Moving To A New Domain

This blog will continue under the following domain:

impossibletransfer.com

Goodbye Blogger!

(I should have the site revamped by October 5.)

Phases in the "Evolution" of Literary Translations

I just read an online article posted by Ding Xiasong called "Why Foreignizing Translation Is Seldom Used in Anglo-American World in Information Age". The article differentiates between direct information and aesthetic information. Direct information is the content of the source text, and the aesthetic information is the style, form or rhetorical devices in the source text. The piece agrees with Venuti by saying that Anglo-American translation culture tends to promote what he calls domestication of both direct and aesthetic information.

Ding takes the side that foreignization (as opposed to domestication) is to be preferred, if we're to follow the principle (or ideal) that a translation should transfer information (aesthetic or direct) about other cultures, language, lives, subjectivities, etc.

More interesting to me than this position (though I think I agree with the author's position, ultimately), was his observation that literary translations tend to follow a pattern. Translations aren't created in a vaccuum; they emerge because of specific historical conditions that bring two cultures, peoples, languages into some degree of communion with one another. It can be brought on by war, imperialism, commerce or whatever. Though foreignized translations are the ideal, he suggests that domesticated translations must begin the process of introducing the culture to the target audience. Once there is more interest, then the audience will be more open to challenging texts (i.e. more foreignized texts).

A slightly different category of examples: in case of Kafka and Tolstoi, we have continued increase in interest of specific writers over a long period of time. We know Kafka and Tolstoi are great, and therefore are willing to put ourselves through more challenging renditions. So we are getting "coarser" treatments of the source text, which are sold as more accurate or authentic copies of the original.

When will Anglo-American (or other English-speaking) readers be ready for more thoroughly foreignized translations of Korean literature?

I suppose the ultimate foreignized translaton (in terms of both direct & aesthetic information) is Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and I know of nothing that rivals this work in its degree of pedantic and encylopedic "faithfulness" to the source text.

I would love to hear from other translators on this issue.

Idiomatic Slippage

I made a comment on Facebook the other day on what a wonderful hit job Jon Stewart did on Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove and Dick Morris. And I wrote, "Really knocks it out of the park."

I was looking over that comment and thought to myself, "knocks it out"--no, that's not right it's "hits it out," because clearly, it's a baseball metaphor, and you don't knock balls, you hit them.

It didn't take long for me to realize I was conflating two expressions. "What a knock out" and "He hits it out of the park." Interestingly though, I am not alone in screwing this up. (Look up both expressions "knocks it out of the park" and "hits it out of the park" on Google. You actually get more hits with the former.)

Or am I just mistaken about this? Are both expressions okay?

Since I started translating, I have become a bit obsessive about idiomatic expressions, because the process of translating tend to somehow mangle your idioms. What's interesting is that if the slippage happens in fiction originally written in English, it's called the vernacular (or it's attributed to character or voice), but when it occurs in a translation, it's more likely to be taken as a sign of a sloppy translation.

Painter, George Deem, 76

I knew nothing about the painter George Deem until I read his obituary in The New York Times in August.

For more than 30 years, Deem has dedicated himself to the work of the masters throughout art history, not simply "appropriating imagery," but delving deeper into the artist's work to reveal ever more about the secrets that lie within those masterpieces... [Text from Nancy Hoffman Gallery]

Why post about Deem in a blog about literary translation?

Mr. Deem was interested, Mr. Vance said, in the dimension of time. He wanted the viewer to experience not only the painting in front of him but also the referenced works that came before. The critic Charles Molesworth called the technique “temporal collage.”

“What he wanted was when you looked at a painting of his, you always saw something else as well,” Mr. Vance said. “You were always seeing two things at once.” [my emphasis]

I liked the way Deem's renderings re-emphasized certain aspects about the "originals" that weren't noticed before. His works didn't simply "mirror" the old paintings, they acted as a commentary on the original, not trying to replace the original but, rather, re-place it.

Myung Mi Kim & Translation

"Writers of color" are often talking about (and asked about) the challenge of audience. Who are they writing for? In reference to "Kwangju" in her poetry, the interviewer asked the poet Myung Mi Kim (in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers), "To say, for example, Kwangju calls into attention certain kinds of audiences with certain kinds of knowledge... How do you imagine your audience?"

Kim's answer (which is the best response I've seen to a question of that sort):

I'd like to propose that there is no one audience toward which one writes (or toward which I write) but that the very act of writing is an approximation of the possible conversations between "audiences." If I imagine an audience at all, I am imagining possibility. And residing inside the possibility are various communities (or audiences, if you will)...that complicate and challenge, support and enliven questions of responsibility, recognizability, and so on.

What I like about her poetry (though I find much of it very challenging) is that she articulates and puts into practice some of the ideas (or attitudes) about translation (and translating) I've been trying to cultivate. I would be interesting to hear from other translators whether they think translating is an appropriate area for this kind of inquiry.

Here's another choice quote from her book Commons:

It is not the actual translation or even the state of translatability between the two texts that is intriguing but the possibilities for transcribing what occurs in the traversal between the two languages (and by, extension, between two "nations," their mutually implicated histories of colonization, political conflicts, and son on). What is the recombinant energy created between languages (geopolitical economies, cultural representations, concepts of community).

And Kim on romanization:

Practices in trasnliteration: comparing the standard romanization to what [I] might be said to be hearing: "sesang saramdur-a" next to "sae sahng sah rham deul ah." Whose ears are at work? Where does the authority of romanizing reside? How might it be entered into otherwise?

Let Us Praise Weird English

Book critic James Wood recently wrote a flattering review of Aleksandar Hemon's new book. In it he describes Hemon's extraordinary background.

When he arrived here, at the age of twenty-eight, Hemon had what his publisher calls only a “basic command” of English. Eight years later, “The Question of Bruno” appeared, stories written in an English remarkable for its polish, lustre, and sardonic control of register. This conversion is often described as “Nabokovian,” and, indeed, Hemon’s writing sometimes reminds one of Nabokov’s. (Hemon has said that he learned English by reading Nabokov and underlining the words he didn’t recognize.) Yet the feat of his reinvention exceeds the Russian’s. Nabokov grew up reading English, and had been educated at Cambridge. When his American career began, in 1940, he was almost middle-aged, and had long experience in at least three languages. Hemon, by contrast, tore through his development in the new language with hyperthyroidal speed.

Wood goes on to praise the foreign-ness of Hemon's prose.

Sometimes his English has the regenerative eccentricity of the immigrant’s, restoring buried meanings to words like “vacuous” and “petrified.” A sentence like this one stands at a slight angle to customary English usage: “I piled different sorts of blebby pierogi and a cup of limpid tea on my tray.” “Blebby” is wonderful, but, perhaps more wonderful, how many native English speakers would ever describe tea as limpid? Occasionally, he flourishes a lyrically pedantic Nabokovian bloom, as with the “fenestral glasses” a character wears.

The line about restoring buried meaning to words like "vacuous" and "petrified" reminds me of the essay by Ted Hughes I wrote about just a few minutes ago. In it, Hughes argues (among other things) that Shakespeare was able to return coarseness and immediacy to words with Latin and Greek roots. For example, quoting Gertrude from Hamlet, "And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?" (This is the part where Hamlet sees the ghost of his father who remains invisible to Queen Gertrude), Hughes shows that he brings "corpse" and "oral" back into "incorporal", which is just wild.

Oh Shakespeare, Is there anything you can't do?

According to Ted Hughes in his introduction to Essential Shakespeare, Shakespeare was a master of "translating" words with Latin or Greek roots, many of which had never been heard by the groundlings, into coarser and more immediate Saxon words, creating a heterogeneous poetic language suitable for a a heterogeneous audience.

The argument is fascinating and here are some choice excerpts.

How was [a new word] to be understood? He could rely on the noblemen in the lord's gallery to give it instant meaning; they would simply trnaslate it from Greek or Latin. But what about the rest of the audience?

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute

"Capacity" is immediately reduced to a plain image "Receiveth as the sea." In other words, it is translated: capacity=spaciousness, roominess, infinite ability to ocntain. In a similar way, "validity" which was probably a new word to most, previously used only in law, is translated by "pitch," a common word meaning "height," or "calibreated position on a scale." Validy" becomes, instantly, place on a scale of values." He deals with "abatement" even more plainly. While he tosses the fine word to the lords' box, he bends to the groundlings, and quite shamelessly adds "that means--low price."

Faced with what were virtually two languages, made more distinctly and urgently so by the presence of the two audiences, Shakespeare rose to the occasion by speaking both--the full foreign text and the full translation--simultaneously. He was pushed to this, one might say, by his perverse insistence on using such a huge number of the new words...

Note: I just posted something about Wood's review of Aleksandar Hemon's new book, which touches on a related subject.