Entry | Literary translator

SPA Traductor literario

contents
Introduction | The role of the literary translator nowadays | The educational background of the literary translator | Research potential

Introduction

It is now commonly accepted that translation is a craft as ancient as human civilisation. Therefore, it would not be too far-fetched to assume that literary translation has existed for as long as literature itself. The Greek classics were once translated into Latin, the Old Testament was translated into Koine Greek for the Jews of Alexandria who no longer understood Hebrew and Aramaic. However, for many centuries the common characteristic - with few exceptions - shared by all the translators who carried out this task was anonymity.

Given that we are not going to discuss literary translation but literary translators, there is little we can say about those early fellow translators who carried out great literary creations without leaving any personal trace other than their own writings. We do not know what their names were, nor what became of them, nor how much they were paid for their work - if they were paid at all - nor under what conditions they carried out their work.

This was the way of things for many centuries, with the great exception of biblical translators, whose genealogy, based on the enormous uniqueness of the text to which they devoted their efforts, is the only well-documented one. We will not focus on them here, because their endeavour corresponds to that of religious -not literary- translators. Regardless of what posterity may think of the Bible as a literary text, none of these translators thought they were translating, nor did they intend to translate literature.

Anonymity changed gradually. Along with the stellar moment of the translation into Latin of the Greek classics through Arabic - a milestone that preceded the Renaissance period by almost two centuries - the first names cropped up in the Middle Ages: Adelard of Bath, Gerard of Cremona, the lengthy list of names associated with the Toledo School of Translators, and the so-called Alphonsine translators: Hermann the German, John of Seville, Domingo Gundisalvo...

However, it is still debatable whether these translators should be called literary translators. The Alphonsine translators were undoubtedly carrying out an enormous task of cultural reconstruction, but it covered both philosophical and mathematical texts, most of which would not be considered literature nowadays.

The real breakthrough for literary translators came with the arrival of the Renaissance period. This was no coincidence: the shift in focus from God to man provided the perfect conditions for the emergence of literary creation. In addition, and by no means by chance, the replacement of Latin as the language of culture by the new Romance languages also played an important part in it. The function makes the organ: new languages fulfil a political function (see, for example, Balliu 1995), and in order for them to do so properly, they must be equipped with similar expressive capacities to those of the classical languages. At that point, translation became - and would never cease to be - a tool for verbal creation, and this function was added to its traditional role as a means of transmitting thought.

There must be a creative intention for literature to exist. We can resort to many other physical indicators, such as the predominance of the expressive function, the exponential incorporation of aesthetic elements, the presence of textual markers such as narrativity, metrics, dialogue, etc., but the true element that indicates the presence of literature is the intention to create literature. This remains true, regardless of whether this intention succeeds or fails, a matter on which it will always be impossible to reach an agreement.

During the Renaissance period, translators began to translate literature, and therefore truly became literary translators. It is not surprising that this was a significant period and with significance, anonymity faded. We know the names of many of the most important translators: In France, Jacques Amyot translated Plutarch, in England Thomas North did so too. In Spain Alonso de Cartagena translated Cicero, in Italy Leonardo Bruni translated The Iliad and in Germany Thomas Murner translated The Aeneid.


Picture of Urrea’s translation of the Orlando Furioso (1549). Source.

Horizontal translations soon began to appear, among the ‘new’ languages. From 1461 onwards, Nikolaus von Wyle translated the Decameron into German, and in 1549 Jerónimo de Urrea translated the Orlando Furioso into Spanish. This also was the period in which translation had a key role in political matters. It is also during this time that Étienne Dolet was burned in the city square for his translation of Plato and when Fray Luis de León was imprisoned over his version of Solomon’s Song of Songs.

However, the concept that continued to be in place was that of the literary translator as a patron of culture, the clergyman or teacher who devotes part of his time to translating the literature that he feels is lacking in his culture, that has made an impression on him or that helps him to develop his language.

At what point did the translator begin to use translation as a means of livelihood? Certainly, at that undefined moment in the 16th century when the printing press created the possibility for books to become an industry and, at the same time, the modern state was slowly emerging. Once again, the function makes the organ, and a rising industry that wants to offer products to its public crosses paths with a new state that maintains international relations and becomes a major employer. Spain is a typical example of this, with the creation of the role of the Language Interpreting Secretariat (Cáceres 2000).

At this point, it is time to stop and address the concept underlying our topic: although the title of this entry is ‘Literary translator’, it is necessary to clarify that the figure we are referring to is that of the ‘editorial translator’ or ‘book translator’. We mentioned earlier how imprecise the term ‘literary’ is, and we only mentioned it as a purely conceptual term. Now, we are taking a step further by adding to this conceptual principle, the highly important professional criterion: most of the translators to whom, from the 16th century onwards, we owe the transfer of literature from one language to another, did not translate only literature, not even when the clients or the recipients of their work were always the same people: those who were first called printers, and later publishers.

The printers did not only print literature, but books. What they sold were books, their products were books (Cayuela 2015, among others).

Books provided the basis for the professionalisation of translators. From then on, even if a translator could not make a living from their work - and they still cannot to this day - translators no longer translated gratia artis but for money, they saw their occupation as a profession, however peculiar it might be, and therefore tried to make a living out of it.

This marks a major breakthrough. For decades the idea that many writers translated ‘to make a living’, ‘to round out their income’ or ‘to survive’ has been prevalent. They were actually literary professionals who included the translation genre among their many literary pursuits, and among the many genres they wrote. This is a matter that has been subject to a good deal of debate (cf., for example, D'Hulst 1997, Arencibia 2002 & Bravo 2004). In fact, some excelled much more in this genre than in others that gave them greater social prestige (and this has led to the misconception that it was a nurturing occupation). From the invention of the printing press to the present day, translation has been one of the many tasks of the literary field.

The role of the literary translator nowadays

The role of the literary translator is currently a renowned one, even though there are still significant differences between countries. These differences are often linked to political and economic considerations regarding culture or to the relative significance of the cultures of other countries.

Something different is whether literary translators have managed to free themselves from their historical hindrances to achieve the professional status they claim. Without going into the details of comparative legislation, in most European and American countries translators are legally considered authors, entitling them to certain economic and moral rights. These include the right to the full integrity of their work (a translation cannot be published with cuts or changes that have not been authorised by the translator) and the right to have their name displayed on a prominent place in the book and to be mentioned in all publications related to it (editorial previews, reviews, and advertisements). Among their economic rights, translators enjoy the right to a proportional payment for their work, which is normally subdivided into an advance on royalties and a percentage of royalties on the sale price. According to the 1952 Universal Copyright Convention, the validity of these rights may not be less than the translator's own lifetime and at least 25 years after his or her death. Different legislations differ in this matter, but this period is usually around 70 years.

The position of literary translators in the market maintains some distinctive features, due to their status as authors. For example, in most countries the taxation of their work is the same as that of authors, and different from legal, medical or technical translators. As with writers, they are often not solely dedicated to this job. Profiles differ, but it is quite common to find a translator who is also a teacher, or a literary translator who also works as a commercial translator, translating all kinds of texts. The role of the translator in the publishing process differs greatly from one country to another, even within the major source languages. In some countries literary translation is still a heroic activity that is considered more the activity of a culture guardian instead of a professional one, according to some associations in, for example, Eastern European countries, represented in the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations. However, in other countries, such as Spain, literary translation has become the real centre of publishing activities, with a ratio between 20 and 23% translations of the total of published books, although during the years of the Great Recession it fell to 16% according to the publishers. According to a report written by the professional association ACE Traductores, which brings together Spanish editorial translators, the economic value of this percentage of annual sales volume amounted to 35%. The difference between these values speaks for itself about the worth of translation in the book sector. This establishes the blatant dramatic conditions experienced by a professional group which is poorly paid, almost unable to survive only by means of this task and that is constantly forced to educate, update and renew itself in order to support, sometimes before supporting their own lives, the cultural and intellectual life of the countries where they work. Just as with many other professions that are related to culture, the cultural sector provides the economy of each country the billions of euros that are not enough to feed all the professionals comprising the pyramid on which it is all based.

The current professional profile of the literary translator combines that of a cultural mediator (traditionally an expert in two languages and cultures, both source and target, but this basic principle is rapidly changing) with that of a documentation expert, who is expected to have a broad cultural background and an average knowledge of a range of computer tools (word processors, databases, web search engines, corpus tools, dictionaries of different types).

Regarding the first of these profiles, the traditional literary translators were trained throughout their career in the knowledge of a source culture in which they became experts, knowledgeable experts in the history, literature, philosophical thought and folklore of that country. However, socio-cultural evolution has completely overtaken this framework. First of all, because very often the languages that shape culture no longer undergo their developmental stages in a single country, or even in a single ‘culture’. If we take the example of the English language, a literary translator translating from that language today will have to choose between specialising in British literature and culture, North American culture, the vigorous Hindustani culture, or the Australian-New Zealand and Anglophone Africa’s ones, to name just a few large cultural areas that are substantially and significantly divided (the literature of the United States has nothing to do with that of Canada, for example).


	Promotional photo of a master’s degree in literary translation.

Secondly, because even the boundaries between language and culture are being blurred. As a result of geographical mobility, it is becoming increasingly common for authors who leave their country at a relatively young age to acquire the language of the destination country and write in it without completely abandoning their culture of origin. This results in hybrid products such as those of the Turkish author Emine Sevgi Özdamar or the Serbian author Sasa Stanisic, who write in German but whose literature develops in a culture unfamiliar to their place of residence, their readers and their translators, who are educated in the German culture, and suddenly confronted with a culture they may be unfamiliar with.

As far as the second profile is concerned, nowadays the literary translator has become a researcher, obliged to track down, among the numerous sources that the web offers, those that provide the most reliable answers to the difficulties posed by the text, be they terminological, conceptual, or diachronic. Paradoxically, at a time in which finding a term has become easier than ever, being sure of its use has become more complex than ever.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the literary translator remains first and foremost a writer of their own language, an author devoted to verbal creativity, linguistic precision and syntactic proficiency.

We must strongly highlight what it means for a translator to be a writer in their own language, namely, an author committed to being part of the literary tradition in which they write. In writing a translation, we must be aware that we are aiming for a lasting piece of work, that is, to create a new literary piece that will replace, in the target culture, an original piece of work with which the readers will never have any direct experience.

The educational background of the literary translator

The long-standing debate about the artistic status of translation (art or technique? science?) has led translation studies to shy away for decades from any particular approach to literary translation beyond historiography, descriptive analysis or pure textual analysis. The non-professional approach, the consideration of the literary translator as a translator ‘of a different kind’ whose skills must be innate (‘to translate poetry you have to be a poet’), had as a necessary consequence the idea that translation techniques could not be applied to literary translation, that it is possible to teach a technique but not an art. In 1993, in the first issue of the magazine Vasos Comunicantes, published not by accident by a professional association, the respected Spanish translator Miguel Sáenz, the only winner of the European Union's Aristeion Prize, said: ‘perhaps you cannot teach translation, but you can certainly learn it’ (Sáenz 1993), as the culmination of a long debate in which he firmly rejected translator innatism.

The establishment of translation studies as a university discipline put an end to this debate. After the pioneering studies in Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s and in Geneva, where a Faculty of Translation and Interpreting was founded in 1941, the explosion of translation studies after the Second World War led to its gradual establishment as a university degree throughout the world.

Needless to say, this left universities confronted with the choice of whether to teach to translate literature or not, an absolutely crucial decision: to teach what could not be taught, or to ignore that which was at the heart of the well-known history of translation: books.

After fifty years, it cannot be said that this dilemma has been completely settled. In many universities, literary translation has hardly been included in undergraduate programmes and is usually reserved for postgraduate programmes. Moreover, the recent experience of the European EU-sponsored PETRA-E project, which aims to design a framework of skills and levels in literary translator training, shows by its very existence that this topic is still an area of debate among academics.

Can literary translation be taught? Yes, of course it can. It still remains unclear which is the most appropriate way, or ways, to do so. There may be some consensus on the format of the translation workshop (which responds to the maxim: ‘you learn to translate by translating’). There may be consensus on the things to apply and the things to avoid, that is, on the area that overlaps between the general techniques of translation and those specific to literary translation. However, the very philosophy of its teaching remains a matter of debate: is translation recreating, or is it reproducing? If it is to recreate, must we use the tools of creation - and therefore unravel them - in order to be able to draw on them when translating? If it is to reproduce, does it involve following the text or reinterpreting it, and would not the latter already be a new connection with recreation?

Assuming either case: which methods are the most appropriate for teaching literary translation? Those that rely on contextual knowledge, and therefore insist on having an understanding of the literature itself, or those that favour technical, stylistic and formal approaches? The very fact that this section ends with a plethora of questions highlights the extent to which the didactics of literary translation is a relatively new universe for the experts.

Therefore, what type of education does a literary translator undertake? Currently, specific university training is usually provided in postgraduate courses, often with mixed syllabi including specific literature subjects alongside other technical and translatology subjects. However, it remains equally true that a significant percentage of literary translators do not come from these studies, but from degrees in translation, from classic philology studies or even from other professional fields that are vaguely related to literature. That said, the translator remains first and foremost a creator, and ultimately the questions that concern a translator are the same as those that concern a writer, although dealing with the peculiar genre we call translation.

Research potential

All in all, it is clear that the figure of the literary translator still provides plenty of research opportunities, both in the educational aspects and in the analysis of the literary translator’s own activity. Not to mention the historiographical aspect (it should not be forgotten that most of the preserved historical testimonies are, in fact, literary translations), in its double role of historicising translation and analysing the historical evolution of translations. The centre of the translation process, the translator, can never be fully researched. Some of the widely accepted truths in this field require further development: if the translator is a creator, then studies need to be developed on the specific way in which creative writing techniques are used in literary translation. If translation is a genre, then time needs to be spent defining what the characteristics of this genre are. On the other hand, the many conditioning factors of their professional development imply a need to constantly update the studies devoted to studying the working conditions of literary translators, the framework in which they work and, of course, possible developments in their specific educational background.