The Practices of Literary Translation

Constraints and Creativity

Jean Boase-Beier, Michael Holman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134935437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In their introduction to this collection of essays, the editors argue that constraints can be seen as a source of literary creativity, and given that translation is even more constrained than 'original' literary production, it thus has the potential to be even more creative too. The ten essays that follow outline ways in which translators and translations are constrained by poetic form, personal histories, state control, public morality, and the non-availability of comparable target language subcodes, and how translator creativity may-or may not-overcome these constraints. Topics covered are: Baudelaire's translation practices; bowdlerism in translations of Voltaire, Boccaccio and Shakespeare, among others; Leyris's translations of Gerard Manley Hopkins; ideology in English-Arabic translation; the translation of censored Greek poet Rhea Galanaki; theatre translation; Nabokov and translation; gay translation; Moratín's translation of Hamlet; and state control of translation production in Nazi Germany. The essays are mostly highly readable, and often entertaining.

1 Introduction Writing, Rewriting and Translation Through Constraint to Creativity

MICHAEL HOLMAN AND JEAN BOASE-BEIER

'Oui, I'œuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

Point de contraintes fausses!
Mais que pour marcher droit
Tu chausses,
Muse, un cothurne étroit.

(Yes, art emerges more
Beautiful from forms that
Resist,
Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.

No false constraints, o Muse!
But to walk straight, lace
Tight
Your narrow shoe.)

* * * *
Fi du rhythme commode,
Comme un Soulier trop grand,
Du mode
Que tout pied quitte et prend!'

(Fi the easy rhythm,
The roomy shoe, the sloppy fit
Of fashion
Where every foot slips out and in.)

(Gautier 1884:223)

1. Creativity and Writing

There are two assumptions that people commonly make when they speak of translation in contrast to original writing. One is that the translator is subject to constraints which do not apply to the original author. The other is that the act of translation is by nature less creative than the act of writing an original work.

Things are not quite so simple, however. The nature of creativity is in itself a very complex matter; it has frequently been suggested, as Pinker (1997:361) points out, that creativity simply cannot have a natural explanation, while on the other hand recent researchers such as Gibbs (1994:7) have maintained that creative thought processes are the result of conceptual constraints. In the absence of suitable tools for measuring creativity, the assumption of differences between original writing and translation is often based on little more than an intuition that translation is derivative in a way original writing is not.

But this is a very tricky assumption, for it takes for granted the supremacy of the original, as though it were in a position of unquestioned authority. Yet much recent work in both literary criticism and translation studies has challenged the notion of the authoritative original; Derrida, for example, echoing Benjamin's comment of 1923 (reprinted in Benjamin 1972), said that translation was "a moment in the growth of the original, which will complete itself in enlarging itself" (quoted in Venuti 1992:7). Especially in translation studies, at least two distinct reasons for this have emerged. One is the way in which all texts assimilate, borrow, imitate and rewrite other material. Thus it is not only translation which is an act of "rewriting" (Lefevere 1992b) and therefore a "political act" (Álvarez & Vidal 1996) of interpretation and transmission, but original writing, too, is rewriting. We shall return to these issues below, and many of the papers in this volume, in particular those by Jenefer Coates, Juan Zaro, Emily Salines and Kate Sturge, examine them in detail. The second main reason for questioning the notion of "original" relates to the view that art is, by its very nature, derivative. Valéry (1959:75) for example, maintained that all writing was translation, and Barnstone (1993:19), echoing Schlegel, elaborates on this view: for him, all mental activity which involves the search for meaning is translational activity. Looked at thus, as a transfer of material between media, it is possible to view painting, sculpture or writing as a translation of a mental idea into a visual, concrete image and, going back one stage further, to view the process of forming mental images as a translation from perception of external reality to conceptual knowledge. In this sense a painting or a piece of writing has already undergone several transformations before it reaches its target recipient and will undergo more before the recipient can interpret it. If the creation and appreciation of art in general are to be seen as involving so many translational transformations, does then the notion of translation in a specific sense as a transfer of literary material between languages cease to be meaningful?

The answer to this question is clearly negative. For whatever transformations the substance of a text has undergone before becoming a text, it must undergo a further one, and a much more tangible one at that, in the process of its transfer from one language to another. For this reason literary translation has been compared, for example by Tytler (in Lefevere 1992b: 132), to making a copy of a painting. Though this is a useful metaphor, in that it suggests that the transfer of one already concretized meaning into another medium can be measured in terms of likeness, faithfulness or equivalence, like all such metaphors it is only partially valid, because the notions of faithfulness and equivalence are themselves open to question. If the original is seen as something whose authority is in doubt, then equivalence to the original needs to be examined from the point of view of multiple potential equivalences. And it is also problematic to apply the notion of faithfulness to a translation of an original and not to the original's representation of reality, an issue to which we return below.

An examination of the work of many writers and translators will, as the essays in this volume show, cast doubt upon the idea that a clear distinction between original and translation can be made, whether as process or as product, and will inevitably lead to the conclusion that terms such as "faithfulness" or "creativity" or indeed "translation" are anything but clear-cut. A well-known illustration of this blurring of the intuitive distinction between original writing and translation can be seen in Edward Fitzgerald's recreation of the work of Omar Khayyám, the eleventh-century Persian philosopher and poet (see Fitzgerald nd). In spite of the presence of several versions by Fitzgerald, as well as extensive comment by himself and others on the process of translating Khay-yám's Rubáiyát, these poems have often been regarded as original works by Fitzgerald. An even more famous example is the Bible, available to the vast majority of its readers worldwide only in translation, but rarely regarded as anything other than an original work in the particular language of the individual reader in question. Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid (1997) is another case in point. The Metamorphoses, upon which Hughes' translations are based, was itself a collection of myths and stories made by Ovid and adapted, as Hughes points out in the introduction to the book, according to Ovid's taste and to his purpose in showing human action transformed by passion to mythical status. The tales, in an iconic act of metamorphosis, cut, augment and mould the ancient material into transformation stories which others, in their turn, have freely appropriated. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare, as Hughes remarks, borrowed freely from Ovid, often translating, transforming or adapting what Ovid had earlier adapted. Hughes himself produced a translation of the Metamophorses so compellingly Hughes-like that it won the Whitbread Award, not normally given for translations. Nevertheless, we tend to view Hughes' version of Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe as a translation, but not Shakespeare's in A Midsummer Night's Dream. We might well ask who were the translators here and what is the distinction between translation and writing?

In her article on Baudelaire in this book, Salines discusses how his work included a huge range of rewriting from close translation to free adaptation. For Baudelaire, translation was inherent in both writing and rewriting, and Salines, in examining these issues, invites us to question the distinction. Barn-stone (1993:95) refers to The Waste Land (1971) as "Eliot's great contemporary salad", composed as it was from "every element of translation". Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Eliot; these merely provide examples of what all writers do, namely integrate other people's writing into their own.

Allusion, too, is a process of integrating other writing, taking particular elements of another work and making explicit or implicit reference to them, building these references into the context of the new work. It is thus different from source-borrowing or other types of reference, which are acknowledged and kept fairly separate from the text: Joyce's Ulysses (1960) makes reference to the hero of the Odyssey and the novel is intended to echo in structure that of Homer's epic. Graham Swift's Last Orders (1996) clearly makes allusion in structure and to some extent in content to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), a fact which caused it, somewhat incredibly, to be accused of plagiarism by disgruntled critics who had failed at first to recognize the allusion. Allusion, in being unacknowledged and fully integrated, would appear to differ from translation or adaptation, which nowadays almost always give sources in order to avoid the accusation of plagiarism. Yet the distinction between translation and other types of borrowing is rarely clear-cut. In Shakespeare's case, it has generally been assumed not to matter. Yet, as the example of Graham Swift shows, we have become unused to tacit reference, and questions of ownership have taken on an obsessive value, to the extent that the original often assumes paramount importance, reducing translation to an invisible, insubstantial or mechanical act, rendered merely in service to what is perceived as the original (Venuti 1995:1). Yet at the same time, as we have noted earlier, the whole notion of the stability of the original is being called into question. It is for this reason that an examination of the practices of writers and translators is essential.

Original writing and translation, so it seems, have in common that they dismantle material and re-shape it into other material, whereby that transformation may involve change of medium (reality into art, play into opera, novel into film, painting into poem) or change of language, as in translation. But what of that other aspect of writing and translation: the constraints to which they are subject? As we suggested at the beginning of this essay, translation tends to be seen as more heavily constrained than original writing. An author, it seems, can write as he or she wishes, can transform reality as seems appropriate, and create whatever worlds are desired, but a translator has to write in relation to an existing work. Yet is this entirely true? Is the writer completely free to transform reality as he or she wants? At a recent writers' round table on fiction, a discussion arose as to whether it was acceptable that William Golding, in Lord of the Flies (1962), included erroneous detail about the lighting of a fire with a magnifying glass. The complaint has often been made that he here fails to echo reality, as though it were a constraint on original writing that he must do so. And yet, if we accept that disbelief is suspended when we read a work of literature, that we in fact enter the world created by the author, how is it that we cannot then accept things inconsistent with real life? If, in keeping with Levin's (1977) view of metaphor, we accept metaphors such as "The man is a wolf" or "The trees wore green gloves" not as mere implicit comparisons but as descriptions of a world in which such things are possible, then why can we not accept other apparent clashes with our world knowledge?

The answer to this question is connected to the reason why translation is often perceived as "wrong" in certain elements, rather than merely as a reflection of one of a number of possible interpretations of the original work. Leaving aside straightforward errors, a translation will be perceived as "wrong" by a particular reader if it does not fit the image that the reader prefers to associate with the original text. This judgement usually comes about at a moment in the text which jars, which draws us away from our immersion in the fictional or poetic world created by the work, and makes us realize we are reading a work created of words. If an author writes something which does not reflect reality as most of us perceive it, as readers we feel jolted back to reality and the illusion is lost. Similarly in translation, the moment an element in the text draws attention to itself, it will draw the reader's attention to the fact not only that this is a translation but, consequently, that it is a piece of writing. Both original writing and translation are thus often constrained by the need to preserve illusion, though this is not a characteristic of all writing: Brecht, Joyce, Meredith, Shakespeare and many others have specifically drawn attention to the text itself and thus to its status as an instrument for creating the illusion of reality.

Original writing is also further constrained by literary tradition. The concept of unity, just to name one familiar example, has, since Plato, been an important constraint on drama, where it has often manifested itself as a set of rules about time, place and action, and on poetry, where it is often used to mean a reconciliation of meaning and form. Other constraints dictate that a particular type of poem has a certain number of lines, or stressed syllables per line, or rhymes in particular places. These rules differ from one culture to another. Thus an English or German poem will be constrained by the requirements of metre based on stressed syllables, whereas Greek or Japanese poetry uses the overall number of syllables to determine the metrical pattern. Or again, French dramatic and narrative poetry has generally used alexandrines, whereas English, with a few exceptions such as Spenser and Bridges, has not. In translation, such mismatching will give rise to some of the most difficult aspects of the translator's task; a fact which is explored in the next section.

Original writing may also be constrained by prevailing political views, or, more substantially, by censorship. As both Claudine Tourniaire and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin show in their essays, authors may avoid certain topics, views or expressions, in order to ensure their work is published. It may also be constrained by the knowledge the author assumes its audience will have. Will they be well-read enough to pick up allusion, educated enough to understand scientific explanation, or, indeed, interested enough to engage with a complex text?

Writing is also constrained by the linguistic characteristics of its medium. These may, for example, be phonological: certain sounds appear in certain places, some words rhyme and others do not, sound can be an iconic echo of reality as it is in sound symbolism such as onomatopoeia or phonaesthesia. However, patterns formed from phonological elements are themselves subject to lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic conventions. Thus onomatopoeia is conventionalized: we say that an explosion makes a "bang", though from the point of view of echoing sound, we could just as well say a "beng" or a "bong", but we do not. Stylistic rules dictate that the concept of rhyme must contain an element of contrast: "bit" rhymes with "hit", but two "bits" do not rhyme. Syntactic constraints ensure that words are placed in a particular order, that sentences have a subject, that subjects and verbs agree, or that, in highly inflected languages, there are other types of agreement, such as that between adjectives and nouns.

All in all, then, original writers do not simply write what they want: they are bound by all manner of constraints: political, social, poetic and linguistic, as well as the constraints of the text itself, which creates a context potentially confining and determining the form and meaning of every utterance.

It is not sufficient, though, to see original writing as the result of creativity which is subject to constraint. For in fact creativity is often intimately tied to constraint, it is a response to it, it is enhanced by it. Indeed, it could be maintained, as Paul Valéry, for example, does in his discussion of prescription in art (1957:1305), that "rules may ... in some cases have creative qualities, suggesting ideas which would never have arisen in their absence". Constraint, in this sense, can be seen as one of the main sources of creativity.

So, for example, Tourniaire explains how the poetry of Galanaki arose out of a need to evade political censorship. Poetry, a compressed linguistic structure, which invites readers to fill gaps with their own knowledge, is an ideal vehicle for communicating what is forbidden. Ambiguity, the device by which multiple pathways to different meanings are created, is the device most appropriate to triggering personal and varied interpretations. Both Tourniaire and Ó Cuillean-áin show how, by saying what is not meant, an author can trigger in the reader a response to what is meant, or create space for the reader's own interpretation.

But it is not merely social and political constraints which engender a creative response; it could be argued that, especially in poetry, the art is largely the result of a response to poetic and linguistic constraint. Poetic language can thus be seen as a language marked by specific characteristics which include the stretching of standard language by creative deviation from its norms. According to this view, put forward for example by the Prague School Linguists such as Mukařovský (1964), and by many later writers, for example Boase-Beier (1987), poetic figures such as metaphor and repetition operate in creative opposition to their severely constrained and conventionalized counterparts in standard language. But poetic language, too, has norms, and strict forms, such as the sonnet, invite innovation and variation. A concept such as rhyme, which is simply the presence in two syllables, appearing in different words, of identical vowels and final consonants, is the basis for other types of phonological parallelism such as half-rhyme, slant rhyme, reverse rhyme and assonance, all of which may be used to achieve particular effects in part based on their contrast to full rhyme. Phyllis Gaffney, in her article on Leyris' translations of Hopkins, discusses his deviations, through the use of idiosyncratic compounds and violations of syntax and morphology, from both standard English and from classical forms of poetry. And iconicity, the mirroring of meaning in form, could be seen as both the essential characteristic of poetic language and its most stringent constraint. When critics, authors, or linguists such as Beckett (1976) or Ross (1980) say that a poem does what it says, they are referring to this particular characteristic. Yet in linguistic terms it is a characteristic which adds a heavy burden of constraint to what, since Saussure (1916), has generally been recognized as an arbitrary connection between meaning and form. In an arbitrary form-meaning relationship lexical choice is a matter for the author, who is constrained only by the existing inventory of lexical items, as well as morphological rules allowing for the creation of new ones. However, if words or word-patterns are actually to mimic what they denote, then some of the freedom of arbitrary association is forfeited. So, when Hopkins (1963:40) used the compound cuckoo-echoing, he could not simply have chosen some other form with the same meaning and still preserved the essential, non-arbitrary link between form and sense, for part of the effect of this compound is that it does what it says: [ku] in the first syllable is echoed by [ku] in the second, and both by [kow] in the second element of the compound. Iconicity is an extreme example of constraint forcing a poet into additional creativity, but there are many others, as discussed earlier in this section, and the ways they are perceived and interpreted vary across cultures and throughout history.

The idea that creative writing would not be possible without formal constraint is in evidence both in critical approaches, which stress formal patterns or unity of form and content, and also in the teaching of creative writing, where trainee writers are given sets of constraints within which and from which to fashion a text. Here creativity is not seen merely as a force or flow of energy which is channelled and formed by constraint but rather as something whose existence is indissolubly tied to the existence of formal constraint.

2. Translation as Constrained Activity

The relationship between the creative achievement of the writer and the creativity of the translator is one of the central concerns of literary translation studies. 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 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.

The constraints involved in the transfer between SL and TL text are legion and involve, among other things, broad cultural considerations of history, genre and linguistic convention on the one hand – both for the SL and the TL text –and on the other, considerations that also have something to do with culture, but are more narrowly, more personally defined. This is the culture of the translator, that is, the summation of the translator's overall preparation to act as an interpreter and intermediary that in turn critically determines his or her role as reader and write...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Michael Holman & Jean Boase-Beier Introduction: Writing, Rewriting and Translation Through Constraint to Creativity
• 2 Emily Salines Baudelaire and the Alchemy of Translation
• 3 Cormac ÓCuilleanáin Not in Front of the Servants Forms of Bowdlerism and Censorship in Translation
• 4 Phyllis Gaffney "The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" Pierre Leyris's Verse Translations of Gerard Manley Hopkins
• 5 R. A. Megrab Ideological Shifts in Cross-Cultural Translation
• 6 Claudine Tourniaire Bilingual Translation as a Re-creation of the Censored Text Rhea Galanaki in English and French
• 7 Sophia Totzeva Realizing Theatrical Potential The Dramatic Text in Performance and Translation
• 8 Jenefer Coates Changing Horses: Nabokov and Translation
• 9 Alberto Mira Pushing the Limits of Faithfulness A Case for Gay Translation
• 10 Juan J. Zaro Moratín's Translation of Hamlet (1798) A Study of the Paratexts
• 11 Kate Sturge "A Danger and a Veiled Attack" Translating into Nazi Germany
• Bibliography
• Index