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SPA Traducción literaria |
contents
Introduction | Dramatic texts | Poetic texts | Children's literature, comic and song | Research potential
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Literary translation bridges the delicate emotional connections between cultures and languages and furthers the understanding of human beings across national borders. In the act of literary translation the soul of another culture becomes transparent, and the translator recreates the refined sensibilities of foreign countries and their people through the linguistic, musical, rhythmic, and visual possibilities of the new language. |
| Rainer Schulte (cit. in Colenciuc 2015: 128) |
The history of universal literature goes hand in hand with that of literary translators, whose artistic skills contribute, very often anonymously, to the volume of fiction in a specific culture. These skills facilitate readers’ (or viewers’, in the case of drama) access to foreign authors without needing to know the original language. The value of translation lies mainly in its enriching (cultural and linguistic) power, and in its role as an agent for the discernment and interaction among the various civilisations (which ultimately explains why translation has always been subjected to surveillance in censorship systems).
Nevertheless, the long history of literary translation seems to be inconsistent with those postulates that question its existence stricto sensu, postulates that often use as an excuse the rigours imposed by the notion of “fidelity”. Here it is worth mentioning the outstanding essay “Miseria y esplendor de la traducción” (“The Misery and Splendour of Translation”) (Ortega y Gasset 1937), in which the Spanish philosopher describes literary translation as particularly utopian, given the difficulty of replicating the style, aesthetics and form of a given text in another language. Other scholars distance themselves from this view and adopt more optimistic interpretations, among them Octavio Paz (1971: 17), who describes it as difficult but not impossible, or at least “partially possible”, according to López García (1991: 9). Umberto Eco (2003) advocates that you can say “almost the same thing” in translation, or, why not, “read almost the same thing” (Clavería, Huertas, Julià et al. 2014).
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| Umberto Eco. |
This discussion has driven a conception of literary translation as a genuinely distinct form, though without extending the search for a precise definition of it. As seen above, this is due not only to its (im)possibility, but also to the need to specify what is regarded as “translation” (equivalence, transfer, interpretation, refraction, etc.) and what can be labelled as “literary” (Ramírez 2018: 9-10).
As Wright (2016: 5) states, “literariness has much to do with the style of a text, with its marked and distinct use of features such as voice, metaphor, ambiguity, repetition and defamiliarization, to give but a few examples”. While a technical translator is required to demonstrate strict lexical accuracy and precise terminology, literary translators must possess not only an in-depth knowledge of the cultures and systems involved (both source and target) but also a substantial literary background and sensibility. Additionally, they are expected to be aware of the potential of the target language and the richness of its resources and styles, to the point of almost becoming authentic writers themselves (Calvo 2016: 173). In fact, Gabriel García Márquez described Gregory Rabassa, his English translator, as the best Latin American writer in the English language, while Julio Cortázar became an author partly as a result of his copious translation work. This helps explain, more than in any other case, while the notion of two identical target versions barely exists, which may also relate to the translator’s personal interpretation of an extract or a given text (which can be deliberately vague or ambiguous, above all in the case of the classics), their degree of sensibility and their creative capacity. Nevertheless, a translation that departs significantly from its source is not typically regarded as “good”; on the contrary, there is a general preference for a fluid reading that creates the illusion for readers that they are reading the original.
There are features that literary texts must have (Landers 2001) and that cannot be omitted by the “translators-writers”. To start with, these practitioners are active creators of fiction: this could in principle be seen as advantageous, since it frees them from the severe consequences of committing a serious error, as might happen in a medical or legal context. But such fiction displays a precise aesthetics and language that call for conscientious attention not so much to what is said as to how it is said, and to the manner in which content is accommodated (punctuation, register, emphasis, etc.). Besides, literary texts display a wide range of tones (humour, irony, sarcasm) and modes (dialogue, description, narration) that can cover multiple fields (legal, crime, erotic, etc.), and which thus demand lengthy processes of documentation.
On the other hand, such text types are usually deeply rooted in the origin culture, so they commonly reveal multiple language varieties (geographical, but also social and temporal) and idiolects —important as tools for character depiction—, as well as culture-related items and intertextual allusions. Obviously, in this regard the possibility of resorting to the original writer, if alive or willing to collaborate, would be ideal for further clarification, suggestions or even “negotiations”. Although in practice such expectations are rarely met (Rosado 2015), such collaboration can lead to a close friendship, as happened between American novelist John Dos Passos and José Robles, one of his translators into Spanish.
Other features, though shared with other translation modalities, also play a crucial role in literature. One of them is humour, above all wordplay (Alice in Wonderland or authors such as David Lodge are good examples of the challenge to the translator), and names, in particular people’s names, some of which (those that are “transparent” or “descriptive”) have an eloquent semantic meaning that defines character quality and behaviour (Braga 2019). Anthroponyms such as Poppy, Bucket, Earnest and Lady Sneerwell represent a challenge when it comes to preserving their primary meaning and effect, which is why translators sometimes resort to prefaces and notes to explain some particular wordplay or to justify a given choice. Naturally, this possibility is not as frequent in stage-oriented theatre —since footnotes are not compatible with performance— or in verse, as the fluent and rhythmical reading of the composition would suffer (though exception must be made for critical editions, which usually incorporate lavish annotations). This makes paratexts (artefacts that surround a central text, as notes, titles, subtitles, lists of contents, pictures, covers, etc.; see below) particularly relevant to an understanding of translation practice.
All of the above suggests that the final text may lose vitality with the passage of time, so that the reader/viewer needs to be approached in a fresher, contemporary way. This requirement leads to retranslation, a practice which is visible, for instance, in the sometimes surprising number of new translations of Shakespeare’s plays or works by great nineteenth-century writers like Hardy, Thackeray and Wilde: according to data from the National Library of Spain, Mujercitas (Little Women) by Louisa May Alcott, registers 248 Spanish entries during the period 1933-2019, including translations, adaptations and re-editions. In the last two decades, the thinking behind retranslation have been analysed in numerous studies that prove the inconsistency of the so-called “retranslation hypothesis”, according to which retranslations should tend to show more accurate renderings than the primary translation (Van Poucke 2017). Even though the deficiencies in that first translation might act as a prompt to others, additional, explanatory factors must be borne in mind, such as the ageing of a target text that requires linguistic or cultural updating or adjustment to new translation norms. Yet this is not enough to justify the appearance of several retranslations in a short period (La expedición de Humphry Clinker, translated by Miguel Temprano, saw the light in 2011, just two years before Marta Mateo’s version of Tobias Smollett’s novel; Calderon’s Life is a Dream saw no less than sixteen English versions between 1990 and 2009). Further criteria must thus be accounted for, such as the profile of the translator, who might be pursuing a reputation in the academic field with the retranslation of a canonical text or embarking on this task as a personal challenge, and political, social or economic circumstances might also play a role. In Spain, the end of the Francoist dictatorship facilitated the retranslation of works that were now free from the censors’ hands: this occurred with Wilde’s Salomé, published in Spanish in 1946 with cuts and changes but regularly retranslated after 1975. At other times, retranslations have helped forge a “national literature”, as seen in the various versions of Shakespeare’s plays into Catalan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is more, a copyright-free literary work is perhaps likelier to be found in other languages.
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| Book cover of Life is a Dream, Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of the play La vida es sueño by Calderón de la Barca. |
This data might lead us to think that the professional practice of literary translation brings with it significant earnings. But paradoxically, those who decide to translate literature frequently do so because of some personal motivation that has little to do with the benefits (economic, at least). This is especially true with canonical authors, usually translated by writers or practitioners (often university professors) with an extensive background. Except in these cases, the translator’s name rarely appears in the final product, even less so in the paratextual apparatus that surrounds its promotion and sale (merchandising, social networks, web pages of publishers and bookshops, press reviews, etc.). Grossman (2014: 30) puts it clearly when she says that a good number of critics and editors consider that the inclusion of the translator’s name in a literary work is likely to be a severe impediment to its success. But from the 1970s on it has not been unusual, at least in the Spanish context, for translation contracts to incorporate a clause by virtue of which the editor must indicate the translator’s name.
Likewise, the influence of editorial policies should not be underestimated, as agents that decide which products should reach the readers of their own culture; publishers may be (for example in the Anglo-Saxon world) quite reluctant to publish foreign literature at all. As pointed out by Lefevere (1997: 29), patronage emerges here as a controlling factor that furthers or hinders literary writing or rewriting. Closely linked to this aspect is the scope of the above-mentioned paratexts (both peritexts —prologues, prefaces, acknowledgements, epilogues, illustrations, etc.— and epitexts —reviews, interviews, publicity notes or other elements surrounding the text but not appended to it—), their effect on the originals and the extent to which they are maintained in translation. Neither must we forget the ideological apparatus behind these actions, with its consequent “manipulation” of the paratextual component by accentuating or minimizing some effects, or omitting and reorganizing others. Despite the existing research in this respect, above all in the case of narrative and children’s books, further investigations into the concept of paratranslation and its “aesthetic, political, ideological, cultural and social implications” (Yuste 2012: 118) are crucial.
Last, literary translation takes in a range of genres and subgenres (narrative, biography, essay, sacred texts, popular tales, etc.), some of which require individual strategies. This occurs with poetry, theatre or children and young adult’s literature, not to mention the constraints inherent to musical texts when inserted into literary works, or the graphic novel.
Given their dual nature as both play scripts and literature, dramatic texts reveal several peculiar features in their translation as, more than in any other case, they can be altered by factors that go beyond the strictly linguistic spectrum (Zuber-Skerritt 1984). Aaltonen (2000: 4) clearly distinguishes between drama translation —meant either for stage or to be read— and theatre translation, aimed at performance. This duality entails the co-existence of a philological text on the one hand (but occasionally not designed to be performed) and, on the other, a more “theatrical”, acting-oriented version that typically demands further transformations if it is intended to “work” on stage. Hence the constant reference to aspects such as orality, immediacy, performability, etc. when considering the spectacular side of translating theatre. Either the translator or the directors (who quite often carry out both tasks) may be responsible for these changes. The significance of such modifications could explain terms such as “version”, “adaptation”, “play based on”, etc. (Braga 2011), which are perhaps used to excuse some of the alterations made to the final play and justify their possible “unfaithfulness” to the source.
Aside from the ethical and terminological questions regarding what theatre translation is, a play will rarely come to the stage without first undergoing a series of cuts, additions and amendments aimed to make it acceptable to the receiving culture. Indeed, very few translations equally satisfy both page and stage. Proof of this is that some translators even write two versions, literary and stage: see for instance American practitioner Dakin Matthews and his double English versions of plays by the Spanish seventeenth-century playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón.
The intricacies of the dramatic text bring into play other equally significant factors, both verbal and non-verbal. The translator of dramatic texts must watch for the rhythm and the pauses between the characters’ lines, as otherwise the length of the play could be affected. Given the significantly oral nature of the text, the actors must be given the possibility of a fluent reading, and the acoustic effect must be appropriate. Zatlin (2005: 73) mentions how Uncle Ben became Tío Fred (“Uncle Fred”) in a Spanish translation of Death of a Salesman, as a way of preventing possible confusion between the name and the imperative tense of the Spanish verb “venir”; in a similar vein, Lorraine Hansberry opted for “Bobo” (a diminutive of Bob) for one of her characters in A Raisin in the Sun, a controversial decision in Spanish given the negative connotations conveyed by the adjective “bobo”.
Similarly, gesture deserves specific attention, whether inserted in the text or indicated in the stage directions: it may provide the actors with useful extra detail, as for example a specific humoristic effect. Such a resource was common with translators in Restoration England, who resorted to Spanish comedias and incorporated richer stage directions about gesture, as opposed to the scarce or non-existing indications in the source play. Indeed, words themselves can also become gesture: in the seventeenth-century play Los empeños de seis horas, the beau, when caught meeting with his beloved Nise, exclaims “Es ilusión que me engaña”; the English translator makes this phrase a stage direction in his The Adventures of Five Hours (1663): “Antonio seeing her, starts, then stands as if amazed”.
The theatrical space can also be an influence: type of space, stage, scenery, clothes, light and sound effects, etc., can facilitate text deletion. Something similar occurs with economic constraints, such as for example the number of actors, which might lead to the omission of lines or even of characters. On top of this, the translator can “manipulate” the source and present it to the audiences under a different guise: political, colonial, feminist, queer, parody, etc., with the subsequent distancing from the author’s original intention. A particular translation stance, for instance a feminist one, can confer more strength to the women participating in the story; this is easily felt in contemporary English renditions of Spanish classics, as the Calderonian Rosaura rendered by José Rivera in Sueño, or Tanya Ronder’s Casilda in her version of Peribáñez, by Lope de Vega.
At other times it is the directors, or even the actors, who are responsible for these alterations. So as to minimise divergences with the source, Brodie (2018: 8) calls for close collaboration between the translator and those mounting the play. But even while respecting the decision of the former, the director’s view may alter the play’s original spirit by means of the so-called “performative contexts” (Thacker 2004: 143), such as setting or music. The use of flamenco in contemporary stagings of Spanish Golden Age dramas lends them an exotic air that might not be present in the plot. Excessive political correctness on the part of the director, on the other hand, can expose expert audiences to surprising decisions, such as the choice of a racially-mixed cast, o swapping the characters’ gender. Similarly, a particular actor’s interpretative choices may have consequences in the dialogue and become a platform for the actor’s skills, as for example in his/her ability to imitate a specific dialect; this was done by director Tamzin Townsend in her production of Las esposas españolas, which bestowed upon farmer Hidewell (originally a Somerset English speaker) a strong Galician accent that highlighted the rustic nature of the character.
This example leads to another aspect in theatre translation: the degree of acceptance of the recipient theatre culture and its flexibility towards foreignisation or domestication. Translator Josep Maria Flotats translocated Yasmina Reza’s Arte from Paris to Madrid, with the consequent modifications, for example substituting Centre Pompidou for Museo Reina Sofía, or transforming characters’ names; the English translator, though, opted for preserving the original location, transporting English audiences directly to France. Similarly, Víctor Batallé rendered Victoria Station, by Harold Pinter, into Catalan as Estació de França.
Lastly, dramatic poetry (comedy, tragedy or others), even though conceived for the stage, shares with the verse both word essence and polymetry.
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| A key work on literary translation (1971). |
The notion of poetry translation (a more appropriate expression than poetic translation since the product need not necessarily be “poetic”) has undergone significant transformations. The attention paid in past times to exclusively formal or content-focused aspects has been shifted to other considerations, such as the significance of the interpretations (Furniss & Bath 2007: 269-70) or “versions”, and the pre-eminence of the notion of creativity, which in this genre is of particular importance. To these considerations the intention of the original poet must be added, as well as the reaction provoked in the reader, which is to say “translate poetry for equivalent poetry, but authentic poetry” (Gallegos 1997: 25, my translation).
Translating poetry involves surmounting the obstacles imposed by the phonoaesthetic elements: verse length, euphony, rhyme, rhythm and lexical musicality. Other challenges include style, diction, image, connotation, lexical and syntactic vagueness, metonymy, metaphor (explicit and implicit) and other figures of language and thought, as well as the poet’s greater syntactic freedom. The translator may question the need to respect the original syntactic configuration if sense is to be maintained, but also other factors that may be “homotextual or intertextual (will or rule by a specific literary school) or by an express manifestation of the intentio auctoris” (Jiménez 2002, my translation). All of the above imply decision-taking: at times, the translators distance themselves from form, sacrificing rhyme and versification; at others, they discard nuances to favour formal elements. Lefevere (1975: 19 and following), based on a taxonomy of his own, distinguishes between interpretation, version and translation, offering the following options in the last case: phonemic (in which sound prevails), literal or philological, metrical (where formal, metrical reproduction predominates), into prose (the poetic qualities tend to get lost when sacrificing rhyme and metre), or finally rhymed or into blank verse. This last choice will depend on the translators’ understanding of the function of poetry, but he or she will inevitably opt for a particular option because of the constraints imposed by the source poem.
Given the “loss” resulting from this process, it is not strange the see verse translation thought of as “something really impossible” (Torre 1994: 159), or to find extreme views like that expressed by American poet Robert Frost, who supposedly defined poetry as “the thing that gets lost in translation” (in Grossman 2014: 64).
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| Example of a highly creative translation (Panero 2011). |
Octavio Paz claimed this is a task exclusively meant for poets, even though he admitted the difficulty of finding good translators among poets: “The good translator of poetry is a translator who is also a poet […]; or a poet who is also a good translator” (my translation). This translator is required to dismantle the text, put its mobile signs into circulation again and “send them back to language” (1971: 20). Such a dichotomy might be one of the reasons why poetry translators seem to enjoy a better reputation than translators of other genres, especially if their original publications have already received some recognition, like Leopoldo M. Panero, Claudio Rodríguez o Jordi Doce, among others; they are seen as taking on the task either because of personal fascination (as did Cernuda with several poems by Keats, José María Valverde with Walt Whitman, or above-mentioned Jordi Doce with Canadian Anne Carson), personal wish or at the invitation of a publishing house
When tackling the construction of a poem in a different language, some prefer the prose (even at the expense of seriously sacrificing style) on account of the dangers entailed by forced rhymes or inadequate connotations, as well as the inevitable semantic sacrifice (in fact, lexical revision processes tend to be lengthy and thorough). Others, meanwhile, might create a facing-page bilingual edition, so that the experienced reader can make up for any deficiencies by checking the source. A sui generis example is above-mentioned Leopoldo M. Panero and his proposal for “per-version”, which entails the unfaithfulness to the original as the perfect formula for escaping from literality and for rendering the longed-for element of creativity (Braga 2019: 203).
There is no doubt that the translation of poetry requires great conscientiousness and effort. It is probably the most creative (and perhaps the most prestigious) field within literary translation, and consequently that which generates the most radically differing versions. Many volumes of translated poetry contain a critical preface with information clarifying the strategy followed. The number of poetry translations, however, remains scarce by comparison with other genres such as narrative fiction or children’s literature.
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Children’s literature, comic and song
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| The Gruffalo, by Julia Donaldson. |
Children's literature
Traditionally, given its audience, literature for children and young adults has been considered a “minor genre”, and its translation has suffered an identical fate. It is striking that greater recognition has not been granted to this type of texts throughout history, especially since publishing statistics (at least in Spain) suggest that translation in this area is indeed profitable: the rate of published volumes stands at higher than 30% according to the 2018 edition of the El sector del libro en España (Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport). Significantly in this regard, the illustrated comic The Gruffalo has been rendered into more than 50 languages (among them Spanish, and surprisingly in four different versions), including Basque, Catalan, Galician and Asturian.
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| Elizabeth, Reading, a painting by August Macke. |
Translating this “marginal” genre is undoubtedly free of some question marks: on the one hand, its recipients are also adults —the so-called reading duality (Pascua 2016: 210)—, who act as intermediaries and might receive some signs by the original author; on the other, the narration is usually accompanied by illustrations that place constraints on the translator. Several inherent linguistic features should also be mentioned, including lexical and syntactic repetition, the importance of sound (above all in texts meant for the youngest children; Wright 2016: 123), the taste for wordplay, nonsense and neologisms, or specific registers and styles, not to mention didactic intention, intertextuality and cultural adaptability (Pascua 2016: 211). Gender issues, too, have recently grown in importance, alongside other issues that are similarly ideologically motivated: religious, political, sexual, didactic, etc. One clear example are the Spanish adaptations of Little Women during Franco’s time, which stressed the traditionally feminine values of the protagonists, or, more recently, the omission of the slaps to the back of Manolito’s neck in the Nordic and English editions of Manolito Gafotas. Needless to say, such features may be the object of editorial censorship (or self-censorship).
Comic
Without doubt, it is in the comic where multimodal restrictions become more apparent, whether visual and typographic or sound-based (as with webcomics). The translation strategies to be followed in this case (Valero 2000) depend on the kind of comic (whether it is for children or adults, educational or entertainment, etc., which will obviously determine lexical choices); the usual presence of elements closely linked to the source culture (thus requiring diverse adaptations: place names, historical and intertextual references) and descriptive people’s names; the reproduction of specific language (onomatopoeia, sounds); humour and wordplay; and the technical side: text direction (as in manga, affecting page layout), the dimensions of speech balloons or insert panels, or issued deriving from the linguistic content outside them (messages in notices, newspaper cutouts, etc.), as well as font size and type.
The significance of fan translation is also worth pointing up. Even though it has expanded fastest in audiovisual and videogame environments, it has made its mark in the literary field too, particularly comics based on Japanese material: manga comics translated into other languages by amateur readers who use alternative means to offer difficult-to-access material, hence (but not always) guaranteeing immediacy. Popularly known as scanlation, this practice involves the illicit publication of copyrighted pages that are scanned for the use of (generally) English readers; a practice that is becoming more common in other languages like Spanish.
Song
Also worth mentioning, given their particular syllabic, phonetic and rhythmical features, are insert songs of the kind that are present even in Shakespeare and Cervantes. In novels and reader-oriented theatre, the meaning of the lyrics is sometimes key, particularly if the songs are unknown to the recipient. At other times, as in performance-oriented drama (or musicals), translation is subjected to multiple semiotic and other circumstances, such as the need to combine, on the one hand, voice and instrument, and on the other, the kinesics and proxemics that go with performance, since the sung parts mingle with lines of dialogue. There are many ways of approaching this (Franzon 2008: 376-389): they include not translating, translating only the lyrics, adapting the text to the original music (or other music), or even having the musical component prevail over the text.
Several fields in literary translation are showing signs of gaining greater prominence. One of these is the literature of minorities: how translators approach the original and show their respect towards “the Other” (which may involve linguistic issues, such as dialectal varieties or multilingualism). Further attention should also be devoted to self-translation: what it is, the motivations of the long list of self-translators (mainly in multilingual countries such as Spain, Belgium or Canada), the extent to which such translators are free (which can blur the frontier between creation and translation) and the verbal and cultural peculiarities it entails. This phenomenon has a long tradition in the literary sphere (Recuenco 2011): writers such as Terenci Moix and Eduardo Mendoza (in Catalan and Spanish) or Álvaro Cunqueiro and Eduardo Blanco Amor (in Galician and Spanish) translated themselves, as did other prominent international authors as August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett or Vladimir Nabokov.
A more exhaustive analysis is also required for the retranslation phenomenon, with the aim not only of more clearly defining the scope of the concept, but also of delving into its motivations and drawing solid conclusions beyond those that local-range case studies can provide.
More specifically in the theatrical world, collaborative translation, a practice currently gaining strength, deserves further investigation. Studies of surtitling are similarly scarce, and would include consideration of the textual alterations it requires and its influence on the reception of the translated play (López Lapeña 2016: 106).
Meanwhile, more profound study should be dedicated to literary fan translation and the ethical issues raised by this non-professional practice, as well as to the growth of the webcomic since the beginning of this century, and its struggles for representation in the virtual world. Although it derives from the traditional comic strip, the webcomic allows great creative freedom and stylistic diversity: its digital format permits its reading from any terminal, whilst enabling the presence of moving sound and image clips that highlight multimodal options, all of which also pose problems for translators.
Finally, literary translation training needs further research. This could benefit from the latest advances in applied monolingual and multilingual corpora, including —obviously— the competences held by this type of translator and how to acquire them, as well as the boundaries of professional ethics.