levine’s own thinking. She tells that she found herself working creatively but on something that was oppressive for her. She claims she felt she was a “self-betrayer fallen under the spell of male discourse [ . . . ] as well as a subversive scribe, ‘transcreating’ writing that stretches the boundaries of patriarchal discourse” (Levine 1991: 181). However, we may wonder whether this claim is a retrospective attempt at self-justification for Levine’s involvement in a project which was distasteful for her and in which her power was limited. From the perspective of the style of the translation, Three Trapped Tigers encompasses a range of voices in addition to the intertextual sources: (1) the voice of Gardner’s draft translation, which Levine says was rejected except for the parody of Poe’s “The Raven” (ibid.: 21). However, Cabrera Infante certainly, and perhaps Levine herself, would have read that draft translation, which would therefore have echoed in some way during the process of recreating the ST;2 (2) Cabrera Infante’s voice from the Spanish ST and also from his interventions in the collaborative translation process; and (3) Levine’s own contemporary American English voice laced with the language of cinema and the Marx brothers, which she says chimed so well with Cabrera Infante’s own. These voices are impossible to disentangle, all the more because of the English influences on the Spanish source and the strong element of hybridity: “Tres tristes tigres is nearly a bilingual book, riddled with invasive English from the United States,” says Levine (ibid.: 4). The linguistic power relations described by Levine, where American English is at one and the same time “the detested language of an imperial presence and the desired language of economic and cultural power” (ibid.: 91), are important factors in the translation of modern Latin American writing, as we saw in chapter 6. In Tres tristes tigres, the two co-exist in the cabaret scene at the very beginning, a speech delivered by the MC and interpreted by him for the benefit of U.S. tourists in the audience:

200

Style and Ideology in Translation Showtime! Señoras y señores. Ladies and gentlemen. Muy buenas noches, damas y caballeros, tengan todos ustedes. Good-evening, ladies & gentlemen. Tropicana, el cabaret MAS fabuloso del mundo (TTT Sp 15).

This hybridity is carried over into the TT, though with the order of languages reversed to facilitate the reading process: Showtime! Señoras y señores. Ladies and gentlemen. And a very good evening to you all, ladies and gentlemen. Muy buenas noches, damas y caballeros. Tropicana! the MOST fabulous night-club in the WORLDel cabaret MAS fabuloso del mundo-presents-presenta-its latest showsu nuevo espectáculo [ . . . ]. (TTT En 3) Levine (1991: 91) claims that such bilingualism in the Spanish ST does not perform the same sociolinguistic function as in the English TT: in the Spanish, it indicates the “pervasive presence” of North American culture, whereas in the English it is likely to be seen simply as “local color.” The theme of translation is pursued and highlighted throughout the book, including the story of an incident involving two American tourists, a Mr and Mrs Campbell. This is retold in the Spanish ST purporting to be a translation, complete with mock footnotes about a supposed English source and the translation “errors” in the Spanish (TTT Sp 185, TTT En 189). Another prominent example is the intertextual parodying of film scenes. The character Arsenio Cué introduces himself à la James Bond: —Arsenio es el nombre. Arsenio Cué. Feroz anglicista traduciendo naturalmente del americano. Dice, también, afluente por próspero, morón por idiota, me luce por me parece, chance por oportunidad, controlar por revisar y muchas cosas mas. Qué horror el espanglish. (TTT Sp 369, emphasis in original) —Arsenio’s the name, Arsenio Cué. Ferocious barbarhythms, translated of course from the American. He also says afluente instead of próspero, moron for idiota, me luce instead of me parece, chance for oportunidad, controlar instead of revisar and things like that. Qué horror el Espanglish. Doctor Esperanglish, I consume. (TTT En 399, emphasis in original) Through the highlighting of calques or borrowings typical of Spanglish, the point of the ST extract is to attack the influence of American English on Cuban Spanish and, by extension, American culture on the culture of the island. Thus, Arsenio introduces himself through a syntactic calque of

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the famous Bond catchphrase (“The name’s Bond, James Bond”). This is followed by a sentence illustrative of lexical interference: Spanish próspero is displaced by afluente (from English affluent), revisar [‘to check’] by controlar (from the English control with the addition of the typical Spanish verb suffix–ar), and so on. The translation retains these examples, although the English reader may not appreciate the point of some of them (e.g., me luce, presumably from ‘it looks to me,’ rather than me parece, ‘it seems to me’) and adds the sentence Doctor Esperanglish, I consume, a clear, though subverted, reference to both Esperanto and to the famous phrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume” by which Henry Stanley greeted explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871. This is typical of the style of the translation of Three Trapped Tigers. The novel as a whole interrogates the link between languages, and the translation additionally brings into firmer focus the underlying invasive or colonialist role of English; in the above example English is jokingly compared to the artificial language of Esperanto, but there is the underlying intertextual reference to the exploration and subsequent domination of the African continent by the Victorian English. In this way, the linguistic presence of the foreign in Tres tristes tigres has ideological implications, since the foreign is the invasive power. Puns and slang are identified by Levine (ibid.: 74) as crucial areas in the translation of a book which privileges sound and the spoken language, or at least the written imitation of it. For the TT, a conscious decision was made to try to mimic the talk of Southern Black American English, “the closest culturally and ethnically to TTT’s many mulatto and black characters” (ibid.: 68). To this end, Levine says they erased the London “accent” of Gardner’s draft, although the examples she gives of this are purely lexical, bloody replaced by damn, filthy by dirty, and so on. Importantly, the translation omits two prefaces, in one of which Cabrera Infante justifies the use of Cuban spoken slang as a literary language to be read aloud. The reasons for omission given by Levine (ibid.: 67) are that the Cuban speech and accent “inevitably vanish” in English and also that a reference in the ST preface to an aphorism from Mark Twain would be “unnecessary” for a contemporary American audience. This shows that, even in a novel and a translation that seek to subvert the reading experience based around novel orality and play with language, there is still an overall strategy of domestication or concealment of dialect. This involves not only substitution of a TL dialect (Southern Black American English) for a SL one (Havanan Spanish), but also the deliberate disappearance of paratextual references to and explanations of the speech of the ST society. What we are left with in places is a mimicking of an oral text but, inevitably, a different voice and style from the original, an example of which is: La dejé hablal así na ma que pa dale coldel y cuando se cansó de metel su descalga yo le dije no que va vieja, tu etás muy equivocada de la vida (así mismo), pero muy equivocada (TTT Sp 34)

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The following is an intralingual translation into more standard Spanish spelling and speech presentation, with the standardizations indicated in bold: La dejé hablar así nada más que para darle cordel y cuando se cansó de meter su descarga yo le dije “No, qué va, vieja, tú estás muy equivocada de la vida (así mismo), pero muy equivocada.” The contrast between ST and the intralingual translation highlights the way in which the ST orthography sets out to mimic the sounds of the Havanan dialect: syllable-final —r rendered as —l (hablal, coldel), syllable-final omissions of na and pa, omission of s in ma and etás. In addition, the rhythms and repetitions and direct speech quotation are also traits of the spoken language. The TT version of this extract reads: I let her go on and on and on and on just so she could get to an end and when she got tired of shootin off her big mouth and kinda breathless I told her but dahling you got it all wrong (those very words, yeah) (TTT En 24). Levine attempts to recreate the ST rhythms, or at least to create new TL rhythms, using repetition (go on and on and on and on), colloquial idioms (shootin off her big mouth, you got it all wrong), graphic representation (shootin, kinda, dahling, yeah) and dialectal syntax (you got, get to an end). When it comes to puns, Levine is again innovative, adding so many new puns that the TT is five to ten percent longer than the original (30–40 pages in Levine’s calculations, ibid.: 25). She is also receptive to an existing voice, that of her own background, specifically the voice of her mother in the case of the phrase School of Hard Knox (TTT En 17), one of her mother’s pet expressions (ibid.: 69). A further illustration of the ‘read-aloud’ character of the TT can be seen in the amusing lists that periodically appear where the function is mainly humorous and deprecating: thus, the list entitled “Confessions of a Cuban Opinion Eater” includes a supposed quotation from the “Monk of the Six Fingers (Si-tse-Fing-ah; Fu-kyu-tuh dynasty)” (TTT En 348). Some lists are completely new in the TT: “Famous in Books” (TTT En 288) features “Mutter Carajo!, by Bert Oldbitch” and “Crime and Puns, by Bustrofedor Dostowhiskey.” Though these play on the sound of the words, they also gain from the combination with the visual sign (e.g. Carajo—Courage), forging the intertextual link to known literary works. Another clear strategy in the translation is the addition and strengthening of expletives, causing a shift in the interpersonal function. This is commented on by Levine herself (ibid.: 27), who says that the language of the original 1967 Spanish edition, published in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship, was censored. There are many examples of more forceful expletives in the TT, of which the following are mere illustrations: ladies don’t say cunt (TTT En 60, instead of ‘ladies don’t say swear words’ for las damas no dicen

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palabrotas), the addition of the Divine Cunt D (TTT En 378, to describe Dracula), of the play on words this cunt of a shirty (TTT En 154) and of three lines beginning “she was a cockteaser or as the Spanish say una calientapijas” to describe the erotic Livia (TTT En 152). Arsenio’s drunken tirade at Vítor is also typical of the strengthening of expletives in the TT: Gallego de mierda, eres un discriminado de mierda, culo; eres un culo (TTT Sp 64) [Galician of shit, you are a discriminated of shit, arsehole; you are an arsehole] You’re a faggot, you’re full of shit, you’re a shitlicking bigot, you’re a snot Gallego, a racist cunt and asshole; that’s what you are, you hear me? un culo (TTT En 59). There is a mix of domesticating and foreignizing strategies. Once again, the sexual explicitness and racism (racist cunt) and homophobia (faggot) are more prominent in the translation, while borrowings such as Gallego and un culo retain the link to the Spanish text and the use of the pre-modifier snot as an epithet may be indicative of Levine’s idiolect, although the reference corpora show it to be a common usage in the United States. Addition is also employed to add pragmatic force to the diatribe with that’s what you are, you hear me? Other stylistic choices in the TT point to domestication strategies. These occur at the phraseological level, where the English often employs a modern colloquial idiom to translate a more standard or less elaborate lexical item in the ST: se quedaba muy tranquilita en su balance (TTT Sp 25) [she] remained very quiet in her rocking chair sitting in the rocking chair good as gold (TTT En 13) Recuerda que ella también nos engañó a nosotros (TTT Sp 27) [Remember that she also deceived us] Don’t forget she pulled a fast one on us too (TTT En 16) hoy está luchando con todo lo que tiene para destacarse (TTT Sp 61) [today [she] is fighting with everything she has to stand out] today [she] is hustling her way to the top with all she’s got (TTT En 56).

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Similar tendencies were noted in the landmark translations of Rabassa, so a stylistic preference for, or ability to achieve, such modern colloquialisms seems to be a mark of at least these two translators. We might hypothesize that this style of translation was conveyed from Rabassa to Levine, though we should also note that Levine’s writings about translation demonstrate a far more active theoretical framework and awareness. It should also be added that the presentation of the Three Trapped Tigers TT shows a strategy of explicitation at a higher, paratextual, level, with the insertion before the prologue of a simplified street map of Havana and, presumably due to concerns over copyright, an added footnote on page 117 acknowledging the source of a song lyric as belonging to Ignacio Piñero’s Réquiem Rumba. The addition of maps and diagrams as a form of intersemiotic translation or guide to the TT is not an unusual translation strategy. This was seen in chapter 5 in the analysis of Rabassa’s translation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, both of which feature a page with a family tree, setting out the relationships that are deliberately confused in the ST. However, unfamiliarity with the historical context is not always restricted to the TT readers: both the ST and TT of García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth, translated by Edith Grossman, contain a map depicting Simón Bolívar’s final journey to the Caribbean coast in 1830. Three Trapped Tigers is unusual because of the detail with which the translation process has been discussed in Levine’s book. It is also unusual because of the creativity brought to the refashioning of the text in English, even though explicitation and domestication are still at work there. These characteristics of Three Trapped Tigers are underlined if we contrast it with another collaboration that produced the translation of Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato (1987). This was translated by Fuentes and Alfred MacAdam, of Barnard College and Columbia University, as Christopher Unborn (1989). MacAdam has written a short article about this translation in which the dominance of the ST author comes across very clearly. Fuentes had originally translated the first chapter himself for the Americas Society magazine Review and was furious at the stylistic changes proposed by the then editor, MacAdam, who tells the story: My task as editor, or so I inferred from Carlos’ rather offhand remarks, was to “clean things up a bit.” So I corrected typos, smoothed what seemed bumpy-places where I thought transitions were too abrupt or where I felt the punning got out of hand—and reworded some jokes to make them more American. (MacAdam 1991: 337) Fuentes reacted so virulently to the translator’s domestication and standardization that MacAdam withdrew the alterations and published Fuentes’ original translation verbatim. Yet a few years later, MacAdam was invited to translate the whole book. When a draft translation was ready,

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Fuentes called a week-long get-together in Mexico involving author, translator, and editor (David Rieff from Farrar, Straus) where he imposed an exacting ten-hour daily schedule to revise the TT, excluding three sections he himself had translated. Fuentes, like Cabrera Infante, therefore controlled the mechanics of the translation process, even if the process of translation sometimes led to the revision of inconsistencies in the original of Christopher Unborn (MacAdam 1991: 339–340). As with Three Trapped Tigers, so Christopher Unborn is essentially an oral text, this time of the street slang of Mexico City. MacAdam openly admits that his strategy was to listen on the New York subway to the way people talked in order to achieve a kind of “semi-black form of speech,” a semi-specific but not fully locatable dialect or slang: The people push their way along Taxqueña, yo asshole watch where you walkin’ man/ [ . . . ] why you wanna get in front of me, lady go fuck youself old fart/yo blindman len’ me your glasses chuck dat nonseer in front of dat truck getta moveon fuckers he look like a wad o’phlegm someone done stepped on (CU TT 304, in MacAdam 1991: 341) In this extract, the representation of the speech patterns and accent is much more dramatic than anything in Three Trapped Tigers: graphically (yo, walkin,’ wanna, len,’ dat, o, etc.), lexically (blindman, nonseer), metaphorically (dat wad o’phlegm) and even grammatically (he look like, done stepped on). However, unlike Cabrera Infante’s novel, this dialect was chosen not for sociolinguistic equivalence but because it was hoped that readers would recognize elements of it and because of the paucity of other U.S. dialects that, according to MacAdam, can easily be represented typographically (ibid.: 341). Such familiarity sometimes produces an incongruous result, overly domesticating what is after all supposed to be ‘Makesicko City’: ¿En qué puedo servirte, mano? le preguntó Ángel al abrir la puerta. (CU ST 120) [In what can I help you, buddy? asked Ángel on opening the door] What can do for you, bro’? asked Angel, opening the door. (CU TT 102). Here, the interpersonal bro (for ‘brother’) cleverly translates the form mano (from hermano or ‘brother,’ with the sense of ‘friend’). However, it is so linked to Black speech in American English that it becomes more identifiably racially specific than the Mexican mano. The conscious attempt to adopt a semi-specific Black dialect as an equivalent for the ST colloquialisms raises various questions about the appropriateness of that dialect. Its use in the TT serves to support the idea that translated language differs from original language, occupying some kind of middle ground, neither related to the source

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nor identifiable as part of the target context. However, in the case of the dialect of Christopher Unborn, this is not a standardizing position: MacAdam’s translation strategy, listening to original street dialogue and attempting to reproduce and remodel it, resembles the working practice of many original authors and methods taught in creative writing classes. In certain dialogues, therefore, MacAdam’s style is more innovative lexically, syntactically and sociolinguistically even if the main stylistic strategy employed in Christopher Unborn translation is one of literal translation together with explicitation of cultural items.3

SELF-TRANSLATION A step further in controlling the translation is for the author to carry out the translation him- or herself. Levine (2005) cites the example of the Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal, who in the 1947 rewrote her own novel, House of Mist (translation of La última niebla, 1935), radically changing the plot in the process. For bilingual writers of the Boom and later, self-translation presented itself as a means of determining the dissemination of their work to the world at large. Carlos Fuentes, who spent five years in the United States as a child, started on that road by himself translating the several chapters of Christopher. Another, even more interesting case of self-translation is that of Ariel Dorfman, whose political writing we discussed in chapter 6. Dorfman was born in Argentina in 1942 to Russian Jewish exiles, who then moved to New York when he was two and a half. Later, at the age of twelve, he accompanied his parents to Chile, where, except for a graduate studentship at Berkeley, he stayed until the military coup of 1973. Since then he has lived and worked in the United States and has made a conscious choice to write his non-fiction in English and his fiction in Spanish. The interrelationship of Spanish and English as part of his identity is described in his autobiographical Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998a), translated from English to Spanish by Dorfman himself as Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte: Un romance en dos lenguas (1998b). In one sense, this separates the book from the scope of the current study, the main focus of which is translation into English. However, the English–Spanish relationship in the Americas is so intertwined nowadays, with some 40 million Hispanics living in the United States and bilingualism being a politically sensitive topic, that a major literary figure operating in both needs to be examined. In fact, often the two languages co-exist, either within the same text or else within the author’s mind: for instance, although in the ST of Heading South, Looking North, Dorfman may be written in English, many of the events and conversations in his memoirs occurred in Spanish during his political involvement in Chile. Therefore, the English text itself is in many ways a translation. It is also true that, whereas Borges, Cabrera Infante, and Fuentes are major figures who have collaborated in translations of their work into English,

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Dorfman is the prime Latin American literary writer to have authored in English and then to have translated his own work. Examining his Spanish TT may give a pointer to how the style of self-translation operates in this environment. The advantage of looking at self-translation is that the variable of potential author-translator misunderstanding or power struggle would seem to be circumvented. Apart from oversights or errors, any shifts must be due to either systemic differences between the languages or to the specificities of translation (i.e., what conscious or unconscious changes the self-translator decides to introduce). Despite the fact of self-translation, a large number of stylistic features are quite similar to other text pairs we have examined. This especially occurs on the phraseological level, where the English, in this case the SL, is generally much more idiomatic and condensed. This is illustrated by the examples in Table 8.1. This illustrative list taken from throughout the book contains a range of parts of speech and translation methods, but generally underpinned by an idiomatic simplification in the Spanish, a use of a more standard, frequent, and less creative expression. The first two in the list are noun phrases: one, all-American kid, is a multi-word unit, a fixed expression with cultural resonance, and so perhaps it is not surprising that it requires explicitation in the Spanish as chico de veras americano. The second, ultra-hip Americana, is a novel collocation, bringing together the prefix ultra and the Table 8.1. Idiomatic lexical equivalents in Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North (HSLN ST) and Rumbo al sur deseando el norte (HSLN TT) ST (HSLN ST)

TT (HSLN TT)

Back translation of TT

all-American kid (HSLN ST 74)

chico de veras americano (HSLN TT 106)

boy truly American

ultra-hip Americana (HSLN ST 119)

las últimas novedades norteamericanas (HSLN TT 169)

the latest North American novelties

bucked that trend (HSLN ST 48)

navegar en sentido contrario (HSLN TT 70)

to sail in the opposite direction

toddle away with his autograph (HSLN ST 113)

alejarse con su autógrafo (HSLN TT 160)

to distance himself with his autograph

I should have breezed through (HSLN ST 110)

debería haber sido natural (HSLN TT 157)

[it] should have been natural

sweeping me into the sawdust of futility (HSLN ST 168)

no me llevaban a ninguna parte (HSLN TT 233)

were not taking me anywhere

208 Style and Ideology in Translation modern colloquial epithet hip plus the creative noun Americana, the suffix -ana following the model of Victoriana, Edwardiana, etc. In this case, again, the translation las últimas novedades norteamericanas fails to retain any of the creative elements of the ST. The next three examples in the list all involve processes: one (bucked that trend) is a stock metaphor or strong collocation and two are colloquial phrasal verbs of motion with evaluative connotations (toddle away = negative, breezed through = positive). For the translation of bucked that trend, Dorfman uses another Spanish metaphor (navegar en sentido contrario = ‘to sail in the opposite direction’), while for the other two he employs more common Spanish lexis in a process of explicitation (alejarse = ‘to distance himself’) and reversal of linguistic point of view (debería haber sido natural = ‘it should have been natural’). One of the clearest examples of the trend towards explicitation and standardization in the TT is Dorfman’s pained reaction to insulting remarks about Chile from foreign schoolmates and other members of the international set in Santiago, in particular a demeaning suggestion from schoolmate Bernie to melt Chilean pesos down into copper bars to make a profit: But none of those bigoted off-the-cuff remarks stuck in my gut like Bernie’s get-rich-quick scheme (HSLN ST 121) Pero ni una de esas frases despectivas respecto a Chile y su inferioridad me asquearon tanto como el mediocre plan de Bernie de enriquecerse a costa del país (HSLN TT 171) [But not one of those disparaging sentences regarding Chile and its inferiority disgusted me as much as the mediocre plan of Bernie to get rich at the cost of the country]. Explicitation here means amplification, which is evident from simply counting the number of words, nineteen in the ST compared to twentyeight in the TT. This even includes counting as three word-forms both offthe-cuff and get-rich-quick, negative pre-modifiers that convey a dynamic concision in the English; in the TT, there is no translation of off-the-cuff, while get-rich-quick scheme is explicated in a post-modifying clause el mediocre plan de Bernie de enriquecerse a costa del país [‘the mediocre plan of Bernie to get rich at the cost of the country’]. Aside from these mechanical linguistic considerations, there is explicitation of evaluation in these expressions. Although off-the-cuff and get-rich-quick do both have negative connotations (the former suggesting lack of thought and the latter a purely profit-driven motivation), the real negativity is centred on the epithet bigoted and the colloquial American idiom stuck in my gut. In the Spanish, this negativity is conveyed by the more standard epithets despectivas (=‘disparaging’), which is indicative of disrespect for Chile rather than the inherent prejudice of those who make the comments, by

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mediocre, an addition which must be viewed as an explicitation of the negative prosody of get-rich-quick, and by the verb phrase me asquearon (= ‘sickened me’), less concrete than stuck in my gut but one that is drawn from the same semantic field. A final instance of explicitation is the addition of the whole phrase respecto a Chile y su inferioridad (= ‘regarding Chile and its inferiority’), a case of increased, even superfluous, cohesion in the TT since Chile had been mentioned in the previous sentence. Hyphenated compounds such as off-the-cuff and get-rich-quick are often used creatively in the English ST. Describing the San Francisco hippies of the late 1960s, Dorfman says: they had rejected the suburban America of lawns and quiz shows, the get-up-and-go American freeways and the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ washing machine. (HSLN ST 206) As in the get-rich-quick example, so here the two compounds are both used as pre-modifiers, this time in an unusual collocation in get-up-and-go American freeways and as a creative syntactic use of what is normally a verbal idiom in keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ washing machine. This creativity may prove to be a stylistic fingerprint of Dorfman in English and makes a valuable point of comparison to the translation style in English of Harriet de Onís, Gregory Rabassa, and Edith Grossman discussed in earlier chapters. There, compound pre-modifiers were seen to be a key element of the translation style of those leading translators who may thereby intuitively have been reproducing syntactic norms commonly appropriate to English as a source language. However, whereas for these other translators the examples generally occurred in standard primings Dorfman manipulates and extends the norms with novel syntax and collocations. The corresponding section in the Spanish TT is as follows: habían rechazado la América suburbana de césped inmaculado y shows en la televisión, no querían vivir una existencia atada a un automóvil y a la necesidad de alimentar incesantemente ese automóvil con combustible extraído de un planeta cada vez más agotado. (HSLN TT 281) [they had rejected suburban America of the immaculate lawn and shows on television, they did not want an existence tied to an automobile and to the need to feed incessantly that automobile with fuel extracted from a planet more and more exhausted]. When translating these compounds into Spanish, Dorfman’s print seems to be the willingness to adapt the text to such an extent that the focus shifts entirely to one aspect—the use of the motorcar and its environmental impact—with no reference at all to the apocryphal washing-machine and the sense of empty competition with the neighbours and other members

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of the social circle. Reference to environmental impact is entirely absent in the English. One possibility for this omission is because this tends to be associated with foreign criticism of the United States and might not be well received in the American version of this text or simply is not deemed of interest in the United States (though this must remain a hypothesis). Analysis of self-translations also sheds more light on syntactic changes and differences in thematic and information structures. In the following example, Dorfman speaks of his decision as a young child to immerse himself in the English of New York and to reject the Spanish language of his parents: I did not speak another word of Spanish for ten years (HSLN ST 29, emphasis added) Durante los próximos diez años no volví a hablar ni una palabra más en castellano (HSLN TT 45, emphasis added) [During the next ten years [I] did not again speak a single word more in Castilian]. Here, the pattern of the English: Actor I

process did not speak

goal another word of Spanish

time adjunct for ten years

is altered in the Spanish, where the time adjunct Durante los próximos diez años (= ‘For the next ten years’) is left-shifted to first position. Examination of other texts in this volume, especially the Rabassa and Grossman translations discussed in chapter 5, has shown that adjunct shifting seems to be relatively common in translation. In the present case, Dorfman selects the more typical unmarked position in both English (final position) and Spanish (first position), irrespective of any difference in thematic focus. However, there are other examples that show a word order change and even thematic shift that are more unusual in translation and perhaps more typical of ‘original’ writing. The following relates Dorfman’s decision in 1968 to renounce English and to write in Spanish: I willed myself to become monolingual again. (HSLN ST 101) Monolingüe, de nuevo quise ser, hacerme monolingüe. (HSLN TT 144) [Monolingual, once more I wanted to be, to become monolingual]. Here the standardized order in English (actor-process-goal-adjunct of frequency) becomes a very marked and more colloquial form in Spanish

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(goal-adjunct of frequency-process-process-goal). The result is a foregrounding of the word monolingüe. Here the self-translator has produced a deliberately more marked, and more creative, TT. A translator working on another author’s ST is much less likely to do this. Thematic shifting also occurs at the paragraph level. In the example below, although on the lexical level the translation is generally close, indeed almost word for word, the TT reverses the discursive organization of the two paragraphs at an important juncture in the book: The revolution was coming to Latin America. The continent I had been born to and now lived in, the continent I had finally decided not to flee, was about to explode in the sixties. (HSLN ST 132) El continente al que había nacido y en el que ahora vivía, el continente del que finalmente decidí no huir, estaba a punto de explotar en los años sesenta. La revolución venía inexorablemente hacia nuestra América. (HSLN TT 186) [The continent to which [I] had been born and in which now [I] lived, the continent from which finally [I] decided not to flee, was on the point of exploding in the sixties. The revolution was coming inexorably towards our America]. This is placed at the very end of Part I of the book, which up to that point had followed Dorfman’s progress from the United States towards the South and his activity in Chile. It is a turning point, after which the focus moves to Dorfman’s hiding from the military and his subsequent departure from Chile for North America. The English text above presents a cause-result order (revolutionĺexplosion), while the Spanish reverses this to result-cause (explosionĺrevolution). Both lead to a climax, with the second paragraph serving more or less as a rheme of the first and presaging the violence of the coup at the beginning of Part II. In this sense, the reversal of order in the Spanish maintains cohesion, even if the climax is slightly different: in the English, the ‘new’ information, located at the end of the passage, is centred around the dramatic process explode, while the Spanish ends with a measured description of the revolution that emphasizes its inexorability. Finally, the narrative point of view in the Spanish is clearly expressed in the possessive pronoun nuestra América: ‘our’ America is Latin America. This shift of interpersonal function on the ideological plane means that the Spanish-language reader will more readily identify with the author’s political and identitary stance. Additions and omissions for cultural or possibly ideological reasons mark the Dorfman text. These affect primarily the psychological point of

212 Style and Ideology in Translation view and may result from a difference in the information expectations of the different readerships. Yet this traditional explanation for the phenomenon conceals a more complex translation procedure that can be ascertained precisely since this is a self-translation of an autobiographical text where the author-translator has a monopoly of knowledge of the events. There are actually two kinds of addition in the TT: the first is explicitation to compensate for likely gaps in cultural knowledge amongst the Spanish TL readership concerning the source culture of the United States. Examples of such addition-explicitation in the TT include a definition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HSLN TT 95) and a clearly ideologically motivated description of the political orientation of the U.S. Republican party (‘the party which defended capitalism to the hilt as a panacea against all the evils of the world’).4 The second kind of addition relates to culturespecific information about Chilean culture to meet the expectations especially of the Chilean readership. Examples are a paragraph about theatre director Óscar Castro (HSLN TT 54), geographical precision relating to the districts of Santiago (walk miles across the city, HSLN ST 90, becomes ‘walk many kilometres from Ñuñoa to Recoleta,’5 and the specification of the brand of typewriter he uses (sitting at my typewriter, HSLN ST 220, becomes ‘in front of my portable Olivetti’).6 The trend to explicitation works in reverse as well. This is the property of a hybrid text such as Heading South, Looking North, where the subject matter derives from two cultural and linguistic contexts and where the English ST is in part a translation of events that occurred in another language (Spanish) and country (Chile). Comparison of ST and TT shows omissions in the TT of material that can really be classified as culturespecific explication in the ST. In other words, material in the ST that functions to fill information gaps for the ST reader and which is superfluous for the TT reader. Thus, the TT omits a parenthetical ST explanation about Antonio Skármeta that would be irrelevant for the Chilean audience of his homeland (“readers might recognize him as the writer whose novel inspired the prize-winning film Il Postino,” HSLN ST 234); also omitted are the culturally-specific allusions to Dagwood and Blondie ironically shared by the left-wing Dorfman and the CIA operatives preparing for the overthrow of Allende (HSLN ST 34). Most interesting, however, are those additions in the TT that suggest more obviously intrusive ideological factors at work on the text, shaping it according to the cultural and ideological environment of its publication. So, a section on the shortcomings of the Allende Revolution contains the addition in the TT of a remark about the regime’s failure to take into account the indigenous peoples of Chile (HSLN TT 352). Indigenous rights, like environmental rights in the getup-and-go American freeway example above, do not appear in the American English original. More information is also given in the TT about the revolutions in Chile and Cuba and Dorfman’s personal support for them: in the TT we are told that he also supported the guerrilla movements in

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Nicaragua, El Salvador, Eritrea, and South Africa, as well as Cuba, where progress is specifically noted in the fields of health, education, and racial equality (HSLN TT 137–138). Information about the successes of the Chilean revolution is sometimes also presented in more detail and more emotionally in the Spanish TT, as in the following, which is part of the story of a peasant woman who comes to see Allende after her husband was murdered by right-wing members of the military: She was one of hundreds of thousands of peasants who had, for the first time in their lives, been made owners of their land by Allende’s government. (HSLN ST 8–9) Bajo la consigna de “La tierra para El que la Trabaja” el gobierno de la Unidad Popular había expropiado los latifundios, transformando a centenares de miles de campesinos en propietarios: por primera vez en su vida esa mujer y su familia tenían unas hectáreas que podían llamar suyas. (HSLN TT 18–19) [Under the slogan of “The Land Is for Him Who Works It” the government of Popular Unity had expropriated the latifundi, transforming hundreds of thousands of peasants into owners: for the first time in her life, that woman and her family had a few hectares which they could call their own]. Comparing the two, the ST reads like a summary. The TT, on the other hand, both expands by giving information about the “The Land Is for Him Who Works It” campaign and also gives the Popular Unity party an active functional role (“the Popular Unity government had expropriated the large estates”). In the ST, the peasants are agents of a passive construction (had [ . . . ] been made owners) that does not mention the potentially controversial term expropriation. The TT also adds emotional detail that brings the reader closer to the woman herself: instead of merely being one of hundreds of thousands of ‘peasants’ (itself a word that points to the remnants of a feudal system) who have benefited, we hear that ‘for the first time in her life, that woman and her family had a few hectares which they could call their own’. Thus, the positive elements of the revolution seem to be emphasized more in the Spanish TT. These lexical patterns and cultural-ideological explicitations tie in with the most evident shift in Heading South Looking North which is at the higher level of genre and can be seen in the presentation of the book itself, specifically in the publisher’s peritext (Genette 1997: 23). On the cover of the UK edition (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998) the book is termed “A memoir,” a personal story featuring photos of Dorfman as a schoolboy and of the Statue of Liberty, representing his childhood in New York, and of the Chilean presidential palace destroyed by bombs

214 Style and Ideology in Translation during the Pinochet coup in 1973, together with a current portrait of Dorfman, representing his involvement as a young adult with the Allende regime. The blurb on the back cover emphasizes the personal slant of the British volume: Searching, moving and beautifully written, Heading South, Looking North is at once a vivid account of a hybrid life and a remarkable meditation on belonging and exile, cowardice and loyalty, tyranny, democracy and the idealism of youth. This follows the pattern of the U.S. Penguin paperback edition where the back cover highlights a quotation from a review in The New York Times: “A fascinating memoir . . . intensely personal and moving . . . a day-today account of his multiple escapes from death during Pinochet’s military takeover in Chile in 1973.” This is a personal memoir, a “bilingual journey,” as the subtitle puts it (emphasis added). The Spanish subtitle of Dorfman’s own Spanish translation is “un romance en dos lenguas,” suggesting a typically Spanish genre, the romance or ballad. The cover of the U.S. Spanish edition (Seven Stories Press) depicts both Dorfman the teenager in New York and the aftermath of the Chilean coup, with a photograph of the Chilean national stadium, but the Planeta edition from Barcelona demonstrates a very different perspective. The front cover spells out that this is “Un testimonio intenso y angustiante sobre el derrocamiento de Salvador Allende” (‘An intense and distressing testimony about the overthrow of Salvador Allende’) and the accompanying photo depicts Pinochet’s saluting other generals in front of the restored façade of the palace. Thus, the Spanish presents itself as a documentary, an eyewitness account of a significant political event, not just a memoir but a piece of testimonial literature, a genre well-known in Latin American writing, exemplified by Guatemalan Nobel Peace winner Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos Debray 1983/1984). The contrast between personal memoir and political testimony is also evident in textual comparison. There is much more emphasis on the first person singular in the English. Indeed, the very beginning of the book features the pronoun I in large typeface followed by a second sentence about “a day in my past” where I is the actor:

I

should not be here to tell this story. It’s that simple: there is a day in my past, a day many years ago in Santiago de Chile, when I should have died and did not. (HSLN ST 3) Spanish normally elides the subject pronoun, so the bold, first-position I of the English could only be replicated with a marked choice in the translation, that is, by use of the emphatic subject pronoun Yo. However, the actual Spanish begins with a complete rewriting of this section:

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Si estoy contando esta historia, si la puedo contar, es porque alguien, muchos años atrás en Santiago de Chile, murió en mi lugar. (HSLN TT 11) [If [I] am telling this story, if [I] am able to tell it, it is because someone, many years back in Santiago de Chile, died in my place]. In place of the bold personal assertion in the English, the Spanish commences with two concessives (si . . . si . . . ) and an elided subject pronoun —‘If [I] am telling this story, if [I] am able to tell it . . . ’ — and follows with the main clause where the actor is not I but rather ‘someone [who] died in my place.’ There is certainly a trend to emphasize the self in the English and to downplay it in the Spanish. A further example, one of several, supports this conclusion. It describes Dorfman’s musing on the explanation given after the event by Fernando Flores, Allende’s Minister of Finance, as to why he had decided against summoning Dorfman to the palace during the coup, a decision which spared Dorfman from what would have been almost certain death: [ . . . ] a witness would be needed who could escape the conflagration and tell the world the story. He thought I was that person [ . . . ]. (HSLN ST 39) [ . . . ] haría falta testigos que escaparan de la conflagración y contaran al mundo lo que había pasado. Ėl pensó que yo era una de esas personas [ . . . ]. (HSLN TT 59) [ . . . there would be needed witnesses who would escape from the conflagration and told the world what had happened. He thought that I was one of those people . . . ]. The English specifically states that Dorfman would be the single individual charged with telling the world the truth about the murderous military takeover and resulting oppressive and violent regime. The Spanish, on the other hand, equally specifically states that testigos [‘witnesses,’ plural] would be needed and that Dorfman was una de esas personas [‘one of those people,’ plural]. This is not to say that in English Dorfman presents himself as a superhero: he equally adamantly confesses the fear which prevented him from going to the palace later that day and the later anguish about life, death, and destiny. What it does mean, however, is that the presentation of the narrator and narrative point of view undergoes a shift, which then affects both the mind style (the psychological point of view) and the identity and reception of the text in the two languages. The text is made to fit a different genre in the various cultures. The issue of personality and identity is crucial to understanding Dorfman’s work. Here, after all, is a person who, at different times of his life,

216 Style and Ideology in Translation has rejected one or other of English and Spanish, who at one point rejects “the multiple, complex, in-between person I would someday become, this man who is shared by two languages” only later to believe that “to tolerate differences and indeed embody them personally and collectively might be our only salvation as a species” (HSLN ST 42). Interestingly, that passage too is considerably rewritten in the Spanish (HSLN TT 63) to emphasize the responsibility of each individual within the nation, with no mention of the species. Although such shifts pass unnoticed unless the two texts are closely and systematically compared (i.e., unless an exercise in translation stylistics is carried out), the general act of translation is not concealed in the Spanish. This is because the process of writing, a personal act of creating or supporting identity through language, is so important to Dorfman. It is underlined from the very first page, immediately following the recollection that he could or should have been killed back in 1973: That’s where I always thought this story would start, at that moment when history turned me, against my will, into the man who could someday sit down and write these words, who now writes them. (HSLN ST 3) The Spanish version of this passage openly admits its status as a translation, Dorfman self-referentially labelling himself as “este hombre que en Carolina del Norte traduce al castellano palabras originalmente imaginadas en inglés” (HSLN TT 11) (‘this man who in North Carolina translates into Spanish words originally imagined in English’ [my translation]). It is no accident that Dorfman chooses to specify both his linguistic and geographical locations, nor that he should be translating into Spanish while based in the United States. It emphasizes the hybridity of person and text, his straddling the border between North and South America. It also reveals the physical dislocation of the translator and translation in space and time.

TRANSLATION WHERE THE LANGUAGES INVOLVED ARE A HYBRID Before we leave Dorfman, we should note that the style of his work contains some of the linguistic features of hybridity we saw feature more emphatically in the Levine translation of Cabrera Infante. This is true of both the ST and TT of Heading South, Looking North but perhaps especially the English ST, since many of the conversations reproduced there are translations into English of conversations which were originally conducted in Spanish. When individual Spanish words are, infrequently, borrowed, italicized, in the English, they are normally accompanied in the same sentence by a gloss

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or an English translation. The following instances are all from the first chapter: This is the last time I will ever see him, the last story I will ever tell him, la última vez. (HSLN ST 4) “Oye, Claudio, hey, would you mind coming to La Moneda next Monday [ . . . ]?” (HSLN ST 8) “A lo largo de mi vida,” she said to me. “In my life, white people have done many things to us [ . . . ]” (HSLN ST 9) they had forced him to call on his fucking pagan gods for help now, sus putos dioses paganos (HSLN ST 9) I had so ardently wanted to become a chileno, to belong (HSLN ST 9). The first three examples seem to be little more than local colour, which is borne out if the same pages are consulted in the Spanish TT where they appear in Spanish with no English explanation. On the other hand, in the same chapter in the TT there are two instances of different English phrases borrowed in the Spanish, one a desperate plea (But will you be there? TT 13) uttered by the five-year old Dorfman to his mother as he wakes from a nightmare, the other a rather gratuitous phrase (a quick look around TT 14). Both are italicized in the Spanish TT and both accompanied by a Spanish gloss, following the pattern of the English ST. The fourth example above (sus putos dioses paganos) seems to be rather different from the others in that it gives us dramatic access through reported discourse to the violence of the military’s words as they torture the husband of a peasant woman. The fifth example, with the word chileno, emphasized but not translated, is representative of the identity Dorfman is seeking. This passage is actually expanded in the TT with the phrase pertenecer a la gran familia de la chilenidad (HSLN TT 19, ‘to belong to the big family of Chileanness’). The decision as to how much of the foreign to include in a text is clearly a stylistic and ideological choice. It does not necessarily correspond to the reality of any supposedly ‘original’ source text. This is demonstrated by one particular example in Heading South, Looking North in a conversation between Dorfman and his wife after their return to Chile from Berkeley in 1968. His wife warns him of the dangers of jogging past a neighbour’s house where there is a particularly vicious dog. The original conversation would presumably have occurred in Spanish, as indicated in Dorfman’s answer in the ST dialogue: “Las calles pertenecen al pueblo,” I answered, “The streets belong to the people.” And off I went to prove my point. (HSLN ST 229)

218 Style and Ideology in Translation This example follows the pattern of others discussed above with the presentation of the foreign phrase being followed by translation into English. Yet the same passage in the Spanish TT has Dorfman making this statement in English, with a Spanish gloss in the following sentence: Respondí en inglés con una frase también aprendida en las protestas de Berkeley: —The streets belong to the people. Y salí a demostrar que, en efecto, las calles pertenecían al pueblo, a los pueblos. (HSLN TT 309) [I replied in English with a sentence/phrase also learned in the protests of Berkeley: —The streets belong to the people. And I went out to show that, indeed, the streets belonged to the people, to the peoples.] The occasional use of the foreign in this work, both ST and TT, therefore comes to serve as a visible reminder and performance of Dorfman’s hybrid identity rather than as an authentic recreation of exact conversations in the past. Although the hybridity of texts by writers such as Dorfman, Cabrera Infante, and Fuentes comes from the fact that these are writers who have grown up or lived in an environment were they have been exposed to more than one language, it is not the only defining factor. After all, Mario Vargas Llosa has long been based in London and his writing does not obviously show the same influence of English; the Chilean exile Luis Sepúlveda spent a decade in Germany, yet one would struggle to find similar examples of German borrowings in his work. On the other hand, the writing of the Peruvian José María Arguedas (1911–1969) is a rare instance of the deliberate modification of Spanish with Quechua songs and structures—postponed verbs, omitted conjunctions, the use of gerunds (Rowe in Arguedas 1993: xvii). In a translator’s note to the English edition, Frances Horning Barraclough, the translator of Los ríos profundos (1958, translated as Deep Rivers, 1978), says that she has “tried to salvage, at least in part, the characteristics of the Quechua-Spanish created by Arguedas in the simplest manner possible, by attempting to be scrupulously faithful to the original” (Argüedas 1981, no page). The stylistic means of doing this includes the bilingual presentation of songs in Quechua and English and, in the main body of the novel, the retention of some Quechua lexis which is explained either in the many footnotes or in a glossary of terms at the end of the translation. Both author and translator make a claim to rendering the Quechua visible through their stylistic choices. What seems to be at stake in these examples is the complex power play between languages as the conduit of social, economic, and ideological

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forces. In the case of Spanish and English, these forces are at play not only in the countries of Latin America which are economically in thrall to the north, but also increasingly in the United States itself where the Hispanic population is important enough politically for both major political parties to offer a Spanish version of their press releases and websites. Although since 1981 many states have attempted to control the spread of Spanish with an English-only policy, there is much writing by members of the Hispanic community which attests to a hybridity of language and identity. The most prominent ‘hybrid’ literature in the United States is Chicano, by Mexican immigrants or their children. The example we shall analyse is Sandra Cisneros. Born in Chicago in 1954 to Mexican immigrants, Cisneros is an iconic figure in Chicana literature. The House on Mango Street (1984, re-edited in 1991), translated into Spanish as La casa en Mango Street (1994) is Cisneros’s best-known work, having sold over three million copies worldwide. After an eighteen-year break, this was followed by Caramelo or Puro Cuento (2002, translated into Spanish as Caramelo o Puro Cuento 2003). The translation into Spanish of Mango Street was carried out by Cisneros’s friend, the noted Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, who figures prominently in Cisneros’s two added pages of acknowledgements in the TT. The presentation of Mango Street in the English and Spanish is different, although not as dramatically so as in the Dorfman example above. Both ST and TT stress that this first-person narrative of Esperanza, a fourteen-year-old girl in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, is a novel about adolescence with its dreams and disappointments; however, while the English describes the neighbourhood as “neither pretty nor easy” and Esperanza as “striving to rise above the hopelessness around her and inventing for herself what she will become,” the Spanish cover sees the central issue being to discover ‘how far our fears, wishes and dreams are universal,’7 frames the district as ‘where tradition mixes with new lifestyles’8 and notes the key themes of loyalty to the community and ‘uprootedness’ (el desarraigo) as well as individual identity and first love. The Spanish TT is thus depicted as centring around the concept of (Mexican) community and tradition transported to an alien (immigrant) context in Chicago. None of this appears in the presentation of the English narrative, which focuses on the individual and her struggle to escape deprivation. In a diglossic text of this kind, the stylistic interest lies in examining how the two culture-signifying languages co-exist and how much of the foreign is visible in the host language. In the English ST, the hybridity of the language is above all at the lexical level. Spanish words in the English ST include: “Mama” and “Papa” (throughout, without the accent mark), “frijoles” (MS ST 38), “chanclas” (MS ST 46), “tamales” (MS ST 47), “merengue,” “tembleque” (MS ST 51), “abuelito” (MS ST 56), “los espíritus” (MS ST 63), “cumbas,” “salsas,” “rancheras” (MS ST 65), “¡Ay, Caray!,” “¡Ay! Mamacita”(MS ST 78), comadres” (MS ST 91). In this list, the use or

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absence of italics reflects the appearance in the text itself: thus, for example, “Mama” and “Papa” appear in standard font, but frijoles is italicized. Italics mark those borrowings as different, still foreign, deliberately foregrounded. The ST accepts many Spanish terms unitalicized, domesticated, indicative of a generally hybrid English-Spanish milieu and related to expectations as regards the linguistic knowledge of the audience. After all, this is a book written by and about a child of Mexican immigrants, born and brought up in a multilingual environment, and likely to appeal to other Mexicans in the United States. Those Spanish words slip unnoticed into the Spanish translation published in the United States, where English then becomes the italicized, foreign code. English words that appear in the Spanish TT include okay, college (MS TT 23), dime (the coin, MS TT 32), volleyball (MS TT 36), puesto de hot dogs (MS TT 71, in place of dime store MS TT 51), Koolaid (MS TT 83), baseball (MS TT 84), uptown (MS TT 87), hollyhocks, pickup (MS TT 122), high school (MS TT 129, in place of eighth grade MS ST 101). It is noticeable that the TT is more exclusive and foreignizing, since even common borrowings such as okay and hot dogs are italicized. Critics of Cisneros’s work point out the influence of the Spanish language on her English, through lexical and syntactic calques (Klahn 2004). Margaret Randall (2002), in a review of the English Caramelo, wonders how the Spanish Caramelo will cope “with one of the novel’s major innovations: the literal rendering of extremely idiomatic Spanish that provides not only much of the book’s charm but also so much of its deeper meaning.” Yet, as we saw in the Mango Street list above, most of the linguistic hybridity revolves around lexical borrowings. The Caramelo ST contains even more of a lexical mix of the two languages, often accompanied by an English translation: He isn’t acabado yet. He isn’t finished (Cmlo ST 5) Uncle says what sells is lo chillante, literally the screaming. (Cmlo ST 7) You disgust me, me das asco (Cmlo ST 11) ¡Felicidades! Happiness! (Cmlo ST 48). Syntactic calques are rarer, and usually restricted to set phrases such as Hit and run (MS ST 65), translated as Pega y corre (MS TT 87), and What a barbarity! (Cmlo ST 11) rendered back into the standard Spanish ¡Qué barbaridad! (Cmlo TT 25). Despite what Cisneros herself says about the influence of the Spanish on the STs (Birnbaum 2002), a view echoed in the afterword by Carmelo translator Liliana Valenzuela, a poet and performance artist from Mexico City now based in Texas, real syntactic calques (that is, calques of the whole sentence structure) are much rarer. These examples tend to be standardized in the Spanish translation.

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In the following, the English calques the Spanish structure (omission of subject pronoun) that then reappears in the TT: Is a good girl, my friend, studies all night and sees the mice (MS ST 32) Es una buena chica, mi amiga, estudia toda la noche y ve ratones (MS TT 45). In fact, more common are non-standard speech patterns in the English that have nothing to do with Spanish. These comprise either graphological representations of pronunciation or incomplete grammatical structures. In most cases, the Spanish TT again standardizes, as in the translation of ain’t in the examples: hey, kid, ain’t you kids know better than to be swinging up there? (MS ST 30) hei, escuincles, ¿no se les ocurre algo menos peligroso que treparse allá arriba? (MS TT 44) [hey, kids, does not occur to you something less dangerous than to climb up there?] Ain’t it a shame. (MS ST 65–66) ¿No es una lástima? (MS TT 87) [Is [it] not a shame?] or gotta in: gotta babysit with Louie’s sisters (MS ST 23) la hace de nana de las hermanitas de Louie (MS TT 35) [acts as nanny of the little sisters of Louie]. One unusual instance concerns non-standard syntax in the English in the speech of Mr Benny the grocer, who scolds the three teenage girls for wearing high heels: Them are dangerous, he says. You girls too young to be wearing shoes like that. Take them shoes off before I call the cops, but we just run. (MS ST 41)

222 Style and Ideology in Translation Train peligros, dice. Son muy chiquitas para trair zapatos desos. Quítensenlos antes que llame yo a la polecía. Pero nosotras nomás corremos. (MS TT 55) [[They] bring dangers, [he] says. [You] are very little to wear shoes of that [type]. Take them off before I call the police. But we just run.] Here, the dialect or sociolect underlying the grammatical markers in the ST (them instead of ‘they’ and You girls too young instead of ‘You girls are too young’) is rendered by Poniatowska through deviant Spanish spellings, or verb forms, suggesting uneducated speech (train for ‘traen,’ trair for ‘traer,’ desos for ‘de esos,’ and polecía for ‘policía’). Dialects are notoriously difficult to translate in any case, especially since they tend to be geographically and culturally constrained.9 There may also be a systemic and cultural difference between English and Spanish in the written representation of dialect, with English more tolerant of non-standard written patterns in general. That Poniatowska resorts to orthographic imitation of non-standard sound is significant since the most creative diglossic level in the translation of these Cisneros novels is the phonological. Poniatowska demonstrates her creativity by substituting lullabies and pop songs (MS ST 59–62, MS TT 65–69) or by creating a new sound in the Spanish: Lucy, Rachel, me tee-tottering like so (MS ST 40) Lucy, Rachel, yo, tam-tam-tam tambaleantes (MS TT 55) [Lucy, Rachel, I, to-to-to tottering] the twangy yackety-yak of the people (MS ST 94) el güiri güiri de las personas (MS TT 121) [the güiri güiri of the people]. Cisneros is fascinated by the sound of language. An aunt in Caramelo threatens to commit suicide, screaming “I’m going to kill myself! Kill myself!!! Which sounds much more dramatic in Spanish—¡Me mato! ¡¡¡Me maaaaaaaatoooooo!!!” (Cmlo ST 12). But there is far more to phonological and linguistic hybridity than a recreation of sound. Each language represents its culture and its homeland. In Caramelo, it is different onomatopoeia in the two languages that is an index for cultural and national differences. The Cisneros family crosses the border and immediately there are phonological signs that they are in Mexico:

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As soon as we cross the bridge everything switches to another language. Toc, says the light switch in this country, at home it says click. Honk, say the cars at home, here they say tán-tán-tán. (Cmlo ST 31) In Mango Street a Mexican mother in Chicago who cannot speak English is horrified to hear her baby imitating the sounds of an English TV ad for Pepsi and we know it reveals the gulf that will develop between them: No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no as if she can’t believe her ears. (MS ST 78) No speak English, le dice ella al nene-niño que canta en un idioma que suena a hoja de lata. No speak English, no speak English. No, no, no. Y rompe a llorar. (MS TT 103) [No speak English, says she to the baby-boy who sings in a language that sounds of tin. No speak English, no speak English. No, no, no. And bursts out crying.] Here, the TT retains the mother’s broken English but gives up on the ST rhyme of tears and ears, which is pertinent to the rhythm of the tune. The TT also standardizes the speech representation, italicizing the direct speech of the woman’s ironically English words. Cisneros’s work is popular and important for raising awareness of the stories of those living in a diglossic Spanish-English context in the United States. However, despite the touching image of the Mexican mother desperately struggling to come to terms with the reality of her child’s linguistic identity, these novels do not tend to interrogate more deeply the linguistic hybridity that is evolving, and the Spanish TTs tend to reduce those linguistic differences. It is other authors who work in the linguistic melting pot, such as the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his ‘new world border’ (1996), who make this new phenomenon more visible. Homi Bhabha (2004: 313, see chapter 2) discusses this in a cultural context where Gómez-Peña’s new hybrid, hyphenated coinages such as Chica-riricua, Puerto-rican-mullato and Chicano-mestizo “expos[e] the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sing of difference—be it class, gender or race.” Edwin Gentzler (2006) discusses the border writing of Gómez-Peña, Ronaldo Hinojosa, Rudolfo Anaya, and others where translation is foregrounded and where “the translation of minority voices necessarily includes questions of power, of resistance, of ethics, of representation, and, in a cultural studies sense, the construction of meaning” (Gentzler 2006: 374). In such contexts the use of Spanish and/or English is an important signifier: Alfred Arteaga’s Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997) discusses the political power relations that underpin any linguistic choice in the United States: “In poem

224 Style and Ideology in Translation or in daily speech, English and Spanish bestow different levels of authority on text and speaker. The relative imbalance in authority grows daily” (Arteaga 1997: 70). The “Poetics” of the title therefore moves beyond the surface or even functional level of language. Arteaga emphasizes the self-conscious dialogic struggle of writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa. Her Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987/1999) has been central in promoting Chicano consciousness and tolerance of linguistic hybridity (Arteaga 1997: 34). For us, it is also a confirmation of the dissolution of the ST-TT divide. A bi-lingual, multi-genre text, it encompasses essay, fiction, and poetry, in a deliberate mix of linguistic codes that sets out to challenge the reader: The switching of “codes” in this book from English to Castilian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language—the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born. Presently this infant language, this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture—to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. (Anzaldúa 1987/1999: 17). The existence of such texts already brings translation and original writing together in dramatic fashion. It merges translation, self-translation, and hybridity and means that the first stylistic choice of Anzaldúa and others is which language(s) to use. This choice is political and affects identity of writer, reader, and text.

CONCLUSION This chapter has considered texts that are run through by hybridity, where SL and TL mix. Here, authorship is openly complex and stylistic analysis can at this stage scarcely hope to separate the different influences and voices and can do little more than mark out some of the defining characteristics of the translation process. But the results are valuable, especially when compared to the case studies in the earlier chapters. The most eye-catching stylistic finding is the creativity and freedom expressed in some of these TTs. This varies, of course, and it is the ST author who generally seems to exert the power in author-translator collaborations such as Cabrera Infante—Levine or Fuentes—MacAdam. But creative new texts are achieved: sections of Tres tristes tigres are completely reworked, while in Christopher Unborn MacAdam deliberately sets out to imitate, graphologically and phraseologically, a type of African-American

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dialect. The translators do express themselves through these stylistic choices and also through peritextual interventions (their own writing about the process) at a later date. However, it appears that the freedom of expression is a function of the permissive presence of the author. This is brought out in the example of self-translation, Ariel Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North. The ideational changes made by the author-translator, affecting the mind style of the work at certain points through factual detail, explicitation, and alterations of cohesive patterning, are quite dramatic. The question remains whether these are due to the fact that it is a self-translation or to the genre of political text. In chapter 4, after all, we saw that the political texts of García Márquez had undergone far more obvious reworking of stylistic structures than had occurred in his fiction. Possible genre-shifting in the presentation of the ST and TT bears relation to the reworking of some of the political texts we saw in chapter 6. On the phraseological level, there are also numerous examples where Dorfman’s English is more creative than the Spanish TT equivalents, including the use of compound pre-modifiers. The possibility emerges that there is a systemic phraseological difference between the primings of the two languages, with English more tolerant of phraseological innovation. This is even supported by some of the findings from the analysis of the Sandra Cisneros novels—the hybridity of the English STs is based mainly on lexical items and the English STs possess far more non-standard speech patterns than the TTs. Finally, different challenge to the reader, and to the English language, is presented by the border writing of authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this book, we set out to analyse the style, voice, and discursive presence of the translator within the socio-cultural, historical, and ideological framework. Each of the case studies in chapters 3 to 8 focused on a specific aspect of style and of the translator’s discursive presence—the pioneer translator Harriet de Onís, García Márquez’s English voices, Gregory Rabassa the translator of the major novelists of the Boom, the translation of political texts, audiovisual texts, and hybrid texts. They were linked through the historical and geographical location of Latin America and the English language of, mostly, the United States. There was political motivation behind the translation of some of the texts and also an imbalance of power relations between the languages, with American English dominant. This macro-context informed the ideological background of most of the translators. Despite the many variables of author, translator, and genre, by considering patterns emerging in the case studies we can advance some tentative responses to the questions we posed in the Introduction: the stylistic differences and similarities between translators; the impact of ideological factors on stylistic choices; and the usefulness of this model for the investigation of major translation studies issues. First of all, we should stress that style in translation is inherently nonsystematic. Patterns do emerge, but none of the translators we have studied in this book always translates in the same way in all cases. Translation is not scientific and there is always an element of choice and poetic taste. The stylistic criteria that guide translators are themselves subjective and hazy: translators speak of the importance of finding the “voice” of the text or author, and the choices are sometimes phonological, seeking to achieve alliteration and other poetic sound effects. This inherent inconsistency complicates analysis and the interpretation of results, meaning that generalizations from the findings are necessarily probabilistic, not universal (Toury 2004). Nevertheless, certain prominent phraseological characteristics of individual translators have been identified on the basis of the texts analysed. These may be due to the idiolects or lexical primings of individual translators. Thus, the style of Harriet de Onís, working in the mid-twentieth century, is marked by a rich literary lexicon, based around an idiomatic lexical core

228 Style and Ideology in Translation and possibly influenced by the lexical primings of American fiction and adventure stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lexical and syntactic concision is a trend in Onís’s TTs, sometimes generated at macro level by editorial pruning, a reminder that any observation on style in translation should carry the caveat that it is the consequence of decision-making from the implied translator, an amalgam of publisher, editor, translator, copy-editor, and other players. Dialectal variation is also reduced by Onís, which means that the geographical identity of the characters, and authors, is diluted in English. By contrast, all García Márquez’s fiction translators, J. S. Bernstein, Gregory Rabassa, and Edith Grossman, tend towards a prominent Americanization of the TL, so noticeable it is sometimes the subject of (disapproving) comment from United Kingdom reviewers. This is achieved in different ways: the occasional lexical item for Bernstein, many colloquialisms (including the semantic field of madness) and phrasal verbs from Rabassa, and expletives in Grossman’s translation of Bolívar. The trend towards foreignization, evidenced in the borrowing of SL lexical items, is strongest in Grossman’s translations. Other features preferred by individual translators are concise and dynamic verb forms (Onís, Rabassa), concrete lexis (Rabassa), and lexical amplification by two-word units or bigrams (Grossman). A very interesting finding is the tendency towards compound pre-modifiers in the TTs of these experienced and renowned translators. Similar uses were noted in the English ST of Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North, in chapter 8. This raises the possibility that such compounds may be a characteristic of original writing in English. Experienced translators aiming for a ‘fluent,’ ‘domesticated,’ TL-oriented TT may perhaps consciously or unconsciously favour such pre-modifiers since they match the patterns of lexical priming of naturally-occurring English. Compound pre-modifiers attest to the syntactic and lexical creativity of English. There is somewhat of a paradox here, since these translators seek creativity by adopting what on the basis of reference corpora seem to be typical TL patterns. More investigation would be needed to understand the processes involved, but one possibility is that translators conform to the TL colligational (syntactic) primings but with some freedom in the choice and collocation of lexical elements. That is, a translation such as branch-arched passage (Onís) imitates the TL propensity for a hyphenated pre-modifier even if the collocation of the two elements branch and arched is unusual and creative. Creativity is an inherent part of style and linked to markedness. In some of these case studies, the use of reference corpora has shown potential to assist in the evaluation of the markedness and frequency of lexical choices, collocations, colligational patterns, and the possible sources and influences of lexical primings. Further refinement and the development of truly comparable genre-specific corpora in the two languages should be a priority in order to assist more detailed investigation in this area. At present, it is extremely difficult to measure the creativity of lexical choices using

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existing corpora such as the BNC and the CREA because, while purporting to be representative, they are not comprehensive. This is why for crude frequency counts we have often resorted to an Internet search engine since the holdings are so much bigger, even for older texts that may be more relevant in the analysis of some of the earlier translations. As we discussed in chapter 1, following Leech and Short and Halliday, deviance, prominence, and foregrounding are central to the analysis of style. Deviance is statistical (deviance from the norm), prominence is psychological (noted by the reader), and foregrounding is motivated prominence (by the author, or translator). In the TT these patterns may well be different from the ST. The use of corpora allows some support for the ascertaining of possible deviance and provides actual occurrences in the language of features which the analyst perceives as prominent or foregrounded in a particular TT. As well as repeated or creative phraseological patterns, there is variation in the treatment of syntax and grammar in the results from the case studies. The most common is for the calquing in English of the overall sentence structure: clear examples are in the translation of Rodó’s Ariel by Stimson, an amateur translator, and also in Bernstein’s translation of García Márquez, which was not well received. This might suggest that in the context of twentieth-century Latin American writing in translation strong syntactic calquing may be a function of the inexperience or lack of confidence of the translator. However, Gregory Rabassa calques large sections of Márquez and Cortázar, and also of Clarice Lispector, with the exception of amplification of prepositional phrases. So the variable of author style may be just as important. Some authors can more readily be translated in this way. On the other hand, more experimental writing such as that by Guimarães Rosa, Lezama Lima, and Cortázar sometimes undergoes syntactic simplification in translation by Onís and Rabassa. This lends support to the hypothesis that translation tends towards the standardization of various styles, almost as if there is an overarching norm of translation syntax to which the translators unconsciously comply. But this depends on genre too, and some forms of translation, notably audiovisual translation, seem to have different norms, shunning relative clauses while embracing non-standard question forms for the sake of concision. The most frequent stylistic syntactic shift in the TTs is adjunct displacement, most noticeably in the translations of Edith Grossman. Corpus-based analysis allows cross-linguistic comparison of adjunct use. There may be a difference between the treatment of space and time adjuncts, with the latter frequently left-shifted to marked theme position by Grossman while space adjuncts are sometimes right-shifted to a more standard clause-final position. Adjunct displacement affects especially temporal point of view but there may also be genre-specific uses, and so further investigation would seem advisable to understand better how these function in translation. The point of view model, based on the categories of systemic-functional grammar is a useful tool for translational stylistics in that it allows categorization of micro-level shifts according to the function at the higher level of

230 Style and Ideology in Translation narrative organization and focalization. It is interesting that there seems to be little obvious shift in evaluation on the ideological plane through modality choices, nor indeed of mind style through an alteration of the transitivity patterns. Translation and modality patterns are frequently central to monolingual stylistics and critical discourse analysis. Perhaps it is because of their visible importance that they are less likely to be openly manipulated in translation; alternatively, translators may be more intuitively sensitive to the realizations of those functions and calque them into the TL. The psychological point of view, or ‘mind style,’ is affected by omissions, syntactic simplification, or a change in patterns of cohesion, and spatio-temporal viewpoint undergoes alteration most noticeably with the shift in adjunct sequencing and with the standardization of tense relations (most commonly historic present to standard past tense) to conform to the macro-patterns of the ST narrative. Although we have adopted a categorized point-of-view toolkit for analysis, we should emphasize (as does Uspensky 1973) that there is overlapping of the different planes. This is most evident with the phraseological plane, which we have understood as general patterning of similar chunks of language, pre-modifiers and idioms being examples. This corresponds in part to Sinclair’s idiom principle and is especially useful in translation since it allows categorization of phenomena which together form important elements of the translator’s style. Among others, there is also naming, the use of pronouns and the use of non-standard speech representation, such as dialect. These affect the mind style and provide some form of evaluation; the naming of Hugo Chávez in the U.S. press is a very clear instance (see chapter 6). At the level of macro-context, the link between ideology and style is seen in the selection of texts to promote a specific image of Latin America, whether it be the exotic image preferred by Waldo Frank, Knopf, and, to an extent, Onís, who was an editor and scout as well as translator, or the controlled dissemination of texts by the covertly funded Mundo Nuevo in the 1960s. At the same time, however, funding helped to secure publication in English for authors of the Boom who were not at all sympathetic to the United States. How far the image of these authors was consciously controlled is difficult to ascertain and there is little evidence that the linguistic strategies distort or filter out political statement that might embarrass the patrons. Nevertheless, the image of an author such as García Márquez is certainly different in English since most of his early political writing is not available or well promoted in translation. The translation of his political texts also reveals important stylistic differences compared to fiction: the cohesion of the story of Miguel Littín is altered, though the text is not abridged, unlike some of Onís’s translations. Non-translation is a form of censorship but so too is the trend towards paratextual framing (Baker 2006), through covers, introductions, footnotes, and the like, where the reception of the message is manipulated even if linguistically it is rendered very closely. Paratexts and peritexts (Genette 1997) are translation’s equivalent of political spin. The translation

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of Rodó’s Ariel and Dorfman and Mattelat’s How to Read Donald Duck are prime examples. Another effect is to generate a genre shift, to conform to preferred genres in the TL context of culture. Heading South, Looking North by Dorfman and the novels of Sandra Cisneros are centred more on the personal experience in the English STs and are divested of some of their political relevance through the presentation on the covers, and, in Dorfman, by shifts of cohesion and mind style which emphasize the first person. But there is an important technological change in the translation of political texts: the increasing tendency towards Internet translation means that governments of all persuasions (including Cuba and Venezuela) and groups and individuals outside the mainstream (such as the EZLN in Mexico) now have greater ability to produce and disseminate translations in an attempt to control their voices internationally. In contrast to the paratextual framing, the relation between ideology, of the TL culture or of the individual translator, and the linguistic realization of style is certainly not deterministic (cf. Van Dijk 2004). That is, we cannot with certainty predict the translation strategy and style from the specific situational constraints. Idiolect and lexical priming are important. They are in part a result of the ideology (in the sense of experience, beliefs, and knowledge) of the translator, but also they are linked to poetic sensitivity and taste. Translator affinity does play an important role: apparently ‘committed’ translators such as Levine and Kunzle and ideologically biased commentators such as Rice (on Ariel) and some sections of the press (on Chávez) overtly manipulate the text with which they have an affinity or antipathy. Apart from these, there is relatively little evidence of any strong link. Editorial interference by Waldo Frank and Alfred Knopf did have an impact by omitting and editing out whole sections of books, and by seeking to impose certain genre norms in a bid to maximize the attractiveness of the TT product. Onís herself seems to have occasionally resorted to adding a religious veneer to her translations and to stereotyping certain characters. Yet translations of some key sensitive texts by the politically polarized Cuban regime and the EZLN reveal little obvious manipulation. Quite the opposite, they seem to set out to control the reception of a supposedly unadulterated TT in the international language of English with a closely calqued translation. Sometimes elements of ideology and identity disappear because of the constraints of the genre or the different sensitivities of the translators. Features of gay language in the works of Senel Paz and Jaime Bayly are removed in the subtitling of the film versions perhaps because the visuals carry much of the load of the message. These interpersonal elements of naming and evaluation are also subject to shifting in the intermediate stages of moving from the dialogue in the novel to screen play to the performance of film dialogue, a very fruitful area of future research. Different translators also produce varying stylistic solutions: Peter Bush’s version of the novella retains and develops the speech of the gay characters more than does Thomas Christensen’s, showing that the voices of the ST are not inevitably standardized.

232 Style and Ideology in Translation Multiple constraints and variables co-exist and there remains much work to be done on the analysis of style in translation. This includes more work on retranslations, which enable comparison against a linguistically stable ST, and rewriting and reframing, where the reception of the TT is guided irrespective of the linguistic style of translation. One of the most interesting findings of these case studies is the blurring and problematization of categories that have until recently been considered as static. Thus, stylistic features of fiction and political texts merge, ST authors such as Cabrera Infante are strongly influenced by readings in the TL or by readings of TL literature film translated into the SL, film adaptations of novels or novellas pass through a series of intermediate and shifting forms of screenplay, dialogue, and subtitle, and modern Latino writing produces a deliberate hybrid of language that potentially destabilizes the concept of SL and TL, ST and TT. The notion of author and translator merges too, with collaborations (Cabrera Infante—Levine; Fuentes—MacAdam) and even self-translation (Dorfman) where the author-translator wields more power than the lone translator, however stylistically creative an Onís, Rabassa, Grossman, MacAdam, or a Levine may be. Teasing out the sources and stylistic realization of such different polyphony will be an important challenge for translational stylistics and for understanding in greater depth the nature of translation.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Throughout this volume, the addition of bold in textual examples is for emphasis and to facilitate reference. 2. Wales (2001: 287) describes markedness as referring to “any features or patterns which are prominent, unusual or statistically deviant in some way.” 3. Compare, in an English-language context, Birch and O’Toole (1988: 1): “Style functions, then, both to class a text among other texts—generally—and to give it an unmistakably individual flavour.”

CHAPTER ONE 1. For Gregory Rabassa, for instance, translation is always “a collective enterprise” (Rabassa 2005: 177). 2. Although all readers bring their interpretation to a text, this of course does not mean that all ST readers are translators in the strict sense of one who produces a new written text in another language. 3. These are Rimmon-Kenan’s terms. There are major terminological discrepancies in this area, since the Russian formalists used fabula and szujet, and Genette histoire and discours for “story” and “text” respectively. 4. Max Havelaar, by Multatuli, published in 1860. 5. In fact, there have been many attempts within translation studies to address the need for a model, with varying degrees of success. Kitty van LeuvenZwart’s well-known model of translation shift analysis, discussed in Schiavi’s paper, was used to analyse extracts of translations of modern Latin American fiction in Dutch (van Leuven-Zwart 1989, 1990). Although van LeuvenZwart combines a comparison of ST and TT with a description of the effects of small microstructural shifts at the higher narrative levels of story and text, the model ultimately fails because of a rather naïve faith in the objectivity of what constitutes a shift, an extremely complex taxonomy of thirty-seven different types of shift, many of which are overlapping, and an overly strict mapping of shift to effect without any real consideration of the narrative context and function. There are other models based around a taxonomy of features which give insights into the translation strategies employed but which offer scant treatment of narratological types: Lambert and Van Gorp (1985), Nord (1991, 1997), who considers stylistic text elements under ‘intra-textual factors’ that affect the TT, subcategorized into lexis, sentence structure, and suprasegmentals; and House (1977, 1997), who employs a Hallidayan register

234 Notes

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

analysis around the lexicogrammatical realizations of Field, Tenor, and Mode but without considering the interplay with voice and narrative levels. Greek ‘different tongue’, raznorecie in Bakhtin’s Russian original. This refers to language variation, including dialects, to the “differentiation or stratification of language” (Wales 2001: 186–187). Compare the famous paper by Roman Jakobson (1959), who claims that everything is translatable except where, as in poetry, form is part of sense. It is well to point out that one source of dispute amongst functionalists concerns the number of functions that language may be considered to possess: four were proposed by I. A. Richards in his Practical Criticism (1929)—sense, feeling, tone, and intention; six by Roman Jakobson (1960)—referential, emotive, phatic, poetic, and metalinguistic; and three by Halliday (1978)—ideational, interpersonal, and textual, building on functional categories proposed by Karl Bühler in his Sprachtheorie of 1934/1965. See also Leech and Short (1981: 30). For example, the day when translated by le jour où (‘the day where’). It would be interesting to test out some of these concepts on non-Western languages such as Chinese and Arabic. That those languages are written from right to left should not invalidate the spatial point of view, although genre conventions in those languages may foreground different elements. Classic examples are Dryden (1692), Tytler (1797), and Yan Fu (see Chan 2004). “Le traducteur n’a point d’autre but que de garder la caractéristique expressive, c’est-à-dire le style de l’original.” See also more detailed analysis in Dan Shen (1995). See also Parks’s analysis of an extract from Italian magic realist Roberto Calasso’s Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, 1988 (ibid.: 215). In a famous paper attacking stylistics, Stanley Fish (1981: 61) takes Halliday to task because his interpretation precedes his analysis of the data and because his grammar is so complex “it can legitimately do nothing more than provide labels for its constituents.” This is countered by Stubbs (2005) who says that a similar argument could be advanced against research in any field in that the researcher will approach the data with some hypotheses as to what will be useful and with the experience of what proved useful in previous investigations. The Translational English Corpus (TEC) is held at the University of Manchester, UK and is available online at http://www.monabaker.com/tsresources/TranslationalEnglishCorpus.htm. The BNC comprises around 110 million words of naturally-occurring (mainly British) English taken from a range of sources, including fiction and newspapers but also some spoken language and informal written material such as advertisements and fliers. The project ended in 1995 and contains texts predominantly published in the 1980s and 1990s. The RAE current corpus (CREA), contains a similar number of words and range of genres and text types and has a fifty-fifty split of peninsular Spanish and Latin Americantexts. Available at http://www.corpus1.leeds.ac.uk Available on CD-Rom. A limited online search facility is available at http:// www.sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk Online search available at http://www.rae.es Colligation is a coinage of Firth (1957) and has recently also been revisited by Sinclair (2004) as well as Hoey (see Hoey 2005: 42–43). A textual and grammatical counterpoint to collocation, it is the idea that a lexical item is primed to occur in a specific grammatical function. For example, that consequence is primed to occur as part of the subject or adjunct and not the object. Also, it colligates negatively in pre-modification and post-modification (Hoey ibid.: 44f).

Notes

235

22. “The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments” (Sinclair 1991: 110).

CHAPTER TWO 1. See Eagleton (1991), who lists sixteen definitions of ideology in circulation at the time, many of which were contradictory, ranging from ideology as distortion, classical Marxist ideas about what was true or false, to sociological definitions based around the function of ideas in social life; see also Fairclough (2001: 78), who discusses social ideology and Marxist ideology. 2. Simpson’s definition underpins Hatim and Mason’s chapter on the ideology of translation (1997: 143–163). 3. “I am not saying, of course, that either the participant in the situation, or the linguist looking over his or her shoulder, can predict the text in the sense of actually guessing in advance exactly what is going to be said or written; obviously not” (Halliday and Hasan 1989: 36). 4. His Studies of Spanish American Literature had been published in New York by Brentano’s in 1920. 5. “She controlled the sluices of the circulation of Latin American literature in the United States and, by means of the United States, throughout the whole world.” 6. Now freely available online at http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d =53545497 7. Despite the success of Amado and later Lispector, Brazilian writers have not really been considered part of the Boom. 8. See Lasch (1969), Stonor Saunders (1999), and Scott-Smith (2002) for conflicting accounts of the Congress’s activities. 9. “Los escritores latinoamericanos están contaminados de política [ . . . ] debemos darles espacio a los artículos politicos. Pero este espacio será sólo una pequeña fracción de la revista,” Emir Rodríguez Monegal Papers, Princeton University. 10. http://www.utdallas.edu/research/cts/teaching-translation.html 11. See, for example, Payne (1993), Rostagno (1997), Balderston and Schwartz (2002), Levine (2005), Cohn (2006; forthcoming).

CHAPTER THREE 1. A debate termed “sterile” by George Steiner in After Babel (1998: 319). For a brief summary of some of the writing on literal and free translation see Munday (2001, chapter 2). More extensive treatment is given in Robinson (1997). 2. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/committees/historic/ad-fish/or-03/ sf03–0102.htm, of 2003. 3. John Wesley’s Notes on the Bible (1754) available online at, amongst others, bible.crosswalk.com/Commentaries/WesleysExplanatoryNotes/wes. cgi?book=ex&chapter=032 4. Gene Stratton-Porter (1911) The Harvester, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, http://www.mckinley.k12.hi.us/ebooks/pdf/tharv10.pdf#search=%22ungratef ul%20cur%20harvester%22 5. “I must go: for I find that I am not to make ducks and drakes of my money, until I come into possession of my property.”

236 Notes 6. Erle Stanley Gardner’s The DA Holds a Candle (New York: W Morrow, 1938). 7. Terri Farley’s Phantom Stallion 8: Golden Ghost, (New York: Harper-Collins, 2006). 8. The same stylistic strategy can be noted in the translation of Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, where the name of one of the indigenous characters, the Adelantado, is retained in Spanish even though its sense, “Advanced,” is symbolic and is specifically referred to in the text (LS ST 196, LS TT 171). 9. “The good stands for all things that bring easement and satisfaction and surcease from pain”; “In the past he had liked comfort and surcease from pain,” http://www.london.sonoma.edu/Writings/WhiteFang/ 10. “Lest my memorial should again appear at the public bar of justice,” James Adair (1775) The History of the American Indians, http://memory.loc.gov/ cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/faw:@field(DOCID+@lit(icufawcbc0005div35)) 11. For example, “Since prices skyrocketed, Californians have used conservation and efficiency to chop as much as 10 percent of their consumption,” Nuclear Terrorism, Nuclear Safety by Harvey Wasserman on AlterNet. Posted 17 September 2001. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11514 12. A search for branch-arched calls up 116 hits, but almost all of these are of a noun+verb, for instance the branch arched over the top 13. http://www.rentslicer.com/view-listing.html?id=550815 14. Kim Edwards “Aristotle’s Lantern,” in Zoetrope 6.1 (2002), http://www.allstory.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=134 15. “The figure of the aged woman in the most gorgeous of her mildewed velvets and brocades,” http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/fantasy/ TwiceToldTales/chap16.html 16. “O! pathless world of seeming!,” from Shadow River by Pauline Johnson, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5625/5625.txt 17. As a comparison contempló occurs 1,020,000 times and contemplaba 871,000 times. 18. “he sought the astrologer, who still remained shut up in his hermitage, chewing the bitter cud of resentment,” Washington Irving (1832) The Alhambra, etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/i/irving/washington/i72a/part22.html 19. “I was passing by the house, chewing the bitter cud of my reflections,” Hesba Stretton (1872) The Doctor’s Dilemma, New York: D. Appleton, http://www. gutenberg.org/files/14454/14454-h/14454-h.htm

CHAPTER FOUR 1. Organized by Waterstone’s Bookshop and Channel 4 national television in the United Kingdom. 2. See Philip Howard, “Nobel Prize for García Márquez,” The Times, 22 October 1982: 8, and Salman Rushdie, “Márquez the Magician,” The Sunday Times, 24 October 1982: 41. 3. See also the beginning of Of Love and Other Demons (García Márquez 1996), where Grossman translates vericuetos as rough terrain and fritangas as fried food (OL TT 5). 4. See the discussion of Grossman’s preface of her Don Quixote translation in chapter 2. 5. http://www.karmel.at/eng/teresa.htm 6. E-mail communication 10 July 2005. 7. Further analysis of this text can be seen in Munday (2002).

Notes

237

CHAPTER FIVE 1. “Sus versiones exhiben brillantes equivalencias a nivel de signos menores, y sobresaliente destreza en la normalización sintáctica que asciende la escala de la idiomaticidad.” 2. See further examples on the following pages: HS ST 81-HS TT 63, HS ST 202HS TT 177, HS ST 250-HS TT 224, HS ST 238-HS TT 214.

CHAPTER SIX 1. Reissued in 1997 by Waveland Press as The President. 2. Typical of this is the following, in the BNC, from a UK parliamentary report of 1943 outlining post-war colonial policy in Kenya: “For a considerable time to come these peoples will not be ready for self-government” (The Colonies: The Labour Party’s post-war policy for the African and Pacific colonies). 3. “The scene forever looms in my nightmares,” http://www.writing.com/main/ view_item/item_id/1140293 4. Kunzle is now (2006) Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. 5. Available online at http://etext.virginia.edu/kjv.browse.html 6. Available online at http://www.murtonsys.com/bibledatabase/htmlc/spanish/ index.htm 7. Twenty-five years before, the nationwide Televisa channel had assisted in the removal of Scherer from his editorship of the daily Excelsior. 8. “Did the veteran’s gravelly voice lay down a ballast of guilt in the pit of her stomach?” http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/edf25/writing/Teshuva.04. html 9. “providing platforms for celebrities to temporary shed the ballast of guilt over success,” http://isfullofcrap.com/oldcrap/2006/05/the_htown_rat.html 10. http://www.geopoliticalreview.com/archives/cat_latin_america.php 11. http://www.acooke.org/andrew/writing/viva.html

CHAPTER SEVEN 1. Our main focus here is on the shifts that occur from novella to screen play to subtitled film, so we shall quote principally from the translations by Peter Bush and only refer to Christensen’s translations where these shed extra light on what is happening. 2. The Spanish dialogue corresponding to this back translation from the film is as follows: ¿Te interesa Vargas Llosa? Éste está dedicado. Pero en casa tengo otro ejemplar. Además tengo a Severo Sarduy y a Goytisolo completos. ¿Vamos a buscarlos? Yo no voy a casa de [ . . . ] gente que no conozco. Aprovecha, niño.

238

Notes ¿Dónde vas a encontrar estos libros? ¡Capté! Sólo puedes tener los libros que te autoriza la Juventud. Los forras, viejo. ¡Ten imaginación! No tengo que forrar nada. Leo lo que me da la gana . . . . . . y no tengo ganas de hablar. ¡Está bién!

3. Literally, ‘crazy woman’ but also used as a general word, ‘guy’.

CHAPTER EIGHT 1. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Gardner published translations of poems by Octavio Paz (The Sun Stone, New York: Cosmos Publications, 1969). 2. Gardner has gone on to work as a freelance translator and poet based in the Netherlands. The Tres tristes tigres episode is recollected somewhat differently on one of his publishers’ websites which declares: “he translated the notoriously difficult novel Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in collaboration with the author (Harper & Row, 1971)”, http://www.arcpublications.co.uk/biogs/gardner.htm 3. By contrast, however, MacAdam censors by omission disrespectful racial comments in the translation of Bryce Echenique’s Tarzan’s Tonsillitis (Ruta 2002). 4. “el partido que defendía el capitalismo a ultranza como panacea contra todos los males del mundo” (HSLN TT 43). These and other English translations in this section are my own. 5. “caminar muchos kilómetros, de Ñuñoa a Recoleta” (HSLN TT 129). 6. “frente a mi Olivetti portátil” (HSLN TT 298). 7. “hasta qué punto nuestros miedos, deseos y sueños son universales.” 8. “donde la tradición se mezcla con nuevos estilos de vida.” 9. Despite the findings of creative rendering of dialect in the Spanish TTs, there are claims that publishers seek to impose a standardized Spanish model in order to boost sales across the Spanish-speaking world (Morales 2002).

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FILMOGRAPHY Fresa y Chocolate [Strawberry and Chocolate] (1993), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio, Cuba. No se lo digas a nadie [Don’t Tell Anyone] (1998), directed by Francisco Lombardi, Peru and Spain.

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Index

A adaptation: of film 173–8, 185–96, 232; as translation procedure 8, 30, 106 addition 68, 76, 79, 81, 91, 93, 107, 112, 119, 122, 141–2, 157, 157, 158–9, 182, 201–23, 211–13 adjunct placement 24, 25–6, 32, 37, 40, 76, 84, 89–90, 111, 114–16, 123, 131–2, 149, 163–4, 210, 219, 230 Alberto, Eliseo 125 Allende, Isabel 61, 125 Allende, Salvador 119–21, 151–2, 156, 212–15 alliteration 21, 88, 93, 106, 137, 195 Amado, Jorge 65, 67, 125, 235n7; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon 52–4 American Association of University Presses 60, 152 American Literary Translators Association 63 Americas, The 65 Americas Society, The 57, 204 amplification 30, 87, 103, 104, 110, 112, 123, 129, 131, 141, 147–8, 149, 160, 208, 228, 229; amplificatory normalization 128 Andersen, Hans Christian 31 Anzaldúa, Gloria 224, 225; Borderlands/La Frontera 224 appraisal 22, 24 Apuleyo Mendoza, Plinio 129 Arciniegas, Germán 53, 65; The Green Continent 66 Arguedas, José María 50, Deep Rivers 218 Arteaga, Alfred 223–4

Asturias, Miguel Angel 54, 55, 97; El señor presidente 151 audiovisual translation 173–96; Bayly Don’t Tell Anyone 178–84; constraints 175–6; image and sound 174; problems of 177; Senel Paz 184–96 author-translator collaboration 198–206 authorship 1, 9, 16, 20, 224 Azuela, Mariano 51 B Bach, Caleb 63 Baker, Mona 6, 14, 15, 29, 35–6, 41, 103, 230 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8, 16, 18, 20, 234n6 Bal, Mieke 23 Balcells, Carmen 55 Balch, Trudy 65 Balderston, Daniel 235n11 Barnstone, Willis 19 Barraclough, Frances Horning 218 Barral, Carlos 55 Bassnett, Susan 49 Bayley, John 100 Bayly, Jaime 231; No se lo digas a nadie 178; film (Don’t Tell Anyone) 61, 178–84 Bernstein, J. S. 96, 97, 123, 228, 229; No One Writes to the Colonel 100–3, 104, 106, 111–2 Bhabha, Homi 62, 223 Bible translation: 29, 162; Pentateuch 1 bilingualism 61–2, 199–200, 206, 218 Birch, David 233n2 Birnbaum, Robert 220 Blair, Dorothy 36 Boase-Beier, Jean 6, 30

254

Index

Bondy, Sebastián “The Suitcase” 127, 133 Bonner, Anthony: translation of “Pierre Menard” 2–4, 6 Boom, the 9, 20, 50–60, 61, 64, 80, 94, 95, 98–9, 125, 127, 151, 168, 206, 227, 230, 235n7 Booth, Wayne C. 11, 14 Bordwell, David 173–5 Borges, José Luis 20, 41, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 95, 206; collaboration with di Giovanni 198–9; translations of “Pierre Menard” 1–5 borrowing 30, 37, 71, 78, 81, 92, 107, 136, 160, 166, 200, 203, 218, 220, 228 Bosseaux, Charlotte 6, 32–3 Bourdieu, Pierre 54 Brenner, Anita 51 Broeck, Raymond van den 31 Brotherston, Gordon 51 Brown, Meg H. 53 Brufani, Gabriela 56 Bühler, Karl 234n8 Burgos Debray, Elizabeth 214 Bush, Peter 36, 237n1; translation of Senel Paz 184–96, 231 C Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 15, 58, 60, 99, 205, 224, 232; Three Trapped Tigers 199–204, 216, 218, 238n2 Caillois, Roger 54 calque 14, 29–30, 71, 81, 88, 101–4, 111–12, 123, 129–32, 136, 141–2, 146–7, 149, 154, 200–1, 220–1, 229–231 Canfield, Cass 56 Carpentier, Alejo 52, 54, 65, 67; The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Steps 80–92, 93, 107, 136, 160 Carroll, Mary 176–7 Carter, Ron 22, 32, 35, 45 Casa de las Américas 59 Castillo, José Guillermo 57 Castro, Fidel 54, 60, 122, 123, 151, 159, 191; proclamation 165, 169–72 Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR) 57–60, 66, 97, 152 Center for Translation Studies, Dallas 63

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel 1, 2, 18, 108 Chan, Leo Tak-hung 234n11 Chatman, Seymour 11 Chaume, Frederic 177 Chávez, Hugo 169, 172 Chicano 8, 62, 198, 219, 223–4 Christ, Ronald 57–8 Christensen, Thomas: translation of Senel Paz 184–6, 195–6, 231, 237n1 Cisneros, Sandra 61, 62; The House on Mango Street and Caramelo or Puro Cuento 219–24, 225, 231 Clark, Peter 36 Cockerill, Hiroko 6 cognitive processes 4, 44–8 cohesion 22–4, 26–7, 68, 79, 86, 101–2, 112, 118–9, 129, 131, 141, 148, 162, 164, 170, 192, 209, 211, 230–1 Cohn, Deborah 53, 54, 56, 60, 66, 235n11 Colchie, Thomas 55, 57 colligation 37–8, 83, 87, 114, , 154, 228, 234n21 collocation 33, 83, 87, 114, 154, 228, 234n21 colloquialisms 49, 69, 76–7, 93, 123, 127, 130–4, 149–50, 166, 202–5, 208, 210, 228 condensation 26, 66–7, 75, 84–6, 88, 93, 131, 141, 157, 207 Congress for Cultural Freedom 59 connotation 33, 107, 120, 154, 162, 208 conscious choices 1, 7, 13–14, 23, 35– 6, 39–41, 45–7, 80, 113, 115, 121, 134, 201, 205–6, 228–30 context: 6–9, 30, 121; cognitive model of 44, 46–8; of culture 22, 41, 46–8, 175, 231; macro-context 6, 40, 43–64, 151–2, 159–60, 227, 230; of situation 20–1, 23, 39, 46–8, 116 Cooke, Andrew 237n11 corpora 8–9, 35–9; British National Corpus 36–8; CREA Real Academia Corpus 38, 70, 234n17; Internet as corpus (Google) 38, 70, 77–8, 83–4, 86, 88, 106, 111, 117, 138, 154, 167; Leeds Internet Corpus 38, 69, 70, 83, 89, 113, 234n18; reference

Index corpus 34, 37–8; Translational English Corpus 36, 234n16 corpus-based studies 6, 36–8, 87, 229 Coronil, Fernando 72 Cortázar, Julio 55, 57, 59–60, 95, 97, 99, 198, 199; Hopscotch 125, 128, 130–8, 149, 229 creative writing 63, 73, 154, 167, 206 creativity 1, 4, 20, 33, 35, 37–8, 40–1, 62, 84, 106, 116, 123, 129–30, 137–9, 149, 195, 198, 199, 204, 207–9, 211, 222, 224–5, 228–9, 232, 238n10 critical discourse analysis 6, 8, 22, 29–30, 41, 43–5, 72, 94, 169, 230 Cuba 65, 71, 172, 192, 200–1, 231; banned literature 188–92; Cuban identity 72–3, 184; dialect 199; Elián González 122–3; Cuban Revolution 54–6, 59–60, 151, 152, 159, 212 see also Castro D Dan Shen 32, 234n13 Darbelnet, Jean 23, 127–8 defamiliarization 34; see also foregrounding deixis 24, 26, 32, 40, 73, 90, 131, 165, 186 Derrida, Jacques 15 Descartes, René 15 descriptive translation studies 6, 14–16, 21–2, 31, 36, 47, 142, 174, 177–8 deviance 34–5, 40, 229 dialect 20, 76, 93, 106–7, 135, 177, 199, 201–5, 222–5, 228, 230, 234n6, 238n10 Díaz, Junot 61 Díaz-Cintas, Jorge 145, 178 Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas 56, 198 Dijk, Teun van 8, 46, 48, 49, 52, 59, 197, 231 domestication (domesticating translation) 48, 75, 79, 81, 92, 93, 103, 106, 127, 129, 142, 149–50, 160–1, 165, 203–5, 228 Donoso, José 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 65, 92, 99 Dorfman, Ariel 61, 62, 151; Heading South, Looking North 198, 206, 210–16, 225, 228, 231; How To

255

Read Donald Duck 152, 156–9, 168, 231; hybrid language 216–9; self translation 206–16, 232 Doyle, Michael Scott 55 Dryden, John 234n11 Duff, Alan 41 E Eagleton, Terry 235n1 economy 30, 85–7, 102, 109–10, 147 editing (of translation) 66, 70–1, 74, 80, 89, 120, 123, 153, 231; of film 174–5, 177 Eggins, Suzanne 46 Empson, William 21 Enkvist, Inger 69 Esquivel, Laura 61 European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST) 176–7 evaluation 14, 17, 24–5, 38, 39, 45, 48, 76, 78–9, 89, 91–3, 120, 123, 135, 154, 156, 172, 196, 208, 228, 230–1 expletives 69, 93, 100, 108, 123, 179, 182, 184, 202–3 explicitation 4, 30, 32, 41, 58, 79, 106, 120, 128, 129, 142, 158–9, 187, 189, 204, 208–9, 212 EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), see Zapatista movement F Fairclough, Norman 41, 43, 59, 72, 235n1 film translation, see audiovisual translation Firth, John Rupert 21, 234n21 Fish, Stanley 234n15 Fodor, Istvan 173 Ford, J.D.M. 53 foregrounding 3, 27, 28, 34–6, 27, 40, 41, 81, 115, 117, 149, 154, 163, 171, 183, 220, 223, 229, 234n10 foreignization 81, 117, 136, 142, 161, 203, 220, 228 formalists 22, 34, 233n3 formality 22–3, 29, 31, 83, 87, 103–4, 106, 132, 146, 161, 167, 194–5 Fornoff, Frederick: Mama Blanca’s Memoirs 77–80, 92

256

Index

Fowler, Roger 20, 22–4, 26, 34, 35, 43, 46, 86 framing 15, 49, 74, 92, 166, 172, 175, 230–1, 232, see also paratext, peritext Francis, Gill 37 Franco, Jean 98, 145 Frank, Waldo 51–2, 75, 92, 230, 231 Franklin, Dan 95, 100 Free Indirect Discourse 16, 33, 68, 75, 79 free translation 28, 235n1 Freyre, Gilberto 52; The Mansions and the Shanties 65, 66, 92 Fuentes, Carlos 18, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 95, 99, 125, 151, 171, 218; collaboration with Alfred MacAdam 198, 204–6, 224, 232; Christopher Unborn 204–6 G Gallardo, Natividad 173 Gambier, Yves 177, 185 Gamboa, Santiago 61 García Márquez, Gabriel 9, 18, 20, 55; Americanization of 100; assimilation of 98–100; Autumn of the Patriarch 70, 141, 151; and J.S. Bernstein 97, 100–3, 123; Clandestine in Chile 117–21; Elián González 98, 122–3; The General in His Labyrinth 107–17, 204; and Edith Grossman 97, 107–17, 122–3; and Randolph Hogan 97, 122; interview with subcomandante Marcos 165, 167; Love in the Time of Cholera 95–6; “Monologue of Isabel” 145–9; News of a Kidnapping 98; No One Writes to the Colonel 61, 100–3; non-fiction 97–8, 117–23, 225; Of Love and Other Demons; One Hundred Years of Solitude 50, 55, 57–8, 95–6, 99, 103–7, 125, 129–30, 142; packaging of 98; publication dates 96–7; and politics 60; and Gregory Rabassa 97, 103–7, 123, 198; reviews of 99–100; The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor 122; Strange Pilgrims; voice in translation 95–123, 228–30; and Ann Wright 97; and Asa Zatz 97, 117–21

Gardner, Donald 198–9, 201, 238n1, 238n2 Gartet, Pascale 49 gay: identity 61, 231; language in Don’t Tell Anyone 178–84; language in Senel Paz 184–94 du Gay, Paul 197 Genette, Gérard 14, 15, 23, 25, 53, 74, 98, 153, 166, 213, 230 genre 7, 9, 18–21, 25, 26, 28–30, 40–1, 46, 61, 70, 71, 87, 114, 117, 227, 229; and corpora 38, 228, 234n17; film 174; and horizon of expectation 49–50; hybrid 161, 224–5; non-fiction 117–23; shift in translation 66, 74, 97–8, 117, 120, 122–3, 168, 213–5, 231, 234n10; of translation 31, 35 Gentzler, Edwin 62, 63, 223 Geopolitical Review 169 Gibbs, John 174–5 Gilgamesh 32 Goldberg, Isaac 51, 52, 53 Gollnick, Brian 51 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 62, 223 Grossman, Edith 18–19, 95, 96, 98, 100, 209, 210, 232, 236n3, 236n4; The General in His Labyrinth 107–17, 204, 228, 229; Elián González story 122–3 Grossman, William J.: Epitaph of a Small Winner 142–4 Guibert, Rita 53 Guimarães Rosa, João: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands 76–7, 93, 229 Güiraldes, Ricardo 51, 92; Don Segundo Sombra 74–7 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 61, 178; Strawberry and Chocolate 184, 187–94 Guzmán, Martín Luis 52; The Eagle and the Serpent 66–70, 74, 91, 92, 93 H Halliday, Michael A.K. 8, 43, 235n3; context of culture 41, 46; context of situation 46; criticism of 46, 234n15; markedness 34–5, 229; model 177, 235n3, 234n8; point of view analysis 24–5; Register analysis 21–3, 46; transitivity 72

Index Harss, Luis 58 Harvey, Keith 194 Hasan, Ruqaiya 46, 235n3 Hatim, Basil 29, 35, 46, 235n2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 86 Hermans, Theo 6, 11, 14–15, 19, 27, 41, 49 Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro 55 Hickey, Leo 1 Hileman, Sam: When the Air is Clear 95 Hispanic community 61–2, 151, 206, 219 Hodge, Bob 35 Hoeksema, Thomas 61, 63, 103, 135, 141 Hoey, Michael 8, 37–9, 114, 234n11 Hogan, Randolph 97, 122 Holmes, James S. 16 Holoch, Donald 166 horizon of expectation 49–50, 53, 58–9, 98, 99–100 House, Juliane 233n5 Howard, Philip 236n2 Hudson, W. H. 53 Hunston, Susan 37 Hurley, Andrew 95; translation of “Pierre Menard” 2–6 hybridity 8, 61–2, 136–7, 176, 198– 200, 212–15, 216–25, 232 hypotaxis 24, 26, 131, 139 I ideational function 22–4, 39, 70–2, 123, 158, 169, 184, 191, 225, 234n8; and psychological point of view 24–5 identity 9, 16, 45–6, 50, 54, 61, 62, 68, 72–3, 160, 197–226; gay 178, 183, 185, 192–4, 196 ideology 8, 73, 151, 178; concept of 43–8, 55, 64, 235n1, 235n2; in language 16, 22, 33; and style 230–1 idiolect 7–8, 17, 20, 35, 40, 111, 115, 127, 132, 135, 138, 150, 177, 203, 227, 231 implied author 11–13, 24 implied reader 11–12 implied translator 11–13, 45, 92, 141–2, 228 informality 103, 106, 130, 134, 183 information structure 4, 24–6, 102, 111, 163, 170, 210, see also thematic structure

257

Inter-American Foundation for the Arts 56–7 interference 17, 40–1, 92, 201 Internet: translation on 152, 160, 171–2, 231 see also corpora interpersonal function 22–4, 69, 119, 154, 160, 163, 202, 205, 211, 231; and ideological point of view 25, 39, 166; in subtitles 180–4, 191–6 invisibility of translator 45, 100, 126 Irby, James E. translation of “Pierre Menard” 2–6 irlandesa, la (translator of Marcos) 160; Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds 160–5 Iser, Wolfgang 11 Ivarsson, Jan 175–7 J Jakobson, Roman 234n7, 234n8 Jauss, Hans Robert 49–50, 98 K Kay, Neil 175–6 Kelly, Dorothy 173 Kelly, Louis 21, 29 Kemp, Lysander 56, 95, 116 Kenny, Dorothy 37 Kerrigan, Anthony 57 King, John 53 Klahn, Norma 220 Knopf, Alfred 51–3, 54, 59, 65–6, 92, 97, 98, 134, 142, 230, 231 Knopf, Blanche 51–3 Kress, Gunther 35, 43, 46, 177 Kuhiwczak, Piotr 31–2 Kundera, Milan 31 Kunzle, David 157, 237n4; How To Read Donald Duck 157–9, 172, 231 L Lambert, José 233n5 Lane, Helen 5, 95, 125 Lasch, Christopher 235n8 Latino 8, 61–2, 198, 224, 232 laws of translation 17 Leech, Geoffrey 20–4, 26–27, 30, 33–4, 35, 189, 229, 234n8 Lefevere, André 48–9, 50, 52, 56 Leuven-Zwart, Kitty M. van 30, 31, 233n5 Levenston, Eddie 31

258

Index

Levine, Suzanne Jill 50, 56–8, 61–2, 64, 93, 137, 206; collaboration with Cabrera Infante 198–204, 216, 224, 231–2 lexical priming 8, 38–41, 47–8, 50, 69–70, 77, 86, 93, 111, 149–50, 155, 227–8, 231 Lezama Lima, José 192, 229; Paradiso 138–41, 142, 148, 149, 204 de Linde, Zoé 175–6 Lipski, John 107 Lispector, Clarice 18, 235n7 The Apple in the Dark 56, 141–2, 148, 229 literal translation 28, 30, 65, 88, 111, 146, 167, 206, 220, 235n1 Lobo Antunes, António 126 Lodge, David 21 Lombardi, Francisco 61; Don’t Tell Anyone 178–92 Luis, William 55 M MacAdam, Alfred 58, 95, 198, 224, 232, 238n3; Christopher Unborn 204–6 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 142–5, 148 McLean, Anne 64 Malmkjaer, Kirsten 9, 14, 30–1, 35 manipulation 7, 13, 44, 48, 120, 169, 231 Marcos, subcomandante 60, 151, 160; Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds 160–5; interview with García Márquez 165; interview with Scherer García 165–8; “A Zapatista Reading List” 168–9 markedness 3, 7, 20, 34–5, 40–1, 89, 113, 115, 117, 136, 163–4, 170, 210–1, 214, 228–9, 233n2 Martin, John R. 24 Mason, Ian 29, 35, 46, 235n2 Mattelat, Armand How to Read Donald Duck 152, 156–9, 168, 231 May, Rachel 13–18, 49 Mayoral, Roberto 173 Melo, João de 126 Menchú, Rigoberta 61, 214 metaphor 17, 21, 30, 71, 83–4, , 87, 147, 163–4, 166–8, 172, 175, 194–5, 205, 208 Miko, František 29 Millán-Varela, Carmen 15–16

mind style 24–5, 86, 101, 119, 122, 144, 158, 215, 225, 230–1, see also point of view psychological Mitchell, Stephen 32 modality 22–4, 25, 32, 35, 88, 120–1, 156, 182, 230 Montero, Mayra 125 Morales, Ed 238n10 Mossop, Brian 27 motivatedness 31, 34–6, 212, 229 Mudrovcic, María Eugenia 59 Munday, Jeremy 235n1, 236n7 Mundo Nuevo 58–60 Mutis, Alvaro 125 N Nahuatl 50–1, 224 narratology 6, 23, 30, 126; representation of narrative process 11–14; representation of translation 11–14; see also point of view Nash, Walter 35, 41, 45–6 neologism 38, 71–2, 76, 153–4, 198 Newmark, Peter 167 Nida, Eugene A 28–9, 128 Nord, Christiane 233n5 O Ocampo, Victoria 51–2, 56 Odyssey Review 58, 65, 126, 133 Olohan, Maeve 36–7, 103 omission 5, 15–16, 32, 66, 68, 74, 103, 117, 119, 122, 128, 131, 144, 155, 177, 180, 185, 196, 201–2, 210–12, 221, 230, 238n3 Onetti, Juan Carlos 54 Onís, Federico de 51, 65, 126 Onís, Harriet de 9, 50–4, 60, 63, 125; Arciniegas The Green Continent 66; Carpentier The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Steps 80–91; editing 66, 92; Freyre The Mansions and Shanties 66; Guimarães Rosa The Devil to Pay in the Backlands 76–7; Güiraldes Don Segundo Sombra 74–6, 91, 92; Guzmán The Eagle and the Serpent 66–70; ideology 66, 91–2, 93; language learning 65; Ortiz Cuban Counterpoint 70–4, 159–60; de la Parra Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs 77–80, 92, 142; and Rabassa 126, 127–8, 131, 136–7, 141; religious terminology

Index 91–2; scout and reader 65–6, 92; style of 65–94, 102, 105–107, 120, 209, 227–32 Ortiz, Fernando 52, 65; Cuban Counterpoint 71–4, 159–60 P Padilla, Heberto 61 Padilla, Ignacio 61, 64 Pan American Sulphur Company 56 Paraconc 36 parataxis 24, 2, 101, 104, 1446 paratext 15, 49, 53, 67, 74, 80, 89, 92, 119, 152–3, 156–7, 172, 201, 204, 230–1 Parks, Tim 33–4, 234n14 parallelism 29–30, 161, 163, 172 Parra, Teresa de la 74; analysis of Mama Blanca’s Souvenirs 77–80, 142 patronage 48, 100, 152; institutional 56–60, 151 Paz, Octavio 116, 125, 238n1 Paz, Senel 61, 73, 178, 231; versions of Strawberry and Chocolate 184–96 Peden, Margaret Sayers 17–18, 57, 95, 125–6; Ariel 153–5, 168 Peer, Willy van 34 peritext 98–9, 213, 225, 230 point of view 6, 8–9, 14, 16, 22–4, 129, 175, 187, 211; in film 175; ideological plane 23–5, 88–9, 120, 164, 181, 211; phraseological 23, 27–8, 70–1, 88, 93, 127, 158, 183, 192–4; psychological 24–5, 26, 72–4, 80, 101–2, 105, 112, 114, 118, 120, 123, 130–1, 141, 158, 164–5, 192, 215, 230; related to ideology 47; spatiotemporal 23, 26–8, 68, 73, 76, 70, 89–91, 93–4, 102, 111, 118, 131–2, 149, 173, 229, 234n10; in translation 31–5, 39–41, 229–30 political ideology 151–72 Pombo, Roberto 165 Poniatowska, Elena 125; translation of The House on Mango Street 219–23 Pontiero, Giovanni 18 Popovič, Anton 29 post-boom 60–2 power 22, 41, 43–5, 52, 72, 94, 172; in hybrid writing 223; imbal-

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ance between United States and Latin America 9, 49, 51, 152, 199, 223–4, 227; in translation 9, 13–14, 72, 97, 178, 198–201, 207, 218, 224, 232 Pratt, Mary Louise 71 pre-modifiers 84–6, 93, 105–11, 123–4, 203, 208–9, 225, 228, 230, 234n21 Preuves 58 prominence 28, 34–5, 37, 40–1, 69, 71, 127, 129–30, 136, 141, 203, 229, 233n2 Ptolemy II Philadelphus 1 punctuation 4, 100–3, 141–4, 148, 165, 177 Puurtinen, Tiina 31 Pye, Douglas 174–5 Q Quechua 50–1, 218 Quiroga, Horacio 125 Quiroga, José 187, 188 R Rabassa, Gregory 9, 57–8, 63, 77, 95, 233n1; advice from Onís 50; Bondy “The Suitcase” 127; Cortázar Hopscotch 127–8; 130–8, 149; García Márquez 96, 198; Autumn of the Patriarch 70, 141, 151; “Monologue of Isabel” 145–9; One Hundred Years of Solitude 57, 61, 97, 103–7, 123, 129–30, 142; influence of The Green Mansions 53; Lezama Lima Paradiso 138–41, 142, 148, 192; Lispector The Apple in the Dark 56, 141–2, 148; Machado de Assis The Posthumous Memoirs of Blas Cubas 142–5, 148; Odyssey Review 65, 127; style of 125–50, 204, 209, 210, 228–9, 232 Rama, Angel 55, 59 Randall, Margaret 220 Ransom, John Crowe 21 Register analysis 20, 22–3, 36, 39–40, 46–7, 233n5 Reid, Alastair 57, 58 Retamar, Fernández 59 retranslation 12, 142, 232; Ariel 71, 152–6; The Devil to Pay in the Backlands 76–7; Mama

260 Index Blanca’s Souvenirs 77–80; “Monologue of Isabel” 145–9; The Posthumous Memoirs of Blas Cubas 142–5; versions of Strawberry and Chocolate 184–96 Review: Latin American Literature and the Arts 58 rewriting 15, 48, 117, 153, 173, 214, 232; of Senel Paz 178, 185–94 rhythm 19, 83, 93, 106, 129, 149, 163, 168, 176, 195, 202, 223 Rice, William F.: Ariel 153–6, 172, 231 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 21, 234n8 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 11, 233n3 Robinson, Douglas 235Ch3n1 Robyns, Clem 32 Rockefeller, David 57 Rockefeller Foundation 56 Rockefeller, Rodman 56 Rodó, José Enrique 51; Ariel 71, 152–6, 229, 231 Rodríguez Luis, Julio 55 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir 57, 58–9, 99, 235n9 Rostagno, Irene 51–4, 56–9, 134, 235n11 Rowe, William 218 Rulfo, Juan 125 Rushdie, Salman 236n2 Ruta, Suzanne 254n3 S salience 35, 82 Saramago, Jose 18 Sarduy, Severo 125 Scherer García, Julio 165, 237n7; interview with Marcos 165–8 Schiavi, Giuliana 6, 11–13, 15, 41, 133n5 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 19 Schwartz, Mary 235n11 Scott, Mike 37 Scott-Smith, Giles 235n8 Seix Barral 55, 188–9 self-translation 206–16, 232 Semino, Elena 27, 148, 189 sequencing, see word order Sharoff, Serge 38 Shapiro, David 57 Shaw, Donald 61 Short, Michael 20–2, 24, 26–7, 30, 33–4, 36, 189, 229, 234n8 Simpson, Paul 8, 23–6, 35, 44, 235n2

Sinclair, John 37, 39, 88, 230, 234n21, 235n22 Smith, Paul Julian 192 Snell-Hornby, Mary 29–30 social semiotic 43 Sommer, Diane 77 Sonnenschein, Gabriela 31 Southern, Richard: “Isabel’s Monologue” 145–9 speech and thought representation 16, 23–4, 27, 40, 75, 79–80, 93, 138, 149 standardization 41, 76, 93, 118, 138, 156, 183, 202, 230 Steiner, George 1, 235n1 Stonor Saunders, Frances 235n8 Stubbs, Michael 234n15 Stimson, F. J. 153; Ariel 155–6, 229 style 19–24, 39–40, 49; and audiovisual translation 173–96; and Boom 55, 59, 64; as choice 1, 6; film 173–5; as fingerprint 7; and identity 197–226; and ideology 44–7; motivation 35–6; and political ideology 151–72; not scientific 3–4; of specific author 95–124; of specific translator 65–94, 125–150; in translation 28–31, 35–9, 41, 64, 227–32, see also variation stylistics 6, 9, 21–2, 33–7, 21–2, 230, 234n15; and corpora 35–7; and film 173–4; and markedness 34–5; objectivity of 33–4; translational 30–1, 129, 216, 229, 232 subtitles, see audiovisual translation Sur 51 systemic functional linguistics 22–3, 29, 31, 39, 41, 46–7, 229, see also Halliday systemic differences between English and Spanish 101, 207, 222, 225 Swanson, Philip 54, 61 Symington, James W. 153 T Taber, Charles 28–9, 128 Tabio, Juan Carlos: Strawberry and Chocolate 184–94 taboo language, see expletives Tannenbaum, Frank 66 Taylor, Christopher 177 Taylor, James L. 76

Index Temps Modernes, Les 58 textual function 22–4, 70, 117; and spatio-temporal point of view 26–8, 131, see also cohesion thematic structure 22–4, 69, 76, 89, 114–6, 210–11, see also information structure Thompson, John 43 Titford, Christopher 173 Toolan, Michael 13 Torres Ríoseco, Arturo 155 Toury, Gideon 6, 16–17, 22, 31, 36, 41, 47, 227 translation: as a genre 29; scope of 8 Translation Review 17, 63, 135, 155 translational stylistics, see stylistics translator: autonomy of 44; discursive presence 14; implied 11–12; training 63–4; voice 14–19 Trew, Tony 25 Tytler, Alexander 234n11 U unconscious choices see motivatedness University of Texas Press 56 Uspensky, Boris 23–4, 26–7, 129, 230 V Valenzuela, Liliana: Caramelo 220–1 van Gorp, Hendrik 233n5 van Leeuwen, Theo 177 Vargas Llosa, Mario 55, 60, 95, 99, 125, 127, 151, 188–92, 198, 218, 237n2 variables (in translation) 6–7, 9, 20–1, 23, 36, 40, 46–8, 120, 130, 207, 227, 229, 232

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variability (variation) 4–7, 20–1, 39, 48, 54, 64, 95, 100, 135, 147–8, 185, 229 Vázquez-Ayora, Gerardo 30, 104, 127–9, 131 Venuti, Lawrence 1, 15, 37, 45, 48, 100 Vinay, Jean-Paul 23, 30, 127–8 voice 6–9, 13–14, 23–4, 27–8, 224, 227, 231, 233–4n5; in Cabrera Infante 198–202; of García Márquez 95–6, 100, 117, 123, 125–6; ideological 16; of translator 14–19, 41, 160–1, 172, 231 Volpi, Jorge 61 von Maltzahn Rinehart, Lenore 166 W Wales, Kate 7–8, 23, 44, 233n2, 234n6 War and Peace 27 Weaver, William 19, 147 White, Peter 24 Wienold, Götz 32 Williamson, Edwin 100 Winder, Robert 18 Woolf, Virginia 32, 55 word order 3, 24–6, 32, 33, 89, 102, 106, 114, 118, 155, 210, 230 Wordsmith Tools 36 world view 8, 22–4, 26, 44, 48, 158, 161, 186–7 Wright, Ann 97 Z Zapatista movement 152, 160, 168, 172, 231, see also Marcos Zatz, Asa 97; Clandestine in Chile 117–2