Using Translation to read Literature

38
Pre-publication version: do not quote.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

Transcript of Using Translation to read Literature

Pre-publication version: do not quote.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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