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
nn 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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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. Byatts 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 Childrens Literature from English to
Swedish 64
B. J. Epstein
5 Translation in Sixteenth-Century English Manuals for the
Teaching of Foreign Languages 79
Roco 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 dOlivets Le Troubadour and the Textuality of
Pseudotranslation 134
James Thomas

v
vi Contents

9 What Does Literary Translation Bring to an Understanding

of Postcolonial Cultural Perceptions? On the Polish
Translation of Amos Tutuolas The Palm-Wine Drinkard 149
Dorota Gouch
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 Martrio de Tiradentes (1892), Francisco Aurlio de
Figueiredo e Melo 238
13.2 Leitura da Sentena dos Inconfidentes (before 1911),
Leopoldino Faria 239
13.3 Tiradentes esquartejado (1893), Pedro Amrico 240

vii
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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 ones 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
x Foreword

But if literary translation redraws disciplinary boundaries and encour-

ages us to explore new and fruitful disciplinary permeabilities, we
should insist further on our initial proposition, that translation invites
us to discover new coordinates of knowledge. The act of translation
opens up a peculiarly elastic and malleable space, in which the trans-
lational mind can remodel the literary landscape, can take reading
consciousness on journeys that conventional knowledge disqualifies. It
thus throws up images of what a rewritten literary history or compara-
tive literature might look like: early oral poetry brought into the very
heart of written contemporary verse, Shakespeare in alexandrines, nar-
ratives reframed to different ideologies, or different gender or political
agendas, Dante seen through the lens of George Herbert or vice versa.
These are not moments of creative irresponsibility, but important capi-
talizations on what translation peculiarly offers: a warrant to reimagine
how we might live among literature.
We need, nevertheless, to strike two cautionary notes. Not surpris-
ingly, in the academic world, translators address themselves to trans-
lators, and explore what translation, both as activity and study, can
illuminate, and in particular what the source text can reveal about the
target text and vice versa. There is a danger that we thus involuntarily
elide from our discussions translations primary audience, the monoglot
reader, the one denied access to these comparative exercises, the one
to whom we have not perhaps yet learned how to speak. This book
implicitly suggests how that dialogue might be pursued, by engaging
with issues beyond linguistic difficulty, beyond the present form of
the Translators Note, by indicating to the reader what histories, what
ideological shifts, what disciplinary perspectives might be activated and
filtered by the translational process. Additionally, we must continue
tirelessly to ask what kind of presence in the literary world literary trans-
lation should be. If translation is indeed a regenerative injection, if its
function is not to preserve texts, as in aspic, but to reproject them into
possible futures, or futures of possibility, then it must have the cour-
age to refashion not just what is literary in the source text, but what is
literary tout court. We are, perhaps, too wedded to certain views of what
constitutes the literary, of what makes language maximally expressive:
stylistic deviation, different forms of repetition, tropes, a certain rep-
ertoire of linguistic structures. Translation is an opportunity to renew
what might be productive of literary effect, by cross-lingually extending
our auditory capacities, our ability to generate associative chains and
formal metamorphoses, our ability to cope with simultaneous percep-
tual structures, our awareness of cultural stratifications and leakages.
 Foreword xi

For too long traditional and experimental forms of writing have been
seen as separate currents, mistrustful of one another; literary translation
as here envisaged suggests a more intimate and constructive fusion of
the rearguard and the avant-garde, a fusion which has implications for
the very making of translational texts: translation calls for new ways of
imagining text and textual presentation, calls for the harnessing of new
kinds of paratext, or hypertext, new communicational channels; trans-
lation, after all, naturally has urgent business with global technologies.

Clive Scott
Professor Emeritus, University of East Anglia
Fellow of the British Academy
Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank Clive Scott, Professor Emeritus at the

University of East Anglia, for his kind support for this project, in par-
ticular for his insightful and thought-provoking Foreword. The editors
would also like to thank Gareth Jones for philosophical input to the
Introduction. We are grateful to Olivia Middleton, our commissioning
editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her enthusiasm for the book and her
careful editorial guidance.

The work presented in Chapter 9 by Dorota Gouch was supported by

a doctoral award funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Additionally, Dorota Gouch would like to thank Professor Theo
Hermans for his incisive reading of the text.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of the copyright for
the literary extracts reproduced in this text. The editors and publishers
would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright
material: A. C. Clarke for granting permissions for a Room wi twa
nebs, a translation of Baudelaires Le chambre double; Paul Batchelor
for granting permissions for The Damned, a poem after Dantes
Inferno (Canto V, 12138); the Museu Histrico Nacional, Rio de
Janeiro, for permission to reproduce an image of the painting Martrio
de Tiradentes, by Francisco Aurlio de Figueiredo e Melo; the Fundao
Museu Mariano Procpio for permission to reproduce an image of the
painting Tiradentes Supliciado, otherwise known as Tiradentes esquarte-
jado by Pedro Amrico; the Cmera Municipla de Ouro Preto for per-
mission to reproduce an image of the painting Leitura da Sentena dos
Inconfidentes by Leopoldino Faria; and to Bloodaxe Books for granting
permissions for quotation from the poem Remembering from Collected
Later Poems 19882000 by R. S. Thomas.

xii
Notes on the Contributors

Jean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation at the

University of East Anglia, where she teaches literary translation, trans-
lation theory, and stylistics, and runs the MA in Literary Translation.
An Executive Committee member of the British Comparative Literature
Association, and member of the Advisory Panel of the British Centre
for Literary Translation, she is a translator between German and
English, and the editor of the Visible Poets series. Besides many articles
on translation, literature and language, publications include Between
Nothing and Nothing (translated poems of Ernst Meister, 2003); Stylistic
Approaches to Translation (2006); and A Critical Introduction to Translation
Studies (2011). She currently holds a research fellowship on Translating
the Poetry of the Holocaust, funded by the AHRC.

Christine Calfoglou teaches on a postgraduate programme in the

School of Humanities of the Hellenic Open University, Greece. She
has taught undergraduate Translation and Linguistics courses at the
University of Athens and seminars for the Postgraduate Programme
in Translation and Translation Theory. Her research interests and pub-
lished work involve the translation of poetry, translation theory and
linguistics, as well as contrastive linguistics, translation in the language
class, and distance education methodology. She is the author of a book
on the teaching of reading and writing, and assistant editor of RPLTL,
an online scientific journal.

Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the University

of Edinburgh, UK. Along with Andrea Hammel, Jean Boase-Beier and
Marion Winters, he is co-director of the Holocaust and Translation
Research Network. His research interests include the cultural history
of the German-speaking countries and post-Holocaust literary and
autobiographical writing. He has published on the German and English
translations of the Auschwitz stories of the Polish writer Tadeusz
Borowski, and on the German translation of Elie Wiesels La Nuit.

B. J. Epstein is a Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the

University of East Anglia, UK, where her research is at the intersection
of translation studies, children's literature and queer studies. She is also
a writer, editor and Swedish-to-English translator, and she runs the

xiii
xiv Notes on the Contributors

translation blog Brave New Words (http://brave-new-words.blogspot.

com/). She has published Translating Expressive Language in Childrens
Literature and Are the Kids All Right? Representations of LGBTQ Characters
in Children's and Young Adult Literature, as well as edited and contributed
to Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries.

Hilal Erkazanci-Durmus is an Assistant Professor of EnglishTurkish

translation for undergraduate and graduate levels at Hacettepe
University, Turkey. Her research interests include critical sociolinguis-
tics, cognitive stylistics, cognitive pragmatics, and translation. Her
research has appeared in a number of edited collections, for example,
Language Planning in Turkey: a Source of Censorship on Translations
in T. Seruya and M. L. Moniz (eds) Translation and Censorship in Different
Times and Landscapes. Her book reviews have appeared in Target, The
Translator, Discourse and Society, and Discourse and Communication.

Antoinette Fawcett is a researcher based at the University of East

Anglia. She co-edited Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue (2010)
with Rebecca Hyde-Parker and Karla Guadarrama Garca and is pres-
ently engaged in translating poems by the Dutch poets Martinus Nijhoff
(18941953) and Gerrit Achterberg (190562). She has won prizes both
for her own poetry and for her tranlsations, including the KeatsShelley
2009 (second prize) and the John Dryden Translation Prize 2010 (third
prize). Between 1988 and 2001 she taught English language and litera-
ture at International Baccalaureate level in several different countries.

Dorota Gouch is Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University,

UK. Her MA dissertation, published in 2011, examined Indo-Caribbean
women's writing, while her PhD research focused on the Polish recep-
tion of translated postcolonial literature in the period 19702010.

Irene Hirsch taught Translation Studies at the Universidade Federal de

Ouro Preto, Brazil. She was the author of Verso Brasileira.

Susanne Klinger is Assistant Professor for English Language and

Literature at nn University, Turkey. Previously she taught in the
UK at the University of Surrey, Middlesex University and London
Metropolitan University. Her PhD research, completed at the University
of East Anglia in 2012 and funded by the AHRC, investigated linguistic
hybridity in Anglophone Nigerian writing, particularly its role in con-
veying the world view of characters and narrators, and related transla-
tion issues.
 Notes on the Contributors xv

Duncan Large is Professor of German at Swansea University, UK. He is

co-editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and his published
work on Nietzsche includes two monographs, two edited collections
and three translations. He has also published extensively on German
literature (especially Austrian Modernism and German Romanticism),
comparative literature and Anglo-German literary relations (especially
the reception of Laurence Sterne), philosophy and critical theory (Sarah
Kofman, Michel Serres), psychoanalysis (Freud), art (Carl Einstein) and
music (Wagner, Palestrina).

Eliana Maestri is Italian Language Coordinator at the University of

Warwick, UK, where she teaches language and translation at undergrad-
uate and postgraduate level. She has recently been a Visiting Lecturer
in Translation at the University of the West of England. She was the
recipient of a EUOSSIC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of
Sydney (201112), working on Italian-Australian identities and per-
ceptions of the EU, and of a Research Fellowship at the University of
Monash, Melbourne (2014). She was Lector in Italian at the universities
of Bath and of Oxford, also lecturing on Italian pulp fiction, and on the
works of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino. She has published a number of
chapters in books on the translations of the autobiographies of Jeanette
Winterson and A. S. Byatt.

John Milton is Associate Professor of English Literature and Translation

Studies at the Universidade de So Paulo, Brazil. His main areas of study
are the history and sociology of translation and adaptation studies.
Among his many publications is Agents of Translation, edited with Paul
Bandia.

Clive Scott is Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia,

UK, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Recent work in the field of
translation studies includes Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of
Reading, Translating the Perception of the Text: Literary Translation and
Phenomenology, Translating Rimbauds Illuminations and Translating
Baudelaire. He is also well known for his work in the field of cultural and
media studies, with books on photography and on the use of captions
and commentaries in advertising, film and photojournalism: The Spoken
Image and Street Photography: from Atget to Cartier-Bresson.

Roco G. Sumillera is a Lecturer at the English and German Department

of the University of Valencia, Spain. She holds a PhD in English Studies
from the University of Granada, as well as an MA in Translation Studies
xvi Notes on the Contributors

from the same university. She carried out part of her doctoral research as
a one-year Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (2010), and
has conducted postdoctoral research at the Residencia de Estudiantes,
Madrid. Her research interests revolve around translation in the Early
Modern period, Early Modern rhetoric and poetics, and ideas on poetic
invention and imagination in Early Modern times.

George Szirtes is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of

East Anglia, UK. He has published 14 books of poetry, and was win-
ner of the Faber Prize (1980), for The Slant Door, and the T. S. Eliot
Prize (2005) for Reel. His most recent books of poetry are New and
Collected Poems (2008), The Burning of the Books (2009) and Bad Machine
(2013). He has translated and edited many works of Hungarian poetry
and fiction, most recently by Sndor Mrai, Yudit Kiss and Lszl
Krasznahorkai, and has judged a number of translation prizes including
the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize
for Poetry Translation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

James Thomas is an independent scholar of nineteenth-century

Occitan literature and a qualified translator. After reading English at the
University of York (1992), he learnt Catalan and Spanish in Barcelona.
His research-based MPhil (Bristol 2005) focused on Antoine Fabre
d'Olivet and Victor Gelu in relation to sociolinguistics, heteroglossia
and regional identities. He is currently editing an anthology of Occitan
literature in translation and has forthcoming publications on Victor
Gelu and Fabre d'Olivet (the latter for an OUP volume on reception of
Dante). His other research interests include Bordeaux in the Restoration
period (181430), British folk music and the francophone reception of
British romantic writers.

Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Her research and publica-
tions are mainly in three fields: translation studies; Celtic medieval
literature; and Irish studies. Her critical studies The Irish Ulysses and
Translation in a Postcolonial Context both won prizes and commenda-
tions. She has edited several volumes including Translation and Power
(with Edwin Gentzler), Language and Tradition in Ireland (with Colin
Ireland), Translation as Resistance, and Translation, Resistance, Activism.
Her most recent full-length study is Enlarging Translation, Empowering
Translators. Trained as a medievalist, Professor Tymoczko holds three
degrees from Harvard University. She teaches a wide variety of subjects
including translation theory and practice, modern and contemporary
 Notes on the Contributors xvii

novel, postcolonial literature, fantasy literature, medieval literature, and

early Irish language and literature.

Philip Wilson taught modern foreign languages for many years in

comprehensive schools and recently completed a PhD at the University
of East Anglia, researching the relevance to literary translation of the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has worked as an Associate Tutor
in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA and is
now Assistant Professor of Western Languages and Literature at nn
University, Malatya. He translated The Luther Breviary (2007) with John
Gledhill, and is the translator of the historical trilogy Fortunes Wheel by
Rebecca Gabl and of the anthology The Earliest German Poetry (forth-
coming). Over one hundred poems have appeared in magazines, plus a
pamphlet of poetry.