Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2021.2008171
Steven G. Kellman
I am obliged to point out an error of fact in Sandra Kingery’s review of my book Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism. On page 1 of the book, I define translingualism as “the phenomenon of writers who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one.” I make it clear that it is possible to be multilingual without being translingual if, despite knowing more than one language, a writer writes only in L1. Although Ernest Hemingway spoke French and Spanish, he wrote exclusively in his native language, English. He was not translingual. Early in Nimble Tongues, I pose the fundamental question of whether the phenomenon of translingualism is worth studying, whether it makes any difference to the kind of text produced. I suggest that a fair test might be to compare the work of a translingual writer with that of a monolingual writer (whose work could presumably not be contaminated by any additional languages). Nevertheless, I point out how very difficult it is to find a writer who is genuinely, totally monolingual. As an example, I cite William Faulkner, who wrote exclusively in English, his L1, and was therefore decidedly not translingual, but whose texts show traces of French and Haitian Creole. From this, Professor Kingery concludes, invalidly, that I have broadened the category of translingual to include even Faulkner. I have not; I have simply noted that Faulkner is not a pure specimen of monolingualism. Professor Kingery faults the book for a “tendency to see translingualism everywhere,” when I have merely pointed out that true monolingualism is very rare. Literary translingualism remains the special case of writing in an adopted language.
{"title":"Note from Steven Kellman","authors":"Steven G. Kellman","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2021.2008171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2021.2008171","url":null,"abstract":"I am obliged to point out an error of fact in Sandra Kingery’s review of my book Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism. On page 1 of the book, I define translingualism as “the phenomenon of writers who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one.” I make it clear that it is possible to be multilingual without being translingual if, despite knowing more than one language, a writer writes only in L1. Although Ernest Hemingway spoke French and Spanish, he wrote exclusively in his native language, English. He was not translingual. Early in Nimble Tongues, I pose the fundamental question of whether the phenomenon of translingualism is worth studying, whether it makes any difference to the kind of text produced. I suggest that a fair test might be to compare the work of a translingual writer with that of a monolingual writer (whose work could presumably not be contaminated by any additional languages). Nevertheless, I point out how very difficult it is to find a writer who is genuinely, totally monolingual. As an example, I cite William Faulkner, who wrote exclusively in English, his L1, and was therefore decidedly not translingual, but whose texts show traces of French and Haitian Creole. From this, Professor Kingery concludes, invalidly, that I have broadened the category of translingual to include even Faulkner. I have not; I have simply noted that Faulkner is not a pure specimen of monolingualism. Professor Kingery faults the book for a “tendency to see translingualism everywhere,” when I have merely pointed out that true monolingualism is very rare. Literary translingualism remains the special case of writing in an adopted language.","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46920750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2022.2064169
Mi Zhang
For a long time, Translation Studies has been affiliated with Linguistics, so the focus of translation research was largely the transfer from source text to target text, and equivalence was the pearl on the throne. With Translation Studies gaining its independent disciplinary status and the “cultural turn” dethroning “equivalence,” the scope of translation research has been greatly expanded. For the past two decades, the call for humanizing Translation Studies has pushed translators from a peripheral to a central position, with the establishment of “Translator Studies” as a subdiscipline in Translation Studies and the proposal of the “agent model” encompassing cultural, cognitive, and sociological domains. Research on translators has been solidified with the emergence of the “sociological turn,” especially with one branch centering on the “sociology of agents.” Literary Translator Studies traces its origin to the 2018 conference, “Staging the Literary Translator,” organized by the University of Vienna and attempts to address this subject from various angles while providing much needed theoretical and methodological frameworks. In his comprehensive introduction, “[Literary] Translator Studies: Shaping the field,” Klaus Kaindl clearly traces the development of Translation Studies and points out the significance of human research. The volume consists of four parts, each concentrating on a specific area. Part 1, “Biographical and Bibliographical Avenues,” explores Translator Studies through these titular approaches. In Chapter 1, “Literary detection in the archives: Revealing Jeanne Heywood (1856–1909),” Mary Bardet adopts a micro-historical approach to humanize this translator in two ways: through the detailed use and thick description of archival materials and by linking her personal trajectory to a social backdrop. Utilizing these methods, the author is able to identify Heywood as the translator of a series of vanguard renderings through the use of various archives housed in different locales. The second chapter, “George Egerton and Eleanor Marx as mediators of Scandinavian literature” by Sabine Strümper-Krobb, sites these translators in an attempt to link their social standing to translation practice. Through the use of biographical sketches, the author concludes that their various networks and activities led to the use of domestication as their translation strategy. In Chapter 3, “Translator biographies as a contribution to Translator Studies: Case studies from nineteenth-century Galicia,” Markus Eberharter demonstrates how biographical material can help understand the language-acquisition background, motivation, and role of the translator, coining the term “translator biography,” which he then applies to the examination of four figures. The author concludes that it is beneficial to embed a translator’s life into the broader sociocultural context in which translation activities take place through biographical analysis. The last chapter in Part 1
{"title":"Klaus Kaindl, Waltraud Kolb","authors":"Mi Zhang","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2022.2064169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2064169","url":null,"abstract":"For a long time, Translation Studies has been affiliated with Linguistics, so the focus of translation research was largely the transfer from source text to target text, and equivalence was the pearl on the throne. With Translation Studies gaining its independent disciplinary status and the “cultural turn” dethroning “equivalence,” the scope of translation research has been greatly expanded. For the past two decades, the call for humanizing Translation Studies has pushed translators from a peripheral to a central position, with the establishment of “Translator Studies” as a subdiscipline in Translation Studies and the proposal of the “agent model” encompassing cultural, cognitive, and sociological domains. Research on translators has been solidified with the emergence of the “sociological turn,” especially with one branch centering on the “sociology of agents.” Literary Translator Studies traces its origin to the 2018 conference, “Staging the Literary Translator,” organized by the University of Vienna and attempts to address this subject from various angles while providing much needed theoretical and methodological frameworks. In his comprehensive introduction, “[Literary] Translator Studies: Shaping the field,” Klaus Kaindl clearly traces the development of Translation Studies and points out the significance of human research. The volume consists of four parts, each concentrating on a specific area. Part 1, “Biographical and Bibliographical Avenues,” explores Translator Studies through these titular approaches. In Chapter 1, “Literary detection in the archives: Revealing Jeanne Heywood (1856–1909),” Mary Bardet adopts a micro-historical approach to humanize this translator in two ways: through the detailed use and thick description of archival materials and by linking her personal trajectory to a social backdrop. Utilizing these methods, the author is able to identify Heywood as the translator of a series of vanguard renderings through the use of various archives housed in different locales. The second chapter, “George Egerton and Eleanor Marx as mediators of Scandinavian literature” by Sabine Strümper-Krobb, sites these translators in an attempt to link their social standing to translation practice. Through the use of biographical sketches, the author concludes that their various networks and activities led to the use of domestication as their translation strategy. In Chapter 3, “Translator biographies as a contribution to Translator Studies: Case studies from nineteenth-century Galicia,” Markus Eberharter demonstrates how biographical material can help understand the language-acquisition background, motivation, and role of the translator, coining the term “translator biography,” which he then applies to the examination of four figures. The author concludes that it is beneficial to embed a translator’s life into the broader sociocultural context in which translation activities take place through biographical analysis. The last chapter in Part 1","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48810373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2022.2065856
Mutlu Konuk Blasing
Translation teaches us that a poem is both something more and something less than what it says. Poems do more than communicate “messages”; they exploit language, the physical presence of words. At the same time, however, a poem does less than communicate a meaning, for what we bring to a text as readers, together with its total context of other literary and nonliterary meanings, makes up a great part of what the text communicates. This doubleness becomes crucial in translating the work of a political poet who is at the same time an innovator in his use of language. Nazim Hikmet is such a poet, and my examples in this discussion will be drawn from my experience of translating his work from Turkish. Although the translation of a single line or even a single word with its aura of connotations, history, usage, and echoes of other words is impossible, it is possible nevertheless to translate a poem. For a poem is experienced as an emotional whole, and this emotional whole can be translated, despite the loss of the original language, style, and even form. Unlike the critic, who can separate the work into a series of untranslatable components and can choose what to look at, the translator must hold the entire complex in suspension and focus not on the separate elements of the poem but on their interaction. And it is this complex of relations that can be translated, for if the target language has poetry—if it has an established poetic usage or poetic structuring of the elements of language—it will contain the same possibilities of word-use, and the same range or kind of relations may be reproduced. For while a literary text is of the flesh and blood of a language, a poem is not identical with the text; a poem is the experience of a text in its harmony and conflict with a variety of contexts. And translation may be defined as reproducing in a second language this complex of relationships that a poem is. In translating a poem, then, one must negotiate a number of contexts for the text. First, the translator has to provide not only equivalent words but a context of poetic usage or function for the words. Since the root of the problem of translating a poem is the untranslatability of all the nuances and auras of words, a prose translation of a poem is not necessarily more accurate than a verse translation. Indeed, a prose translation is essentially unfaithful, for a poet’s meaning in any one poem is inseparable from the fact that it is being said in poetry. In a poem, both the sound and meaning of a word become functional, and this momentary integration of sound and sense, which rests precariously on the essentially arbitrary nature of the connection between how a word sounds and what it means, is what distances poetry from institutional or “profane” language-use. In the translation of poetry, this simultaneously necessary and arbitrary connection between the sound and sense of words and lines poses a question to language itself. The apparent necessity of th
{"title":"Translating Poetry: Texts and Contexts of Nazim Hikmet","authors":"Mutlu Konuk Blasing","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2022.2065856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2065856","url":null,"abstract":"Translation teaches us that a poem is both something more and something less than what it says. Poems do more than communicate “messages”; they exploit language, the physical presence of words. At the same time, however, a poem does less than communicate a meaning, for what we bring to a text as readers, together with its total context of other literary and nonliterary meanings, makes up a great part of what the text communicates. This doubleness becomes crucial in translating the work of a political poet who is at the same time an innovator in his use of language. Nazim Hikmet is such a poet, and my examples in this discussion will be drawn from my experience of translating his work from Turkish. Although the translation of a single line or even a single word with its aura of connotations, history, usage, and echoes of other words is impossible, it is possible nevertheless to translate a poem. For a poem is experienced as an emotional whole, and this emotional whole can be translated, despite the loss of the original language, style, and even form. Unlike the critic, who can separate the work into a series of untranslatable components and can choose what to look at, the translator must hold the entire complex in suspension and focus not on the separate elements of the poem but on their interaction. And it is this complex of relations that can be translated, for if the target language has poetry—if it has an established poetic usage or poetic structuring of the elements of language—it will contain the same possibilities of word-use, and the same range or kind of relations may be reproduced. For while a literary text is of the flesh and blood of a language, a poem is not identical with the text; a poem is the experience of a text in its harmony and conflict with a variety of contexts. And translation may be defined as reproducing in a second language this complex of relationships that a poem is. In translating a poem, then, one must negotiate a number of contexts for the text. First, the translator has to provide not only equivalent words but a context of poetic usage or function for the words. Since the root of the problem of translating a poem is the untranslatability of all the nuances and auras of words, a prose translation of a poem is not necessarily more accurate than a verse translation. Indeed, a prose translation is essentially unfaithful, for a poet’s meaning in any one poem is inseparable from the fact that it is being said in poetry. In a poem, both the sound and meaning of a word become functional, and this momentary integration of sound and sense, which rests precariously on the essentially arbitrary nature of the connection between how a word sounds and what it means, is what distances poetry from institutional or “profane” language-use. In the translation of poetry, this simultaneously necessary and arbitrary connection between the sound and sense of words and lines poses a question to language itself. The apparent necessity of th","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42453205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2022.2066369
Elizabeth Gamble Miller
Sólo la voz is a major work by Hugo Lindo, El Salvador’s best known living poet. It is a volume of forty-seven untitled cantos which are individual poems with intertwining themes and repeated motifs so that they comprise one long poem. As translator I wished to re-create the multiple aspects of Hugo Lindo’s particular aesthetic sensibility and to express his poetic vision. To accomplish this objective I sought to reconstruct the intricate relationships between the poetic elements—visual, auditory or semantic—that compose the internal dynamics of his poem and, further, through my choice of words, to reestablish in English its coherence or inner logic. Hugo Lindo views life experience as composed of polarities such as expectation and disillusionment. His aesthetic ideas and philosophic concepts are not presented as statements but take form metaphorically through a series of images so that his poetry becomes an actual enactment of the poet’s vision of the paradoxical nature of life. Thus, his thought is in constant interaction with his poetic process. Through particular techniques, Lindo creates an imaginary reality which enacts the paradox of life on an aesthetic level. The poet’s poetic process is built on the conflict of clashing metaphors and on the elaboration of opposing images. Within these techniques is an inherent paradox as each image consists of incongruous elements: for example—“cells of ashes.” In a biological context “cells” implies life; in a physical or spiritual context “ashes” suggests death. Through varying techniques whose internal nature is paradoxical, Hugo Lindo creates poems that evoke the multiple and contradictory aspects of life experience. The poet’s view of reality as fluid and ambiguous rather than absolute emerges for the reader through the poem’s successive images as each is undermined by the following one. A short, concrete example is in his phrase “agonies of the bedroom” in Canto XXXI of Only the Voice. The word “agonies” establishes an emotional field which is reversed when it is followed by “of the bedroom,” for this raises a question about the negative or positive connotation of “agonies.” These characteristics of fluidity and ambiguity compel the translator to conserve the antagonistic duality and multiplicity of interpretive possibilities through a choice of words that reflect the dualistic nature and effect the necessary ambiguity or clarity. Such dualism and ambiguity are found in the poet’s images which are brilliant, clear and concrete, yet have expansive possibilities. As an example, in Canto XXXII the nouns chosen for the second stanza are concrete: “muros,” “hilos,” “eslabones,” “abismos”; they represent material realities. Yet they evoke a figurative meaning as well. They must be translated by nouns which are vivid in the image they evoke and also suggestive of an additional meaning. For the translation of “hilos,”· “cords” would not be appropriate; a better selection is “bonds,” which reproduces the d
《Sólo la voz》是萨尔瓦多在世最著名的诗人雨果·林多的一部重要作品。这是一本由四十七首无标题的短诗组成的卷，这些短诗是主题交织、主题重复的个别诗歌，构成了一首长诗。作为译者，我希望重新创造林多独特的审美情感的多个方面，以表达他的诗歌视野。为了实现这一目标，我试图重建构成他诗歌内部动力的诗歌元素——视觉、听觉或语义——之间的复杂关系，并通过我的措辞，在英语中重建其连贯性或内在逻辑。雨果·林多认为生命体验是由期望和幻灭等两极组成的。他的美学思想和哲学概念不是以陈述的形式呈现的，而是通过一系列意象隐喻的形式呈现出来的，从而使他的诗歌成为诗人对生活悖论本质的真实再现。因此，他的思想与他的诗歌创作过程是不断互动的。林多通过特殊的手法创造了一个想象的现实，在审美层面上再现了生活的悖论。诗人的诗歌创作过程建立在相互冲突的隐喻冲突和对立意象的阐述之上。在这些技术中有一个固有的悖论，因为每个图像都由不协调的元素组成：例如，“灰烬细胞”。在生物学背景下，“细胞”意味着生命；在物质或精神方面，“灰烬”意味着死亡。雨果·林多通过各种内在矛盾的技巧创作了唤起生活体验的多重矛盾的诗歌。诗人对现实的看法是流动的、模糊的，而不是绝对的，通过诗歌的连续图像呈现给读者，因为每一个图像都被下面的图像所破坏。一个简短而具体的例子是他在《只有声音》第三十一章中的短语“卧室的痛苦”。“痛苦”一词建立了一个情感场，当它后面跟着“卧室的”时，这个情感场就颠倒了，因为这引发了一个关于“痛苦”的消极或积极内涵的问题。“这些流动性和歧义性的特点迫使译者通过选择反映二元性的词语来保留解释可能性的对立二元性和多样性，并产生必要的歧义或清晰度。这种二元性和模糊性体现在诗人的形象中，这些形象既灿烂、清晰、具体，又具有广阔的可能性。例如，在第三十二章中，为第二节选择的名词是具体的：“muros”、“hilos”、“eslabones”、“abismos”；它们代表了物质现实。然而，它们也唤起了一种象征意义。它们必须用名词来翻译，这些名词在它们唤起的形象中是生动的，也暗示着额外的含义。对于“hilos”的翻译来说，“cords”是不合适的；更好的选择是“债券”，它再现了抽象和具体的双重维度。翻译后的诗节应该是：“为什么是这些墙和纽带？/为什么是这些链接，/这些无法弥补的深渊？”在每种情况下，所选的单词都具有视觉和形象的特点。显然，Sólo la voz的力量在于它通过明显简单的语言唤起情感，然而，它通过其联想品质传达了多个层次的现实。《第二章》探讨了诗人写诗的方法，展示了在保留不同层次的解读时可能出现的问题。主题，即创造的行为，是由一个关键词投射出来的，这个关键词的含义在英语中无法用一个术语“el Verbo”或“单词”来重新创造
{"title":"Retracing the Translation Process: Hugo Lindo’s Only the Voice","authors":"Elizabeth Gamble Miller","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2022.2066369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2066369","url":null,"abstract":"Sólo la voz is a major work by Hugo Lindo, El Salvador’s best known living poet. It is a volume of forty-seven untitled cantos which are individual poems with intertwining themes and repeated motifs so that they comprise one long poem. As translator I wished to re-create the multiple aspects of Hugo Lindo’s particular aesthetic sensibility and to express his poetic vision. To accomplish this objective I sought to reconstruct the intricate relationships between the poetic elements—visual, auditory or semantic—that compose the internal dynamics of his poem and, further, through my choice of words, to reestablish in English its coherence or inner logic. Hugo Lindo views life experience as composed of polarities such as expectation and disillusionment. His aesthetic ideas and philosophic concepts are not presented as statements but take form metaphorically through a series of images so that his poetry becomes an actual enactment of the poet’s vision of the paradoxical nature of life. Thus, his thought is in constant interaction with his poetic process. Through particular techniques, Lindo creates an imaginary reality which enacts the paradox of life on an aesthetic level. The poet’s poetic process is built on the conflict of clashing metaphors and on the elaboration of opposing images. Within these techniques is an inherent paradox as each image consists of incongruous elements: for example—“cells of ashes.” In a biological context “cells” implies life; in a physical or spiritual context “ashes” suggests death. Through varying techniques whose internal nature is paradoxical, Hugo Lindo creates poems that evoke the multiple and contradictory aspects of life experience. The poet’s view of reality as fluid and ambiguous rather than absolute emerges for the reader through the poem’s successive images as each is undermined by the following one. A short, concrete example is in his phrase “agonies of the bedroom” in Canto XXXI of Only the Voice. The word “agonies” establishes an emotional field which is reversed when it is followed by “of the bedroom,” for this raises a question about the negative or positive connotation of “agonies.” These characteristics of fluidity and ambiguity compel the translator to conserve the antagonistic duality and multiplicity of interpretive possibilities through a choice of words that reflect the dualistic nature and effect the necessary ambiguity or clarity. Such dualism and ambiguity are found in the poet’s images which are brilliant, clear and concrete, yet have expansive possibilities. As an example, in Canto XXXII the nouns chosen for the second stanza are concrete: “muros,” “hilos,” “eslabones,” “abismos”; they represent material realities. Yet they evoke a figurative meaning as well. They must be translated by nouns which are vivid in the image they evoke and also suggestive of an additional meaning. For the translation of “hilos,”· “cords” would not be appropriate; a better selection is “bonds,” which reproduces the d","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46962856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2022.2046402
G. J. Racz
{"title":"Reflections of a Translation Review Editor","authors":"G. J. Racz","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2022.2046402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2046402","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46009723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2022.2065842
O. Paz
Learning to speak is learning to translate; when the child asks his mother for the meaning of some word, what he is really asking is that she translate the new word into his vocabulary. Translation within a language is not, in this sense, essentially different from translation between two languages. The history of every nation repeats the child’s experience: even the most isolated tribe must, at some time, confront the language of an alien people. The astonishment, rage, horror, or amused perplexity we feel in response to the sounds of a language we do not know soon becomes doubt over the one we speak. Language loses its universality and is revealed as a plurality of languages, all foreign and unintelligible to each other. In the past, translation dispelled that doubt: though there is no universal language, languages form a universal society. Once certain difficulties are overcome, all can know and understand each other. And they understand each other because in different languages men always say the same things. The universality of the spirit was the answer to the confusion of Babel: there are many languages, but meaning is one. Pascal found in the plurality of religions a proof of Christianity’s truth; translation responded to the diversity of languages with the ideal of a universal intelligibility. Thus, translation was not only an extra proof but a guarantee of the unity of the human spirit. The modern age destroyed that security. When he rediscovered the infinite variety of temperaments and passions and beheld the spectacle of a multitude of customs and beliefs, man began to stop recognizing himself in other men. Until then, the savage had been an exception. It was necessary to suppress him by conversion or extermination, by baptism or the sword. But the savage who appeared in eighteenth-century salons was a new creature. Although he could speak his hosts’ language perfectly, he embodied an undeniable foreignness. He was no longer the subject of conversion but rather of argument and criticism; the originality of his judgments, the simplicity of his customs, and even the violence of his passions were proof of the madness and vanity, if not the infamy, of those baptisms and conversions. Change of direction: the religious search for a universal identity was followed by an intellectual curiosity bent upon discovering differences which were no less universal. Foreignness ceased to be an aberration and became exemplary. This exemplary quality is paradoxical and revealing: the savage was the civilized man’s nostalgia, his other self, his lost half. Translation reflected these changes: no longer did it tend to seek out the ultimate identity of man, but instead became the vehicle of his uniqueness. Its function had consisted of revealing similarities over differences; from now on, it would show that those differences were irreducible, whether describing the strangeness of the savage or of our neighbor. Doctor Johnson expressed the new attitude very w
{"title":"Octavio Paz on Translation: Literature and Literality, translated by Lynn Tuttle","authors":"O. Paz","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2022.2065842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2065842","url":null,"abstract":"Learning to speak is learning to translate; when the child asks his mother for the meaning of some word, what he is really asking is that she translate the new word into his vocabulary. Translation within a language is not, in this sense, essentially different from translation between two languages. The history of every nation repeats the child’s experience: even the most isolated tribe must, at some time, confront the language of an alien people. The astonishment, rage, horror, or amused perplexity we feel in response to the sounds of a language we do not know soon becomes doubt over the one we speak. Language loses its universality and is revealed as a plurality of languages, all foreign and unintelligible to each other. In the past, translation dispelled that doubt: though there is no universal language, languages form a universal society. Once certain difficulties are overcome, all can know and understand each other. And they understand each other because in different languages men always say the same things. The universality of the spirit was the answer to the confusion of Babel: there are many languages, but meaning is one. Pascal found in the plurality of religions a proof of Christianity’s truth; translation responded to the diversity of languages with the ideal of a universal intelligibility. Thus, translation was not only an extra proof but a guarantee of the unity of the human spirit. The modern age destroyed that security. When he rediscovered the infinite variety of temperaments and passions and beheld the spectacle of a multitude of customs and beliefs, man began to stop recognizing himself in other men. Until then, the savage had been an exception. It was necessary to suppress him by conversion or extermination, by baptism or the sword. But the savage who appeared in eighteenth-century salons was a new creature. Although he could speak his hosts’ language perfectly, he embodied an undeniable foreignness. He was no longer the subject of conversion but rather of argument and criticism; the originality of his judgments, the simplicity of his customs, and even the violence of his passions were proof of the madness and vanity, if not the infamy, of those baptisms and conversions. Change of direction: the religious search for a universal identity was followed by an intellectual curiosity bent upon discovering differences which were no less universal. Foreignness ceased to be an aberration and became exemplary. This exemplary quality is paradoxical and revealing: the savage was the civilized man’s nostalgia, his other self, his lost half. Translation reflected these changes: no longer did it tend to seek out the ultimate identity of man, but instead became the vehicle of his uniqueness. Its function had consisted of revealing similarities over differences; from now on, it would show that those differences were irreducible, whether describing the strangeness of the savage or of our neighbor. Doctor Johnson expressed the new attitude very w","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49228951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2021.1904167
J. K. Vincent
As Hiroaki Sato explains in his delightful and informative book On Haiku, “the haiku is one of the few cases . . . where the doings of translators . . . have helped shape the view of the verse form in foreign countries.” Sato is referring here to the practice of writing haiku in English in three lines despite the fact that, in Japanese, haiku normally appear in a single line. When Lafcadio Hearn first translated Matsuo Bashō’s famous frog poem in 1898, he followed the Japanese format, rendering it “with no fuss” in a single line as: “Oldpond—frogs jumped in—sound of water.” But since then, most translators seem to have felt that, in order for a haiku even to register as a poem in English, it needed to take up more real estate on the page. By now, the three-line format has become so ingrained in English that most readers would be surprised to find it doesn’t work that way in Japanese. Sato has quite a lot to say about why he thinks haiku work better in a single line, although he cheerfully admits that this issue is his “hobby horse” and is not especially sanguine about changing anyone’s mind. But there is no doubt that the “doings of translators” have affected the way we read and write haiku in profound ways, and it is as one translator’s response to those “doings” that Sato’s book makes its most important contribution to the literature on haiku in English. What are these “translators’ doings?” I am thinking not only of the habit of translating haiku in three lines to make them seem more substantial, but also of a related habit of thinking of haiku according to what might be called the “lyrical” model: as poems that require no context other than “the occasion of [their] reading” to be fully appreciated. This way of thinking of haiku is largely responsible for the fact that haiku in English tend to appear on the page shorn of any context. Such an understanding of haiku as fundamentally lyric took hold in Japan in the late nineteenth century when Masaoka Shiki anointed the haiku as a genre able to stand on its own, independent from linked verse as a form of “literature” on par with Western lyric poetry. This notion of haiku has now spread around the globe. But it was far from the only way to think of haiku, even in Shiki’s time. Readers can be drawn to haiku for many reasons, many of which depend on context, such as the view they provide into the lives of the poets who wrote them, how they allude to earlier poems (what Haruo Shirane has called the “vertical axis”), how they evoke shared cultural associations attached to seasonal words, or as one of many links in a linked verse session involving many poets. All of this is to say that haiku are about much more than what Anglophone poets like to call the “haiku moment” when the solitary poet communes with nature to attain a state of heightened consciousness. A persistent focus on this “zenlike” moment as the essence of haiku is one of several more or less Orientalizing shibboleths common in English wri
正如佐藤裕明在他那本令人愉快且内容丰富的书《论俳句》中所解释的那样，“俳句是为数不多的案例之一……译者的所作所为…帮助塑造了国外对诗歌形式的看法。”佐藤在这里指的是用英语写三行俳句的做法，尽管在日语中，俳句通常出现在一行中。1898年，当拉夫卡迪奥·赫恩(Lafcadio Hearn)第一次翻译松尾诗的著名蛙诗时，他遵循了日文的格式，“毫不夸张”地将其翻译成一句话:“Oldpond-frogs in - sound of water”。但从那以后，大多数译者似乎都觉得，为了让一首俳句在英语中成为一首诗，它需要在页面上占据更多的空间。到目前为止，三行格式在英语中已经根深蒂固，以至于大多数读者会惊讶地发现，在日语中并非如此。佐藤有很多话要说，为什么他认为俳句在单行中效果更好，尽管他高兴地承认这个问题是他的“爱好”，对改变任何人的想法并不特别乐观。但毫无疑问，“译者的行为”对我们阅读和写作俳句的方式产生了深远的影响，佐藤的书正是作为一位译者对这些“行为”的回应，对英语俳句文学做出了最重要的贡献。这些“翻译”在做什么?我想到的不仅是把俳句翻译成三行，使它们看起来更充实的习惯，而且还有一种与之相关的习惯，即按照所谓的“抒情”模式来思考俳句:作为诗歌，除了“阅读的场合”之外，不需要任何上下文来充分欣赏。这种对俳句的思考方式在很大程度上导致了英语俳句往往出现在没有任何上下文的页面上。这种对俳句的理解基本上是抒情性的，这种理解在19世纪晚期的日本得到了巩固。当时，雅冈志贵(Masaoka Shiki)认为俳句是一种能够独立于连体诗的体裁，是一种与西方抒情诗相当的“文学”形式。俳句的概念现在已经传遍了全球。但即使在志贵的时代，这也远不是俳句的唯一表达方式。读者被俳句吸引的原因有很多，其中很多都取决于上下文，比如它们提供了对创作俳句的诗人生活的看法，它们如何暗示早期的诗歌(Shirane Haruo称之为“垂直轴”)，它们如何唤起与季节词汇相关的共同文化联想，或者作为涉及许多诗人的连诗会话中的众多链接之一。所有这一切都是说，俳句不仅仅是英语诗人所称的“俳句时刻”，当孤独的诗人与自然交流以达到一种高度的意识状态时。将这种“禅宗般的”时刻作为俳句本质的持续关注，是英语写作中常见的几个或多或少东方化的陈词滥调之一，佐藤推翻了这一主题。对于译者来说，要超越对“俳句时刻”的执着，就意味着要问一些根本性的问题:翻译俳句的真正意义是什么，以及要提供多少上下文。把注意力集中在诗歌本身，只会给那些能够独立存在的诗歌带来特权。但是，许多俳句需要更多的背景才能变得生动，这并不会使它们成为更糟糕的诗歌。的确，尤其是俳句，它并不总是很清楚诗在哪里结束，上下文在哪里开始。当译者有效地提供上下文时，就像佐藤在他翻译和讨论的俳句中所做的那样，这些微小的作品可以打开通往更广阔世界的门户。在最好的情况下，佐藤的评论和翻译的混合读起来与其说是解释，不如说是对诗人作品的一种延续。在许多章节中，我想我最喜欢的是其中一章，佐藤带我们看了一首连体诗的36个环节，这首诗被称为“大海变暗”，作者是巴玄和另外两位诗人。这节课包括了许多著名的诗歌，很多读者会认出来，但很可能会看到选集没有提到它们最初创作的公共环境，也没有提到每一个连续的链接是如何回应前一个诗的，只是转向另一个意义，与后面的诗结合在一起。佐藤把这一切都放了回去，结果是启示性的;他的评论有点像罗兰·巴特在《S/Z》中对巴尔扎克的评论。《论俳句》包括了关于前现代俳句中预期的权威人物的章节，比如bashu, Yosa Buson，和Kobayashi Issa，但也有更早的古典连体诗的例子，以及用日语和英语写作的不同的现当代诗人群体。它以基本定义和俳句如何在全球传播的讨论开始，从赫恩和w.g.的翻译开始。 在19世纪后期，阿斯顿，并在第二次世界大战后以r·h·布莱斯的极具影响力的四卷本作品《俳句》加速发展。正如Sato所指出的，在j·d·塞林格(J. D. Salinger) 1959年的短篇小说《西摩》(Seymour)中，这位俳句作家的主角成为布莱斯的粉丝后，布莱斯变得更加出名，西摩称布莱斯是“一首霸道的老诗”。结果是，“在过去的三十年里，相当一部分转向俳句的美国人是由于布莱斯通过塞林格这样做的。”
{"title":"On Haiku","authors":"J. K. Vincent","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2021.1904167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2021.1904167","url":null,"abstract":"As Hiroaki Sato explains in his delightful and informative book On Haiku, “the haiku is one of the few cases . . . where the doings of translators . . . have helped shape the view of the verse form in foreign countries.” Sato is referring here to the practice of writing haiku in English in three lines despite the fact that, in Japanese, haiku normally appear in a single line. When Lafcadio Hearn first translated Matsuo Bashō’s famous frog poem in 1898, he followed the Japanese format, rendering it “with no fuss” in a single line as: “Oldpond—frogs jumped in—sound of water.” But since then, most translators seem to have felt that, in order for a haiku even to register as a poem in English, it needed to take up more real estate on the page. By now, the three-line format has become so ingrained in English that most readers would be surprised to find it doesn’t work that way in Japanese. Sato has quite a lot to say about why he thinks haiku work better in a single line, although he cheerfully admits that this issue is his “hobby horse” and is not especially sanguine about changing anyone’s mind. But there is no doubt that the “doings of translators” have affected the way we read and write haiku in profound ways, and it is as one translator’s response to those “doings” that Sato’s book makes its most important contribution to the literature on haiku in English. What are these “translators’ doings?” I am thinking not only of the habit of translating haiku in three lines to make them seem more substantial, but also of a related habit of thinking of haiku according to what might be called the “lyrical” model: as poems that require no context other than “the occasion of [their] reading” to be fully appreciated. This way of thinking of haiku is largely responsible for the fact that haiku in English tend to appear on the page shorn of any context. Such an understanding of haiku as fundamentally lyric took hold in Japan in the late nineteenth century when Masaoka Shiki anointed the haiku as a genre able to stand on its own, independent from linked verse as a form of “literature” on par with Western lyric poetry. This notion of haiku has now spread around the globe. But it was far from the only way to think of haiku, even in Shiki’s time. Readers can be drawn to haiku for many reasons, many of which depend on context, such as the view they provide into the lives of the poets who wrote them, how they allude to earlier poems (what Haruo Shirane has called the “vertical axis”), how they evoke shared cultural associations attached to seasonal words, or as one of many links in a linked verse session involving many poets. All of this is to say that haiku are about much more than what Anglophone poets like to call the “haiku moment” when the solitary poet communes with nature to attain a state of heightened consciousness. A persistent focus on this “zenlike” moment as the essence of haiku is one of several more or less Orientalizing shibboleths common in English wri","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46910809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2022.2066354
R. Schulte
Breon Mitchell is one of the most important translators from German working in the United States today. His publications include translations of The Trial by Franz Kafka, The God of Impertinence by Sten Nadolny, Shadowlife by Martin Grzimek, The Silent Angel by Heinrich Böll, Laura’s Skin by J. F. Federspiel, and The Color of the Snow by Rüdiger Kremer. Mitchell’s translation of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass was published in 2009. For the past decade he has been the Director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he initiated the collection of translators’ archives. Selections from Mitchell’s “Afterword” from The Tin Drum are interspersed throughout the interview. Credit: Clifford Landers
{"title":"The Voice of the Translator: An Interview with Breon Mitchell","authors":"R. Schulte","doi":"10.1080/07374836.2022.2066354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2066354","url":null,"abstract":"Breon Mitchell is one of the most important translators from German working in the United States today. His publications include translations of The Trial by Franz Kafka, The God of Impertinence by Sten Nadolny, Shadowlife by Martin Grzimek, The Silent Angel by Heinrich Böll, Laura’s Skin by J. F. Federspiel, and The Color of the Snow by Rüdiger Kremer. Mitchell’s translation of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass was published in 2009. For the past decade he has been the Director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he initiated the collection of translators’ archives. Selections from Mitchell’s “Afterword” from The Tin Drum are interspersed throughout the interview. Credit: Clifford Landers","PeriodicalId":42066,"journal":{"name":"TRANSLATION REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49504045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：