Perspectives on Retranslation

Ideology, Paratexts, Methods

Özlem Berk Albachten, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Özlem Berk Albachten, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351334457
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods explores retranslation from a variety of aspects and reflects methodological and theoretical developments in the field. Featuring eleven chapters, each offering a unique approach, the book presents a well-rounded analysis of contemporary issues in retranslation. It brings together case studies and examples from a range of contexts including France, the UK, Spain, the US, Brazil, Greece, Poland, modern Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire. The chapters highlight a diversity of cultural settings and illustrate the assumptions and epistemologies underlying the manifestations of retranslation in various cultures and time periods. The book expressly challenges a Eurocentric view and treats retranslation in all of its complexity by using a variety of methods, including quantitative and statistical analysis, bibliographical studies, reception analysis, film analysis, and musicological, paratextual, textual, and norm analysis. The chapters further show the dominant effect of ideology on macro and micro translation decisions, which comes into sharp relief in the specific context of retranslation.

Section III
Toward New Objects,
Methods, and Concepts

6 Critical Edition as RetranslationCritical Edition as Retranslation

Mediating ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s Notation Collections (c. 1630–1670)

Judith I. Haug ¹

While the other contributions to this volume deal with translated and retranslated texts, the present chapter adopts a metaphorical vantage point to the issue of retranslation. My approach applies the concepts of translation and retranslation to musical instead of textual transmission. The work that is the topic of my chapter is a collection of notations from 17th-century Istanbul, which marks an isolated step in the history of the transition of Ottoman art music to writing, a form of music that had traditionally been orally transmitted. It is a unique source which invites reflections on the mediation of music across cultures and times, changing contexts, and changing demands. This eminently rich manuscript in the focus of the study—MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Turc 292—is a notebook-cum notation collection compiled roughly between 1640 and 1675 by ʿAlī Ufuḳī (Haug 2016, 179), a Polish-born musician and interpreter of Sultan Meḥmed IV (Behar 2005, 17–55). This bicultural, bimusical individual translated Ottoman music from its source language orality to the target language written music, which was ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s native tongue (as he received his first musical training in Europe where musical writing was and is prevalent). Here, this step of textualization that represents a frozen moment in the century-old stream of oral tradition is treated metaphorically as the first translation. The present author, a musicologist who recently completed a critical edition of MS Turc 292, is contemplating her role in the process of mediating a more than 350-year old notation to a modern scholarly and performing audience, likening this role to that of a retranslator. This includes, as Koskinen and Paloposki have pointed out in a recent article, that the retranslator/editor is “forced to develop a stance towards the predecessor” (Koskinen and Paloposki 2015, 25).

Ottoman music has always been largely non-written (while a vast body of theory exists in writing), but it was fixed in Western notation by ʿAlī Ufuḳī and has again been edited in Western notation by the present author. This musical script has grown over the course of centuries for an entirely different musical system with different features and requirements. Hence, this additional level of complexity requires the development and justification of a specifically adapted methodology.² After some preliminary remarks on the author, sources, and procedure, the two main parts of the chapter deal with textualization as translation and critical edition as retranslation. In a similar vein, musicologist Margaret Bent has pointed out the difference between the mere “transliteration” of a source and a “translation” which takes place in modernizing editions (Bent 1994, 373 and passim). In dealing with the concept of textualization, the following words of the eminent linguist Walter J. Ong are most helpful, as they can be applied directly to music:

What the reader is seeing on this page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound. It is impossible for script to be more than marks on a surface unless it is used by a conscious human being as a cue to sounded words, real or imagined, directly or indirectly.

(Ong 2002, 73)

Western notation has changed considerably during its long history, and not all of its earlier features are readily understood today. For example, modernizing editions change the original clefs to those common nowadays or reduce rhythmical values which seem slow to a modern performer. Such changes amount to a translation from an older form of expression to a current one.

Translation can be construed as the mediation of content between one system of thought and another. In this sense, musics are languages and their notations are their sign systems—if they are written at all, which many of the world’s musics are not. Like languages, musics are not universally intelligible, contrary to the popular idea of music as a wordless language: “Although strictly speaking, music consists exclusively of sounds, it can equally be seen as a language, comparable to our spoken language but composed of sounds: a wordless language or, to formulate it more elegantly, a non-verbal means of communication” (Samama 2016, 43). The author, a composer and musicologist, takes for granted that what he designates as musical meaning is culturally agreed upon and works only in the confines of a well-established tradition (here: Western art music). This view takes its root in the 18th- and 19th-century European discourse of language-less, “absolute” instrumental music which was understood by philosophers and art critics as solely able to convey the “ineffable” (Georgiades 1967, 177–178; Scruton 2017). But, as the present example of a multi-step mediation process shows, reality is not that simple.

In the context of translation studies (Tahir Gürçağlar 2009), the term retranslation is defined as a “second or later translation of a single source text into the same target language” (Koskinen and Paloposki 2010, 294). The case of ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s compendium is slightly different as the original source of the textualization/translation—oral repertoire transmission—is lost and inaccessible to the modern editor/retranslator. The target language—Western staff notation—is the same for both steps, while the intended use of textualization/translation and edition/retranslation differ and ultimately account for the necessity of an edition/retranslation. In spite of the persistence of oral transmission lines in the Ottoman-Turkish context, the mid-17th century is so remote that mediation is required. The cause that motivates the edition of ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Turc 292 as a retranslation hence does not so much lie “with a deficient previous translation” (Koskinen and Paloposki 2010, 296), but with this previous translation’s need to be mediated in order to be more relatable in the modern context. The “aging” of (literary) first translations is a familiar phenomenon (Tahir Gürçağlar 2009, 234; Koskinen and Paloposki 2010, 25–28 and passim). In the metaphorical concept of textualization/translation and edition/retranslation, it is also true that

with each reading and each (re)translation, the source text is pluralized and one new and possible text comes to light. In this sense, it is the impermanence of the original, and not the deficiency of the translation, which gives impulse to the reiterative act of retranslation.

(Deane-Cox 2016, 191–192)

If knowledge crosses borders—of culture, language, and, significantly, time—and is thus being transferred into new contexts, parameters change and mediation becomes necessary. In the case of notated Western art music, the techniques and sign systems have changed considerably to an extent of being unintelligible without previous training (Apel 1953; Schmid 2012). Here enters the critical edition, which aims at making the source material accessible to a modern scholarly and performing audience while underlining, contextualizing, and explaining its peculiarities. As time passes, products of thought and culture become remote, we lose touch with them and feel that mediation becomes increasingly necessary (Bent 1994, 373–374)—even more so in the case of music, which exists in time. In spite of the technological progress that allows us to record musical performances since a comparatively short period, music remains volatile in the sense that it happens in time and we have to reflect upon it while it is happening.

As stated above, in the multilayered case under discussion here, textualization is understood as translation and edition as retranslation. The first translation process happened in the mid-17th century from orality into writing, a transition with considerable implications and repercussions. The retranslation process has been initiated in the early 20th century and is ongoing right now, as the 17th-century notations are edited by modern musicologists, evaluated, and made accessible to a modern scholarly and performing public.

The Sources and Their Author

The sources concerned are the two ample notation collections produced by the Polish-born Ottoman palace musician, composer, physician, translator of the Bible, and interpreter to the Sultan, ʿAlī Ufuḳī/Albert (or Wojciech) Bobowski (c.1610-c.1675), MSS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Turc 292 and London, British Library, Sloane 3114. As mentioned in the introduction, the focus of the present study is on the Paris manuscript. MS Turc 292, to current knowledge the first instance of Ottoman music in Western notation written by a cultural insider, namely the fully acculturated, “bi-musical” ʿAlī Ufuḳī, is an untitled, subsequently bound loose-leaf collection of decidedly personal and spontaneous character. With its mixed contents, it unites the features of a European-style commonplace book and an Ottoman mecmūʿa or cönk (song-text collection) (Yeo 2014; Wright 1992). MS Turc 292 is a source of immense value for musicology and many other disciplines, bearing testimony to the multicultural intellectual life in mid-17th-century Istanbul, as it contains texts relating to music, linguistics, medicine, current events, food, art, etc. as well as songs in at least 10 languages, often intermingled on the same page. The way in which the Ottoman Turkish language is transliterated with Latin characters in MS Turc 292 is si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I Ideology and Censorship in Retranslation
• Section II Paratextual Studies in Retranslation
• Section III Toward New Objects, Methods, and Concepts
• Section IV Retranslation History and Bibliographical Studies
• Contributors
• Index