The first text included in Theories of Translation, "On the Art of Translation," is a speech given on July 24, 1965 in Heidelberg by Hugo Friedrich, a professor of Romance Languages at the University of Freiburg from 1937 to 1970. Friedrich is probably most famous for his in-depth study of poetry, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, in which he discusses the interpretation of modern poetry.
"On the Art of Translation," a seemingly short speech, was translated for inclusion in Theories of Translation by Schulte and Biguenet, and is unfortunately cut off toward the end, just before Friedrich embarks on an analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke's translation of a Sonnet IV by French poetess Louise Labé. Eager to read Friedrich's analysis and to avoid ending the chapter with: "Can we afford to ignore these theories? . . ." I scoured the internet for "Zur Frage der Übersetzungskunst," hoping, at the very least, to find the speech in German so that I could someday slog through it. I came up completely empty-handed. As a consolation prize, I stumbled across this gem of a site offering translations of Labé's Sonnet XVIII in many languages, including Vietnamese!
The included portion of Friedrich's speech, like the Introduction, offers a brief chronological overview of translation theory, covering the Roman "conqueror" mentality, the enrichesse of the Renaissance, and culminating with Diderot/D'Alembert and Schleiermacher/Humboldt in the 18th and late-18th/early-19th centuries, respectively. Beginning with the Roman appropriation of Greek texts – let's not call it translation – Friedrich makes note of Cicero's now-shameful extrapolation of Greek "ideas" and "forms" which he tuned to Latin "conventions of usage" and Saint Jerome's imitation of the same theories for his translation of the Greek Septuagint. In his treatise De optimo genere interpretandi Saint Jerome writes, "The translator considers thought content a prisoner which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror." A later Roman translation concept bridges the gap between Roman and Renaissance translation practice. In addition to conquering the source text, the source text serves as a type of muse, inspiring the creation of a better "original text." In short, the works were in competition. It's important to note as well that, in Roman translations, no real effort was made to adhere to the stylistic properties of the source text. Part of creating a better text – if not "better" simply because it was now in Latin – was removing that which may have been awkward, different, or outside of the Latin "conventions of usage" and deposing the original author.
European Renaissance translators, instead of deriving inspiration solely from the "ideas" and "forms" of the source text, used the stylistic elements of the source text as a springboard for bringing new artistic and stylistic elements to their target language. The approach strove to "enrich" the target language. As an example Friedrich discusses Malherbe's translation of Seneca's Lucilius letters. Rather than attempting to emulate Seneca's short, dry, incongruous sentences, Malherbe chose this opportunity to create a wholly new French style. He added connective material, additional narrative, and explanations. From this "translation," classical French writing is said to have emerged.
Parallel to an emerging linguistic and historical tolerance that came about in the second half of the 18th century, new theories on translation practice developed which – bittersweetly – sought to recognize and do justice to the uniqueness of different languages. This brought philosophers like Diderot and D'Alembert face-to-face with the "untranslatability" of texts and resulted in a general resignation to translation's impossibilities. However, from this brief resignation came the recognition of certain linguistic affinities between language and its rhetoric, such as the "total art of language," elocutio, and the "heights and depths of language," genera. Translators within this new style, admirers rather than conquerors of the foreign, moved toward the source text, occasionally further altering the translation simply "for the sake of its foreignness." Humboldt and Schleiermacher, the German translator counterparts to Diderot and D'Alembert, were the first to truly embrace this new approach to translation. Of translators, Schleiermacher says that they ought "not to leave the reader in peace and to move the writer toward him, but to leave the writer in peace (i.e., untouched) and move the reader toward the writer." He further distinguishes between "language as reality," Gegebenheit, and "language as act," Tat, which, to me, attempts to clarify the difference between language as an existent tool and language as a medium for artistic expression. Within Tat, language becomes a vessel of motive and emerges in the author's style. Within Gegebenheit, language serves a purely descriptive function and corresponds to a generic word-for-word rendering and passing on of information. As a result, it is a translator's duty to pay attention not only to the Gegebenheit but more importantly to the Tat of the author's language.
On more contemporary practices (Friedrich died in 1978), Friedrich draws our attention to the common accidental elevation of the translation. A common problem, he states, among writer-translators, is to ignore the true style and register of the source text, elevating the text in the target language. This is a phenomenon against which Humboldt warned: "Ambiguities of the original that are part of the essential character of a work have to be maintained... One can't afford to change something that is elevated, exaggerated and unusual in the original to something light and easily accessible in the translation."
Showing posts with label Biguenet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biguenet. Show all posts
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Theories of Translation
The introduction by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet to their essay collection Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (1992) ably prefaces the compilation, covering a variety of ideas in the history of translation theory and introducing prevailing historical thinkers, who are limited not only to included essayists but also to essential translators and theorists like Matthew Arnold, famous for his work on Homer. Overall, the editors strive to create a cohesive and well-rounded presentation of their included essayists and the larger streams of translation thought.
What initially caught my eye amongst the various translation concepts was the idea that multiple translations are in fact welcome and possibly necessary to the understanding of any particular translated text. Schulte and Biguenet present Wilhelm von Humboldt's admission that, "[R]eaders of a national language who cannot read the classics in the original will get to know them better through multiple translations rather than just one translation," by way of Arthur Schopenhauer's theories on translation equivalencies, namely that words do not always possess exact equivalents in other languages, due in part to different connotations and different patterns of usage. Schopenhauer argues that because of this absence of true equivalents, translation of poetry is impossible: "Poems cannot be translated, they can only be rewritten." This is later taken up again by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, when he discusses the differences between translating prose and poetry. In prose, words are "univocal," meaning that they carry a specific meaning based on context, but in poetry, more often words intentionally retain multiple meanings. Schulte and Biguenet paraphrase, "Words... create connotations that reflect multiple ways of looking at and interpreting the world," which seems to suggest that in addition to words retaining multiple meanings, that authors also create additional meanings for words based on their contextualization of them. It is therefore no wonder that multiple translations are necessary for adequate understanding of a foreign text.
Pulling from Hugo Friedrich's 1965 speech, later included in the anthology, Schulte and Biguenet draw attention to the Roman practice of translating Greek texts. Cicero claimed to translate ideas and forms while in reality doing little justice to the source work. The goal was never to recreate the source work in a new language – Latin – but to use the material of the source work to create a wholly new text in which the interesting bits had been expropriated from the Greek. Schulte and Biguenet point out that Saint Jerome, famous translator of the Greek bible, held a similar position to that of Cicero and other Roman translators. In fact, "Saint Jerome saw himself in competition with the original text, and the goal was to supersede the foreign text." While Saint Jerome may be at one end of the spectrum, Walter Benjamin falls in the center, and Vladimir Nabokov at the opposite end. In the case of Benjamin, who believed that translations enriched the target language, the necessary twist of using words in alien ways, filling them with new meanings so they can adequately convey the source text, resulted in a richer target language. Nabokov, on the other hand, held that the only valid way to translate was word for word.
Unable to include Matthew Arnold in the anthology due to the length of his essay, Schulte and Biguenet attempt to include his major points in the introduction, especially those regarding scholarship, audience, and faithfulness in translation. According to Arnold, the translator's target audience should consist solely of scholars in the particular language and area of study because it was only they who could correctly judge the accuracy of the translation. Not only should the translation take into account the source language, but also the historical context of the text and the author. Those people who were best able to relate to and understand the true nature of the source text were the scholars of that period. "No one can tell him [the translator] how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. Those are scholars, who possess, at the same time with knowledge of the Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling... Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry." He cautions against the translator trusting his own judgement, that of readers of his target language, or even his own scholarship.
Also mentioned in the introduction are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Roman Jakobson, who each separated translation into three different types.
Goethe defines them thus:
1. Simple prosaic: not defined (I imagine this is some generic regurgitation of the source text in the target language)
2. Parodistic: the translator attempts only to appropriate the foreign content
3. Identical: the translator attempts to make the translation identical to the original
Jakobson:
1. Intralingual translation or rewording
2. Interlingual translation or translation proper
3. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation – such as translating a poem into a film score
While Goethe's list is clearly hierarchical, moving from generic, possibly word-for-word translation to identical translation as the highest and most desired form of translation, in only one of Jakobson's categories does anything resembling the standard definition of translation come up, for "intralingual" translation seems to suggest merely the process of shifting words around in a single language and intersemiotic translation, while an interesting addition, is not a typical area of focus for translation studies, especially in this particular anthology.
Towards the end of the introduction, we encounter the philosophers, or those people who, in my opinion, so deeply question what it is to translate that we are left wondering if there really is such thing as a translatable source text and if there's any chance we're actually able to discern what the author was trying to convey. Beginning with Octavio Paz, Schulte and Biguenet include the following from Paz's essay "Translation: Literature and Letters": "When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows." Thus, the translation begins in the mind. Language is merely the translation of thought, which is comprised of visual cues, emotions, and other sensory experiences. To Hans Erich Nossack, "writing itself is already translating." And if writing is translation, German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer reminds us that, "Reading is already translation, and translation is translation for the second time" or fourth time if you go so far back as to include Paz's idea that language itself is translation.
Included in the introduction are more translators, theorists, and philosophers than I can begin to summarily give credit to, but I will include one last quote from Rudolf Pannwitz's Die Krise der europäischen Kultur.
What initially caught my eye amongst the various translation concepts was the idea that multiple translations are in fact welcome and possibly necessary to the understanding of any particular translated text. Schulte and Biguenet present Wilhelm von Humboldt's admission that, "[R]eaders of a national language who cannot read the classics in the original will get to know them better through multiple translations rather than just one translation," by way of Arthur Schopenhauer's theories on translation equivalencies, namely that words do not always possess exact equivalents in other languages, due in part to different connotations and different patterns of usage. Schopenhauer argues that because of this absence of true equivalents, translation of poetry is impossible: "Poems cannot be translated, they can only be rewritten." This is later taken up again by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, when he discusses the differences between translating prose and poetry. In prose, words are "univocal," meaning that they carry a specific meaning based on context, but in poetry, more often words intentionally retain multiple meanings. Schulte and Biguenet paraphrase, "Words... create connotations that reflect multiple ways of looking at and interpreting the world," which seems to suggest that in addition to words retaining multiple meanings, that authors also create additional meanings for words based on their contextualization of them. It is therefore no wonder that multiple translations are necessary for adequate understanding of a foreign text.
Pulling from Hugo Friedrich's 1965 speech, later included in the anthology, Schulte and Biguenet draw attention to the Roman practice of translating Greek texts. Cicero claimed to translate ideas and forms while in reality doing little justice to the source work. The goal was never to recreate the source work in a new language – Latin – but to use the material of the source work to create a wholly new text in which the interesting bits had been expropriated from the Greek. Schulte and Biguenet point out that Saint Jerome, famous translator of the Greek bible, held a similar position to that of Cicero and other Roman translators. In fact, "Saint Jerome saw himself in competition with the original text, and the goal was to supersede the foreign text." While Saint Jerome may be at one end of the spectrum, Walter Benjamin falls in the center, and Vladimir Nabokov at the opposite end. In the case of Benjamin, who believed that translations enriched the target language, the necessary twist of using words in alien ways, filling them with new meanings so they can adequately convey the source text, resulted in a richer target language. Nabokov, on the other hand, held that the only valid way to translate was word for word.
Unable to include Matthew Arnold in the anthology due to the length of his essay, Schulte and Biguenet attempt to include his major points in the introduction, especially those regarding scholarship, audience, and faithfulness in translation. According to Arnold, the translator's target audience should consist solely of scholars in the particular language and area of study because it was only they who could correctly judge the accuracy of the translation. Not only should the translation take into account the source language, but also the historical context of the text and the author. Those people who were best able to relate to and understand the true nature of the source text were the scholars of that period. "No one can tell him [the translator] how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. Those are scholars, who possess, at the same time with knowledge of the Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling... Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry." He cautions against the translator trusting his own judgement, that of readers of his target language, or even his own scholarship.
Also mentioned in the introduction are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Roman Jakobson, who each separated translation into three different types.
Goethe defines them thus:
1. Simple prosaic: not defined (I imagine this is some generic regurgitation of the source text in the target language)
2. Parodistic: the translator attempts only to appropriate the foreign content
3. Identical: the translator attempts to make the translation identical to the original
Jakobson:
1. Intralingual translation or rewording
2. Interlingual translation or translation proper
3. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation – such as translating a poem into a film score
While Goethe's list is clearly hierarchical, moving from generic, possibly word-for-word translation to identical translation as the highest and most desired form of translation, in only one of Jakobson's categories does anything resembling the standard definition of translation come up, for "intralingual" translation seems to suggest merely the process of shifting words around in a single language and intersemiotic translation, while an interesting addition, is not a typical area of focus for translation studies, especially in this particular anthology.
Towards the end of the introduction, we encounter the philosophers, or those people who, in my opinion, so deeply question what it is to translate that we are left wondering if there really is such thing as a translatable source text and if there's any chance we're actually able to discern what the author was trying to convey. Beginning with Octavio Paz, Schulte and Biguenet include the following from Paz's essay "Translation: Literature and Letters": "When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into the simple words he already knows." Thus, the translation begins in the mind. Language is merely the translation of thought, which is comprised of visual cues, emotions, and other sensory experiences. To Hans Erich Nossack, "writing itself is already translating." And if writing is translation, German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer reminds us that, "Reading is already translation, and translation is translation for the second time" or fourth time if you go so far back as to include Paz's idea that language itself is translation.
Included in the introduction are more translators, theorists, and philosophers than I can begin to summarily give credit to, but I will include one last quote from Rudolf Pannwitz's Die Krise der europäischen Kultur.
Our translations, even the best, proceed from a false premise. They want to germanize Hindi, Greek, English, instead of hindi-izing, grecizing, anglicizing German. They have a much greater respect for the little ways of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign work. The fundamental error of the translator is that he maintains the accidental state of his own language, instead of letting it suffer the shock of the foreign language. He must, particularly if he translates a language very remote from his own, penetrate to the ultimate elements of language itself, where word, image, tone become one; he must widen and deepen his language through the foreign one.
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