Translation in a Postcolonial Context

Early Irish Literature in English Translation

Maria Tymoczko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781900650168
• eBook ISBN: 9781134958740
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This ground-breaking analysis of the cultural trajectory of England's first colony constitutes a major contribution to postcolonial studies, offering a template relevant to most cultures emerging from colonialism. At the same time, these Irish case studies become the means of interrogating contemporary theories of translation. Moving authoritatively between literary theory and linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies, anthropology and systems theory, the author provides a model for a much needed integrated approach to translation theory and practice. In the process, the work of a number of important literary translators is scrutinized, including such eminent and disparate figures as Standishn O'Grady, Augusta Gregory and Thomas Kinsella. The interdependence of the Irish translation movement and the work of the great 20th century writers of Ireland - including Yeats and Joyce - becomes clear, expressed for example in the symbiotic relationship that marks their approach to Irish formalism.

Translation in a Postcolonial Context is essential reading for anyone interested in translation theory and practice, postcolonial studies, and Irish literature during the 19th and 20th centuries.

1. The Metonymics of Translation

It is what I have tried to do, to take the best of the stories, or whatever parts of each will fit best to one another, and in that way to give a fair account of Cuchulain's life and death. I left out a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or another, but I put in nothing of my own that could be helped, only a sentence or so now and again to link the different parts together.

Augusta Gregory, Dedication, Cuchulain of Muirthemne

It is a curious fact of contemporary literary studies that very different branches of literary theory have converged on the same insight: every telling is a retelling. Deconstruction, as well as its critical progenitors, has been at pains to point out that writers do not simply create original texts: to a great extent any literary work is dependent on texts that have gone before and, moreover, literature is as much about literature as about life. There are not only text and context, but a fabric of intertextuality that links texts to other literary works, both textual predecessors and contemporaries. Thus, a literary work, like a translation, depends on previous texts: neither is an "original semantic unity", both are "derivative and heterogeneous".¹ Every writing is a rewriting.

Studies of oral literature – that is, the literatures of most peoples of the world currently and the literatures of most past cultures, literatures which include both folklore and oral epic, as well as various other performance types – have come to similar conclusions. It is agreed that the content, form, and performance techniques of any given traditional song or tale, for example, derive from established patterns that the teller or singer inherits and in turn passes on to those who succeed him. Albert Lord, following Milman Parry, the framer of the theory of oral composition of epics such as the Iliad, Beowulf, and La Chanson de Roland, has summarized this view succinctly: "The picture that emerges is not really one of conflict between preserver of tradition and creative artist; it is rather one of the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it. The ideal is a true story well and truly retold" (Lord [1960] 1964:29, cf. 99ff.). Every creation is a re-creation.

Folk tellers themselves acknowledge their own indebtedness to the tellers who have gone before them, as can be seen in the stories of some of the most famous twentieth-century Irish storytellers. Peig Sayers ends one of her tales, "That's my story, and if there's a lie in it, let there be. 'Tis long ago I heard it from my father. He had the world of stories" (trans, in O'Sullivan 1966:204). Similarly, after telling a version of the Deirdre story, Éamonn a Búrc concludes, "That's the way I heard that story being told by my own father, William Burke of Aird Mhór" (trans, in O'Sullivan 1974:29). And again from Éamonn a Búrc, "That's a true story, the way I heard it! If 'tis a lie, it wasn't I made it up" (trans, in O'Sullivan 1974:119).

Thus, literary works are recreations, retellings, or rewritings, whether they are oral or written, ancient or modern. Looking at literature in this way is useful for understanding aspects of individual literary works, literary traditions, and literary systems, and an exploration of the workings of retellings or rewritings, of the characteristics and properties of retellings and rewritings, offers potential insights for all levels of literary inquiry. Investigation of the way any particular type of rewriting functions also potentially illuminates other types of recreation, rewriting, or refraction. Translation theorists, notably Andre Lefevere, have stressed that translation is a very obvious form of rewriting. Investigations of translation and translations have much to teach about the nature of literature as a whole; conversely investigations of retellings and rewritings have much to teach about translation as a process and translations as products.

Although translations are "probably the most radical form of rewriting in a literature, or a culture" (Lefevere 1985:241), they are to be grouped with other modes of processing primary texts, including film versions of texts, children's versions, criticism, reviews, literary histories, anthologies, editions, and the like, all of which shape the evolution of literature and culture,² Not only are literary texts themselves forms of rewriting, literary texts do not exist and operate simply in their primary form; rather literary works are "surrounded by a great number of... refracted texts" (Lefevere 1982a: 13; cf. 1982b:4-8, 16-19). Processed for various audiences or adapted to a particular poetics or ideology, refracted texts are responsible in large measure for defining, maintaining, and redefining a canon. Translation is one form of refraction, a form of writing that is rewriting.

A basic feature of rewritings and retellings is that they are metonymic. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which an attribute or an aspect of an entity substitutes for the entity or in which a part substitutes for the whole.³ Thus, twelve keels sailed the sea is metonymic for twelve ships sailed the sea, where keels, parts of ships, substitutes for the whole, ships. Perhaps the most famous metonymy of twentieth-century literature is James Joyce's "bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing", the opening sentence of the eleventh episode of Ulysses, where "bronze by gold" is metonymic for the two barmaids, a redhead and a blond represented respectively by the colour attributes of their hair. The metonymic aspects of literary retellings are particularly clear in two cases: the case of oral traditional literature and the case of mythic literature, written as well as oral.

John Foley (1987:192ff.) has argued that when a traditional oral tale is told, the telling is metonymic on several levels. For a traditional audience each telling evokes metonymically all previous tellings of the tale that the audience has participated in and, further, the telling instantiates and reifies metonymically the entire tradition that the audience and teller share. So, for example, the traditional Yugoslav audience hearing Avdo Meðedović sing a song about Marko Kraljević had evoked for them all other occasions of Avdo singing the same song, but also all other singers' versions of the same epic, and beyond that all of Marko's various adventures and the Serbo-Croatian epic tradition as a whole with all its many epic tales, as well as the relation of that epic tradition to the culture and the history of the community.⁴ At the same time, the form of the epic being sung was also metonymic of the formulas, the metre, the genre, and the methods of oral composition in Serbo-Croatian tradition.

In France an oral rendering of "La Belle et la Bête" not only called up all previous oral and written renditions of this tale, but all versions of tale type AT 425C (or even AT 425, the entire animal groom cycle), as well as the traditional lore of France.⁵ Moreover, its form was metonymic of the various narrative conventions of wondertales in France, from the opening and closing signals of the genre to the medieval ambience of the settings. The Irish audience hearing the story of Finn trapped in the bruiden ('a hostel, large banqueting-hall, house, fairy-palace') in which Conan adheres by his posterior to a bench, has evoked metonymically all previous versions of the same tale, as well as the genre of bruiden tales, the entire corpus of Fenian lore, and Irish traditional literature in general. At the same time other aspects of the oral tradition in Ireland – such as the narrative form (including the "runs" of Irish wondertale tradition), the relationship of the Fenian ballad tradition to the narrative tradition, and the hierarchical prestige of various sorts of tales with Fenian tales at the summit – are also metonymically evoked.⁶

The power of this discourse about the metonymics of rewritings and retellings as a framework for the discussion of translations is illuminated by the characteristics of the rewritings and retellings that are most familiar to literary scholars: written versions of myths.⁷ Every telling is a retelling: there are no stories for which this is more true than myths, for which there are no "originals". Myths descend from the depths of time – indeed, this is what it means to be a traditional story. Even if we suppose that there was once a single moment of creation for any specific myth (which most theorists of oral tradition would agree is usually the case), behind that moment of creation lies a vast body of tale types and archetypal patterns which the myth reworks and reanimates.⁸

Foley's argument about oral traditional literature can be extended to the case of rewritings of myth, the most familiar examples of which in Western tradition are reworkings of classical and biblical myths, though rewritings of the Arthurian legend and the stories of Don Juan or Faust could also be used to illustrate the same principles. The rewritings of classical myths have been a staple of Western literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to the Old French Eneas and the Middle English Sir Orfeo, through Shakespeare's Troilus and Racine's Phèdre, to Joyce's Ulysses, Anouilh's Antigone, and Camus's Mythe de Sisyphe. Any single version of these myths calls up in a reader all other versions of the same story: the part (a single version) stands for the totality of the myth. Joyce's Ulysses evokes in the reader not only Homer's Odyssey but Dante's Ulysses and Tennyson's Ulysses and even potentially Charles Lamb's version of the Odyssey for children, entitled The Adventures of Ulysses. Indeed Ulysses is a perfect example of the metonymic aspect of literary reworkings of myths, for in order to understand Joyce's story of Dublin on 16 June 1904, the reader must already know other versions of the Ulysses myth or else come away with a very strange conception of Ulysses indeed and have absolutely no clue about the classical architectonics of Joyce's work.⁹

Like folktellers, literary artists use the metonymic aspect of mythic retelling in powerful – though distinct – ways. Authors commonly use a canonical version of the myth as an implicit standard of comparison, against which the audience measures the author's own vision. For a mythic retelling to make its full impact, the audience must be familiar with such a canonical version of the myth as a baseline for their reception of the mythic retelling. When the twelfth-century author of the Old French Eneas foregrounds Aeneas as lover, rather than as the heroic and dedicated (Dido might even have said monomaniacal) founder of Rome, he is speaking to his contemporaries about the relative importance of love and war in a man's life, using the Aeneid as the implicit standard for his own work.¹⁰ When Giraudoux wrote La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, he counted on the fact that the audience knew that the Trojan War would take place, that they were familiar with the Iliad, if only through refractions, as a baseline for understanding his reworking of the myth. Thus, authors make their thematic points in mythic rewritings through a metonymic process. The metonymic aspect of mythic retellings allows a teller or a writer to adapt, amplify, or even subvert an established myth and nonetheless still participate in and continue the tradition.

These are examples of the ways that, in order to understand and appreciate any one version of a myth, a reader must refer a specific version to the whole mythic tradition. At the same time such a rewriting of a classical myth stands metonymically for the larger mythic corpus of which the single story is part,¹¹ for the particular national or linguistic literature of which the single version is part, for the entire tradition of Western written literature all the way back to the Greeks, as well as for the earlier oral Indo-European heritage. It is a paradox that one must already know a myth in order to recognize a mythic tale and to apprehend the import of any particular version of the myth, yet the myth itself does not exist apart from specific versions.¹² Though the metonymic aspect of mythic rewritings is particularly clear because the content of the texts represents larger wholes (whole families of texts), all literature works this way and the metonymic aspects of texts are not restricted to content. Aspects of poetics, specifically literary form, are also metonymic in written literature as in oral literature. Thus, for example, any single English sonnet evokes all the sonnets of Shakespeare and Petrarch, as well as the entire tradition of sonnet writing.¹³ This is so because any writing is a rewriting, any literary creation a recreation.

The metonymic level of a text is only one of many levels: the literal level, of course, but also the metaphoric level. Interestingly, the metaphoric level can be generalized by the audience, so that it too becomes a metonymy. Thus, for example, in Anouilh's Antigone, Antigone's resistance to Creon is to be read as a metaphor for resistance to the Nazis, but in turn it can be seen as metonymic of all human resistance to injustice everywhere and for all time. The metonymic levels of literature facilitate the extension of the metaphoric aspects of a text so that the latter also acquire a metonymic significance, becoming emblematic of larger human experience, for example. This is one of the things that is meant when people talk about the way in which myth "universalizes" or about the way great literature speaks to "the human condition".

Within literary works other sorts of metonymies are also operative. A piece of literature customarily evokes its culture through consequential and telling signals or details, typically parts or aspects of the culture that are saturated with semiotic significance and emblematic of the culture as a whole, both in terms of objective structure and subjective experience. For example, references to significant places or key historical events or kinship patterns can serve to locate a literary work within a larger context of time, space, and social structure, thus evoking those larger cultural contexts (cf. Basso 1990). In this regard, such cultural elements within a literary work are metonymic evocations of the culture as a whole, including its material culture, history, economy, law, customs, values, and so on. Metonymic structures within literary texts are, therefore, densely woven, referring to various aspects of the literary system and to other cultural systems alike.

The metonymic features of literature are essential to the ways literature is learned, recognized, and known, and, thus, to the epistemology of literature. Because single literary works can represent larger abstract literary wholes and categories, human beings are able to learn about and recognize tale types, genres, categories of literature, forms, and so on from a limited exposure to literary examples. Literature, like language, is not simply mastered through exhaustive exposure to examples, and literary production is not simply a matter of duplication of what has been learned. The learning of literature involves the recognition and mastery of patterns and, as with language, the questions of competence and generativity are complex.

Metonymy in literary rewritings and retellings is also an important aspect in cultural continuity and change. It permits the adaptation of traditional content and form to new circumstances, allowing change while still maintaining a predominant sense of the preservation of larger elements of tradition. The metonymic dimension of literature enables traditional audiences to correct (and forgive) the mistakes or omissio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Early Irish Literature
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Metonymics of Translation
• Chapter 2: The Politics of Translating Táin Bó Cúailnge into English
• Chapter 3: Formal Strategies for Integrating Irish Hero Tales into Canons of European Literature
• Chapter 4: The Two Traditions of Translating Early Irish Literature
• Chapter 5: On Translating a Dead Language
• Chapter 6: On Cú Chulainn's Attributes Translating Culture in a Postcolonial Context
• Chapter 7: Translating the Humour in Early Irish Hero Tales
• Chapter 8: The Names of the Hound
• Chapter 9: The Accuracy of the Philologist
• Chapter 10: Metametonymics
• Appendices
• Abbreviations
• Works Cited
• Index