Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies [Pbk. Ed] 0826499953, 9780826499950

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Translation and Creativity

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Translation and Creativity Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies

Edited by Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella

Continuum The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

15 East 26th Street New York NY 10010

www.continuumbooks.com © Eugenia Loffredo, Manuela Perteghella and contributors 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-82649-995-0 (Paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Translation and creativity : perspectives on creative writing and translation studies / edited by Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Creative writing. I. Loffredo, Eugenia. II. Perteghella, Manuela. P306.2.T73589 2005 4181.02—dc22 2005049713 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents Acknowledgements

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Foreword Theo Hermans

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Introduction Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella

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Part One Creating trends: exploring new frontiers 1. Notes on translating the self Paschalis Nikolaou

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2. Translation and the spaces of reading Clive Scott

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3. Loosening the grip of the text: theory as an aid to creativity Jean Boase-Beier

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Part Two Translation methodologies 4. Unlocking the black box: researching poetry translation processes Francis R. Jones

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5. Inventing subversion: body as stage amid desire, text and writing

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How space uses the unspeakable to develop a new methodology of translation practices in Greece

Christiana Lambridinis 6. Painting with words Ann Pattison

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Part Three Case studies: translators as creative writers 7. Creative translation, translating creatively: a case study on aesthetic coherence in Peter Stambler’s Han Shan Xavier Lin

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8. Poetry, music and transformation in the Gulf of Naples: a creative voyage of The Tempest Manuela Perteghella

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Part Four Textuality and experiment 9. Translation and the challenge of orthography Judy Kendall 10. Faust goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) Chantal Wright

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11. Poetry as ‘translational form’: a transgeneric translation of Jeanne Hyvrard’s Mère la mort into English Eugenia Loffredo

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The editors are greatly indebted to Theo Hermans for kindly writing the Foreword. Thanks are also due to Clive Scott and Jean Boase-Beier for their useful comments and helpful advice on the early drafts of the Introduction. We are also particularly grateful to Paschalis Nikolaou for his inspiring ruminations on the creative turn in translation studies, and on creativity in general. We would like to express our deep gratitude to Anna Sandeman, our editor at Continuum, for her encouragement and unfailing support, but above all we would like to thank her for her enthusiasm for this project. We also take this occasion to thank Rebecca Simmonds at Continuum for her patience and efficiency for dealing with our requests. Further, Paschalis Nikolaou acknowledges the support of the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, and wishes to thank Clive Scott, Jean Boase-Beier, David J. Mollett and Aishwarya Subramanyam for reading drafts of, and offering their advice on, Chapter 1. Jean Boase-Beier would like to acknowledge the help and inspiration provided by MA and PhD students at the University of East Anglia. Francis R. Jones would like to thank Hanneke Jones and Yi-Yi Shih for their very helpful advice on a draft version of Chapter 4. He is also grateful to Newcastle University’s Research Committee for providing the grant which financed his study. Christiana Lambridinis is grateful to Emy Sarava and Rania Stathoyiannopoulou for their texts of personal translations as well as Mara Stylianou for her creative writing text, discussed in Chapter 5. She would also like to thank Antke Engel for a draft of her inspiring paper entitled ‘Travelling images. Desire as a method?’. Ann Pattison would like to thank Roger Greenwald, for providing up-to-date information on the combined creative writing and translation course at Innis College, University of Toronto; Florence Mitchell, former coordinator of the ITI French network, for encouraging Ann to run the first ITI workshop, described in Chapter 6, and inviting her back to run a second one; and Alison Quayle, for giving permission to quote her comments relating to her translation of La Barque de Delphes in Chapter 6. Xavier Lin is grateful to Susan Bassnett for her enlightening comments and opinions on Chapter 7 and to Peter Stambler for his kindness and enthusiasm in helping him with copyrights clearance. Judy

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Kendall would like to thank Iris Elgrichi and Miyaji Eiko for introducing her to the experience of translating from Japanese, illustrated in Chapter 9. She would also like to thank Kanazawa University in Japan and the University of Gloucestershire for providing her with the time to translate and research the creative process. Chantal Wright acknowledges the support of the AHRC, formerly the AHRB, with regard to her research for Chapter 10. Eugenia Loffredo is grateful to Claudine Tourniaire and Clive Scott for their comments on the translation of the quotes in Chapter 11. The editors are also grateful to the following copyright holders for kindly allowing us to reprint copyrighted material: John Lucas at Shoestring Press, UK, for permission to quote from Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s ‘Translating into Love Life’s End’ in Chapter 1; Mahmutcehajic for permission to reproduce Skender Kulenovic’s poem ‘Cry’ in Chapter 4; and The Foreign Languages Press, People’s Republic of China, for allowing us to reproduce the translation of Han Shan by Peter Stambler in Chapter 7. © The Estate of Eduardo De Filippo and © Giulio Einaudi Editore, Italy, for permission to reproduce extracts from Eduardo De Filippo’s translation La tempesta, in Chapter 8. We would like to thank Miyaji Eiko for her kind permission to use Suiko, and Morikawa Hiromi at Iwanami Shoten Publishers, Japan, for allowing us to reprint Kinuta in Chapter 9. Last but not least, the editors wish to express their deep gratitude to all our contributors who have helped this project to develop successfully into an innovative and thought-provoking book.

Foreword Theo Hermans

Just as translating today comprises activities ranging from the use of translation memories and terminology banks to localization and community interpreting, so research into translation has diversified. Anthropology, historiography, sociology, semiotics, cognitive science, all lend models. As these disciplines evolve, the models change. Still, translation itself keeps one step ahead. No individual approach seems able to encompass it. Exactly why this should be so is hard to say. The complexity of translation may well be one reason. Another may be that too much research has too readily bought into the traditional construction of translation as a derivative type of manufacture under cramped conditions. That is, after all, the common perception of translation as it is reflected also, for instance, in copyright law. When descriptivist researchers championed the concept of norms, they understood them primarily as constraints on behaviour, rather than, say, as problem-solving templates inviting imaginative manipulation and selection. As long as we continue to work within those bounds, we will always see translation in a certain light, and in that light only. That is why the approach illustrated in the present collection is not just refreshing but liberating. It does not present another methodology borrowed from the next discipline. It shifts the ground altogether. It highlights aspects of translation that the traditional construction has marginalized – agency, subjectivity, intentionality, the management of discourse. It locates these phenomena in the context of contemporary theorizing. And it is entirely appropriate that it should concentrate on literary materials. For hundreds of years the translation of literature, along with that of scripture, provoked passionate debate about what the exercise entailed and whom it served. It is also the area in which questions of loyalty and integrity, expression and fidelity, have been the most intense. Literature itself affords points of entry. From T. S. Eliot’s concern with tradition and the individual talent to Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence we encounter variations on the theme of the reciprocity between dependence and novelty, constraint and creativity. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz describes original writing and translation as similar and complementary

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movements even if they tend in opposite directions. Georges Perec and the OULIPO writers in France revel in consciously imposed formal constraints as means to stimulate the imagination. As the editors explain in their introduction to the present collection, the emphasis must be on constraints and creativity, creativity within and thanks to constraints. Further perspectives lie open: pedagogical applications, in the form of creative translation workshops to match the emergence of creative-writing courses; the study of translators’ own perceptions of their roles and responsibilities. There is a historical dimension. A genealogy of the translator’s creativity remains to be written, perhaps in conjunction with that of imitation with which translation shares a mimetic drive. The idea of authorship as defined by original genius is, after all, a recent invention. For centuries, writers were aware that their reading would inescapably be carried over into their writing and that, at the same time, a new piece of writing constituted the record of a way of reading. A window thrown open lets fresh air in. We need this book. We need more books like it.

Introduction Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella

The ‘creative turn’ in translation studies This book explores the relationship between translation and creative writing through the discussion of cutting-edge literary translation practices, new teaching and training methodologies, and research currently undertaken in the field of translation studies. In recent years, the growth and development of translation studies in academia has been accompanied by different theoretical approaches to translation. Among these, the influential ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies, championed by Bassnett and Lefevere (1990, 1998), marked an important step as it placed the practice of translation and the then emerging discipline of translation studies within a multifaceted, contextualized cultural framework, which has enabled scholars to embrace interdisciplinarity within translation studies, while the symbolic, metaphorical and actual interfacing of ‘translation’ with the cultural sphere has highlighted its (symbolic) links with other intellectual and critical settings. Further, the contextualized framework of translation studies has, most importantly, revealed the relative nature of translational practices and strategies. Cultural issues in translation such as socio-cultural change, status of translator and translations, acculturation of rewritings, have inevitably raised concerns of ideology, manipulation and power, with particular reference to postcolonial issues and to translational relations between dominant and minority languages and cultures, so that the cultural turn has consecutively generated a ‘power turn’, as suggested by Tymockzo and Gentzler (2002). Turn after turn, translation as concept, practice and scholarship has thus changed shape, initiating further shapes, and has accustomed itself to a position between discourses and across disciplines. Indeed, the emergence of numerous interdisciplinary translation theories and methodologies is evidence of the willingness to test ‘the notion of interdisciplinarity by showing that many interdisciplines are possible in translation studies, and that even if disciplines do not share conceptual paradigms and research methods, they might nonetheless be joined together to advance a project of translation’ (Venuti 2000: 3). If translation scholarship since the late 1980s, in amplifying previous

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research such as descriptivism and polysystem theory (see, for example, Holmes 1988; Even-Zohar 2000; Hermans 1999, 2002), has been, and still is, preoccupied with culture and (re)production of culture, other contemporary explorations and experimental practices, often still at the margins of the common perception of translation, reveal how translation is being rethought and redefined in the light of ‘creativity’ and as a form of ‘writing’. Creative writing, as a new critical setting, has increasingly become the next contender field promising an insight into the process of translation and, ultimately, an innovative and stimulating ‘project of translation’. This fresh perspective can be explained by the significance increasingly bestowed upon the creativity inherent in rewritings, such as literary translation, and upon the mental processes occurring during these rewritings. And yet it is the cultural relativity of translation, as a practice and as a discipline, which allows a further shift, this time towards translational ‘subjectivity’; in other words, towards the translator’s creative input in the process of ‘writing’ a translation, and the creativity inscribed in the products generated by this subjectivity. The newly scrutinized agency of the translator, as a ‘reader-creator’ and as ‘self-writer’, is a recurring concept throughout these new approaches. The aim of Translation and Creativity, then, is to address and discuss the links between translation and creative writing from linguistic, cultural and critical perspectives. The broad spectrum of the book is established by the variety of thought-provoking contributions on creativity and translation coming from several international scholars working in the academic field of translation studies, and from practitioners (writers, poets and translators). The stimulating notions the authors spawn here range from self-translation as autobiography, to ‘transgeneric translation’ and ‘pop translation’, to ‘spaces’ of reading and translational virtuality, to mental ‘black boxes’, with an emphasis on cognition as a creative outlet. Also, the book presents and investigates the importance of creative writing workshops as part of the translator’s training, as well as case studies and practices of experimental and highly poeticizing translations. Each chapter assesses these links, contributing to the further development and enhancement of the discipline with new methodologies drawn from other research areas. The systematic investigation of the notion of creativity in translation undertaken here ultimately foretells the occurrence, and the necessity, as Paschalis Nikolaou observes in the opening chapter, of a ‘creative turn’ in translation studies. This shift of focus from ideology to idiolectology, from culturality to cognition and consciousness, from text to textuality, not only continues and complements the previous scholarly turns and conceptual paradigms already applied to translation, but it also interrogates them in an ongoing productive dialogue. Indeed, Translation and Creativity, by addressing the often overlooked creative element in translation from different perspectives, critically engages with culture-based theories of translation.

introduction

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The book also contributes to changing the common perception of the (monolingual) receiver of translations, no longer conceived as the ‘lay’, unsuspecting reader who depends completely on one allegedly reliable rendering, but rather as a critical reader who can ultimately engage in the diversification of responses that these practices provoke. Most importantly, the book, as ‘project of translation’, intends to foster discussion, inviting scholars and students to rethink translation in terms of a creative writing practice, and to investigate alternative translational methodologies that focus on the cognitive aspects of translation as writing and on translator-oriented research. But, how to reconcile two activities, creative writing and translation, which have been long regarded as complementary, if not opposed approaches? A way of explaining this view is that the polarity between an ‘original’ writing and its translation is not ontologically determined; rather the derivative status of translation reflects socio-cultural power relations. This relationship of inferiority is exemplified by the well-known engendered metaphor of translation employed by Lori Chamberlain (2000): The metaphorics of translation . . . is a symptom of larger issues of western culture: of the power relations as they divide in terms of gender; of a persistent (though not always hegemonic) desire to equate language or language use with morality; of a quest for originality or unity, and a consequent intolerance of duplicity, of what cannot be decided . . . the implied narrative concerns the relation between the value of production versus the value of reproduction. (Chamberlain 2000: 323)

From the hierarchy of original and copy ensues the vertical relation of author and translator, demarcating the author’s literary creativity (as production, originality and innovation) from the submissiveness of the translator, whose task is to transmit and preserve form and meaning intact at the same time (translation as reproduction and derivation). But it is precisely the disclosure of this impossible task which provides the argument against the subordinate position of translation. Walter Benjamin’s view of the missionary duty of translation reverses the conventional hierarchy by exposing how the original writing depends on translation for its ‘afterlife’: ‘For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process’ (Benjamin 2000: 17). It is no surprise that Derrida’s intent to subvert the autonomy and value of the original echoes Benjamin’s conceptual dimension of translation: ‘Strange debt . . . [it] does not involve restitution of a copy or a good image, a faithful representation of the original: the latter, the survivor, is itself in the process of transformation. The original gives itself in modifying itself; this gift is not an object given; it lives and lives on in mutation’ (Derrida 1985: 114). Writing and translating are therefore intricately dependent on each other: the two are bound together by a

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paradoxical and unavoidable contract in which both are debtors and both will always remain insolvent. From this perspective, then, the relation between writing and translating is configured on a horizontal plane where similarities are foregrounded. These similarities entail their shared condition of insolvency, and thus of continual mutation. Contemporary critical and literary theories, and more specifically poststructuralism and deconstructionism, explain this condition by the nature and the mechanisms of textuality. The popular notion of intertextuality, for instance, has brought about the destabilization of the idea of an authoritative original, by insisting on the impossibility of determining textual boundaries. The concept of ‘originality’ can then be criticized in the light of cultural and critical theories of the text in relation to its readers, to history and to itself as a part of the necessary, unavoidable intertextual play. As a result, ‘translation’ as a form of writing is always already inherent in the source text. Texts do not occur out of nothing, but recur as altered forms of pre-existing texts – as intertexts; there are no origins and there is no closure, but an ongoing textual activity consisting of a host of complex transactions, in which texts are assimilated, borrowed and rewritten: The idea of originality . . . posits an independence where none exists – or where only a limited invention is possible . . . Any number of contemporary theoretical concepts are concerned with the activity of reworking already-existing cultural material; in fact such concepts imply that reworking material is to some extent the only kind of cultural activity there is. From such a perspective, originality and fidelity become largely spurious ideas. (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 4)

André Lefevere’s definition of ‘rewriting’ not only takes into account these textual processes but also inserts them in a socio-cultural, ideological and literary frame, reinvesting translation, as mentioned above, with ‘issues such as power, ideology, institution and manipulation’ (Lefevere 1992: 2). Translation, intended as rewriting, is an active form of interpretation whose cultural impact is extensive: ‘translation is the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting, and . . . it is potentially the most influential because it is able to project the image of an author and/or those works beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin’ (Lefevere 1992: 9). The conceptual articulation and the ideological function of translation in different literary and cultural systems provide further evidence against the view of translation as derivative. Textual transformations taking a specific shape in rewriting practices redress the rapport between creative writing and translation, assimilating them to the same plane, the one of ‘modes of writing’. This is also the result of studies conducted by Steven G. Yao. In Translation and the Languages of Modernism (2002), the modernist period tells of an important change in the practice of translation, in which Ezra Pound is the first broadly influential writer since at least the seventeenth century to bestow upon translation, over and above merely so-called original composition, an explicitly

introduction

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and generative, rather than a derivative and supplementary, role in the process of literary culture formation. (Yao 2000: 2)

For the modernist, translation was much more than either just a minor mode of literary production or an exercise of apprenticeship, though for some writers it continued to fulfil such a traditional function. Rather, it constituted an integral part of the Modernist program of cultural renewal, a crucially important mode of writing distinct from, yet fundamentally interconnected with, the more traditionally esteemed modes of poetry and prose fiction. (ibid.: 6)

These culturally and literarily situated analyses then expose translation as a mode of writing comparable to the traditional ones, tracing, at the same time, the contours of an ever-complex notion of textuality, which, in its continuous movements and transformations, assimilates and engenders (con)texts – when texts become contexts: ‘You don’t translate texts, but rather you attempt to re-create contexts . . . And then there’s the tantalizing question, Where does the context end and the text begin? But then again, the supposedly sacred boundaries between languages are not absolute; there are secret bonds among all languages’ (Levine 1991: 8). Indeed, by following the dynamic of textuality, not only is it possible to uncover an intricate network articulating a dialogue between texts and contexts, but also the close relationship of different modes of writing, whereby one seems to presuppose the other. And, if we include in this scenario critical discourse itself, as a mode of writing, the relation between original writing and translation is further complicated, and paradoxically their affinity is reinforced. The links between translation and criticism have already been acknowledged by Gaddis Rose’s book Translation and Literary Criticism, in which literary translation is considered ‘also a form of literary criticism . . . What translating does is to help us get inside literature . . . we should feel we are moving inside what we are reading, examining literature from the inside, a way of making sure that we feel it from within’ (Gaddis Rose 1991: 13). As with translation theory, the establishment of creative writing as a discipline points to the impossibility of dissociating writing from criticism, of a critical engagement with theory, and ‘provides a natural focus for the critical issues that give theory its life . . . Involvement is more immediate than in straightforwardly critical studies. Texts are freed from the dead hand of literature, quickening again as writing (so canonical texts can once more be seen as solutions to generic and expressive problems)’ (Miles 1992: 44). Thus, the shaping of text, in both creative writing and translation, presumes a critical awareness, a critical thinking which pervades this ‘moving inside’ a text and this ‘immediate’ involvement with it. This view, of course, demystifies the notion of original writing as a purely spontaneous activity and translating as willed activity.

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Postmodern theory, with its blurring of boundaries and its subversion of long-established hierarchies, has then not only affected the perception of translation but also evidently destabilized the conception of creative writing: with the ‘celebration of multiplicity and diversity, creative writing, in wanting to join the party, will naturally find itself pushing against an open door . . . contemporary theory not only decentres the object of study, from text to context, but also from author to cultural energies that make his or her text possible’ (ibid.: 36). And, here, creative writing has to confront a predicament, similar to the one translation has always suffered from: how to deal with the suppression of notions such as creativity, inspiration – in other words the imaginative mind – if the activity is reduced to a reworking of cultural and generic voices. However, in reality, a closer look at contemporary culture presents a paradoxical picture in which ‘contemporary theory’s erosion of the traditional boundaries of the discipline invites creative writing in, but creative writing appears to reinstate the very primacy of the subject that contemporary theory actively demotes’ (ibid.). Thus, if we scratch hard enough at the thick surface of textual independence, of the author’s marginalization (or even death), an unexpected intentioncentred approach to creative writing is somehow still lurking behind the Derridean desire to write: the author, or better the ‘writer’, as a master of language and textual craftsman, as an arranger of intertextuality, is still very much alive as an indispensable component of text production. The author, even if a ‘functional principle’ (Foucault 1977: 159), still posits a series of constraints on the birth of texts. This becomes evident in the publicity surrounding literary festivals, in the centrality of writers in events such as readings and book-signings, and in the Western copyrights system. Accordingly, it is still possible to talk about intentionality, yet no longer in terms of the individualistic Romantic notion of the genius-author: the intentionality of the contemporary writer is not to be readily associated with ‘inspiration’, but becomes a form of critical practice. The translator’s agency: towards a new subjectivity The implications of the above considerations on creative writing are not necessarily as detrimental to translation as they may at first appear. On the one hand, from the point of view of translation, the resuscitation of the author-writer and intentionality may signify that we are back to the starting point, where translation is perceived as a servile duty to someone else’s intention. On the other hand, it can be suggested that postmodern theory has not really jettisoned the notion of author; rather it has functioned as a crucible in which this has been transformed into the more intriguing and pertinent concept of agency and subjectivity. Subjectivity not only avoids ‘killing’ the author, but it also brings about the ‘birth’ of the translator as a co-author. Indeed, in the affirmation of translation as a mode of writing, the understanding of its process cannot be detached from the writerly import of the translator’s subjectivity.

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Lawrence Venuti’s conceptualization of the ‘in/visibility’ of the translator (as opposed to the in/visibility of translations) represents a more systematic, and overtly political, attempt to redeem the translator from his/ her anonymous position. ‘Invisibility is an illusionistic effect of discourse’ (Venuti 1995: 1), masking the fact that ‘a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in any one translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretative choices, in specific social situations, in different historical periods’ (ibid.: 18). This is a plain critique of the figure of the translator as an assembler of linguistic equivalences obtained from a dictionary, which, seemingly out of fashion, is still very strongly perceived in technical translation and is part of the commonsensical view of translational practices. Venuti’s work also functions as a spur to better understand the translator’s subjectivity from a ‘contextual’ perspective. The variance in translation practices and subsequent strategies is also generated by the fact that translators inhabit different cultural, temporal and spatial spaces, often all at once. To rethink the translator may mean to consider a possible identikit: ‘upbringing, education, knowledge, sensibilities, predilections and beliefs also contribute to the formation of the individual personality of the translator’ (Boase-Beier and Holman 1999: 8–9). However, it can be said that although the historical, social and cultural environment, forming the translator’s individuality, provides crucial clues for understanding the outcome of the translating process, these are preliminary factors to be taken into account and integrated with a closer look at the relationship between the translator and a given translation, so as to identify the particularities of the translator’s creative input. The ethical aspect of the translator’s task is not affected by his/her visibly entering the text; actually, the responsibility of a self-conscious translator takes on the Bakhtinian double meaning of the word, ‘response-ability’, and thus is enriched by the (inter)personal dimension. Most importantly, the ability to respond to a text – and a translation is a manifestation of one of the possible responses – entails a relationship with the source text, in which a dialogue is established and in which the translating subject – neither the person of the translator nor a Kantian universal subject – comes to be defined. The focus on the cognitive aspects at work in the translation process enables us to compare it to the process of writing itself. Translation logs and diaries, drafts or think-aloud protocols, or acts of self-translation – in other words, everything recording the process of translation, as it unfolds in the mind of the translator – represent an important attempt to trace the self-reflection of a translational development: the target text turns into the inscription of the translating subjectivity in the act of self-reflection and ultimately self-translation. Thus, translation is revealed to be a privileged exploratory space in which many voices converge and reshape each other. Whether the translator’s or the author’s, these voices become, in translation, performances of personae interrelated ‘in’ and ‘by means of ’ the act of writing.

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Redefining the translator means recognizing that the translator is a problematically constituted, and an intricately functioning, subjectivity, whose paradoxical condition is to inhabit in-betweenness, and more precisely the undefined – and indefinable – space between source language and target language. The dialogue in which the translator is constantly involved is of a singular nature, both linguistically and somatically, as it expands to comprehend present, past and future: every translation dialogue occurs that once; there is no repetition, since every dialogue is present for the moment that it is present, and it never comes again . . . In the confrontational presence of the I–You, the translator feels both languages, responds to them somatically, senses their passions and ‘innervations’ all at once . . . [the I–You dialogue] involve[s] mutual shaping. It cannot be artificially stabilized in favor of either the SL . . . or the TL . . . It must be left open to an immediacy of relation. (ibid.: 96–7)

And there is more. Collaboration, at the same time partnership venture and text-devising practice, sits at the heart of ‘creative’ translation, demonstrating how creativity is not an individualistic concept. A collaborative project, either a translator working together with the source language writer or with other translators, turns out to be an important translational moment displaying the richness of each subjectivity simultaneously entering into relationships with the text and with language, creating intriguing intertextual configurations; collaborations ultimately allow us to see how the people involved are all contributors, that is co-writers. Complex, yet democratic and communal, this is a practice adopted, for example, by feminist translators, who have been ‘womanhandling’ texts not only with highly experimental, politically motivated interventions but also with challenging, and less travelled, routes of rewriting these texts (see, for example, Godard 1990; von Flotow 1997; Simon 1996). Within this location of multiple voices and personae the retracing of the translator’s subjectivity needs to include ideas of both ‘fragmented’ and ‘shared’ agency, while the translation dialogue becomes an ‘intercontextual’ and ‘intercreative’ process, a meeting point not only of different or similar contexts, of skills, expertise, cultures, but also of perceptions and cognitions. Subjectivity and creativity in translation To acknowledge the presence and the influence of the translator’s subjectivity represents a significant stage in the understanding of the intimate links between creative writing and translation, especially because the similarities of the creative processes involved in the two activities become manifest. Indeed, it is impossible to talk about subjectivity without invoking creativity, and, to speculate on the connections between the writer’s subjectivity and the translator’s subjectivity, is inevitably also to speculate on creativity itself. But is it possible to define creativity? Theorizing creativity has always been a daunting task, as the variability of this concept seems to exert a certain resistance to theoretical efforts:

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‘Creativity defies precise definition. This conclusion does not bother me at all. In fact, I am quite happy with it. Creativity is almost infinite’ (Torrance 1988: 43). A great number of studies on creativity have been carried out by contemporary psychologists (see in particular Sternberg 1988, 1999). It is not our aim to review them at present, but a brief look at this type of research points to a variety of theoretical orientations spawning multiple definitions (see, for example, C. W. Taylor 1988). Some chapters of Translation and Creativity explore creativity in translation more consciously from a cognitive standpoint; other chapters do not assume an overtly scientific stance. Whatever the case, it is worthwhile to note that the findings of the investigations conducted in psychology and cognitive science, and the ensuing controversial discussions on what ‘creativity’ actually is, underlie the points made in this book about the role of creativity in translation, and, after all, explain the multiplicity and the diversity of translational methodologies here adopted. A cognitive approach to creativity focuses on the creative person and places the source of creativity inside the individual; in this context, researchers’ efforts are devoted to describing the patterns underlying the mental processes leading to the ‘creation’ of creative products. From this kind of study ensues the possibility of making claims for universals in creativity, especially once the attention turns to the thinking process. Creativity then becomes synonymous with a practical thinking skill which can be improved and developed and, consequently, is not the prerogative of special individuals, but rather a normative process available to everybody. Applied to literary and writerly contexts, this notion can help us to understand the recent prolific growth of creative writing courses in higher, further and adult education. And yet, despite the framework in which these kinds of course are set up, and the democratization of the acquisition of writing skills, ‘creativity’ is still regarded as a spontaneous process readily associated with a special individual and a sort of freedom, which is sustained by an ‘individualistic conception of authorship . . . According to this conception, the author freely expresses his thought and feelings in writing’ (Venuti 1995: 6). Generally speaking, the translator does not seem to share this prerogative, it being impossible for him/her to evade the influence and the constraints imposed by both the source text and other external determinants. However, looking from a different angle, the exercise of one’s own creativity turns out to be directly proportional to the constraints to which one is subject; in other words, the more one is constrained, the more one is creative. This is the central issue discussed in The Practices of Literary Translation (1999), in which the translating process is compared to the creative process, and seen as stemming from a tension between constraints and creativity. But a difference informs the elements of this relationship: While the writer, as has been shown, is by no means free, being subject to a variety of constraints imposed by the chosen medium and the broad context of his or her creative activity, the translator is subject both to the ever present model of the source

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language (SL) text and also to the additional limitations imposed by the medium with which and the context within which the target language (TL), in turn, has to operate. (Boase-Beier and Holman 1999: 7)

Working with, and within, constraint thus entails a shift of focus from an absolute and free subjectivity to one which creatively interacts with a specific set of givens – which may again account for a notion of creativity as a series of skills that can be learned. But the crucial point to stress here is that, even if less visibly so, the writer of so-called original material is subject to constraints in the same way that the translator is. The impossibility of eluding such a necessity is disguised by the historically determined myth of the ‘author-genius’ (to recall Venuti’s quote above). If constraint is a ‘burden’ ultimately leading to creation, this is indeed shared by both the writer and the translator, as explained by Boase-Beier and Holman: Yet just as constraint moulded and gave rise to the creative impulse in the original, so in translation this added burden of constraint can force a translator into new ways of overcoming it and thus into new creativity. (ibid.: 13)

Thus, both the creative impulse in the original and the retracing of that creative impulse – what translation seems to do – are operations originating from a primary constraint common to both writer and translator: the handling and crafting of the raw material of language. Moreover, by being a direct effect of constraints, creativity becomes, as in technical creativity, a skill of innovative (and adaptive) problem-solving. Both writer and translator conduct a textual exploration in the management of rhythm, modulation, syntax and word choice, which is, at the same time, accompanied by, and the result of, an exploration of intertextual spaces, of the ‘interliminal text’ yet to be written (Gaddis Rose 1991: 7). The significance of the translator’s creative input is not diminished by the ‘added burden of constraint’ (Boase-Beier and Holman 1999: 13), that is the apparently limiting physical presence of the source text. Rather, the source text offers the starting point for a journey and becomes the space ‘into’ and ‘through’ which the translator is given the opportunity to explore creatively and perform his/her subjectivity: ‘each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph has a boundary that is more a threshold than a barrier . . . Each boundary can be crossed inasmuch as a threshold provides an entry’ (Gaddis Rose 1991: 7). Consequently ‘crossing’ and ‘entering’ the text are necessary steps for the translator embarking on a translational journey. Indeed, reading itself is a significant creative activity in which a sort of (re)writing is presupposed: ‘interpretation of texts always entails interaction with texts. Interaction with texts always entails intervention in texts’ (Pope 1999: 43). The stepping ‘into’ the text does not necessarily imply stepping ‘over’ the text, so that textual intervention is quickly reduced to gratuitous manipulation. On the contrary, reading as rewriting, and translation as its paradigm, turns out to be the very act whereby the conception of the source text precedes its consumption, and, by inverting spatio-temporal coordinates, the translator

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allows the source text to be shaken out of its fossilized state of finished product. Throughout this book creativity is perceived in a multiplicity of modes and expressions that accommodate its many functions and directions: from the privatization of textual experience, to inventive, often adaptive solutions to specific linguistic and cultural constraints. It also signals a reconfiguration of the reading and writing experience that enters into dialogue with, and interrogates, other texts, other literary practices, and the nature of translation itself. Therefore a ‘creative turn’ in translation studies embraces subjectivity, textuality and discursivity, selfhood and cognition, experience and experiment. Indeed, some chapters of this book advance the proposition that the experiential cannot be dissociated from the experimental. The translator’s creative reading of the text is tickled by the inner virtuality of its possible (translational) forms, its other subjective dimensions. One example is Clive Scott’s Translating Baudelaire (2000b): here the creative translator-critic’s response to several of Baudelaire’s poems is visibly acted out in various renderings, which portray a relationship defined in terms of ‘spiritual autobiography’ and, at the same time, ‘an experiment in “contextualized” translation’ (Scott 2000b: i). This experimental attitude is progressively spreading in educational institutions, as well as in summer schools for professionals, and has been taken on by some scholars whose main interest is to engage with ideas of creativity in translation. A ‘creative turn’, then, is slowly taking place, as this book testifies. However, for this to happen effectively, it needs to be accepted and supported in the larger socio-cultural, economic and literary systems. The notions of individualistic authorship have generated ‘proprietary, moral and restrictive copyrights over texts, intentions, and interpretations’ which are essentially ‘cultural forces’ standing in the way of translation and rewriting, of the Derridean desire to write/translate/ rewrite (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 5). Ultimately, the issues raised by this book – the redefinition of the translator as text-producing subjectivity, the increasingly experimental interpretations of texts, and the emergence of collaborative writing projects – call for a rethinking of the Western notion of textual ownership and authorship. Structure of the book The book systematically covers the unifying theme of creativity in translation in eleven chapters. These are organized in four parts to facilitate reading and consultation. Each part deals with a specific area in translation: theory, methodology, case studies and practice. The first three chapters in Part One: ‘Creating trends: exploring new frontiers’ introduce innovative and diverse theoretical trends in translation studies, considering ‘reading spaces’ and cognitive processes in both writing and translation, illustrated by examples of poetry translations.

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Paschalis Nikolaou’s opening chapter explores the links between translation and creative writing from a writer’s perspective by focusing on the overlooked aspect of self-translation. The manifestations of creativity in literary translation are perceived as ‘articulations’, through the appropriation of other voices and texts, of the translator’s own subjectivity and literary voice. The nature of, and experiences in, self-translation, as an act at the borders between translation and writing, are explored in the context of literary bilingualism and emphasize the correspondences between translation and the (auto)biographical. It is implied throughout that the theory of literary translation, as a creative act, needs to take into account an inherent autobiographicity: we are dealing with a translating self rather than simply textual–linguistic transfers. The chapter, in fact, closes by proposing pedagogical interfaces of creative writing and literary translation. Clive Scott presents, and argues for, a new approach to translation which addresses not merely the language of the source text but its imaginative world, and more especially the potential spaces spawned by the text, where the projective mindsets of both translator and reader might be said to converge. Rooted in the experience of a creative reading, these spaces, as textual virtuality, may be geometries, social spaces, modal spaces, the spaces generating, and generated by, the choreographies of reading. In this chapter, Scott explores textual and translational virtuality in his choreography of ‘montage’ and ‘cubist’ translations of Rimbaud’s ‘Antique’ and ‘Ville’. Scott’s exploration of reading spaces and textual virtuality in translation is complemented by Jean Boase-Beier’s different theoretical perspective in Chapter 3. Her premise is that theory is itself a creatively constructed (and shifting) view of practice, which can describe, but cannot dictate, practice. To examine this important aspect of creativity in translation, Boase-Beier uses cognitive linguistics, and in particular relevance theory, as a tool to foster creativity. Nikolaou’s glimpse into the mental processes of the translator is thus taken further by Boase-Beier’s argument that cognitive theories of translation, which highlight the nature of poetic texts as maximally underdetermined and interactive, can broaden a translator’s views of what is possible, and thus serve as a stimulus to creativity in translation. The reading experience, described by Scott, is also dealt with in this chapter: by taking into account the cognitive state(s) in the act of reading, Boase-Beier argues that poems work by encouraging constructs in the readers’ mind: the translator as reader constructs a reading of a text and translates it in such a way that the reader of the translation can in turn construct his/her own reading. The central argument of Part One is that translation is shaped by the same cognitive processes as those shaping creative writing. The implications of this proposition are developed further in Part Two: ‘Translation methodologies’, which features fresh translational, and translatortraining, methodologies. Here, the pedagogical implications of the dialogue established between translation and creative writing in Part Two

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represent a natural continuation of the cognitive claims made in Part One. A process-oriented approach is advanced by Francis R. Jones in Chapter 4. This chapter describes how data-gathering and data-analysis techniques can be used to examine the mental, and more specifically creative, processes at work in professional and expert poetry translators. Jones advocates here a mixed-method approach (interviews, think-aloud protocols, follow-up commentaries) with multiple subjects, to set translators’ actual translating actions in the context of their wider professional behaviour, self-image, and so forth, and to achieve generalizable rather than anecdotal findings. This aim is achieved by means of the analysis of poetry translation thinkaloud data, in which ‘sequences’ (how the translator identifies and tackles problems in real time), ‘foci’ (what type of problems the translator tackles) and ‘drafts’ (how the profile changes over successive redrafts) are assessed. As for the translator’s creativity, ‘reimage foci’ (variations on source-text semantic content) appear crucial in showing where the translator adds rather than merely reproduces. A different kind, and space, of self-articulation is explored by Christiana Lambridinis. While Jones is more concerned with the translator’s mental space and its creative processes, in Chapter 5, Lambridinis contemplates theatrical space as methodology for the performance of desire, text and writing in translation. With special attention to the fertile ground of marginalized spaces in Greek translational practices, Lambridinis uses the ‘unspeakable’ as stage, and ‘invisibility’ as a dismembered and disremembered actor, never apparent in the text itself but consistently ‘enstaged’ to provide the reader, and translator, with the paradox of a nonruled space from which to differentiate and in which to abandon, even temporarily, the stratifications of known and accepted language. The main argument of this chapter, then, revolves around the production of the symbiotic meaning usually produced between writer, reader and translator, and the articulation zones of the ‘self’ converted into readable and translatable spaces. Finally, an intriguing facet of this chapter is that it discusses and shows translation at the same time. This is an iconic piece of critical writing performing creativity and undergoing, under our eyes, the transformations that characterize creative translation. While Lambridinis explores the performance of translation in her seminars, Ann Pattison’s own workshop ‘Painting with Words’ has been specifically devised to show how creative writing techniques and pedagogical tools can help translators to become better at translating. In this chapter, the methodology of this innovative workshop is explained and, emerging from its structure, its underpinning conception of translation is suggested, that is translation as a form of creative writing which can be taught. The structure of the workshop enables students to explore, and enhance at the same time, their creative skills. The exercises used to this purpose emphasize how writing and translating interact, and are also based on neurophysiological research and the roles of left-brain and right-brain thinking.

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In Part Three: ‘Case studies: translators as creative writers’, the translator’s agency and examples of ‘creative translations’ are critically investigated in two case studies. The first one is Xavier Lin’s case study of Peter Stambler’s translation of Han Shan (a hermit poet of the early Tang Dynasty). By focusing on the idea of aesthetic coherence in translation, Lin discusses how the stylistic device of parallelism, the most important element of classical Chinese poetry, is read and reworked by the creative translating strategy of Stambler. Lin examines in what ways the aesthetic coherence of Han Shan’s poetry is successfully maintained and recreated in the translation by substituting the aesthetics of parallelism in the source text with that of foregrounding in target text. In Chapter 8, Manuela Perteghella explores ‘creative’ reading and writing in the translation of plays. She analyses the translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by modern Italian actor-manager and playwright Eduardo De Filippo into the sixteenth-century Neapolitan vernacular, from a ‘literal draft’. De Filipppo’s own emotive reading and cultural response to the play prompted him to write–translate a highly personal, ‘intracultural’ play. The subjectivity of the translator does not ‘surface’ only in the play text itself, but also in his ‘Translator’s note’, a paratext which acts as a source of information on writing practice(s), cultural traditions and the translating self. In the light of De Filippo’s play, Perteghella addresses the notion of translation as ‘cultural-creative writing’, where both cultural and subjective sightings of the text interconnect. La tempesta is also the result of a collaborative process which points to the notion of a ‘fragmented’ translation agency. Departing from the translation criticism of Part Three, Part Four, ‘Textuality and experiment’, includes examples of three experimental practices adopted by literary translators focusing on new areas such as translation of orthography, ‘pop translation’ and ‘transgeneric translation’. In Chapter 9, Judy Kendall lends insight into to the challenge of translating Japanese and Chinese orthographies into English, namely the Japanese syllabary (katakana and hiragana) and characters (kanji ); and Chinese characters as used in China, as adapted in Japan (kanji ), and as seen by Western readers. Her premise is that these orthographies should not be merely perceived as graphics but also as shifts in emphasis, which therefore predetermine textual effects affecting meaning. In this chapter, then, Kendall sets out to experiment with the complexity involved in translating between ‘orthographies’, paying particular attention to textual discontinuity, non-linear writing and directional script flow. An important aspect of this attempt is that Kendall’s orthographic translations are the result of a collaborative experience, the Japanese–English translation project of Suiko/The Water Jug (1996) by Miyaji Eiko. Kendall is here a co-translator in a multicultural, multilingual writing team. Underpinning this chapter is therefore the notion of a ‘shared’ translational agency, as an alternative to the ‘fragmented’ agency surfacing in Perteghella’s chapter.

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Creative reading and textual spaces are explored once again in the translation triptych by Chantal Wright. She promotes creativity and experimentation in translation both as process and product. Relying on poststructuralist theories, Wright observes how the translator has been finally invited to embrace positively the multiplicity of meaning implied by the imprecise nature of the signifier. The reading of a children’s book entitled Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe, a book which investigates Goethe’s cultural translatability, has led Wright to subject Goethe’s Faust to trial by translation, creating a multiple translation or a translation triptych. This – made up of a ‘literal’ translation after Nabokov, a translation for children and a ‘pop translation’, in which Star Wars meets the Rolling Stones courtesy of a postmodern reading – gives the reader access to the process of translation, a privileged access which the ‘one-translation-only’ is unable to provide. The translation triptych then enhances the reader’s experience of the source text, as it turns out to be the full manifestation of Scott’s textual virtuality – the multidimensionality of the text given in a simultaneous configuration. Finally, Eugenia Loffredo’s account of her own experimental translation practice of Jeanne Hyvrard’s Mère la mort (1976) into English introduces the idea of ‘transgeneric translation’. By following the less beaten path of generic transformation going from prose to poetry, she explores translation in terms of ‘textual event’, that is a performative act which illustrates the translator’s ongoing relationship with the text and response to the text. In this sense, it recalls Scott’s own experimental practice and theoretical input. Due to the idiosyncratic and poetic language of the target text, in so far as it continually draws attention to its own material constituents, the translator is engaged in a more tactile involvement with a text. As a result of the translator’s handling, the raw linguistic material is activated. Then grammar, syntax, the phonic and the graphic levels of language become the plastic matter a translator is required to mould. Poetry, finally, seems to be the appropriate form for the reproduction of textual rhythmics and textual movements, which foreground the notion of the ‘voice’ embedded in the text. Classroom applications Translation and Creativity is designed for lecturers, tutors, undergraduate and postgraduate students working and researching in the field of translation studies, and more specifically in the field of literary translation. The innovative approaches advanced in these essays are becoming increasingly popular among students and academics, and the book can be used as a textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in translation studies (literary translation, applied translation, stylistics, for example). Also, the thematic grouping of the four parts can contribute to the design of new undergraduate and postgraduate modules aiming to combine translation with creative writing, or translation with experimental

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writing. The book can also be useful as further reading in comparative literature modules. There are different ways in which to read the present book, as each chapter has a certain self-sufficiency. But a thematic reading is perhaps the most profitable, following the four sections and covering a particular area at a time (theory, methodology, criticism and practice). While key theoretical concepts in translation studies are addressed and explained in the Introduction, each section brings together a spectrum of differing approaches. Furthermore, the book offers methodologies and pedagogical tools for the development of creative writing postgraduate modules, by fostering experimental writing and text-devising skills, and suggesting techniques and workshops for dealing with the rewriting and reworkings of literary texts. Finally, the complementary and balanced presence of theory and practice makes Translation and Creativity of interest to professional translators, seeking to question their current methodologies and practices, and to learn about current academic research linking translation to literary creativity.

Part One Creating trends: exploring new frontiers

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1 Notes on translating the self Paschalis Nikolaou

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable (Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ )

Turning inwards In Translation, History and Culture (1990) André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett anticipated a ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies, promptly followed eight years later, in Constructing Cultures, with a ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies (Bassnett 1998c). In the years following these manifestos, and as these ‘turns’ complete influential courses, translation studies really has come of age as an academic discipline, transcending interpretations forced upon it by older and more established areas of study, and now confidently moulding perspectives from a diversity of fields into its own. As an increasing number of reference works – handbooks, readers, encyclopedias – that mark a discipline’s maturity abound, the aim of this opening chapter is to draw attention to borderlands that have managed throughout this growth to remain relatively unexplored. Why should it take so long before we can speak of a ‘creative turn’ in translation studies, as we witness a synod of literary, linguistic, cognitive and other perspectives (see, for example, the contributions in Riccardi 2002) freshly and diversely focusing, in their allied plurality, on how it feels to be translating, on why translation exceeds what is asked of it in so many ways? It might be that as far as assessing ‘creative translations’ or defining contexts of creativity in translational processes is concerned we seem to lack a sense of foundation, and still feel uncertain about frameworks and methodological means (the very things that any ‘turn’ speaks through) which would draw us out of anecdotal accounts. Yet in this case, what is anecdotal, personal, is far from unwelcome in rethinking theoretical certainties and vitally reconfirms translators at the centre of their writing. Relevant frameworks and discourses are not that far away: once again, there is a perceived thrust towards defining what ‘creativity’ is – especially in studies of cognition (see, for example, Dartnall 2002; Heilman 2005) – as well as new forays into life-writing that reconsider the ways in which autobiography persists in

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the literary text, how it contaminates and is contaminated by narrative creativity (see, for example, Gilmore 2001; Eakin 1999). I can only echo a sense of such critical shifts here, while insisting on the overall need for connecting them to current concerns within translation studies. I want to propose a view of translation that allows for secret spaces of selfwriting, from two different perspectives, beginning with a general mapping of (auto)biographical aspects of literary translation, tracing marks of subjectivity that witness the personalization of the text of translation. This is followed by a further exploration of manifestations of creativity in translation and links to autobiography through self-translation, this nebulous juncture of creative writing and literary translating; in the process I imply ways in which identity and subjectivity are ‘translated’ through acts of writing, and consider the clandestine self-translations which impel creativity in both original and translation, and produce literary spaces in between. (Auto)biographical facets of literary translation Literary translation operates in the shadow of the source text; its practitioners apparently deal in lexical, syntactic and other equivalences between languages in what is primarily perceived as textual/linguistic manoeuvring rather than a process of gestating literature. Yet dissociations from creative writing travel beyond concerns about the more immediate, prohibiting existence of source texts as opposed to influences and formative readings. They are also grounded in literary composition perceived as an extension of a self, a self to a degree constructed and transformed through its own expressions, as the creative subject ever alchemizes the processes of writing. With literary translation, on the other hand, attitudes shift: it is writing minus the self that makes the product of translation a translation; a principle of self-suppression is what should guide its processes. The translator’s sense of identity is inevitably there, but crouching under another poetic sensibility, and sculpting its statue; he or she adheres to necessities of cultural and linguistic transfer, caters to our own cognitive needs for what remains an original to which we as readers, rather than its translator, should provide the interpretative response. And so translators have to be literary non-beings, applying a (self-)imposed doctrine of containment, functioning as textual psychics, only speaking in the tongues of others. An attempt to bring literary writing and projects of translation closer to each other by considering shared interests in (auto)biography faces a number of obstacles. To begin with, texts of life-writing mainly differ from literary ones by virtue of their referential aspect (as in authors coinciding with their subjects in autobiography), as well as by an essential premise of veracity searched for, found and imparted; and the text of translation is further distanced in building no narrative of its own. Yet not only do definitional boundaries between fiction and life-writing welcome creative subversions, as in Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2000) or Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), but also the biographical and the

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autobiographical effortlessly intersect (see, for example, Marcus 1994). Translation, moreover, is not far from where such tensions are often played out. Biographers seek to convey the truth of their subjects, positioning themselves as translators of lives, yet often identifying with the other selves they write about, appropriating their subject (see Baron and Pletsch 1985) as they re-version their ‘source text’. Though their presence is hardly ever witnessed in narrative form, there are workings of life-writing in literary translation, ranging from identification elements comparable to those we encounter in projects of biography, to the influence of insights provided by existing literary criticism of texts and (auto)biographical expositions of their authors. Such information often affects ‘from the outside’ the production of the target text as this may be directed to avenues uncalled for by the offered structures of the source text – and the tacit significance of this ‘reading around’ often comes through in prologues, footnotes, and so on, while frequently encouraging further ‘biographical’ segments in them. What we sometimes sense in the other side of the expected linguistic engineering of literary translating are imaginings of ‘source selves’ and recordings of translators as they write: we have perhaps an uneasy mix of the biographer and autobiographer in literary translators who are not merely replacing one language with another but cannot help trying to inhabit authorial subjectivities as they strive to internalize and preserve the textual selfhood that happened to be born in one linguistic environment, and metempsychose it in another. And there should be further complications if the psychology of translation involves a simultaneous self-denial, in the willingness to be and write someone else, and, through its interpretative movements, also a cryptic writing of the self in what can serve as an autobiographical detour, a ventriloquism of self-expression through an owning of other textual selfhoods: a sense of self is affirmed even as imports of alterity keep revising it. This kind of telling of the self through – and almost in spite of – translation disrupts what we anticipate as a subtitling of the original author’s voice. It is, of course, more markedly observed in the work of poettranslators. Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his version of Beowulf (1999), as well as the St Jerome Lecture on his work on the poem (1999/2000), are at points strikingly autobiographical as the poet’s subjectivity is firmly positioned in between literary creativity and translation. Heaney considers Beowulf to be part of his ‘voice-right’ as he recalls Joseph Brodsky ‘who once said that poets’ biographies are present in the sounds they make’ (1999: xxiii), and throughout these paratexts we witness lexical decisions, translation strategies and metrical/rhythmical biases poignantly referred to – and justified through – intersecting memories of growing up, illuminations of how one’s poetic voice takes shape, evocations of translation between Northern Irish and Anglo-Saxon identities, and wakefulness to political contexts and the experience of nation. Heaney’s expressive anxieties are exemplified in his ownership of a single word. His response to his

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publishing house reader’s editorial reservations about the use of the word ‘bottomless’ (as going beyond what the original warrants) in line 1366 is particularly telling: ‘I might have pleaded that “bottomless” occurs as the last word in a poem of my own’ (1999/2000: 29). Instead, he writes to his editor that ‘bottomless’ is a word ‘with mere-y suggestions, since as a child I was always being warned away from bog pools in our district – because they had “no bottom to them”. So I was prepared to transgress, and paused for a while before coming round to a different rendering’ (ibid.). In his urgently claimed ‘bottomless’, Heaney voices a possession we could never have otherwise known; he calls us to bear witness to transferences of the creative self, to the bonds between language and memory, to the literary voice that subsists and inscribes its trajectory in inhospitable environs. While in Heaney’s case we are conditioned to realize the life of the poet inside his translation from the writings that surround it, an autobiographic consciousness can infiltrate more radically translational texts as it conspires with what the poet-translator (un)consciously sets out to do. The highly interpretative, modernist approach that marks Christopher Logue’s ongoing recomposition of the Iliad, his War Music (2001), allows the poet to inhabit briefly his retelling of Homeric events, boldly affixing an autobiographical glimpse to his ‘account’ of the ancient epic as Logue remembers himself and friends as tourists in the modern town of Skopje (ibid.: 50). There are other ways: in Chasing Catullus (2004), Josephine Balmer’s hybrid volume subtitled ‘Poems, Translations and Transgressions’, we witness the translator arriving at her own poetic voice as an exploration of creative possibilities between translation and original, as she moves between irreverent sub-versions and ‘originals’ already packed with allusions, found in and through translation. For Balmer, creative translation is essential in adequately telling the self; her intertextual labyrinth doubles as an autobiographical structure, her varied channelling of ancient myth into contemporary circumstance serves as an articulation of loss, as she points out in her preface: . . . there is more here than literary experiment. Chasing Catullus also represents a journey of the soul, an odyssey in three stages, with a descent into the underworld, as in Homer’s epic poem, at its dark heart; a response to the death of my seven-year-old niece from liver cancer. For just as classical writers rewrote and translated ancient myth in order to express dangerous emotions – passion, fear, dissent – so classical translation can provide us with other voices, a new currency with which to say the unsayable, to give shape to horrors we might otherwise be unable to outline, describe fears we might not ever had have to courage to confront. (ibid.: 9)

Inventiveness in translation cannot be separated from the transformations of identity the translating act invites. The invasive vestiges of consciousness outlined above, demanding the visibility of a self as opposed to a translator, do coincide with what we receive as creative. We perhaps feel more justified in describing a translation as ‘creative’ when (often unconsciously) we

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read autobiographical arcs in what become for us instances of literary ventriloquism. A sensed proximity to the author/translator’s creative agenda will often precondition us to insert such appropriations – already attracting more critical attention than the original – as yet another selfwriting site in a diversifying body of work. We are prepared to project works such as Heaney’s Beowulf or his Sophocles (1991, 2004), Don Paterson’s reworkings of Antonio Machado in The Eyes (1999) or Ted Hughes’ Ovid (1997), Aeschylus (1999a) and Euripides (1999b) as appropriations by a kindred spirit, textual amalgams partaking in these authors’ respective oeuvres. Such books carry the name of creativity, they present from their cover pages what repositions reader response and critical emphasis towards a text we are more inclined to call an ‘adaptation’, ‘version’, ‘re-imagining’. Rather than equivalences or accuracies in textual transmission, what we focus on as readers and critics in poet-translators are implied dialogues, the ways two subjectivities textually merge, match, interact. We expect to unearth the poets we think we know, and now perhaps can see more clearly, as they voice themselves in translation. This is how the poet David Constantine – also the translator of Hölderlin’s German versions of Oedipus and Antigone (2001) – reviews Tom Paulin’s (2004) Lowellesque collection of translations, The Road to Inver : Many [of Paulin’s translations], indeed, can take their autonomous places among the best of his verse . . . he is topical, and local and personal. Often he will update an old text and ram it into the politics of here and now . . . Strict translators can learn from him, even though their responsibilities bind them to a different purpose. They can learn techniques of survival. (Constantine 2004)

And so to the ‘real world’ of translation, where its practitioner has to be ‘strict’ and remains largely invisible, where it is mostly through the notes, forewords and commentaries framing the translation that the presence of a mediating subjectivity, another self, is first sighted. Translational paratexts make manifest a bidirectional relationship between two texts, two writers, they help us to recognize what extends beyond linguistic engineering, signposting a process that is not on autopilot, but driven by a further identity. Their absence, on the other hand, can reduce our ways of seeing translation, now more likely to be thought of as something that takes place between languages rather than subjectivities, if indeed it does not help us to forget that translation has even taken place. Moreover, when a translator’s foreword grants us access to moments of readerly illumination, the epiphanies of how to proceed, frames of mind recorded in the process of regenerating a text or glimpses of identification as expression moves from one mind to another, then we do not merely encounter comment, explanations: we identify autobiographical spaces, where – often alongside abridged biographies of the original’s author – the experiencing of translation speaks, where a parallel life, a self that translates, is written.

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We might want to allow a more personal discourse to breathe, consider a more visibly testimonial aspect in our paratexts. If translation attains literary value more readily when an already known second voice inside it invites correspondences with a body of work, we are reminded that translational creativity is often perceived contextually over and above operating textually. Confessional inflections in rethought paratextual spaces help to voice the translator’s creative subjectivity while navigating the difficulty in sharing all of the interpretative circumstances poet-translators enjoy. At the same time, this is also to draw attention beyond what often merely seems creative in translation to what actually is. Indeed, what is called for are also new contextualizations which further theoretical understanding while attesting to what is already there, as Scott has proposed: [t]he production of translations needs to be combined with the exploration of translation theory, textual analysis, and associative mechanisms such as intertextuality and the re-imagination of forms. Translation should perhaps generate, and find itself at the centre of, literary critical life-writing, should more explicitly accept its status as a kind of autobiography of the reading self. (2000a: xii)

– a position largely enacted in his Translating Baudelaire (2000b). Literary translation should become aware of its (auto)biographical facets, acknowledge the transferences taking place in its acts, contextualize the self that is also translated in one’s ‘target text’, and arrive, through wider disclosures of a creative subjectivity at work, at new understandings of its practices that are also understandings of the self. Sites of self-translation Why cannot writers remain faithful to themselves? Emerging from the no man’s land between two languages, self-translations present us with a literary solecism where our notions of creativity and self-expression, the nature of textuality, reach a critical cul-de-sac. Previous, sporadic studies of this grey area between translation and original often try to account for what drives one towards self-translation, looking at cases of translingual authors involved in an inherently self-reflexive and creative process, as well as at issues of textual status and relationships with corresponding ‘originals’, or the links to more ‘proper’ translational practices. With respect to Beckett as a self-translator, Brian T. Fitch (1985: 117; see also 1988: 131–3ff.) suggests that differentiation in processes involved between self-translation and translation proper confers a different status on the self-translated text as it is reimbued with authorial intention; being the repetition of a process rather than the reproduction of a product – which to an extent can be said for translation in general – the self-translated text’s relation to the original’s precedence is purely temporal in character rather than one of status and authority, rendering both texts variants or versions of each other. So self-translation can be seen as more of a double writing process than a

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two-stage reading–writing activity (Fitch 1985: 112). Indeed, Cant (1999: 138–40) describes Beckett’s use of the practice as a form of continued writing and essentially a mode of developing his texts in reductive ways. The rewriting of one’s own original, what we observe as the transubstantiating and recasting of its key elements, often has to do with initial efforts of retracing the creative self, what George Steiner, in the mine of reflection on translation that is After Babel, calls ‘a narcissistic trial or authentication’ (1998: 336): the author ‘seeks in the copy the primary lineaments of his own inspiration and, possibly, an enhancement or clarification of these lineaments through reproduction’ (ibid.). In self-translation, the attempted exercising of (textual, at least) self-identity through what starts as linguistic transposition leads us to locations where we realize how far beyond both translation and self-identity we can find ourselves: many self-translators would certainly agree with the feelings of Greek-born, Swedish author Theodor Kallifatides on its outcomes: I soon realized that I was unable to translate my own works. The only thing I could do was to rewrite my books . . . They became different books. Another rhythm, another style, another sense of humour, another sadness and another love. (2003: 4)

And so despite, or perhaps because of, the presence of a ‘narcissistic’ element, self-translation more readily defies misconceptions that plague literary translation also, as its spaces insist on questioning textual finitude and notions of reproduction. The marked absences in this practice of what we would expect to be straightforward translation should also be retraced back to a formative, enveloping context of bilingualism where, as François Grosjean (1982: 279 passim) reminds us, language shifts, especially as they are likely to coincide with shifts in context, social role or situation, often cause feelings of personality change. If bilinguals live in (self-)translation, readjusting their sense of identity as they alternate more than just languages (see, for example, the contributions in de Courtivron 2003), it is not surprising to see the creative writer who possesses a bilingual consciousness recompensed for any felt deficiencies in self-identity (as noted by Kallifatides above) by more than one creative imagination: this is Chinghiz Aitmatov reflecting on the starting points of his Russian/Kirghiz self-translations: When I was writing Dzhamilia, I thought about my heroes’ feelings – in the Kirghiz language. With the novella The Little Poplar . . . on the other hand, it was completely different. The sequence of events and the heroes’ experience were laid out in my mind in terms of Russian idioms from the very beginning, and therefore I wrote the work in Russian. (Aitmatov, quoted in Dadazhanova 1984: 77)

It is also hardly unexpected that migrant ‘split’ selves, the life that dwells in the plural of language and culture, should find autobiography so urgently inviting. Susan Ingram (1998) notes that language and translation are

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regularly at the centre of autobiographical narratives by bilingual authors; reminding us that recent theory locates the self ‘as a position, a locus where discourses intersect’ (1998: 15, quoting Nussbaum 1988: 132), she proceeds to consider life-writings that ‘are exemplary in what they convey about the construction of authorial identity between languages’ as they persistently manifest the bilingual writer’s act ‘as one of translation’ (ibid.). Such memoirs remember identity through language, for where does the deepest material of the self lodge itself if not in language? . . . you can never sidestep the question of identity when you learn to live in a new language. Questions of home, of assimilation, of linguistic and cultural alienation, of triangulation and translation; the elusive search for one-ness and the haunting quest for the self are perhaps foregrounded more acutely in texts by bilinguals because their authors face an ultimate disconnection. (de Courtivron 2003: 3–4)

It is a keen awareness of dualities, then, not least one that anyone involved in translation would bear out, which turns to literary expression as well as life-writing while enabling each one in the other, fostering hybridity, inciting a literary negotiation of translation, of the translating/bilingual mind and how it perceives itself. In his discussion of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1994 novel, The Folding Star, Alistair Stead (1999) reminds us that when we encounter the word or implication of ‘translation’ in literary texts it is never simply language transfer that is named; rather, we are frequently pointed to problematizations of identity. In his essay, Stead uncovers the diverse conceptual layers, metaphoric potencies and performative qualities of translation that permeate Hollinghurst’s text, the ways they speak for the makings and unmakings of selfhood, and considers the translator protagonist’s efforts to tell or portray himself as (im)possible self-translations. In many ways, it is in self-translation that the manifold senses of translation are best articulated; this is how the opening, titular poem of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s Translating into Love Life’s End (2004: 3) – a bilingual self-translation of an earlier Greek collection – begins: Since I cannot touch you with my tongue I translate my passion. I cannot communicate so I transubstantiate; I cannot undress you so I dress you with the fantasy of a foreign tongue.

The poet proceeds to convey the almost physical relationship that develops between translator and her author, transliterating this living with and through the voices of others as it extends before and beyond its textual marks. And so translation asks to be renamed as more than an act of writing, reaches for the poet’s subject matter as at once truth, theme and

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metaphor. Its apparitions would not perhaps be expected from writers who have not reflected on the presence of translation in their lives (AnghelakiRooke has a parallel career as translator of Albee, Brodsky and Heaney, among others), on the ways their writing self is also incorporated in their translation work. ‘Self-translation’ exceeds inadequate descriptive labels when we witness more than a hyphen between ‘self’ and ‘translation’ in the mind of the multilingual poet; the term also alerts us to the subjectivities involved all along, and told within or around acts of literary translation, to a literary encounter which opens up autobiographical spaces, to the junctures where translations are also self-translations. The bilingual incarnation of Anghelaki-Rooke’s collection, where the translator is anonymous as her name coincides with the name of the author, inevitably creates new textual intricacies, as the opening poem, a cross-section of a translator’s self, now faces its self-translation, the poem completing itself and its author’s inward journey. The other she addresses in an original where the poet already (self-)translates now further coincides with Anghelaki-Rooke herself, mirrored in an English version that sees her aligned capacities as translator, poet, self-translator identifying – if not identified as – one another. It takes a poem, a translator-poet and the mirror images of both to enunciate the ways in which the translation of literature can come close to acts of life- and self-writing. We need more ‘public’ accounts of a practice that perhaps remains a deeply private affair, and especially as by nature (as in how one experiences one’s bi/multilingualism) its perceptions and processes could vary greatly from one self-translator to another. In my case, a context of self-translation also partakes in a method of composition. It does begin as translation: a listening to lexical correspondences between Greek or English words, only for translation to be led immediately astray; equivalents turn to their unfaithful echoes, to cognates and connotations, to free associating and new lines, if not often entirely separate poetic entities detaching themselves from an autogenic process in which writing is constantly furthered and rarely, if ever, feels finished. Perhaps because one does not experience self-translation as a reading or interpreting of one’s own writing, there are few constants that have to reach another linguistic context ‘intact’, and many of what Perry (1981: 181, quoted in Grutman 1998) terms ‘bold shifts’, as radical rearrangements do not clash with a sense of translational responsibility to a text whose very condition, after all, is a mercurial one. Only when publication and an audience somewhat steadies a meaning and form might a sense of digression be more accented, and one feels more inclined to hold back, to keep doing a translation, to oblige to the near impossible, what Chaudhuri calls the cultivation of ‘a special detachment of being: the self that translates cannot be the self that had composed the original text’ (1999: 47–8). One does, however, often feel an obligation to recapture a former self, the mindframe that spurred the first passage into words and to retell somehow a mental event, to pursue through the interfacing of languages a psychological point

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of departure. This, however, can never be more than partly possible in an anarchic context where a bestiary of linguistic, literary and conceptual ‘programmes’ run in parallel and infect each other; where perceived onsets and intentions quickly become distant memories through a seemingly unending return to, and from, words and lines that witness text(s) and selfcohabit their mutual metamorphosis. This/my kind of self-translation, in the sense of an inter- and intralinguistic redrafting, invariably arrives at certain textual features and patterns of synthesis. As one leaves behind the epiphanic moment and initial verbalizations, the synergies established by the ‘invasion’ of one language by the other create a certain cognitive dynamic; translation sets off a destabilizing dance of associations that accelerates self-reflexivity, quickens awareness of the materiality of words. It fosters a sense of plurality, undecidability and ambiguity, a rise in instances of double meanings in my texts, whose theme can often indeed be one of translation or language breakdown, alongside a preoccupation with inner dialogues and divided selves. If one freeze-frames the process, so that linguistic shapes in Greek or English solidify and appear as articles of poetry, one still sees how they are also textualizations of their inherent duality, of one poem shaped in parallel with itself. Textual creativity here stems from a still unresolved conflict between internalized/personalized language environments; the need for this conflict to be creatively told perhaps comes from further within oneself. Actual self-translation illustrates only in part a situation in which language(s) constantly question and reshape the selves formed through them. If bilingualism may drive cognitions of literary writing, internal selftranslations are a fertile subsoil, charging and determining literary texts that may still appear to be born – and stay – in one language. In this sense I would concur with de Courtivron when she warns that [o]ne can be inhabited by bilingualism even if one does not speak two languages fluently but writes from the absence of what should have been. For sometimes, after the loss of an early language, the music nevertheless remains alive en creux, leading one to write as on a palimpsest, in one tongue but always over the body and the sound of a buried language, a hidden language, a language whose ghosts reverberate in words . . . (2003: 7)

I will close with what can be taken as a poetic negotiation of ideas on translation presented throughout this discussion, a creative transposition where self-translation is not just taking place but further participates in the play of meaning. Rather than a poem, I would call ‘Autoscopy’ (‘hallucination of an image of one’s body’ in the Chambers dictionary) a creative/critical formation, one that must have been encouraged by thoughts on translation, thoughts that are now here condensed, spatialized and creatively released in a textual exercise. Up to a point the text whose current version follows (together with notes on the reasoning of its gradual

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incarnations), was shaped independently of, and in parallel with my theoretical reflections, as a playing with (as few as possible) words, an unconscious effort to consider translation through a freer, more literary space. As I became aware of a dialogue between my parallel activities in which the ‘poem’ becomes some sort of evolving commentary, a creative mirror or a literary diary of criticism, echoing and further shaping my thinking, ‘Autoscopy’ also turned into a more deliberate attempt to reproduce, dramatize a translating/writing self. Autoscopy Selfaware, selfless, Narcissus καθρεπτ στηκε σε μιαν οπτασ α του ξνου σματο Αυτμεταφραζμενο, εκτ εαυτου´ ο Να´ρκισσο

reflects on a mirage of mirror images

The two bilingual stanzas are, in a number of ways, translations of each other. Yet to explain this, one has to take a step back: an earlier version of ‘Autoscopy’ had the English lines (first and last three here) forming a first part, with the second one in Greek, starting with lines 7–9 of the above, followed by lines 3–6. In that formation, where each language had its own space, it was more obvious how the Greek part is a textual doppelgänger, a translation/reflection of the minimalist gathering of words that exhaust a ‘theme of reflection’ in the English lines. The Greek lines advance and complete, through the language shift, the enunciation of a consciousness turning inwards that the lexical choices already reflect, with the two-stanza text intended as an iconic embodiment of (bilingual/translational) selfconsciousness. In every mirroring, however, there is also a difference, and the (self-)translation is unfaithful, adding a further layer of meaning in actually mistranslating what has come before: in this sense ‘Self-/aware’ becomes ‘Αυτ-μεταφραζμενο’ (self-translating); ‘self-/less’ turns into ‘εκτ εαυτου´’ (literally ‘outside one’s self’ but also ‘losing one’s temper’); ‘καθρεπτ στηκε’ (‘mirrored’) becomes ‘reflects on’; ‘του ξνου σματο’ (‘of the foreign body’) becomes ‘of mirror images’ (my appendix offers a literal translation of the Greek lines). The text above is, and is not, the one I have just described: there is here a simple, last reversal in structure so that one ends up with a new arrangement, two bilingual parts that take my concept to a logical end, further exposing the reasoning behind the earlier version by installing an imaginary mirror within each stanza as well as between them. The change itself is partly a result of reflecting on the

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purpose of the earlier ‘poem’ as recorded here. It is Narcissus, also another name for the translator and/as self-translator, which perhaps demands this further turn. The reversal of the lines makes clearer a search for identity taking place through a dialogue of languages, a self – represented by each stanza – that is untranslatable while ‘self-translating’ can only be located in constant transformation, mistranslation, creative mirroring. In this current version, two selves appear to merge within the text. This is perhaps why the line/mirror separating the two parts in the earlier version (‘εσνα ερευν // looking for you’ – a more or less literal translation) stating the search for the self in the space where literature, translation and self-translation amalgamate, was later dropped. While this cyclical text appears thus to complete its creative course, the reality of distances between identity and its writing remain. My experiences in self-translation make me think of it as a practice that encourages self-reflexivity and fuels creative experimentation, something that through an onset of translation, a movement between languages, always arrives at an undisclosed elsewhere, at places where textualities turn inwards, where different alphabets invade one’s work, where translation turns from a process into a theme, and other selves proliferate in one’s poetic narratives. There is a sense in which the peculiar cognitive quickenings of literary bilingualism and contexts of self-translation connect with certain growing concerns in one’s creative output, as I have already suggested; Coates (1999: 98–101) seems to concur in her study of Nabokov’s work, recognizing dynamics between Nabokov’s continuous translating or self-translating and self-reflexive plot changes, as well as the marked presence of doubling in his work (for example, the more-than-two ‘Humberts’ in Lolita). It appears that a diversified practice of translation shapes motifs and metaphors in Nabokov the creative writer. ‘Self-translation’ as self-observation is part of the development of every writer, as writers indeed have to cultivate a certain detachment of being as readers of themselves when revising their work – and do not drafts of a novel or a poem often also speak for an effort to translate, put in words what is already seen in our minds? There are perhaps roles for actual selftranslation in the course of one’s creative self-analysis: its practice speeds up certain recognitions as it provides us with a textual journal of self-discovery. Conclusion The main concern of this chapter has been to draw attention to signs and symptoms of subjectivity in translational settings, and to suggest inroads that translation and creative writing make into each other as self and identity are asserted in transitional spaces. I have considered some (auto)biographic parameters in literary translation, creative contexts of literary bilingualism and diverse manifestations of self-translation, all along noting points of convergence, particular creative tendencies and features, loci of self-reflexivity and critical insight.

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The view on the translational paratext as a terrain in which a creative apprenticeship is recorded and the translator’s subjectivity might be articulated follows from literary translation being often also an autobiographical act: we can trace translators’ voices and circumstances in their re-voicing of other authors, witness a literary agenda lurking inside, developing through, and signalled around, the text of translation. This asks of us to connect creativity in translation with projects of telling and remembering the self through the other (or as an other); and to propose that theoretical elucidations of translational creativity need to address possible shapes and spaces of life-writing and underlying psychologies of versioning, rather than limited to taxonomies of textual/linguistic deviation. Taking these considerations into account, we perhaps need to extend present critical currencies and reach a bit further, beyond the workings of literary systems, (in)visibilities, description of strategies or prescriptions of one’s task, and engage with a translating self, its makings, (un)conscious cognitions and creative detours. Even more so, if we sense that literary creativity in general often overlaps with autobiographical/self-translational mindsets; that it might begin from a position of translation. We need to find points of entry – or perhaps inhabit – the ‘black box’ of what is a person and a literary consciousness as much as a translator: to start listening to these selves, to be able to trace and decipher more adequately how translators perform and transform source authors, originals and their own voice at once, we certainly need significant imports of notions and knowledge from research on life-writing, bilingualism, creativity and cognition, and as we consider presences of translation within a wider context of literary experience and experiment. We also need to make such fields more aware of the creative manifestations and potential autobiographical vocabularies of literary translation. The drawing nearer of translation (its textualities and writing modes) to the studies of autobiography in particular, strengthens understanding of shared ground between translating, ‘original’ writing and self-expression. We should perhaps encourage alliances and better understanding between literary translators and creative writers in pedagogical environments, where people that constantly cross paths but seldom really meet can become increasingly aware, through hybrid workshops and interdisciplinary courses, of the creative modes and tactics in each other’s textual output. Translation then becomes this mirror that fosters awareness of what writers are involved in, and should be further explored as part of an armamentarium of literary creativity: its (ab)use should be encouraged in pedagogies of creative writing, not least in order to understand the creative core of literary translation, to give due respect to its practitioners. The dynamics that could develop in such settings allow us not only to better monitor the diverse instances and common grounds of translational and literary creativity, but also to establish new contexts, where translation and creative writing alchemize and reach for new literary spaces, finding additional forms and selves.

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Appendix A literal translation of the Greek lines of ‘Autoscopy’ (7–9 followed by 3–6): Αυτ-

Selfμεταφραζμενο,

εκτ

translating (in translation), out(side) εαυτου´

ο Να´ρκισσο

of self (or, εκτ εαυτου´: ‘lose one’s temper’) καθρεπτ στηκε

σε

mirrored/reflected in μιαν οπτασ α

a(n) apparition/mirage του ξνου

σματο

of the foreign/alien body

Narcissus

2 Translation and the spaces of reading Clive Scott

Reading and translating I want a particular view of a city, looking, say, from the end of the principal avenue obliquely across towards the cathedral, from the top of the radio tower. In 1640, this view did not exist, was only a virtual view, and even then would not have included the nineteenth-century post office and the more recent fire station. Alternatively, this view that I want is, even now, not physically achievable, because, in fact, there is no radio tower. In a sense, the view exists, but as things are, cannot be enjoyed. But this virtual view can be created, could not be photographed, but could be painted. This view of the city is the target text’s (TT’s) view of the source text (ST), a view that could not have been either seen or foreseen in the year of the ST’s publication and that now includes additional architectural features; or still cannot be seen, but exists, and can be conceptually constructed, like a cubist object. This analogy I find very apt for translation, but, of course, it is not entirely so. We cannot tell the truth about another text, whatever our angle. Language prevents us; it must follow its own imperatives, it must assent to the translator’s own quirks of linguistic perception, linguistic knowledge, linguistic preferences. Translation, like any other linguistic act, is necessarily a fictionalization. And it seems to me reckless to carry on as if language could at least partially tell the truth about a text that already exists (i.e. as if there are bits that are translatable and bits that are not). But it perhaps can tell the truth about a text that does not exist, might exist. Benjamin (1992: 76–80) has one solution to this perennial problem: place the real ST/SL (the perfect language) elsewhere, in virtuality, so that the surrogate ST, in dialogue with TTs, can conjure up the missing, virtual ST. My solution is other: place the TT elsewhere, in a space that the ST has yet to occupy, or, in terms of our previous analogy, see the ST from an angle from which, on its publication, it could not be seen, across a landscape of buildings which has not yet come into existence and has never, in perception, assumed this particular disposition. If translation is necessarily a fiction, then it must go out to meet its

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fictionality, acknowledge it, by placing its activity in a space which exists to the extent that it is possible, to the extent that it would exist, would be the truth, if certain probabilistic conditions were met. In other words, translation should place itself squarely in the conditional, the hypothetical, the optative, while trying to ensure that it is the best of guesses, that, if this were so, then that would be how it is. This process of finding a conditional perceptual position relative to an ST, of seeing the ST now with its inescapable post office and fire station, of seeing its elements in a particular, once-only configuration relative to each other, is the process of reading. It is not a text we translate, so much as a reading of a text, not a reading as in ‘interpretation’, but a reading as in ‘ongoing psycho-physiological, psycho-perceptual relationship’. Marcel has to read, to translate, his life, in order to write A la recherché du temps perdu: ‘. . . je m’apercevais que ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand écrivain n’a pas, dans le sens courant, à l’inventer, puisqu’il existe déjà en chacun de nous, mais à le traduire. Le devoir et la tâche d’un écrivain sont ceux d’un traducteur’ (1989: 469) (‘So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word it does not have to be “invented” by a great writer – for it exists already in each of us – has to be translated by him. The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator’) (1983: 926). The ability to translate relates directly to perceptual position: having reached a certain point in his existence, the pattern of interconnections within his life, its concealed directions, become retrospectively visible, translatable. In translation, it is truer to say that the life makes sense of itself than that it is made sense of. Proust listens to the text of his own life, in his own creative solitude, listens to a text which, because it is alien, can all the more fruitfully become his own, transforms a text that was an ending into a text that is a new beginning. These processes are those described by Proust in his preface (‘Journées de lecture’) to the translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and the Lilies by himself and Marie Nordlinger. From this preface, then, there are three propositions that we should retain: reading is that state ‘où mon imagination s’exalte en se sentant plongée au sein du non-moi’ (1971: 167) (‘where my imagination is excited to feel itself plunged into the womb of the non-ego’) (1987: 106) – just as, conversely, any ST desires to be other, to be translated; reading is not a conversation with a writer but a communication received in solitude, ‘c’està-dire en continuant à jouir de la puissance intellectuelle qu’on a dans la solitude et que la conversation dissipe immédiatement, en continuant à pouvoir être inspiré, à rester en plein travail fécond de l’esprit sur lui-même’ (1971: 174) (‘that is to say, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power we have in solitude, and which conversation dissipates immediately, while continuing to be inspired, to maintain the mind’s full, fruitful work on itself’) (1987: 112); for the author, the text is a ‘conclusion’, for the reader/translator an ‘incitement’: ‘Nous sentons très bien que notre sagesse commence où celle de l’auteur finit . . . la lecture est au

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seuil de la vie spirituelle; elle peut nous y introduire: elle ne la constitue pas’ (1971: 176–8) (‘We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author ends . . . Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it’) (1987: 114–16). Proust’s meditations on reading are prescient of Barthes’s distinction between the ‘lisible’ and the ‘scriptible’ (1971: 9–12); reading-as-interpretation preserves ‘lisibilité’, reading-as-psycho-physiological-relationship generates ‘lisibilité’; translation endeavours to transform the ST as ‘lisible’ into the ST as ‘scriptible’. The blank space of the page is the solitude of reading, the place of the translator’s imminent fictions, of his/her listening to the incitements of the ST. This is the place of the translator’s imagination, the stage on which the ST will be performed, the site of the convergence of a whole bundle of virtualities: the virtual spaces generated by the text itself in the mind of the reader/translator; the virtual spaces of the reader/translator’s own mind as it reads the ST into its own solitudes; the virtual spaces of the reader of the translation, as the process begins all over again. This space, then, needs also to retain a certain fluidity or manipulability, needs to suggest or accommodate other sets of relational coordinates, other psycho-physiological bearings, other perspectives on the city, those of the translation’s several readers. These spaces are cosmic, social, psychological, available to all geometries. And the text which maps them out and maps itself into them, with its peculiar layouts, typographies, ajours, does not quite adhere. It is with a cityscape that we begin, a cityscape in which our bearings, our angle of vision, change halfway through, a city like the city of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, one and yet multiplying with every telling, Venice and notVenice, or in Rimbaud’s ‘Ville’, Paris and not-Paris (London), or London and yet not-London (Paris). Rimbaud’s ‘Ville’ Rimbaud’s ‘Ville’ (see Appendix 1 for French text and ‘straight translation’) is, in effect, a tale of two cities: first, a city apparently without morphological complexity, homogeneous and doctrinaire, a city in which a certain featureless architecture has begotten certain behavioural characteristics, a city in which, to judge by the presence of passive constructions and abstract subjects, human agency has been gradually whittled away. Second, within this city, behind its façades, or on its perimeter, another city, dimly outlined, invisible from the outside; the inhabitant can only be sure of the building that his own inwardness has as if constructed. The poet’s dwelling, the cottage, sounds like an example of heritage architecture and the vision on the world it provides is phantasmal, sensitive to the urban uncanny, metaphorizing. While the prose of the first city provides a sequence of guide-like statements from a citizen peculiarly detached from his own living space, the prose of the second unfolds rhapsodically and in

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disorderly fashion from the cottage matrix, and comes to an end, not for any good syntactical reason, but because of a rhetorical imperative; this is the syntax of old Paris, with no sense of a main thoroughfare/clause, where proliferating buildings, courtyards, alleys, streets constantly reformulate space, time, morality, vision. It is usually proposed, in fact, that this poem has something to do with Rimbaud’s experience, with Verlaine, of London in the latter months of 1872. The evidence lies in ‘mon cottage’ (34 Howland Street?), the coal smoke, the reference to the continent as another place, London as the only contemporary city with a population running into millions (about 3,250,000 in 1865), Verlaine’s comment about the absence of monuments in London, in a letter to Edmond Lepelletier (24 September 1872), and parallels with views expressed about London, again by Verlaine, in his ‘Sonnet boiteux’: Ah! Vraiment c’est triste, ah! Vraiment ça finit trop mal. Il n’est pas permis d’être à ce point infortuné. Ah! Vraiment c’est trop la mort du naïf animal Qui voit tout son sang couler sous un regard fané. Londres fume et crie. Ô quelle ville de la Bible! Le gaz flambe et nage et les enseignes sont vermeilles. Et les maisons dans leur ratatinement terrible Épouvantent comme un sénat de petites vieilles. Tout l’affreux passé saute, piaule, miaule et glapit Dans le brouillard rose et jaune et sale des Sohos Avec des indeeds et des all rights et des haôs. Non vraiment c’est trop un martyre sans espérance, Non vraiment cela finit trop mal, vraiment c’est triste: Ô le feu du ciel sur cette ville de la Bible!

My own first version of Rimbaud’s prose poem (see below) is thus a view through Verlaine’s ‘limping’ sonnet, based on the supposition that Rimbaud’s poem has a clear ‘volta’ (‘Aussi comme . . .’) with a significant change of direction and manner, and that the whole is built on 8:6 proportions. The nature of the shift from octave to sestet here is very much that of the Baudelairean sonnet as described by David Scott: In the majority of Baudelaire’s sonnets, whereas the octave tended to be discursive, the sestet was analytical or visionary. Its primary quality was its perceptiveness – its ability on the one hand to clarify or re-assess, often ironically, the preceding quatrains, and on the other to elaborate their implications and reveal their ultimate significance. Its function was, like the mind or spirit, to interpret and synthesize the raw experience, the sense data of the octave. (1977: 47)

But this transformation of the physical into the metaphysical is accompanied by a process of formal unravelling. My sonnet ‘limps’ rather like Verlaine’s: the rhymes lose their way, as they do in Verlaine’s sestet, and it

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uses Verlaine’s tredecasyllables as an excuse for a heterosyllabic treatment which tests the reader’s tolerance to the limit in its cavalier closure (what licences a line-initial capital will condone!): I am a none too discontented, soon displaced Citizen of a modern metropolis. Modern? Perhaps, since no known taste In furnishings, houses, city plan, brings solace, Nor monument to irrational belief. Morals, language stripped to barest basics, And lives so uniform that time is more their thief Than on the continent, so say the mad statistics. So, as from my cottage window I can see New spectres wading through the city’s smoke, Unending, thick – our sylvan shade, our summer Night! – new Furies passing by my door, My homeland and my whole heart’s core, Since all here’s this, – our bustling servant-daughter Death, dry-eyed, and Love on wings of black despair, and Crime prinked up and whining in the muddy street.

My last line may seem like a brazen piece of rule-bending, an attempt to carry incompetence on a technicality, but there are good textual reasons, as we have seen, for performing this débordement: the personified Eumenides quite literally break down the city-sonnet’s limits, cannot be administratively contained. The metaphysics of the city outstrips its utopian rationality, drifts into the air around the conurbation, so that its agents are free to operate in the space of their own caprice. I have had to abbreviate some of the source text, but this might be seen as an inevitable erosion: these abbreviations occur in the English/ Shakespearean octave, in a modern city in which ‘ce cours de vie doit être plusieurs fois moins long que ce qu’une statistique folle trouve pour les peuples du continent’, while the sestet which, precisely, identifies this as a continental/Petrarchan sonnet, extends the time of the form to include a tail. In fact, the continental sonnet has always, potentially at least, been a tale of two cities: the octave, with its customarily chiastic, self-mirroring rhyme scheme (abba/abba) is a classical architecture of the symmetrical and static, of self-completing form; the sestet, on the other hand, is a dynamic structure (usually three rhymes in six lines as opposed to the octave’s two in eight, in a scheme that has greater unpredictability), mobile, on the move, asymmetrical, incomplete (in that one rhyme of the first tercet at least must wait for completion in the second tercet). In terms of groundplan, the octave lays out the axial boulevards of Haussmannization, generating a visible pattern of spatial relations based on a binary principle. The

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sestet, on the other hand, works by the principle of three (tercets, Eumenides) in order to summon the archaic, labyrinthine city behind the regularized façades, the meandering streets and alleyways which emerge from each other like complex root systems, in a syntax of self-extending apposition. Many have pointed to the natural connection between montage and the cityscape. Montage offers a paradoxical mixture of the randomly fragmented and the tendentiously relational. By going on to set my sonnet in a montage (see Appendix 2), I want to capture not only the anarchic play of urban encounter and association, but also the compelling need to discover the hidden design of the city, what it wills without our knowing, what it makes available in its magisterial indifference. We read the montage as ephemeral citizens, passing through a sudden compilation, a here and now in real time which might slip back into something predicted, predictable, but which might equally thrust us forwards into the ramifications of the haphazard. If montage is allowed to fix itself, then, more than any single image, it will tie us into a programme, into a propaganda, into a too insistent articulation of meanings; but transience sustains the interrogative mode, an interrogation which is bound to beget other spectatorial and readerly maps. Montage offers us the documentary in the service of the oneiric. All objects, however authentic, however ‘factual’, once wrenched from the context which prescribes their use, that makes their use coterminous with their meaning, are emptied of documentability; photography here is compelled to exist in a state of constant selfcontradiction. In order to be effective in a montage, a photograph must not be returned to its context, and interpretation by processes of reconstruction (i.e. the return to the mimetic) must be thwarted. Even those objects which might be recognized must be allowed to make a journey into otherness. So in my own effort, the repeated photograph of 34 Howland Street, and even the misty image of London (Alvin Langdon Coburn) must drift off into new imaginary locations, into virtual or fictional cities. Deprived now of direction, of relational distance, of scale, of spatial configuration, these elements which began their life in reality, and which will sacrifice none of their indexicality, may seek out new referents, without those referents ever coming into existence. Montage as the image of the urbanite’s mental space plays out the drama of legibility, not so much as a problem posed by a city plan, or an architecture, or a particular distribution of population, but as a problem of the assimilative capacity of human consciousness. Montage can be experienced as a non-space, without perspective or planar arrangement, without a position for the reading/viewing subject. In circumstances like this, the human mind dissolves into the city’s images, is possessed by the city, becomes a homeless blank, as perhaps in the first city of ‘Ville’. In these circumstances the city can have no name and citizenship is a purely putative position. Alternatively, montage is seen as presenting a multidimensional space which, while it cannot be absorbed in a single panoramic view, yields

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itself to the perambulating flâneur, is gathered into human consciousness, but not necessarily resolved by that consciousness. Rimbaud’s ‘Antique’ Montage may give us the impression that we are turning an object or space through a sequence of views. In an obvious sense, the TTs of a multitranslation are rotations of the ST through a sequence of potentially multidimensional angles, of different spaces and times. Translation is perhaps, in its quiddity, cubist. And some texts, like Rimbaud’s ‘Antique’, even seem to compel this cubistic attitude upon us. The puzzles presented by ‘Antique’ (see Appendix 1 for a ‘straight’ translation) resolve themselves into two underlying concerns: the reading of the overall ‘situation’ and of the final sentence in particular. The son of Pan (satyr, faun) is a statue (Py 1967: 99), brought to life Galatea-like, or ‘une vision onirique volontaire, commandée’ (Brunel 1998: 193) (‘a dreamvision, deliberate, expressly conjured up’), a sly subversion of the blason (Raybaud calls it a ‘dé-représentation’ (1989: 13) (‘de-representation’). The potential sources of the hermaphroditic element (‘où dort le double sexe’), from Ovid to Swinburne, have been comprehensively surveyed by Guyaux (1991: 85–105). As for the final sentence, Brunel is of the view that it represents the ‘démarche . . . d’un danseur’ (1998: 193–4) (‘the gait . . . of a dancer’), a precise, studied choreography; Py sees it as ‘une marche remarquablement ralentie par la fragmentation de la perception visuelle en trois temps’ (1967: 100) (‘a walk remarkably slowed down by the fragmentation of visual perception, operating in three different stages’). For Osmond, it accurately depicts the faun’s preparing to walk, ‘flexing the right thigh, and then moving the left leg in stages: first flexing that thigh, then swinging the entire leg off the ground’ (1976: 101); Bernard and Guyaux laconically quote Ernest Delahaye: ‘L’attention de l’observateur s’est arrêtée sur une seule partie de la première jambe, sur les deux parties de la seconde’ (2000: 534) (‘The attention of the observer has focussed on a single part of the first leg, and on both parts of the second’). In view of these perceptual ambiguities – because, after all, they are perceptual rather than interpretative – there is every justification for taking up Osmond’s implicit invitation: ‘After Rimbaud, other artists have portrayed the human body in the form of a musical instrument (e.g. the Cubist painters)’ (1976: 102) (see Appendix 2). In this rendering of ‘Antique’, a cubist figure is asked to inform our reading of a text; the graphic figure is a presence in which is grounded a presiding awareness. The figure is designed to replace the title, or vie with the title, as a reference point; or is designed to act as a point of destination for the title’s point of departure. And the variations in font, as well as establishing particular kinships between individual words and between particular phonemes/graphemes, are designed to suggest that lexical items are set at different depths in a

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relief, or at different angles to each other. But this is not writing cubistically; it is writing to the tune of a cubistic totem. If cubism is characterized by the interpenetration and overlapping of forms, if, in its low relief, planes are tilted against each other, then in language, equally, words meet each other at angles, share portions of the same territory, intersect. And it is peculiarly in the hybridized nature of the prose poem to tread the border between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, the metonymic and the metaphoric, the perceptual and the conceptual (mimetic/cubist), teasing the reader with the dialectical shifts between the poles. It is in this spirit that I have essayed a calligrammatic version of ‘Antique’ (see Appendix 2), whose form is partly governed by the figure developed in the previous version, but also by the ways in which: (a) words intersect each other, or make contact with each other, through a shared grapheme; or (b) letter shapes suggest parts of an anatomical outline or a physical feature. I have tried also, but with only partial success I think, slightly to vary my calligraphic style, so that: (a) different portions of the ‘body’ have slightly different graphological characteristics, some more angular and ‘gothic’, others more rounded and Italianesque; and (b) the lightness or heaviness of touch varies. These are my attempts to create, with writing, different ‘sculptural’ styles, different ‘hues’ within a general monochromaticism (and hence some intimation of planar variation) and differences of ‘shading’. But the design is principally important in its creation of a figure directly out of language, in which shape and volume and surface and spatial displacement are produced by the letters themselves. The graphemic components of words must be seen to generate an alternative ‘syntax’, a syntax which directly sculpts its own intuitive perceptions, its own tactilities on the page. My final rendering of ‘Antique’ is in the style of Gertrude Stein. The still lifes of Tender Buttons (1914) evidently owe much to Stein’s conversations with Picasso, whom she had come to know as early as 1905 – his portrait of her was painted in 1906 – and to her perusal of his work (and that of Cézanne and Braque). The collection itself has attracted polarized responses – the poems mean nothing coherent/the poems have multiple encrypted messages running patchily through them (sexual, Gnostic, anti-patriarchal, socio-economic) – similar to the contradictory readings of analytic cubism we have already touched upon. I say ‘in the style of Gertrude Stein’, but the significance of this remark is by no means clear. Randa Dubnick (1984) identifies the Stein of The Making of Americans as an analytic cubist and the Stein of Tender Buttons (1914) as a synthetic cubist. But DeKoven (1983) finds in Tender Buttons an intersection of styles: ‘ “Rooms”, the third section of the book, is all in the 1911 transitional style . . . “Objects” and “Food”, the first and second sections of the book, both begin in the transitional style, then accelerate steadily through the middle style towards the extreme style of 1913 [i.e. towards greater fragmentation]’ (76). My own rendering gravitates towards the style of

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‘Rooms’ in its recourse to self-extending syntax, in which repetition has a significant part to play. But like the Stein of ‘Objects’ and ‘Food’, I also resort to wilful ‘mishearings’ or ‘misunderstandings’. Where, for example, Stein uses ‘cross’ for ‘less’, or ‘be where’ for ‘beware’, or ‘in specs’ for ‘inspects’, I sandwich ‘androgyny’ within ‘hermaphrodite’ (‘him and Roger and he Aphrodite’) and indulge in other, similar (half-) homophonies: Being Pan’s son is one being graceful and wanting to change in not needing to want though being Pan’s son is changing to graceful. Around your brow, crooned is sung in sunlit making or flower a reds and buries the little orbs then the precious ones moving. Seen eye holders. Re cheeks, what is it, vine leavings, suppose it absorbing, suppose some hollowing. On the canine no saturnine on ogle listening. Like your torso is its being a Cythera or some stringing strumming just so, not a not plucked but notes and notes in and out wandering wan winsome in arms is not disagreeable. Your heart is managed a cycling please do not please do not lower than belly than which way to him and Roger and he Aphrodite. Walk then at night-time in nightfall the gentle the moving this right thigh and moving then duskily this other the other thigh just after the darkness the right thigh the left thigh in parting the day then departing start walking this thigh moving slowly and then this other one the other and gradually lifting starkly and darkly this left leg deftly.

I seem to use Rimbaud as the materia prima with which I can pastiche Gertrude Stein. Or is it the other way round? It hardly matters as long as we cling to these two principles: (a) the translation which seeks to register the journey of the ST across the space/time between there and then and here and now will inevitably be a translation which involves a third party or third parties (i.e. the inhabitants, or their representative, of the intervening space/time); (b) translation may very consciously practise pastiche, but even if it does not, the adoption of a style, a register, a persona will entail a degree of pastiche-writing. We must therefore confront what it means to say that translation is pastiche. I have argued in other circumstances (2000b: 133) – apropos of the epigraph – that the ‘third voice’ is extremely beneficial, distracting ST and TT from their tête-à-tête, from a set of issues (linguistic fidelity, cultural accuracy, compensation, and so on) quite properly made fruitless by the intervention of other interests (how could the ST and the TT ever think that they were all that was at stake?). Now I would argue not merely for the beneficiality of the third voice but for its indispensability, both in terms of history and of good practice. Conclusion We are looking, then, to encourage a translational practice in which the ST is a percept which, by dint of perceptual multiplication, loses its ability to do anything other than act as the ‘iconic’ origin of the TT. The TT achieves its own autonomy not by turning away from the ST, but by conceptualizing

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it, that is to say, by endowing it with virtuality, by treating it not as something recuperable from the TT, but as something which the TT is taking forward, and only taking forward. By that I mean that the ST can never properly come to itself in a rematerialization. Of course there will continue to be a product, a TT, but this TT is no more than a token, a spectre, asking to be treated putatively, an instigation, an invitation, a provocation, a relay, pushing the ST on its way. Translation transforms the ST as percept into the ST as concept. In such circumstances, we cannot desire to be accurate about, or faithful to, the ST. We can only desire that the ST continues to live its literariness differently, in a sequence of constant self-differentiations, of constant perceptual renewals.

Appendix 1 Ville Je suis un éphémère et point trop mécontent citoyen d’une métropole crue moderne parce que tout gout connu a été elude dans les ameublements et l’extérieur des maisons aussi bien que dans le plan de la ville. Ici vous ne signaleriez les traces d’aucun monument de superstition. La morale et la langue sont réduites à leur plus simple expression, enfin! Ces millions de gens qui n’ont pas besoin de se connaître amènent si pareillement l’éducation, le métier et la vieillesse, que ce cours de vie doit être plusieurs fois moins long que ce qu’une statistique folle trouve pour les peuples du continent. Aussi comme, de ma fenêtre, je vois des spectres nouveaux roulant à travers l’épaisse et éternelle fume de charbon, – notre ombre des bois, notre nuit d’été! – des Érinnyes nouvelles, devant mo cottage qui est ma patrie et tout mon cœur puisque tout ici ressemble à ceci, – la Mort sans plaurs, notre active fille et servante, et un Amour désespéré, et un joli Crime piaulant dans la boue de la rue. City I am an ephemeral and none too dissatisfied citizen of a metropolis credited with being modern, because every known style has been studiously avoided in the furnishings and exteriors of the houses, as in the city plan. Here you would be at a loss to point out any monument to past beliefs. Ethics and language are reduced to the barest minimum, at long last! These millions of people, who have no need to know each other, pursue their education, work, old age with so little variation that their lifespan must be several times shorter than what unruly statistics tell us about continental peoples. Thus as, from my window, I can see new spectres moving forward through the thick and persistent smog – our sylvan shade, our summer night! – new Furies, passing by my cottage door, which is my homeland and my heart’s content, since all here is like this, – dry-eyed Death, our ever-busy daughter and servant, a Love without hope and a fetching Crime whimpering in the street’s mud. Antique Gracieux fils de Pan! Autour de ton front couronné de fleurettes et de baies tes yeux, des boules précieuses, remuent. Tachées de lies brunes, tes joues se creusent. Tes crocs luisent. Ta poitrine ressemble à une cithara, des tintements circulent dans tes bras blonds. Ton cœur bat dans ce ventre où dort le double sexe. Promène-toi, la nuit, en mouvant doucement cette cuisse, cette seconde cuisse et cette jambe de gauche.

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Antique Son of Pan, full of grace! Around your brow crowned with flowerets and berries your eyes, precious orbs, move. Stained with darkening wine dregs, your cheeks sink to sunken. Your sharp teeth gleam. Your torso is like a cithara, plucked notes run up and down your pale-skinned arms. Your heart beats in this belly, bed of the slumbering double sex. Walk, at night, gently moving first this thigh, this other thigh and this left leg.

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Appendix 2

Figure 2.1 ‘Ville’

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Figure 2.2 ‘Antique’

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Figure 2.3 ‘Antique’

3 Loosening the grip of the text: theory as an aid to creativity Jean Boase-Beier

Constraint as a source of creativity This is not the first time I have argued that what one might intuitively expect to hamper creative freedom in translation in fact serves to enhance it. In The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity (1999), Michael Holman and I, examining some of the constraints (self-)imposed upon writers, argue that the notion of constraint is not, for creative writing, to be seen as negative: something akin to compulsion, coercion or denial of individuality. In that chapter we take the view that constraint in terms of measure, balance or pattern empowers the creative act because it is in the interplay between given extra- and intratextual constraint and individual freedom that creativity develops. Similarly, we argue that the constraints imposed by the presence of a source text empower and enhance the creativity of the translation act by placing the translator in a position of striving to overcome them (1999: 17). In this chapter I am not concerned with the effect of constraints imposed by the source text but instead with another, and perhaps more unexpected, aid to creativity: theory. Specifically I shall be asking: How could knowledge of theory actually help a translator to be creative?

How theory affects practice The view expressed here – that theory can affect practice – must be set against the background of two basic assumptions about the nature of theory itself. One such assumption is that a theory is essentially an explanation of practice and cannot therefore dictate practice; if it did, it would lose its explanatory power. This can be seen if we examine what I take to be a central issue in translation: how an interpretation of the source text (ST) is arrived at. Clearly it would be possible to construct a textual reading which conforms to a particular theory. This, according to Pilkington (1991: 48) is why David Lodge’s (1986) reading of Hemingway is ‘absurd’ (1991: 49): it is determined by Lodge’s theory of how to read a text, and is therefore unnaturally constrained. Though Pilkington (1991) does not elaborate

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upon this point, in fact Lodge not only produces a bad reading but also fails to illustrate how his theory works to explain readings as the reading is itself dependent upon the theory. Theory, then, cannot dictate how we read or, presumably, how we translate a particular text: theory is something essentially non-prescriptive, something which gives a systematic account (see Gutt 2000: 117) of how an intuitive critical reading of a text or a translation of a text comes into being. (For further discussion of whether theory can dictate practice, see Chesterman and Wagner 2002.) The second assumption about the nature of theories which I am making is this: They are themselves creative constructs. Like any product of creative processes (like a painting, a poem or a piece of music), they are therefore things with which we creatively engage. Theories by their nature demand the active participation of those who strive to interpret them, a mental engagement which involves developing and changing one’s view of the world. This is to some extent quite irrespective of whether one accepts the theory as a true account of a set of circumstances or not. One may, for example, decide to reject the view that the world is flat but the first time one considers such a view, one’s conceptual representations of the world are expanded to include a flat world as a possible scenario. The human mind functions by entertaining frameworks of what is, what could be and what could not be possible. Theories therefore fulfil a human need: the need to refresh constantly, rethink, expand and adjust our picture of the world; they are, in Mary Midgley’s words, ‘pairs of spectacles through which to see the world differently’ (2001: 26). If a theory does not dictate practice, does not provide a fixed set of instructions to follow, but is essentially a creatively constructed (and shifting) view of practice, then this suggests that the reason courses in translation studies (and other disciplines) frequently include an element of theory is not so much to provide knowledge for its own sake but because theory gives us new ways of thinking. More specifically, a theory may, even if and especially if it cannot tell us what to do, allow us to approach the task of translation in a new way. One would expect this to be especially true of a theory which itself allocates a central role to creativity. In the next section I will focus on one such theory: relevance theory. I shall try to establish what this theory tells us about the reader’s role, the translator’s freedom and the creativity of the translation act, and how it can, by holding these issues up for scrutiny, potentially help a translator to see that there are different ways of translating the same text, and also that translation of poetry in particular allows for the maximum of creativity on the translator’s part. Relevance theory and the reader Relevance theory, when applied to literary texts, is, like all cognitive stylistic theories (see Stockwell 2002: 1; Pilkington 2000: 22), essentially a theory of reading. When applied to translation (as, for example, by Almazán Garcia

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2001) its importance lies in emphasizing the role of the translator as reader, that is as someone who actively engages with a text (see MacKenzie 2002: 3) to produce a reading of the text, and, based upon that reading, produces a further text which allows for the active engagement of its own readers. The best-known application of relevance theory to translation is Gutt (2000), a book which focuses on the act of translation as an act of communication. However, Gutt is not primarily concerned with literary texts or literary translation, and, in placing his emphasis on the communicative aspect of translation, he does not address all of the same questions as authors of cognitive stylistic studies in general address nor those posed by authors of such approaches to literary translation. This is a distinction discussed by Mackenzie (2002: 31), who points out that in fact Sperber and Wilson, who developed relevance theory in their book Relevance, focus in that first edition more on communication and its assumption of optimal relevance, whereas in the second (1995) edition of the book, they make it clear that in terms of cognition the notion of maximal relevance (1995: 260ff.) is of paramount importance. Maximal relevance, when applied to the reading of a literary text, suggests that the way the text is formulated will be seen by the reader as especially significant. In keeping with this view, and because in this chapter I am concerned mainly with the translator’s reading of a poetic source text, I will here focus on what relevance theory (and cognitive approaches more generally) can tell us about the translation of literary texts. Specifically, I wish to make the following set of assumptions, which I take to be consistent with relevance theory and cognitive stylistics, about how a translator reads a poem to be translated: (1) The translator assumes that what the poet (or the voice in the text) is saying is relevant (Gutt 2000) in all its aspects. (2) ‘Relevant’ in general means yielding maximum returns for minimum effort (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 123–4). The corollary of this is that more effort yields greater returns (MacKenzie 2002: 31). (3) Poetry works by demanding more effort; it is ambiguous, complex, and requires the mental and emotional involvement of its reader (Empson 1930; Pilkington 2000) and therefore also of its translator (Boase-Beier 2004a). (4) Poetry demands more effort because engagement with it gives rise to a set of weak implicatures which are largely embodied in what can broadly be called its style (Pilkington 2000; Boase-Beier 2004a), rather than in its propositional meaning. (5) Poetry expresses a mental state (Boase-Beier 2002; Richards 1926: 87ff.) and creates effects on the reader (Pilkington 2000) which include experiencing one’s own version of that mental state (MacKenzie 2002: 42). These assumptions carry important consequences for the translator of a poetic text, and I shall deal with some of these consequences as they relate to the assumptions in turn. Taken together, (1) and (2) say that

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communicators in general assume maximum return for minimum effort, and that therefore the more effortful a reading, the greater the returns one could expect. This means that we read and interpret and continue to construct and modify a reading of a literary text until it satisfies us, at least temporarily. This is a point made both by Scott (2000b: 3) arguing for an approach to poetry translation which is rooted in a postmodernist view and by Oatley (2003), who is a cognitive psychologist. Readings, which can, in this sense, usefully be distinguished from interpretations (both Scott and Oatley make this distinction; Sperber (1996a) uses ‘interpretation’ for what Scott and Oatley call ‘reading’) are thus private and personal and represent the reader’s (and in our case, the translator’s) utmost engagement with a poetic text; this is expressed in (3) above. ‘Minimum’ in this sense (as in (2)) is to be understood as the minimum necessary to produce a personally acceptable reading. It may be that such a ‘minimum’ involves an engagement with a poem lasting weeks, or years, or a lifetime. It is in the nature of poetry to set that minimum very high, much higher than in, say, a scientific report (or a newspaper article; see Boase-Beier 2004a: 34). And it is one of the problems of some translations of poetry that the minimum has been set too low: it is as though the translator has too soon felt that an adequate reading has been obtained and interpretation has stopped too early. What (4) suggests is that poetry, by its very nature, demands the sort of engagement of the reader which (1), (2) and (3) express. ‘Relevance’ is not a notion which only applies to the way the mind of a reader works but it is crucially tied up, through (4), with the nature of a poem. Poetry achieves relevance exactly by virtue of its characteristic of drawing the reader in, and it draws the reader in by being non-explicit, by allowing inferences (MacKenzie 2002; Pilkington 2000). What a translator, constructing a reading of a poem, will do, is ask not ‘What does this poem mean?’ but ‘What does it mean to me, given my background, understanding, aims and knowledge?’. Not ‘What does the author intend?’ but ‘How do I, given my background, understanding, aims and knowledge, construct an intention for the imagined or inferred author?’. Indeed, it could be argued that it is not possible in any case to entertain the same mental picture or state as the original writer, even if one had access to it, because such a mental representation will always be transformed by the individual, who will ‘paraphrase it, translate it, summarize it, expand on it’ (Sperber 1996a: 34). In discussing the reading and translation of a poem by von Törne (1981) about the Holocaust (Boase-Beier 2004a), I noted that my reading of other texts about the Holocaust influenced my choice of possible structures to fill a gap left by a missing auxiliary in the poem. The missing auxiliary is typical of German poetic discourse, but it is also typical (as it appears to the translator in this case, but presumably also to many readers with a background in German culture or history) of the sort of statement made by people who have witnessed or known about atrocities but do not actually want to acknowledge them; an instance of language which ‘reveals even

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where it is silent’ (Schlant 1999: 3). As translator I construct an intention for the narrator of the poem (possibly even for von Törne himself) to convey such a state of mind. Indeed, according to relevance theory (and implicit in many other literary theories, especially those in the phenomenological tradition; see, for example, Iser 1978), I cannot read without constructing such an intention. As a translator, knowledge of relevance theory (but also of cognitive stylistic theory in general and of literary theory, including postmodernist literary, in general) will help me to be aware that this perceived intention is indeed a construct, though a necessary one, upon which I can act, while simultaneously acknowledging that it is not final or exclusive. If I return to the poem later I may translate differently. Someone else may translate differently. It is hard to see how any of these potential translations could be more right or wrong than others. But they can certainly be more or less aware of the issues. And finally, (5) above says something very fundamental about the nature of poetry which has consequences for its translation. What a poem does is make us feel; Pilkington (in an unpublished paper) exemplifies this with Les Murray’s poem ‘On Home Beaches’ (2001: 132) which makes us feel what it feels like to be a fat man in swimming trunks on a beach. Not to know that there are fat men in swimming trunks on beaches, but to feel what it would feel like if one were oneself in this position. (And, crucially, if one were oneself in this position, not if one were the man in the poem.) A translator will want to capture that mental and emotional state and allow the readers of the translation in turn to experience their own version of these feelings. In sum, then, the type of theory I am considering here tells us that when we want to translate a poem we first construct a reading of it which will take into account both the nature of poetry to be open enough to engage its readers and its characteristic of making its readers feel. This reading will not be merely a surface reading or a concern for the meaning of the poem in a truth-conditional sense. It will go behind and beyond such superficial meaning in ways compatible with assumptions (1)–(5) above. The question this chapter asks, then, in the context of the above issues, is: What sort of freedom does knowledge of this type of theory give the translator? Translating ‘at the edge’ The following is a poem by Ernst Meister (Boase-Beier 2003: 46), with an English gloss. (1)

1

AM RANDE DES MEERS, at-the edge of-the sea 2 vom Horizonte gezogen – by-the horizon drawn 3 ‘zu Rande’, das ist to edge that is

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woanders. elsewhere

5

Zu Rande: to edge die Ankunft von jedem. the arrival of everyone

6

7

Ach, ein Spruch! ah an idiom

8

Mir ist to-me is 9 vor Augen before eyes 10 die Strecke, the path 11 um Hügel gewunden round hill(s) wound 12 und Hügel . . . and hill(s) 13 14 15 16

Hier, here nimm die take the Unsinnsblume nonsense-flower vom Wegrand. from-the way-edge

On the face of it, there is an immediately obvious problem for the translator of this poem into English, and that is that there is a play on several meanings of the word Rand. On the one hand there are the various uses of the expression am Rande as ‘at the edge of’ or, metaphorically, ‘tangentially’ or ‘in passing’ and also of several expressions which suggest an imminent falling-over into something feared: usually despair, death or madness. On the other there is zu Rande, which is part of expressions like mit etwas zu Rande kommen, ‘to manage something’. This ambiguity suggests two opposing possibilities: a sense of being on the edge of something unknown and fearful or a sense of taking control. At the same time the expression in l. 7 suggests awareness of the nature of idiom, so this play on the opposing metaphorical meanings of the idiom and on its literal meaning would seem to be central to the poem. An essential element in the way I read this poem is to see it as embodying and giving rise to a state of being in two (or more) minds, a cognitive state that is typical, I would argue, of that expressed in poetic texts and more specifically in figures such as metaphor, irony and ambiguity, figures which can only be understood if two or more mental pictures are enter-

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tained simultaneously. It is a cognitive state also present, outside poetry, in states of ‘knowing and not knowing’ (Boase-Beier 2004a; Cohen 2001) or ‘doublethink’ (Orwell 1987: 38). And in everyday language such a cognitive state is activated by idioms, which can always be understood both literally and in their conventionalized, accepted, but non-literal meaning, which, as we have seen in the case of expressions with Rande, may also have contradictory aspects. The mention of an idiom in l. 7 I understand as a further signal to the reader to explore the opposing ideas of the literal Rande in l. 1 and the idiomatic Rande in l. 3. Lines 8–12 appear to pick up the more literal, physical meaning of an edge, but the use of Rande in the final four lines, in its close juxtaposition to Unsinnsblume (‘nonsense-flower’), suggests again a metaphorical use, this time, in contrast to l. 3, a metaphor for an uncertain situation. The concept of the idiom, in its central position of the poem, in my reading both signals this dual state of mind and also suggests that it is a state which arises out of language, or at least can arise out of or be triggered by language. The idiom is also, as I read the poem, symbolic of the poem itself: this must both be read literally, as about physical, geographical features of life, and also metaphorically, as about questions of coping with life. It has a meaning which can be decoded as the sum of its parts, and also a further non-compositional meaning (the idiomatic meaning) which is more than the sum of its parts and can only be got by inference. The poem thus says something about ways of reading: you can take what you read at face value, or you can take it to be full of unspecified implicature which you as reader engage with, or (and I would say ideally) you can do both at once. Further implicatures of this reading of the poem are that meaning is not prior to utterance but arises from it, that meanings are personal and contextual, and that such creativity is part of the way we think and talk (as embodied in an idiom) and not something peculiar to poetry. What I have just set out is one possible reading of the poem, a reading which goes beyond a concern for what Rand is usually translated by into English. I have put this reading into the following translation (Boase-Beier 2003: 47) (2)

1 NEAR THE TOP OF THE HILL 2 preferring the path – 3 ‘on top of ’ is 4 another place. 5 6

Get on top: how we all get there.

7

Ah, just an idiom!

8 Before my eyes 9 the path 10 stretches

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round hill after hill . . .

13 14 15 16

Here, pick this nonsense-flower on the path to the top.

There are of course as many possible ways of translating this poem as there are of reading it. Other possible translations include one suggested by John Hartley Williams, in an email of 5 June 2003: (3)

AT THE SEA’S EDGE drawn to the horizon – ‘out on the edge’, which is to say, another place. On the edge: everyone’s destination.

Another version I tried was: (4)

IN THE GRIP OF THE WAVES tugged by the horizon – ‘get to grips’ is another place. Get to grips: how we all get by.

Hartley Williams’ version suggests that the concept of an edge is of especial significance to him, whereas my published version (2) and the one in (4) both place rather more emphasis on an idiom which gives rise to a double meaning of literal location and a set of metaphors for opposing mental states: control and lack of control such as might be experienced ‘in the grip of ’ emotion, illusion or madness. I have also chosen, in the published version ‘Near the Top of the Hill’, to focus on the contrast between journey and destination, here expressed as path and summit, and have picked up this contrast in the final line. Unsinn I read as the opposite of Sinn, where Sinn is the usual or accepted meaning of an expression, exactly that literal meaning which an idiom, by having so obviously dual meaning, will always throw into doubt. John Hartley Williams, in his correspondence with me about this poem (ibid.), said that the version ‘Near the Top of the Hill’ represented ‘not what Meister says, [but] what Jean Boase-Beier says’. I do not disagree with this; indeed what I am saying is that a reading of a poem is necessarily a construct on the reader’s part. A poem works by encouraging such constructs, so, if you construct a reading of a text and translate in such a way that the reader can in turn construct their own readings, you are doing exactly what poems demand. In this sense, the versions in (2), (3) and (4) above are simply alternatives.

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The creative and the cognitive dimensions in translation studies In parallel with the creative turn in translation studies, which this volume celebrates, there has also recently been evidence of a cognitive turn. In this, translation studies is in step with developments in other areas and disciplines, with the development of cognitive linguistics (see Lee 2001), cognitive poetics (Stockwell 2002; Semino and Culpeper 2002), with what Sperber (1996b: 3) calls the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology, with the interest in states of mind evidenced by sociological studies such as Cohen’s (2001) study, mentioned above, of how we deal with atrocity, with the increased interest within literary studies in how readers read (Lecercle 1999) and within literary linguistic studies in how readers construct meaning (Fabb 1997; Goldsworthy 1998; McCully 1998). Indeed I would argue that it is a trend to be found in many currently popular works as diverse as The Jigsaw Man (Britton 1997), about the work of a forensic psychologist in piecing together the mind of a criminal or The Book of Tells (Coll 2003), which deals with what people’s habits say about their state of mind. In all these areas, interest in the cognitive involves an investigation of what is below the surface and suggests that the reader (or listener, witness, forensic expert or observer) can find ways of understanding what is beyond the superficially obvious. Cognitively based studies of translation are part of this development. They are concerned with how a translator constructs a reading of a text and how that reading can be carried over into the translation while preserving intact the essentially interactive nature of the text. Such studies include, on the one hand, think-aloud protocols (Jääskeläinen 1989) which attempt to offer insights into what translators think. On the other hand, using the finished product as a clue to reconstructing a process, they may focus on the use of notions such as mind style (Boase-Beier 2004b), a concept which was originally developed by Fowler in 1977, and refers to the way patterns in a text are used as pointers to a world-view. Such studies also include references to notions such as the cognitive state which a reader constructs as lying beneath a poem, expressed in the poem’s voice (Boase-Beier 2004a). They are crucially concerned with a view of poetry and literature in general as indeterminate, full of gaps, complexities, ambiguities and signals, all of which demand maximum engagement by the reader. Views of translation which fall into this category can have profound consequences for the literary translator’s task because they suggest that it is the nature of the literary text to invite creative engagement. Relevance theory, in particular, is useful, because it enables us to separate the sort of communication which happens in everyday conversation, and which is generally aimed at efficiency, from literary communication, where what is most relevant is what is most relevant to the individual reader in a given context. Indeed, it could be argued that, in literary communication, the most efficient (in the sense of most poetic) reading is exactly the most inefficient (in terms of how non-literary texts are read) because it is the

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reading which demands not least but most effort. Cognitive translation theory, therefore, by emphasizing the reading aspect of the translation act and encouraging us to characterize literature as maximally underdetermined in meaning, demands the maximum creative involvement of the translator. Knowledge of such theories should free the translator from feeling too closely tied to the content of the original text and should encourage maximum creative freedom in the act of translation. What I have been arguing in this chapter is not that knowledge of relevance theory (or any other theory of literary reading, or of translation or of anything) will provide a translator with guidelines to follow. The effect of theory is more subtle than this; it involves providing a new view of the world, changing its reader’s perceptions, broadening the mind. In this its effects are very similar to those of literature and other creative works. In this way theory can act as a counterbalance to the constraints of the ST.

Part Two Translation methodologies

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4 Unlocking the black box: researching poetry translation processes Francis R. Jones

Introduction The high cultural prestige of poetry and the perceived difficulty of rendering it into another language make poetry translating a highly valued skill. Poetry translating, however, is in many ways still an unanalysed ‘black box’. Though valuable research exists in this area, it remains highly fragmented; and certain aspects appear so far to have been off-limits to direct empirical research. In particular, there has been very little investigation into what poetry translators actually do in text-transformation and wider professional terms. In this chapter I describe a set of data-gathering and data-analysis techniques, developed during a small-scale study into the working processes of ‘professional’ poetry translators, which can be used to prise open this black box. For reasons of space, I concentrate largely on the gathering and analysis of think-aloud protocols: real-time taped records of translators translating. Of course, research findings must ultimately be judged by what findings they generate – hence I also describe some sample findings from the study. Their main purpose, however, is to illustrate what the methods can potentially tell us, rather than to give a full overview of results.

Poetry translation processes: previous research Most empirical research into poetry translation processes consists of reports, usually by translators themselves, of how particular poems or collections were translated (for example, Weissbort 1989), though there is also a smaller body of edited translator interviews (for example, Honig 1985). These combine to give a picture of poetry translation as a rich, multifaceted process of solving often highly complex problems. Thus, for instance, de Beaugrande (1978) and Felstiner (1980) describe the lengthy process of coming to understand the source work and poet. Moffett (1989, 1999) describes the time, effort and ingenuity required to translate traditional rhyme and rhythm structures. And Jones (2000, 2002) describes how a poetry translator has to solve problems on several levels: transforming

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structures of form and semantics, communicating a text-world that might be alien to target readers, finding publishers, and so on. Such studies are retrospective, that is, based on observations made after the event. Since Krings’ pioneering Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht (‘What happens in translators’ heads’: 1986), however, there has been an upsurge of research into concurrent translation processes – that is, research based largely on think-aloud sessions recording what translators think and do while they are translating (see, for example, Jääskeläinen 2002; Tirkkonen-Condit 2002b). Most studies in this tradition conceptualize translation as a cognitive process. Though, from a cognitive viewpoint, at least some translation work is automatized, that is, involves simply reading a segment of source text and writing down a target equivalent, think-aloud studies cannot further investigate these phases for the very reason that automatized translation is largely unthinking (Jääskeläinen and Tirkkonen-Condit 1991; Mondahl and Jensen 1996; Bernardini 2001). Hence studies in this tradition have paid more attention to so-called ‘translation strategies’, where the translator consciously tackles a discrete problem, by means such as rephrasing the source-text segment, free association, dictionary searches, and so on (Krings 1986; Lörscher 1991, 1996; Mondahl and Jensen ibid.). Researchers such as Tirkkonen-Condit and Laukkanen (1996) have also looked at translators’ evaluative comments about themselves, their translating processes and the texts being translated. Research in the cognitive tradition has shown that, even in non-literary prose, translation processes are far from simple. A translator’s progress through a text is typically non-linear, iterative and multitasked: comprehension merges into production, initial solutions are revised or problems revisited later in the draft, and problems put on hold while related problems are solved (Séguinot 1996, 2000; Breedveld 2002; Shih in progress). As for expert translators (the focus of this study), they do not merely translate words and grammar, but lay heavy stress on global text features such as cohesion and context, and on having a ‘vision’ of the emerging target text within which they constantly evaluate their output (Breedveld 2002; Tirkkonen-Condit 2002a). Also, they do not necessarily translate faster or meet fewer problems than novices, as they are more likely to spot problems which a novice would not see; and the search for solutions which fit in with their target-text vision can considerably slow down output. But with all translators, quality of final output appears to correlate with factors such as the intensity of dictionary work and the sheer amount of time spent on a given amount of text (Jääskeläinen 1996; Tirkkonen-Condit 2002a). Most studies in the cognitive-process tradition have focused on nonliterary prose. Two pioneering think-aloud studies, however, both looking at the translation of classical Chinese verse into English, have generated valuable data about how trainee translators and non-translator poets actually translate poetry (Lam 1991; Liao 2002). Liao, for example, reports her translators’ overriding concern with non-semantic aspects of text transfer such as poetic form (rhyme and rhythm) and diction, which often

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caused them considerable difficulty. Translators typically adopted radical solutions to such problems – reshaping syntax, reordering, compensating (for example, replacing a five-syllable source-text line with a target-text pentameter), or even abandoning rhyme and rhythm altogether – though, more often than not, translators felt that some essential aspect of the poem was ‘lost in translation’. All of Lam and Liao’s subjects, however, were novices either as translators or poetry-writers; and the evidence cited above, for expert translators in other genres, indicates that experienced/expert translators of poetry may have somewhat different experiences. It appears, therefore, that poetry is likely to present translators with a radically different set of problems from the non-literary genres described in previous think-aloud studies. This implies that, before we can generate and present findings on a large scale, we need to explore further how think-aloud data about poetry translation can be gathered and analysed, and what contextual information would be needed in order to interpret the analyses. This, the description of a set of research methods for investigating poetry translation as it happens, is the main purpose of the present chapter. Validity To begin with, if poetry translation research is to have any value in describing what happens in the real world, I would argue that it needs to meet the same validity criteria as research into other complex human phenomena (De Vaus 2001: 27–31). To have internal validity, data-gathering and analysis methods should match what one wants to know (ibid.: 27–8). Thus, if one aims to investigate translators’ working processes, there is little alternative to actually observing them while translating – via the think-aloud method, for example. Retrospective reports such as those cited above give at best second-hand, edited evidence here. What they show is how poetry translators conceptualize and rationalize their actions, which can certainly be valuable to set the narrow, as-it-happens data in a wider context. Even here, however, translator interviews can provide better-quality data because they enable the researcher to put the same set of specially focused questions to a number of subjects, instead of allowing the translator to ramble at will. Translator interviews, however, are surprisingly rare in translation research (Sorvali 1998). Subject selection is also an internal-validity issue. Existing studies have already outlined the problems and working practices of novice poetry translators. Expert practitioners, however, define not only public perceptions of any socially valued skill (such as literary production), but also the level which trainees are expected to reach. Hence expert poetry translators are central to any coherent description of poetry translation processes – which is why they are the focus of the study described here. To have external validity, a study should be able to generalize beyond the actual data gathered (De Vaus 2001: 28–9). Unfortunately, very few

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poetry-translation studies have looked at multiple texts or translators in order to examine which processes might be typical and which might be idiosyncratic (see Susam-Sarajeva 2001). To have construct validity, research should fit in with a coherent theoretical account of the phenomenon being studied (De Vaus 2001: 30). Though poetry translating is often used as a vehicle for discussing wider translation issues, not many theory-oriented discussions examine poetry translation in its own right (among the honourable exceptions being Lefevere 1975; de Beaugrande 1978; Allén 1999), and discussions can also often be prescriptive (for example, Venuti 1995; de Beaugrande 1978) rather than modelling poetry translation ‘as is’ (pace Lefevere 1975; Koster 2000). As far as they go, existing theoretical views of poetry translation are certainly valuable in interpreting empirical research. Any coherent, nonprescriptive account of poetry translation which updates Lefevere and de Beaugrande’s models from the 1970s, however, needs to incorporate recent trends in translation theory as a whole. I regard three trends as particularly important here: 1. Models of translation as interpersonal, ethical and socio-political action (for example, Chesterman 2002) can contextualize the wider professional activity of poetry translators, explaining how poetry translators operate as ‘ambassadors’ between cultures, and as empowered agents between individuals such as writers, publishers and translation commissioners. 2. Seeing the translation process as a complex cognitive act of text transformation with the aim of interpersonal communication (Gutt 2000) – the basis of the think-aloud research outlined in the previous section – can help to explain why poetry translators take particular routes towards particular textual solutions. It would also provide a firm baseline for examining what in poetry translating is unique to poetry and what is shared with the translating of other genres. 3. Psychology-based models of creativity, as described by Kirsten Malmkjær (2003),1 could enable one to analyse a key aspect of the poetry translator’s work which would otherwise stay firmly locked in the black box. By themselves, few if any methods ensure all types of validity. Think-alouds, for example, can supply internally valid accounts of poetry translation processes by showing what translators actually do. But they are typically weak on external validity, because translators cannot easily rationalize or contextualize their actions, and because the time-consuming nature of the method means that subjects are typically few in number. Interviews have the opposite profile: they can ensure external validity by allowing more subjects to give wide-ranging accounts of their actions, but internal validity is potentially weaker, in that their accounts risk being idealized and even self-censored. A mixed-method approach, however, can increase validity by enabling the advantages of one method to compensate for the drawbacks of

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another (Creswell 2003: 29–31). And where data overlap (for example, when think-alouds and interviews both give data on translating strategies), one method can be used to check the reliability of the other. Thus some translation-studies researchers, for example, have combined think-alouds with follow-up interviews or questionnaires about the text translated and/ or comparative analyses of source and target texts (Dancette et al. 1996; Kovacˇicˇ 2000). The present project The pilot study described here has two phases: 1. Open-ended interviews with five poetry translators: see Appendix 1 for summary of the question schedule. 2. A think-aloud study of one translator (myself) translating one SerboCroat poem over four drafts, with a week between each draft: see Appendix 2 for source text and fourth-draft target text. These can be said to have strong internal validity in that they describe translators’ wider conceptualizations of their social and textual actions (interviews) plus how they actually translate (think-aloud). And though I, as researcher subject, could obviously not interview myself, my think-aloud data can still be contextualized by researcher introspection during analysis – a method which actively embraces the principle that ‘the personal-self [is] inseparable from the researcher-self’ (Creswell 2003: 182). Nevertheless, though a mixed-method approach is used, the fact that there were too few subjects to generate powerful generalizations means that external validity is still weak. The reason for this lies in the methoddevelopment aim of the present study. Running and analysing think-aloud research presents considerable methodological challenges, especially in a genre which sets very different demands from the non-literary prose texts focused on by most previous studies: hence the decision to begin with an exploratory study of the researcher’s own translating processes. Ideally, a follow-up study would involve pre-interviews with a larger number of translators, think-aloud protocols with a sub-group of these translators, plus follow-up interviews with the latter. All my subjects are professional poetry translators, working from various languages into English, their mother tongue. ‘Professional’ is defined as having published at least one complete volume of poetry translations. Being a professional is no guarantee that one is an expert, that is, that one translates well (Jääskeläinen 1996); and even though the translators in the present study were arguably validated as experts by the publishers who saw their work as fit for publication, this does not necessarily mean that an unpublished poetry translator translates badly. Thus if, in a future study, one wished to find out what distinguishes expert from non-expert translators, direct quality assessment of professional and novice subjects’ output by translation users (such as readers, critics, fellow translators and

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publishers) would provide surer guidelines here. This would first entail establishing what the assessment criteria should be – for example, by asking the same users to generate a set of criteria. The interview phase Open-ended interviews are widely used in social-science research to supply data on subjects’ attitudes and typical practices. In accordance with the view outlined above of translation as social and interpersonal action, they were used here (see Appendix 1) to examine: 1. The social and interpersonal context of the translators’ professional behaviour. 2. What translators see as their typical approaches and strategies to the whole translation process: selecting, reading and translating texts, and placing them with publishers. In the present study, five translators, working from Dutch, German, Polish or Russian into English (their mother tongue), were interviewed. Interviews lasted from one to two hours. Four were face to face, and one by telephone, which resulted in no data loss; but an attempt at email interviewing was abandoned because it gave considerably less data than oral interviews. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Though a grant paid for initial transcription, checking the transcriptions was extremely time-consuming, and close note-taking from the tapes would almost certainly have given just as much usable data in less time (Jones 1996: 174). As the main focus of this article is on think-aloud methods, only very brief accounts of analytic methods and findings for the interviews are given here. It is worth mentioning, however, that analysis of open-ended interviews can take two forms, both of which were used in this study: 1. Quantitative: by coding the mention of key features and then counting in how many interviews each code word occurs. All translators, for example, mentioned multiple drafts with ‘drawer time’ between each draft, and four out of five used other translators, and so on, as informants. Translators differed, however, as to whether they analysed the source text in detail before translating, as advocated by de Beaugrande (1978). Three claimed they normally did so, one claimed he did not, and another saw it as varying from source poet to poet. 2. Qualitative: by examining the key ‘storylines’ in the translators’ narratives. Subjects, for example, appeared to have one of three ‘personalities’. One translator, whom I labelled a jazz player,2 described himself as ‘feel[ing] the musical pulse’ of the source text and ‘sliding’ it into a target version. Another, whom I labelled a wordsmith, carefully analysed the texts before translating and focused on semantic equivalence rather than poetic form. The other three, whom I labelled librettists, prioritized both meaning and form.

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The think-aloud phase: data-gathering Viewing poetry translation as cognitive engagement with text implies that think-alouds, widely used to examine translation processes in other genres, can also access the processes of transforming and recreating poetic text – though data-gathering and analysis methods will inevitably need adapting to the changes of genre. To begin with data-gathering, the present study first indicates that it is better to run such studies in the translator’s normal workplace, as was the case here, than in an experimental setting. This allows translators to consult what might well be a wide range of reference books – in my case, two Serbo-Croat–English dictionaries, a monolingual Serbo-Croat dictionary, an English thesaurus, and an English rhyming dictionary. Of course, real-life settings introduce real-life variables, such as translators’ preferences for different reference materials; but if our purpose is to find out what poetry translators do in real life, eliminating such variables would hinder this very purpose. Second, as in this study, think-aloud monologues are often audiorecorded. This has the drawback of being unable to distinguish target-text options which translators simply mull over in their heads from those which they actually write down. Though in my own case I could reconstruct this, when recording other translators it would almost certainly be better to use a video recorder to show what is written down. An external (for example, clip) mike would be advisable, however, to make sure that the spoken data were still adequately captured. Third, the time-consuming nature of think-aloud research is exacerbated by the fact that poetry translating itself is slow work. My sonnet generated six hours of recordings. At ten transcribing hours per cassette hour, these took about sixty hours to transcribe, generating 233 pages of protocols;3 coding and logging data then took about one week per draft. A study which examined enough subjects translating enough different types of poem (rhymed and unrhymed, for example) to make generalizable conclusions, therefore, would be no small-scale research project. Analysing poetry protocols As with the interviews, analysis consisted of putting qualitative ‘skin’ on quantitative ‘bones’ (see Creswell 2003: 15–17). The protocol was divided into lines according to tape counter number (see extracts below); each number represented 6–7 seconds of translating time. This enabled the translating time taken up by various phenomena to be quantified. The protocols were then examined qualitatively to capture what was going on at certain key moments. Analysis itself was structured according to three key measures: ‘Sequences’, ‘Foci’ and ‘Drafts’. Each is described in detail below.

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Sequences4 These units (like Dancette and Ménard’s ‘loci’: 1996) describe what the translator does when. Most are ‘strategic’ or ‘problem-solving’ sequences: these start with the realization of a translation problem, then go through a simple or complex set of problem-definition, search and/or evaluation procedures, until an acceptable solution is recorded or the problem abandoned. Some, however, are ‘non-problematic’ or ‘automatized’ sequences, when a source-text segment is read and an acceptable target-text equivalent immediately written down ( Jääskeläinen and Tirkkonen-Condit 1991). In the present study, it was felt that examining the length and complexity of sequences could provide useful information about the magnitude and nature of the poetry translator’s task. For example, research described earlier has shown translation processes in other genres to be non-linear and multitasked. Unsurprisingly, the same was true for the poetry translation processes in this study; but though the overall picture was complex, it was not amorphous. The translator’s sequences showed a clear double level of organization, whereby larger strategic sequences, which may be called ‘macrosequences’, were made up of one or more strategic or nonproblematic sub-sequences, which may be called ‘microsequences’. A macrosequence typically aims to produce an acceptable version of a medium-length unit of text (for example, draft-translating a half-line, or revising a verse) or a textual structure (for example, finding a pair of rhyme-words). Thus, in Figure 4.1, macrosequence 1 shows the translator reading the source-text half-line kad sama je tmina, then puzzling out and finally writing down two alternative literal equivalents: when it itself is darkness and when it is darkness alone. Microsequences tackle sub-aspects of the overall problem addressed in the macrosequence. In Figure 4.1, microsequence 1a begins (line 50) with identifying the adjective sama (itself, alone) as problematic, as opposed to the adverb samo (only); but this is put on hold while surrounding problems are tackled. In microsequence 1b (line 51), kad is translated nonproblematically as when. In microsequence 1c (lines 52–7), the meaning of tmina (darkness) is checked in the dictionary. Microsequence 1a is then returned to (lines 58–62), and an equivalent it itself generated for sama on the assumption that it agrees with the preceding feminine singular noun sˇuma (forest). With the writing of an English equivalent for the half-line (lines 60–2), microsequence 1a (and macrosequence 1) appears to end, and the next text-unit is read (line 63); but microsequence 1a (and macrosequence 1) is picked up again when another feminine singular adjective (tolika: so much) reminds the translator that sama might also agree with the feminine singular noun tmina, generating the alternative solution it . . . alone (lines 64–70). Such a double level of problem-solving, where a problem is broken down into constituent sub-aspects, is likely to characterize the translating or revising of ‘difficult’ text in general, and is almost certainly not unique to

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Figure 4.1 Sequences from draft 1 (line 1, 2nd half: see Appendix 2) poetry. Poetry, however, has been identified as a particularly problematic text type for novice translators (Liao 2002); and in non-literary genres, expert translators appear to find different problems than novices, not fewer (Jääskeläinen 1996). What is special about poetry, therefore, might be the fact that its conciseness, its associative and stylistic preciseness, plus its combination of meaning and sound structures, make such difficult-text

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operations the norm during translation. Indeed, macrosequence 1 (20 tape-counter units or just over two minutes in length) is one of the more straightforward ones in the sonnet data: the average macrosequence was 44.9 units long and contained 7.6 microsequences. Foci The second dimension of analysis examined what type of problem each sequence tackled (as with Dancette and Ménard’s ‘niveau d’analyse’: 1996). Microsequences were coded in terms of the following strategic ‘foci’:5 • • • • • •

rhyme; rhythm; sound (misc.) – other sound-effects, for example, alliteration; lexis; grammar/discourse; reimage – shaping new semantic content independently of source-text meaning; • parallelism – for example, phrases in lines 1 and 5 echoing each other; • intertextuality – reference to other poets or translators, for example, ‘very Ted-Hughes-ish, this’; • feel/flow/style – an unspecified sense that an item is (in)appropriate. Three additional, non-strategic categories were: • non-problematic – an automatized read ST → write TT sequence; • scan – reading ST or TT, but not as part of one of the above foci; • unidentified (focus unclear) and procedural (sequences managing the wider translation or think-aloud task, such as ‘OK, next verse – line nine.’). These categories were derived from various sources: • previous poetry-translation research (for example, Liao 2002); • critical literature on the source author – pointing out, for example, Kulenovic´’s etymologically rich lexis and complex syntax (for example, Kisˇ 1990); • otherwise, the protocol itself. Intertextuality and reimage for example, were simply ‘there’ in the data. Comparing tape-counter units for each focus indicates the relative size of each type of problem tackled. Results for all four drafts combined are shown in Figure 4.2.6 The prominence of rhyme (13.7 per cent of all foci) and rhythm (14.8 per cent ) is hardly unexpected, but the dominance of lexis-based sequences (22.5 per cent) is perhaps more surprising. Interesting from a creativity point of view, however, is the high percentage of reimage-based sequences (19.2 per cent). After Sternberg and Lubart (1999), who view creativity as problem-solving which involves both novelty and appropriacy, one could define creative acts in poetry

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Figure 4.2 Foci, all drafts combined, percentages of overall tape-counter units

translating as those strategies which try not to reproduce source text features, but to generate new features to suit the target text as a poem in its own right. In semantic terms, this is what reimage strategies do. They meet the novelty criterion for creativity by creating new, non-ST content – as when draft 1’s literal equivalent to the depths of my memory, of the prisoner looking for the seeing-through of a wall (line 3: see Appendix 2) becomes transformed in draft 2 through a series of sound- and meaningbased free associations: 607 608 609 610 611 612 613 614

# Prisoner . . . as deep as memory, prisoner # spying, prying # # prying his walls # wall-prying prisoner . . . deep as memory, wall-prying prisoner trying to see #

These associations, however, stay within the same broad semantic field as the source image: all reimage sequences in the data seem to be trying to achieve a best-fit compromise between source–target semantic equivalence on the one hand and target-text criteria on the other (naturalness, soundfeatures such as alliteration, the need to end with a previously chosen rhyme-word such as ‘see’). This may be seen as a desire that solutions should be maximally appropriate: the other key element of creativity in Sternberg and Lubart’s definition.

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Drafts The translator interviews showed that poetry translating typically involves multiple drafts. This gives the third dimension of the think-aloud protocol analysis (after sequences and foci themselves): that of how sequences and their foci change from draft to draft. Thus: • In Draft 1, there was a clear distinction between foci. The fact that only 2.2 per cent of tape-counter units were unidentified/procedural shows that sequences were relatively easy to classify. This in turn indicates that work in draft 1 tended to be analytic, tackling issues such as lexis, grammar, and so on, separately. Lexis foci predominated (49.8 per cent of units), followed by grammar/discourse (12.1 per cent) and rhyme (12.3 per cent), showing a concentration on low-level ST–TT equivalence, though pairs of rhyme-words were also being sought. • In Draft 2 there was a radical change: a chi-square analysis of the relative number of tape-counter units per Focus across Drafts 1 and 2 showed highly significant differences (p 1.7 E-265). Now 23.8 per cent of units were spent on rhythm, 23.7 per cent on rhyme and 21.5 per cent on reimage – showing that poetic form was being added at this phase, which meant a lot of creative changes to ST semantics. Average macrosequences were very long (75.3 tape-counter units or 5.8 minutes in length, each with 9.5 microsequences), as was the draft overall (accounting for three out of the six hours spent on all drafts combined), showing the difficulty of the problems being tackled. As in later drafts, work concentrated on revising the target text generated in the previous draft, with only occasional recourse to the source text. • Draft 3 again showed highly significant differences in relative Focus size from Draft 2 (chi-square p 1.6 E-142). Macrosequences were still quite long (averaging 58.8 units), while microsequences were short (4.5 units, as opposed to 5.9 and 7.9 in drafts 1 and 2 respectively) and more foci were unidentified/procedural (11.8 per cent of all units, as opposed to 2.2 per cent and 7.0 per cent in drafts 1 and 2 respectively). This shows a tendency for long, shallow ‘sweeps’ through the text which touch on more aspects (foci) in a given time and revise more holistically (the foci were harder to identify). Of total units, 26.2 per cent were spent on reimage and 20.9 per cent on lexis, showing focus on TT semantics and lexical texture. • Though Draft 4 was shorter overall, distribution across the main Focus categories was very similar to that of Draft 3. A chi-square test again showed highly significant changes (p 1.1E-07). A closer look, however, showed that this was due mainly to increases in unidentified/procedural (that is, foci were even harder to identify), scan (reading through the previous version without changing it) and parallelism (looking for or avoiding similarities between separate lines) – indicating an even greater tendency to holistic, wide-ranging rather than analytic, narrow-focus revision.

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As mentioned earlier, think-aloud findings can be contextualized with more holistic data from interviews and, in my case, self-reflection. Out of the three translator personalities identified by the interviews, for example, I see myself as a librettist, for whom semantic meaning and poetic form are equally important. The analysis here shows that this balance is achieved by focusing first on semantic equivalence (draft 1), then on poetic form (draft 2), and then on an increasingly holistic merging of the two. Conclusion Most existing analyses of poetry translation start from the object of translation – that is, from the text as literature. Research within this model involves examining, for example, how well the target text reflects the stylistic subtleties of the source, or how the target has represented the source in ideological terms. These are obviously valid research approaches: after all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of literary translating is in the literary reading. Nevertheless, this article has proposed an alternative research model which starts from the subject of translation – that is, the translator. As its main focus is on people and processes rather than textual product, it uses methods typical of wider human-science research, including those already applied to the study of non-literary translation. The model analyses poetry translation in terms of cognitive skills within a wider interpersonal and social network. In particular, it advocates a mixed-method approach, eliciting and cross-checking the professional and text-transformation strategies of multiple translator subjects with a combination of interviews and real-time think-alouds. At a more detailed level, this chapter argues that think-aloud protocols of poetry translation can be analysed from a combination of viewpoints. Thus quantitative methods, such as comparing the time spent on different aspects of the task, can be integrated with qualitative illustrations of what these tasks typically involve, and with translators’ introspective comments gathered before and after the task. Moreover, analyses of the internal structure of translators’ problem-solving sequences can be combined with descriptions of what problems the translators are trying to solve, and how the nature of problems and solutions change over the redrafting process. It is hoped that this brief overview shows that human-science methods focused on the translator as subject can go some way towards describing and analysing the sheer complexity of the poetry translation process, and that they can tackle even traditionally ‘off-limits’ aspects of poetry translation such as translator creativity. Any fully-rounded research model of poetry translating, however, also needs to take more traditional textbased approaches into account – by integrating the direct observation techniques described here with literary-critical analyses of source and target texts, for example, or with the models of literary translation as social and textual action described in Venuti (2000). This will enable researchers

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to ground poetry translators’ professional and textual problem-solving procedures in the wider cultural significance of what they are doing. If nothing else, this is crucial because poetry is one of the few genres that is rarely translated simply for money or out of personal obligation. Virtually all poetry translators translate poetry because they care passionately about poetry and literary communication – and not only enjoy translating poetry, but believe that it needs translating. Appendix 1: Guided pre-interview questionnaire (summary) 1. Background • Years spent translating poetry. • Source and target language(s). • Number of published book-length translations. • Poets translated. • Translator-training courses taken (if any). 2. Selecting works for translation • Strategies used. • Do you select? On what criteria? • And/or are you selected? 3. Translation strategies • What are the phases of tackling a ‘typical’ translation job, from opening the source text to sending off to the publisher? • Do you have a separate source-text reading/analysis phase? • Do you first translate orally/mentally or go straight to writing? • What do you write on your first draft? How do you organize it? What strategies do you use here? • Do you have a revision phase? If so, what do you do at each revision? • Do other people have input into your target text? If so, when and how? • What are the knottiest problems you have to solve? • How do you tackle tricky word-meaning issues? • How do you tackle word-sound? • How do you tackle the issue of traditional poetic form? • What about non-contemporary source texts? 4. Philosophy and beliefs • Do you have any overt principles/beliefs which you feel guide your translation strategies? 5. Placing works with publishers • Strategies. • Problems encountered, and how these problems have been solved. 6. Other factors • Source language/culture. • Target language/dialect. • Deadlines. • Any other factors not mentioned.

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Appendix 2: Source text and draft 4 target text from think-aloud study KRIK Otkuda znam da je tu sˇuma kad sama je tmina, tolika da su je pune – i prazne duplje vida do dna mi pamc´enja, suzˇnja sˇto trazˇi provid zida. Da li to pipam stabla, il mene dira tamnina? Otkuda znam da je u sˇumi to kriknula ptica, kad sama je tisˇina, bezvucˇno nalicˇje zvuka, kad i sˇum moga daha prah mrklog postane muka, i sˇuplje bezuvcˇje ud-e u korijen glasnih zˇica. Taj krik – tmina to ote li dan ptici iz drijema? Il kriknu ljubav, il razbojstvo – i vec´ ih nema. Kud padam kucaj po kucaj sa srca-cˇasovnika? Gdje slijepcu vida da nad-em zˇizˇu suncˇevog oka? Tminu da zovem za sudiju, tajac za svjedoka? Kako taj muk da nadglusˇim pred mukom mrtvog krika? Skender Kulenovic´, from Soneti, 1968 (Kulenovic´ 1988) CRY And how do I know these are woods when there is nothing but night, so much that darkness has brimfilled the empty sockets of sight as deep as memory, prisoner prising at walls to see. Are my fingers brushing at trees or is darkness touching me? And how do I know in the woods that what just shrieked was a bird, when all I can hear is silence, sound inside-out, the unheard, when even the hiss of my breath is stillness, pitch-black and mute, a deadening coal-dust that numbs my vocal chords to their root. That shriek now a bird’s, what wrenched it from dreaming – was it the dark? Or a cry of love, or of reiving? But now there’s nothing there. Between the beats of my heart-clock, what drags me down, in what arc? How is this blindman of sight to find the range of the sun-eye? My witnesses stillness and night: shall I summon them to swear? How must I deafen the silence before that silent uncry?

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kirsten Malmkjær’s paper inspired this line of analysis in the present study. Reflecting his hobby in real life. Excluding draft 4, which was highly similar to draft 3, would only have reduced these figures by 10 per cent. ‘Strategies’ in my November 2003 paper. Foci and microsequences were strictly coterminous (one focus = one microsequence). Where the same stretch of protocol appeared to have

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translation and creativity twin foci (for example, rhythm and reimage simultaneously), this was also seen as a case of overlapping microsequences. Non-problematic microsequences are excluded, as they are only a feature of SL–TL transfer (draft 1) or of copying handwritten text into the word-processor (draft 3).

5 Inventing subversion: body as stage amid desire, text and writing How space uses the unspeakable to develop a new methodology of translation practices in Greece Christiana Lambrinidis

Pass(port) control in a southern European airport: I pass, as two activists from South Africa do not pass, held back for further scrutinizing of their (pass)ports. Is this not what translation is all about? Upon arrival at the hotel, my (pass)x(port) is held at the reception desk – personal information is sent to the police – to be returned to me upon departure. ‘Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis . . .’ (Kristeva 1991: 1). How many (in)visible translations of rage are we subject to as readers – translators – writers? Do we pass scattered boundaries of interpretation as a dissimilar collectivity of foreigners? Is this not translation? In October of 2003 I walked into ΠΛΑΤΩ – a bookshop in Belgrade – well versed in Anglophone titles and postmodern theory. I did not ask which books were available and in what languages before the NATO bombings. There was no apparent rage, only the visibility of a shelled building across from the Modern Art Museum. Is this not translation? Fulfilling my European Community privileges or else designing the stage for a performance of ambivalent meanings and soundless monologues to take place, I bought two books from the ΠΛΑΤΩ bookshop: The Damned Yard by Ivo Adric (2000), a Bosnian writer of former Yugoslavia, edited by Celia Hawkesworth, a British scholar and Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, edited by Vinay Dharsadker (2001), an Indian scholar teaching in the USA. Where are the pass(port)s? Perhaps the pass(port)s – where the port em-bodies the pass and the reenactment of the pass[ing]1 determines successful crossings – can be found in the act of buying these books – a nationalism in practice masked as an imaginary compilation of multiply dispersed hegemonic selves. Isn’t translation masking? Why else would I buy books in the middle of a city I crossed/traversed with my parents travelling north as a girl in the back of a

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British2 car – Greeks trans-port[ed]3 by their own colonized position. Ethnicity en-staged as familial body in motion – trans-port[ed] selves viewed themselves and each other as crossing geographies in an attempt to establish boundaries within a symbiotic system of family relations. My parents intended to appropriate hegemonic constructions of self as un-interpreted, un-changeable, loyal and thus avoid altogether a transference4 of sorts which would betray the volatility of a system that could not but depend on its various multiplicities of mis-representation. Perhaps the act of buying these books allows for a personal but (in)visible conversion/coercion within memory as a travelogue of bodies in diaspora: a performance allowing for desired (dis)associations amid the front lines of rage as reading–translating–writing. Is this not translation? To establish impeding relationships, however homo-social, ambivalent and copious, between reader–translator–writer,5 I should add that in Athens (Greece), where I live, it would be highly unlikely to find any of the above-mentioned books. For me as a southern European/Mediterranean/ Balkan woman, both books existed in bodies of translation torn out of their fragmented, displaced narratives – where politics of gender, globalization and intervention strategies exercise implementations of space and accessibility – where spirited discourses of identity-inscribing flee in all directions, as Gilles Deleuze (1997) might say. Is this mobility, forced or not, a translation? During the war in former Yugoslavia and because of nationalistic and religious in-securities (I am not avoiding the correlation with the stock market) Greece sided with Serbia – I, on the other hand, did not feel comfortable not to subvert this siding how ever problematic may be considered a coherence of identities – I left for Tuzla (Bosnia) with a European Parliament convoy where I conducted writing workshops for women in the refugee camps. Seventy-five testimonies I later directed into an in-cohesive performance, Women of Tuzla, Serajevo and Mostar: A Mythography of Courage,6 in Antwerp, Athens, Galway, Athens, Kurdish refugee camps, against the victimization of refugees as a training ground for dignity and survival. By that time the war was over, and Serbocroate, the language used in the testimonies and spoken by the women, had been dismantled into a fictitious separation of nationalistic prescriptions within a barbwire trespassing of borders. Inevitably the performances became sites of resistance as the Serbocroate, the Kurdish, the Flemish and the Celtic cohabited the stages with the women from the camps to create alternative communities of witnessing. This communal identity-constructing, however unstable, contextual and vulnerable, enabled a corporality out of the ephemeral, action plucked out of an assumed passivity. I did not know then I were to meet – like a spirit returning to the body once owned – the perpetual exile of inner selves. ‘But when darkness comes I put off this unenviable body – my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent – and inhabit space. I am then Virgil’s companion and Plato’s . . .’ writes Virginia Woolf (1959: 52–3) in The Waves, performing perhaps an act of translation as a fantasmatic play of accessibility between and among thinkers. When my father died, my

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mother could not bare his empty pillow – her widowhood was such an ambiguous presence that absences had not only to turn themselves into somata (bodies) but I had to re-occupy my position in the back of the British car mentioned earlier. Space had to be inhabited for the father’s ghost – father logos – to be accessible as crossing geography in an attempt to translate symbiotic boundaries into an outside identity of a dispersed engendering. Isn’t accessibility the enlightened emancipatory heteronormative excuse for translation practices – another deployment of coherence? Isn’t coherence a homo-socialized performance between written/unwritten texts where stages are located for en-ghosting to appear or disappear? En route to the airport outside Belgrade, the taxi driver told me that his wife, a civil engineer, made 100 euros a month commuting to work 100 kilometres a day. Is this a translation? The books I had bought to familiarize myself with literature from former Yugoslavia – not incidentally I had chosen a Bosnian writer – displaced in the midst of Belgrade yet worldrenowned – and affirming my own travelling as cosmopolitan living of sorts even though connected with academic activist work, en-staged me as a Plato and gave the part of a Virginia Woolf to the civil engineer and vice versa. Casting is a praxis of perspective and interpretation. En-staging is an accepted act for audiences to seize the meaning of politics as translation. Translation cannot be Pietà-like innocent in actions of con(version), coercion. Translation is a mechanism of assigning meaning to ‘outside belongings’. Outside is a more adequate figure for thinking about social relations and the social. Isn’t translation a construction of mediated and unmediated histories and thus a space of social relations and the social? Doesn’t translation also function as a movement of inner and outward mobilities among people and texts? The notion of the outside supposes that we think in terms of ‘relations of proximity’, or the surface, ‘a network in which each point is distinct . . . and has a position in relation to every other point in the space that simultaneously holds and separates them all’ (Probyn 1996: 11). Isn’t this politicized geography another version of translation? Is translation space or surface? Or is it a horrific but mesmerizing theatre of violence where language chokes even the unarticulated proximities between subjects, textualities and the unspeakable? And if that is so, does writing become a torture chamber where ‘mother tongue’ appears in true form as a gagged bodily organ? My tongue – Η ΓΛΩΣΣΑ ΜΟΥ – [in Greek the word ΓΛΩΣΣΑ is the same for both language + tongue] is in my mind. Or deeper even. Repressed. So much so I must fish it out to invoke it, I must be suppliant to have it. The words I catch do not function. They are addled. Rotten eggs. Or better yet, words are bodiless. In my life the only permissible, freely accessible, IMMEDIATE, language – tongue ΓΛΩΣΣΑ are the senses. They are not censored. They are receptive, ready to inscribe. I feel my language – tongue ΓΛΩΣΣΑ is not breathing. It is scared and it is hiding. I spend much of my life thinking. In unsettling ways. Many times so violently that it seems to me that

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any minute my head will explode. Because these thoughts cannot be articulated. Cannot be transformed into words. They simply circulate inside of me, birth others, do not fit. But there is no Reason–Logos to free them. Lately I cannot write. I wake up and sleep with this anxiety, often I dream about it as well. That they were stealing my voice. That I will not be able to write down my thinking, as it reproduces itself and is gagged at the same time, it chokes me. To be able to write again, I must stay by myself, speechless, tranquil. I must stoop over SILENCE and draw up from their hiding place, slowly, patiently, the words that are MINE. I feel chased all the time. (Mara Stylianou, 1 November 2003, creative writing workshop in Athens)

The writer of the above text, written as a response to the writing assignment, Γρα´ψτε τη συνθ%κη τη δικ% σα Γλσσα απ το νημα στο ργανο, τσι στε να επιτρπει την πιθαν% δημιουργ α νων λεξιλογ ων (‘Write the convention of your own language – from meaning to (the) bodily organ – for the possibility of new vocabularies to occur’) en-stages her self into an elf-like body and works with her father in his law firm. She practises insurance law, like he does. She does not take off her body, but she does put it off, like Woolf, as she negotiates it constantly – a sign of punctuation in her father’s lexicon. Lately she has been hammering it out with him to acquire a place of her own. After gruelling negotiations for the daughter to be allowed to stay away from the physicality of the father’s omnipresence, the father agrees to re-enact space – what is space? Leibniz argues in the ‘Fourth Letter to Clarke’ (Leibniz and Clarke 1956) ‘if space is a property or an attribute, it must be the property of some substance. But of what substance will that bounded space be an affect or property, which the persons I am arguing with suppose to be between two bodies?’ (1956: 37) – perhaps the desired, fantasized, secret lover as daughter is for the father LOGOS the bounded space . . . Between two bodies . . . the incestuous and the collaborative in law . . . the Father wants the purchased flat – the outside surface – the . . . terms of relations of proximity . . . he wants it large and very expensive . . . as if the daughter’s future habitat must, for certain, personify the success of the displaced father’s story within the workings of the capitalist machine lurking behind the incest-prohibition that en-robes them both into a metaphor for a blurring of boundaries. Incestuous desire has to be foreclosed for us to establish clear boundaries – in other words untouchable signifiers of meaning. Blurring but not incest, is what translation always tries to avoid – at least in the physical attributed bodies of textuality – are there untouchable signifiers of meaning in the mechanisms of trans-lay-tion [α τιον = the deeper reason, the necessity which causes an action, which formulates a condition]? Because the father logos has kept the daughter tongue under his lock and key, within permeable spiritualities of the law as bureaucracy of the father order for so long, she is opting for small flats that translate well the limited space – an origin that has been foreclosed and cannot be argued with. She has spent her life so far occupying with her masqueraded elf-like – look! – a space inside her parents’ house. By establishing the father to be symbolizing the capital, the mother to be symbolizing reproduction and the

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child to be symbolizing the labour force, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1972) argue in Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, our nuclear family system, based on binary oppositions and heteronormativity, ensures our socialization into the capitalist system. Isn’t writing a subtextual product of binary oppositions, isn’t it a con-version/co-ercion of the capitalist machine? How do we free ourselves from writing? Perhaps with translation? How do we enact fantasized liberation acts? Perhaps with translation? After two years in the writing workshop, it is the first time Mara speaks of choking and of non-writing. Now that she is about to be set free, desire transposes itself into a mute body where the tongue-language is repressed only into the mind – a secret body in compartments – that delivers itself into unseen births mutating both its affirmations and its oppositions. A ‘double session’ as Derrida would call it, between literature and truth – seeking to reconstitute the presence of the other and therefore a dialectic model as the object of writing. But in Mara’s text there is no silent discourse of the soul but an angst which reproduces itself even as she is trying to recover the words which will make her articulate and tranquil. If there is a dialectic model with the father, the part of the other is interchangeable with the word. The word becomes the other and the only possibility for discourse is silence or muteness. Is this text asking from an imagined translation – a space of acceptance, tranquility and silence, a Foucaultian ethos of silence in a culture? And if it does, is this a mediated, performed practice where a brilliant woman in Greece can claim and construct a space of her own? And if so, isn’t this a conversion of body into readable space? Isn’t the chosen tongue-language a performed space in conflict as the first act of an untitled and subterranean ongoing theatre? A stage of soundless monologues desperately lusting to convert into dialogues with the other – the gagged bodily organ – allowing for the space and the sound to be awkward, inarticulate, un-grammatical, nonsensical perhaps? How do we free ourselves from writing? Perhaps with embodied records of the unspeakable? How do we enact translation as fantasized liberation acts? Is theory performance? Is performance a space for gagged organs and awkward languages? If translation is the theatre within which we understand the bondage relations of proximity between the thwarted selves of writing, desire and text, how do we then practise translation? In Greece, even the most brilliant translated edition does not carry the translator’s body to the headlines of the book’s social appearance. Resembling the ways in which family keeps its members hostage to qualify for space as substance theorizing. The importance never lies with the stage helping hand who is not thought of capable to exist autonomously inside the

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unravelling of any of the textualities partaking in a translation process. Invisibility becomes a socialization of proximity for those employed to exercise their converting skills and understanding of who puts what into which words. Three years ago, we founded a women’s translating collective in Athens, specializing in translating women’s texts. To make the need for such a collective understandable, I should mention that Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (1993), when translated into Greek, was arbitrarily changed into a heteronormative narrative, as publisher and translator decided to change the narrating voice from a feminine to masculine, selling, instead of the specific book, a widely accepted homophobia. Like that, invisibility overtook the prominence of a text read in various settings around the world. Had we used the stage to present translation realities, only silence and gagged presences would personify accurately the political distortions suffered by the original text. Because of such practices, and because of the lack of women’s writing translated into Greek, we began a feminist publishing series, that continues to undergo wars of a muted kind. To familiarize the translating women with texts on writing by Toni Morrison, Luce Irigaray, Alice James, Audrey Lorde, to mention a few, we began writing ‘double sessions’ with the unconscious. Keeping close contact with the politics of textualizing selves, we went through several writing exercises. We wanted to dis-embody desires held hostage inside fantasmatic writing constructions of self to give space to the translators-to-be. Like that they could voice the realities of their own lives away from the vocal stereotypes Greek society enforces upon women as spoiled speech acts. I teach English. Not a foreign language. On my way there. From one language to the other. I translate. I construct. Ways that weather well. The weight of co-socializing. I alter. I construct. Small wooden horses that unmask. My own text. (Emmy Sarava, member of feminist translating group) I am a teacher. Can I teach? I am a woman. Can I give birth? I am a translator. Can I translate? I am Toni Morrison. I can, I can, I can. She is not afraid to unsettle the toys mother arranged on the self. She spoils them, paints them, re-arranges them in new sequences, takes them out of sequence, breaks them. I never dared mess up the shelf mother has arranged years

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ago without me realizing the dreadful consequences. With just the thought of the last word I stand there, embarrassed, immobile, looking at the toys in line. Naked toys waiting to be fed. A doll winks at me. She wants me to be a collaborator. I am sorry mama, the precipice gaping underneath the shelf is all too inviting for me . . . I stand on my toes to look and find a key. I take it and lock the door . . . (Rania Stathoyiannopoulou, member of feminist translating group)

To emphasize the politics within the realm of translation and allow for a performative assigning of social relations within the accepted practice of the field in Greece, we interfered with the mechanisms of book publishing and proposed a new style of translation in print. At the end of each book, the translator(s) would add a creative writing section on personal investments of translating – excerpts of which were quoted above. Emy Sarava, a teacher of foreign languages lives alone in the city centre and en-stages an autonomous living in between languages – her own and others from which, according to her text, she wants no dividing lines to recast stepping over. She subverts hegemonies by dispersing identities within a realm of language as translation in motion: ‘On my way there, from one language to the other, I translate.’ Within a lack of contesting narratives, Emmy situates herself on stage to undo the silenced body of a translator not to mark a presence but an absence as the tongue-language chosen becomes a performed space in conflict. Rania Stathoyiannopoulou, on the other hand, chooses translation to inhabit a moment inside her life as a film shot to achieve mobility. Married, with two children, living away from the city centre above an ancient cemetery, as if she desires death to mediate subterranean realities. To understand the writer’s text she misreads it by writing how the writer, in this case Toni Morrison, taught her how to take back the spell of weakness cast upon her when dolls and shelves occupied the space of imagination. Faltering lines could not but design obedient living along the edge of misconception. Misconceived, she could allow herself to grow away from herself and like that teach English – an assumed foreignness, a masked proximity – to children in case the cemetery underneath the hearth could somehow allow for visible/in-visible playgrounds. Like that, in between theory, text writing and creativity, we constructed a new space where translators were neither puppeteers nor puppets in the shadow theatre of en-ghosted politics. We proceeded with publishing the first two books of the feminist series according to our proposal. The Re[a]venge of Barbie: Essays on Women’s Writing,7 the first book, began with a short text I wrote, as the editor, about subverting embedded relations in between authorship, the original and the trans[lated] in Greece. Appropriations and misappropriations intended called for what the reviewer from the largest Sunday newspaper in the country ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗΣ wrote ‘. . . this is a book which refers to itself and is reconstructed not only during its composition but every single time it is read . . .’.8

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This is not a peaceful book. It is neither difficult not easy. It is produced by the collaborative work of a women’s translating group trained to translate women’s writing. Which is why the translations abide by the writing style of each writer. It aims to introduce theoretical and non-theoretical texts on women’s writing by women writers and thinkers. It belongs to the women who read, write, want to write, never wrote, and to the men who want to learn ways to understand women or to see women or to read women. It belongs to adolescent boys and girls from the in-visible to the visible borderlands. It belongs to those who do not usually read and are looking for themselves. It belongs to those who read Greek and those who are learning to read Greek. It belongs to those who want to know the other and the same within themselves, those who fear whatever they desire, they know, they overlook.

Dialectical spaces do not have pass(port)s. There are no visible points of control. Perhaps books are points of control and interpretative strategies perform spectacles of understanding where that which is not us leads to a language which is not our own. From then on dispersed hegemonic selves follow their own and their multiple displacements in between and outside of invented histories of violent or bloodless acquisitions and ambivalent meanings. It is not an uncommon practice in Greek realms of translation to find instances where the translator, especially if the translator is male and the writer female, overrides the original text offering corrective versions of an assumed but not of an en-ghosted authorship as translation. Like a warden in an asylum or a prison corrections officer who directs imaginary uprisings only to be put in a position to assign solitary confinements to the inmates. As Foucault would say, inventing is that which does not make us see the in-visible but enables us instead to see how in-visible is the nonvisibility of the visible (Foucault 1996). Initiating a space for the speaking of translators themselves turns on the lights towards the darkened theatre of conversion practice in and out of the act of trans-lation and allows for a community of writers and translators to coexist at the vibrant and noiseless margins of text and interpretation in between a ventriloquist mortality and an ambiguous afterlife. Years of struggle, where women in Greece could translate women against silencing practices obliterating original and translated texts alike, resulted in an unprecedented breakthrough. The responsibility of continuing that struggle relies upon each of us who work to change the way we speak, we write, we understand and practise theory for allegiances to occur in the theatre of the unspeakable. Notes 1.

‘Passing is a slang term used when a person appears to be someone else or something else or make others believe that they are. It is attributed, generally, to be able to be accepted as a member of the opposite gender, a different race, or to appear as not having a certain disability’ (www.brainyencyclopedia.com) (accessed: 24 April 2005). See also Passing, a (1929) novel by Nella Larsen about a light-skinned African-

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

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American woman posing as white, and a (1994) memoir, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White, by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip. See in the British Council’s website under ‘British Council History’ the essay entitled ‘Propaganda?’ by Nicholas J Cull. (www.british council. org/history-why.htm) (accessed: 23 April 2005) Is [ed.] to denote editing another act that helps one understand the politics of translation further? See, for example, ‘The Politics of Translation’, G. C. Spivak (1993: 179–200). Trans latum: in etymological terms it means transference as a movement in/through space, meaning ‘to be carried across’. Dashes are commonly used to also show a break of thought . . . in the case of my text, dashes are used to show the theatricality of positioning between writer, translator and reader according to which the translator is physically in between reader and writer. More so the dashes function as masks between the inarticulate and articulate meaning of words to allow for a transference between social, material and cultural worlds. See Lambrinidis, C. (1995). Also ‘At Home with Lepa Mladjenovic: Women of Tuzla . . .’ at www.joannestle.com/livingrm/lepa/lepa03 belgium.html (accessed: 22 April 2005) Λαμπριν δη, X. (επιμ.) (2002), Η Δι-εκδκηση τη Barbie: Δοκμια Για Τη Γυναικεα Γραφ. Αθ%να: Κοχλ α. See in newspaper ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗΣ, Παπαδοπου´λου Αγγελικ% « Αν σκεπτταν η Μπα´ρμπι» (6 February 2002).

6 Painting with words Ann Pattison

Introduction There are two ways in which translators have traditionally learned their craft. The first is the empirical and largely retrospective method in which trainees learn by their mistakes, guided by more experienced translators who revise their work, a practice that is still prevalent in the translation departments of many international organizations. The second method involves studying linguistic theory and translation techniques, thus learning to rationalize the translation process. There is, however, a third way to train translators, that is, by teaching them to write as well as translate. This chapter, which considers the interaction between translation and creative writing from a pedagogical perspective, aims to demonstrate how the link between the two can be explored to pave the way for greater originality, giving translators a far greater facility in using words, the tools of their trade. It introduces an innovative workshop concept that is designed to benefit both established and trainee practitioners. This concept has a place in the development of not only literary translators but also the translation profession as a whole, including those who work with more institutional and technical texts. All translators can achieve improvement in the quality of their work once they are encouraged to write for pleasure, take risks and go beyond the usual boundaries. Before looking at the workshop itself, let us first consider the interface between translation and creative writing and examine conflicting historical perceptions of the translator’s role and of the art of translation. Over the centuries, the notion of pleasure, particularly the pleasure that the reader derives from an elegant text, underlies the more liberal attitudes to the role of the translator, in which translation was seen primarily as a mode of writing. El Medjira (2001) cites the role played in the seventeenth century by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt and his belles infidèles school in shaping French classical tastes in literature. Voltaire, for example, described d’Ablancourt (1606–64, a translator of, among others, Cicero, Tacitus and Caesar) as an elegant translator, but referred to his translations as ‘de belles infidèles’, that is, beautiful but unfaithful.

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The idea that translating great writers generates creativity and helps you to become a better writer is nothing new. According to Barnstone (1993: 108), Quintilian, the Roman orator from the first century ad, who wrote a twelve-volume work on how to train orators, knew that the writer’s skills (in his case the speech-writer’s skills) improved as a result of exercising the act of translation. In Book 10, Section 5 of his Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian explains the value to orators of Greek–Latin translation exercises. In European literature, we find further such examples that illustrate the beneficial effect of translation on writing. Many well-known French writers honed their skills by translation. Chateaubriand, for instance, translated Milton (Delisle and Lafond 2001). Mallarmé, who was an expert in English philology, translated poems by Poe. Translation had a stimulating effect on writers, with French and German versions of Shakespeare playing a key role in the future development of European literature. Such influences were not merely imitative and derivative but also led to the generation of new work or of new literary trends, such as the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) movement, which emerged in Germany during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The followers of this revolutionary movement reacted against the Enlightenment or Age of Reason and advocated inspiration, rather than reason (Cuddon 1991). Shakespeare was seen as their model and inspiration. Somewhat earlier, Voltaire, who was in England (1726–8), had translated the first three acts of Julius Caesar into French. Mason (1975) points out that the influence of Shakespeare was evident in several of Voltaire’s own plays written after this time, including Brutus (1730), La Mort de César (1731) and Zaïre (1732). Other writers, such as Montesquieu, who appears to have had a negative perception of translation, expressed the view that translating was a stultifying activity. In their outline of varying attitudes to translation through the ages, Delisle and Lafond (2001) refer to an anecdote from the satirical epistolary novel Lettres persanes (‘Persian Letters’) by Montesquieu (1721: letter 129). The anecdote below describes a meeting with a somewhat odd and very fastidious character, known as the mathematician, and a translator. The translator has exciting news: ‘I have just given my Horace to the public.’ ‘What?’ said the mathematician, ‘The public has had him for two thousand years.’ ‘You misunderstand,’ the other replied; ‘it is a translation of the ancient poet that I have just published. I have spent twenty years doing translations.’ ‘What, sir!’ said the mathematician, ‘haven’t you had a thought for twenty years? Do you speak for others while they think for you?’

In the same letter Montesquieu actually said: ‘If you go on translating all the time nobody will ever translate you’ (1721: letter 128), thus implying that translation had a status inferior to that of writing. More modern views of the relationship between creative writing and translation, on the other hand, clearly acknowledge that, as Newmark argues, the main feature of translators is that they are writers (1991: 144).

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The highly acclaimed translator-poet Seamus Heaney actually goes as far as to see a ‘topographical relation’ between himself and the work that he is translating. In the introduction to his translation of the medieval Irish epic Sweeney Astray, Heaney (1983: vii) mentions his shared experience with Sweeney of the ‘green spirit of the hedges’. He feels that his intimacy with the same landscape gives his translation an added authenticity. Furthermore, Heaney’s Whitbread prize-winning Beowulf (2000) was acknowledged by Julian Barnes, of the Times Literary Supplement, as a reclamation of literature: ‘Seamus Heaney’s new translation has released the poem from the syllabus back into literature’ (2000: on cover of paperback edition). Another distinguished translator-poet, Octavio Paz (1914–98), the Mexican writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, believed, and likewise demonstrated by his own achievements, that what translators do constitutes literature, the translator’s initiative in the act of translation being of vital importance and having the status of creation (1971: 19). These two examples suggest that what practising poets bring to translation is an added creativity. It is their ability to both work within and expand the boundaries that makes them better at their craft. Translation is no longer a creative act by proxy but becomes ‘writing in its own right’. This has profound implications for translator education. Unlike journalists, who receive extensive training in the effective use of language, translators are not generally taught writing skills. Where a writing module is offered as part of a masters course in translation, it is usually confined to technical writing skills. A quick straw poll in a class of translation students usually reveals that only two or three in any class have written anything creative since they were teenagers. The Painting with Words workshop In order to demonstrate the value of teaching translators creative writing skills, I devised a workshop concept entitled ‘Painting with Words’. The title draws on the metaphor of an artist. In the handouts, prospective workshop members are asked: ‘Would you go to the Tate Modern or to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, set up your easel and try to copy one of the paintings?’. Most of us would not contemplate doing this unless we had taken some art classes first, yet when it comes to a work painted in words, we as translators seem to have fewer scruples about practising the craft of writing before we attempt to produce translations. We will now discuss the Painting with Words formula and the rationale for each of the stages of the workshop. The concept was tested out in a class of both French and English mother-tongue translation students before it was used for the first time with professional translators from the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) French network. Workshops last a day or half a day. Before attending, the participants are asked to relax and jot down the first thing that comes into their heads. If nothing does, then they are asked, ‘Think of your childhood or your first love’. They are told, ‘What

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you write doesn’t have to be brilliant. It doesn’t even have to be particularly good. It does have to be spontaneous enough to give you an insight into what the creative process feels like and how it works.’ Because the intention at this stage is to achieve maximum spontaneity, they are not given a specific theme. They are asked to use their mother tongue or the language they dream in most and to submit their work anonymously so that it can be photocopied and put into a booklet for use at the workshop. In order to stimulate discussion on the interaction between translation and creativity, the workshop includes theory as well as two practical sessions. The introductory talk is initially historical in perspective, covering some of the writer-translators cited above. We then examine the role of translators and writers from a neurophysiological angle. In particular, we explore the controversial subject of left-brain and right-brain thinking, often referred to as ‘brain lateralization’. The intention here is to consider the origins of creativity and encompass all aspects of creative output including the visual side. Later, this will provide a point of departure for a discussion of writers who were also artists and of how translators might approach their work. The article ‘ “Right brain” or “left brain” – myth or reality?’ (McCrone 2000) is used to give a very brief overview of this topic. Most neuroscientists now reject the traditional view that considered the left cerebral hemisphere to be the logical, verbal and dominant half of the brain, whereas the right half was the imaginative and emotional side. The current view seems to be that the left hemisphere is responsible for detail whereas the right looks at the broad, background picture, McCrone says (ibid.). This was demonstrated by experiments in which researchers used images called letter navons, in which a large single letter such as an S is made up of many smaller letters, such as a series of Fs. Subjects were asked whether they saw the global image (the large letter S) or the local elements (the small letter Fs). However, later experiments using object navons, such as anchors, made up of very small local images, such as cups, produced conflicting results, which have highlighted a number of anomalies. Consequently, scientists are still unable to answer many questions relating to the issue of brain lateralization. Although the notion of ‘left brain–local/right brain–global’ is still under debate, it could have some relevance to the relationship between translation and creative writing. Detail appears to be significant. For instance, devices that writers find particularly successful in attracting the reader’s interest usually include the use of specific detail, such as a colour. Solange Hando, a travel writer of French mother tongue who writes in English (Hando: 2003, personal communication), highlights the importance of being a good observer with a sense of curiosity. She focuses on a specific detail when describing a scene and even carries with her something red that she can use to create a point of interest in photographs. Here we have been referring to visual details, but to paint a more vivid picture, some writers use references to culture-specific items or even to brandnames.

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Translators can then experience real problems in conveying all the associated connotations. For instance, in various foreign language versions of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾, translators had problems finding a suitable equivalent for ‘Woodbines’, a brand of cigarettes with very specific associations, as Hatherall (1997) points out. In the next part of the workshop, the discussion of techniques, such as focusing on detail, then leads on to a more general short exposé of the ‘tricks of the trade’ that writers use. These ‘tricks’ include starting a story with a hook (or accroche as it is known in French); the concept of show, don’t tell; suspension of disbelief; and the rule of three (where an effect is reinforced by repeating it three times or by gradually moving up the scale of intensity). A memorable example of a hook which gains the reader’s and a potential publisher’s interest from the very first sentence is from Sylvian Hamilton’s The Bone Pedlar (2000): ‘In the crypt of the abbey church at Hallowdene, the monks were boiling their bishop.’ Translators need to recognize when such hooks are being used and understand how they induce the reader to ‘swallow the bait’ and carry on reading. Only then is it possible to do justice to the source text. Steven King (2000) talks about the writer’s ‘toolbox’. Translators, too, have a toolbox of words and writing techniques at their disposal. They just have to learn how to use them. Another technique we look at is ‘Show, don’t tell’. This catchphrase is used in creative writing workshops to describe the modern practice of avoiding, where possible, the use of an omniscient narrator. Instead writers are encouraged to invoke the reader’s senses or introduce specific details to give a text immediacy. Mark Twain explains this very simply: ‘Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.’ Skilful use of this technique helps writers to achieve what books about creative writing call ‘suspension of disbelief’, that is, to create a world that seems completely authentic although it is imagined. They create this world by carrying out scrupulous research and paying rigorous attention to detail. To illustrate how repetition can be used effectively, we compare successful openings of books in both French and English, such as Gallo’s Napoléon: L’empereur des rois (1997: 13). Gallo repeats the line ‘Il est le Maître’ (‘He is the master’) four times on the first two pages and the fifth time he says ‘Napoléon est le Maître’. This flouts the rule of ‘elegant variation’ (that is, using synonyms wherever possible), which purists consider to be essential for good style in French. Even so, it paints an effective picture of Napoleon’s despotic character. A similar example from an English novel is the constant repetition of ‘she’ followed by a succession of verbs in the present tense, on the first page of Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992: 1). The above exposé of literary devices, using examples from at least two languages, serves to present translation as a form of writing and to familiarize students with techniques that would usually be covered in a creative writing class. It is generally acknowledged that writing improves

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with practice. Goldberg (1986) suggests that it is like a muscle that has to be exercised daily. A further reason for studying literary devices in both languages is that it helps translators to become aware of cultural norms and conventions, such as the above French predilection for the use of synonyms. To quote a further example, the omniscient narrator, though no longer popular in UK writing, is often encountered in the works of Latin-American writers, such as Isabel Allende, for instance. Such awareness of the cultural norms makes it easier to recognize when a writer is breaking the rules and crossing boundaries and creating an original image or alternatively, when he or she is resorting to clichés. To develop this a step further, translation may be seen as a form of cultural recontextualization in which translators learn norms not only to recognize them, but also to use them for their own purposes, so that they can defy them, creatively. Creative writing tutors encourage students to avoid clichés in their work even though some do appear in published material. A skilled translator will recognize a cliché in the source text and will likewise know when the writer has broken convention and created a startling new phrase or image. Such knowledge then provides a yardstick for evaluating how important it is to preserve the author’s imagery in translation. It may not be in the author’s best interest if the translator retains a cliché. On the other hand, paraphrasing a startling new image would sell the writer short and trivialize the status of original thought. An example that illustrates this point is found in the poem ‘Zone’, from Alcools by the painter-poet Apollinaire (1913). He creates the shocking image of a ‘soleil cou-coupé ’, translated by Oliver Bernard (1965: 25) as a ‘beheaded sun’. Writers are risk-takers, risk-taking being an essential part of the act of creation. With the exception of the belles infidèles school, translators in the past were often more cautious, which explains the popularity at certain periods in history of the literal approach to translation. In nineteenth-century France, for example, there was a movement known as the retour au littéralisme, spearheaded by Chateaubriand, who produced a very literal rendering of Milton’s Paradise Lost. During this period, some of Dante’s work was even translated into fourteenth-century French by Littré (Delisle and Lafond 2001). The aim of the present workshop, however, is to equip translators with the tools that will allow them to take risks successfully and be more creative. In order to encourage workshop participants to see the act of translation as an original act of writing, we progress from literary images to images that are visual in nature, such as shape-poems, delving deeper into the links between writing, translation and other creative arts, such as drawing and painting. The Calligrammes written by Apollinaire (1925), for example, provide an excellent stimulus for discussion of translation strategies. A brief look at these shape-poems also creates a further opportunity to revisit research with letter navons and the relationship between detail and the whole picture.

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Another aspect of writing that we look at is the creation of character. We do this because modern novels are often character-driven. This activity fits logically into a French–English workshop where students are likely to be familiar with Molière and his use of archetypes, that is, universal characters found everywhere, at any time, such as the miser, the religious hypocrite and the hypochondriac. This can lead seamlessly into a practical themed writing activity, in which groups of students are given a large poster, blank apart from the outline of a figure drawn on it. The task is to flesh out characters by filling the blank space with keywords in English or French and, if time allows, weave them into a story. An alternative hands-on writing experience is writing in response to sensual stimuli. These could be a piece of music (such as the theme for the film Out of Africa), smells and scents (coaltar soap, cinnamon, lavender, a wild rose, a slice of lemon and nail varnish) or a pumice stone (which feels rough to touch). This exercise demonstrates how to bring a page to life and make a reader hear, smell and feel what is happening. It gives translators a chance to put into practice the principle of ‘show don’t tell’ that they have discussed in the theory session, and to produce an original and vivid piece of writing, perhaps for the first time since they left school. They will explore the nature of inspiration and learn to value it in someone else’s work. Once students have had a chance to discuss how creative writing can help them as translators, we move onto the core part of the workshop. This session demonstrates how writing and translating interact by giving translators the opportunity to defy Montesquieu and be translated themselves. For them it is a new experience and something of a role reversal. Let’s assume we have a mixed group, some of whom work from English into French whereas others translate from French into English. The French mother-tongue translators study pieces of creative writing in English submitted by their English-speaking colleagues and discuss how they might reproduce sections of the texts in French. At the other end of the room, French poems and passages of prose are being translated into English. Everything remains anonymous until the final feedback session. Then we discuss all the main translation issues arising from the texts and authors can reveal their identity if they wish. In the closing session, translators are encouraged to become active culturally and on a literary level by joining a writers’ circle or a reading group. This is reinforced by the student handout, which reinforces the point about the ‘rule of three’, exhorting participants to ‘read, read, read’ and ‘write, write, write’. One advantage of a combined writing/translating session for translators, including those who normally work in the fields of law, medicine or technology, is that makes them aware of the reader’s needs. King (2000) mentions his concept of a favourite reader who is always in his mind when he writes. Student translators have also found that they can produce a more coherent, cohesive and meaningful target text if, when they are translating, they are able to visualize the target reader of their translation as a friend or favourite aunt with no knowledge of the source language. The workshop

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further enables them to see that, whether they are writing or translating, they must function first and foremost as communicators. The role and status of the translator It seems appropriate at this point to examine how pedagogical initiatives such as this can help to raise the status of the profession. One of the advantages of the Painting with Words concept is that translators are able to discover what it feels like to be at the receiving end and be translated. This gives them the impetus to re-evaluate their role. As Delisle and Lafond (2001) point out, during the Renaissance, translators in England not only shaped the English language, but also were so highly thought of that they often lived at court and served as tutors to princes. What, then, is the status of the translator in the twenty-first century and what is the role of creativity in translation? Robert French (2004), writing of creativity within a scientific concept, refers to the discovery–creativity continuum. This concept could also be applied to translation, whatever the field. Good scientific and technical translators, for example, have a sense of curiosity and love research. The more effort they put into this research, the more the translated text reads like an authentic and original piece of writing. The act of translation itself becomes an act of discovery as the translator looks into the subject in depth, doing much of the groundwork that the journalist would have done before writing the original article. Translation’s position on the continuum slides backwards and forwards, depending on the level of creative input involved. As we have seen, both translators and writers are craftspersons whose activities converge in a number of areas. They process the same raw material, words, and have the same tradesperson’s tools in their toolbox – a ‘termbank’, a whole range of stylistic devices and other tricks of the trade. Both hone their skills by exercising a sense of curiosity and paying attention to detail but where they have traditionally diverged is in their approach to boundaries and in their awareness of the freedom they have to break the rules. One of the benefits of the workshop is that it provides the impetus for translators to gain greater confidence in their ability to manipulate language. They gradually become masters of the craft of using words, able to make language perform whatever function they want. As a result of this process, which is of course progressive rather than instantaneous, they will find that they, too, can push out the boundaries between the translator and the writer. New initiatives in translator education such as this workshop, which empowers translators to see themselves as writers, should contribute to a redefinition of the status and role of the professional translator as a writer per se. The English version of a seminal work on genetics, Antoine Danchin’s La Barque de Delphes (‘The Delphic Boat’) translated by Alison Quayle, who attended the first Painting with Words workshop, illustrates that the growth in status of the translator need not be confined to the

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sphere of literary translation. In this scientific work, the act of translation is seen as a mode of writing and the translator was able to shape and restructure the sequence of ideas to suit the cultural requirements of the target readership, working in close collaboration with the author (Quayle: 2005, personal communication). On the translator’s initiative, the information was then presented in a form that would be more digestible for British and American readers, whose educational background does not have the extensive philosophical component prevalent in the French system. In addition to acquiring greater confidence, which allows them to attain a higher professional status, student translators will develop greater skill in presenting a complex sequence of ideas. As a result of the creative writing experience, they can learn to verbalize difficult concepts. Although postgraduates who specialize in the more institutional and technical areas of translation soon become familiar with key concepts in translation theory and linguistics and are able to rationalize the translation process, they are rarely prompted to articulate their own more original thoughts. They may know how to restructure a sentence elegantly and improve cohesion, but are not always aware when they have introduced a change in the emphasis. Sometimes, too, attention to detail can prevent them from seeing the whole picture. The purpose of the discussion in the workshop of left-brain and right-brain thinking and of the role of details in creating an authentic piece of writing is to sharpen their perception of the relationship between detail and the whole picture. For too long now, translation has been perceived by many as a form of writing by proxy, an activity that people engage in as a kind of second best because they cannot find words of their own. Many translators may have felt that their freedom to be creative is restricted by the source text and by the need for the writer’s voice and perception of the truth, that is, of the message that the writer is communicating to the reader, to be presented accurately. It is possible, however, to preserve the sanctity of this message and at the same time push out the boundaries. A creative writing experience will help translators to find not only their own words but also their own voice. Those translators who have become aware of the nature of their own voice are better able to find the writer’s voice, and recognize those elements that make it special. They will then not only know how to recreate it in translation but can also interpret it with greater sensitivity and creativity as they explore the interface between the writer’s voice and their own. Furthermore, constraints of any kind do not necessarily work against creativity, as many poets will testify. Consider, for example, the resonance achieved by Racine in Phèdre (1677) within the confines of a strict verse form, the Alexandrine. Since the workshop teaches us how to work creatively within such constraints, it is by no means merely an exercise or an entertaining way of spending an afternoon. It can provide us with an insight into the writing and translating process and demonstrate where the boundaries are. It may even help us to evaluate the risk and determine

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when we can safely cross the line. Literary translators are not the only ones who stand to gain from exploring the act of creation. Others, working in diverse fields, are often asked to translate promotional material such as brochures or web pages. To do justice to such texts, they need knowledge of business or technology and must have an intuitive response to the copywriter’s sudden surges of creativity. Translators who can offer this expertise will be recognized as high-status professional practitioners, that is, as wordsmiths with ‘value-added’ multilingual skills. Sometimes, even, clients require a spatial awareness, an eye for layout and design, which is where translators are at the interface between various forms of creative expression. Finally, albeit slowly, academic institutions are beginning to acknowledge that there is a role for creative writing in translators’ education and professional development. One interesting initiative in this area is, for example, a full-year credit course that is offered in alternate years to students at Innis College in the University of Toronto. Although this course, taught by Roger Greenwald, a poet-translator, is essentially a creative writing course for writers and a translation course for translators, it is designed so that writers and translators can benefit from interacting (Greenwald 2005). The 2005–6 course description states: The bulk of the course will be devoted to workshop sessions during which the instructor and the students will offer criticism of and advice about work submitted by the students. For students who applied to the course as writers, that work will consist of creative writing. For students who applied as literary translators, that work will consist of literary translations . . . Exercises will include writing assignments that will be completed by all students, including translators, and writing assignments for which translators may translate texts of the same genre.

Conclusion As has been demonstrated in this chapter, that translation itself is an active form of writing accounts for the effectiveness of workshops such as mine. By writing within a relaxed environment, translators can improve their skills and find their own voice, and can thus move one step further along the discovery–creativity continuum. To return to the subject of neurophysiological research, McCrone concludes his discussion of lateralization by saying: ‘It is how the two sides of the brain complement each other that counts.’ Similarly, as the gap between them narrows, creative writing and translation can complement each other. It would certainly be interesting to see some research into the relative roles played by the two sides of the brain in creative writing and translating respectively, since the findings could have very exciting implications for translator education. Meanwhile, public perceptions of the translator’s status are evolving. To take a recent example, in the Independent Arts and Books Review, Boyd Tonkin acknowledged the translator’s contribution

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to the success of the Turkish novel Snow (Pamuk: 2005): ‘Snow is further blessed by Maureen Freely’s pacy, vigorous translation’ (Tonkin: 2005). As translators achieve greater proficiency as writers, their involvement in the interaction between cultures is gradually gaining recognition. Those involved in translator-training programmes can drive forwards the empowerment of translators by offering them the opportunity to develop as writers as well as translators.

Part Three Case studies: translators as creative writers

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7 Creative translation, translating creatively: a case study on aesthetic coherence in Peter Stambler’s Han Shan Xavier Lin Introduction Only recently in the history of translation, translators have been regarded more as textual creators in their own right. Once the clear-cut differentiation between translation, adaptation, versions and rewriting has been proved difficult by those scholars who viewed translation beyond linguistics, and once the writing–translating spectrum has become a continuum, the mechanism of creativity in translation, especially poetry translation, must be re-examined on the basis of this continuous spectrum. One domain where translators can perform their art is composed, as Theodore Savory puts it, of ‘[t]he existence of possible alternatives between which the translator must make his own choice’ (1957: 27). However, although making choices may have been an important part in the practice of this art, the art truly begins only when ‘you have to reproduce the materiality of the signs, its physical properties’, as Octavio Paz puts it (Honig 1985: 155). In addition, the complexity and difficulty resulting from the incommensurability between any two languages or two cultures also render poetry translation more than just an activity of choice-making. The gaps emerging from this incommensurability will have to be bridged by what the translator draws out of his/her own creativity. Then, translation is no longer about looking for the solution; rather, it is about creating solutions. In a word, the idea of making choices among options does not always imply that translators should create options out of their own translating faculty, that is, creativity. Therefore, poetry translation should not be reduced to or thought of as an activity of mere replacement, but it becomes one of recreation. From this point of view, certain parts or elements in the target text (TT) are bound to be alien to the source text (ST). One of the important and inevitable sources for the missing pieces in the puzzle of translating process is the translator himself/herself. ‘What I consider the most important, and also the most difficult, claim to deal with,’ according to Burton Raffel, ‘is what might loosely be termed the aesthetic: How is the translator to reproduce in the new language the peculiar force and strength, the inner meanings as well as the merely outer ones, of what the original writer

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created solely and exclusively for and in a different language and a different culture?’ (1988: 157) Picking up where Raffel leaves the issue, this chapter proposes that, for the merging of the transferred elements to be possible, an aesthetic coherence in the translated text is an indispensable basis, and explores how this basis may involve creativity in translating. Generally speaking, one cannot exclude the concepts of aesthetics of the target literature and culture from the construction of this basis. They become arguably more foregrounded when one translates a regulated verse of the Tang dynasty (c. ad 618–709) into a twentieth-century English poem, since the two parties involved share little, if any, common linguistic and cultural background. And, in the negotiation between two such diverse backgrounds, ‘translation like poetry is not limited to a single easily isolated activity’ (Brower 1974: 1). The ‘poetic competence’ one needs in translating poetry ‘should not [and cannot] be nailed down as an immutable and exact group of factors with a fixed degree of dominance’ (de Beaugrande 1978: 23). Different approaches Patricia Terry, a language teacher and translator, holds that ‘[a] translator will always be motivated by a vision, not of reality, but of language’ (Frawley 1984: 63). This underpinning vision relates to what one sees in translation. Where poetry translation is concerned, this often means a vision of that ‘peculiar force and strength’, in Raffel’s words (1988: 157), that one may find to vibrate within the ST. This ‘peculiar force and strength’ is crucial in justifying those moves poetry translators make that originate in places other than the ST. One of them may be ‘a blueprint’,1 or even just a poetic preference, for the original poem to balance its new aesthetic coherence in a new cultural environment. Discussing how to construct one’s own blueprint for translating poetry, Robert Bly suggests that one will find the challenges intertwined into ‘one difficulty, something immense, knotted, exasperating, fond of disguises, resistant, confusing, all of a piece’ (1970: 13). It becomes obvious that it is impossible to find any blueprint that can tackle this complexity without missing something. The ‘holisticness’ in poetry translation originates in the very essence of poetry, as well as in all forms of literature and art: the unity and dynamism, the shell and the kernel in the work, may prove one (Dixon 1995: 19). This organic interrelation of the elements inside a poem is unavoidably ‘highlighted by translation’ (ibid.). And in translation, this ‘holisticness’, or aesthetic coherence, will need to be regenerated through the system that the translator fabricates. But, to start, a translator has to cut in from somewhere. Even though ‘a principal fear of translation is that it operates as a process of fragmentation’ (Scott 2000b: 120) and an analytical systemization of poetry translation may readily be proved fallacious, it can still be helpful for us to visualize the complex holistic process of translating poetry as an aesthetic mass.

creative translation, translating creatively 99 André Lefevere (see Lefevere 1975) advances ‘seven strategies and a blueprint’ to examine and compare the strengths and weaknesses different approaches may have. They include: adopting different elements of the ST, as well as the phonemic unit; the literal meaning; the metre and the rhyme of the ST, as the basis upon which the TT may develop; and adapting the ST into another genre, such as prose or free verse. Robert Bly’s system of ‘eight stages of translation’ basically pivots on how a translation should sound. In his system, after setting up a fundamental semantic and cultural groundwork for translation by the first two stages and a doublecheck at the last, Bly assigns more than half the stages to improving the phonetic features of the translation, using ear more than mind to translate (Bly 1970). Clive Scott, with the ‘central preoccupation’ of translation as a servant of selfexpression rather than of pedagogy (Scott 2000b: 251), chooses free verse as a basis for equilibrating all the constituents in poetry translation. Scott justifies what he terms the ‘appropriacy’ of this genre as the only medium for a translator who needs ‘a space of creative and self-expressive spontaneity’ in rendering poetry (ibid.: 88). In contrast, Octavio Paz looks forwards to the translating culture for a general basis on which creative negotiation may occur in translation. Believing parallelism, an aesthetic quality prevalent in Chinese literature, to be of key importance in exploring this realm, Paz devices his own translating strategy 2 in his attempt on Chinese poetry: ‘to retain the number of lines of each poem, not to scorn assonances and to respect, as much as possible, the parallelism’ (Weinberger and Paz 1978: 47). Paz’s approach manifests the significance that translation is not only a bilingual activity but, in fact, also a bicultural one. Theoretical meet and meeting theoretically Since Yan Fu advanced the triad of translation criteria, Xin, Da, Ya (literally, ‘faithful, fluent, elegant’) in the preface to his translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays as an apology for his practice, this ‘topicization’ of what qualities the TT should possess has become one of the major approaches through which modern Chinese translation theorists mediate their ideas. However, the origin of this approach can be traced back in Chinese literary criticism tradition up to nearly the dawn of Chinese literature. In a tradition where the major function of poetry is ‘stating the mind’,3 it is only natural that Chinese literary critics came to emphasize the importance of leaving yan (literally, the words or expression) behind when poets get hold of the yi 4 (literally, the meanings or connotation), as stated in Zhuang Zi, one of the most influential Taoist classics (Zhuang 1992: 313). The fusion of the Confucian and Taoist literary concepts matured in the critical comments emerging in the Tang and Song dynasties. According to Si-kong Tu, arguably the most important poetry theorist of the late Tang Dynasty, one of the true qualities of poetry is to gain full ripeness of poetic beauty without any textual exertion5 (1987: 837–908). In the Song Dynasty

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(960–1279), Zen Buddhism, a Chinese branch of Buddhism that discarded rigorous study of the sacred script and believed in epiphany as the way of enlightenment, matured and formed a holistic ideological system with Confucianism and Taoism that permeated the literati of the time. Poetry critics further emphasized that the true poetic quality of a poem was what exists beyond textual level.6 This poetic transcendentalism culminated in Can Lang Shi Hua (literally, ‘Poetics by Cang-lang’) by Yan Yu (c. 1197–1241) of the late Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), the one work on poetics that has been generally acknowledged as the pivotal text of Chinese literary theory. The theory of Yan Yu stood distinguished for its direct comparison between Zen epiphany and composing a poem. He advanced that the aesthetic quality of a poem should be like ‘the moon light on the water and the beauty in a face’ (1991: 443) – superb poets achieve stylistic and aesthetic effects without poetic craftsmanship or concrete wordings. In other words, one feels the beauty in a poem and yet finds it nowhere in the text. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese literary criticism tradition found a new realm in translation criticism when Yan Fu proposed his triad of translation criteria, xin (fidelity), da (fluency), ya (elegance).7 The triad has been the centre of controversy within translation theory ever since. Only when viewed under the precept of Chinese literary tradition, according to which a poetic essence exists holistically beyond the textual level, can the coexistence of xin and da in his theory possibly make sense. From his point of view, ‘the purpose for fluency is fidelity’ (Yan 1989: 1): the translator’s responsibility to fidelity is to know what is in the author’s mind, and his/her responsibility to fluency is to state it directly from his/ her [translator’s] mind (echoing ‘stating the mind’ in Chinese poetry tradition). To fulfil these responsibilities, ‘[the translator] should comprehend the author as thoroughly as if the thoughts of the author were his own. Then, the translation he produces will naturally turn out refined and obtain perfect coherence’ (ibid.). Ya, the third of the triad, often becomes the target of criticism for its specificity (what if the original text is not ‘elegant’ stylistically?). Yan quotes Confucius to support this desideratum: ‘One who is inept in rhetoric will be seriously limited when he tries to promote his idea’. Since his translation aimed at a specific readership – the literati – this quality of elegance contains a very practical purpose. However, this practicality in purpose does not explain why he then did not use the more concrete ‘rhetoric’ or ‘style’ as one of the criteria but, instead, the abstract ya. He argues: ‘only in the pre-Han Dynasty style can thoughts be conveyed accurately. Our contemporary language, often curtailing thoughts of the author to suit its own limitation, misses the original by an inch in text but a thousand miles in contents’ (ibid.). In his time, modern vernacular Chinese, still a newborn baby inept in many ways, proved incomparably less resourceful than the 2,000-year-old linguistic and literary system, the archaic Chinese, a language with which sages and philosophers like Zhuang Zi and Confucius conveyed profound thoughts. Yan believed

creative translation, translating creatively 101 that only when the translation cohered under the pre-Han style could any point be expressed accurately and comprehensively. As we can see here, the true enlightening side of ya is the emphasis on aesthetic coherence in translation, which evolves from the Chinese literary tradition. When poetry translators intend to render the ST into poetry in the target language, one of the key issues will be what makes a text poetry. It is much easier to tell whether a text is a poem than to define what poetry is. Two texts as different from each other as ‘l(a’ by e. e. cummings (1968), which seems to exclude the possibility of recitation, and the music-rich ‘The Eagle’ by Tennyson (1971), can both be readily and generally accepted as poetry. What is the true common quality that qualifies both as poetry, then? In the Western literary tradition, ‘[a] frequent concept in describing poetic use of language is that of “deviation” from ordinary discourse, going back at least as far as the twenty-second chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics’ (de Beaugrande 1978: 16). On the contrary, whether the language of poetry, if such a language exists, is different from the language of non-poetic texts is not an issue in Chinese literary tradition. The issue has been approached differently. The belief, still strong nowadays, is that the quality of poetry exists beyond the textual level, and can only be conceptually captured in the abstract, as proposed in the theories of Si-kong Tu or Yan Yu: poetry in a poem is like the moon on the water of text. Without the water there can be no reflection but the reflection is not the water. Or, in another metaphor, poetry is the beauty in a face while none of the features alone can account for what is beautiful. What makes a text poetry is not what exists textually but the chemistry in the amalgamation of all the intrinsic and extrinsic elements of the work, including the reader, the poet and the whole cultural environment – in a word, a gestalt emerging only when all the possible factors somehow come together beautifully. Poetry in a text is an aesthetic gestalt, perceived and yet non-existing. One may have had the experience of explaining to an unwitting person that there ‘is’ indeed a cup between two opposing dark areas or two faces against a lighter background in the famous gestalt graph shown below. It can reasonably be inferred that when the arrangement between the two areas of different shades is much more complicated than shown here, the graph can produce more than one gestalt for different viewers, just as a poem may arouse different aesthetic effects for different readers. What makes a text begin to become a poem exists everywhere in it and yet is nowhere to pinpoint. The mere rhyme scheme of aaba cannot make a four-lined text a ruba’i,8 even though this is an indispensable element of this genre. Neither does mere figurative language make poetic prose a poem, despite being an important part of poetry. When we look inside the text for answers, we encounter concrete structural phenomena such as metre, prosody, rhyme, allusion, metaphor, and so on. But with those elements only, one cannot get hold of the essence of poetry. Each poem has a multidimensional structure that is transferred from author to reader through mere black prints on white paper, as Mallarmé puts it, ‘the poet

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Figure 7.1 Rubin’s vase

does not write with thoughts but with words’ (Richards 1965: 131). Even so, one cannot deny the existence of a multidimensional mental structure of ‘light area’ created by the ‘darker areas’ originated from the textual, literary and cultural elements of the poem in question. Lefevere argues that ‘poetics consist[s] not in theme and particular form, but in a series of “equilibriums” ’ (1975: 108–9) – that is, when everything somehow comes together beautifully. Or, in Yan Yu’s metaphor, it resembles ‘the beauty in a face’ (Yan 1991: 443). Since poetry in a poem relies on the ‘equilibriums’ in the gestalt it forms, any substitution of an element can cause a chain reaction to the gestalt of the ST. ‘This is why, in the translation of poetry, one often aims at rewriting, as if accepting the challenge of the original text so as to recreate it in another form and another substance’ (Eco 1984: 94). In ‘accepting the challenge’ of Han-shan, Peter Stambler weaves an event from his personal life into one of his translations, ‘Burial’ (Stambler 1996: 35). Richard Lattimore’s statement, ‘verse translation is poet plus translator’ (1959: 49), is probably one of the shortest but clearest comments on the role of creativity in poetry translation. In Stambler’s translation, one can examine how the poet in a translator, or the translator in a poet, expresses the

creative translation, translating creatively 103 original author as well as himself through recreating the aesthetic gestalt of the ST, which is a ‘central preoccupation’ in poetry translation, as Scott sees it (2000b: 251). When parallelism encounters foregrounding In his translation of Han Shan (literally, Cold Mountain, an early Tang hermit poet, c. seventh century), Encounters with Cold Mount, Stambler shows how creativity can function to recreate the aesthetic gestalt of the translated poem. Not only does Stambler ‘[make] substantial alterations in the literal texts’ (Stambler 1996: 13) from time to time; he even goes so far as to substitute an event from his personal life for an image in the original text because he believes that both the event and the poem share the same emotional kernel. One of the typical examples is the substitution of the cremation of his mother in the third stanza of the translation he entitled ‘Burial’. Stambler holds, in that poem, ‘Han Shan’s seeing the yearning for life in the doomed peach blossoms evoked my recent memories [his mother’s death and cremation] so irresistibly that I replaced his image of falling petals . . . The image is quite different from Han Shan’s; the emotional life, I think, is essentially the same’ (ibid.). But this incident in the translator’s personal life turns out to be valid material to express both the translator himself and the author because the incident has been fused creatively with other elements in the translation to form an aesthetic gestalt that corresponds to that of Han Shan. The original poem given below is accompanied by the transliteration and the gloss of each character.9 Then, a line-by-line literal translation is followed by Stambler’s translation. tao peach

hua blossom

yu to yearn

jing to outlive

xia summer

feng wind

yue moon

cui to urge

bu not

dai to wait

fang to visit

mi to seek

han shi Han dynasty time

ren people

neng can

wu no

yi one

ge person

zai survive

zhao morning

zhao morning

hua flower

qian transforming

luo falling

sui year

sui year

ren people

yi moving

gai changing [the neck couplet]

[the head couplet]

[the chin couplet]

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104 jin now

ri day

yang to rise

chen dust

chu place

xi past

shi time

wei was

da immense

hai sea [the tail couplet]

The literal translation: The peach blossoms yearn to live through a summer. They fail to sustain under the urging of the wind and the moon. If one tries to find any one from Han Dynasty, He will find that none still stays around. Morning after morning, the blossoms fly and fall. Year after year, people move and change. The place where dust rises today Was once a vast ocean.

Stambler’s translation: Peach blossoms yearn for a summer’s life, Shivering before a slight breeze, paling

[stanza one]

In each descent of the moon. Of all the ancients, Not one wakes when a bough stirs. [stanza two] Leaves of my book curl, and the edges brown In the fire that livens my mother’s ashes.

[stanza three]

When I stumble my feet raise dust Where once the greenest sea rolled.

[stanza four] (ibid.: 35)

The stanza in question is the translation of the neck couplet of Han Shan, that is, the third stanza of Stambler. The imagery gaps here do seem immeasurably wide when they are viewed without context. The justification of Stambler’s translating strategy consists of two issues: first, whether the image, ‘yearning for life in the doomed peach blossoms’ (ibid.: 13) carries such a substantial significance in the original poem, as Stambler claims; second, how Stambler tailors the event to achieve a compatible aesthetic effect. Han Shan starts with the personification of peach blossom that ‘yearns for a summer’s life’ in the first couplet (ibid.: 35). The second couplet focuses on the shortness of human life. The third, presenting a perfect parallelism in syntax and grammar, summarizes the swiftness of the duration of both peach blossoms and human beings. The last concludes with the transient nature of the universe. It is a truism that time overcomes all, but Han Shan ‘livens’ (ibid.: 13) it by highlighting the character yu (literally, ‘yearning’ or ‘to yearn’) with his unique system of parallelism. Besides the parallelism built in the intrinsic framework of genre itself, that is, regulated verse, the four couplets can be further divided into three

creative translation, translating creatively 105 groups of parallelism: the first two, the third and the last. The first two couplets plainly narrate that the existence of peach blossoms and human beings proves transient. The two couplets vaguely mirror each other without the rigorous parallelism in the syntactic or grammatical constituents, strung together with a lyrical narrative flow and implicitly identifying human beings with peach blossoms. In the third couplet, the quality of poetry condenses dramatically under the concise parallelism at work in the syntax, grammar and semantics between the two lines, and with the reiteration of two characters (double days and double years) and four synonyms (‘transforming’, ‘falling’, ‘moving’ and ‘changing’). This poetic energy accumulates from the beginning and climaxes in the intricate poetics of the third couplet, anticipating the conclusion: the transient nature of the world. This reality is divined from falling peach blossoms that yearn to outlive a summer. Another parallel system elaborates across this structure in the last four lines of the poem so as to echo the first line, ‘peach/blossom/to yearn/to outlive/the summer’. If we read from an angle vertical to the line sequence, two imagery groups emerge in the latter half: one is time, that is, day– year–today–past; the other is the fact and object of transience, that is, transforming/falling: moving/changing: dust–sea. Each of them is vividly symbolized by the two counteracting constituents of the topic line: the peach blossom symbolizes the fact and object of changing (be it the sea, the dust, fading or ageing) whereas the passing summer can be a poetic equivalence to passing time of different length (be it a day, a year or all the history past). Situated in the heart of the first line, yu, ‘yearning’, pivots two parallelism systems in the poem, forming the ground zero of the explosive poetic energy. The yearning for life of the dying flowers that Stambler discerns and adopts as the justification of the imagery replacement is thus presented as a poetic gestalt in the graph of multi-parallelism of the poem. Paz holds that ‘parallelism is the nucleus of the best Chinese poets and philosophers’ (1978: 47). The art of parallelism, as Paz observes, is to keep ‘the unity that splits into dualty [sic] to reunite and to divide again’ (1978: 47). The yearning for life of the peach blossoms emerges as a poetic gestalt upon the intertwining parallelisms with the character yu situated at the pivot. As English cannot recreate parallelism as effectively and accurately as Chinese, especially the one in the climatic third couplet of Han Shan, Stambler presents this poetic gestalt with a different but aesthetically corresponding strategy: foregrounding. From the analysis above, the four couplets in Han Shan can be divided into three groups: couplet one and two, couplet three, couplet four. The latter two contain in themselves a cross-couplet parallelism that is indirectly, but closely, connected to the first line of the poem, which contrasts the two major image groups of the poem and hinges them with yu, ‘yearning’. Stambler’s four stanzas follow the same division. In Han Shan’s poem, the invisible bridge of parallelism that flexibly holds together the first two couplets is simply non-existent in the English literary tradition. To

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bridge this gap, Stambler replaces this parallelism by summing up the first group of stanzas with the last line, ‘Not one wakes when a bough stirs’, implying, as remotely and as subtly as in Chinese, a comparison between peach blossoms and human beings. The sudden and powerful densification of prosody in Han Shan’s third couplet, achieved by parallelism, a mechanism unique to Chinese poetics, is rendered in the third stanza into an emotional description of an event in Stambler’s personal life that carries a strong impact. Several substitute mechanisms are devised along with this extemporaneous shift to maintain an organic connection between this stanza and the rest of the translation, replacing the connection between Han Shan’s third couplet and its context. First, the balanced emphasis on peach blossoms and human beings through parallelism in Han Shan has been replaced with their fusion in the last line of the first stanza group: ‘No one wakes when a bough stirs’. This line, however, does more than combining the personified ‘yearning’ of the peach blossom and the unavoidable lifelessness of the deceased. With ‘No one wakes’, the ancient are not just dead; they are also buried. This implication forms a metamorphic catalyst for an aesthetically successful transfer of imagery, with which the funeral from the translator’s personal life movingly merges into the translation, implanting an emotional energy textually unrelated to the original poem without a breakage in aesthetic coherence. Second, the foregrounded adjacency of ‘ashes’ and ‘dust’, the two similar images situated in Stambler’s sixth and the seventh lines, the centre of the latter half of the poem, also makes the controversial cremation image to become an indissoluble part of the context and, therefore, allows its emotional energy to manifest the image in question: the yearning for life of the flower. Third, both the second lines of the two stanzas start with locational adverbs: ‘In the fire’ and ‘Where’. The foregrounded locational adverbs at corresponding locations organically create another domain upon the textual order: In the fire/Where once the greenest sea rolled. The fire of cremation, the very last flicker of life, still yearns to recall the source of life: the green sea. Then, it can be no accident that the two most foregrounded positions of the latter half of the poem are occupied by ‘Leaves’ at the beginning and ‘rolled’ at the end. ‘Leaves’ in its connotation corresponds to the image of ‘greenest sea’ chromatically, kinetically and even metaphorically. And, situated in an even more foregrounded position of the two, the last syllable of the poem, ‘rolled’ sums up all of the important images: the fallen petals, the breeze, the changing moon, the passing of generations, flames, ashes, feet that stumble, the immense sea, all of which roll. It even recalls the alternation of the two groups of images, time and changing facts/ objects, in its counterpart in Han Shan. The mechanism of foregrounding, manoeuvred by Stambler, mediates the poetic gestalt of yearning for life, resonantly echoing the parallelism attained by Han Shan.

creative translation, translating creatively 107 Conclusion Foregrounding is the main approach that Stambler adopts in his translation with the aim to recreate the gestalt of poetics achieved by Han Shan with the use of parallelism. The incident in his personal life that he merges into Han Shan, though completely alien to the ST, is part of the material Stambler employs to build a bridge over the ST–TT gap. One may defend such translating strategies, especially weaving an incident of his personal life into the TT, with Willis Barnstone’s capacious guideline for poetry translation: ‘All ways are permissible provided they lead to the good poem’ (1993: 50). In fact, from the viewpoint of Chinese literary concept, what matters more in a poem is the beauty beyond the text instead of merely the text itself. An important issue in poetry translation, then, is whether and how the TT recreates the aesthetic gestalt of the ST, rather than translation being just a textual transference. Therefore, Stambler’s strategy, in a sense, embodies this concept. He creatively strikes a similar chord with seemingly unrelated notes, as this chapter has demonstrated. Stambler’s foregrounding and inclusion of an incident of his personal life in his translation represents an important creative move, as he allows these two elements to develop creatively within his TT and to achieve compatible aesthetic effect. Umberto Eco holds, ‘[a] translation can express an evident “deep” sense of a text even by violating both lexical and referential faithfulness’ (Eco 1984: 14). In Stambler’s creative translation, whether he violates either lexical or referential faithfulness may be arguable, he does imaginatively render an evident ‘deep’ sense in this Han Shan, that is, the yearning for life, with a poetic gestalt existing beyond the text of his translation as its counterpart beyond the Chinese text.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

An example of the former may be found in Huang Ke-sun’s Rubai Ji, a translation of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, which is in iambicpentametric quatrain. Here Huang adopts the form and style of the genre as a blueprint to mediate the elements he transfers from the ST. In fact, FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat (1910) itself may serve as another example, since FitzGerald adopted his contemporary English metre, that is, the iambic pentameter, to render rubai, an ancient Persian poetic genre of the twelfth century. I see a dilemma in choosing either ‘translation strategy’ or ‘translating strategy’. Both options carry ambiguities: ‘translation’ may mean either the product or the process, whereas ‘translating’ may be confused for a participle, rather than a gerund. However, here, I would like to emphasize the ‘activity’ and the ‘process’, and, therefore, the gerund has been adopted. The transliteration of the original text, shi yan zhi, is from The Book of History: Canon of Yao. Since The Book of History included time as early

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

translation and creativity as around the first half of Zhou Dynasty (c. eleventh century to 211 bc) and was mentioned in many classics, including Analects of Confucius (c. 551–479 bc), it has been generally accepted that it was originally compiled earlier than mid Zhou Dynasty. In the chapter ‘Wai-wu’, Zhuang Zi compares meanings/contents to a fish and text/form to a fishnet; he holds that there is no point in keeping the net if one has already caught the fish one needs (1992: 313). The text that states the quality in question, bu-zhuo yi-zi, jing-de feng-liu (Si-kong 1987: 74), reads literally ‘without using a word/achieving brimming poetic beauty’. This idea was advanced in his masterpiece, Er-shi-si Shi-pin (‘Twenty-four Classes of Poetic Styles’), and became one of the most applied criteria for poetry criticism and one of the most valued poetic qualities. In Sequel to Shi-hua by Sir Wen, Si-ma Guang, the most important scholar, statesman and historian of North Song Dynasty, holds that ‘Ancient poets valued those implicit aesthetic effects that emerge only when readers brood over the text’ (Si-ma 1991: 165). Yan Fu, in fact, did not specifically lay the triad down as requirements. He starts his apology with ‘The three true challenges in translation are xin, da, ya’ (1989: 1), even though the Chinese for ‘challenges’, nan, may simply mean ‘difficulty’, theorists often interpret these qualities as ‘criteria’ or ‘desiderata’. A Persian quatrain with rhyme scheme of aaba, which became well known in the English world for Edward FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam. Traditionally, the four couplets of lu-shi, regulated verse, are named in this order: shou-lian (head couplet), han-lian (chin couplet), jing-lian (neck couplet) and wei-lian (tail couplet).

8 Poetry, music and transformation in the Gulf of Naples: a creative voyage of The Tempest Manuela Perteghella

Introduction Brown (1993) refers to ‘foreign Shakespeare’ when discussing translations and productions of the Elizabethan playwright in other parts of the world. The familiar English texts give way to ‘strange’ non-English scripts, which reveal unexplored subtleties, or act as bold interpretations, performed on unusual stages, through the use of uncommon gestural languages. Brown believes that it is specifically from these readings and rewritings of Shakespeare’s texts that the English-speaking critic, director and audience can benefit at home. The ‘foreign Shakespeare’ is also accompanied by the discovery of fresh, challenging positions toward the plays, of ‘new sightings of the imaginative vision that created the plays, and new ways in which we can call them our own’ (Brown 1993: 34). Kennedy (1993: 5) argues that at the root of these foreign contributions to the anglophone dramatic world is the fact that usually these rewritings operate a ‘modernization’ of the language and idioms of Elizabethan England. The substitution of archaic or dated words, for example, with a modern and contemporary lexicon allows the play to be linguistically bound to contemporary cultures and issues. This chapter analyses a quite different sighting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in the translation by modern Italian playwright and actor-manager Eduardo De Filippo undertaken in 1983, and explores how his subjective, yet also culturally contextualized, reading of the play has informed choices in the translational process. Against the convention of linguistically modernizing Shakespeare’s play, to which Kennedy is referring above, and which has been part of the Italian tradition of translating Shakespeare (see, for example, Quasimodo 1956; Lombardo 1993), this Tempest is localized back in the past, catapulted into the seventeenth century, and placed, through a regionalized voice, into its ‘imaginary’ setting, somewhere in the Mediterranean between the Gulf of Naples and Tunis. By so doing, the play also gets positioned within the tradition of Italian regional and popular theatre, and more specifically that of Neapolitan comedy.

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While on this voyage into the making of La tempesta, I will identify a ‘cultural-creative writing’, one born out of a personal, intimate, emotive response to the text, influenced by De Filippo’s own memories of past experiences and his idiolect, and at the same time shaped by the theatrical culture in which he developed and matured as a playwright and actor, always informed by his own Neapolitanness. It is possible to analyse the input of the translator’s subjectivity in the ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ of the play, as well as of influential cultural forces, not only by looking at specific textual examples of the linguistic transfer, but also by dissecting De Filippo’s own ‘Translator’s Note’, a ‘paratranslational’ trace of the translator’s subjectivity, occupying the last three pages of the 1984 published edition. The writing project has been aided by a ‘literal’ translation from the English text – undertaken by Isabella Quarantotti, De Filippo’s wife – which suggests the presence of a second, more-or-less hidden subjectivity, and which contributes to De Filippo’s final translation. The idea of two translation agencies, or indeed of one ‘fragmented’ translation agency, in the rewriting process, is also addressed in this chapter. The Tempest: questions of context and text Reading and translating The Tempest are challenging tasks for several reasons. First, there are questions of context to deal with. The text in modern times has been inevitably (and iconically) linked to notions of colonialism. Although the storm and subsequent shipwreck take place in the Mediterranean, and there are references to European classical literary heritage, Hulme notices that there are also allusions to the New World, particularly in the character of the savage Caliban ‘. . . a “cannibal”, as that figure has taken shape in colonial discourse: ugly, devilish, ignorant, gullible and treacherous – according to the Europeans’ description of him’ (1986: 108). Recently, the discourse of postcolonialism has critically engaged with, and further appropriated, the text. Issues of race and imperialism have been foregrounded, for example by Brown (1985). Critics agree that postcolonial readings of the play are ‘so established . . . that in contemporary productions “some emphasis on colonialism is now expected” ’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989: 190–1, quoted in Fortier 1997: 133), and that its characters are now employed as ‘a general metaphor for imperial–marginal relations’ (ibid.). Other political and social issues that the play is generally thought to address include the intricate relationship of nature versus nurture (or natural world versus civilization), as suggested by the island (and Caliban’s) wilderness, by Prospero’s teachings and by Gonzalo’s ‘commonwealth’ speech in Act II. The usurpation of power is another perceived socio-political theme recurring throughout the play (Prospero has seized power on the island, but he has also been usurped of his own Dukedom of Milan by his brother Antonio). On a contextual level, characterization can become complex and

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ambiguous. This is particularly the case with the character of Caliban, the deformed slave and son of the indigenous witch of the island, enslaved by Prospero. His character can be seen either as the innocent, oppressed slave, as in postcolonial adaptations (see, for example, Fortier 1997: 134–5), or simply as a savage brute. Another ambiguous character is Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, a benign magician or the embodiment of the European colonialist, imposing his own egocentric view on indigenous cultures. While colonial and postcolonial studies have then focused on the context of The Tempest, an alternative reading of the text is explored and argued for by McDonald who, through stylistic criticism, aims ‘to reassert the value of textuality in a nontextual phase of criticism’ (1991: 15), which may eventually restore the balance between ‘the aesthetic and the political’ (ibid.). McDonald feels that somehow, in the middle of revisionist appraisals of canonical drama, the text per se has been neglected. He sees these critical perspectives on the play as essentially ‘anti-aesthetic’, because ‘the textual harmonics can too easily be considered a means of textual mystification, a tool in Prospero’s magic trunk’ (ibid.: 17), an elaborate way of masking its colonial discourse. In his own critical reading of The Tempest McDonald looks at its stylistic, poetic features, particularly the various forms of repetition whose function is to ‘to tantalize the listener, generating expectations of illuminations and fixity but refusing to satisfy those desires’ (ibid.). The text is infused with a musical feel throughout: from a stylistic point of view, alliteration and onomatopoeia pervade the text, together with witty wordplays and puns. Parallelisms, repetition of imagery, lexical, syntactic and metrical reiteration are the striking stylistic features of this play. Indeed, it is specifically this use of repetition that generates the whole incantatory effect and musical qualities of its language. Consequently, this textual–stylistic feature is echoed in the contextual–thematic repetitions and, as McDonald points out, may also be a link to the (metaphorical) issue of ‘reproduction’, such as political reproduction reconciling the textual features to contextual issues (1991: 17). Despite the fact that (post)colonial readings of The Tempest were circulating around the time De Filippo made his translation, his own reading and subsequent rewriting are more concerned with the particular textuality and stylistic constraints of the play, with the possible textual and cultural parallelisms between the English text and his own plays and theatrical culture. As an actor, he was also aware of practical performance issues and how these would force him to deal with some of the stylistic features and constraints of the text. Theatre translation: page, stage and creativity The main problem that theatre translation scholars, and practitioners, are confronted with is the definition, and subsequent position, of the dramatic text, in other words, whether the play is primarily a literary genre or textual

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‘sign’ of the larger theatrical system (see, for example, Bassnett 1998b, 2000). Things are further complicated by the dual tradition of translating plays for the page and the stage (see Bassnett and Lefevre 1990). This dual tradition is linked to opposing definitions of drama preoccupied with ontological, theoretical problems surrounding what a playtext actually is – literary text and/or blueprint for performance – and how its alleged performance level is textually contained. These diverse approaches to the translation of plays also seem to reflect a historical reality and the social need for the dramatic text to be studied and recorded on the page, in a book form, while, at the same time, fulfilling its performance ‘virtuality’ on stage. But let us consider this now widely accepted dual tradition, and the ensuing relationship between (translated) playtext and performance, in the light of what Johnston sees as the stage/performance dimension of the play, a dimension which makes it an ‘acting’ text and a source of creative processes. He observes that ‘writing for performance signifies that the translator is, in this sense, a writer and at every stage of the production process must function as a writer’ (Johnston 2004: 27–8), and that, working within this theatrical context, one can only talk of a ‘re-creation’ of the already creative ‘stage language’ of the source text (Johnston 1996: 251). On the other hand, translations for the ‘page’, often catering for a scholarly readership, are based on philological exactness, as the translator approaches drama exclusively as literature and not as part of the signsystem of theatre, positioning himself or herself as a fidus interpres. This process can lead to a play which might be perceived as difficult to perform: The translator who has rendered only the verbal text – most likely with a panoply of illuminating footnotes – must be prepared to allow an acting script either to replace or to develop from what he or she has presented primarily as a text to be read. (Johnston 2004: 27)

De Filippo’s (re)writing of The Tempest was commissioned for a published edition, for a book rather than a script, and for a publishing house rather than for a theatrical production, yet the translator here is also a playwright and actor, actively performing, producing and working within his own theatre tradition(s), conventions and culture. His sensibility towards the literary text and its stylistic form, as we shall later see, was balanced by his perception of the possible acting text(s)/stage language(s) spawned by his ‘actor’s reading’, so that the resulting translation could in turn be read and interpreted intersemiotically by actors and directors without further editing. In this sense, the dichotomy ‘stage versus page’ is interrupted and this particular translated text, born into one tradition, can find – has found – a passage into the other. De Filippo’s rewriting of the play, as mentioned above, had also been assisted and informed by a literal translation that was needed to expound such philological exactness: this text enabled De Filippo eventually to begin his drafts and make some textual and performative decisions in the final account. But how does De Filippo’s subjectivity actually manifest itself on the

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blank page? How is this writerly manifestation ‘read’, interpreted and performed by other agencies using the multimediality of theatre? First, I will look at how this subjectivity operates in the translation by analysing illustrative examples of the textual–linguistic transfer, with a particular reference to some stylistic and cultural features of the source and the target texts – using the English-language edition of Shakespeare 1971 and providing a back translation of the Neapolitan text; this comparative analysis will be informed by De Filippo’s own telling of the process in his ‘Translator’s Note’. Second, I will discuss one particular staging of La tempesta. Eduardo’s Tempesta The play was translated by De Filippo in 1983 and was published the following year. This translation was one of the last writing projects of the playwright, as he died shortly afterwards in October 1984 at the age of 84. He recalls in his ‘Translator’s Note’ how publisher Giulio Einaudi asked him over lunch to choose and translate one Shakespearean text for a special collection he had devised, entitled ‘Writers translated by Writers’ (Shakespeare 1984: 185). The contextual position or literary status of De Filippo as a household name in the Italian theatrical culture allowed him in the first place to be involved in such a project by Einaudi. Among the Shakespearean comedies, De Filippo chose The Tempest because it reminded him of an ancient theatrical genre, called the féerie, which had as main characters supernatural beings, witches, demons, elves, fairies, and required the use of scenic devices for magical effects (ibid.). The féerie had its origins in the seventeenth century and had been part of the repertoire of Italian theatre companies until the mid-nineteenth century. De Filippo remembers how the Shakespearean text brought him back to a past experience: he was 19 years old and an actor in the theatre company of Vincenzo Scarpetta – his half-brother – when Scarpetta decided to resurrect the féerie in his programme. The subsequent production of La collana d’oro profoundly impressed the young De Filippo, with its witches and demons, the special effects of a river flooding, pictures rotating on the walls, chairs dancing to music, as he recalls here: Fu un grande successo, e l’incanto sottile di quell’ambiente fantastico, ingenuo e supremamente teatrale mi è rimasto dentro per oltre mezzo secolo, influenzando la mia scelta. (ibid.: 186) (It was a great success, and the subtle enchantment of that fantastic environment, naïve and superbly theatrical, has stayed inside me for more than half a century, and has influenced my choice.) (author’s translation)

In this particular production the character of Felice Sciosciammocca, the ingenuous man getting into trouble, was introduced, linking the genre of

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the féerie to that of Neapolitan comedy (ibid.: 185). Felice Sciosciammocca became part of the Neapolitan theatrical repertoire and popular culture, as much as the commedia dell’arte mask of Pulcinella, thanks to the successful interpretation and performances by Eduardo Scarpetta, an established Neapolitan comic actor, father of both Vincenzo and Eduardo, and adapter of La collana d’oro. De Filippo was also deeply moved by Prospero’s action of forgiving his brother, rather than avenging himself (ibid.), and therefore perceived the play to be about repentance and tolerance rather than vengeance. He chose the play because of this ‘moral’ message that he saw in it, which was particularly apt for his contemporary social situation. He rhetorically asks: ‘quale insegnamento piú attuale avrebbe potuto dare un artista all’uomo di oggi, che in nome di una religione o di un “ideale” ammazza e commette crudeltà inaudite . . .?’ (ibid.) (‘what better and more actual teaching could an artist give to the man of today, who in the name of religion or of an “ideal” kills and commits unheard cruelties . . .?’) (author’s translation). This is quite a striking remark to be made in a ‘Translator’s Note’, and perhaps here De Filippo is referring to Italian and world events of the early 1980s, at the time of writing (terrorist attacks, wars, political scandals), but one can only speculate that these might have affected his choice of the play. Even if these speculations are eliminated, it is plain that De Filippo perceived Prospero to be essentially a compassionate character in the play, a forgiving man, and this reading of Prospero’s characterization is reflected in the translation. Besides consulting the English source text itself, he acknowledges the cooperation of his wife Isabella, who translated word by word every line of The Tempest, explaining to her husband the meaning of Elizabethan words, their several possible connotations/collocations, researching archaisms and difficult, unfamiliar expressions: ‘Isabella mi ha trasportato in italiano letteralmente tutta la commedia, atto per atto, scena per scena, cercando poi in certi suoi libri inglesi il significato doppio e a volte triplo di certe parole arcaiche che non mi persuadevano’ (ibid.: 187) (‘Isabella transported into Italian the whole comedy, literally, act by act, scene by scene, searching in some of her English books the double, even triple, meaning of certain archaic words which did not convince me’) (author’s translation). In this sense, the ‘literal’ text and the research she provided informed the choices of De Filippo, who, because of the thorough information provided by Quarantotti, felt as if he himself had indeed been translating directly from the English (ibid.) This inherent collaboration during the various phases of the writing project must have influenced De Filippo, and particularly his rewriting of Elizabethan cultural references and rhetoric, and must have been a source of creative input in the drafting process. De Filippo operates a ‘historicizing’ method on the language, a strategy which can be defined as a total or radical temporal localization, intended to position a text in its original historical context, but not necessarily its

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cultural one. He uses the Neapolitan of the seventeenth century, a rich, baroque vernacular with a musical quality, as he himself observes: . . . quanto è bello questo napoletano antico, cosí latino, con le sue parole piane, non tronche, con la sua musicalità, la sua dolcezza, l’eccezionale duttilità e con una possibilità di far vivere fatti e creature magici, misteriosi, che nessuna lingua moderna possiede piú! (ibid.) (. . . How beautiful this ancient Neapolitan is, so Latin, with its paroxytone, rather than apocopated, words, with its musicality, its softness, its exceptional plasticity, with its possibility to give life to magic, mysterious, events and creatures, that no modern language owns any more!) (author’s translation)

Thus, it is clear that his Tempesta is placed within the Neapolitan linguistic– cultural system. De Filippo continuously substitutes English metaphors and puns with Neapolitan ones, and he often amplifies the text with Neapolitan idioms, stressing that the characters are indeed ‘Neapolitan’. An example is in the opening scene, when, during the storm, De Filippo’s sailors twice shout ‘Guagliú, facimmece annore: simmo napulitane!’ (ibid.: 5) (‘Guys, let’s be brave! We are Neapolitans!’) and later on, when Ferdinand hears Miranda speak, his loud thought ‘My language! Heavens! I am the best of them that speak this speech, were I but where ’tis spoken’ (I. ii. 33–5) is directly addressed to Miranda and rendered as ‘Cielo, tu staje parlanno/’a lengua mia, che gioia!/Io so’ Napulitano/e parlo ‘a lengua toja. Si mo’ stessemo a Napule, io e te, sotto lu vraccio’ (Shakespeare 1984: 54) (‘Heaven, you are speaking my language, I am Neapolitan and I speak your language. If you and I were in Naples now, we would be holding hands’). Rather than as a spirit, Ariel (Ariele) is presented as a ‘scugnizzo’, a bit of a rascal, a typical young man who knows various tricks and uses the small, winding streets of Naples as his own territory, and Caliban (Calibano) is a credulous savage, ‘nu selvaggio fesso’ (ibid.: 40). The Tempest, through De Filippo’s rewriting, also becomes positioned within Neapolitan theatrical traditions. We can argue then that this is an instance of acculturation, that is, the text is brought closer to target cultural and literary systems. In this context, acculturation is intended as the deterritorialization of the play, which is moved into a different locality and culture. La tempesta seems then to adhere to domesticating translational practices. Yet this acculturation process takes place from a dominant language into a minority, non-standard one. At the same time, the ancient vernacular, with its own archaisms, gives an almost alien reading and hearing experience. The play presents and explores themes of magic and illusion, and of metamorphosis. The songs by Ariel are an example of the dreamy and musical qualities of the language of the play and of the theme of ‘transformation’:

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Death in this magical underwater kingdom is perceived as ‘something rich and strange’; the use of rhymes produces the rhythm, a sense of going onwards and onwards, against a marine background. In Ariele’s Neapolitan song about Alonso’s marine transformation after being ‘drowned’, it is art (specifically sculpture) that becomes the object of semantic repetition and not the sea itself: Alonso has been transformed into a statue of precious, sculpted marble: Nfunn’a lu mare giace lo pate tujo. L’ossa so’ addeventate de curallo, ll’huocchie so’ dduje smeralde . . . E li spoglie murtale, tutte nzieme se songo trasfurmate: mò è na statula de màrmole prigiato, sculpito e cesellato! (Shakespeare 1984: 52) (at the bottom of the sea your father lies. His bones have become coral, his eyes are two emeralds . . . And his mortal remains, altogether, have been transformed: Now he is a statue of marble precious, sculpted and chiselled!)

The translation of humour for the immediate consumption of a theatre audience posits another challenge, especially when the cue is not in the stage directions for physical comedy, but in the verbal delivery of the characters. Puns are expressions of such verbal humour (see, for example, Delabastita 1997 on puns). In their discussion of constraints and creativity in literary translation, Boase-Beier and Holman see constraints, not only cultural, but also stylistic and linguistic, as a source of creativity (1999: 13–17). Puns and wordplays become constraints against which the translator’s creative problem-solving and adaptive process awakens and drives him or her into finding different associations. In Act II of The Tempest, Antonio and Sebastian, unhappy at being shipwrecked on an apparently inhabited island, are mocking the rest of the party with wordplays and puns. In the next illustrative example, the noun ‘temperance’ was used as a proper name by the Puritans during Shakespeare’s time:

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Adrian: It must needs be of subtle, tender and delicate temperance. Antonio: Temperance was a delicate wench. (II. i. 41–2)

De Filippo leaves out the connotation of temperance and proper names altogether, and plays with references to sweets and cakes: ‘sfogliatella’ is a traditional sweet Neapolitan pastry and ‘babbà’ is a Neapolitan cake, again positioning the text within Neapolitan humour and culture: Adriano: Ccà nce sta l’aria fina, delicata, Soave e fresca cumm’a na zitella, Nu zeffirello dolce cumm’a na caramella. (Here there is a subtle air, delicate, pleasant and fresh like a maiden/spinster A zephir/gentle wind, sweet like a candy) Antonio: Meglio na sfugliatella o nu babà! (ibid.: 67) (Better a sfogliatella and a babà)

The source play contains a series of compounds, mostly with reference to the sea. McDonald (1991: 19) not only points to their repetitions at various levels (phonetics, rhythmics, lexics), but also cites the work of Anne Barton, who contends that Shakespearean compounds signpost a purposeful ‘reduction of language’ (Barton 1968: 13–14, quoted in McDonald ibid.). How does one deal with the ambiguity of Shakespearean compounds and with this alleged linguistic minimalism when the rewriting itself has been characterized by over-explanations, and shaped by the two genres of intricate Neapolitan comedy and the baroque féerie ? The previous compound ‘sea-change’ (I. ii. 404, see above) indicates the physical mutation of Alonso, Ferdinand’s father, believed to be drowned by his son. De Filippo leaves out the reference to the sea, and has ‘se songo trasfurmate’ (Shakespeare 1984: 52); (‘they [the mortal remains] have been transformed’), while ‘sea-swallow’d’ (II. i. 248) is translated by adding four new lines, and introducing the storytelling tradition into the text: Lu viaggio de ritorno Te lu si ‘smenticato? Lu veliero sfunnato, Distrutto e zeffunato! (1984: 83) (The return voyage, have you forgotten about it? The vessel burst at the bottom, Destroyed and sunk!)

The discourse of linguistic and cultural imperialism, usurpation and colonization within the play is probably best illustrated in the first act. Miranda is complaining that, after years trying to ‘educate’ Caliban, all her efforts have been unsuccessful: in fact he has even attempted to rape her.

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On his part, Caliban indicates how unfruitful Prospero and Miranda’s act of language teaching has been. In this edition, it is Miranda who speaks to Caliban, while Prospero watches close by. However, these lines have been attributed to Prospero for the past two hundred years, because of their harshness: Miranda: . . . therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved more than a prison. Caliban: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse (I. ii. 361–5)

In the English source text Caliban’s use of ‘you’ is ambiguous: Miranda and Prospero are both present in the scene, so it could be a plural ‘you’, or a formal ‘you’ to either Miranda or Prospero, depending on which edition of the play is consulted. De Filippo gives the lines back to Prospero, and omits the reference to Caliban’s confinement in the rock altogether: Prospero: . . Chi lava ‘a capa all’ aseno, Ricordatello buono: Nun solo perde l’acqua Ma pure lu ssapone (. . . Whoever washes the donkey’s head, Remember well, Not only does s/he waste water But also the soap) Calibano: . . . Ognuno ’a lengua soja: Io tenevo la mia E tu la toja. L’unica cosa c’aggio guadagnato Mò t’ ’a dico: Te pozzo smalerì C’ ’a stessa lengua Ca tutt’ ’e dduje sapimmo E ce capimmo (Shakespeare 1984: 47–8) (Everyone has his/her own language, I had mine And you [have] yours. The only thing I have gained from this, Now I’ll tell you, Is that I can curse/swear at you with the same language that both of us know And understand)

Here Prospero appropriates the popular culture of proverbs, and, in the key reading of the character as a forgiving and good human being, he is depicted as a wise, perceptive man who makes use of what past experiences

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have taught him. He compares the efforts to educate Caliban to those of washing a donkey which does not really care about being clean. Caliban makes explicit that he already possesses his own language, and he himself agrees that Prospero’s efforts have been wasted, as he will use this new language to curse. De Filippo’s shaping of characterization is thus directly linked to his own subjective response to the play, a tale of repentance, and since the text is rewritten according to the genre of Neapolitan comedy, the storytelling tradition continues to typicalize this rewriting. Imagery, rhetoric and elaborate language are often employed by Shakespeare in the play. De Filippo complained that, when translating some of the play’s imagery, the actor in ‘himself’ would rebel against elaborate wordplays and imagery, or that he needed to add lines to explain to the public and to himself some implicit concepts, as when he adds lines to highlight the fatherly love of Prospero for Miranda (Shakespeare 1984: 186). In the following textual example, Prospero is indicating the young Ferdinand to Miranda and asks her to open her eyes: Prospero: The fringed curtains of thine eyes advance And say what thou seest yond (I. ii. 413–15)

De Filippo, in his ‘actor’s reading’, followed by a rewriting for the (potential) performer, chooses not to translate the rhetorical use of language and instead translates: Prospero (a Miranda): Guardanno addò lu dito mio te nzegna, Che vide tu llà bascio? (1984: 52) (Looking where my finger points to you, What do you see over there?)

De Filippo changes the rhetoric for gestural language: by using ‘look where my finger points’, he inserts kinesics which act as instructions for the actor and which are implicit in Shakespeare’s text. In the opening storm scene, the captain is losing control of the vessel. The sailors and the nobles are scared, and in their cries of fear there is a reference to Elizabethan sailors getting drunk in times of danger. Boatswain: (slowly pulling out a bottle) What, must our mouths be cold? (I. i. 52)

As expounded in his ‘Note’, De Filippo over-explains this reference, which takes up to four lines: Nostromo: Guagliú, bevimmo! Stunàteve, e po’ priàte. Si nu murimmo Cu li bbocche gelate (1984: 9)

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De Filippo acculturates the source text and regionalizes it into the vernacular tradition and genre of Neapolitan comedy. However, his playtext is difficult to categorize. This is not a politically motivated, ideologically driven domestication. The Shakespearean English is changed into a vernacular which (although Alonso and Ferdinand are perceived to be ‘Neapolitans’ in Shakespeare’s play) allows for remoulding of certain textual passages and for the creation of specific textual–cultural parallelisms. De Filippo uses an ancient language full of archaisms, and deviates from the Italian (canonical) literary tradition of Shakespearean drama translation, which makes this also a very unusual and unfamiliar Shakespeare’s text, particularly for non-Neapolitan audiences. De Filippo translated the play in only one month and a half, often working eight hours per day, in the summer of 1983, and despite the ‘torrid heat’, this had been an ‘enjoyable’ experience, with an ‘enchanting’ text (Shakespeare 1984: 187). The text was subsequently recorded by De Filippo, and extracts from the tape recordings were first presented and heard in May 1984 in Rome, at the Università La Sapienza. He spent the whole summer of 1984 working hard to complete the recordings, which, edited by his son Luca, was then used for a puppet production (with marionettes), by the Marionettes Theatre Company of the Colla family, who have been around since at least the nineteenth century. Again, the play is placed in his transposition from page to stage, into a specified Italian theatrical tradition: that of the marionettes, puppets attached to, and controlled by, metal wires. Any marionette production of The Tempest becomes a metaphor for Prospero ‘making’ the island spirits his own ‘puppets’ and controlling them through magic. The production took place at the Teatro Goldoni in Venice, during the Festival of International Theatre after De Filippo’s death, in 1985. Antonio Sinagra composed the musical accompaniment. De Monticelli (1985), reviewing the production, recalls how the show was a poetic, fabled experience developing over a series of baroque scenes ‘among the shining of the metal wires’ (ibid.). Then, the voice of De Filippo, who had been ‘performing’ the different characters’ voices, with their specific nuances, timbres, tones, pitches, emotions (apart from Miranda, for whom Imma Pirro did the voice-over, and Ariele’s songs, sung by Antonio Murro), was continuously transforming, renewing itself into multiple voices, so that the themes of transformation and metamorphosis were taken iconically into multimediality: Alla voce saggia e astuta di Prospero, non esente da qualche bruciacchiatura ironica, si alterna . . . quella crespa, dispettosa eppure intimidita, dello scugnizzo Ariel, e quel miracolo di caratterizzazione cavernosa, da far pensare alle sonorità interne di un tino vuoto e gigantesco, che è la voce tumefatta di Calibano. (ibid.)

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(The wise and shrewd voice of Prospero, not completely absent from some ironic burns, alternates . . . with that crisped, impudent yet cowed of the scugnizzo Ariel, and that miracle of cavernous characterization, that makes you think of the inner sonorities of an empty, giant barrel, that is the swollen voice of Caliban). (author’s translation)

The hearing of his recorded voice was also an emotional experience because of his recent death (ibid.). The marionettes tradition transformed the writing of De Filippo into his own emotional response to the source text, into practically a féerie, ‘comic’ yet ‘grotesque’, childlike at the same time, with a ‘dreamy dimension’ introduced during the Mask (ibid.). Besides the references to the féerie, another theatrical genre is introduced in the production: the scenes and dialogues between Trinculo and Stefano were acted out as the two bawdy buffoons traditionally inhabiting the Neapolitan avanspettacolo, the curtain-raiser show (ibid.). This type of theatrical genre spread in Italy in the 1930s and was based on improvised scenarios, revolving around comic macchiette or sketches, and often musical interludes, practically becoming a type of variety show (see, for example, Scaglione 2001). The puppet production of La tempesta by the Colla family mirrored that of Scarpetta’s La collana d’oro, not only with regard to the mutual magical elements, supernatural characters and to the use of special effects, but also with regard to the explicit and embodied allusions to Neapolitan theatre: the references to the avanspettacolo in the former, and the introduction of Felice Sciosciammocca in the latter. Conclusion: a cultural-creative writing Because of the acculturation of the play into the non-standard Neapolitan language and its specified environment, La tempesta is an example of ‘intracultural’ text. Pavis (1996: 6) describes ‘intraculturalism’ as a search for repressed, hidden or forgotten indigenous traditions, and Bharucha (1996: 200, 208) sees it as an alternative to the globalizing forces which are homogenizing indigenous cultures. Yet the term, as employed here, does not necessarily have a political, postcolonial connotation. It simply suggests the (re)positioning of the play within the specified locality of Neapolitanness, that is, within one defined cultural and linguistic community with its own traditions, occupying a ‘space’ within the dominant (perhaps imagined/ constructed?) ‘Italian’ culture. This Neapolitanness mainly features in De Filippo’s own theatre writings. Of course, the play is not only intracultural. The (intra)cultural writing has been accompanied by a return to adolescent memories and borrowings of, and references to, a theatrical/ textual heritage, which can be seen as a sort of literary and artistic DNA of the translator, which surfaces in the form of intertextual allusions. Allusion, as Boase-Beier and Holman argue, is ‘a process of integrating other writing, taking particular elements of another work and making explicit or implicit references to them, building these references into the context of the new work’ (Boase-Beier and Holman, 1999: 3–4). These echoes then

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reverberate in the (translated) play and are interpreted, as discussed above, by the stage producers of the play, who have integrated further references besides those already contained and recognizable in the text. Cultural sightings of this translation cannot then be separated from subjective/ creative sightings, by the translator’s own self as the rewriter, or from the role played by resources of creativity such as the oral traditions and memories. On the other hand, the acculturation process has made possible and visible the links between the text of the 1611 Tempest and the seventeenthcentury genre of the féerie, as imagined and remembered by De Filippo, who interrogates this forgotten theatrical tradition together with the other intertexts present in the translation. Neapolitan comedy, the tradition of storytelling, his own tragicomedies, all inform De Filippo’s writing subjectivity and his own idiolect as a playwright: he has accordingly used his own poetic markers, and poeticisms in the translation, pointing to ‘poetic strategies’ and particularly to ‘poeticizing’, as termed by Crisafulli (2002: 38). Poeticizing does not merely indicate the substitution of one metre for another, but also the use of certain imagery, poetry, stylistic devices, possibly even absent in the source text, which are usually taken both from the target culture repertoire and from the translator’s own self as a writer – the literary and artistic DNA – and which are inserted in the translation, even amplified. Further, translators like De Filippo are in a favoured position because of their prestige, status and experience as writers, poets or playwrights: these are the so-called ‘privileged translators’ (Delabastita 1998: 223): ‘. . . when the translators in question hold a canonized position in the target literature or theatre, which is taken to entitle them to the privilege of a more personal response to Shakespeare’. In the case of this particular translation agency, the poetics of the translator operate ‘visibly’ in the translated text, through poetic markers, and literary and theatrical allusions to Neapolitaness. The translation agency is also visible in the ‘paratranslational’ material. The published edition contains, for example, footnotes to explain certain linguistic expressions and words that De Filippo has used for the nonNeapolitan reader. The ‘Translator’s Note’, dated December 1983, becomes a piece of writing in its own right, in which the translator can retrace the translational process, readers can grasp the (re)writer’s relationship to both the source and the target text and have a glimpse of his subjectivity. Therefore these paratextual notes contribute to work against the translator’s ‘invisibility’ (see Venuti 1995). Prefacing and footnoting are, for example, used by feminist translators as tools for (political) visibility and intervention in the text (von Flotow 1991). Lastly, in this particular note, as discussed above, De Filippo acknowledges the role of his helper, and in a way co-translator, Quarantotti, as actively contributing to his final translation. Although as readers we do not have access to the ‘unpublished’ and ‘unperformed’ literal draft of Quarantotti, we know from De Filippo’s account of her contribution that she used interpolations, explanations, perhaps suggesting alternative

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translations of words, idiomatic expressions, annotations and notes. An exchange of ideas and drafts accompanied by more editing may have preceded the final (re)writing. The traditionally perceived neutrality and uncreativity of the literal or verbal translation is questionable, because any rewriting contains an interpretative stage to some degree, and because of Quarantotti ’s own subjectivity. Her literal draft(s) and the final text by De Filippo have become entangled, interconnected and interdependent: one could not have been born without the other. This textual relationship points to a notion of a translational ‘fragmented’ agency, whereby two subjectivities enter in dialogue with the text at different stages of the translational process, and collude at some point in the writing.

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Part Four Textuality and experiment

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9 Translation and the challenge of orthography Judy Kendall

Introduction The orthography in which a work of art is written plays an essential role in the aesthetic effect of the whole. The orthography chosen can directly affect such considerations as rhythm, puns, subtext, atmosphere, emotion, the speed at which the reader assimilates the work of art and the order in which it is assimilated. This is particularly evident when translating into English from Japanese, because Japanese, orthographically speaking, has extremely rich resources to draw on. Japanese orthography consists of two very regular syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, and one highly irregular morpheme-based script, kanji. A key consideration for a translator is the fact that each script has a different aesthetic effect. The morpheme-based script is derived from characters or ideographs used in China, the Japanese versions of which are known as kanji.1 However, it is difficult to write a text in Japanese in kanji alone. This is due to the fact that the grammatical syntax of Chinese is considerably different from Japanese; and Chinese is an isolating language in which each sign represents a morpheme, whereas Japanese is inflected and requires appending suffixes and particles to words and clauses in a sentence. As a result, it is difficult to write a Japanese text with kanji alone. They can form the bulk of a Japanese text, denoting nouns, verb stems and other words expressing ideas, but to complete this text it is necessary to use one of two phonographic scripts (hiragana or katakana). Like kanji, these scripts are also based on versions of Chinese characters but these versions denote specific syllables of sound and have different aesthetic qualities. Indeed, there are cases where writers have chosen to write a whole text in a single phonographic script in order to achieve a specific effect. Adults tend to use hiragana in conjunction with kanji, employing hiragana for almost all functional words: prefixes, suffixes, inflectional endings, words expressing grammatical relationship, and so on. The hiragana script is cursive, flowing and soft: .2 As well as acting as a bridge between different kanji in a sentence, and completing the sentence of which the

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kanji form the base, hiragana also carry connotations of femininity and childhood. Today, they comprise the first set of letters that children learn, and books for young children are written totally in this script. In the Heian period (794–1192),3 before the scripts combined, hiragana was perceived as the proper way of writing for women. Men of the period wrote exclusively in Chinese using Chinese characters. They only wrote in Japanese, in hiragana, if they wanted to write something immediate, personal or sensual, often in that case posing as women. The katakana script is harder and more angular than hiragana : .4 It is derived from notations written by Japanese Buddhist monks on obscure characters in Chinese texts. Today it still carries the sense of ‘alien’, although it is now used for ‘loan words’ from foreign languages other than Chinese (English, French or German, for example). Katakana is also used for emphasis (an equivalent to our italics), for slang, for certain onomatopoeic words, and for naming plants and animals. The orthographic challenge The first encounter of a reader with a written text is with its orthography. This encounter remains primarily a visual experience when the orthography is unknown, and sometimes, as in the case of Japanese orthography, even when the orthography is known. Japanese orthography is so complex and the characters and readings of them so many that the average Japaneseliterature readers are likely to encounter many instances of obscurity, at which times they tend to resort to deciphering and dissecting the visual components of unknown characters in an attempt to arrive at their meaning. In addition, the few simple but commonly recurring kanji in which the original pictograph is still easily recognizable ensure that the visual experience remains to the fore. Two examples of such kanji are ‘tree’:

Figure 9.1 An example of kanji: ‘tree’

translation and the challenge of orthography 129 and ‘person’:

Figure 9.2 An example of kanji: ‘person’ To invert Barthes’s argument (1977: 38), which claims that a linguistic message is present in every image, it is possible to say, in the case of kanji, that the image is present in every linguistic message. Traces of the development of such pictorial symbols into signs can be found in the repertoire of kanji in use today. Although many no longer have a close relation to pictographs, a considerable number inhabit a middle ground, combining pictographs and symbols to express more complex ideas than that of the purely visual image of a tree. Two examples are the kanji for ‘below’, , and ‘above’, . In addition, these kanji are often present as elements of more complex characters. The materiality of the orthography is foregrounded in much the same way as the materiality of modernist and postmodernist texts is sometimes foregrounded by the employment of imagistic skill. Indeed, the parallels are so close that the linguistic experiments of some modernist writers, notably Ezra Pound, include the deliberate use of orthography presumed to be unfamiliar to the reader. For the non-Japanese reader approaching what appear to be impenetrable shapes in Japanese orthography, the materiality of such orthography is predominant and exclusive. The script is perceived solely as means of signification. To such a reader, the referent of a Chinese character in Pound’s Cantos is the character itself. The signifier has become the signified and is the text. Such an example, in which the referents of these characters remain permanently deferred, constitutes an extreme demonstration of Derrida’s différance (1981: 8–9): ‘movement that consists of deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving’. The visual impression of an unknown or little-known orthography becomes both an impenetrable barrier and a final viewing point. When using unfamiliar orthography alongside a more familiar rendering, other barriers are created for the reader who does not know that orthography, as explained by J. H. Prynne in an afterword to Original: Chinese Language–Poetry Group: At one stage we thought to include some of the Chinese text, maybe even brushwritten, but the Originals themselves have countered this idea, because it would suggest exoticism or extraneous willow-pattern ornament; to them, we are the exotics,

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with our credit-card view of the speech act (how crude, to set the choice as text or graphics). (1944: 123)

The unfamiliarity of the foreign orthography transforms the orthography into the signified text, and this in turn has an effect on the English orthography that surrounds the Chinese so that it too, although still acting as signifier, is seen also to some degree as signified text. This ambiguity is close to that which occurs continually in Japanese script, in which text can always be read in two ways, stopping at the graphics and going beyond them to their referents. Readers who are able to read beyond the graphic ‘extraneous willowpattern’ as described by Prynne above, to perceive the referents of that ‘willow-pattern’, in addition to perceiving it as graphics, are also influenced by orthographic differences that relate to shifts in the emphasis, direction and order that occur as one orthography is followed by another. Thus, the physical characteristics of a particular orthography predetermine the shape and effect of the work inscribed in it. If a given orthography participates in the meaning of a text then the conventional approach to translation, of separating the meaning from the form, is no longer possible. The orthography is not an invisible container of the work but influences it and helps to form it. The connection between the two is so close that the use of a different orthography results in a different text. Derrida’s notion of différance is a useful formulation here, since orthography both differs from the referent it denotes and also defers a reader’s comprehension of that referent. At the same time the very différance of the orthography can act as its referent. The signifier and signified thus become equivalents. To investigate this point further, it is appropriate to examine an English translation of a source text written in what is considered from an English perspective to be the most alien of orthographies: Japanese.5 Miyaji’s Japanese–English translation project, Suiko/The Water Jar (1996),6 takes as its source text a contemporary collection of haiku.7 The haiku is one of the most subtle and ambiguous of Japanese literary genres, and it generously exploits the rich complexities inherent in orthography. Translating Japanese orthography: haiku The translation of Suiko was undertaken by a multicultural translation team composed of native Japanese, English and Hebrew speakers (Miyaji, Kendall and Elgrichi). Initial explanations by Miyaji of each haiku, its meaning, context, associations and the specific character-readings intended, were followed by word-for-word English translations by Elgrichi. These were refashioned into haiku by Kendall, reviewed by Miyaji, and rewritten further by Kendall where necessary. Once a number of trial versions of haiku had been produced, the team arrived at decisions relating to structure, metrics and translation of proper names through a process of collaborative discussion.

translation and the challenge of orthography 131 The English haiku in Suiko were originally intended by Miyaji to act as footnotes for educated (therefore fluent English-reading) Japanese haiku readers, since a number of the kanji used by Miyaji carried specific, obscure and sometimes obsolete readings, a feature not uncommon in contemporary haiku written in the traditional manner. This purpose of Suiko is reflected in the production of the book: clearly numbered source and target haiku are placed on facing pages. However, the different cultural and linguistic perspectives of the translators inevitably had an effect on the translation. The combination of three languages, cultures and five orthographies (three Japanese, one Hebrew and one English) in a team working to produce a bilateral translation exposed at a magnified level the discontinuities always present in an act of translation. This was particularly the case with regard to the different orthographies. Furthermore, each member’s perception of the languages and cultures not native to them also affected the process. In Suiko 174, the idea of a bare tree is held in the Japanese orthography. It is not referred to in words but is contained in the kanji for ‘withered’, which is partly made up of the pictographic radical for ‘tree’, also often used as a radical in the names of different trees:

Figure 9.3 Suiko 174 [ wither ] [ leaving gaps + and ] [ ya gi] kanji . h’gana . kanji . h’gana . h’gana . kanji . kanji . ju kichi ’s ] [poetry ’s ] [spare white] kanji . kanji . h’gana . kanji . h’gana . kanji . kanji .

In addition, the name ‘Yagi Jukichi’ holds within it the sound of the Japanese word for ‘tree’, ‘ki’ or ‘gi’, and, when written, includes, as part of a compound kanji, the single kanji for ‘tree’. For a Japanese reader,

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therefore, there exists in the orthography of this haiku a strong, if partially hidden, reminder of trees. If focus is placed on finding an equivalent in English orthography for the visual effect of the ‘tree’ kanji, with the aim of transforming the kanji into an English alphabetical sequence, then such a haiku appears untranslatable, and the act of translation itself defective. But if translation is a privileged creative activity, the effect created by the visual presence of a tree in the source text can be transferred to the different shape and context of the target text. In the English translation of Suiko 174 this occurs by transferring the visual allusion present in the kanji into a semantic allusion in English. ‘Branches’ is a word that is not present in the Japanese. bare winter branches lines of Yagi Jukichi the whiteness between Suiko 174

In this English translation, ‘wither’, which in the Japanese haiku carries the connotations of a tree in autumn, is rendered by ‘bare branches’. ‘[S]pare white’, which implies both snow seen through the bare branches of a tree and the whiteness of the lines of Yagi Jukichi’s spare verse, is included in the English in the words ‘winter’ and ‘whiteness between’, and in the spaces between the lines. Thus, the focus of the Suiko team remained on finding the most appropriate way of recreating the visual sense that the original poem evokes, and this includes replacing iconic clues in the source text with verbal clues in the target text, rather than searching for equivalents. When Miyaji (1996: 132) refers in her epilogue to how the English haiku ‘changed shape again and again’, she is talking in terms both of physical shape and of the metaphorical and semantic allusions present in the poem. Such experience demonstrates the transformational and multiple nature of readings, as Derrida (1981: 63) has argued in his warning against reading ‘according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface’. Furthermore, as Miyaji herself was aware in her concern to remedy limits she found in the knowledge of her Japanese readers, such a multiplicity of readings necessarily includes some that may obscure others. It could be argued that by removing the visual effect created by the graphic tree present in the Japanese, replacing it with ‘bare winter branches’, the poem has become more explanatory and less present as an image of the poetry of Yagi Jukichi. However, the three spaced lines of the English haiku introduce a different sense of space, one that shifts the emphasis slightly to a focus on the aesthetic spareness of the haiku form. However, an awareness of the transformational possibilities of reading in the multidimensional space of a text also allows for the creation of new interpretations by the empirical reader. As Barthes (1977: 148) remarks:

translation and the challenge of orthography 133 ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’. Focus on this destination gives further impetus to the translators to expend their own efforts in creative input. It also resulted, for the Suiko team, in a process of negotiation, since the main concern of the two non-Japanese members of the team was to produce not footnotes for Japanese readers but independent English haiku for nonJapanese readers. For Miyaji’s purposes, for example, the inclusion of ‘branches’ was not necessary, but Elgrichi and Kendall successfully argued for its inclusion for the benefit of non-Japanese readers. Thus, the collaborative element in this project, and in particular the representation of three different cultures, languages and orthographies, resulted in a heightened awareness of the needs of different empirical readers, whether native or non-native English or Japanese, and, consequently, as Miyaji (1996: 132) observes, a ‘great creativity, which with every meeting widened the [English] haiku’s original borders’. The result of this process is therefore a text that has widened its boundaries in terms of both authorship and readership. Its original author, language and readership have all changed. Although Miyaji hopes to carry her readers with her into English, the collaborative nature of the translation process means that the target text is influenced by the differing cultures, varying knowledge of the source and target text and different subjective viewpoints of each member of the translation team. A series of complex negotiations between the translators results in a text that crosses cultural boundaries, open to Japanese readers familiar with English, English readers familiar with Japanese, and English readers unfamiliar with Japanese. It has become an ‘intertext’. Such shifting of the borders of the haiku was also influenced by differences in aesthetics, again highlighted by discontinuities in the physical layout of the orthographies. ‘The whiteness between’ in Suiko 174 is, for example, a reference to the Japanese aesthetic of ma, ‘space’ or ‘interval’.8 For a Japanese reader, the space on the page remains as important as the ink that fills it. Space is clearly a large element in the composition of the tiny haiku, which drops in one vertical line only part of the way down an empty page, and which is composed of strings of characters spaced equally apart. This space remains unaffected by semantic considerations since Japanese orthography does not recognize word boundaries and rarely uses punctuation. The similarly miniscule English haiku also creates a sense of space. However, a reader unacquainted with Japanese aesthetics and ignorant of ma can only have a limited appreciation of this space, the effect of which is diluted in English orthography by its pragmatic use as a marker of word boundaries. One creative option for a translator is to work with concrete poetry techniques,9 such as those developed by Apollinaire (1925),10 by reshaping the haiku so that the unusual layout foregrounds the white spaces of the page. Again, such an approach demonstrates the importance of focus on shape rather than equivalents,

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Figure 9.4 Reshaped widening the focus from an emphasis solely on semantic equivalence to include that of shape. Miyaji’s haiku are written in a traditional style so it might seem an anomaly to translate her work into the shape of a concrete poem. However, the existence of seventeenth-century emblem poems, such as George Herbert’s Easter Wings (1867: 34–5), provides a more traditional source. The orthography of the Japanese text of Suiko 199 contains an aesthetic use of katakana: merci on Heisen temple’s snowy stairs as we give way to the French Suiko 199

In the Japanese, the katakana ‘furansu’, meaning ‘France’, is combined with the kanji ‘go’ to refer to ‘language’ or ‘French word(s)’; it implies an instance of spoken French. [f ra n ce language + in ] k’kana . k’kana . k’kana . k’kana . kanji . h’gana. [snowy road] [ yield ] [hei sei temple] kanji . kanji . kanji . h’gana . kanji . kanji . kanji .

The choice of katakana, used conventionally to represent non-Japanese words, suggests the presence of the French visitors at the temple. In the

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Figure 9.5 Suiko 199 English version, this sense is created by the use of the French word ‘merci’. ‘Merci’ is easily recognized by both Japanese and English readers as a French word. It also happens to resemble visually, though not aurally if correctly pronounced, the English ‘mercy’, thus acting as an echo of the ‘giving way’ of the last line of the haiku – just as hiragana and kanji (more usual scripts for a traditional haiku writer) give way in the original to the katakana ‘furansu’. If the translators had wished to emphasize another aspect of the haiku and one unique to Japanese orthography, that of a combination of scripts within the confines of a single phrase, they could have emulated concrete poetry’s use of graphic devices, in the choice of font for ‘merci’, rendering it, for example, as merci or m e r c i. Such exploitation of font would signal to the English reader a change that the Japanese reader understands from the use of katakana. However, whereas in Japan variance in orthographic script has been part of a centuries-old tradition, combining hiragana and kanji in every text, the use of such a combination of fonts in the West gives the text a distinctly modern feel. Once again, such an effect might not be appropriate for Miyaji’s very traditional haiku. In addition, for the English reader with little knowledge of Japan, such graphic devices may not be interpreted in the way the translators intended. Thus, such a target text involves the reader also in a new and creative act, reading the text by taking it not only beyond the boundaries set by the author, but also beyond those set by the translators. Similar considerations affected the translation team’s decisions about the form of the English haiku. In English, although one-line haiku do exist, the more traditional English form is composed of three lines. Equally, the 5–7–5 syllable count of traditional Japanese haiku, although frowned on by

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current English haiku circles, is still the most common and easily recognizable English haiku form. It also provides the advantage of extra syllable space since English words are generally shorter than Japanese words.11 This extra space is much needed since, in the English haiku, the complexity present in the kanji of the source text is simplified by translation into the less opaque English script. This means that when interpreting haiku in English, there is no longer the obvious visible hurdle to overcome that is often present in the difficult kanji used by haiku writers in Japanese. The syllables gained by keeping the 5–7–5 count allow for the translators to introduce in words the intricate visual and aural complexities of the kanji. The fact that Japanese orthography does not denote word boundaries creates additional flexibility when attributing semantic meaning. A similar flexibility is attained in modernist, postmodernist and recent experimental poetry due to a disregard of rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation and an exploration of the possibilities of linguistic playfulness of the English language, as in Caryl Churchill’s postmodernist play The Skriker (1994: 3): ‘When did they do what they’re told tolled a bell a knell, well ding dong pussy’s in’. This disregard could be emulated in an English translation of Suiko 199 as: mercionheisen templessnowystairsaswe givewaytothefrench

or mercionheisentemplessnowystairsaswegivewaytothefrench As in the case of a multiplicity of fonts, the effect of removing the English word boundaries, capital letters and punctuation is a clear departure from traditional practice, and it foregrounds the materiality of the letters to an extent that surpasses that of Japanese orthography. The reader is likely to give up reading in favour of looking. The unfamiliarity of the layout of these English letters draws attention to them as letters. The lack of word boundaries results in a self-reflexive orthography: the letters, not the words or their referents, become the text. In contrast, the crucial characteristic of the lack of word boundaries in Japanese, a regular feature of orthography, found as much in newspapers as in literature, is ordinariness, and this ordinariness results in invisibility. An additional flexibility in Japanese writing has been added in recent years as Western literary and educational influences have affected the direction in which the scripts are read. Now it is possible to find contemporary Japanese texts written in one of three directions: all three ways start from the top of the page but one moves horizontally from left to right as in the English writing system; the second, horizontally from right to left (rarer these days, but still used, for example, on goods vehicles); and the third, vertically from right to left. As is the case with the choice of script, each direction has an influence on the aesthetic impression of the whole,

translation and the challenge of orthography 137 ensuring that a Japanese reader is likely to be more aware than a reader accustomed to a Latinate script, not only of how a text is organized, but of how it is not organized; of the alternatives not selected. Employment of unusual directions in the reading of the first line of an English version, thus: m e r c i o n h e i s e i or, thus: iesiehnoicrem poses the same problem of excess of unfamiliarity as encountered in experimentation with fonts and word boundaries. Such multidirectional reading is reflected in the complex ambiguities of kanji themselves. Most kanji are phonetic-ideographs, combining elements of semantic meaning and elements of phonetic meaning, which may or may not bear a direct relation to the whole. In addition, one kanji may carry multiple semantic and phonetic readings, up to two hundred phonetic readings in some cases. The range of these phonetic readings in written Japanese is matched by the number of homonyms in spoken Japanese. The two interrelate in a curious way. It is not uncommon for people conversing in Japanese to resort to tracing out certain kanji on their palms for purposes of clarification. Similarly, frequently, a written kanji only takes on a specific meaning for a reader after its phonetic reading has been determined. The large number of Japanese homonyms also ensures that once the phonetic reading of a written kanji has been ascertained, the ambiguity still continues, since that phonetic reading may have, hovering above it, a cluster of homonyms. The lack of boundaries between words, the multidirectional possibilities of script-flow and the complex ambiguities of many kanji demand constant movement from readers, back and forth, or up and down, as they ascertain the meaning of a text. It is more difficult to read texts by swiftly skirting along the surface of letters in the manner customary for readers of linear

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and non-symbolic scripts such as the Latinate script, although reading strategies allow Japanese reader to ascertain a particular meaning, despite the ambiguities. Translating Japanese orthography: Noh In traditional Japanese literary forms, multidirectional possibilities of reading are reflected not only in the physical direction of the written text but also the directions in which semantic interpretation flows. The poetry of Noh,12 for example, is a multilayered texture of grammatical shortcuts, incomplete sentences and homonyms in a patchwork of allusions and quotations. After the completion of Suiko, two of the Suiko team undertook a translation of Zeami’s Noh play, Kinuta, (Zeami 1960). The translation process followed similar lines to those of the Suiko project, with Elgrichi, as a classical Japanese scholar undertaking the role of introducing the historical and literary context of the play. Previous English translations of the play exist, namely Fenollosa/Pound’s (1916), and Royall Tyler’s (1992), but neither of these focus on the poetry of the Noh, so the main purpose of this Kinuta translation (Zeami 1998) was to introduce the subtle beauty and complex ambiguities of this highly organized poetry to English readers. An instance of the poetic ambiguity contained in a traditional Noh text can be traced in the various recastings in Kinuta of the name of the maidservant. She is referred to as Yugiri, which, semantically and phonetically, means ‘evening mist’. The idea of mist or rain is also present visually, since this compound word includes the pictograph for ‘rain’ as a radical (that is a root element) in the kanji for ‘mist’. ‘Yugiri’ or ‘Evening Mist’ is a fitting name for one who is in the play a messenger between two worlds, a carrier of bad news, a witness of endings (the husband’s delayed return, the woman’s death), and so is a living reminder of the transitory nature of life – a constant theme in Noh. Kinuta, like Zeami’s other plays, presents a gradual accumulation of key images, such as rain, mist, clouds and the day drawing to a close. Each time such images are used, their meanings and overt associations are subtly altered, both from and by their previous appearances, as they pile up to form a pyramid of meaning. In the translated text of Kinuta (Zeami 1998), the translators, very aware of these ambiguities, used colour-coded shapes on the original text to highlight the repetition or near-repetition of key words, characters and concepts, so that they could rework them into the English translation. The wordplay on the maid’s name in Kinuta demonstrates this process at work. In her first full speech (Zeami 1960: 333/1998: part 2), Yugiri echoes her own name when she says ‘yugure’, which means ‘evening’s end’, so, in the target text ‘yugure’ is translated as ‘missed [mist] evening’s end at/ inn after inn’, thus punning on the near homonym of ‘yugure’ / ‘Yugiri’, and, in order to keep at least some of the associations of the name that

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Figure 9.6 Kinuta colour-coded

Zeami draws out here and elsewhere in the text, the translators chose to refer to the maid as ‘Evening Mist’, rather than ‘Yugiri’. The linguistic playfulness that the peculiar properties of the Japanese writing system encourages has also moulded the development of Japanese literary devices. Perhaps the most typical symbol of ambiguity in Japanese is the device kakekotoba or ‘pivot word’. This device holds at one and the same time meanings that can be read with previous or with following words, echoing the flexibility in Japanese reading directions. The small shifts of the kakekotoba contribute to the whole textual movement of a Noh play, in which words build up through repeated and varying use to crescendo in a final meaning more rich and complex than any individual appearance allows.

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The kakekotoba is also still much used today. Although it has apparent similarities to the English pun, it crucially does not complete a sentence. No meaning is dominant, and none alone constitutes a full translation. The readers must constantly shift their attention between meanings. In such a way, kakekotoba also reflects the manifold associations held within an individual kanji.13 In this example from Kinuta (Zeami 1960: 339/1998: part 7), kakekotoba and ambiguous Japanese syntax produce multiple changes in direction of the flow of sense:

Figure 9.7 Kinuta ‘Voices Fade’ [voice] [ too ][wither/exhausted][field/’s][’s/field] kanji . h’gana . kanji . h’gana . kanji . h’gana . [cricket][’s/field][call/voice] [’s/field] kanji . h’gana . kanji . h’gana . [ scattered/confused ] [grass] [ ’s ] kanji . h’gana. h’gana . kanji . h’gana . [flower][heart] kanji . kanji . Voices fade from crickets in fields wither with the grass is singing scatterbrains are turning the heart’s blossom

translation and the challenge of orthography 141 In the first line of the Japanese the word placed between ‘voice’ and ‘field’ refers both to the fading of the voice and withered state of the field, creating a stuttering but inexorable onward movement. These multiple shifts in sense resonate, once again, with Derrida’s concept of différance (1973: 88): ‘the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence’. It is no coincidence that Derrida (1992c: 305) conducts an extensive analysis of the ‘differential vibration’ resulting from the different uses of ‘yes’ in the work of James Joyce, and that the major inspiration for the Kinuta team’s creative translation came from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939: 3): Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war:14

and Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker (1994: 1): Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span spick and spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold

Once again, such an English Kinuta appears indisputably modern. Barthes (1977: 170–8) recognized such parallels in his own observations of a similar ‘discontinuity of codes’ in ‘Lesson on writing’, a discussion of Japanese Bunraku.15 He observes (ibid.: 178) the disregard of linear codes in Bunraku, and compares this to modern Western literary texts: ‘As in the modern text, the tressing of codes, references, discontinuous observations . . . multiplies the written line’. Such non-linear techniques allow the translator to create a text that is not limited by the conventional boundaries of grammar and syntax, and so can refer back to the effects present in the source text, but also move beyond them. Kristeva (1982: 141) also questions the linearity of a text when discontinuity occurs: ‘its [the text’s] makeup changes; its linearity is shattered, it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts, incompletion, tangles, and cuts’. Such a description could be applied to the kakekotoba, except that for Kristeva this discontinuity occurs at a particular point: ‘when the narrated identity becomes unbearable’. The kakekotoba, however, while it is essentially a technique of discontinuity, is part of a continuous Japanese literary tradition, integral both to Japanese aesthetics and Japanese orthography. Kristeva’s notion, however, does apply to the reader’s experience of a translation, which both refers back to its source text and moves on beyond it to a created new text. In a second example from Kinuta (Zeami 1960: 339/1998: part 6), continuity within an apparently discontinuous syntax is expressed through subtle shifts in direction, achieved by subversion of rhythm and punctuation:

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Figure 9.8 Kinuta ‘Moment of Beauty’ [ beautiful ] [ ’s ] kanji . kanji . h’gana . [moment][ what a! ] kanji . h’gana . h’gana . h’gana . [time] [autumn][ ’s ] [at that time, precisely ] kanji . h’gana . h’gana . kanji . h’gana . [evening ] [ towards/direction ] kanji . h’gana . kanji . Moment of beauty full stopped in its track down the exact time is now an autumn evening

A speaker of these lines tends to give emphasis to ‘moment of beauty’ and ‘stopped in its track’. However, at the end of both the first and second lines, after the faint pause that is demanded by the physical ending of the line, a turn in the language produces other meanings: ‘beaut[i]ful’ and ‘track down’. The lack of an expected ‘s’ on ‘track’ announces the imminent switch to a further reading, and helps the speaker to give both readings of ‘track’ equal emphasis, as if the line is stopping at mid-point, turning on a wheel of meaning – a fitting experience for a moment of ‘exact time’. Furthermore, the reading of ‘full’ as the punctuation mark of a ‘full stop’,

translation and the challenge of orthography 143 present within the phrase ‘full stopped in its track’, is strongly suggestive of a pause, which, if observed, seems entirely appropriate to the sense of being present in the ‘now’ (‘the exact time is now’). This example of kakekotoba in Kinuta, with its focus on a rhythmic continuity that counters the discontinuity of the syntax, is less disjointed, giving the impression of a smooth linear flow. It also enacts that point of rupture and repetition when, as Derrida writes of Mallarmé (1992b: 113–14), ‘simple decision is no longer possible, where the choice between opposing paths is suspended . . . the meaning remains undecidable ; from then on the signifier no longer lets itself be traversed, it remains, resists, exists and draws attention to itself. The labour of writing is no longer a transparent ether’. From then on, too, the labour of translation is not transparent either. Conclusion Discontinuity is featured in almost any example of Japanese script, resulting from the combination of up to three writing systems, multiple possibilities of aural and semantic readings and directional script flow, as well as complex kanji composition. Such discontinuity is also reflected in the style and content of Japanese literature. Latinate scripts do not share these characteristics, and it is significant that the translations of the effects discussed in this chapter took inspiration from modernist and postmodernist Western texts that commonly focus on text as text. Clearly there are strong parallels between the postmodernist investigations of the intertextuality of texts and the crossing of boundaries that occurs in the act of translation. In both spheres, creativity plays an important role in the recontextualization of source works and the development in the target work of a new mode of writing. Acts of collaborative translation heighten the creative element as translators and author negotiate with each other and with their differing perceptions of the text and its readers in order to arrive at a new creative solution. The nature of translation as a creative act is made even clearer when it occurs not only from one language to another but also from one orthography to another or, in the cases cited in this chapter, three orthographies to another. It is not possible to find equivalents when dealing with such diverse orthographies. There are none. The translators have to create in new spaces and form a text that is suitable for them. Notes 1. Much of Japanese culture has its origins in China and was improved, adapted and developed to suit the new environment. In orthography, periods of influence are intermittent throughout Japanese history, and in many cases the same characters, borrowed more than once at different times, have developed multiple meanings and associations. 2. ‘chotto’, hiragana for ‘a bit’.

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3. The powerful rule of the Heian dynasty (794–1192) ensured an unprecedented period of peace and security, during which Japanese culture flourished. The great novel The Tale of the Genji, the masterpiece of Japanese literature, was written at this time (probably in the first decade of the eleventh century) in hiragana by the female writer known as Murasaki Shikibu. 4. ‘koko-a’, katakana for ‘cocoa’. 5. Japanese orthography holds the dubious distinction of being considered the most difficult writing system in the world, its complexities also having a direct effect on the augmented degree of textual ambiguity in its literature. 6. Miyaji Eiko is a contemporary haikuist and haiku journalist. 7. Haiku is a short form of verse composed of seventeen syllables, broken into a pattern of 5, 7 and then 5 syllables. It is traditionally written in one line in Japanese. 8. In classical Japanese aesthetics, the presence of ma, translated as ‘space’ or ‘time’, is regarded as crucial in a work of art. Ma refers to the perceptual space between events, not an abstractly calculated space but a sensory space, even a sensually perceived space. Absence, silence, incompleteness and/or an essential lack of finality are highly prized in Japanese art (see: www.thingsasian.com/goto_article/ article.2121.html). 9. Concrete poetry emphasizes the visual presence of the poem on the page. 10. See Apollinaire (1925). Apollinaire’s work considerably extended visual techniques in poetry. 11. The relative brevity of English words is in fact one of the arguments put by many English haiku circles against a strict adherence to the 5–7–5 format in English. The other main argument is that English poetry is metrically based and not syllabic. 12. In Noh theatre (or No¯), gesture, dance, mask-work, music and song are fused in a precise stage art. Much of the repertoire was created by Kanami (1333–84) and his son Zeami (1361–1443). Zeami is considered the master of Noh. The text of a Noh play is traditionally composed of a combination of flat prose and highly poetic passages. 13. See Keene (1953: 6). 14. Joyce began writing this work in March 1923. 15. Classical Japanese puppet theatre.

10 Faust goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) Chantal Wright

Translation by implication: Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe (‘The Secret Report on the Poet Goethe’)1 (1999) is a novel written in German which introduces children to Goethe’s most important works. It is co-authored by Rafik Schami, one of Germany’s most famous children’s authors, whose mother tongue is Arabic but who writes in German, and Uwe-Michael Gutzschhahn, a well-known writer and translator from English. Der geheime Bericht has two narrative thrusts. The framework or contextual narrative is concerned with a fictional Middle Eastern island called Hulm and is set at the turn of the last century. Hulm finds itself under threat as a consequence of England and Germany’s increasing interest in the Middle East’s natural resources. As Germany and England vie for influence in the region, Hulm’s young Sultan decides that his tiny island must prepare, both strategically and intellectually, for the inevitable coming of the Europeans. As well as initiating practical preparations such as repairs to Hulm’s harbour, the Sultan sends out ten literary scouts, each of them a native speaker of a European language who has adopted Hulm as her or his home. These scouts are to travel to the lands of their birth and collect the writings of their country’s finest writers and thinkers. The scouts are then to return to Hulm and convince a secret commission of scholars, headed by the Sultan, that their chosen authors are worthy of being translated into Arabic. A group of translators will work in a purpose-built House of Wisdom and translate the texts selected by the commission. The translated works will then be taught in Hulm’s schools and universities to further young people’s understanding of European cultures. This narrative provides the framework for an introduction to Europe’s great writers, although Der geheime Bericht focuses solely on Goethe. The novel constitutes one episode in an imaginary epic tale encompassing the writers of all the European nations. It is the task of Tuma, the Sultan’s best friend and a German by birth, to present Goethe to a commission of scholars who gather together each night for an evening of storytelling. Tuma introduces a different text by Goethe each evening, rather like

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Scheherazade in 1001 Nights, although Tuma is telling stories not to save his own life but to explain wherein Goethe’s greatness lies and, it is hoped, to secure the translation of his works into Arabic. The commission are so impressed by Goethe’s writing that they devote nine evenings to the consideration of his work. On the fifth night of storytelling, Tuma introduces the commission and the reader to Faust, parts one and two (DGB 90–103). The German reader of Der geheime Bericht is faced with a text where translation is implied but not performed. Tuma presents Faust to the commission by summarizing and paraphrasing Goethe’s text and by using direct quotations from it.2 Der geheime Bericht appears on the page in German; Goethe, of course, wrote in German. However, the scholarly commission listening to Tuma’s report do not speak German – they are Arabic speakers. Within the framework of the narrative, Goethe is, as yet, unknown in the Arabicspeaking world. Tuma is therefore presenting Goethe in Arabic. The reader is being asked to imagine that the direct quotations from Goethe have been translated into Arabic, even though they appear in German on the page. The premise of Der geheime Bericht is that Goethe is on trial; his suitability for an Arabic-speaking audience is being tested. On the basis of Tuma’s summary and partial translation, the commission must decide whether Goethe’s work is deserving of ‘serious’ translation. As long as Goethe’s texts remain in German on the page, however, it is difficult for the reader to make the imaginary leap and take Goethe’s trial seriously. Goethe’s position in the German canon is undisputed. Even the young reader of this novel will be aware of his importance. Any trial conducted in German is therefore a quaint and unthreatening event. If the implied translation is actually performed, however, then the trial becomes real. This occurs when the novel is translated into another language (English, in this case). The German reader remains outside the text as an observer, aware of the artificiality of putting Goethe on trial. The English reader, however, is drawn into the trial as a participant; he or she becomes an additional member of the scholarly commission. The English reader does not have the same linguistic and cultural relationship to Goethe’s texts as the German reader and is therefore truly in a position to judge Goethe, or rather, to judge Goethe in translation. For in English there can be no more direct quotations from the original text. In fact, there is no more original text, only translation. The task of persuading the commission, the task of persuading the reader, falls to the translator, who assumes Tuma’s role in the text. Performing Der geheime Bericht: performing translation Performing the translation of Der geheime Bericht, in the sense of carrying it out, is also an opportunity to perform translation, in the sense of drawing attention to both the translation process and the translation product: it is an opportunity to put on a translation performance. Der geheime Bericht is concerned with the key role played by translation in mediating foreign

f a u s t goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) 147 cultures. Performing the translation is an opportunity to show the reader that translation is not a mechanical, objective task which results in a definitive, faithful translation but a subjective, manipulative process which results in one (or several) of many possible outcomes. My performance consists of a translation of selected passages from Goethe’s Faust (passages cited in Der geheime Bericht). I have translated these passages in three different ways – creating a translation triptych – in order to open up the process of translation and to highlight the role played by translation in shaping the reception of foreign texts and the mediation of foreign cultures. What gives me – the translator – licence to draw attention to my own textual presence in this manner? The first explanation is the one outlined above: the framework provided by Der geheime Bericht which stresses the importance of translation, and yet where the translation is implied rather than performed. The second explanation is what Rosemary Arrojo terms the recent ‘empowerment’ of translation, which is due to ‘the dissemination of a reflection generally labelled as “postmodern” ’ (Arrojo 1998: 25). This ‘reflection’, which can be observed in the writings of postmodern thinkers such as Barthes and Derrida, calls into question the authority of both author and text, and in doing so opens up a space for the translator to become visible. Barthes (1977: 142–8) takes ultimate authority over a text away from the author and gives this power to the reader. Each reader inscribes the text with new meaning, rewriting it. Meaning is only ‘accessed’ by the individual reader in the individual reading act. The author has no authority to define how his or her text should be interpreted. Derrida (1992a), drawing on Saussurean structural linguistics, views language as a non-referential system, where words are defined not in terms of their relationship to phenomena in the real world, but against other words. Meaning is therefore located in a shifting system of différance – in the difference between words. The quest for meaning is continually deferred; meaning is impossible to pinpoint and fix once and for all. Prior to this postmodern turn, the ‘loss’ or ‘distortion’ perceived upon comparing the translation to the original text – a ‘loss’ which confirmed the impossibility of achieving equivalence – was often attributed to the inadequacy both of the translator and of translation as a phenomenon. It did not extend to an investigation of signification in the original text. The postmodern reconceptualization of the ‘original’ means that what was ‘lost in translation’ is now ‘gained in translation’. The imprecise nature of the signifier implies a multiplicity of meaning which can now be embraced in a move towards play and experiment. The translator is free of any obligation to reproduce faithfully the ‘original’ text – a futile task, in any case – and instead may begin to participate, as a creative agent, in its ongoing reinterpretation and enrichment. Clive Scott’s translations of Baudelaire (2000b) are an excellent example of how the postmodern turn has influenced translation. Scott uses the postmodern notion of intertextuality – the idea that all texts are influenced by and contain traces of earlier texts (this is an extension of the Derridean

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concept of différance to the literary system) – to empower the translator. Scott shows that Baudelaire’s poetry reveals the voice of the Roman poet Juvenal, among other influences. The purpose of highlighting these borrowings is to show that the source itself has sources. The source text is ‘a quotation, a fragment of a larger cultural canvas’ (Scott 2000b: 125). Baudelaire is positioned as an event on a literary timeline, thereby paving the way for the translation to become a later, but not inferior, event on that timeline. Scott wants the reader to view his translations as compl(e/i)ments to earlier texts, as versions of texts which happen to be written in another language, and in a different age from that of their source. Scott draws on Benjamin’s (2000) claim for a pure language (reine Sprache) as further evidence that every source text has a source. Benjamin posits the existence of a language which all natural languages originate from and strain towards. One might imagine that the concept of a pure language would be antithetical to postmodern reflection. Benjamin does not, however, claim that pure language is accessible: one can argue that pure language functions simply as a symbolic device, as a myth. The hypothetical existence of pure language relieves both original and translation of the responsibility of being definitive, stable texts. Neither one of them is the source, nor can the source be reached. Translating and re-translating the ‘source’ text merely multiplies our chances of glimpsing the ultimate source. Pure language can only be intuited through the experiments in form embodied by literary texts across the range of natural languages. The simultaneous presence and absence of pure language can act as a spur to creativity and is a legitimization of the translator’s task. My translation triptych draws on these ideas and theorists, refusing to pin down meaning in one definitive translation, instead offering parallel translations where meaning resides in the sum of the parts. Faust ’s trial by triptych My translation triptych opens up the process of translation by presenting the reader with three compl(e/i)mentary translation products which perform both the process of translation and Goethe’s Faust. Wherever Der geheime Bericht quotes directly from Faust, I give three different English translations of the quotation. The number three is only significant in that it is not one (a definitive translation which conceals the translation process from the reader) and not two (which would suggest that the translator’s task is simply to choose between binaries such as free vs literal or foreign vs domestic).3 Theoretically, any number of translations greater than three would be acceptable for my purpose. The three translations are laid out horizontally on the page and can be read in any order. Table 10.1 names the three types of translation and lists the main themes or issues which they address.

f a u s t goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) 149 Table 10.1 A translation triptych ‘Literal’ translation

Translation for children

Pop translation

accessing the original text

addressing a specific audience

(post)modernization

fidelity foreignness

accessibility ‘reading’

pastiche restaging

By providing parallel translations, the triptych helps to create a new, critical reader of translation and to do away with the passive, ‘ignorant’ consumption of translated texts. The triptych encourages the reader to compare and contrast, to consider the nature and function of translation and to formulate his or her own answer to the question, ‘What is a translation?’. ‘Literal’ translation Literal translation here implies ‘literal’ translation after Nabokov (2000). Nabokov’s style of translation, as exemplified in his translation of Eugene Onegin, is a way of talking about or reporting the original text rather than performing it. The receiving language acts as a host for the original text, explaining to the reader of the translation, via its close adherence to the syntax and lexis of the source text as well as extensive use of footnotes, how the original text operates. The rationale behind this type of translation is that translation is a necessary evil. It is the only way of making the mechanics of the original text accessible to a reader who is ignorant of the source language. Furthermore, ‘literal’ translation is, for Nabokov, the only acceptable form of translation: anything else ‘is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody’ (Nabokov 2000: 77). Nabokov thus refuses to attempt any re-creation of the rhyme which characterizes Eugene Onegin (a verse drama) in Russian. Recreating rhyme is a demanding and artificial undertaking which moves a translation too far away from its source, rendering it unrecognizable in relation to the source text in all other respects. Nabokov’s definition of fidelity is tied to his understanding of the purpose or function of translation, which is to help the ignorant reader understand how the foreign work operates. My purpose in including a Nabokovian ‘literal’ translation in the triptych was, first, to present this ‘academic’ translation approach to the reader and, second, to force the reader to acknowledge the foreignness of the source text and hence the role played by the translator in converting it into a ‘domestic’ text. My ‘literal’ translation of Faust, a verse drama like Onegin, follows Nabokov’s lead in adhering to lexis and syntax and in eschewing the re-creation of rhyme and metre. The following example from my ‘literal’ translation of Faust occurs when Wagner, Faust’s pupil, replies to Faust’s question about the dog which has

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been following them on their Easter walk. The dog will later reveal itself to be Mephisto, the devil, in disguise. Table 10.2 The mysterious dog (TSR, 27; DGB, 96) ‘Literal’ translation

Translation for children

Pop translation

Wagner:

‘I think your eyes might be deceiving you, Mr Fist. I don’t see any smoke and fire.’

Wagner:

With you it really could be eye-deception

It looks normal to me, sir.

‘Eye-deception’ is not, of course, a conventional noun phrase in English. It is a ‘literal’ translation of the German compound noun ‘Augentäuschung’. While German does not possess as large a lexis as English, it does have the creative ability to form new nouns by clustering already existing nouns together. A literal translation transfers this unique capacity to English. The oddity of ‘eye-deception’ calls attention to the foreign origin of the text and ‘foreignizes’ English (in the Nabokovian rather than the Venutian sense), pushing the language into unexplored territory. The reader is forced to acknowledge the presence of the translator in the space between ‘eye-deception’ and, for example, the more domesticated translation for children ‘I think your eyes might be deceiving you . . .’. Translation for children The translation for children aims to show the reader how consideration of audience can influence the translation product. This translation type attempts to open up the Faust story for children by using modern language and a more familiar genre; I have translated not only interlingually but intersemiotically, from drama to prose, in order to increase accessibility to the text. This is a common Anglo-American practice when ‘translating’ canonical texts for children intralingually (one need only look at the numerous prose adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays available in any library or bookshop); a practice advocated by Goethe himself. The result of my interlingual and intersemiotic translation of Faust contains, with its emphasis on first-person dialogue, traces of its theatrical origins (see the translation for children in Table 10.2, for example). Translating a text such as Faust for children inevitably necessitates some clarification of the metaphysical concepts with which the text is concerned. The translator offers an interpretation or reading of the text, based on her own understanding, which in turn is aided by the available scholarly literature.4 The following example shows Mephisto’s cryptic attempt at explaining his role to Faust.

f a u s t goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) 151 Table 10.3 Mephistopheles explains himself (TSR, 28; DGB, 96) ‘Literal’ translation

Translation for children

Pop translation

Mephistopheles: A part of that power That always wants evil and always creates good I am the spirit who always negates! And that rightly so, for everything that arises Is worthy of being destroyed Therefore it would be better if nothing arose So everything that you call sin Destruction, in short, evil Is my actual element

‘I’m with the Big Guy,’ said Mephisto knowingly. Mr Fist looked puzzled. ‘Surely you know who the Big Guy is?’ Mephisto leaned over and whispered conspiratorially in Mr Fist’s ear: ‘G . . . O . . . D.’ Mr Fist looked unimpressed. ‘I’m God’s left-hand man. I take care of all the . . .’ Mephisto paused, relishing the words in his mouth. ‘. . . dirty business. My job is to prove that you’re bad. Oops. Did I say bad? I meant to say good of course.’

Mephistopheles: (sings, karaoke-style, the opening lines of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’) Please allow me to introduce myself, etc.

Mephisto is the devil, but he is not an independent devil who wields as much power as God. Mephisto is very much God’s servant, and his mischief-making is ultimately employed in the service of good. Faust soon comes to realize that Mephisto does not in himself represent any danger. The translation for children aims to explain what is more cryptically expressed in the ‘literal’ translation. One can also see from the example above that I have Anglicized Faust’s name and transformed him into Mr Fist. This name change indicates a desire to be playful and humorous, rather than a bid to ‘domesticate’ the text or to make judgements about a young audience’s ability and willingness to deal with foreign names. The German word Faust can, after all, signify ‘fist’, and it seemed appropriate, within the spirit of my translation triptych, to highlight this particular ‘meaning’ of the German word. Another noticeable stylistic feature of the children’s translation is its use of rhyme and repetition. In the following example, Mephisto promises Faust that drinking an elixir of youth prepared by a witch will indeed have the effect Faust desires.

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Table 10.4 The elixir of youth (TSR, 30; DGB, 97) ‘Literal’ translation

Translation for children

Pop translation

Mephistopheles:

‘As soon as this brew has crossed your lips, you’ll get the hots for all kinds of chicks.’

Mephistopheles:

You will soon see, with this drink in your body Helen in every woman

Your loins will soon be aflame for hag and beauty alike.

Here the translation for children uses rhyme and rhythm to echo the rhyme and rhythm in Goethe’s verse drama and to appeal to a younger audience. Rhythm and rhyme are common stylistic features of children’s writing and are a source of humour for younger readers, which is often the effect achieved by rhyme in Goethe’s Faust. Pop translation My final translation type is a pop translation, inspired by postmodern theories of the text and innovative translation practices such as Clive Scott’s translations of Baudelaire (2000b). The translation is pop in two respects: first, like much of popular culture, it is intertextual, borrowing lyrics from pop songs and referring to characters and dialogue from Hollywood films such as Star Wars. Second, it restages Faust for a contemporary audience, an audience living in a postmodern age. My motivations for restaging Faust are twofold. The first reason is that Goethe’s Faust itself reworked a pre-existing Faust legend which dates back to at least 1587. Goethe rewrote the story of the scientist who sells his soul to the Devil for an Enlightenment audience. Goethe’s Faust is not damned for making a pact with the Devil, as was the case in the older versions of the legend, because Faust is now a secular creature for whom damnation holds no threat. Rather, he damns himself because in his Enlightenment quest for fulfilment, he harms another human being, the innocent Gretchen (Beddow 1986: 22, 89; Boyle 1987: 14–15). What is at stake in the famous wager with Mephistopheles is not the loss of Faust’s soul in the conventional sense, but the loss of identity which would be the inevitable consequence of placing more value on a fleeting moment of pleasure than on an abiding sense of self (Boyle 1987: 51). As such, Faust is a symbol for and a locus of the debates which preoccupied Enlightenment society. As Boyle points out, Goethe demonstrated that ‘the life of a Faust who has translated the central notions of traditional Christianity into his own modern idiom cannot be narrated in a simple retelling of the traditional legend. The Faust story has to be translated too’ (ibid.: 46). The second reason for restaging Faust can be explained by reference to

f a u s t goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) 153 a prose text by Borges (1981) entitled ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Borges describes the efforts of a fictional poet, Pierre Menard, to rewrite Don Quixote at the beginning of the twentieth century in exactly the same words used by Cervantes three hundred years earlier. Borges humorously analyses a passage from Don Quixote as written by Menard and then by Cervantes (the passages are of course identical), contrasting Menard’s ‘archaic style’ with Cervantes’ easy handling of contemporary Spanish (Borges 1981: 102). Borges also identifies influences on Menard’s Quixote such as Russell and Nietzsche, philosophers who could not possibly have influenced Cervantes’ Quixote (ibid.: 101). The moral of the essay appears to be that all texts are products of specific times and spaces and that the passage of time will inevitably effect how one reads (and writes) a text. Menard’s fictional undertaking is also the task of the translator, who rewrites texts across the barriers not only of time, but also of language.5 Borges dismisses ‘those parasitic texts which place Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on the Cannebière, and Don Quixote on Wall Street’ (ibid.: 99), but, given his humorous tone, the translator may well interpret the latter comment as an exhortation to produce precisely such a parasitic text. Menard’s goal is too absurd to emulate. For the reasons outlined above, Goethe’s Faust requires perpetual retranslation to reflect the constant change in society’s thinking on metaphysical concepts such as the nature and provenance of good and evil, the essence of God and God’s relationship to humankind. My pop translation aims to compl(e/i)ment Goethe’s Faust by reinterpreting it for a postmodern audience, thereby contributing to the survival of the text and enriching contemporary understanding of it. In Table 10.5 below, God is shown to be alive and well in heaven, and expresses his frustration at the various nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to talk him out of existence. Mephisto is one of the few believers left. The language used in this translation type is of course the strongest indication that this Faust is written for a contemporary audience. When Mephisto appears before Faust in a puff of smoke, he introduces himself with lyrics from the 1968 Rolling Stones’ song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (see Table 10.3). Similarly, when Mephisto receives permission from God to tempt Faust, God makes a reference to Darth Vader and briefly assumes the persona of Yoda. Just as the ‘literal’ translation of Faust forces the reader to confront the role played by the translator in ‘domesticating’ foreign texts, the pop translation, with its flagrant borrowings from a variety of pop cultural sources, draws the reader’s (or the audience’s) attention to the translatedness of the text, thereby raising the ‘visiblity’ of the translator and the translation act.6 As Cervantes could not have been influenced by Nietzsche or Russell, neither could Goethe have watched Star Wars or listened to the Rolling Stones. The reader is aware that somebody is putting words in Goethe’s mouth and comes to realize that the reader’s access to the foreign text is facilitated, and manipulated, by the translator.

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Table 10.5 God’s relationship to the Devil (TSR, 25–6; DGB 94) ‘Literal’ translation

Translation for children

Pop translation

The Lord: Of all spirits who negate The joker is the least burden to me Man’s activity can all too easily slacken He soon makes love to absolute quiet Therefore I happily give him a companion Who teases and moves and must be active as a devil

‘You know,’ said God, as he hopped from cloud to cloud, talking to nobody in particular, ‘devils are not quite so bad as people generally think.’ He continued. ‘Take Mephisto for instance. All he does is put a bit of temptation in a person’s way. Tease a little here, encourage a little there.’ God wagged his finger at a group of angels who had gathered around to listen to his musings. ‘Human beings can get very lazy you know. Very lazy indeed. If we didn’t send somebody down there to check up occasionally, there’d be all kinds of mischief going on, guaranteed.’

God: (clearly becoming more and more agitated) It all started with Nietzsche, who thought I was dead. Clearly the French felt he hadn’t gone far enough because then along came postmodernism and very nearly put me out of business altogether. (shouts out loud at the audience) AT LEAST SATAN BELIEVES I EXIST. (more calmly) So, send in the devil I say. Let’s shake ’em up a bit. ’Cos when the going gets tough . . .

Table 10.6 Mephisto receives permission (TSR, 26; DGB 94) ‘Literal’ translation

Translation for children

Pop translation

The Lord: Well good, it’s left up to you Draw this spirit away from his source And lead him, if you can seize him Down with you on your way And stand ashamed if you must acknowledge That a good person in his dark urge Is well aware of the true way

‘I’m not convinced,’ said God to Mephisto. ‘But if you insist.’ He waved his hand at the Devil dismissively. ‘Mr Fist is a good man. He won’t fall for your empty promises and magic tricks.’ Mephisto was delighted. Finally, a chance to do some tempting! He held out a leathery hand to seal the wager.

God: He’s all yours. Go wild. But you’ll soon have to admit that our Faust is no Darth Vader. (in Yoda-like tones) Doubt in his heart there is. But strong is the force in him. Turn to the dark side he will not.

f a u s t goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) 155 Conclusion The inspiration for my translation performance was provided by the implied translation in Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe and by the postmodern trend in translation thought, which, by questioning the authority of both text and author, opens up a space for the translator to become a creative agent and for the translation to become a creative space. My translation triptych aims to lay bare the process of translation to the reader, showing how a translation can be shaped by the translator’s understanding of the function of translation (to enable the reader to understand how the foreign text operates, for example) or by a specific translation ‘brief’ (to make a canonical text accessible to a young audience, for example), or by temporal distance from the source text. In opening up the translation process, the triptych helps to create a more critical reader of translations. In addition to this, the translation triptych is a creative experiment: a personal exploration of what it means to be a translator, as well as a personal encounter with Goethe’s Faust. However, the triptych also functions as a creative illustration of the academic debates currently taking place within translation studies and points towards a potential new role for literary translation, the role of ‘inbuilt supplement to literary criticism’ (Scott 2000b: 2). In its three-dimensionality, the translation triptych recreates the complexity of the source text in English, resisting the temptation to give what Scott refers to as an ‘interpretation’ – the translation for children clearly does interpret, but this is balanced out by the whole – in favour of a ‘reading’, which is sensitive to the text’s ‘moods and directions, to the ways in which it makes its meanings’ (ibid.: 247). This sensitivity inherent in the multiple translation approach could gainfully be employed in the teaching of foreign literature at university level, irrespective of students’ ability to access the source language. In this sense, the translation triptych is not only an experimental translation form, but also a persuasive argument for the ability of translation(s) to enhance and enrich our understanding of literary texts. Appendix Extracts from Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil Es mag bei euch wohl Augentäuschung sein (DGB 96; corresponds to Table 10.2) Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft. Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was ensteht Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht;

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Drum besser wär’s daß nichts enstünde. So ist denn alles was ihr Sünde Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt, Mein eigentliches Element. (ibid.; corresponds to Table 10.3) Du siehst, mit diesem Trank im Leibe, Bald Helenen in jedem Weibe. (ibid.: 97; corresponds to Table 10.4) Von allen Geistern die verneinen Ist mir der Schalk am wenigsten zur Last. Des Menschen Tätigkeit kann allzu leicht erschlaffen,

Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; Drum geb’ ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu, Der reizt und wirkt, und muß als Teufel schaffen. (ibid.: 94; corresponds to Table 10.5)

Nun gut, es sei dir überlassen! Zieh diesen Geist von seinem Urquell ab, Und führ ihn, kannst du ihn erfassen, Auf deinem Wege mit herab, Und steh beschämt, wenn du bekennen musst: Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange, Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst. (ibid.; corresponds to Table 10.6)

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe (henceforth referred to as DGB) has not, as yet, been translated into English. The Secret Report on the Poet Goethe (henceforth referred to as TSR) is my own translation of the title. Throughout this article, all English translations from DGB are my own, including the passages from Goethe’s Faust quoted by DGB, and are taken from my unpublished MA dissertation (Wright 2002). DGB uses italics to indicate its use of short quotations from Goethe. Longer quotations are both italicized and offset from the main body of the text. Reducing choice in translation to binaries is an oversimplification of the translation process and often draws attention away from wider ethical and functional issues. See Chesterman (1997) for a useful discussion of binaries in translation. See Beddow (1986) and Boyle (1987) for helpful discussions of the first part of Goethe’s Faust.

f a u s t goes pop: a translator’s rereading(s) 157 5. 6.

As Bassnett says of this Borges essay: ‘Borges never uses the word “translation”, but his story is about translation all the same’ (Bassnett 1998a: 26). Terminology such as ‘domestication’, ‘foreignization’ and ‘(in)visibility’ owes much to Venuti (1995, 1998), who has played a significant role in politicizing the role of the translator over the last decade.

11 Poetry as ‘translational form’: a transgeneric translation of Jeanne Hyvrard’s Mère la mort into English Eugenia Loffredo

Introduction Jeanne Hyvrard was born in Paris in 1945, and was trained as a political scientist. We do not know much more about her, as Hyvrard has chosen to preserve her anonymity. What we have is ‘only a name and a written trace, the inscription of her voice. No face, no habits, no places, no friends, and no opinions will be associated with her other than the ones she expressly puts on paper, for she scornfully rejects the “biographical” for the sole benefit of the textual matter’ (Reid 1988: 317). Thus, our knowledge of this writer depends mostly on her oeuvre, comprising prose novels, short stories, poetry, essays and experimental texts, which exceed the boundaries of conventional genre definitions. Mère la mort (‘Mother Death’) (1976) also speaks of Hyvrard, and more specifically of her idiosyncratic relationship with her language. ‘Née á Paris comme mes parents, je n’ai jamais connu d’autre langue que le français, sa gloire, ses pompes et ses œuvres’ (Hyvrard 1985: 37) (‘Born in Paris like my parents, I’ve known no other language but French, its fame, its pomp and vanities, and its works’ (author’s translation). And this is true even when, confronted with Caribbean culture as a child, French became to Hyvrard la langue matricielle (ibid.) (stepmother tongue). Although generally considered a representative of Caribbean literature, Hyvrard’s voice stands out for being markedly French, as she herself explains in her article ‘La contrelangue’ (1985), and as shown by the place of publication of most of her works, Paris, and by the mainstream French publisher, Les Editions de Minuit. But most of all, her voice has been associated with écriture feminine. Despite no overt commitment to the feminist movement, her writings have socio-political implications in line with the feminist view, since she pursues the subversion and the reformation of language as taking place both at a content and formal level. In Mère la mort, Hyvrard’s peculiar relationship with language, and the clash with her own language, is established within only one possible framework: insanity. This book voices the repressive experience of a psychiatric asylum and can be briefly described as the relentless monologue of a ‘mad’

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woman, an unnamed je, ‘I’, who defies the repressive language of her oppressors, also non-identified ils, ‘they’, presumably the representatives of the patriarchal language, by sabotaging its very grammar and syntax. Such an experimental text readily lends itself to an experimental translational approach, as the attempt carried out in this chapter will illustrate. This ‘experiment’ consists of a transgeneric translation which exploits the peculiar formal and linguistic features of Hyvrard’s subversion of language, and examines how poetry can become a translational form for prose. In the framework of madness, the sound of a voice – its tonality, its cadence and what it performs – seems to be the prominent aspect calling for translation. As a matter of fact, this becomes the main translational preoccupation which overrides the hermeneutic activity consisting of identifying and fixing a content. Thus, the translation presented here does not aim to transfer a series of meanings. Rather, the translator sets out to reproduce the traits of a voice, as we shall see, equally meaningful, and the translation results from a listening experience of Mère la mort. And the most appropriate form in which this particular translational experience can be articulated seems to be poetry. The translation of Hyvrard’s voice (the unnamed je of the book) is carried out in two stages: initially, the text undergoes a process of substantial transformation in which a ‘poetic object’, called ‘pseudo-poem’, is produced; this preliminary translation, occurring only at a generic level, is then followed by an interlingual translation, when the pseudo-poem is translated into English. By being the materialization of not merely a linguistic transfer but also a textual event, the translation becomes a performative act which makes visible the translator’s progressively intimate relationship with the text, her response to the text. The implications of this approach hint at crucial aspects of the creative process in translation, whereby the translator’s subjectivity becomes visible, indeed, is magnified in a newly recreated text, while critically and creatively engaging in a dialogue with the source text. Listening to the voice Interestingly, the experimental translation of Mère la mort originates from a problem of a practical order: within the limited context of my doctoral thesis,1 the complete translation of the book (consisting of 159 pages) would have occupied too large a space. As the presentation of several excerpts from the book was not an option for the purposes of the thesis, this constraint raised the inevitable question of how to offer to the reader the wholeness of a work in a fragmented version. In reality, as the complexity of the personal relation with the text was evolving, what was first an insurmountable obstacle – the length of the book – turned, instead, into a doorway opening onto unforeseen and creative ways in which the text could be brought to light, and in which the translator’s creativity could be reconfigured.

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When in search of the ‘essence’ of a text – if we can talk about it not in its reductionist sense, but rather in terms of its singularity – in Hyvrard’s case, we cannot but discern the idiosyncrasies of her voice, so that grasping its ‘essence’ means hearing her voice. Listening to someone’s voice enables us to enter into a rapport with otherness: ‘l’écoute de la voix inaugure la relation à l’autre’ (Barthes 1982: 225) (‘Listening to a voice inaugurates the relation to the Other’) (1985: 254). And attending to someone’s quality of voice is somehow an instinctive response to the compelling charm that the conspicuous physicality of specific sound features provokes in the hearer: Parfois, la voix d’un interlocuteur nous frappe plus que le contenu de son discours, et nous nous surprenons à écouter les modulations et les harmoniques de cette voix sans entendre ce qu’elle nous dit . . . La voix qui chante . . . cette matérialité du corps surgie du gosier, lieu où le métal phonique se durcit et se découpe. (1982: 225–6) (Sometimes an interlocutor’s voice strikes us more than the content of his discourse, and we catch ourselves listening to the modulations and harmonics of that voice without hearing what it is saying to us . . . The singing voice . . . that materiality of the body emerging from the throat, a site where the phonic metal hardens and takes shape.) (1985: 255)

Hyvrard’s language can be compared to a ‘voix qui chante’, a singing voice that cannot be simply read but asks to be listened to. This observation suggests that the translator’s involvement with the text is not limited to reading, in other words, to an intellectual and hermeneutic process which, even when it ultimately appeals to, and provokes, emotions, obligatorily passes through signification. Indeed, the listening activity represents the sensuous dimension of the translator’s experience, which is here explored by means of translation. This dimension is generally neglected mainly because of the complications derived from defining what a voice is in a text and how one can possibly listen to it. ‘Voice’ and ‘listening to a voice’ are generally referred to as acoustic and auditory phenomena, and it is not without difficulty, and resistance, that they can be applied to writing, unless an oral performance of a poem, for instance, is involved. In literature, in fact, voice stands for a particular literary style with which one author is identified, and differentiated from another, or for the representation of both a fictional character and its subjectivity in a text. The notion of writing as a process rather than a product, and specifically a process consisting of the transformation of the material constituents of language, may point to a way out of the literary metaphor of the voice, and unravel the possibility of ‘experiencing’ this unreachable and ethereal substance, that is, an individual voice. Listening to a voice is an experience that cannot be written about, yet can be written: ‘Ce qui est ainsi révélé, c’est une écoute non plus immédiate mais décalée, portée dans l’espace d’une autre navigation “heureuse, malheureuse, qui est celle du récit, le chant non plus immédiat

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mais raconté” ’ (1982: 227) (‘What is thereby revealed is a listening no longer immediate but displaced, conducted in the space of another navigation, “which is that of narrative, the song no longer immediate but recounted” ’) (1985: 257). But, before moving on to consider the translation, it is necessary to stress that we are dealing with a female voice. Most of the reflections devoted to the female voice have been carried out by feminists, who, for evident reasons, have invested this notion with enormous importance. First, reclaiming voice stands for restoring freedom of self-expression on all levels, political, cultural and sexual. Furthermore, in women’s writing, ‘having a voice’ not only indicates the opportunity to articulate and make audible women’s experience as such, but is also an act affirming textual authority. At any rate, in whichever way the term is employed, voice becomes a metaphor, while the physical aspect of the female voice is overlooked. On the other hand, in the context of this experiment, which foregrounds the physicality of voice, another notion is assumed – ‘vocality’: we use the word ‘vocality’ to indicate a broader spectrum of utterance. Too often ‘voice’ is conflated with speech, thereby identifying language as the primary carrier of meaning. However, human vocality encompasses all the voice’s manifestations (for example, speaking, singing, crying, and laughing), each of which is invested with social meanings not wholly determined by linguistic content. (Dunn and Jones 1994: 1)

The preliminary translation: ‘La litanie’ Je n’entends plus que le discours monocorde de la rivière. (11) Le discours monocorde de la rivière. (21) Je me souviens de l’ordre monocorde des violons de l’été. (38) Le discours monocorde des violons de l’été. (47) Le discours monocorde de la rivière. Les violons verts de la campagne. (84) Le discours monocorde de la rivière, jusqu’à ce que cesse en moi le charivari qu’ils y ont mis. (87) Toujours la même dans le discours monocorde de la rivière. (90) Le discours monocorde de la rivière. Le calvaire. (120) Je deviens le discours monocorde de la rivière. (120) Je suis le discours monocorde de la rivière. (120) (Hyvrard 1976) [word-for-word translation into English] The only thing I can now hear/understand is the monochord discourse of the river. The monochord discourse of the river. I recall the monochord order of the violins of summer. The monochord discourse of the violins of summer. The monochord discourse of the river. The green violins of the countryside. The monochord discourse of the river, until the noisy tumult they have put in me ceases.

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translation and creativity Always the same in the monochord discourse of the river. The monochord discourse of the river. Calvary. I become the monochord discourse of the river. I am/follow the monochord discourse of the river.

A performance such as Hyvrard’s ‘chant’ can be interpreted2 only through another performance. In the same way that a musician tunes his/her instrument and/or his/her voice before the performance of a musical piece, so the translator, at this preparatory stage, tunes in to the text. And the voice which made itself more discernable at each listening of Mère la mort is the echo–voice chanting litany. This effect is generated by the regular repetition of phrases and sentences throughout the book, functioning as a sort of refrain. To encapsulate the sense of monotony that would emphasize the crucial role of repetition in the litanic mode, and ultimately to recreate the idiosyncrasy of Hyvrard’s voice, ten sentences regularly recurring in the text (as can be noticed from the page number in brackets) have been assembled together in the shape of a ‘pseudo-poem’, which I called ‘La litanie’. The selection of the sentences assembled in here, which all contain le discours monocorde, is mainly based on the fact that these words ‘say’ what the lamenting voice ‘does’. Their repetition works as a persistent echo resounding and lingering in the reader/translator’s ears page after page. At this stage, ‘La litanie’ can be regarded as a preliminary translation which introduces and dramatizes the listening/tuning in to Mère la mort. Choosing litany as the form for our translation has broader implications. Litany is a genre whose origins date back to the fourth and fifth centuries. Litanies were part of Catholic ritual and were created to be recited in public with the intention of pleading for God’s mercy. The peculiarity of this religious and public act lies in the fact that the individual and the community both actively participate in it. In fact, these liturgical prayers, consisting of a series of petitions, are recited by a leader, who starts a sentence or phrase, and by the congregation, which terminates the sentence or phrase with fixed responses. The figurative sense of enumeration and general monotony of the word litany derives from the fact that the words in these invocations are continuously repeated. At first sight, the notion of repetitiveness in litany suggests an impoverishment of stylistic resources and lack of subjectivity. But in Hyvrard’s reappropriation of litany, a complexity of functions, lying behind monotony, is revealed. Litany becomes the formal framework in which it is always possible to observe a double movement between individual and community. This determines its rhythm, its cadence. Dans l’écriture féminine, la répétition n’apparaît plus seulement reliée à l’émotion d’une seule. Répétition et identité vont toujours de pair, mais c’est parfois un nous éclaté (qui comprend moi et toi, moi et vous) qui prend à son compte la quête de la femme par les errances et les fictions. Même fusion du personnel et du collectif. (Lamy 1979: 73)

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(In écriture féminine, repetition seems no longer to be connected with the emotion of only one (woman). Repetition and identity go always together, but sometimes it is about a split ‘we/us’ (which comprise an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ singular, an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ plural) which takes into account women’s search by means of restless wanderings and fictions. Even the fusion of the individual and the collective). (author’s translation)

The form of litany, then, assumes crucial values in the context of the écriture au féminin and becomes a weapon which Hyvrard consciously uses to attack language: by abusing the very characteristic and possibility of language, that is, its repeatability, she turns language against itself. Therefore, repetition, which once served to establish meaning, has now, in the shape of women’s invocations and lamentations, the opposite function of unsettling the fixed sense of a word. Ultimately, repetition allows Hyvrard to implement the ‘fusional’ mode, whereby images, voices, signifieds and signifiers that are distinct merge into one another, continually threatening the binary logic of the patriarchal order. Both the individual–community relationship and the destabilization of meaning generated by the fusional mode are the two main foci in this experiment, and their impact on the translation will be discussed in detail later in the chapter. The poetics of the pseudo-poem ‘La litanie’ Litany seems to be the most appropriate choice for our experimental translation also on other important grounds: this is not only a form of expression specific to women but also a poetic form. Then, the conspicuous presence of poetic and of stylistic devices (such as alliteration, homophony, rhyme, parallelism) and the archaico-religious aspects of the litanic mode become the resources exploited to better express the author’s existential predicament as a woman and emphasize the poetic nature of Mère la mort’s language. To make sense of the pseudo-poem, ‘La litanie’, and its translation into English, it is important not to regard the first as just as ten sentences put together, but to read it as a text in its own right. The pseudo-poem is pseudo only insofar as it has not been written in this shape by Hyvrard herself, but not in terms of its, at least aspired to, poeticness. ‘La litanie’ is designed to embody, and to unfold, these properties of poetry for a specific translational purpose, which is to enhance the rhythm and the sound of the singing voice that the translator strives to make more distinct. It is the ‘poetic being’ of the litanic form of Mère la mort that gives us access to a sort of volume-control device, which can be activated by means of translation: ‘La litanie’ is, then, a necessary preliminary translational stage, a quasiphysical gesture of turning up the volume, to amplify female vocality, and, as it were, to play back Hyvrard’s voice.

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The rhythm and the sounds of ‘La litanie’

Figure 11.1 ‘La Litanie’

Language becomes verse by organizing rhythm in a regular pattern. Metre is what provides a poetic realization with regularity and strength, by ensuring that the alternation of accent and pause occur at regular intervals: ‘Metre is an organising principle which turns the general tendency toward regularity in rhythm into a strictly-patterned regularity, that can be counted and named’ (Attridge 1995: 7). Although regularity is inherent in the litanic form – its monotony – the purpose of the rhythmic scansion carried out in the pseudo-poem is to suggest a reading style marked by ‘an intensification and regularization of the normal rhythm of the language’ (ibid.: 8). For the intensification and the visualization of rhythm, I have resorted to some basic notions of versification that concern canonical poetic patterns, although the pseudo-poem itself does not fit the description of any recognized French verse. Elements of traditional rhythmic scansion have been applied to the

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pseudo-poem not so much to impose a poetic superstructure but more to bring to light the poetic facets of the text, poetic despite its discordance with the canonical metric forms. The rhythm of ‘La litanie’, indeed, is inspired, and determined, by the way it relates to the rhythm of Mère la mort, which shares many characteristics with the rhythm of the prose poem, defined in these terms: ‘Rhythm in the prose poem does not map out textual space, cannot work as a textual cadaster, but instead constantly questions itself, improvises itself, interrupts its own continuities’ (Scott 1999: 27). The ‘highly uncoded’ nature of the prose poem and the lack of ‘syllabic stability’ (ibid.: 30) open on to a multiplicity of reading interpretations. Despite the poetic scansion, ‘La litanie’ does not contradict the flexibility of Mère la mort’s textual structure. Instead, a high degree of adaptability is displayed by two factors: first, the very possibility of conceiving ‘La litanie’ depends on textual openness and mobility; second, this reading is only one of the possible readings, in this case, the result of the translator’s listening experience. From this perspective, ‘La litanie’ can also be defined as a preliminary rhythmic translation. Each line has been divided into rhythmic measures by what the French call coupes. Their purpose, in our scansion, is to create groupings of syllables which visualize monotony by maintaining a regularity in the number of syllables (3/4) of each segment; and, by assuming an equal duration in each segment, the rhythmic movement is not upset by any abrupt acceleration or deceleration, with the only exception of line 6. Another element used to suggest monotony is the accent – which tends to fall on the last syllable of each segment. It is important to underline that the accent in the ‘La litanie’ functions not as a formal aspect in versification, but rather as a crucial tool in determining the rhythm of a reading style: la fonction [de l’accent] est d’assurer la cohésion sensible des constituants sonores qui fait l’unité de sens, et, dans une unité complexe formée de plusieurs segments partiels, de démarquer les temps forts (par opposition aux temps faibles, non marqués), et de distribuer dans le temps les crêtes d’intonation (points culminants de la voix) et les pauses. (Jaffré 1984: 12) (The function [of accent] is to ensure the perceptible cohesion of the sound/acoustic components which create the unit of meaning, and, in a complex unit made up of several partial segments, to pick out the points of accentuation (as opposed to the non-marked, unaccentuated elements), and to distribute in time the intonational crests (the pitch-peaks of the voice) and the pauses). (author’s translation)

Ultimately, although the pseudo-poem enacts an intensification of the normal rhythm of language, it does not operate on ‘natural’ language, but on Hyvrard’s language – as iconically conveyed by her words le discours monocorde. In ‘La litanie’ the palette of sounds has a limited range, and the obvious reason is the repetition of the same phrase in different lines. The phrase le

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discours monocorde de la rivière is the main theme of several variations and reproposes itself in a distinct guise each time; other words around it set a different scenario. These words too share a similar phonic material. The delimitation of the diversity of sounds does not result in an impoverishment of the phonic resources; on the contrary, it helps to generate musicality in the text, and, more specific to the purpose of ‘La litanie’, to isolate Hyvrard’s idiosyncratic voice. To map the web of interactions among sounds and their individual expressive import, the analysis of the sound palette is based on sound symbolism (see Morier 1975; Tsur 1992). Alliteration, the main poetic device used to enhance regularity of sounds, is to be found in the prominent words ‘discours’ and ‘monocorde’, in which the phonemes [d] [k] [r] of the first are echoed in [k] [r] [d] of the second. It should also be noted that alliteration extends to the longer phrase to which scansion has been applied – ‘le discours / monocorde / de la rivière’: its syntactic units all contain at least two identical sounds, that is, [d] and [r]. Le discours and de la rivière have also [l] in common. A certain quality of sound is further determined by the sonorité or the sourdité (Morier 1975: 252) of the consonants, that is voiced or voiceless sounds. The majority of voiced consonants in ‘La litanie’ endows the phonic substance with the tactile impression of vibration, resounding in words which are related to the phenomenon of vibration, such as [d] and [r] of discours and [v] and [l] of violons. Also, some of the voiceless sounds are echoed in the sense of the word and can be regarded as the ‘traduction de sons “sourds” (c’est-à-dire de bruits et non de sons périodiques)’ (ibid.: 252) (‘translation of “voiceless” sounds (that is, of noises and not of the periodic sounds)’ (author’s translation), as, for instance the [ ʃ ] of ‘charivari’. The highest number of sounds is represented by the two liquids [r] and [l], and the variant []. These sounds suggest the ideas of ‘liquidity’. Although only rivière embodies the correspondence sound/sense, the recurrence of the liquids in the other words of the same line contributes to the sense of fluidity. An interesting example is discours, which intimates the idea of a flowing motion and associates le cours de la rivière to le cours des mots. The absence of the stop [b], the presence of only one [p] and a low number of [t]s intensify the sense of uninterrupted fluid movement. Generally speaking, the phonic matter of ‘La litanie’ enhances its semantic counterpart: le discours monocorde has the character of continuity, flowing as the river does. The considerable number of liquid sounds seems to suggest that the flux is so regular, uninterrupted and never hindered, that the regularity of the motion produces the illusion of the opposite effect, that is, of stillness. Monotony functions in the same way: a sound repeated many times can, indeed, make us believe that the succession of the various segments in time has vanished. Consequently, in the liquid state of imprecision, binary oppositions have dissolved and time has been subdued. However, rare points of rupture in the continuity and in the regularity of

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the flux can be found in ‘La litanie’, even if they are not immediately identifiable. In fact, these sounds provoke a different effect as they occur in the liquid state.3 For instance, the intensity of the frequently recurring [k] in ‘discours’ and ‘monocorde’ is somehow assimilated and assuaged by its combination with other sounds, as, for example, the sibilant [s], which seems to exert a silencing or ‘soothing’ force. Also, the high number of voiced consonants suggests that its sonority is characterized by vibrations, as, for instance, with violons verts. The impression of a stronger break occurring in line 6 is given first by its length, involving an abrupt change in the monotonous rhythm, and second by the presence of ‘consonants whose spectrum includes high-pitched resonance, such as [s], [f ], [ ʃ ]’ (ibid.: 256). The words ‘cesse’ and ‘charivari’ then signal a shift of tone from the ‘shrill’ to the ‘hissing’. Overall, this symbolical reading of the consonant sounds leads to certain observations on the constant co-presence of opposites, and, more specifically, in terms of the double-edgedness of sounds causing a shift in vocality. The translation: ‘The Litany’ I only hear the monochord talk of the stream the monochord talk of the stream I call to mind the monochord order of the summer viola the monochord talk of the summer viola the monochord talk of the stream the green viola of the fields The monochord talk of the stream as long as the shrill and shriek they’ve put in me stop All along the Identical (thing) in the monochord talk of the stream the monochord talk of the stream Calvary I becAMe the monochord talk of the stream

After having tuned in to the text by means of the preliminary translation from prose to poetry, ‘La litanie’, the translator proceeds with the next stage, the interlingual translation. The analysis of ‘The Litany’ will be carried out by following the three main translational concerns so far pursued in ‘La litanie’: first, the relationship between the individual and the community; second, the destabilization of language, that is, the linguistic struggle animated by the restoration of a language long lost, in which the notions of difference, identity and power are dismantled and relocated in a feminine context; third, the sounds and the rhythm of the poeticness of Hyvrard’s voice. The individual and community relationship The possibility of voicing women’s experience, in the context of Mère la mort, occurs in the framework of madness. The figure of Cassandra, the mad prophetess from Greek mythology, is present in the text, even if in different shapes, and it would not be pure speculation to identify the je,

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who is taking on the role as the leader reciting ‘The Litany’, with this priestess of an archaic religion. From the same perspective, it is possible to consider les enfollées, that is, the ‘maddenedwomen’4 to whom the book is dedicated, the community of women addressed by the je. In the representation of this relationship the graphic level of ‘The Litany’ comes to play a meaningful role. To make perceptible these two constitutive voices, the translation exploits graphic devices, so that the respondent’s lines are distinguished from the leader’s by means of the italics and an indented blank space. Also, this graphic configuration pictures the dialectical relationship between the individual and the community in a movement of two stages which, through repetition, become circular. The first phase of this movement corresponds to the moment when the individual is dispossessed of the ‘word’, which is delivered to the community. The ‘I’ who utters the first sentence disappears in the sentence that follows. A verbal sequence, first intended to express one’s subjectivity, once repeated several times results in the effacement of the subject that first uttered it. The nature of this movement is revealed in its complexity in the second moment when the words, once again, return to its utterer, producing the effect of an echo in which both voices merge. It is also possible to follow this dialectic by looking at the tension in the grammatical relationship between subject and object. In ‘The Litany’, the two elements to be considered are the ‘I’ and ‘the monochord talk of the stream’. Their changing grammatical position seems to take on the form of a struggle, which is finally resolved in the last line. The ‘I’ is the subject of three sentences and, as the first word, it visibly stands out. ‘The monochord talk of the stream’ is the grammatical object of lines 1 and 3, but it is also the subject of five lines. The grammatical position as subject seems, then, to be competed for by both the ‘I’ and ‘the monochord talk of the stream’. The grammatical polarity begins to be resolved in line 7 and, then, in the last line. Lines 9 and 10 of ‘La litanie’ consist of two identical verbal sequences with two different copulas deviens and suis, which testify the occurrence of the grammatical fusion between the subject and the object, of the je and le discours monocorde, according to the Hyvrard’s fusional mode. In line 7 of ‘The Litany’, the merging process, relating to issues on identity, is initiated when the ‘I’ standing out in ‘Identical’ becomes the personal pronoun to be linked grammatically to the ‘monochord discourse’, by means of ‘in’. Moreover, the word ‘Identical’ translates la même in line 7 of ‘La litanie’, whereas ‘thing’, in ‘the Identical (thing)’, is the translator’s addition to supplement the ambiguity contained by the definite article la. This can mean either la même personne, ‘the same person’ – and, as la is feminine, it may as well refer to the ‘I’ – or la même chose, ‘the same thing’, ‘the same situation’. In line 9, ‘I becAMe’ (even if it translates a different verbal tense from the French) represents the graphical solution displaying the completion of the fusion at two levels: first, the fusion of a state (the ‘being’ of je suis, ‘I am’)5 and a process (the ‘becoming’ of je deviens, ‘I become’); second, the identification of the subject and the object

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(‘I’ and ‘me’ in ‘I becAMe’, and ‘I’ and ‘the monochord talk of the stream’, joined by the copula ‘become’). Finally, the overall attempt of the translation is to make explicit the play of identity, identification and difference between subject/object at work in the source text. The destabilization of meaning Repeatability, as said earlier in the chapter, is the very condition that makes language possible. However, by abusing repetition, the ‘litanic’ mode used by Hyvrard provokes the contrary effect and undermines meaning in the patriarchal order. In this kind of feminine discourse, words are emptied of their conventional meaning. By pushing this approach to the extremes, the translation intends to perform, and indeed to magnify, these rapid shifts of meaning. Through repetition, and more specifically lexical and syntactic parallelism, the permutation of signifiers threatens the stability of each signified, since the signifiers repeated appear each time in a different context, in different grammatical positions (as also seen in the fusion of the subject/object), and, put side by side with different signifiers, give rise to unexpected associations. Difference, identity and ultimately fusion also occur in this context. For instance, ‘the monochord talk’ in ‘the monochord talk of the stream’ is different from the one in ‘the monochord talk of the summer viola’; on the other hand, ‘the order’ in ‘the order of the summer viola’ and ‘the talk’ in ‘the talk of the summer viola’ come to be associated, as they are both preceded by ‘monochord’ and followed by ‘summer viola’. Another interesting association is generated by the alliteration of words such as ‘talk’, ‘shriek’ and ‘shrill’, which very significantly draws our attention to the shift of vocality. Examples of clash and fusion can be found in the sense of sadness suggested by the gravity of the sound of the ‘viola’, conflicting with the impression of light and the vitality of ‘summer’. This is intensified by the two contrasting palettes of sounds and colour, grammatically brought together in ‘the green viola’ – these also diverge in tonality, the aural being sombre and the visual being lively. A further level in which repetition exerts its destabilizing power, and affirms the distinctiveness of a female voice, is intertextual. In fact, with, les violons de l’été, ‘the summer viola’ there seems to be an open violation of Verlaine’s poem ‘Chanson d’automne’: Verlaine’s violins are associated with autumn, and not with summer. Similarly, the use of the word monocorde instead of monotone is probably intended to convey the different tonality of a different plaintive voice. The rhythm and the sounds of ‘The Litany’ In the same way as in ‘La litanie’, the rhythmic pattern of ‘The Litany’ clearly does not belong to any canonical pattern, and, again, its main purpose is to suggest a reading style that would stress the sense of monotony.

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Figure 11.2 ‘The Litany’ The manner in which this is done, however, differentiates it from the French. The obvious reason resides in the difference between the French and the English systems of prosody: while French is syllabic, English is mainly accentual–syllabic. Instead of scanning by foot, the scansion here offered is by phrase, which can contain more than one accent. This technique, in fact, allows us to configure lines in such a way that the monotony of the voice is more successfully reproduced to suggest a reading style. Where it was possible, I have opted for monosyllabic words, rather than polysyllabic. In this way, lengthy syllabic segments were avoided, since the system of segmentation chosen for ‘The Litany’ already implied that the verbal sequences would contain more words, and be longer, than in ‘La litanie’. Moreover, monosyllables allowed me to add words not present in the source text without compromising the average length of each line. On the graphic level, the removal of any punctuation mark augments the effect of a continuous flow of words, while the contrasting regular and italic types suggest the occurrence of a ‘visual’ vibration within the liquid state.

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Although the overall musicality is strongly affected by a different rhythm, the consonants producing the most important alliterative effects in ‘La litanie’ are also present in the palette of sounds of ‘The Litany’. Indeed, the word choice is also strongly motivated by the intention of recreating those sounds. For example, the word ‘monochord’ ensures the frequency of the two main sounds of the French monocorde [m] and [k], which are reverberated in other words; for instance the [m]6 in ‘stream’, ‘mind’, ‘summer’ and the [k] in ‘talk’ and become’. Also the [d] in monochord is echoed in the word ‘order’. The liquids [l] and [r], suggesting the impression of liquidity, are contained in the words ‘stream’, ‘green’, ‘viola’ and ‘fields’. The voiceless sound [ ʃ ] of ‘charivari’ is felicitously reproduced in a double translation of ‘shrill and shriek’, whose alliterative effect not only intensifies the quality of voice but also signposts the shift of vocality. The indication of a sudden interruption of the flowing of the litanic mode is given by the longer sentence, and the increased acceleration of the rhythm corresponds to an increase of the pitch of voice, transmuted in a scream. As for the vocalic sounds, the juxtaposition of the [i], a high-timbre vowel marked by high resonance (Morier 1975: 1163) in ‘stream’, ‘green’, etc., and the [], low-timbre sounds endowing the voice with a general low tone (ibid.: 1164), in ‘monochord,’ ‘talk’, generates an intriguing tension, as in line 6 of ‘The Litany’. Conclusion This experimental translation intends to offer an alternative route to gain understanding of the process of translation and the creative role played by the translator. Disclaiming it purely as an experiment, rather than a translation, means to overlook the insights and the issues it explores. On the other hand, it seems a very arduous task to justify this attempt and call it a translation, since conventional translation would exclude such a production on the basis of the notion of fidelity. Indeed, ‘The Litany’ strives to be more faithful to Mère la mort than perceived at first sight. And this is possible if the notion fidelity is revised so as to establish to what a translator is faithful, and to include, and account for, the creative input of the translator’s subjectivity. In the case of ‘The Litany’, the process of translation is illustrated as a relationship between the text and the translator, and as an exploration of textuality, starting with a listening activity. From this perspective, the translator’s choice is to translate a voice and to provide a dramatization of her listening experience, as well as an illustration of the process itself whereby this voice is heard. If the experiential dimension of the translation is recognized, then the translator’s subjectivity needs to be taken into account. However, the possibility of the translator’s tuning up and performing means to perceive the source text as a mobility rather than a fixed entity – as the qualities proper to voice itself. The translation combines together the main features of Hyvrard’s idiosyncratic language, as examined in the

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chapter, and, by magnifying them, it conveys the traits of female vocality – indeed, also the translator’s. In line with the experimental attitude inspiring both feminist and Hyvrard’s approaches, this attempt endeavours to defy the conventional notions of fidelity, truth, transparency and definitive meaning, and to promote experimentation, but it does not sustain any specific political agenda (as the various feminist translation practices reviewed by von Flotow in Translation and Gender (1997)). Instead, this approach intends to divest interventionism of its pejorative connotations, which words like ‘violence’ and ‘abuse’ inevitably bring about, so that experimentation and ‘transformance’ (Godard 1990: 90)7 are in fact the outcome of a creative interaction with the text. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

Eugenia Loffredo ‘A translator’s voyage into madness: an experimental translation of Jeanne Hyvrard’s Mère la mort’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia 2002). The double meaning of ‘interpretation’, as both the hermeneutic activity and the performing of any artistic piece, is here purposely maintained and playfully exploited. As in the case of the foetus in the mother’s womb. The reference to the sounds emitted by the mother and suffused in the amniotic liquid seems to be appropriate to the context of Mère la mort. In fact, Hyvrard also associates the sea/river with the womb and symbolically retraces the traumatic experiences of death and birth from the point of view of the foetus. The dedication opening the book does not simply address les folles, ‘the mad women’, but les enfollées, those women who, like the je, have understood and accepted their ‘mission’ to restore la langue fusionnelle, a language which existed before the patriarchal language. The translation, the ‘maddenedwomen’, also a neologism, is taken from the English translation by Laurie Edson (Hyvrard 1988). Je suis means both ‘I am’ and ‘I follow’. This is very difficult to render and, as it was not the main concern of the translation, I did not provide a solution. The sound [m] plays a significant role in Mère la mort, as it can be found in keywords such as mère, ‘mother’, mer, ‘sea’, mort, ‘death’, monotone, ‘monotonous’, etc. ‘To adopt this term is to underline the interweaving of feminist writing and feminist translation for “Transformance” is also the collective title for the re/writing (translation) project’ (Godard 1990: 90).

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Index

accent 165 accessibility 77 acculturation 115, 120, 121–2 adaptations 23, 97 Adric, I., The Damned Yard 75 afterlife of text 3 agency, fragmented 123 Aitmatov, C. 25 Albee, Edward 27 Allén, S. 62 Allende, Isabel 89 alliteration 68, 69, 111, 163, 166, 169, 171 Almazán Garcia, M. 48–9 ambassadors, poetry translators as 62 ambiguity 28, 52 perceptual 39 poetic 138 analysis literary-critical 71 mixed-method 71 analytic revision 70 Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina, Translating into Love Life’s End 26–7 Apollinaire, G. 133 Alcools 89 Calligrammes 89 appropriateness 68, 69 archaism 115, 120 archetypes 90 Aristotle, Poetics 101 Arrojo, R. 147 articulations 12 Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. 110

author as genius 6, 10 marginalization of 6 see also self-translation; writers autobiography 12, 19–20, 23, 25–6, 31 avanspettacolo (curtain-raiser) 121 background, linguistic and cultural 98 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7 Balmer, Josephine, Chasing Catullus 22 Barnes, J. 86 Barnstone, W. 85 Baron, S. H., and Pletsch, C. 21 Barthes, R. 35, 129, 132–3, 147, 160 ‘Lessons on writing’ 141 Barton, A. 117 Bassnett, S. 10, 112, 157n. 5 and Lefevere, A. 1, 112 see also Lefevere, A., and Bassnett, S. Baudelaire, Charles 11, 36, 147–8, 152 Beaugrande, R. de 59, 62, 64, 98, 101 Beckett, Samuel 24–5 Beddow, M. 152 belles infidèles 84, 89 Benjamin, W. 3, 148 Bernard, O. 89 Bernard, S. and Guyaux, A. 39 Bernardini, S. 60 Bharucha, R. 121 bilingualism 25, 26–31, 99 binaries, choice between 148 binary oppositions 78–9 biography 21 ‘black boxes’ 2 Bloom, Harold ix blueprint 98, 99, 112

190

index

Bly, R. 98, 99 Boase-Beier, J. 49, 51–4, 55 and Holman, M. 7, 8, 10 The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity 9–10, 47, 116, 121 bold shifts 27 Borges, J., ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ 152–3 boundaries, between translator and writer 91, 143 Boyle, N. 152 brain, left and right (brain lateralization) 13, 87, 92, 93 Braque, Georges 40 Breedveld, H. 60 Britton, P. The Jigsaw Man 55 Brodsky, Joseph 21, 27 Brower, R. 98 Brown, J. R. 109 Brown, P. 110 Brunel, P. 39 Bunraku 141 calligraphy 40 Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities 35 Cant, S. E. 25 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 153 Cézanne, Paul 40 Chamberlain, L. 3 characterization 90, 110–11, 114, 118–19 Chateaubriand, René, vicomte de 85, 89 Chaudhuri, S. 27 Chesterman, A. 62 children, translation for 150–2, Figs 10.2–4 Chinese scripts 127, 130 choice-making 97 Churchill, C., The Skriker 136, 141 cityscape 35, 38 classroom applications 15 clichés, avoiding 89 Coates, J. 30 cognitive linguistics 12, 55–6 cognitive process, translation as 3, 55–6, 60, 62, 71 cognitive stylistic theory 51 Cohen, S. 55

coherence 77 Colla family 120 collaborative projects 8, 11, 143 see also women’s translation collective Collett, P., The Book of Tells 55 colonization 117 commedia dell’arte 114 communication, translation as 49 concrete poetry 133, 134 Confucianism 99, 100 Constantine, D., (trans.) Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone 23 constraints and creativity 9–10, 11, 47, 56, 92–3, 111, 116, 159 contexts, texts as 5 contextualizations 24 continuity 166 coupes 165 courses, academic 15–16, 19 interdisciplinary 31 Courtivron, I. de 25, 28 creative writing classes 88 as discipline 5–6, 9, 14 creativity in translation 1, 2, 14, 15, 55–6, 81, 154 cognitive approach to 9 constraints on 9–10, 11 impulse towards 10 theorizing 8–9 Creswell, J. W. 63 Crisafulli, E. 122 criteria for translation, triad of 99, 100 criticism, translation as 5 cubism, translation and 39–40 Cuddon, J. A. 85 cultural references 114 cultural relativity 2 cummings, e. e., ‘1(a’ 101 Dadazhanova, M. 25 Dancette, J. 63 and Ménard, N. 68 Danchin, A., La Barque de Delphes 91 Dante Alighieri 89 Dartnall, T. 19 data-gathering and data-analysis techniques 59–74

index De Filippo, Eduardo 14, 109–23 La tempesta 113–23 ‘Translator’s Note’ 113, 114, 122 De Filippo, Luca 120 De Vaus, D. 61, 62 deconstructionism 4 DeKoven, M. 40 Delabastita, D. 116, 122 Delahaye, Ernest 39 Deleuze, G. 76 and Guattari, F. 78 Delisle, G. and Lafond, J. 85, 89, 91 Derrida, J. 3, 11, 79, 129, 130, 132, 141, 143, 147–8 destabilization of meaning 169 detail, specific 87–8, 88, 92 deterritorialization 115 Dharsadker, Vinay 75 diction 20 dictionaries 65 différance 129, 130, 141, 147, 148 direction of reading 136–7 discontinuity 133, 141, 143 discovery–creativity continuum 91 double sessions 79 drafts 13, 64, 70 Dubnick, Randa 40 Dunn, L. C. and Jones, N. A. 161 Eakin, P. J. 20 écriture féminine 158, 162–3 Les Editions de Minuit 158 effort, minimum and maximum 49–50 Eiko, Miyagi, Suiko/ The Water Jug 14 Einaudi, Giulio 113 El Medjira, N. 84 elegance in translation 84, 100 Elgrichi, I. 138 see also Miyaji, E., Kendall, J. and Elgrichi, I. Eliot, T. S. ix empowerment of translation 147 Empson, W. 49 Enlightenment 85 epiphany 100 Even-Zohar, I. 2 experimental practices 14, 159, 171, 172 Fabb, N. 55

191

father logos 77, 78 féerie 113–14, 117, 121, 122 Felstiner, J. 59 feminine discourse 169 feminism 161 feminists, as translators 8, 122, 172 Fenollosa, E. and Pound, E. 138 Festival of International Theatre 120 fictionalization, translation as 33–4 fidelity 4, 100 Fischlin, D., and Fortier, M. 4, 11 Fitch, B. T. 24–5 flexibility 136 Flotow, L. von 8, 122 Translation and Gender 172 fluency 100 foci 13, 68–9, 70, Fig. 4.2 ‘foreignizing’ English 150 foreignness 75, 81 Fortier, M. 110 Foucault, M. 79, 82 Fowler, R. 55 fragmentation 98 Frawley, W. 98 free associations 69 freedom, creative 47, 48 Freely, Maureen 94 French, R. 91 ‘fusional’ mode 163 Gallo, M., Napoléon: L’empereur des rois 88 Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe 15 genre, changing 99 gestalt, poetry as 101 gestural language 119 Gilmore, L. 20 Godard, B. 8, 172 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust 147–56 Goldberg, N. 89 Goldsworthy, P. 55 grammar 136, 168 grammar/ discourse 68, 70 Greenwald, R. 93 Grosjean, F. 25 Guattari, F. see Deleuze, G. Gutt, E.-A. 49 Guyaux, A. 39

192

index

haiku 130–7, Fig. 9.4 English 131, 133, 135–6 Hamilton, S., The Bone Pedlar 88 Han Shan 15 Hando, S. 87 Hatherall, G. 88 Hawkesworth, C. 75 Heaney, Seamus 27, 86 Beowulf (tr.) 21–2, 23, 86 Sophocles (tr.) 23 Sweeney Astray (tr.) 86 Heilman, K. M. 19 Hemingway, Ernest 47–8 Herbert, G., Easter Wings 134 Hermans, T. 2 hiragana 127–8, 135 Hölderlin, Friedrich 23 holistic process, translation as 98, 100 holistic revision 70–1 Hollinghurst, Alan, The Folding Star 26 Holman, M. see Boase-Beier, J., and Holman, M. Holmes, J. 2 Holocaust 50 Homer, the Iliad 22 homonyms 137 homophony 41, 163 Honig, E. 59, 97 hook, as start of story 88 Hughes, T., Ovid, Aeschylus and Euripides 23 Hulme, P. 110 humour, translation of 116 Huxley, T. H., Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays 99 Hyvrard, J. ‘La contrelangue’ 158 ‘La litanie’ 161–72 Mère la mort 15, 158–72 identity constructing 76 inscribing 76 translator’s sense of 20 idiolect 122 idiom 52–4 Neapolitan 115 imagery 89, 111, 119, 122 imperialism 110, 117 incommensurability 97

Independent Arts and Books Review 93 individual and community, relationship between 167, 168 individualistic authorship 11 Ingram, S. 25–6 Innis College, University of Toronto 93 insanity 158–9, 167–8 Institute of Translation and Interpreting 86 intentionality 6 interdisciplinarity 1 interliminal text 10 interlingual translation 150, 159, 167 intersemiotic translation 159 intertextuality 4, 6, 22, 68, 121–2, 133, 143, 147, 152, 169 interviews, translator 59, 61, 62, 63 analysis 64 questionnaire 72–3 intraculturalism 121 in/ visibility 7 invisibility, of translator 80, 82, 122 Irigaray, Luce 80 irony 52 James, Alice 80 Japanese scripts see orthography Jääskeläinen, R. 55, 60, 63, 67 Jääskeläinen, R. and Tirkkonen-Condit, S. 60, 66 Jensen, K. A., see also Mondahl, M. and Jensen, K. A. Johnston, D. 112 Jones, F. R. 59, 64 Joyce, J., Finnegans Wake 141 Juvenal 148 kakekotoba (pivot word) 139–43 Kallifatides, T. 25 Kanami 144n. 12 kanji 127–9, 132, 135, 136, 137, 140, 143, Fig. 9.1, Fig. 9.2 Kant, Immanuel 7 katakana 127–8, 134–5 Kendall, J. see Miyaji, E., Kendall, J. and Elgrichi, I. Kennedy, D. 109 King, S. 88, 90 Kisˇ, D. 68 Koster, C. 62

index Kovacˇicˇ, I. 63 Krings, H., Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht 60 Kristeva, J. 141 Kulenovic´, Skender 68, 73 Lam, J. K. M. 60–1 Laukkanen, J. see Tirkkonen-Condit, S. and Laukkanen, J. Lecercle, J.-J. 55 Lee, D. 55 Lefevere, A. 4, 62, 99 and Bassnett, S. Constructing Cultures 19 Translation, History and Culture 19 see also Bassnett, S., and Lefevere, A. Leibniz, G. W. 78 Lepelletier, Edmond 36 letter navons 87, 89 Levine, S. J. 5 lexis 68, 70 Liao, C.-H. 60–1, 68 linearity 137–8, 141 liquidity 166 ‘lisible’ and ‘scriptible’ 35 litany 162–72 literal meaning 99 literal translation 89, 122–3, 149–50, 151, Figs. 10.3–6 literary devices 88 Japanese 139 literary theory 51 Littré, Maximilien Paul Emile 89 Lodge, D. 47–8 Logue, Christopher, War Music 22 Lombardo, W. 109 Lorde, Audrey 80 Lörscher, W. 60 ‘loss’ in translation 147 Lowell, Robert 23 Lubart, T. I. see Sternberg, R. J. and Lubart, T. I. McCrone, J. 93 McCully, C. 55 McDonald, R. 111, 117 Machado, Antonio 23 MacKenzie, I. 49, 50 Mallarmé, S. 85, 101–2 Malmkjaer, K. 62

193

Marcus, L. 21 marionette productions 120–1 Marionettes Theatre Company 120 masking, translation as 75 Mason, H. 85 meaning and form 64 Meister, Ernst 51–4 Ménard, N. see Dancette, J. and Ménard, N. message, writer’s 92 metaphor 52, 54 methodologies of translation 12 metre 164 Midgley, M. 48 Miles, R. 5–6 Milton, John 85 Paradise Lost 89 mind style 55 minimalism, linguistic 117 mishearings, wilful 41 Miyaji, E., Suiko/ The Water Jar 14, 130–6, Fig.9.5 Miyaji, E., Kendall, J. and Elgrichi, I. 130, 133 modernism 4–5, 22, 136 modernization 109 modes of writing 4 Moffett, J. 59 Molière 90 Mondahl, M. and Jensen, K. A. 60 monosyllables 170 monotony 166, 169–70 montage 38–9 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, baron de, Lettres persanes 85, 90 Monticelli, R. de 120 Morier, H. 166 morphemes 127 Morrison, Toni 80, 81 Motion, A., Wainewright the Poisoner 20 multidirectional reading 137 multilingual skills 93 multitasking 66 Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji 144n. 3 Murray, L. ‘On Home Beaches’ 51 Nabokov, V. 15, 30, 149, 150 Lolita 30 narcissism 25

194

index

narratives 64 narrator, omniscient 88, 89 nature versus nurture 110 Neapolitan comedy 114, 117, 119, 120, 121 negotiation 133 neurophysiology 13, 93 Newmark, P. 85 Nietzsche, Friedrich 153 Nikolaou, Paschalis, ‘Autoscopy’ 28–30, 32 Noh theatre 138–43 non-linearity 60, 66, 141 non-problematic sequences 66, 68 Nordlinger, Marie see Ruskin, John Nussbaum, F. 26 Oatley, K. 50 Ondaatje, M., The English Patient 88 1001 Nights 146 onomatopoeia 111 originality 4 orthography 127–44 Japanese and Chinese 14, 127 Osmond, N. 39 OULIPO x Out of Africa 90 page and stage, translating for 112 ‘Painting with Words’ workshop 86–91 Pamuk, O., Snow 94 parallel translations 148–9 parallelism 68, 70, 99, 111, 120, 163, 169 paratextual/ paratranslational material 23–4, 31, 122 pastiche, translation as 41 Paterson, Don, The Eyes (tr.) 23 Paulin, T., The Road to Inver 23 Pavis, P. 121 Paz, O. ix, 86, 97, 99 Perec, Georges x performance 79 writing for 112 performing translation 146–8, 159 Perrot d’Ablancourt, Nicolas 84 Perry, M. 27 personalities, of translators 64, 71 phonemes 166 phonetic-ideographs 137

Picasso, Pablo 40 pictographs 128–9, 131, Fig. 9.1, Fig. 9.2, Fig. 9.3 Pilkington, A. 47, 49, 50, 51 Plato 77 plays, translation of 14, 111–13 playwright/ actor, translator as 112, 122 pleasure, writing for 84 Poe, Edgar Allan 85 poems, structure of 101–2 poeticizing 122 poetry, Chinese 99 poetry translation 11, 13, 15, 21–3, 28–30, 35–46, 97–108 assumptions on 49–50 reasons for undertaking 72 research into processes of 59–74 poets, as translators 22, 23, 86, 93, 122 politics of translation 81 pop translation 2, 14, 15, 152–4 Pope, R. 10 post-structuralism 4, 15 postcolonialism 110–11 postmodern reflection 147–8, 154 postmodernism 6, 51, 136, 143, 152, 153 Pound, Ezra 4–5 Cantos 129 see also Fenollosa, E. and Pound, E. problem-solving 60, 66–8, 116 Probyn, E. 77 procedural foci 68 promotional material, translation of 93 prosody 170 Proust, M. A la recherche du temps perdu 34 ‘Journées de lecture’ 34–5 Prynne, J. H., Original: Chinese Language–Poetry Group 129–30 pseudo-poem 159, 163–7 punctuation 133, 136, 170 puns 111, 116, 138, 140 Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin 149 Py, A. 39 Quarantotti, Isabella 110, 114, 122–3 Quasimodo, S. 109 Quayle, A. 91

index Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 85 race issues 110–11 Racine, J., Phèdre 92 Raffel, Burton 97–8 Raybaud, A. 39 re-creation, translation as 97, 112 re-imaginings 23 reading, process of 34–5 reading groups 90 Reid, M. 158 reimage foci 13, 68, 69, 70 relevance theory 12, 48–51, 56 repetition 88, 111, 117, 138, 143, 151, 162–3, 169 reproduction 111 responsibility 7 retour au littéralisme 89 revisions 60 of trainees’ work 84 rewriting 97, 123 translation as 4, 112 rhetoric 114, 119 rhyme and rhythm 59, 60–1, 68, 70, 99, 101, 149, 151–2, 163–7, 169–71 Riccardi, A. 19 Richards, I. A. 49 Rimbaud, Arthur 12 Antique 39–41 Ville 35–9 role of translator 91–3 Rolling Stones 15 ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ 153 Rose, M. Gaddis 10 Translation and Literary Criticism 5 rule of three 88, 90 Ruskin, John, Sesame and Lilies (tr. Proust and Nordlinger) 34 Russell, Bertrand 153 St Jerome Lecture 21–2 Sarava, Emmy 80, 81 Saussure, Ferdinand de 147 Savory, T. 97 Scaglione, M. 121 scanning (text) 68, 70 scansion 166 Scarpetta, Eduardo 114 La collana d’oro 113–14, 121 Scarpetta, Vincenzo 113–14

195

Schami, R. and Gutzschhahn, E., Der geheime Bericht über den Dichter Goethe 145–72 Schlant, E. 51 scientific texts, translation of 91–2 Scott, C. 98, 99, 155 Translating Baudelaire 11–12, 24, 50, 147–8, 152 scripts Japanese 127–30 Latinate 143 Séguinot, C. 60 self, sense of 20, 21 self-suppression 20 self-translation 7, 12, 24–32 as autobiography 2 as self-observation 30 semantic equivalence 69 Semino, E., and Culpeper, J. 55 sequences 13, 66–8, 70, Fig. 4.1 macro- and micro- 66–8, 70 Shakespeare, William 85 ‘foreign’ 109 Julius Caesar 85 The Tempest 14, 109–23 shape-poems 89 ‘show, don’t tell’ technique 88, 90 Si-kiong, Tu 99, 101 signifier 147 and signified 129, 130, 143 Simon, S. 8 Sinagra, Antonio 120 socialization 77, 78–9 sonnets 36–8 Sorvali, I. 61 sound 68, 69 sound symbolism 166 space on page 133 spaces, between source and target language 8, 20 spaces of reading 2, 15, 35 spatial awareness 93 Sperber, D. 50, 55 and Wilson, D., Relevance 49 stages of translation 99 Stambler, Peter 14 Star Wars 15, 152, 153 Stathoyiannopoulou, Rania 81 status, of translator 85, 86, 91–3

196

index

Stead, A. 26 Stein, Gertrude 40–1 The Making of Americans 40 Tender Buttons 40 Steiner, G., After Babel 25 Sternberg, R. J. 9 and Lubart, T. I. 68, 69 stimuli, sensual 90 Stockwell, P. 48, 55 strategies, translation 60 structural linguistics 147 Sturm und Drang 85 Stylianou, Mara 78, 79 stylistic and cultural features 111, 113 stylistic devices 122 subject selection 61 subjectivity 123 translational 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, 24, 110, 112–13, 122, 159, 168, 171 Susam-Sarajeva, S. 62 suspension of disbelief 88 syntax 136, 140, 141, 143 Taoism 99, 100 target reader 90 Taylor, C. W. 9 Teatro Goldoni, Venice 120 technical translation 7 Tennyson, A., The Eagle 101 Terry, Patricia 98 textual events 14 theatre, Italian regional and popular 109 theatre translation 14, 111–13 theatrical space (as metaphor) 12 theory 47–56 as creative constructs 48 non-prescriptivity of 48 think-aloud studies 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 70 analysis 65–71 audio-recordings 65 data-gathering 65 quantitative and qualitative methods 71 time-consuming 65 third voice 41 time taken (by translation) 65 Times Literary Supplement 86

Tirkkonen-Condit, S. 60 and Laukkanen, J. 60 see also Jääskelääinen, R. and Tirkkonen-Condit, S. Tóibín, C., The Master 20 tongue 77 Tonkin, B. 93–4 toolbox, writer’s/ translator’s 88, 91 Törne, V. von 50–1 Townsend, S. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 88 trainee translators 84 ‘transformance’ 172 transgeneric translation 2, 14, 15, 159 translation exercises, Greek–Latin 85 translation turn 19 translational agency, ‘shared’ 14 translational virtuality 2 translator, as co-author 6 ‘tricks of the trade’, writers’ 88 triptych, translation 147–56, Fig. 10.1–6 Tsur, R. 166 Twain, Mark 88 Tyler, R. 138 Tymockzo, M., and Gentzler, E. 1 Università La Sapienza 120 validity 61–3 variation, elegant 88 Venuti, L. 1, 7, 9, 62, 71, 122, 150, 157n. 6 verbalization of difficult concepts 92 Verlaine, Paul ‘Chanson d’Automne’ 169 ‘Sonnet boiteux’ 36 vernacular tradition 120 verse forms 92 ‘versions’ 23, 97 virtuality 12 visibility 82 vision, translator’s 98 vocality 161 voice author’s 15, 160–1, 171 women’s 161 voix qui chante 160 Voltaire 84, 85

index Weinberger, E. and Paz, O. 99 Weissbort, D. 59 Williams, John Hartley 54 Winterson, Jeanette, Written on the Body 80 women’s translation collective 80, 81–2 Woolf, V. 77, 78 The Waves 76 word boundaries, unrecognized 133, 136, 137 wordplay 111, 116 workshops concept 84, 86–91, 93 creative writing 2 hybrid 31 for translators 13 writers as translators 85, 97, 113, 122 translators as 85 see also authors; self-translation

197

writers’ circles 90 ‘Writers translated by Writers’ 113 writing by proxy, translation as 92 writing skills 86 writing/ translating sessions 90 xin, da and ya 100–1 Yagi Jukichi 131, 132 Yan, Fu 99, 100–1 Yan, Yu 101, 102 Can Lang Shi Hua 100 Yao, S. G., Translation and the Languages of Modernism 4–5 Zeami, M., Kinuta 138–43, Fig. 9.6, Fig. 9.7, Fig. 9.8 Zen Buddhism 100 Zhuang Zi 99, 100