Translations and Translation Theories East and West
Workshop Three:
The Art of Translation
19-20 September 2002
Venue: Room 116, SOAS
Project Leaders: Dr William Radice (SOAS) and Prof Theo Hermans (UCL)
Research Assistant: Dr Ross Forman
ABSTRACTS
Harry Aveling, (Asian Studies, La Trobe)
“Mistakes” in Translation
Translators are regularly berated for their “mistakes”. Howard Goldblatt wrote
an article in The Washington Post in April this year which was headed: “Translator:
Writer everyone loves to hate. Where does he get his nerve?” The article began
with a quotation from Isaac Bashevis Singer: “There is no such thing as a good
translator. The best translators make the worst mistakes. No matter how much I
love them all, translators must be closely watched.” He followed it with a
quotation from Milan Kundera: “ ye translators, do not sodomize us!” And for
good effect he also added the Italian tag: “Traduttore-traditore” (Translator =
traitor). (As Goldblatt then comments: “Is this a great job, or what?”)
Translators do occasionally defend their mistakes. In his book The Forked Tongue
(Mouton , The Hague 1971), Burton Raffel insists in connection with his Poems
from the Old English: “I maintain, however, (1) that I have no case misrepresented
the spirit of any poem, and (2) that my percentage of errors is infinitesimally
smaller than he (and implicitly, you) suggests” (p. 144).
The word “mistakes” is not one that often enters into the theorisation of
translation. Of some twenty books about translation on my home bookshelf, only
a few have entries in their index on either “mistakes” or “errors”. The word does
not appear in the glossary to Christiane Nord’s Translating as a Purposeful Activity
(St Jerome, Manchester 1997), although she does devote a section of the book to
“Translation Errors and Translation Evaluation”. This section (pages 73-79) of
her book discusses: (1) Translation Errors as Non-Functional Translations; (2) A
Functional Classification of Translation Errors, and (3) A Hierarchy of
Translation Errors. The index to Laurence Venuti’s The Translation Studies Reader
(Routledge, London 2000) does not include the word either. But if one turns to
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the word “equivalence”, one is encouraged to “see also adequacy, accuracy,
correspondence, fidelity, identity”.
The paper will begin with a summary of Nord’s argument, then consider
whether it is still meaningful to consider “mistakes” as a failure to achieve
“equivalence, adequacy, accuracy, etc.” in these postmodern days in which the
concept of multiple readings is well established. Part of my argument will also
distinguish between “dumb mistakes” (foolish errors) and “deliberate mistakes”,
when a translator specifically chooses to recreate the text in a way that seems to
deviate from the literal surface meaning of the source text. Thirdly, I will suggest
that the evaluation of translation needs not to insist “This is wrong”, but rather
to ask “Why has the translator chosen this particular way of translation? What is
it that s/he is trying to bring across from the original text?”
In the discussion following the paper, I hope that other participants will present
their own examples of how they have justified some of their own “deliberate
mistakes”.
Cosima Bruno (East Asia, SOAS)
English-Chinese/Chinese-Chinese: On Reading Poetry through Translation Shifts
My approach to contemporary Chinese poetry is through translation: I compare
the Chinese text with two English translations of it and, on the basis of the results
of such comparison, I explore the poetics of this work.
The reason of this unusual approach to poetry lies in the belief that the alterities
revealed by shifts in translation are not merely indications of necessary alterities
between the “nature” of Chinese and English language in general, but are
indications of the individual use of that language. Translation constitutes a
special dimension for the study of poetry, specifically because it re-activates the
possibilities enhanced by a poem in the original language, thereby showing how
the language of that poem differs from the language it is written in.
The attention is largely text-centred, proceeding from the text to the theory: the
analysis of translation points out some reoccurring shifts; the description of these
shifts draws attention to some main features of the Chinese text; the
identification of these features finally leads to a gradual, although probably
partial picturing of its poetics.
Therefore the goal I aim at is not simply to describe the formal features of the
texts for their own sake, but to show their functional significance for the
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coherence of the text. I attempt to answer the question of why certain forms have
been chosen by the poet over other possible ones, from the language available to
him?
In discussing this approach to poetry, I shall illustrate how translation helped me
to disclose the work of two contemporary Chinese poets: Yang Lian and Yu Jian.
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
How Hard Should We Try?: Questions of Detail in Literary Translation
We have all been sent a sheet outlining the questions that you would like us to
address, and I would like to take off from the first two sets of questions posed
there. To me, ‘What is the purpose of translation?’ is the crucial question. What
we decide to call ‘a good translation’ depends on the answer we give to that first
question. Whenever I undertake any task of translation, I ask myself: what is the
purpose of this particular task that I am taking on? There could indeed be a
plurality of purposes in any single task, so the idea of what is a good translation
needs to be broad and accommodating rather than narrow and rigid. I certainly
think that the quality of literary vitality can be conveyed in translation, and I
believe that our attitude to form needs to be flexible.
The question of mistakes is an intriguing one. Some mistakes may be of the
straightforward kind (say, a word or phrase inadvertently missed out, or a word
misunderstood) regarding which we can reach an immediate agreement; with
other mistakes, it may be necessary to have quite a long discussion before any
such consensus can be reached; and sometimes slightly different interpretations
are entirely possible, so that translators (and scholars) will have to agree to differ.
A few mistakes do not invalidate the whole work, and shifts of meaning are
inevitable when a text moves from the terrain of one language to the terrain of
another. In that case, how hard should we try? I think we have to try our best
without getting wound up about it. I would like to illustrate this with examples,
using some English translations of the Bengali poet Vijaya Mukhopadhyay
which have been published as a booklet. I hope to focus on concrete examples in
the spirit of a workshop. Through such focusing we can raise our awareness of
the practical issues involved in the craft of literary translation and improve our
skills.
Hannah Henderson (British Council)
Translation and the British Council
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Hephzibah Israel (South Asia, SOAS)
The Noblest Service on Earth:
Translating the Bible in Nineteenth-Century India
Translating the Bible has influenced the theorising and practice of translation in
Europe. However, not much has been said about Bible translation outside of
Europe, which began in the sixteenth century soon after European contact with
non-European cultures. For Western Protestant Missionaries translating the Bible
was translating Christianity. They believed that the placing of a translated
version of the Bible in the hands of recent or potential converts was essential for
Christianity to take firm root in alien environments. This is also true of the
history of the Church and the Bible in India where Christian missionaries were
faced with the challenge of presenting the biblical message in various Indian
languages and in ways meaningful to the Indian contexts. My research concerns
itself with the history of the Bible in Tamil translation and the various
controversies and discussions that surrounded these translations.
One of the agencies that took on the responsibility of translating the Bible in
India was the British and Foreign Bible Society, which from 1805 set itself the aim
of transmitting authorised translations of the Bible in different languages across
the globe. Through its first auxiliaries established at Calcutta and Madras in 1811
and 1820 respectively, the Bible Society attempted to organise and institutionalise
the task of Bible translation in the major Indian languages, Tamil included. By
mid-nineteenth century, the Society had established a network that linked
translators and their readers, translations and responses to them, production and
finance more formally than in earlier centuries when these were left to individual
interest and enterprise. Equally, the Bible Society also initiated debate on Bible
translations that later developed into formal rules and guidelines for Bible
translators, revisers and editors.
My presentation will concentrate on the issues regarding Bible translation that
engaged the attention of missionary translators connected to the Bible Society in
the nineteenth century in the Madras Presidency and Ceylon. I will focus on
discussions and analyses of the process of producing a standard Tamil version of
the Bible that contributed to the formulation of nascent theories of Bible
translation in nineteenth-century India. I will attempt to connect and place in
context the Bible Society’s push for standardisation and uniformity of Bibles that
led to an insistence on standardisation of translations, of language and religious
vocabulary. This will lead me to address the question of how far such
standardisation was successful and why. Further, I will argue that the desire to
achieve standard translations is connected to the objective of creating an abstract,
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standard Christian subject who would transcend differences of pre-existing
cultural conditions or religious beliefs.
Chandanashis Laha (English, North Bengal)
Tagore’s Treatment of a Mahabharata Episode
When a creative writer draws on a parent text, the chief interest of his/her work
lies in its departure from the source material, primarily because the deviations
result in ‘transformation’ as ‘transcreation’. The present paper aims to see how
Rabindranath Tagore, in his dramatic poem KARNA – KUNTI SAMBAD,
reworks the very decisive discourse between Karna and Kunti on the eve of the
great battle of Kuruskhetra. Tagore retains the basic situation as it is in the
Mahabharata: Kunti, mother of the Pandavas, in a secret meeting, entreats her
long forgotten and disowned son Karna (the firstborn she bore the Sun god in
her maidenhood, and who is now a formidable ally of the Kauravas), to side with
the Pandavas: the son—who is otherwise famous as a `great giver’—refuses to do
so, and he has his own arguments. Even so, Tagore’s metatext has utterances
given to Karna that mark him off from the Karna of the epic. The crucial
difference that surfaces in Tagore’s, however, is not widely acknowledged but
rather marginalised as an offshoot of the romantic poet’s lyricism. Nevertheless,
there are some critics who focus on the novelty and modernity of Tagore’s Karna.
They detect in the hero’s utterances (i) an analogue of the European heroic spirit,
OR (ii) the melancholy that smacks of Hamlet, OR ( iii) the essential traits of
Camus’s Absurd Man. The paper collates these views as well as looking in
passing at Tagore’s own English translation of KARNA- KUNTI SAMBAD, in
order to re- read his reworking of a very significant episode in the Mahabharata.
And in doing so, it seeks to address issues such as the transformation a material
undergoes while reworked in a different genre, and the use of classical sources
by modern works.
Gopa Majumdar
The Pains and Pleasures of Translation
The paper examines some of the fundamental practical dilemmas facing the
translator. Perhaps the greatest is the split of loyalties to the source writer and
to the target reader. To be useful, the translation must be both readable and
accurately convey the sense of the author's work and, where possible, the
lyricism.
“The Art of Translation” Abstracts 6
To produce the flexibility that this requires demands high levels of bilingualism
and understanding of both cultures. Cooperation with a living author may be of
immense value, but can have its pitfalls. Where the author is deceased, the
responsibility for capturing the "essence" lies with the translator's linguistic
abilities.
A successful translation is measured significantly by the readers' demands for
access to more of the author's work.
Nima Mina (Near and Middle East, SOAS)
Translation and Post-Revolution Iran in Esmail Khoi
My paper is about Esmail Khoi's poem “Return to Borgio Verezzi”, a key text
about the experience of post-revolution Iranian exile, written in Italy in
1984. I try to show how the English translation by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and
Michael Beard eliminates much of the original poem's rhetorical features, its
culturally specific allusions and intertextual intricacies. The translation thus
reduces the poem's specifically Iranian color and increases its openness so that it
can be read as a key text of world literature about an experienced shared by all
intellectuals who escape from dictatorships in
other parts of the world.
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Alison Mukherjee
From Biblical Bangla to Nirmal Babu’s Bride:
Why the Novel Followed the Thesis
The paper will examine the relationship between Biblical Bangla, the thesis I
wrote for my PhD, and Nirmal Babu’s Bride, the novel which followed the
academic work.
The paper will begin by briefly outlining the subject of my research, the Bengali
translations of the Hebrew Psalms, identifying in particular the themes and
issues which are reflected in the novel. I will ask why the thesis felt somehow
incomplete, a feeling which was only satisfied when I moved on to imaginative
writing. Next I will discuss the novel, concentrating on the ways in which it
reflects, develops and differs from the academic research. Finally I will see
whether it’s possible or helpful to apply the terminology used when analysing
and assessing translations, to the relationship between the thesis and the novel. Is
it ‘faithful’ to the original, is it meaningful to talk of ‘equivalence’, what about
patronage and motivation, norms and conventions?
Martin Orwin (Africa, SOAS)
Trying to Translate the Warp and Weft of Poetry
In this presentation I shall discuss the experience of translating two Somali
poems for Mother Tongues, an issue of Modern Poetry in Translation. I shall
consider the process of translation by addressing the first set of questions
informing this workshop: What is a good translation? What is the purpose of
translation? Can literary vitality be translated? Can poetic form be translated?
Poetry forms the foundation of Somali expressive culture. A constantly
developing and dynamic mode of cultural expression, it nevertheless continues
to demand the use of alliteration and metre. Further, despite the fact that some
poets use writing in composition, poetry is still a heard, an ‘aural’ form.
Translating such poetry for people used to reading poetry and who do not have
the same expectations regarding form was a challenge over and above the
translation of culturally specific references. As this was my first translation for a
wider English speaking, poetry-reading audience, and as I felt a great
responsibility to the two poets to convey something of the power of their poems,
I thought long and hard, read what I could on form and translation and
discussed matters with friends and colleagues. It is this process and the
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decisions I made along the way which I shall present, along with thoughts which
I have subsequently had.
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Enrico Palandri (Italian, UCL)
The Invisible Original
In his paper Enrico Palandri will discuss the nature of the original text examining
through his experiences as a translated author, a translator and a translator of
himself, what is the distance between ideas and feelings expressed in a piece of
literature and the language used to express it. The gist of his argument being
that, as literature is an Art based on imitation, the original is not the original
work of literature from which one translates, but something beyond it. A thing, a
state of mind, a spiritual twist. Hence, translators are often more creative than
the author himself. What is therefore the real task facing both? And are all
readers, from this point of view, translators, even from their own language?
Abhijeet Paul (Literature, Open University)
The Face of Bengal and Other Poems:
Fifty Years of Jibanananda Das in Translation
The first English translations of the poems of Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), the
well-known post-Tagorean poet of Bengal, appeared in Calcutta in 1945. Since
then some of his more popular and occasionally, the lesser known, poems have
been translated by scholars, critics, poets and lay persons from India,
Bangladesh, Australia, and the USA. However, the Bengali literary critics remain
anxious and skeptical of the representation of the unique element of his poetry in
English translation: the face of Bengal.
The face of Bengal is both literal and metaphorical, existing in Puranic and
medieval myth as well as real time, recreating an embarrassingly pure, rural,
physical-natural landscape of Bengal in painstaking detail. It forms, in retrospect,
an elemental crust of his poetic system, which naturally poses considerable
challenge to the translator. The outburst of physical-emotional excesses is
essentially rooted in the medieval Bengali mangal kavyas and the padabalis,
while the poetic form is clearly tradition-bound to the secularized version of
Bengali poetry which primarily Rabindranath Tagore, among others, helped
establish by the early twentieth century. While Rupashi Bangla (Beauteous Bengal,
1957) clearly requires, on part of the translator, a greater level of involvement, if
not indulgence, in the physical-rural-mythical excesses of Bengal, poems that
appear in Banalata Sen (1944) are notable for their romantic/subjective overtones.
Others in Dhusar pandulipi (Gray manuscripts 1936), Mahaprithibi (The world at
large, 1944), Sat ti tarar timir (Darkness of the seven stars1948), Bela abela kalbela
(Time, untime and time apart 1961), are distinctively urban poems, which to say
the least, are the most complex in their use of language, myth, and history.
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Bengal in this last category of poems is admittedly the most difficult to translate
because of its presence in the language of memory, recombining with a mesh of
jagged urban landscape of Calcutta (trams, gaslight, beggars, hydrants, etc). The
seasons too, especially autumn and winter, are not particularly cyclic as in a
natural setting, but take supplemental and subjective positions. The examples of
imaginative translations of Jibanananda’s poetry examined in this paper are
therefore confined to those that display a certain degree of fluency and literalism
on the one hand, and a desire to keep alive the meaning-complexity (arthajatilata) by choosing to play with the language and poetic form in the target
language, on the other. There is no overt intention of constructing a
Jibananandian translational poetics here, for such a scope is limited by the fact
that not enough translations of his poems are available in English, and more
importantly, that the selection of poems in the translated volumes, with some
important exceptions, are based on the popularity of the ‘nature’ or ‘romantic’
poems.
As a result, the more complex urban inter-war, and postwar poems remain
largely on the fringe of the editor’s agenda. My attempt in this paper can
therefore be best described as an overview of the negotiations and
incommensurabilities that the translators of Jibanananda Das’ poetry have faced
over a little more than the last fifty years.
Lucy Rosenstein (South Asia, SOAS)
Theory versus Practice:
Some Thoughts on Postcolonial Translation with Special Reference to Hindi
In a long introduction to his translations of short stories by the Hindi writer
Nirmal Verma Prasenjit Gupta argues that any translation of Indian writing done
by a Western translator is an act of neo-colonialism and ‘damages the original’.
He also asserts that translation from Indian languages into English is problematic
for the translator ‘located in India’ too, since it strengthens the position of
English ‘the language of Western neo-colonialism’.
Similarly in Survival: An experience and an experiment in translating modern Hindi
poetry Harish Trivedi argues that English translations of Hindi texts ‘serve to
underline the supremacy of English vis-à-vis Hindi’. He also raises the question
of the English in which Indian texts are translated: should translators subjugate
‘the linguistically marked and flavoursome “Indian English” to the rather bland
Anglo-American idiom?
“The Art of Translation” Abstracts 11
This paper argues that there is a difference between ‘state-of-the-art
postmodernist English’ which artfully and deliberately uses foreignizing
strategies, and incompetent, awkward use of English which merely reveals lack
of ‘intimacy’ with the target language. In order to illustrate this point I discuss in
detail the translations of two recent Hindi poems.
I argue further that this kind of excessive ideologizing of translation theory
undermines translation practice. The nationality of a translator cannot be the
touchstone by which to measure the success of a translation. Moreover in the
contemporary post-modernist context any insistence on confining identities to
the straightjacket of nationality is bound to fail. It is the interplay of a variety of
constantly shifting identities that makes the post-modernist translator.
Translation theory can help translation practice only if it leaves behind
ideological reductionism and intellectual snobbery.
References
Anamika, 1998: Anu∑†up (Delhi: Kitabghar).
Anamika ?: Translation’, Indian literature 188, pp. 21-2.
Anamika: ‘Homework’, unpublished.
Bassnett, S. & H. Trivedi (eds), 1999: Postcolonial translation: theory and practice
((London &New York: Routledge).
Benjamin, W., 2000: ‘The task of the translator’ in Venuti (ed.): The translation
studies reader (London &New York: Routledge).
Gupta, Prasenjit (ed. & tr.), 2000: Indian errant: Selected stories of Nirmal Verma
(Delhi: Indialog Publications Pvt. Ltd.).
Simon, Sherry, 1996: Gender in Translation: Cultural identity and the politics of
transmission (London &New York: Routledge).
Snell, Rupert, 1993: ‘Ajneya translates Ajneya: The Nilambari poems’, India
International Centre Quarterly, vol.20 (4), pp. 110-28.
Spivak, Gayatri, 2000: ‘The politics of translation’ in Venuti (ed.) The translation
studies reader (London &New York: Routledge).
Venuti, Lawrence, 1993: ‘Translation as cultural politics: regimes of
domestication in English’, Textual Practice, 7.2.
Weissbort, D. & G. Rathi (eds), 1994: Survival: An experience and an experiment in
translating modern Hindi poetry (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi).
Ridder Samsom (African Studies, Humboldt, Berlin)
Tomorrow Means Loneliness:
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Observations from Three Swahili-Dutch Poetical Encounters
One of the oldest Swahili manuscripts, “Kasida ya Hamziya”, dating from the
early 18th century or even earlier (1652), is a Swahili version of the Arabic poem
“Umm al-Qura”, popularly known as “al-Hamziyya”. It is what we used to call
an ‘interlinear translation’ of a poem by the 13th century Egyptian poet,
Muhammad ibn Said al-Busiry. Indeed, the history of Swahili poetry displays
many examples of translations into Swahili. So far, not much work has been done
on the analysis of the procedures, methods and strategies that the translators,
often poets themselves, have used in rendering these foreign poems in their
mother tongue.
Since 1969, the festival ‘Poetry International (Rotterdam)’ brings poets from all
parts of the world together. Their poems are performed in their original
languages, accompanied by translations in English and Dutch. Often poets at the
festival take part in a number of sessions, translating work by one or two fellow
poets into their own languages. As the translator of three contemporary Swahili
poets, who were performing at ‘Poetry International’ (1984, 1991, 1999), I have
been participating in these translation workshops.
My talk will focus on translations from Dutch/English into Swahili by Ahmed
Sheikh Nabhany (Lamu, 1927), Abdilatif Abdalla (Mombasa, 1946) and Haji Gora
Haji (Kokoni, Tumbatu, 1933).
I will address issues of re- and transcreation, cultural reinterpretation, prosodic
rules as a stipulation for Swahili poetry, dialogue poetry, and the source as
inspiration for what is no longer a translated rendering, but a new piece of art.
Discussing an initiation song that Haji Gora Haji presented as ‘untranslatable
poetry’, I will try to show the conceived limits of translation, whereas I take the
birth of two new poems in Dutch, relating to the encounters between the Dutch
and Swahili poets, as the result of the attempt to push beyond those limits.