Literary Translation

Chantal Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415745321
• eBook ISBN: 9781317286776
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include examples from existing translations, activities, further reading suggestions and a glossary of key terms.

Literary Translation introduces students to the components of the discipline and models the practice. Three concise chapters help to familiarize students with:

• what motivates the act of translation
• how to read and critique literary translations
• how to read for translation.

A range of sustained case studies, both from existing sources and the author's own research, are provided along with a selection of relevant tasks and activities and a detailed glossary. The book is also complemented by a feature entitled 'How to get started in literary translation' on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal (http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/translationstudies/).

Literary Translation is an essential guidebook for all students of literary translation within advanced undergraduate and postgraduate/graduate programmes in translation studies, comparative literature and modern languages.

1
Why do we translate?

Translations do not happen easily, anywhere or anytime. It is rarely a question of someone simply wanting to translate. Every translation ensues from a context where someone finds themselves in the presence of a series of necessary elements: something to translate, a social reason to do so, ideas about the nature of translation, and the necessary time, space, money, and intellectual skills. Together all of that can produce a translation.

Anthony Pym, On Translator Ethics (2012:100)

Literature must have been translated for enhancing one group’s cultural heritage at the expense of another’s. Perhaps a kind of imperialism where the ‘text’ supported or solidified a territorial or lineal claim. Or perhaps a benign looting to bolster what was felt to be an inferior native patrimony. Or, less benignly, literature could have been translated as a pleasure commodity with a price; life in the case of Scheherazade, but minstrels, story-tellers must have been human trophies all along. […] All in all, millennia later, the motives for translating literature may not be all that different.

Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Translation and Literary Criticism (1997:15–16)

Why do I translate? A personal response

In his book On Translator Ethics, Anthony Pym levels the criticism that much theoretical writing on translation assumes an unspecified translator and a set of universal behaviours, and does not show enough consideration for the particulars of a given context (2012:4–5). In order to avoid this pitfall, and so that the discussion in this chapter might unfold from a place of subjectivity, I will begin by reframing, in the first person, the question of why we translate, offering a personal answer to the broader question of why we, as individuals and by extension as cultures, undertake this activity. Once I have done this, I will proceed to investigate whether my own sentiments and experiences find external resonances. Why, then, do I translate literature? What is it about literary translation as a process and as a product that draws my interest?

First things first, for the sake of honesty: I do not translate to earn my living and I am not always paid for the translations that I produce. There are translations that I would not produce without being paid for the work involved and translations for which, conversely, I do not expect to be paid and where non-financial rewards – ‘symbolic (prestige), social (the contacts), and cultural (the learning process)’ (Pym 2012:125) – take the place of payment in hard cash. I earn my living as an academic, specifically as an academic working in the fields of Translation Studies and Comparative Literary Studies, and many of the non-financial rewards of the translations I produce, whether I receive payment for them or not, have to do with my career. In my particular corner of Translation Studies – the theory and practice of literary translation – being a translation practitioner adds legitimacy to the theoretical and methodological claims I make in the classroom and in print. My status as a practitioner also legitimizes my existence as an academic on a personal level: I do not think I would be an academic if my research were not practice-based. The purpose of this disclosure is to be honest about the freedoms accorded me by my day job: I can, and indeed, for reasons of time, need to be selective about what I translate. This puts me in a different position to a translator who is self-employed and operating under financial pressure and heightened temporal constraints. I do, however, also work ‘commercially’, which is to say that I have produced and will hopefully continue to produce translations for which I am paid by publishers whose goal it is to make a profit on their books.

I stated earlier that there are translations that I would not produce without being paid for my labour, and translations for which I do not expect to be paid. It is worth explaining this distinction as it brings me closer to my motivations for translating in the first place. Not all of the translations I have produced have come about as a result of my own initiative. Most translators in the Anglophone context, with the exception of very well-established translators who have name recognition, combine pitching and catching. They pitch translation projects to publishers, taking on an agent-like function (but sadly without the percentage cut that agents charge), and they receive translation commissions from publishers who have purchased the rights to a foreign text and are in need of a translator to render it into English. I too pitch and catch. It makes sense that I am often more committed to the texts that I pitch than to the texts that I catch, but I nonetheless have become very fond of the majority of the texts that I have translated on commission. Commissions are financially remunerated; but although many of the pitches I have made have also been compensated, some have not. Two of the translations I have produced that were not paid in the conventional sense were a collection of poetry by Bulgarian-German poet Tzveta Sofronieva entitled A Hand Full of Water (2012) and a prose text by Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada entitled ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ (2013). In the former case I was ‘paid’ for the translation in the form of a grant from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. When I applied for the grant, I did not have a publisher for the poems and there was no guarantee that I would find one. PEN invested its money to compensate me – and a number of other translators working on a range of projects – for the time spent producing the translation and in order that I would have a complete text to show potential publishers, thus increasing the text’s chances of publication. I was lucky enough to receive further payment for the project in the form of a prize, which brought with it a cheque and a publishing contract with White Pine Press. PEN’s investment had paid off and I was amply compensated for my work, but through a subvention economy rather than through the marketplace. It is a curious irony that I am likely to have earned more money translating Tzveta Sofronieva’s poems than the poet herself made writing the originals. In the case of the second text, Yoko Tawada’s ‘Portrait of a Tongue’, I received no payment at all for my translation. The Canadian publisher, University of Ottawa Press, relied on a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Aid to Scholarly Publications Program to cover its publishing costs. Why was I moved to translate these texts? Why do organizations such as PEN subsidize such projects, and why do small non-profit-making publishers and university presses publish them?

For my own part, I can answer that I was attracted to Sofronieva’s and Tawada’s work both as an academic and a translator. My doctoral research investigated the translation of German exophonic texts – that is, German literary texts written by non-native speakers of German. I was fascinated by the phenomenon of writers changing their language: by the life circumstances that might lead one to take such a step, by the personal and professional costs of such a decision, the implications that this might have for the writer’s style in the adopted language and the effects on the society whose language has been adopted – Germany, in this case. A significant proportion of contemporary exophonic writers in Germany has struggled to find acceptance by the publishing industry. Many exophonic writers have published in part or entirely with small, niche houses, e.g. Yoko Tawada with konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke and Tzveta Sofronieva with Hans Schiler. In some cases writers have taken to self-publishing, e.g. Italian-German writer Franco Biondi, who now uses Book on Demand after years with the small publisher Brandes & Apsel. Where Tzveta Sofronieva was concerned, the act of translating her poetry contained an element of witnessing to it as literature and of witnessing to her as a friend; we had met quite randomly on a train travelling to the Frankfurt Book Fair when I was a doctoral student and were surprised to discover a common bond in exophony. Friendship, I have since discovered, is not an uncommon impetus for the establishment of a working translator–author relationship: Maureen Freely became Orhan Pamuk’s translator because of their long-standing acquaintance, for example (Freely 2013:118). The opportunity to translate poetry for the first time, contemplating how to render its formal features and elliptical narratives in English, also intrigued me. In Tawada’s case, my decision to translate ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ was sparked by the desire to make translatable a text that mused on linguistic equivalence in German and English, a text seemingly locked in to a particular linguistic relationship, to render it accessible to an English-speaking readership with little or no knowledge of German. From this premise grew an experimental translation that embedded the translator in the text by splitting each page into two columns and allowing the translator to fill the right-hand column with her commentary, thus opening up the translation process and making the translator visible to the reader. My motivations for translating in these two instances were ‘genre’-specific rather than global: exophonic writing was a political act and a literary phenomenon that raised certain intellectual questions; translating exophonic texts also had the potential to be a political act and was certainly an engaging literary endeavour. Translation would hopefully widen the audience that might be reached by Tzveta Sofronieva’s poetry, which had not been translated into English before, allowing her text to travel and her ideas to circulate. Tawada’s writing, on the other hand, had already been brought to the attention of the US reading public through the efforts of translators Susan Bernofsky, Margaret Mitsutani and Yumi Selden; my engagement with her text was primarily an intellectual and a creative experiment.

Although a very particular set of circumstances led me to translate A Hand Full of Water, the involvement of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, which now bears the name of its previously anonymous donors – translator and scholar Michael Henry Heim, who passed away in 2012, and his wife Priscilla Heim – was motivated by more global, humanistic concerns. The fund was set up in 2003 ‘in response to the dismayingly low number of literary translations currently appearing in English’ and with the aim of promoting ‘the publication and reception of translated world literature in English’ (PEN America 2015). The lack of foreign literature available in English was and continues to be seen as a cause for concern in Anglophone intellectual circles. Encounters with the foreign are considered beneficial; isolationism and parochialism can have dangerous consequences. White Pine Press, the University of Ottawa Press and indeed many university presses and publishing houses share in this belief.

I too have global motives for translating, irrespective of the degree to which I am enamoured of a particular text. I have already stated that I feel affection for most of the books that I have translated on commission. The Pasta Detectives (2010), written for the 8–11 age group by German author Andreas Steinhöfel, is one such book. It tells the story of Rico and his friend Oscar, two small boys who live in Berlin. Rico has learning difficulties and attends a school for children with special needs. He loves animals, is extremely attuned to people’s emotions and adores his mother, who is bringing him up by herself. Oscar is a highly gifted child who is less than socially competent and has a tendency to cause offence with his bluntly honest remarks. His mother has left the family home and he is being brought up by his father, who suffers from depression, is emotionally distant and often neglectful of his son. The Pasta Detectives is the first in a trilogy of books about Rico and Oscar, and in it the two friends solve a series of kidnappings. The book manages to be highly entertaining and sensitive in its account of how Rico and Oscar negotiate their differences and work to overcome their respective difficulties. Its contribution to highlighting special-needs issues was recognized by NASEN, an organization based in the UK that advocates on behalf of people with special needs, which honoured The Pasta Detectives with its Inclusive Book Award in 2011. The fact that such an award went to a translated text, which was not necessarily perceived as a translated text by the judges, suggests that target cultures can benefit from the fresh ideas and insights and the different world views brought in by translations – and the book’s offerings are not limited to its depiction of the life of a child with special needs. The form of childhood depicted in Andreas Steinhöfel’s book is very different from contemporary modes of childhood in the UK and in North America. Rico is a latchkey kid who wanders around his block of flats and his Kiez – the area of Berlin where he lives – by himself. The very fact that he lives in a block of flats, a typical feature of life in a continental European city and one that does not imply anything about a person’s class status, may be disorientating to an English-speaking middle-class child but is perhaps less so to a child who has grown up in social housing in the inner city. The social mix depicted in the book – rich and poor, gay and straight, German and non-German – reflects the fact that it is more usual for people of different income levels and social backgrounds to live in the same building and in the same area in German cities. This social mix is unusual in contemporary Anglophone children’s literature, as is the freedom of movement that Rico enjoys, unthinkable among the suburban North American middle class, and curtailed but not yet entirely absent from a child’s life in the UK. A child reading this book will encounter this very different world and the possibility of otherness. The claims that I make for The Pasta Detectives hold true for many translated texts. Even if a book is not a great book, or for that matter a ‘Great Book’ in the canonical sense, it can still expose its readers to difference.

My global reasons for translating, then, include giving other readers the opportunity to experience the same enjoyment I get from reading, being intellectually stimulated, entertained and challenged. I am keen to extend the audience for certain texts and authors, and for foreign literature more generally, and I believe that translation is an act of witnessing to literary value and a means of spreading ideas. Books from other cultures can alter our way of seeing the world. This is not to say that books from within our culture cannot also have this effect, or that all books from other cultures have the potential to effect a shift in our perception, but simply that certain books from outside our cultural circle may be particularly potent in this respect and that translation is the prerequisite for them to unleash these effects on an audience outside their source culture. There is certainly something political or ideological in this set of motivations, in the sense that I am clearly a xenophile but also in the sense that this is indicative of a belief that the ideas and forms found in foreign literature can challenge but also make a contribution to domestic cultural products and values.

The ‘how’ of translation – and I am speaking in basic, practical terms here rather than in terms of the long-standing dualist vision of translation as a positioning towards a source or a target language, text and/or culture – is a further part of the ‘why’. Translation presents a linguistic and intellectual challenge: how do I apply my knowledge of the two languages in question and my familiarity with the source and target cultures to the process of producing a translation? ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Why do we translate?
• 2 How do we read translations?
• 3 How do translators read?
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Tzveta Sofronieva’s German-language poems
• Glossary
• Index