Translating Style

A Literary Approach to Translation - A Translation Approach to Literature

Tim Parks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317640233
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining linguistic and lit crit approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters to analyse translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned, showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author depending on the nature of his or her inspiration.

This new and thoroughly revised edition introduces a system of 'back translation' that now makes Tim Parks' highly-praised book reader friendly even for those with little or no Italian. An entirely new final chapter considers the profound effects that globalization and the search for an immediate international readership is having on both literary translation and literature itself.

1. Identifying an Original

For the last ten years or so I have been playing the game of inviting students to look at the same passage in English and Italian and to tell me which is the original and which the translation, a game that would later develop into a methodology, or almost. Here is the kind of text one inevitably starts with, because it is so easy. It is taken from a tourist guide.

The clear poem of the surrounding landscape, where very sweet sunsets go down, the fertile land with long poplar-rows and slow streams of rivers and canals, the laborious and strong people of the vast agricultural and industrial zone (simple and persevering in their own traditions) form like a ring round the historical group of the city that the exemplary wisdom of the local administrations has opportunely respected.¹

And the Italian:

La limpida poesia del paesaggio circostante su cui scendono tramonti dolcissimi, la terra ubertosa con lunghi filari di pioppi e pigre correnti di fiumi e canali, la gente vigorosa e laboriosa della vasta zona agricola ed industriale (semplice e tenace nelle proprie tradizioni) fanno come da corona al gruppo storico della città che la saggezza esemplare delle amministrazioni locali ha opportunamente rispettato.

There is rarely a student who does not identify this as an Italian original in the space of a minute or so. And even the native English speaker with little or no Italian will immediately be aware that the English here is either a poor translation or a parody of some kind. Indeed, native English speakers have a tendency to burst out laughing when they hear the text read out loud. But can we say why exactly? And is there anything useful to be learnt from our reactions to a text like this?

Having shown students the passage I invite them to try to identify examples of lexical interference in the translation (for example false cognates, or collocations that are acceptable in Italian but not in English), then grammatical interference (syntactical structures that are considered ‘correct’ and ordinary in Italian but not in English) and finally what I refer to as ‘cultural interference’ (elements that might be desirable in a passage of this kind in Italy, but not in an Anglo-Saxon culture).

What emerges from such an analysis when applied to this particular translation is that while there are many lexical and cultural ‘problems’, there is only one straight grammatical error in the English (‘form like a ring’). So we are not talking about total incompetence on the part of the translator here. On the contrary, a large number of grammatical transformations have been successfully performed.

With regard to lexical interference, it is true that the false cognates (‘laborious’, ‘zone’, ‘group’) do their worst; nevertheless we soon appreciate that, like the grammar, they are not the main culprits in generating that growing hilarity that seizes the native English speaker as he reads through this text. The problem is rather more complicated.

Let us consider the collocation presented in the opening line:

The clear poem

La limpida poesia (The clear/transparent/unruffled poem/poetry)

Here we notice that while ‘poem’ is a true cognate of ‘poesia’ it is unusual to use the word figuratively in this way in English. The uncountable noun ‘poetry’, also a true cognate of ‘poesia’ (Italians use the same word for both the single ‘poem’ and the more generic ‘poetry’), lends itself more easily to figurative use. Partly as a result of the difficulty with this leap into the figurative, and partly because the words ‘limpido’ and ‘clear’ only overlap for a limited part of their respective connotative ranges, the word ‘clear’ tends to be understood, before ‘poem’, as meaning ‘easily comprehensible’ rather than indicating, as does ‘limpido’, visual clarity, as in ‘a clear day’ or ‘clear water’. As a result we have the impression that the writer has attempted a metaphor with lyric pretensions, but in the end made no real sense at all.

Only a little further on in the same opening sentence, the emphasizing of ‘very’ before ‘sweet’ to translate the Italian superlative ‘dolcissimi’ (sweetest/very sweet) in ‘tramonti dolcissimi’ (sunsets very sweet) is also a problem. One might just about accept ‘sweet sunsets’, though it is hardly recognizable either as common or poetic usage in English (alliteration helps us to accept it), but ‘very sweet’ draws too much attention to this adventurous collocation, seems rather prosaically to beg the question, ‘ok, exactly how sweet can a sunset be?’

Then with splendid bathos those sunsets ‘go down’. This, like the use of ‘very’, is by no means a grammatical error. True, the word ‘sunset’ already includes the idea of ‘going down’, so there is an element of redundancy here, but then so does the Italian ‘tramonto’ (sunset). Imagine a sentence of the variety, ‘The sunset slowly subsided behind a horizon of soft hills’. Such a statement does not seem impossible, and the logic is exactly the same as ‘very sweet sunsets go down’. No, the thing to notice here is simply that one can and one does say this in Italian, whereas one cannot say it in English (or not without being laughed at).

Similarly, while one can say ‘tenace nelle proprie tradizioni’ (determined/ persevering in their own traditions) in Italian, to say ‘persevering in their own traditions’ in English only begs the fascinating question, ‘in whose traditions if not their own?’. The emphasizer ‘own’, like the previous ‘very’, is thus not only superfluous but distractingly so.

So far, then, comparison of the two passages does give us, if nothing else, a sense of the different spirit of these two languages, an awareness, that is, of how dangerous it can be to use emphasizers in English. Later on, even where the generous gesturing of the Italian translates easily into English (in terms of pure semantics) we cannot help feeling uneasy in the presence of words like ‘vast’ (to describe the agricultural area around Mantua), or expressions that insist on ‘the exemplary wisdom of the local administrations’. And even without completing a word by word analysis of the whole passage, what has been said so far should be enough to prompt a first and obvious conclusion: that much of language has to do, not with the grammatical rules and transformations we can learn in the classroom (though they are vital), but with what the people who speak the language consider normal and acceptable.

With this particular passage, then, we are aware of how much would have to change in an English translation, in order to achieve a reader reaction not too unlike that of an Italian reader of the original. The first line, for example, might have to go something like: ‘The sharp lyricism of the surrounding countryside with its delicately hued sunsets …’. We would have to aim, that is, for a style common to such texts as tourist brochures. And since this would remind us of the fact that the chief intention of this passage, indeed its raison d’etre, must be to encourage people to come to Mantua, one might begin to question whether some of the information in this passage could ever be rendered in the kind of lexis, syntax and register that the English use in tourist brochures.

Perhaps another way of putting this reflection would be to ask: does the English tourist really want to know about the ‘vasta zona … industriale’ (vast industrial area) around the city? Will he believe that the ‘local administrations’ have acted with ‘exemplary wisdom’? Certainly, as a translator one might become uneasy about writing such things. Hence a passage like this makes us aware of the need to translate, as it were, the general purpose or function of a text, rather than its exact semantic surface. This is a matter we shall have to return to.

For we still have not really answered the most interesting question of all. Why do native English speakers respond to this translation with laughter, or at least smiles? And, crucial for my purposes in this book, why do non-native speakers whose English is sufficiently advanced for them to appreciate that this is a poor translation not laugh?

The point here, perhaps, is that in its many departures from the kind of style one expects in a tourist guide (not to mention everyday English speech) the translation draws attention to itself as language rather than simply as content. In this regard it partakes of the arrogance of literature. That is, experience tells us that it is literature that usually assumes the right to deviate from more ordinary ways of saying things, to draw attention to itself as language. True, its deviations often then atrophy into the conventions of a recognizable poetic style, but it is a characteristic of the most dynamic literature to deviate even from these. Since a collocation like ‘clear poem’ certainly departs from more or less everything, it can be said to have something in common with literature. But of course we are happy (though not always initially so) for literature to offer such departures, because it often does so with what we sense is felicity: that is, we see an appropriateness between the deviation from standard forms of expression and the content of the text, and we sense a harmony between all the deviations taken together. The rhymed poem is the most extreme example:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.²

But when a piece of writing assumes this right to deviate from standard forms, yet fails to deliver appropriateness and harmony, then we begin to laugh. We laugh at the gap between the ambitious gesture and the questionable achievement. Thus the Scottish poet William McGonagall gets an entry in The Macmillan Encyclopedia for his ‘memorably bad poetry’, much of which reads like a poor translation of a rhymed tourist guide:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the silvery Tay!

That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave

His home far away, incognito in his dress,

And view thee ere he passed along en route to Inverness.³

The native English speaker laughs at the tourist brochure on Mantua because his sensibility to a common use of English, to the style of tourist guides and indeed to literary styles in general, makes him aware of the many amusingly inappropriate departures this passage makes from those forms, while nevertheless remaining comprehensible. Aping lyricism it plunges into absurdity. The foreigner does not laugh, or laughs less, because, although aware that there is much that is unusual and even ‘wrong’ with this English, his sensibility to the language is not such that he is acutely sensitive to its inappropriateness. Obviously we are in the area of subjective evaluation here, but the point I wish to establish is that it is extremely difficult to judge, in one’s second language, the appropriateness or otherwise of a departure from ordinary forms of discourse. It is difficult to read the text, that is, with a finely developed sense of all the other texts which stand in relation to it and which give it, for the native reader, its full significance. Here, just to close the discussion is a possible translation of the piece, this time a little more aware of the sort of English that would ordinarily be used. Even those who have little Italian will be aware of how much has had to change, lexically, syntactically and ‘culturally’ to prevent the piece from seeming ‘funny’:

The lyrical beauty of the surrounding landscape with its soft-hued sunsets, the rich, arable fields bordered by poplar rows and gently flowing waterways, add a crowning aura to a city whose ancient centre has very sensibly been preserved intact. Meantime, within and without the town, the energetic, hard-working people of the busy North Italian plain carry on their simple, time-honoured traditions.

Proceeding from this opening example where original and translation are so easily and amusingly distinguishable, I might then go on to offer students a series of texts of the following variety.

GREAT MEALS IN MINUTES – Quick and Delicious.

The time-saver’s cookbook. If you love good food but hate spending time preparing it, here’s the cookbook you’ve been waiting for. GREAT MEALS IN MINUTES makes it possible for you to get in and out of the kitchen in a snap – without resorting to those expensive and all-too-familiar entrées.⁴

PIATTI PRONTI IN UN MINUTO. Una cucina rapida e squisita. Il libro di cucina che vi farà risparmiare tempo. Se apprezzate la buona cucina ma non avete il tempo per dedicarvi alla preparazione dei cibi, ecco il libro che fa per voi. PIATTI PRONTI IN UN MINUTO vi consentirà di entrare e uscire dalla cucina in un momento, senza dover ricorrere alle pietanze surgelate, tanto costose quanta ormai sin troppo comuni.

Here the uninitiated might be briefly confused as to which text is the original, since both English and Italian achieve a convincing register, deploying the syntax and lexis typical of a junk-mail invitation to buy a cookbook. But comparison of differences between the two rapidly points the way. These might be listed as follows:

GREAT MEALS IN MINUTES

PIATTI PRONTI IN UN MINUTO – DISHES READY IN A MINUTE

The concept ‘great’ is absent in the Italian, while there is no concept in the Italian absent in the English. Both texts include the kind of alliteration which gives them that mnemonic quality useful in an expression that must function as a title. If the text was translated into English from the Italian, is it likely that a translator would have chosen to introduce the word ‘great’? Hard to say. Translating from the English, would there be any reason to eliminate some reference to the very high quality of the food? Yes. An Italian audience might be resistant to the notion that a meal produced in a few minutes could be ‘great’. The two cultures in question have rather different attitudes to cooking.

The phrases ‘in minutes’ and ‘in un minuto’ (in a minute), though semantically different, are standard forms in their respective languages for the same concept, ‘very quickly’. It is worth noting that while we are used to translators making changes of this variety (where th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note to the New Edition
• 1. Identifying an Original
• 2. Translating the ‘Unhousedness’ of Women in Love
• 3. Translating the Evocative Spirit in James Joyce
• 4. Translating the Smoke Words of Mrs Dalloway
• 5. Translating the Matter of Samuel Beckett’s Manner
• 6. Barbara Pym and the Untranslatable Commonplace
• 7. On the Borders of Comprehensibility: The Challenge of Henry Green
• 8. Translating Individualism: Literature and Globalization
• Bibliography
• Index