Translating Humour

Jeroen Vandaele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134966516
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

It is all too often assumed that humour is the very effect of a text. But humour is not a perlocutionary effect in its own right, nor is laughter. The humour of a text may be as general a characteristic as a serious text's seriousness. Like serious texts, humorous texts have many different purposes and effects. They can be subdivided into specific subgenres, with their own perlocutionary effects, their own types of laughter (or even other reactions).

Translation scholars need to be able to distinguish between various kinds of humour (or humorous effect) when comparing source and target texts, especially since the notion of "effect" pops up so frequently in the evaluation of humorous texts and their translations. In this special issue of The Translator, an attempt is made to delineate types of humorous effect, through careful linguistic and cultural analyses of specific examples and/or the introduction of new analytical tools. For a translator, who is both a receiver of the source text and sender of the target text, such analyses and tools may prove useful in grasping and pinning down the perlocutionary effect of a source text and devising strategies for producing comparable effects in the target text. For a translation scholar, who is a receiver of both source and target texts, the contributions in this issue will hopefully provide an analytical framework for the comparison of source and target perlocutionary effects.

A Great Feast of Languages

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the Translator

DIRK DELABASTITA

FUNDP Namur, Belgium

Abstract. Shakespeare’s ‘King Henry V’ is a play which exploits multilingualism for both comic and non-comic purposes. These various functions are described before the paper moves on to explore the unique challenges that this polyglot play poses to the translator. Special attention is given to the rendering of the French-English bilingual comic scenes into French. Given that much of Shakespeare’s joking in ‘Henry V’ involves national stereotyping and serves a nationalistic agenda, the translators have understandably been swayed in their choices by political sensitivities, but a range of other factors play a role as well (knowledge of foreign languages, historical connotations attached to languages, conventions for language representation, translation norms, textual norms, etc.). The complexity of the field of forces and pressures surrounding the translator is such as to cast doubt on the notion of a ‘general’ theory of humour and (its) translation. We need further empirical study of texts and contexts, involving a cautious interpretation of possible reasons and possible effects.*

Shakespeare’s Henry V from 1599 describes the successful French campaign of King Henry V, culminating in the miracle victory of Agincourt (1415). The play basically dramatizes historical facts, but, as usual, Shakespeare granted himself considerable poetic licence. In act one, learned clergymen provide Henry with a legal justification or pretext for his claim to the French throne. Henry’s resolve is further strengthened by the French ambassadors who bring him tennis balls from the Dauphin, a gift that scornfully alludes to Henry’s frivolous youth. Act two begins in London, where Pistol, Nym and Bardolph learn from Nell that their (and the King’s) old crony Falstaff has just died. The three of them decide to follow the King to France, hoping for the spoils of war. Before sailing, Henry orders the execution of three English noblemen – Cambridge, Grey and Scroop – who had accepted French bribes to assassinate him. Act three describes the successful siege and occupation of Harfleur. The French Princess Katherine has an English-vocabulary lesson with her tutor Alice. Henry decides to take most of his men back to Calais to recover from disease and fatigue, but on their way, near Agincourt, they find themselves facing a formidable French force. Act four shows the different attitudes on either side the night before the battle: soberness and responsibility on the English side, overconfidence and vanity on the French. The English defeat the French against all odds. In act five, Captain Fluellen forces the swaggering Pistol to eat the leek (national emblem of Wales) which he had earlier derided. His old mates Nym and Bardolph having been hanged for theft, Pistol slinks back to England. The wooing scene between Henry and Katherine and the outcome of the peace talks show the King equally victorious in love and warfare, providing a triumphal conclusion.

1. History, language(s) and comedy

Henry V is a history play, i.e. a play depicting scenes from the life of an illustrious historical character and using the past as a source of insight and guidance for the present. Many plays of this typically Elizabethan genre dealt with England’s troubled recent past: the Wars of the Roses and its precedents. The genre rose into prominence after the Armada’s defeat in 1588 and soon proved hugely productive, illustrating the upsurge of nationalistic feeling in that period, as well as the cultural anxieties that accompanied it. A lot has been written about the genre’s ambivalent complicity with the so-called Tudor myth (the royal house of Tudor had brought unity and national greatness to England after the bloody Wars of the Roses and the Tudors’ role as national saviours and their acts of valour and piety should wipe out the memory of any past faults and the lingering doubts about the legitimacy of their rule).

Formally speaking, the genre was rather loosely defined, with some history plays tending more to comedy (e.g. Henry IV, Part two) and others to tragedy (e.g. Richard III). While Henry V is a fairly serious play, whose theme and general atmosphere have even caused it to be described as a kind of a national epic, there are also several comic scenes in the play. Falstaff, who was so central to the comedy in Henry IV, Part two (as well as in The Merry Wives of Windsor), dies off-stage at the beginning of the play, quite heartbroken after his rejection by Henry, who dumped his old mates to rise to the challenge of a splendid kingship. With Falstaff gone, the comedy in Henry V rests mainly on the following characters: Nym, Bardolph, Nell and especially Pistol (who is the only one of Henry’s former pals to survive until the end of the play); Fluellen (to a slighter extent also Jamy and Macmorris), the brave and loyal Welsh captain, hot-tempered but slightly simple-minded; Katherine and Alice, who butcher the English language in the vocabulary lesson scene as well as in the wooing scene; and Burgundy (a French nobleman), who engages with Henry in a series of bawdy double-entendres at the end of the wooing scene.

What is particularly interesting from a translation viewpoint is Shakespeare’s ample use of national stereotypes, regional stage dialects and different languages. The lowlife characters speak an English whose special flavour owes more to class dialect than to regional dialect, while also displaying a fondness for learned words and foreign phrases. Fluellen, Jamy and Macmorris, who are meant to embody the typical Welshman, Scotsman and Irishman respectively, are not heard in their own Celtic languages, but they speak the regional English accent typical of their home country. Katherine and Alice speak either their native French or poor English; and so forth and so on. In fact, Henry V has been called “arguably one of the most babylonian texts in the English language” (Hoenselaars 1999:xiv). As such, the play acutely confronts translators with two questions that are in normal cases too trivial to even think about: what language(s) does the text have to be translated from, and what language(s) does it have to be translated into? More concretely, the notion of source language (SL) has to be broken down into the following:

• SL Eng [now archaic]: in the majority of speech turns, Shakespeare employs a ‘normal’ stage English, with of course variations depending on character, class and circumstance; from the viewpoint of the text’s later reception, it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s English has over the centuries acquired an archaic flavour it didn’t possess initially;

• SL Eng [Fr]: in certain scenes, English is spoken by French characters and correspondingly shows traces of linguistic interference (broken English);

• SL Fr [Eng]: Henry and Pistol speak a few phrases in abominable French, showing traces of linguistic interference in the opposite direction (broken French);

• SL Fr [now archaic]: in certain scenes, unmarked French is spoken by the French characters; here too, it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s French has meanwhile acquired an archaic flavour and shows a degree of ungrammaticality it wasn’t meant to have initially;

• SL Eng [Welsh]: Fluellen, who is present in many scenes, speaks an English which is strongly coloured by his Welsh provenance;

• SL Eng [Irish] and SL Eng [Scottish]: Macmorris and Jamy speak English with an Irish and a Scottish accent respectively;

• SL Latin: there are a few snatches of Latin, used as the medieval lingua franca of law and religion; moreover, Pistol likes to show off the little Latin that he has.

Pistol, furthermore, uses a few isolated loanwords (SL Spanish) and in scene 4.4 (partly quoted below) the French word qualité strikes him as so obscure and cacophonous as to remind him of the equally incomprehensible refrain of a popular Irish song (SL Irish).

2. Comic and other functions of the play’s multilingualism

Given the great number of dramatic situations in which different languages and/or language varieties converge or clash, it is hazardous to attempt broad generalizations about the functions of the multilingualism in Henry V. But the risk has to be taken, for we know that translators tend to be alert to the functions of ST items as much as to their intrinsic features.

2.1 The mimetic function

The production of humour is a prominent function of the multilingualism in Henry V, but we must first of all acknowledge the importance of the mimetic (historical, representational) function, which by adding ingredients such as historical authenticity and couleur locale has to ensure that in the mind of the spectator or reader there is conformity between the representing text and the represented reality. Thus, the recourse to stage dialects and foreign languages helps to give substance and credibility to individual characters and dramatic situations. Consider for example the propensity of Nell to slip into malapropisms when she ventures beyond her habitual tavern vocabulary by using Latin loanwords, or Pistol’s love of bombastic rhetoric which keeps him quoting foreign phrases either within or beyond the pale of correctness and relevance.

Fiction here draws on geolinguistic and sociolinguistic fact (even if we allow for the effect of cliché and convention, which may create a wide gap between real dialects and their representation on stage). The mimetic function can only make individual characters and their personal verbal idiosyncrasies come to life against the background of more collective linguistic norms, defined in terms of social, regional or national identities. When characters such as Fluellen or Katherine resort to ‘foreign’ languages or ‘funny’ accents, this adds further strokes to their individual portraits in the play, but not without simultaneously giving them a position and an identity in a wider spatiotemporal setting which was known to be historically authentic. The campaign of Henry V was part of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and it is therefore only appropriate that Shakespeare’s play should oppose English-speaking against French-speaking characters. In the same way, it hardly comes as a surprise that soldiers enlisted in the Celtic fringe speak their regional accent. Henry V re-enacted historical events, rooted in authentic settings, and not some imaginary romance set in a geographically or historically remote world or in some fairy-tale wonderland.

Vehicular matching is the scholarly term that Meir Sternberg (1981) coined for the mimetic technique I have just described, i.e. the allotment of specific languages or language varieties to characters and groups of characters in accordance with the historical reality represented. As a mimetic device, it helps to enhance the credibility of characters and dramatic situations.

Yet, vehicular matching is not universally favoured by authors, nor is it indispensable to the aesthetic effect. This may be illustrated by most of the Roman (e.g. Antony and Cleopatra) or Mediterranean plays (e.g. Romeo and Juliet) in the Shakespearean canon, where English is used more or less throughout, qui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Statement
• Introduction: (Re-)Constructing Humour: Meanings and Means
• Translation and Humour: An Approach Based on the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH)
• A Cognitive Approach to Literary Humour Devices Translating Raymond Chandler
• On Translating Queneau’s ‘Exercices de style’ into Italian
• Subtitling Irony: ‘Blackadder’ in Dutch
• ‘Funny Fictions’: Francoist Translation Censorship of Two Billy Wilder Films
• A Great Feast of Languages: Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the Translator
• Performance and Translation in the Arabic Metalinguistic Joke
• Playing the Double Agent: An Indian Story in English
• Humour in Simultaneous Conference Interpreting
• Revisiting the Classics
• Book Reviews
• Conference Diary
• Recent Publications