Post on 28-Feb-2023
Pre-publication version: do not quote. Published version in Boase-Beier et al (2014) Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries (Palgrave Macmillan)
Using Translation to Read Literature
1. Stylistic Criticism: How Does Translation Help?
Literary translation, which I understand to
include the translation of texts that have been
or are likely to be deemed literary, and also the
translation of any text in a way appropriate to
literature (cf. Boase-Beier 2011: 43), as well as
the study of both, has a history of borrowing
from other disciplines. When Holmes set out an
agenda for translation studies in the early 1970s
(Holmes 1988), he made it clear that, just as it
would have applications to other areas, it would
also need to incorporate “information from
related fields and disciplines”.
1
When Gutt wrote about literary and non-
literary translation in Translation and Relevance
(2000) he argued that the field of Translation
Studies was not a distinct area because
translation could be explained as part of a
generalised theory of communication. However, the
fact that aspects of a particular discipline can
be explained borrowing theories from another
discipline is not a reason to suppose that the
first can be abandoned as a separate area of
study. Theories are always only partial
explanations. Thus there are bound to be aspects
of translation that can be explained by other
theories, such as a theory of communication, just
as there are bound to be aspects of other fields
and disciplines that need to borrow from
translation studies.
2
The Introduction to this volume describes some
of the arguments that have been made recently for
broadening the boundaries of translation, both in
terms of what it borrows from elsewhere, and also
in terms of what it can lend to other
disciplines. It is the latter aspect that
particularly concerns me in this chapter. I
intend to ask in what ways translation and the
study of translation can inform and enhance that
particular area of the study of literary texts
generally called stylistics or poetics. This
area, or discipline, has also been called
“linguistic criticism” (Fowler 1996), or
“literary linguistics” (cf. Toolan 1998: iix),
depending on its particular emphasis. Today the
discipline is firmly established, and it is with
its particular manifestation as cognitive poetics
– a theory of reading texts which takes
3
pragmatic, contextual, mental and emotional
aspects into account – that I shall be concerned
here. To some extent it could be argued that all
modern stylistics (like all modern linguistics
and all contemporary literary theory) is
cognitive, in the sense that there is no longer
an emphasis on the purely textual, if indeed
there ever was. More precisely, I take cognitive
poetics (and I shall refer to it thus in the rest
of this chapter) to be that type of stylistics or
poetics which focuses on the mental processes of
reading and their effects on the mind, relating
them to the stylistic detail of actual texts.
The potential value of translation for
cognitive poetics seems obvious. Much of the
debate about what translation is and does (cf.
Boase-Beier 2011: 3-28) concerns what is beyond
the text rather than merely in its linguistic
4
detail. Particularly with literary translation,
we want to know how texts can lead to different
interpretations, how they achieve their effects,
what different readerly contexts will mean for
possible readings. And the fact that it is the
linguistic detail of the text which gives rise to
such interpretations, effects or ways of reading
is thrown into sharp relief by the confrontation
of two different languages and the exploration of
how original and translated text work in these
different languages.
There are two main ways in which we can
consider what translation can tell us about style
and the understanding of style. In his book
Translating Style (2007), Parks compared the Italian
translations of several English modernist novels
with their originals. His assertion is that,
where the translation can be seen to deviate
5
significantly from the original, this deviation
often points to something of particular stylistic
significance in the original. This is an idea I
explored further in ‘Translating the Eye of the
Poem’ (2009), where I argue that the point in a
translated poem at which it diverges from the
original in particularly interesting ways can
indeed be shown by close stylistic analysis to be
a pivotal point in the original poem, and in fact
very specifically to correlate with
“convergences” (Riffaterre 1959) of stylistic
features in the poem.
There is a second way, however, in which the
comparative study of a translation and its source
can affect our critical stylistic reading of the
source text, and it is this that concerns me
here. If Parks was attempting in his comparisons
to gain insight into textual elements which are
6
typical of a particular author’s style (Parks
2007: 12), then stylistics, which focuses on the
reader, should be able, by borrowing such
comparative reading of translation and source
from translation studies, to give an enhanced
account of what reading the original involves. In
the study of literary texts “reading” can be
understood as that which we do intuitively, when
engaging with a text, including the various ways
in which the text affects us, what we feel, think
and understand. But the study of reading can also
involve an explanation of this engagement and its
effects. It is especially with this second aspect
that stylistics, and in particular cognitive
poetics, is concerned (cf. Stockwell 2002: 1-3).
For someone familiar with cognitive poetics, and
therefore reading and analysing a text on this
basis, these two types of reading will fall
7
together: if it is possible to explain how
readings work, the knowledge of such explanations
will feed into the reading itself.
While it has been argued (e.g. by Culpeper
2011: 97-98) that reader- theory had largely
become absorbed into theatre semiotics by the end
of the 1990s, I would maintain that in fact many
of its aspects have been taken over into
stylistics, and particularly into cognitive
poetics. What Iser (1974: 274) originally
distinguished as the artistic and aesthetic
aspects or poles of literature have become, in
cognitive poetics, the style of the text and the
mind-style it embodies, on the one hand, and, on
the other hand, its effects upon the reader,
including the reader’s structures of knowledge,
emotions, and physical reactions. While Culpeper
(2011) may be right that reader-theory is no
8
longer at the heart of literary criticism,
stylistics, on the contrary, has been marked in
recent years by an increasing focus on the
reader. Whereas early stylistics was concerned
with style as a set of choices made by a writer
in those areas of language assumed to be open to
such choice (see Leech and Short 2007: 9-12 for
discussion), later stylistics has become, with
the development of stylistic pragmatics and
cognitive poetics, more concerned with the ways
in which a reader is affected by the style of a
text, how he or she reconstructs what are taken
(during the process of reading, though not in an
absolute sense) to be the author’s choices.
Recent cognitive poetics has come to view the
figure of the author in the text, as a
counterpart to the real author, as someone
imagined by the reader, of context as something
9
added to and built up during reading, and of the
meaning of a text as being a variable and open-
ended construct in the reader’s mind (cf. Oatley
2003: 161).
Cognitive poetics has thus kept the close textual
engagement of earlier versions of stylistics, but
it has taken on board much of the view of recent
literary criticism about the heteronomous text,
the changing interpretation, the varying context.
As I noted earlier, though it cannot tell us how
to read, the analysis of how we do read affects
the practice of reading. If, then, our analysis
can be enhanced by consideration of the
translation as well as the original, what will
this tell us about what readers do? How will such
enhanced analysis affect our reading of the
source text?
10
2. The Translation of R.S. Thomas: Two Examples.
R.S. Thomas (1913 – 2000) was a Welsh poet who
wrote in English. He has been variously described
as eccentric, dour, unfriendly, impish, and very
funny (see Rogers 2006). He was an Anglican
priest of the Church in Wales who particularly
disliked “people in the church hierarchy” (Morgan
2006: 9), and an English-language poet who
disliked the English. For Thomas, God could only
be present where one’s thoughts were able to
become free of earthly concerns, one’s mind “a
vacuum” (Perryman 2003: 38). His poetry has been
described as spare (Morgan 2006: 17), as narrow
(Minhinnick 1993), and as serious (Wintle 1997:
27). In fact it abounds in ambiguity and
wordplay, and repays persistent engagement. Many
of his poems deal with the relationship between
faith and life. Some, like ‘A Life’ (1993: 516),
11
are written in the third person, though appear to
be autobiographical; his autobiography is also
written in the third person (Thomas 1997). After
saying his life has been characterised by more
fear than courage, and that poetry saved him from
the “humiliations” of prose, the poem goes on:
… One of life’s
conscientious objectors, conceding
nothing to the propaganda of death
but a compulsion to volunteer.
The phrase ‘one of life’s conscientious
objectors’ appears upon first reading to be
somewhat ambiguous: the narrator could be either
(i) one of life’s objectors to war, or (ii) an
objector to life. A consideration of the German
translation, by Kevin Perryman (2003: 69), whose
12
thoughtful and poetic translations have been
responsible for making Thomas’s work known in
Germany, shows that something here is different:
… Einer jener Kriegsdienst- one of-these war-service-
verweigerer des Lebens, … refusers of life
Though “Kriegsdienstverweigerer” is the normal word,
in German, for that to which we normally refer
with “conscientious objector”, the German does
not seem capable of meaning that one is an
objector to life. The reason can be clearly seen
if one compares the two passages. In English,
interpretation (i) has “life” as the location and
assumes that the direct object of “to object”,
the verb from which “objector” is derived,
remains unexpressed. In fact, this direct object
almost always remains unexpressed in English: a
13
conscientious objector is generally, if not
always, understood to be an objector to war. In
interpretation (ii) “life” is the direct object
of “to object”; the person described is someone
who objects to life. In the German, “Kriegsdienst”
(“war service”) is the object of verweigern, to
refuse, and so the Kriegsdienstverweigerer can only be
someone refusing to take on war service.
Given R.S Thomas’ views on the importance of
withdrawal from everyday life, of silence, of
withdrawal from fixed ideas of God, and his
concern with the notion of via negativa (knowledge
of God gained by understanding what God is not),
and with the “great absence / that is like a
presence” (Perryman 2003: 38) the second
interpretation - someone who, as a matter of
conscience, objects to life - seems important.
The point I am making here is not that this
14
reading is impossible in the German poem (for one
could of course take Kriegsdienstverweigerer as a
metaphor for someone who refuses involvement in
life), nor that the translation should, could, or
might be different. It is rather that, on reading
the English alone, we might simply be unaware of
the ambiguity. Yet it is surely a fruitful one
given that, for Thomas, being a pacifist and
being one who withdraws from life were connected.
When confronting the English poem with the
German, we become aware of the difference: that
English does not actually express the object of
the verb “to object” in the phrase “conscientious
objector”. It is this that allows the ambiguity
in English, and it is the realisation that
English, unlike German, is intrinsically
ambiguous in its use of this expression, which
leads to a fuller exploration of the
15
possibilities when reading the original. That is,
one asks: “What is a conscientious objector?”
If in ‘A Life’, the poet (or the narrative
voice) looks back upon the life of the person
referred to only as “he”, many later poems are in
the first person, or, like ‘Remembering’ (2004:
282), directly address in the second person what
appears to be a younger version of the speaker in
the “now” of the poem. ‘Remembering’ exhorts the
addressee, in apparently straightforward terms,
to love his wife while young (i.e. “now”) “for
her ecstasies” because the time will come later
when married life is marked by love which
expresses itself in small services rendered, in
cooking or sewing, or “a bed made up for
passionless sleeping”. The final lines of the
poem describe how, in that projected future, she
16
will imagine her sorrow goes unobserved,
concluding as follows:
…… Your part then
will be to take her hand in your
hand, proving to her
that, if blind, it is not dumb.
These lines, for all their apparent simplicity,
contain one of Thomas’ typical uses of “it”, a
word which can easily be ambiguous of reference
in English, and is often thus used by Thomas. For
example, it is memorably used in this way in the
poem ‘Agnus Dei’ (Thomas 2004: 139) in which the
word “it” refers back to either “the lamb” or
“the idea”, a linguistic ambiguity which points
to a cognitive one that is especially important
to Thomas’ philosophy. I have argued elsewhere
17
(cf. Boase-Beier 2011: 140-141) that the point of
Thomas’ use of “it” in that poem is to call into
question the distinction between a lamb as an
object of sacrifice and a lamb as an idea of
sacrifice, and that such ambiguity, and the
dialectic it expresses, is very difficult to
capture in German where one noun is neuter and
one feminine and thus, also, the corresponding
“it”, which must agree.
In the poem ‘Remembering’, the ambiguity of
‘it’ seems, on first reading, less significant,
though its reference is obviously unclear.
Something is (or will be, at that later date)
possibly blind, but definitely not dumb. A
comparison with the German poem shows that here
there is no such ambiguity:
An dir wird es
18
up-to you will it
dann sein, ihre Hand in die deine then be her hand into the yourszu nehmen und ihr so zu beweisen, to take and her so to showdaβ deine Hand vielleicht blind, doch nicht that your hand maybe blind but
not
stumm ist. dumb is
Here it is only the hand which, while possibly
blind, will definitely not be dumb. This
difference is so striking that it suggests a re-
reading of the original poem. And here there
appear, on reflection, to be three possible
interpretations: (i) your part will be to take
her hand in your hand and prove that your hand is
not dumb; (ii) your part will be to take her hand
in your hand and prove that her hand is not dumb;
19
(iii) your part will be to take her hand in your
hand and prove that your part is not dumb.
It has been argued by many writers (e.g.
Eagleton 2007: 125) that the point of poetic
ambiguity is not to make alternative readings
possible but to make several readings
simultaneously possible; that ambiguity comes
about as a result of a complex world view being
expressed. On this basis, once one has read the
German together with the English, a narrowing of
meaning in the German becomes apparent, and this
leads the reader to consider exactly how it is
narrowed. The reduction to a reference to “your
hand” in German contrasts clearly with the
possibilities in English where, if indeed all
apply, your hand will not be dumb, and neither
will hers, and neither will “your part”. This
20
leads in turn to a further question: what is
“your part”?
If we look again at the final lines of
Thomas’ poem, bearing in mind that “it” has now
been seen to have several possible references,
and therefore several interpretations, the same
interpretative procedure can be applied to “your
part”. This, too, has at least three possible
interpretations: (i) it could be “your part in
the relationship”: love her now in this way, love
her later in that way; your part in this loving
relationship will then be to take your wife’s
hand, and so on. Or it could be (ii) a sexual
reference, which would certainly be a typical
Thomas double entendre, and is suggested by the
mention of the present “ecstasies” and the later
“passionless sleeping”: your (bodily) part will
need to translate itself into a hand which holds
21
hers. It could also be (iii) a reference to the
role of the poet: you may pretend to be blind to
her sorrow, which she herself thinks is
unobserved, but a poet’s part is at least not
dumb; the poet speaks in love poems such as this
one and those which the narrator knows are to
come.
Furthermore, once this third possibility for
“your part” is entertained, the original
uncertainty of the reference of “it” to either
your hand or her hand or your part becomes more
meaningful. Not only is the poet’s hand not dumb,
for it helps the poet speak in poems, but the
wife’s hand is not dumb either, for it performs
all the various tasks set out earlier in the
poem, such as the making up of beds for
passionless sleeping, and these acts of her hand
are as spoken expressions of love.
22
My argument here is that a reading of the
poem on its own may lead one into a superficial,
less ambiguous interpretation of “it”. If “it” is
read as “your hand” or possibly “her hand”, then
the possibility of “your part” being blind but
not dumb might not be entertained. Indeed, the
very simplicity of Thomas’ language and imagery
might well lead readers to suppose that his poems
have clear and obvious meanings. Several critics
have fallen into this trap with Thomas, most
notably, perhaps, the poet Robert Minhinnick
(1993), who complained that Thomas’s imagery was
predictable, failing to read Thomas as a poet of
thought-processes rather than of imagery. In this
poem, a comparison with the German translation
produces a jolt of realisation: the loss of
ambiguous reference caused by the need for
gender-agreement on “it”, together with the
23
strangeness of “it” in English, immediately after
“your hand”, means that the possibilities of
reference for “it” have not been exhausted. Only
a small mental step is then required to go
through the same procedure with “your part”, as
one of the possible referents, and then to
revisit the parallel references for “your hand”
and “her hand”.
But the process of interpretation does not
stop even here: if “it” can be your hand, her
hand, or your part, then perhaps these referents
all apply; perhaps they are fused. And if your
part can be your role in the marriage, your
sexual parts, or your role as a poet, then
perhaps these, too, can be fused. In cognitive
poetics terms, what happens here is a process of
conceptual blending. Hands become blended
(mentally fused) with sexual parts. Taking your
24
wife’s hand in yours becomes a sort of sexual
act. And not even, given the blend, a surrogate
one. But there is a further blend of sexual
activity with one’s role in the relationship, and
with the writing of poetry, because the now
sexually-charged hands can be seen to apply
themselves to the everyday acts of sewing or bed-
making just as to the acts of making poems.
Again, these would not be surrogate acts, but
blended acts. There is an important difference,
for blending, unlike simple metaphor, results not
in something standing in for something else, but
in a mental space containing elements of both
things (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 40-44).
That Thomas was deeply concerned with the way
personal and sexual relationships fused, or
indeed should not fuse, with both his writing of
poetry and with his relationship with God is
25
well-attested, both in the critical literature
(e.g. Brown 2006: 94-96) and in his own writing.
He was also fascinated by (and on occasion
perhaps mischievously provocative about; see
Rogers 2006: 302-304) the nature of metaphor as
substitution or as blend (though he would not
have called it this). Some of the rather odd
things he is reported to have said, such as his
irritation with religious thinkers who spoke as
though they “had a sexual relationship with God”
(Rogers 2006: 301) can be explained as his
personal ambivalence towards and wariness of such
fusion of feeling and thinking and his struggle
to avoid inappropriate cognitive blending.
These thoughts are not meant to suggest that
we need to know all about Thomas’ life in order
to understand his poetry, but in fact the
opposite: the point of cognitive poetics is that
26
the text itself tells the reader where to explore
and search further, where to interpret and engage
further. Reading the translation alongside the
original aids this process by showing that the
poem, though apparently linguistically simple, is
in fact linguistically complex, and conceptually
even more complex. As noted above, poetic
ambiguity makes several readings simultaneously
possible. Cognitive poetics suggests that they
are in fact blended.
The process, once begun, is impossible to
stop. If “it” is read as a blend, and “your part”
is read as a blend, then the relationship between
the narrator and “she” (who inevitably, in the
reader’s mind, become blended with the real poet
and his real wife) comes to blend with the real
poet’s other roles (or “parts”): those other
roles in his life which are blind but not dumb.
27
It is the blend of the poem’s narrator with the
real R.S. Thomas that leads one to speculate
further about his philosophy. Thus the reader
will speculate that blindness could relate to his
role as vicar: if he must be blind to the allures
of the material world he need not be “dumb to
mouth”, to quote Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘The Force
that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’,
which fuses life with nature and old age with
youth (Thomas 1971: 77). And this comparison
suggests a further blend in ‘Remembering’: of
memory itself, which is a blended form of
knowledge where the blindness of the past is
fused with the hindsight of the present, in which
the poet is not dumb, and can therefore speak of
past blindness.
Thus a whole series of states of being which
involve being blind but not dumb can be read into
28
the poem, once the initial ambiguity has been
seen. One of the problems the poem leads the
reader to speculate about is the extent to which
these states merely echo one another and the
extent to which they are blended. The poet blends
them but the priest would have liked to keep them
apart.
3. Reading Translations
It appears that reading the translation of a poem
together with its original can make the reader
more aware of what mental processes the poem
gives rise to in the reader’s mind. These mental
processes, such as ambiguity, metaphor and
blending, are then attributed to the poem itself:
the reader assumes they are not merely in his or
her own mind. We saw that in ‘A Life’ such
comparative reading showed the careful critical
29
reader why even a casual reader might question
“one of life’s conscientious objectors”, when it
became clear that the German provided for no such
question. This realisation led to the exploration
of two interpretations, pacifism and the
philosophy that God is found in absence. In
‘Remembering’, a similar thing happened, though
the process appeared here to be much more
complex: the comparison of translation with
original helped explain why even a casual reader
of the original feels the significance of “it”.
Because the German translation allows, in a
purely linguistic sense, no questioning of “it”,
the need to question “it” in the original becomes
clearer to the comparative reader. Once the
various possibilities for “it” have begun to be
explored, the reader is led further to explore
how ambiguity suggests blending, and it is this
30
blending that suggests the complex philosophy at
the heart of the poem, and a series of blends is
opened up, which the reader relates to the real
poet (or the “extrafictional voice”, that is, the
poet one constructs mentally; cf. Stockwell 2002:
42) and leads one to speculate about the poet-
priest blend. The comparison of translation with
original thus initiates a greater mental
engagement with the original. The move from
simple to more complex that occurs when one reads
the translation and then re-reads it in contrast
to the original is also, in this case, a mirror
for the way further reading of the original
happens: one moves from simpler to more
cognitively complex interpretations.
What can also be considered at this point,
then, is whether such a process, whereby
different possibilities thrown up by ambiguity
31
are themselves seen to be subject to a more
complex relationship of blending, is something
that can happen in the earlier poem, too. That
is, does the ambiguity in ‘A Life’ as to whether
the direct object of the verb “to object” is war
or life lead to a blend?
Revisiting ‘A Life’, one sees that indeed
pacifism and a withdrawal from life are not
merely different aspects of the philosophy
expressed here, but that they are fused, and
conceived of as a blend. A great deal of fear,
and a small amount of courage, notions with which
the poem opens, are shared characteristics of
both withdrawal and pacifism: though the ‘he’ in
the poem doubts God, he is too “pusillanimous”,
or fearful, to deny him. And there is a further
parallel: he is shown as “saving his face in
verse from the humiliations prose inflicted on
32
him”. So poetry, like conscientious objecting,
like the via negativa, is the refuge of the fearful
from inflicted pain. When conceptual domains
blend, they need shared characteristics to do so,
and this is clearly the case here: poetry,
pacifism and the via negativa can all be seen to be
characterised by fear of hurt. It is also a
common assumption of blending theory (see
Fauconnier and Turner 2004: 42-44) that the
blended mental space has characteristics not in
any of the original ones: and in fact the blend,
in this poem, of poetry, pacifism, and via negativa,
does result in what is expressed in the final
phrase of the poem: “a compulsion to volunteer”.
Not for the earthly army, in the case of the
blended Thomas-narrator figure, but for poetry,
pacifist demonstrations and preaching.
33
Thus not only does a comparison of
translation with original lead to deeper
understanding of the original but that process of
going deeper into the poem, once begun, is
potentially infinite, and no longer needs to rely
upon the comparison. It also no longer needs to
rely upon the more obviously complex ambiguities
in the poetry; it has become a way of reading
Thomas’ poetry.
And, interestingly, the process of reading a
translated poem with the original actually
parallels Thomas’ own philosophy: it is in the
translation’s absences (which are thus not losses
but gains for the reader) that the real work of
exploration begins.
34
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