Literary Translation

Redrawing the Boundaries

J. Boase-Beier, A. Fawcett, P. Wilson, J. Boase-Beier, A. Fawcett, P. Wilson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137310057
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries is a collection of articles that gathers together current work in literary translation to show how research in the field can speak to other disciplines such as cultural studies, history, linguistics, literary studies and philosophy, whilst simultaneously learning from them.

1

Why Literary Translation is a Good Model for Translation Theory and Practice

Maria Tymoczko

1.1 Introduction

Literary translation and studies of literary translation are at times dismissed as irrelevant to translation theory and to the teaching of translation practice in translation studies. Some translation studies scholars view them as too eccentric, too specialized, and perhaps even too precious to be taken seriously as the basis for developing translation theory, for more general theoretical inquiries about translation, and for the teaching of translation practice to those preparing for careers in the marketplace.

The irony is that some of the earliest and most productive stages in the development of the field of translation studies were initiated not only by linguists such as Roman Jakobson and J. C. Catford, but also by literary scholars including Jiří Levý and Anton Popovič, who were influenced by the Prague School; a cluster of literary scholars in the Low Countries including James Holmes, Jose Lambert, André Lefevere and Theo Hermans; Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury in Israel; and Marilyn Gaddis Rose in the United States, among others. All of these literary scholars made essential contributions to the theoretical frameworks currently used in the field of translation studies, within which much of translation theory has been elaborated and insights about translation practice and pedagogy have developed (cf. Tymoczko 2007: 28–42).

This chapter explores why literary translation continues to serve as a good model for translation theory and practice. The object is not to exclude other translation types from the theorizing of translation nor to suggest that the practice of translating should be taught preferentially through the vehicle of literary translation, but to explore why literary texts and their translations can and do provide foundational models for theorizing various aspects of translation of all types. The scope and nature of literary translation usually make it a good model even for theorizing most facets of oral translation, namely forms of interpreting.

The current concept of theory in academic disciplines was developed principally in relation to the growth of the natural sciences in the Early Modern period of European culture. The word theory is a relatively new term in English, first attested in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and it has had a variety of meanings during the last 400 years as the natural sciences themselves have shifted their understandings of the relationships linking theory, hypotheses, experiments and data. It follows that in order to understand the concept of theory it is more useful to see theory as a term of art or as a technical term rather than as a word whose meaning and usage are most apparent in ordinary language. Definition 4 of theory in the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED) is the relevant entry for understanding the role of theory in translation studies:

a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Definition 4 is attested earlier than and contrasts with definition 6, the definition that the OED calls the ‘loose or general sense’: ‘a hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, a speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion’. Often translation studies scholars – particularly those with little background in the natural sciences – are not clear about these different meanings of the word theory, thus tenaciously seeing theory in arguments that are in fact merely ‘individual views or notions’ and ‘speculations’. Particularly because translation studies as a field straddles the humanities and social sciences, often drawing heavily on empirical data and experiments, it is essential to understand that the field’s use of the term theory should conform to the sense of definition 4 in the OED (cf. Tymoczko 2007: 140–86).

In developing and testing theory, models are often necessary in order to make sense of a large and complex array of data (cf. Tymoczko 2007: 171–5). By positing a model that defines core parameters of a situation, it is possible to separate out exiguous attributes of a phenomenon that are irrelevant to the central theoretical and practical issues that the data present. This is necessary in cases where the data are complex, confusing and open-ended, as well as in other overdetermined situations. A model makes it possible to simplify a problem and focus on important parameters, eliminating the necessity of commenting on every aspect of all the examples under examination. Models also serve as a foundation for decisions about which parameters to examine in detail within a theoretical framework, suggesting areas of productive research and essential data to investigate. Models provide criteria that can be tested for relevance to the field of data in question because they provide somewhat simplified schematics for positing and then testing theoretical hypotheses, parameters and principles by means of focused experiments. If the model holds up to such tests, the specifics of individual cases can in turn be examined to see if particulars not covered by the model are sufficiently explained by the theory or other contextual factors. If not, the model must be changed so as to explain elements originally excluded from the schematic. Obviously if the model fails to hold up to the tests, then it is clear that parameters of the model must be altered or expanded or that other constraints must be added.

An important factor in constructing a model is that it must be of the right size and complexity. A model needs to be inclusive enough to cover all the data presented by a field of inquiry, but it cannot be too inclusive or it will encompass data that are not relevant to the field or so specific that the data cannot be generalized. Similarly the model cannot be too small: so restrictive and exclusive that it is unable to cover the whole range of data that must be accounted for. Excessive details and restrictions will make it difficult to use the model for developing theory that will apply to all cases addressed by the theoretical field but only those cases. It is obvious as well that the parameters of a model must be relevant to the problematics addressed by a particular theory, presenting those parameters and related issues clearly.

The data of translation studies are immense and complex: examples and practices of translation and interpreting in all languages and cultures through time. In turn translation theory should cover all examples of translation in general whatever the culture, language or period. It is always possible to have a restricted theory within this general umbrella, say a subordinate theoretical framework that will govern translating for the European Commission or the problems of translating Japanese texts. But to be a restricted theory as such, rather than a description or a prescriptive set of rules about practice, the statement must be able to be accommodated within the larger theoretical framework of translation studies as a whole, serving as a limited case, and it should be possible to indicate the parameters that are being relaxed, eliminated or added in relation to the more general theory. Here the relationship between Einstein’s special theory of relativity and his general theory of relativity is an example.

In making an argument about the suitability of literary translation as a model for translation theory, therefore, it is trivially true that the definition of literature has to be broad enough to encompass literary practices through space and time, across arbitrary languages and cultures. A first approximation would include both oral and written genres that are included as literature in any language by any culture. Moreover, in terms of Eurocentric literatures, the definition would revert to the broader (and more archaic) eighteenth-century definition of literature that included such things as essays (the works of Montaigne or Emerson for example), history writing (such as Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), sermons (such as Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’) and other forms of belles-lettres (cf. Eagleton 1983: 17–22). The necessity for a broad definition of literature as a basis for the formulation of translation theory is part of the reason I have stressed the importance of translation in oral traditional contexts in some of my own writing (Tymoczko 1990, 1999, 2007: 68–77).

When we think of models in the way I have outlined above and literature in a broad sense, the presuppositions and implications of my arguments below will be clearer.

There is no body of texts (using texts to include oral performances) that is as large, as complex and as representative of cross-cultural textual practices as the body of literary works created by human beings, and there is no set of translations that is broader and larger than those of the literature that has been preserved from the last 3000 years of human history. Literary works and their translations constitute a body of work that is capacious and comprehensive enough to exemplify the central aspects of translation theory and also large and broad enough to provide counterexamples of theoretical propositions when such counterexamples are needed in order to hone theory. Because of the size and variety of this corpus it can be posited that most theoretical questions in translation studies can be investigated with examples from literary translation. Nonetheless, the corpus of literary works that has been translated is not coterminous with all of translating and interpreting; the boundedness and circumscribed nature of the corpus are also useful in formulating certain theoretical propositions and in testing them for general relevance. All this is to say that literary translation provides an excellent model that is the right size for theorizing translation, as I will argue in what follows. Because the subject of this essay is so far-reaching, each of the points discussed will of necessity be treated in a very compact manner.

1.2 Literary language is language writ large and it best illuminates the role of language in translation theory and practice

A general characteristic of literature in human cultures is that literary language is language writ large. It is characteristically rich and complex, exemplifying the full range of the linguistic phenomena and capacities of a particular human language. No other corpus of texts can make this claim. Although translation is not restricted to linguistic issues, clearly translation is normally in part a linguistic practice. Whatever the role of other non-linguistic aspects of a particular translation task, language is almost always at the core of translating and interpreting.

Literary translation is thus a superb model for this aspect of translation theory. Literary language is in part rich because there are many literary text types, literary texts tend to be longer than many other text types, and literary content (and hence language) varies extensively cross-culturally, cross-temporally and cross-linguistically. The linguistic range of literary texts is broad, often including ceremonial and sacred materials in ornate, beautiful, solemn language. But literature can also be witty, irreverent, satirical, scatological and so forth.

Insofar as the corpus of literary texts and their translations is large, moreover, literary translation also offers examples of almost every linguistic anisomorphism and asymmetry: in the rhythms of language (what Paradis 2004 calls the prosody of language), in phonemics, in morphology and syntax, in lexis and the conceptual semantic structure of languages, and in pragmatics. Literature and literary translation also exemplify almost every language and language typology known from sufficient data. This is because literature is a cross-cultural phenomenon and seems to have been part of every culture and language type in the world throughout human history so far as records indicate, even if literary texts have not survived for our inspection.

In addition literary language tends to include both marked and unmarked examples of syntax and morphology. Vocabulary is normally broad, involving both common and recondite words and expressions, which are sometimes archaic, even including language that has become petrified and is no longer fully understood by performers, writers and their audiences. Literary language can be colloquial, ritual, technical or specialized, aimed at an initiated audience of readers or listener-participants.

Because literature is often representational, embedded elements in literary texts often present multiple dialects and registers, including varieties of technical language, sometimes found as instances of speech and reported speech. The range of explicit and implicit speech acts, from promises to jokes to laments, in the corpus of literary texts is unsurpassed in any other group of text types.

Similarly linguistic tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche, though part of ordinary spoken language, are often most at home in the ornate, expansive utterances of literary text types. Indeed since the time of Aristotle in European tradition, tropes have normally been exemplified with passages in literary texts. Literary language is also often creative, innovative and generative, and includes the creation of nonce words and unexpected syntactic patterns. The linguistic creativity of literary texts results in part from the fact that in many cultures literature de facto, and paradigmatically, involves difficult, ambiguous and defamiliarized language, as the Russian formalists and other critics have shown (cf. Tymoczko 1999: 248–77 and sources cited).

The translation of all these features of literary language exemplifies the full range of translational phenomena relating to linguistic anisomorphisms and asymmetries relevant to translation theory. Because the history of literary translation can be documented for almost three millennia, it provides an unsurpassed temporal and typological range of translational phenomena related to language. Literature is in fact the only corpus of texts that can claim the ability to model the principal features of the full range of human languages known and hence to serve as the strongest domain for theorizing the linguistic aspects of translation.

1.3 Cultural asymmetries in literary translation: content and context in translation theory

Translation theory must also account for cultural asymmetries and anisomorphisms, a factor in translating as important as the linguistic issues just discussed. For all the reasons given – the extent and variety of literary data across time, space and cultural typologies – literary translation provides the best model for exemplifying both the sorts of cultural asymmetries encountered in translating and the range of translational solutions chosen that can serve as a basis for theorizing the cultural dimension of translation.

In literary theory and literary criticism, literature is generally viewed as involving the interface of content, text, intertext and context (cf. Bal 1980; Kristeva 1980, 1984; Plett 1991; Worton and Still 1990). Thus literature is ideal for modelling the relationship of content and context and literary translation exemplifies these relationships in rich forms that are ideal for theoretical consideration. Literary translation involves transposition of the content of a source text within its own complex forms of contextualization in the source culture to a representation in another cultural context which has its own patterns of contextualization that can involve different literary text types and invoke other intertextual grids, all of which in turn impact on the representation of content. Moreover, because of the recursive representational quality of many literary works, text types, and traditions, the bread...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Clive Scott
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Why Literary Translation is a Good Model for Translation Theory and Practice
• 2 Dialogic Spaces and Literary Resonances in the French Translation of A. S. Byatt’s Autobiographical Story ‘Sugar’
• 3 Cloud Talk: Reading the Shapes in Poetry and What Becomes of Them
• 4 The Conservative Era: a Case Study of Historical Comparisons of Translations of Children’s Literature from English to Swedish
• 5 Translation in Sixteenth-Century English Manuals for the Teaching of Foreign Languages
• 6 Iconic Motivation in Translation: Where Non-Fiction Meets Poetry?
• 7 A Narrative Theory Perspective on the Turkish Translation of The Bastard of Istanbul
• 8 Fabre d’Olivet’s Le Troubadour and the Textuality of Pseudotranslation
• 9 What Does Literary Translation Bring to an Understanding of Postcolonial Cultural Perceptions? On the Polish Translation of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard
• 10 Translating the Narrator
• 11 On the Work of Philosopher-Translators
• 12 Translation and Holocaust Testimonies: a Matter for Holocaust Studies or Translation Studies?
• 13 The Important Role of Translation in the 1789 Brazilian Minas Conspiracy
• 14 Using Translation to Read Literature
• Index