Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries

282 Pages·2014·1.421 MB·English

by  Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett, Philip Wilson (eds.)

Literary Translation
Also by Jean Boase-Beier
A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION STUDIES
THE PRACTICES OF LITERARY TRANSLATION: Constraints and Creativity (co-editor)
STYLISTIC APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION
Also by Antoinette Fawcett
TRANSLATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE (co-editor)
Literary Translation
Redrawing the Boundaries
Edited by
Jean Boase-Beier
University of East Anglia, UK
Antoinette Fawcett
University of East Anglia, UK
and
Philip Wilson
İnönü University, Turkey
Selection, introduction and editorial content © Jean Boase-Beier,
Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson 2014
Remaining chapters © Contributors 2014
Foreword © Clive Scott 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-31004-0
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First published 2014 by
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Foreword by Clive Scott ix
Acknowledgements xii
Notes on the Contributors xiii
Introduction 1
Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson
1 Why Literary Translation is a Good Model for Translation
Theory and Practice 11
Maria Tymoczko
2 Dialogic Spaces and Literary Resonances in the French
Translation of A. S. Byatt’s Autobiographical Story ‘Sugar’ 32
Eliana Maestri
3 Cloud Talk: Reading the Shapes in Poetry and What
Becomes of Them 50
George Szirtes
4 The Conservative Era: a Case Study of Historical Comparisons
of Translations of Children’s Literature from English to
Swedish 64
B. J. Epstein
5 Translation in Sixteenth-Century English Manuals for the
Teaching of Foreign Languages 79
Rocío G. Sumillera
6 Iconic Motivation in Translation: Where Non-Fiction Meets
Poetry? 99
Christine Calfoglou
7 A Narrative Theory Perspective on the Turkish Translation of
The Bastard of Istanbul 114
Hilal Erkazanci-Durmus
8 Fabre d’Olivet’s Le Troubadour and the Textuality of
Pseudotranslation 134
James Thomas
v
vi Contents
9 W hat Does Literary Translation Bring to an Understanding
of Postcolonial Cultural Perceptions? On the Polish
Translation of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard 149
Dorota Gołuch
10 Translating the Narrator 168
Susanne Klinger
11 On the Work of Philosopher-Translators 182
Duncan Large
12 Translation and Holocaust Testimonies: a Matter for
Holocaust Studies or Translation Studies? 204
Peter Davies
13 The Important Role of Translation in the 1789 Brazilian
Minas Conspiracy 219
John Milton and Irene Hirsch
14 Using Translation to Read Literature 241
Jean Boase-Beier
Index 253
List of Figures
4.1 Strategies for neologisms by year, focusing on the major
strategies, in percentages 69
4.2 Strategies for idioms by year, in percentages, focusing on
the two major strategies 70
4.3 Strategies for puns by year, in percentages, focusing on the
three major strategies 72
13.1 Martírio de Tiradentes (1892), Francisco Aurélio de
Figueiredo e Melo 238
13.2 Leitura da Sentença dos Inconfidentes (before 1911),
Leopoldino Faria 239
13.3 Tiradentes esquartejado (1893), Pedro Américo 240
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Foreword
By virtue of being temporally and/or spatially distanced from its source
text, literary translation cannot but translate new kinds of knowledge,
or new configurations of inherited knowledge, into that source text, so
that it is governed by different epistemological or cognitive dispensa-
tions. At the very least, translation reattaches a source text to a cultural
milieu and redefines the cultural givens, whether those givens concern
politics, ethnicity, gender or intertextual fabric. In this sense, literary
translation is like the administering of a regenerative injection. In this
sense, it is naturally a vehicle for the forces of proliferation and centrifu-
gality. If we use the more usual and inclusive term ‘recontextualization’
to describe this process, we risk misrepresenting it, in two principal
ways: we imply that the process is unproblematic and unified, when it
is multiple, conflicted, heterogeneous; and we make of the translator
a cultural servant rather than an idiosyncratic reader. To translate is
both to capture one’s perception of the text and to develop new modes
of perceiving it. The present volume is designed to demonstrate how
source texts might, by translation, be invested with alternative modes
of perception.
Translation studies has from time to time expressed apprehensions
about the dilution of the notion of translation, either through the infil-
tration of ‘ancillary’ forms (imitation, pastiche, adaptation, versioning,
intermedial/intersemiotic translation) or through the generalization
of the activity itself: any act of comprehension, any resolution of the
meaning of discourse by a metadiscourse, counts as translation; con-
sequently, the integrity of the discipline and the rigour of its method-
ologies have seemed to be put constantly at risk. This book lays those
ghosts; partly because it is itself driven by an expanding vision of liter-
ary translation, by a conviction that literary translation, and indeed
pseudotranslation, can ever only be dimly aware of where its borders lie,
or should be set; partly because it is happy to look through the other
end of the interdisciplinary telescope: do not just ask what other disci-
plines can do for literary translation, ask also what literary translation
can do for other disciplines; partly because it is looking for the ways in
which a metadiscourse of interpretation can find its way back to the
impulses of a creative writing.
ix