Genetic Translation Studies

Conflict and Collaboration in Liminal Spaces

Ariadne Nunes, Joana Moura, Marta Pacheco Pinto, Ariadne Nunes, Joana Moura, Marta Pacheco Pinto

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350213005
• eBook ISBN: 9781350146839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

Examining the research possibilities, debates and challenges posed by the emerging field of genetic translation studies, this book demonstrates how, both theoretically and empirically, genetic criticism can shed much-needed light on translators' archives, the translator figure and the creative process of translation. Genetic Translation Studies analyses a diverse range of translation materials including manuscripts, typographical proofs, personal papers, letters, testimonies and interviews in order to give visibility, body and presence to translators. Chapters draw on translations of works by authors such as Saint-John Perse, Nikos Kazantzakis, René Char, António Lobo Antunes and Camilo Castelo Branco, in each case revealing the conflicts and collaborations between translators and other stakeholders, including authors, editors and publishers. Covering an impressive array of language contexts, from Portuguese, English and French to Greek, Finnish, Polish and Sanskrit, this book demonstrates the value of the genetic turn in translation studies and offers new ways of working with translator correspondences.

1

What is genetic translation studies good for?

Ariadne Nunes

Institute of Literature and Tradition Studies, Nova University of Lisbon

Joana Moura

Catholic University of Portugal/Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon

Marta Pacheco Pinto

Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon

When in one of the founding handbooks to translation studies Gideon Toury discussed Avraham Shlonsky’s 1946 Hebrew translation of Hamlet’s monologue ‘To Be or Not to Be’, he set out by claiming that his aim was to provide ‘an account of the successive revisions made by one translator while working on one textual segment of considerable independence … to uncover the constraints to which that translator subjected himself as he went along and the way he manoeuvred among them’ (1995: 193; emphasis in the original). Based on the analysis of those successive revisions and constraints, Toury’s objective ‘in the tentative reconstruction of a translation process’ (1995: 193) was ultimately to determine the ‘modernist norms’ governing it. Toury did so by building hypotheses based on a deductive comparison of the textual materials stored in the Shlonsky Archive, namely from the collation of a manuscript (the first draft) and a typescript (possibly produced on the basis of a cleaner, interim copy of the manuscript) with autograph revisions by the translator. Toury then went on to complement his analysis with the study of two final versions, one which was staged and the published book version. The descriptive translation studies (DTS) scholar sought to reconceive the translation process in a way that bears clear affinities with the reconstruction of the writing process pursued by geneticists.

The reading strategy and methodological approach followed by Toury show that genetic criticism and translation studies have more in common than one would expect at first, with genetic criticism occupying notwithstanding a shadowy presence in translation research. The aim of this book is to give visibility to this encounter by making the case for genetic translation studies (GTS). This chapter charts GTS as a relational concept that seeks to go beyond the textual surface level by defying in particular the commonly accepted notions of translation as a stable, finished text and the translator as a surrogate author.

An unexpected intersection? The genetic dossier of translation(s) and translator(s)

When outlining the compositional history of the Hebrew translation of Hamlet’s monologue, Toury was careful to describe the different stages of his archaeological method, which started off with the reordering and classification of the materials collected from archival research. Although Toury does not name this procedure, in genetic criticism this reordering of textual evidence corresponds to the ‘genetic dossier’ working phase (Grésillon 1994: 242). As Toury’s case study illustrates and as reinforced by the chapters in this volume, by gathering data for empirical research, the genetic dossier can help the translation studies researcher disclose the intricacies of the translator’s – and other translational agents’ – working method.

Typically, a genetic dossier includes the writer’s avant-textes, either endogenetic (drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs) or exogenetic (personal papers, private library that may offer handwritten marginalia for study, letters, interviews, for instance, containing verbal data that, though external to the text, was appropriated to become part of it [e.g. de Biasi 1996: 43–4]).¹ The dossier is diachronically organized in order to show the evolving phases of the writing process, of which the published text may be considered just a phase. This process may continue even after the publication of the text with its reeditions, (re)translations and different forms of reception (the so-called post-textes)² (Cordingley and Montini 2015: 2) that can also be included in the genetic dossier, although this has not been the focus of genetic criticism.

In fact, with reference to an author’s genetic dossier, Pierre-Marc de Biasi contends that this post-textual phase has nothing to do with genetic criticism and the genetic perspective, rather pertaining to ‘the criticism of the reception and history of the book’ (1996: 42). The same issue has been addressed by other scholars, including Elsa Pereira in the present volume, who considers otherwise. Faced with a wide range of interlinguistic materials, from allographic translations to self-translations and authorial witnesses, Pereira suggests developing an appropriate editorial design that allows for assembling these materials together in a digital archive. One of the premises on which the present book capitalizes is precisely that post-textual documentation can belong to the exogenesis, as seems to be implied in Dirk Van Hulle’s mapping of macro- and microgenesis (2016: 47 and 49).

In this vein, the very ‘criticism of the reception and history of the book’ becomes a key component of any translator’s or translation’s genetic dossier. This genetic dossier necessarily includes materials from the translator’s workshop ranging from translator’s drafts, manuscripts or corrected proofs (see Dionísio, Hartmann, Kołodziejczyk, Ivaska, Pereira, Hersant, Pimenta, Pinto and Nunes in this volume) to a translator’s memoir, (auto)biography or interviews (see Ivančić and Zepter, Faria and Mourinha), any reviews of the text to be translated that may have been collected or used by the translator, or any translations in another language. The latter constitute the afterlives of a text beyond its first printing, each possibly contributing to renewed textual variation. Indeed, the genetic dossier of the source text may also be incorporated into the genetic dossier of translation(s). Since editors, revisers of literary translations and publishing houses all have a say in the production of translations by conforming them to their own marketing strategies, editor’s and reviser’s drafts, as well as publisher’s records and publishing contracts, are all part of the genetic translation dossier.

Therefore, in GTS, post-textes relating to both the source text(s) and the translation may have to do with genetic criticism. While Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning in reasserting the emergence of GTS add that ‘[t]he methods of textual genetics … generally accoun[t] for collaboration when it becomes manifest (material) in the genesis of a translation’ (2017: 11), post-textes can unveil non-manifest collaborative or conflictual networks and other non-manifest relations (such as intertextuality)³ that may have contributed to fashioning the textual object; in such cases the post-textes pertain to the genetic perspective.

What is more, an author can always go back to the work demised and hone it on the basis of its translation. Samuel Beckett is a well-known example of this retrospective practice; Dirk Van Hulle (2015: 46–8) quotes his Happy Days/Oh les beaux jours to illustrate a process in which the (French) translation participates in the remaking of the (English) genesis. Moreover, an author can call for a new translation. A striking example of this is the English retranslation of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book. As Eker Roditakis (2018) has demonstrated, its first translation came out in 1994 by the hand of Güneli Gün and was followed by a retranslation in 2006 by Maureen Freely. It was Pamuk himself who commissioned Freely for the task in view of the negative criticism and harsh reviews Gün’s translation had received both in the United Kingdom and the United States. The scholar concludes that ‘the decision for retranslation was not taken entirely due to target system dynamics, but interference from the source system’ (2018; emphasis in the original) – or, if you will, interference from the genesis.

Back in 1995 Toury acted as a geneticist when surveying what he termed ‘the translator’s “laboratory”’, in which he included materials relating only to the translator’s workshop – in other words, the translator’s dossier. He further stated that ‘it is not too difficult to tease apart the layers comprising each version and put them in their correct order, which is a precondition for any justification of observations in terms of a reconstructed translation process’ (1995: 196; emphasis added). Genetic criticism has from the outset relied on this same precondition and can help both translation practitioners and researchers go beyond things taken for granted. Similarly, the chapters gathered in this volume show that the genetic dossier is the product of an empirical-inquisitive methodology central to GTS, for it helps organize and set the corpus for analysis.

At the crossroads of translation studies and genetic criticism

In 2015, Anthony Cordingley and Chiara Montini announced a genetic turn in translation studies with their special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia. In their introduction, they specifically coined this new field of research located at the intersection between translation studies and genetic criticism as ‘genetic translation studies’. Its object, these authors claim, ‘is the textual evidence of the activity of translation rather than the translating subject’, thus focusing on the practices of the ‘working translator and the evolution, or genesis, of the translated text by studying translators’ manuscripts, drafts and other working documents’ (2015: 1).

The new field promotes an understanding of the text as a ‘work in progress’ rather than a ‘finished work’ (Cordingley and Montini 2015: 3), that is, as a process rather than a product. Serenella Zanotti and Rosa Maria Bollettieri make this point in their definition of genetic criticism: ‘Differently from textual criticism, manuscript genetics does not aim to reconstruct one particular state of the text, but rather the process by which the text came into being’ (2015: 128). GTS, as a hybrid between descriptive translation studies and genetic criticism, is, we add, ultimately about piecing together a response to the ‘how’ question (how a text was translated) and searching for transparency in deconstructing agency in authorial or translatorial writing. In this twofold movement, the translating subject eventually crops up as an object of research within GTS, hence, we argue, becomes inextricable from it.

Using works by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Van Hulle has identified five contact zones between translation studies and genetic criticism, with which the contributors to this volume engage: ‘genesis as part of translation; translation of the genesis; genesis of the translation; translation as part of the genesis; and finally, the genesis of the untranslatable’ (2015: 40). For Van Hulle, the purpose of this productive interaction, which he explores in terms of binary combinations, is to ‘enhance a form of textual awareness’ (2015: 40) that is pragmatically beneficial for practitioners in translation and genetic criticism alike. On the one hand, it can help translators find solutions for their translation task by going back to the genesis (genesis as part of translation) or, conversely, it is the translation that can lead geneticists to identify and possibly better understand questions pertaining to the complex genesis of the source text (translation of the genesis). On the other, unfolding the complex genesis of the translation and chronologically arranging the order of the extant versions can compel the examination of the genetic dossier of the source text (genesis of the translation), just as self-translators can rewrite the genesis on the basis of their own translations (translation as part of the genesis).

Van Hulle’s last example, which is illustrated in connection with Beckett’s self-proclaimed untranslatability of Worstward Ho (1983), brings us back to our earlier discussion of de Biasi’s claim that the post-textual phase does not concern genetic criticism. For according to Van Hulle, GTS rests upon reconsidering how translation complicates the seemingly stable difference between endogenesis and epigenesis in genetic criticism by putting it in terms of a difference ‘not in kind but in degree’:

Although the ‘endogenesis’ is supposed to take place ‘inside’ the private sphere of the author’s workspace, it is never entirely immune to outside elements, such as ‘exogenetic’ sources or suggestions by partners, friends, editors, correctors and publishers. (2015: 50)

The focus on degree rather than on kind to explain the difference between these two levels of analysis shows that ‘the nexus between translation and genesis turns out to be a bidirectional interaction’ (Van Hulle 2015: 51) rather than ‘a unidirectional link between two fields of research (genetic criticism applied to translation)’ (2015: 40).

These fields, genetic criticism and translation studies, emerged as disciplines in their own right in the 1970s. In spite of having their roots in a text-based scholarship, they do not often dialogue with each other. Perhaps this liminal dialogue lies in the fact that, unlike translation studies scholars (and translators themselves) who move across linguistic and cultural boundaries, geneticists have tended until recently to operate within one language and culture system.

Indeed, to state the obvious, genetic criticism and translation studies deal with questions of auctoritas, authority and authorship, albeit the difference in status that each has traditionally ascribed to the figures of author and translator, respectively, and consequently to the writing production of each of them. Perhaps less evidently, the act itself of transcribing a text, an early stage of genetic criticism, can be construed as a mode of translation (Robinson 2013: 121). Although Peter Robinson does recognize interpretation as integral to both transcription and translation, other views posit the translation metaphor as anchored in an age-old conception of translation as just imitation, copy or reproduction of the original auctoritas, with no room for creativity, a concern raised in Pimenta’s chapter in this volume.

The history of literary translation is no way short of examples supporting the antithetical view between author and translator. Arguments privileging untranslatability often evoke an author’s or a work’s unmatched aura of originality and creativity. Literalness, for instance, is perhaps the oldest law of translation, having been prevalent during the Renaissance (Hermans 1997) or the Romantic period in respect for the authorial genius. When the first Bible translations into vernacular languages emerged, they were seen with discomfort and suspicion by the religious authorities, for profaning the sacred word. In the same vein, when Erasmus published the first edition of the Greek New Testament, which was accompanied by a Latin translation, the variants it incorporated in relation to the Vulgate ‘caused much furor’ (Hendel 2015: 11). The edition questioned the authority of the biblical text, allowing anyone – and not just the Church – to interpret the Scriptures. Theologians were, however, quick to contest that ‘philological knowledge was unnecessary, since God has preserved the original texts and translations intact’ (Hendel 2015: 13). Yet, no original writing of the New Testament has survived the two-thousand-year span of time until Erasmus’s edition, so determining its archetypal text was a way of making it known, thereby justifying Erasmus’s edition.⁴

Textual scholarship, whose traditional goal has been to restore the absent authorial text, was not indifferent to the Romantic prizing of originality. The Romantic overvalue of authorship drove scholars to the concern over preserving authorial documentation as an object of interest, either under the material form of personal collections and libraries or under the textual form of critical editions. By contrast, when in the 1960s and 1970s structuralist theories claimed the study of the text proper, disparaging the author or authorial intention, genetic criticism rose as a method that places the focus on the writer instead of the author, the writing (process) instead of the text (product) (de Biasi 2011: 11). In this vein, the work developed by Louis Hay and his team of German and French scholars on the Heine’s manuscripts acquired by the French National Library in 1966 was pioneer in adopting a genetic approach to texts (Deppman, Ferrer and Groden 2004: 7).

Studying manuscripts and archival material has supported a textual analysis that leaves aside context or authorial considerations. Since the genetic critical approach to manuscripts does not intend to discover their original meaning – that is, the authorial intention – but instead to underscore the creative writing process and its historicity, it challenges the idea of authorial genius and of writing as the result of a divine-like inspiration. Epiphanic myths as that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is genetic translation studies good for?
• Part 1: Genetic approaches to translation and collaboration
• Part 2: Translators’ stories and testimonies
• Part 3: Translators at work
• Index
• Imprint