The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies

Roberto Valdeón, África Vidal, Roberto A. Valdeón, África Vidal

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315520117
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filología
• Categoría: Idiomas

Written by leading experts in the area, The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies brings together original contributions representing a culmination of the extensive research to-date within the field of Spanish Translation Studies.

The Handbook covers a variety of translation related issues, both theoretical and practical, providing an overview of the field and establishing directions for future research. It starts by looking at the history of translation in Spain, the Americas during the colonial period and Latin America, and then moves on to discuss well-established areas of research such as literary translation and audiovisual translation, at which Spanish researchers have excelled. It also provides state-of-the-art information on new topics such as the interface between translation and humour on the one hand, and the translation of comics on the other.

This Handbook is an indispensable resource for postgraduate students and researchers of translation studies.

1
Spanish translation history

Luis Pegenaute

Spanish translation history and historiography

In a much-cited phrase, Antoine Berman (1984, 12) stated that the constitution of a history of translation is the first task of a modern theory of translation. Verdicts of a similar nature have been presented by Bassnett (1980, 38), D’Hulst (1991, 61; 1995, 14), Lambert (1993, 22), and Delisle (1997–1998, 22). If we accept Berman’s words, we should acknowledge that researchers, both inside and outside Spain, seem to have applied themselves diligently to laying the foundations of a modern theory of Spanish translation, as works of a historical nature – be they the study of a past translation, a past translator or a past translation theorist – constitute a bibliographical corpus whose dimensions are certainly of note. A query on keywords “History” and “Spain” provides 2750 hits in BITRA (a Spanish free and online bibliography on translation and interpreting which includes more than 75,000 references, far exceeding those of other bibliographies such as, for example, John Benjamins’ Translation Studies Bibliography). Although those 2750 hits constitute quite an impressive amount of references, the specialized bibliography compiled by Francisco Lafarga on the history of translation in Spain – continuously in progress and available at http://hte.upf.edu/ in Lafarga and Pegenaute’s website on this topic) – triples that figure, providing the amazing figure of 8000 references, which bears testimony to the tremendous activity undertaken in this particular field of research. It is legitimate to consider, therefore, that the study of translation throughout the history of Spain (or, if you prefer, the study of the history of Spanish translation, or the study of the Spanish history of translation) has experienced a boom worthy of attention, even if research is still too often scattered or fragmented, as a consequence of a certain lack of cooperation among research teams, and even if enough attention has still not been paid to certain issues (see the following).

Although an interest in studying the history of Spanish translation is highly appreciable, there still is, however, a shortage of historiographical contributions taking a systematic and integrated analytical approach to the difficulties and problems implicit in the specific study of Spanish translation history, with a clear definition of the field of study and sharp methodological precision. By translation historiography, Woodsworth understands “the discourse upon [translational] historical data, organized and analysed along certain principles” (2001, 101), which must clearly be differenced from translation history, which is the actual narration of the events of the past. A similar position is adopted by Apak (2003), Fernández (2016) or Lambert, who states that “we have to distinguish between the object of study and the discourse on the object of study, although such a discourse can also be itself part of the investigation” (1993, 4), as opposed to, for example, Pym (1998, 5) and Gürçaglar (2013, 132), who make no distinction between both concepts. D’Hulst (2010), for his part, introduces a tripartite classification between history, historiography, and metahistoriography, the latter category coinciding with Woodsworth’s and Lambert’s notion of historiography. According to D’Hulst, history is the “proper sequence of facts, events, ideas, discourses, etc.”, while metahistoriography is “the explicit reflection on the concepts and methods to write history and also on epistemological and methodological problems that are related to the use of these concepts and methods” (D’Hulst 2010, 397). Within this terminological scheme the concept of historiography acquires for D’Hulst a new meaning, namely, “the history of histories, i.e., the history of the practices of history-writing” (2010, 398). However, in this chapter, I shall understand history and historiography in Woodsworth and Lambert’s terms, and conceptualize metahistoriography as both (1) the history of histories and (2) the discussion upon the historiographical sources, as it involves a “discourse which is concerned or alludes to other discourses” (definition of ‘metadiscourse’ in the Oxford English Dictionary).

The historiography of Spanish translation history is still a field very much in need of academic development. Bibliographical references of interest come from different sources: general historiographical studies on translation, with occasional attention to Spain, such as those by Lepinette (1997), Pym (1998), López Alcalá (2001), Sabio (2006), Vega (2006), and Lafarga and Pegenaute (2015b); specific historiographical studies on Spanish translation (sometimes biased towards metahistoriography), such as Pym (2000b), Santoyo (2004, 2012, 2014), Lafarga (2005), Pegenaute (2010, 2012, 2017), Navarro-Domínguez (2012), Sabio and Ordóñez (2012), Ordóñez and Sabio’s edited volume (2015), Pérez Blázquez (2013) and Ordóñez (2016); and introductory studies to the history of Spanish translation, such as Lafarga and Pegenaute (2004, 1–18) and Ruiz Casanova (2018, 31–61). The majority of the aforementioned studies have revealed – albeit not always explicitly – how historical studies of translation display several shortcomings: firstly, an indeterminacy in the conceptualization of the object of study, such as the – not always obvious – concepts of translation and translator; secondly, certain problems of a methodological nature (most prominently, the segmentation of time and space), which are largely a consequence of not paying enough attention to Lambert’s admonition to avoid two extremes when studying the history of translation, namely: (1) simply borrowing historical and historiographical frameworks derived from other disciplines (as, for example, literary studies, history, linguistics, etc.); (2) considering that translation (whether viewed as process or product) constitutes something intrinsically unique which has nothing to do with the general characteristics of a culture or society (Lambert 1993, 4).

Translations

The scholar carrying out research in translation history depends, of course, on catalogues documenting bibliographical information on existing translations. There are different resources which are particularly useful, the most evident of which is the Index Translationum, UNESCO’s database of book translations, which contains indexes of authors, publishers, and translators. This database contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about 100 of the UNESCO Member States since 1979 and totals more than 1,800,000 entries in all disciplines. The references before 1979 can be found in the printed editions. Although the following are not specific resources for translation, it is also useful to check Dionisio Hidalgo’s Diccionario general de bibliografía española (1862–1881), Antonio Palau’s Manual del librero hispanoamericano (1948–1977), the Catálogo general de la Librería española e hispanoamericana, 1901–1930 (1932–1951), the Catálogo general de la Librería española, 1931–1950 (1957–1965), and – in the case of eighteenth century works – Aguilar Piñal’s Bibliografía de autores españoles del siglo XVIII (1981–1995). In electronic form it is available at the database Proyecto Boscán. Catálogo histórico crítico de las traducciones de la literatura italiana al castellano y al catalán desde 1300 a 1939, www.ub.edu/boscan, coordinated by María de las Nieves Muñiz and Cesáreo Calvo, which incorporates detailed information on the translations of not only Italian literary works but also of other pieces in the field of social sciences (see Muñiz 2007). The research group TRILCAT (Traducció, recepció i literatura catalana) has made available in its website http://trilcat.upf.edu a catalogue of translations of literary works into Catalan (nineteenth century–2000) and of Catalan literary works into Spanish (from the end of the nineteenth century). The research group BITRAGA (Biblioteca da tradución galega) presents in its website http://bibliotraducion.uvigo.es) a catalogue of the translations of literary works into Galician from 1980 (see Montero 2010 and Galanes 2012).

A book series is specialized in these kinds of catalogues: BT: bibliografías de traducción, directed by Francisco Lafarga, which has hitherto published eight volumes on topics such as the translations of Balzac and Hugo, English novelists translated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, etc. This series, restricted to translations published in book form, presents onomastic indexes of translators, prologuists, editors, etc. Other – also partial – catalogues worth mentioning include the ones by Portnoff (1931) on the translations of Russian novels until 1930; Montesinos (1955) on the translations of novels in the first half of the nineteenth century; Beardsley (1970), on the translations of Greek and Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Lafarga (1983, 1988) on the translations of French dramas between 1700 and 1835; Garulo (1988) on the translations from Arabian between 1800 and 1987; and Ballestero (2007) on the translations published between 1918 and 1936. Some websites have collected the translations themselves: the research group Traducción y Lenguajes Especializados grants access to translations of literary works and essays, some of which have been edited and annotated, together with specific studies on these translations (see Zaro 2007); the website BITRES (Biblioteca de traducciones españolas www.cervantesvirtual.com), directed by Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute, presents numerous translations – otherwise, of rather difficult access – and specific studies on them, fifty of which have been collected in Lafarga and Pegenaute (2011) and another thirty-one in Lafarga and Pegenaute (2015c).

In many instances the translation historian comes up against an ontological problem, as it is not always possible to clearly establish the dividing line between writing and rewriting, that is, between creation and the different forms of re-creation, such as imitation, adaptation, parody, and translation. We should be aware that different practices of rewriting are very much determined by changing ethical and aesthetic codes (that is, by norms, in Toury’s terms). The difficulties of ascertaining when a text is a translation increase when dealing with early texts, inscribed in a manuscript tradition. Santoyo (2014), for example, draws attention to the exigencies of constituting a corpus of medieval translations in the Iberian Peninsula, distinguishing those in book form from those presented in documents and glosses, and occasional translations inserted in original texts. In the Middle Ages, when the poetics of (re)writing was so unanimously different from ours, texts were translated from a variety of sources, in many instances from texts to which numerous glosses had been added, and which may not have survived (see Rubio Tovar 1997). Very often, the translator would add his own commentaries, correcting or amending the text. These interpolations and switches in meaning were in many instances perpetuated when the translations became the source texts for new translations (for example, when Latin authors were translated from French and Italian intermediary texts). In other instances, the agent manipulating the text was the amanuensis. Some of these manipulations might certainly be involuntary, due to the circumstances under which the task was being carried out, but others were very much premeditated; for example, when domesticating into Christian terms pagan texts from Classical sources.

The problem of drawing a clear borderline between translation and adaptation/imitation is not restricted to medieval times. Quite often the plot of the source text would be transposed from one locale to another, in a process of cultural transposition: for example, the translation/adaptation of Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra into Spanish by Diego de Salazar in 1536 (Tratado de re militari. Tratado de caballeria) displaced the dialogue from Italy to Spain and turned the speakers into two Spaniards, while converting the political language of civic humanism into that of theological rights, which allowed this piece of work not to be prohibited by the Inquisition (Botella 2000). One century later, still within the limits of the Spanish Renaissance, the version of Garzoni’s Piazza universale (1615) by Cristóbal Suárez Figueroa was described in its title page as ‘parte traduzida del toscano y parte compuesta’ (Burke 2007, 31). In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century numerous examples can also be produced. Tomás de Iriarte, in 1789, in his prologue to his translation of Robinson der Jungere by Joachim Heinrich Campe – which he did from the French – openly admitted that “lejos de ceñirme a una traducción rigurosa y literal, me he tomado la libertad en suprimir, aumentar o alterar en no pocos lugares” (in García Garrosa and Lafarga 2004, 240). Cándido María Trigueros, for his part, asserted in very clear terms his poetics of translation in Mis pasatiempos (1804), stating that “cuando traduzca lo haré libremente, y jamás al pie de la letra; alteraré, mudaré, quitaré o añadiré lo que me pareciere a propósito para mejorar el original, y reformaré hasta el plan y la conducta de la fábula cuando juzgue que así conviene” (in García Garrosa and Lafarga 2004, 360). These procedures were implemented, for example, in his translation of Galatée: roman pastoral, by Floran (itself an imitation of La Galatea, by Cervantes) in 1798: “con los materiales ajenos, agregando algunos propios que no se hallan en el original […], he procurado levantar un edificio nuevo que sea en algún modo original y mío propio, esto es, otra imitación que tenga algo nuevo”. His creative interventions gave him the right, he considered, to compete with the author in terms of recognition: “solo aspiro a competir con el original, ya sea por la regularidad de la disposición, ya por la propiedad y gracia de la expression” (in García Garrosa and Lafarga 2004, 338). Félix Enciso Castrillón (1808) drastically abridged the History of Bruce and Emily, or, The Amicable Quixote, reducing the long three-volume source work that he was working with (Chanin’s French intermediary translation) to two short volumes, in an attempt to facilitate for the reader a better understanding of the English culture that it depicted. He retained little but the names of the protagonists and wrote an ending very different from that of the original. He considered, however, this procedure absolutely legitimate, justifying it for moral and ethical reasons: “Miro esta obra como un manojo de rosas: yo la he quitado las espinas que podían dañar a las buenas costumbres de mi nación, y he dejado las flores que no pueden menos de divertir a todos” (in García Garrosa and Lafarga 2004, 375). Finally, by way of example, in order to illustrate the occasionally fragile frontier between translation and creation, we can cite the case of well-known Spanish author Mariano José de Larra, who presented as his own ‘original comedy’ a piece which he had adapted from the French, as was the case of his No más mostrador (first performed in 1831), an imitation/adaptation/translation of Les adieux au comptoir, by E. Scribe...