Translation as a Comic Strip

This is a fun blog/book/comic strip, which features a translator and his adventures in comic format. There are so many metaphors for translation and perhaps translation is a comic strip could be one too, but regardless of that, check the site out.

More Metaphors

If you read this blog, you know I’m always interested in metaphors for translation. Well, there’s an entire book on the subject now, Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, edited by James St. André.

As Ben Van Wyke points out in his contribution, which is about metaphors relating to bodies and clothes, translation and metaphor have always been tightly linked:

“The word for translation in English, as well as in many other European languages, comes from the Latin translation, which is a translation of the Greek metaphora, the word from which English derives “metaphor.” In ancient Greek, metaphora was used in the sense that we employ the word “metaphor” today, as well as for translation from one language into another. Thurs, related in this way, translation and metaphor both imply the notion of carrying over or transferring meaning from one word or phrase to another.” (18)

In this anthology, Celia Martín de León talks about the metaphor of footsteps, while Sergey Tyulenev discusses translation as a form of smuggling, and Yotam Benshalom focuses on performance, among other metaphors analyzed.

The book also includes a helpful bibliography of works that discuss metaphors for translation.

This is a light, enjoyable read that might give readers new ways of understanding old metaphors as well as offer entirely new metaphors for thinking about translation.

More Metaphors

In the last post, I discussed Translation in Practice, edited by Gill Paul and published by Dalkey Archive Press. The book offered two new metaphors, one for translation and one for editing.

Mahmoud Darwish is quoted giving another metaphor of translation: “The translator is not a ferryman for the meaning of the words but the author of their web of new relations. And he is not the painter of the light part of the meaning, but the watcher of the shadow, and what it suggests.” (5)

And Ros Schwartz describes a metaphor of editing: “A good editor is like a midwife – he or she helps bring forth that perfectly formed translation that is inside you but doesn’t necessarily emerge unaided.” (65)

Point of Contact

Earlier this summer, I read Point of Contact, a journal/book from Syracuse University. This issue is about Saúl Yurkievich and his translator Cola Franzen and is a bilingual edition of their letters, as well as a few essays and art, with an introduction by and an interview with Franzen. The book also comes with a CD of a dual-language reading of Saúl’s work. And, it has some previously unpublished poems by Yurkievich but, oddly, they were not translated by Franzen.

It is fascinating to get to see how the translator and her writer correspond, how they discuss and negotiate, how they doubt, clarify, explain, how they work through the publishing process and receive awards, and how, over the years of their correspondence (1982-2003) they become closer, which ultimately helps the translation work.

Some messages are rows of corrections (such as pp. 96-97), while others are about who to submit to and when (41-43), and still others use metaphors to describe the translation process. For example, Cola writes “My feeling about the poem is that it is like a soap bubble, and that my task is to launch it, get it spinning, not let it land or break until the last word when it just blinks out.” (44) and “…the poems are yours, no matter what linguistic clothes they are wearing. It must be strange for you to see your poems turn up in new skins…” (49)

Most interesting of all are the explanations, from Saúl about what he meant in his originals and from Cola about how she has chosen certain translations. For example, she writes “for el gran ovillo se engalleta, I have decided on the enormous skein becomes knotted. We don’t use jamming, jam up for hair, or threads, or fiber. Those are tangled, snarled or knotted. A mechanical part that sticks is jammed; traffic is jammed, etc. I played with the idea of snarl, ensnarled, but it’s such an ugly sounding word, and engalleta is so nice, with the cookie embedded in it. And then animals snarl…it’s a sound-word as well. Knotted is in a way harsher than snarled, and the poem is turning more serious at that line…” (36-7)

The correspondence clearly reveals the attention paid to each poem, each word. I noticed some typos and errors in the book/journal issue, but if one can overlook that, it is worth reading to get insight into the translator-writer relationship.

More Metaphors

A few weeks ago, I was teaching a class on the history of translation theory. So many different metaphors were mentioned during our discussion of material about Sir John Denham and John Dryden. I will name some of them here.

Transfusion. In the sense of an alchemical reaction, transfusion was a fairly common metaphor some centuries ago, though perhaps the word today would make us think instead of a blood transfusion. In either case, the idea of infusing new spirit and new life into something applies.

Shell and kernel. Latham gets a across a similar idea (i.e. of preserving the general meaning if not the exact wording) with his comment "I used the freedome of a Translator, not tying myselfe to the tyranny of a Grammatical consruction, but breaking the shell into many peeces, was only carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation." (as quoted in Venuti's excellent The Translator's Invisibility).

Clothing. This is a very common metaphor. Rider (also cited in Venuti) used this metaphor: "Translations of Authors from one language to another, are like old garments turn'd into new fashions; in which though the stuffe be still the same, yet the die and trimming are altered, and in the making, here something added, there something cut away." In other words, you use the author's material but refashioned and reshod.

Tight-rope walker/dancer. In the introduction to his translation of Ovid's Epistles, Dryden wrote: "'Tis much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs. A man may shun a fall by using caution, but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected, and when we have said the best of it, 'tis but a foolish task; for no sober man would put himself into a danger for the applause of escaping without breaking his neck."

More Metaphors for Translation/Translators

In the last post, I mentioned Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. She includes some analysis of translation metaphors, which is a topic I am interested in. She writes that studying metaphors translators use about their work is an important part of translation studies today. Here are some of the ones Professor Bassnett mentions:

“[C]lusters of metaphors used by translators reflect their thinking about the role and status of translation in their own time. Predictable metaphors relating to rhetoric in general include following in footsteps, changing clothing, discovering treasure or alchemical transfer, and these metaphors also show a certain degree of ambiguity towards the source text, with the status of the text in its source system being significant in determining the attitude and strategies of the translator as well as the right of the target culture to possess it.” (146)

The translator as a servant was a popular metaphor through 19th century. (147)

Augusto de Campos uses the metaphor of the transfusion of blood. “Translation is for him a physical process, it is a devouring of the source text, a transmutation process, an act of vampirization.” (155)

“The images of translation as cannibalism, as vampirism, whereby the translator sucks out the blood of the source text to strengthen the target text, as transfusion of blood that endows the receiver with new life, can all be seen as radical metaphors that spring from post-modernist post-colonial translation theory.” (155)

Learning to Sail Our Own Ships

This is the 200th post on this blog!

While working on writing abstracts on the essays in The Translation of Children’s Literature (edited by Gillian Lathey), I noticed this quote in an essay by Birgit Stolt: “Jakob Grimm compared the task of the translator with that of a sailor: the latter mans a ship, directs it with full sails to the opposing shore, but then has to land ‘where there is different earth and where different air plays.’” (67)

Reading that reminded me of this quote from Louisa May Alcott: “I don’t worry about the storms, for I am learning to sail my own ship.”

So, fellow translators, let’s continue sailing our own ships, managing the different earth and the different air, and not minding all the storms we meet on our way.

A Round-Up of Articles

A couple of months ago, I posted a round-up of articles because I kept seeing so many interesting ones on translation. Well, here’s another one, mostly focusing on translating poetry. It’s exciting that translation is appearing more and more!

Here is an entire issue of an online magazine devoted to translation. I like the quote in the piece by Linh Dinh that says “The best way to criticize an imperfect translator is to do a better translation.” I wonder how many translations have been done for that reason. There is also a nice metaphor for the work a translator does: “I’m not a translator so much as a tightrope walker between two unreliable
dictionaries.”

An article on translating poet César Vallejo is here. Poet Clayton Eshleman writes, among other things, about how translating Vallejo has influenced his own work.

And one on translating poet Zbigniew Herbert is here. This essay contains the line “Hofmann can’t read Polish (neither can I), but he makes a vigorous, smart and hugely entertaining case by comparing the older and newer translations.” I find this to be odd; if one compares two or more different translations of the same work without also analyzing the source text, then one is comparing how the texts work in the target languages, not how the target texts are as translations. In my opinion, this is not how one should critique a translation.

Finally, for those who can read Swedish, here is an article by the Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, about being translated. She writes that she doesn’t consider herself a Danish poet, but rather a poet who happens to write in Danish, since she was born and raised in Denmark. Since poetry is a way of understanding, a way of reaching other people, translation is an important part of it. She says that like Doctors Without Borders, there should be Poets and Translators Without Borders, too.

Enjoy the reading!

The Violence of Translation: Conquering and Colonizing a Text

To continue with the metaphor theme, I was intrigued by the book Translation and Empire by Douglas Robinson, which discusses postcolonial theories of translation. One chapter quotes from Jerome, Dryden, and other major figures from translation studies, and it is interesting to see their comparison of translators to conquerors or pillagers, who take what they want from a text and then make it over as they see fit in the target language. The text is thus rather violently colonized. In some instances, it seems that (male) translators view languages as female; it is, therefore, acceptable to “rape and pillage” a foreign tongue – to take what the translator thinks most important or useful – in order to protect the native language.

Translation as a Log Cabin

Readers of this blog know that I like metaphors for translation. So I was happy when, while reading The Translator as Writer, an interesting book I will surely mention again soon, I noticed an essay called “Metaphors for the Translator” by translator Michael Hanne. In this piece, he reviews some of the many metaphors people have suggested for translators and the translation process and analyzes them. Here is one example:

“She [translator Margaret Sayers Peden] suggested that the best translators of literary texts act like curators transporting an old timber structure such as a log cabin to another location: ‘Carefully we mark the logs by number, dismantle them, and reconstruct them in new territory, artfully restoring the logs to their original relationships and binding them together with a minimal application of mortar’. She insists that the translator must avoid the temptation to ‘slather on the plaster’ beyond the point which is essential (Peden 1989: 14). Translation involves a demolition job followed by a reconstruction. This is an attractively ingenious image, which, on further consideration, turns out to be fundamentally mistaken. The problem is that, when you come to ‘reconstruct’ the text in new territory, you have to undertake the task, not with original logs, but with timber (language) that is indigenous to the target culture, has a different grain, a different colour, and is supplied in different lengths. Moreover, as literary scholars from Mikhail Bakhtin to Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes remind us, all language is second-hand, which means that every literary text is made of fragments of earlier utterances. So, when we translate, the lengths of timber with which we reconstruct the log cabin are not only of a different species, but they have also been recycled and bear the marks of the previous uses to which they have been subjected in that territory/culture.” (212)

If the Clothes Don't Fit...

We’ve looked at various metaphors for translation, and most recently that was the clothing metaphor.

Lawrence Venuti, one of the major critics of “invisible” translators (i.e. that “fluency” is not necessarily the major criteria we should judge in translations), also refers to translation as clothing.

He wrote: “The translator is no stand-in or ventriloquist for the foreign author, but a resourceful imitator who rewrites the original to appeal to another audience in a different language and culture, often in a different period. This audience ultimately takes priority, insuring that the verbal clothing the translator cuts for the foreign work never fits exactly.”

Clearly, his idea that the clothing doesn’t fit, relates to the idea of visibility. You generally don’t notice someone’s clothes if they are neat, clean, fashionable, and well-tailored. We can compare that to invisible translation; it serves a specific purpose and is unobtrusive. But you would notice clothes if the clothes are dirty, out of style, and ill-fitting. That is visible translation. You are aware of the lack of fit, even if it is just slightly off. You, as the reader of a translation that doesn’t fit exactly, probably feel a little uncomfortable, and your attention is drawn to the very fact of the translation.

What’s interesting is that Mr. Venuti suggests that it is the translator’s concern for the target audience that ensures that the clothes don’t fit and that the translation is visible, whereas others might argue that it is the translator’s faithfulness to the source text that does that.

A Translation Metaphor

I always enjoy reading metaphors or other descriptions that involve translation in some way (both metaphors that depict translation and those that describe something else using translation), because they offer a view of what people think translation is. One day it might be interesting to study these metaphors and see how the sense of translation has changed over time.

For example, last month, I mentioned Alistair Elliot’s idea of translation as powdered eggs. Henry Rider, in the preface to his 1638 translation of Horace to English, offers a very different metaphor, that of translation as clothing:

“Translations of Authors from one language to another, are like old garments turn’d into new fashions; in which though the stuffe be still the same, yet the die and trimming are altered, and in the making, here something added, there something cut away.”

I’d thought of translation as many things before, but I hadn’t thought about it as “old garments,” and though I like Mr. Rider’s metaphor, I don’t really agree with it.

Do you have favorite translation metaphors or descriptions?

Powdered Eggs and Omelettes

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Alistair Elliot, an English poet and translator. He had an interesting metaphor for translation. Mr. Elliot said that translating was like having powdered egg and trying to reconstitute it with water to make it resemble something like the original egg. Though it sounds poetic, I’m not sure that this is really such an apt metaphor, since it suggests that translations are always inferior to the originals. Powdered eggs, after all, can never be real eggs and they can never quite match the taste, the smell, or the consistency, no matter what you do to them. It’s true that a translation can never be the precise equivalent of the original, but I think most good translations deserve more than to be called powdered eggs. Translators take eggs and crack them open, then add a few ingredients in an attempt to make a good dish out of them. The dish recognizably includes eggs, but isn’t exactly eggs anymore. Maybe we can consider translations omelettes, rather than powdered eggs.

The Clockmaker

The well-known comment by Robert Frost that “(p)oetry is what gets lost in translation” reflects the general idea that if translation as a whole is nearly impossible, then translation of poetry is truly so.

In 2004 at Poesidagarna, an annual poetry festival mentioned in the last post, the Dutch poet Michel Kuijpers, who publishes poetry under the pseudonym K. Michel, compared translation to taking apart a clock. If one wants to understand how a clock works, one takes it apart and studies the pieces before putting it back together. Similarly, if one wants to understand a poem, one takes it apart, studies it, and then puts it back together – in another language. The Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, who teaches Russian and Lithuanian at Yale, seems to serve as both poet and clockmaker, since he mentioned that when someone is going to translate his work, he writes a detailed explanation of what he meant and what the implications of his word choices are and, if he knows the target language, he also writes a first draft of the potential translation. It’s true that many writers answer their translators’ questions when possible, but what is it about translating poetry that drives a poet to help his translator to such an extent as Mr. Venclova does?

Arguably more so than in prose, both the words and the form matter in poetry. Meter and rhythm are two features of poetry that some translators mention when discussing the difficulty of translating poetry. Prose also has meter and rhythm, of course, although they are often more obvious in poetry. Poetry may also have rhymes, which are quite difficult to translate well. Then there is the language. Poetic language is frequently imaginative and words are used economically, so the preciseness of the translation is especially noticeable and important. There is rarely plot in poetry, at least not in the same way as there is in a novel or a short story, and this makes the emphasis on each word even stronger.

So a translator has many decisions to make. Can the rhymes, the meter, the rhythm be retained? What must be left out or changed if any one of those is retained? And for the words, what images and feelings do they represent in the original language and is it possible to transfer those images and feelings to the target language? Or must replacement images and feelings that work better in the new language be chosen? After all, since languages and cultures don’t work the same way, if a poem is translated too literally, a poet’s whole meaning could be lost in translation.

The elements that make a poem are the same elements that make a poem challenging to translate. But what’s a translator to do? Our job is to find a way to say what seems impossible to say and we serve the writers and the readers by making texts available to a larger audience. We are, as Alexander Pushkin was quoted as saying, “the post-horses of enlightenment.” Although perhaps now we should say that we are the clockmakers of enlightenment.