Pub Date : 2019-07-30DOI: 10.1515/9781474468497-011
{"title":"Leopardi on the Right Language of Translation","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781474468497-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474468497-011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":156665,"journal":{"name":"Translation and Literature 1","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114153061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Translators, said Pushkin, are the posthorses of civilization. A culture renews itself through its translators, accepts what it can in the versions made available to it of other ways of thinking, feeling, and writing. Language itself will change under the pressure of a translated idiom. As far as English culture is concerned, this happened most notably in the Elizabethan period, and the list of Tudor translators who contributed to the English Renaissance would be very long indeed. If we, like Shakespeare, have accepted and absorbed Montaigne, for instance, it was thanks to John Florio, an Englishman from a naturalized Italian family, whose vibrantly idiosyncratic prose translates finesses verbales (for example) as 'verbal wily-beguilies'. If Ovid, then Golding, whose version of the Metamorphoses T. S. Eliot still quotes. Extraordinary things happened to Plutarch in North's English version of Amyot's French translation, and his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans contributed hugely to Shakespeare's political philosophy and even, in detail, to his poetry (Enobarbus's famous description of Cleopatra in her barge at Cydnus owes many images to North). We could go on and on, for Renaissance England was eager to absorb foreign learning of all kinds. And the neoclassical culture which followed was international in spirit, and to this spirit Pushkin in part belongs. Romanticism, however, takes a rather more complex view of translation, and this complexity is of necessity assimilated by modern theory. The Romantic doctrine of expressive form, and the high valuation placed upon creative individualism that went with it, combined into an organicist philosophy of unrepeatability, and therefore, essentially, of untranslatability, and this philosophy remains a powerful force in our time, however much it has been modified. Robert Frost, for example, famously defined poetry as 'what gets left out in translation'. Romantic practice coincides with Romantic theory to the extent that translation comes to be seen as a special case of what Goethe called 'elective affinities', whereby language speaks to language and text to text. Translation, especially of poetry, no longer transmits information by means of a simple source-text/ target-text model,
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Pub Date : 2019-07-30DOI: 10.3366/TAL.1992.1.1.104
Kenneth B. Muir
During the past ten years I have made four attempts to discuss the problems involved in translating Calderon's plays and a fifth attempt can be justified only by a shift in my opinions.1 Inevitably one's views alter. They are modified by correspondence and conversations with one's collaborators, by the comments of reviewers and of other translators, by translating for the first time two tragedies, which demand other skills, and, whenever possible, by what one learns from rehearsal and performance.2 The impressive productions of Ibsen by Peter Hall owed a good deal to the presence of both translators at rehearsals and their determination, shared by the actors, to be true to the exact meaning of the original plays.3 The difficulties confronting translators of Calderon and Lope de Vega are sufficiently obvious. Apart from the fact that poetry is by its very nature untranslatable, so that even the most brilliant versions of Shakespeare and Racine are perversions, there is a wide linguistic difference between English and Spanish that makes rhyming too difficult in English and too easy in Spanish. Golden Age dramatists, moreover, made use of a great variety of verse forms, considered appropriate to the content, whereas in Elizabethan drama there is a preponderance of blank verse, an increasing use of prose and a diminishing use of rhyme. The attempt after 1660 to accustom English audiences to heroic couplets petered out after less than a decade, notwithstanding the genius of John Dry den. Despite all these obstacles, Ann Mackenzie and I, and other translators, go on with our impossible task, believing that enough of the plays survives translation to give some small idea of their greatness to readers and audiences. What, then, are the options open to translators at the present time? Jill Booty's versions of Lope de Vega have won golden opinions from hispanists.4 They do indeed display obvious merits, but they are in prose. Although some prose drama, Riders to the Sea and The Master Builder for example, is more poetic than The Elder Statesman or Winterset, Booty's prose, eloquent as it is, is prosaic. No one would suspect from her versions that Lope was a great poet, esteemed by his countrymen, as his first English critic affirmed, as we esteem 'our Will Shakespeare'.5
{"title":"Translating Golden Age Plays: A Reconsideration","authors":"Kenneth B. Muir","doi":"10.3366/TAL.1992.1.1.104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/TAL.1992.1.1.104","url":null,"abstract":"During the past ten years I have made four attempts to discuss the problems involved in translating Calderon's plays and a fifth attempt can be justified only by a shift in my opinions.1 Inevitably one's views alter. They are modified by correspondence and conversations with one's collaborators, by the comments of reviewers and of other translators, by translating for the first time two tragedies, which demand other skills, and, whenever possible, by what one learns from rehearsal and performance.2 The impressive productions of Ibsen by Peter Hall owed a good deal to the presence of both translators at rehearsals and their determination, shared by the actors, to be true to the exact meaning of the original plays.3 The difficulties confronting translators of Calderon and Lope de Vega are sufficiently obvious. Apart from the fact that poetry is by its very nature untranslatable, so that even the most brilliant versions of Shakespeare and Racine are perversions, there is a wide linguistic difference between English and Spanish that makes rhyming too difficult in English and too easy in Spanish. Golden Age dramatists, moreover, made use of a great variety of verse forms, considered appropriate to the content, whereas in Elizabethan drama there is a preponderance of blank verse, an increasing use of prose and a diminishing use of rhyme. The attempt after 1660 to accustom English audiences to heroic couplets petered out after less than a decade, notwithstanding the genius of John Dry den. Despite all these obstacles, Ann Mackenzie and I, and other translators, go on with our impossible task, believing that enough of the plays survives translation to give some small idea of their greatness to readers and audiences. What, then, are the options open to translators at the present time? Jill Booty's versions of Lope de Vega have won golden opinions from hispanists.4 They do indeed display obvious merits, but they are in prose. Although some prose drama, Riders to the Sea and The Master Builder for example, is more poetic than The Elder Statesman or Winterset, Booty's prose, eloquent as it is, is prosaic. No one would suspect from her versions that Lope was a great poet, esteemed by his countrymen, as his first English critic affirmed, as we esteem 'our Will Shakespeare'.5","PeriodicalId":156665,"journal":{"name":"Translation and Literature 1","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124312941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
'aspice (namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti mortalis hebetat uisus tibi et umida circum 605 caligat, nubem eripiam; tu ne qua parentis iussa time neu pracceptis parere recusa): hie, ubi disiectas moles auulsaque saxis saxa uides, mixtoque undantem puluere fumum, Neptunus muros magnoque emota tridenti 610 fundamenta quatit totamque a sedibus urbem eruit. hie Iuno Scaeas saeuissima portas prima tenet sociumque furens a nauibus agmen ferro accincta uocat. iam summas arces Tritonia, respice, Pallas 615 insedit nimbo effulgens et Gorgone saeua. ipse pater Danais animos uirisque secundas sufficit, ipse deos in Dardana suscitat arma. eripe, nate, fugam finemque impone labori; nusquam abero et tutum patrio te limine sistam.' 620 dixerat et spissis noctis se condidit umbris. apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae numina magna deum. Virgil, Aeneid II, 604-23
'aspice（namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti mortalis hebetat uisus tibi et umida circum 605 caligat, nubem eripiam; tu ne qua parentis iussa time neu pracceptis parere recusa）：hie, ubi disiectas moles auulsaque saxis saxa uides, mixtoque undantem puluere fumum, Neptunus muros magnoque emota tridenti 610 fundamenta quatit totamque a sedibus urbem eruit.Iam summas arces Tritonia, respice, Pallas 615 insedit nimbo effulgens et Gorgone saeua.ipse pater Danais animos uirisque secundas sufficit, ipse deos in Dardana suscitat arma. eripe, nate, fugam finemque impone labori; nusquam abero et tutum patrio te limine sistam'。620 dixerat et spissis noctis se condidit umbris.维吉尔，《埃涅伊德》第二章，604-23 节
{"title":"Translating the Aeneid","authors":"David West","doi":"10.3366/tal.1992.1.1.97","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.1992.1.1.97","url":null,"abstract":"'aspice (namque omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti mortalis hebetat uisus tibi et umida circum 605 caligat, nubem eripiam; tu ne qua parentis iussa time neu pracceptis parere recusa): hie, ubi disiectas moles auulsaque saxis saxa uides, mixtoque undantem puluere fumum, Neptunus muros magnoque emota tridenti 610 fundamenta quatit totamque a sedibus urbem eruit. hie Iuno Scaeas saeuissima portas prima tenet sociumque furens a nauibus agmen ferro accincta uocat. iam summas arces Tritonia, respice, Pallas 615 insedit nimbo effulgens et Gorgone saeua. ipse pater Danais animos uirisque secundas sufficit, ipse deos in Dardana suscitat arma. eripe, nate, fugam finemque impone labori; nusquam abero et tutum patrio te limine sistam.' 620 dixerat et spissis noctis se condidit umbris. apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae numina magna deum. Virgil, Aeneid II, 604-23","PeriodicalId":156665,"journal":{"name":"Translation and Literature 1","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127192250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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