Literary Translation Essay

Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a au indeedtic ruling of literariness with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction its methodologies and addresses to its subject. This touch of literariness is crucial for the theoretical thinking or so literary comment. In this paper, I have attempted to analyze various recent theoretical positions to the think over of literary alineation and sought to understand them in the circumstance of the discipline in the field of literary studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century.The recent developments in the literary studies have radic entirelyy questi championd the traditional essentialist nonion of literariness and the idea of female genitalson from various theoretical military positions. I have contrasted the traditional discourse on literary description with the recent discourse in order to highlight the shift in the touch of literariness and its impact on interpreting theory. The traditional essentialist go about to take holds, which Lefevere (1988173) c e trulys the corpus come along is base on the Romantic notion of writings which sees the author as a quasi-divine actor possessing genius.He is believed to be the origin of the Creation that is Original, Unique, organic, transcen dental and thusly sacred. deracination hence is a mere copy of the unique entity, which by definition is uncopy-able. As the representative is not the origin of the work of art, he does not possess genius, and he is grappleed merely a drudge, a proletariat, and a shudra in the literary Varna body. This traditional approach is break-of-pocket to the Platonic-Christian metaphysical underpinning of the Western culture.The original versus copy dichotomy is deeply root in the Western thought. This is the reason why the West has been traditionally contradictory and allergic to the notion of interpretation. The traditional discussion of the problem s of literary displacement considers conclusion equivalents not just for lexis, syntax or imageions, but in any case for features deal style, genre, figurative language, historical rhetorical belongingss, polyvalence, connotations as salubrious as denotations, ethnical items and culture- specialized concepts and measure outs.The choices do by the transcribers wish the decision whether to retain rhetorical features of the character language text or whether to retain the historical stylistic dimension of the original be drive all the more grievous in the case of literary rendering. For instance, whether to transl have Chaucer into old Marathi or modern atomic number 18 truly important. In the case of translating poetry, it is vital for a translator to steady down whether the verse should be translated into verse, or into free verse or into prose. to the highest degree of the scholars and translators bid Jakobson (1991151) believe that in the case of poetry tho ugh it is by definition unrealizable only inventive transposition is possible . It is the creative dimension of variation that comes to fore in the translation of poetry though nobody come outs to be sure of what is meant by creativity in the set-back place. The word is charged with theological-Romantic connotations typical of the corpus approach to literature.The misgivings around which the deliberations about translation at bottom such(prenominal) a conceptual framework atomic number 18 made argon so whizr stereotyped and limited as the literary text, specially a poem is unique, organic building block and original is the translation possible at all? Should translation be literal or free? Should it emphasize the content or the form? Can a faithful translation be beautiful? The answers to the question range from atomic number 53 extreme to the opposite and usually end in near severalize of a compromise.The heavy(p) writers and translators gave their soundly-known d ictums about translations, which reflected these traditional beliefs about it. For Dante (1265-1321) all poetry is untranslatable (cited by Brower 1966 271) and for Frost (1974-1963) poetry is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation (cited by Webb 203) while Yves Bonnefoy recites You dissolve translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of whatsoever early(a) (1991186-192). On the otherwise hand theorists resembling Pound (1929, 1950), Fitzgerald (1878) say the give way Dog is better than the dead Lion, believe in license in translation.The others like Nabokov (1955) believe The clumsiest of literal translation is a cubic yard times more useful than prettiest of paraphrase. Walter Benjamin, Longfellow (1807-81), Schleriermacher, Martindale (1984), seem to favour frequently more faithful translation or believe in extraneousizing the autochthonal language. While or so of the translators like Dryden atomic number 18 on the side of nigh s eparate of compromise among the deuce extremes.Lefevere has pointed out that most of the publications fathere on the basis of the concept of literature as a corpus attempt to provide translators with true pass offlines, dos and donts and that these writings ar basically prescriptive even if they dont soil their norms explicitly. These norms, according to Lefevere, argon not far removed from the poetics of a specific literary period or even run screwing the poetics of the period (1988173). Even the approaches based on the objective and scientific foundations of linguistics ar not entirely neutral in their preferences and implicit regard as judgements. around writings on translation based on this approach are obsessed with the translation process and coming up with some model for description of the process. As Theo Hermans (19859-10) correctly observes that in spite of some impressive semiotic enclosureinology, complex schemes and diagrams illustrating the mental process of decoding messages in one medium and encoding them in another(prenominal), they could hardly describe the existing conversion that takes place indoors the human mind, that blackest of black boxes.Lefevere notes, the descriptive approach was not precise useful when it came to make up ones mind what unafraid translation is and what is bad. nearly of recent developments in translation theory mind for alternatives to these essentializing approaches. Instead of considering literature as an autonomous and independent domain, it sees it in oftentimes broader social and ethnical framework. It sees literature as a social institution and related to other social institutions. It examines the complex interconnections amid poetics, politics, metaphysics, and storey.It borrows its analytical in any casels from various social sciences like linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, economics, and psychoanalysis. It is closely allied to the discipline of cultural studies, as discus sed by Jenks (1993187) in using culture as a descriptive rather than normative category as fountainhead as working indoors an spread out concept of culture, which rejects the high versus low stratification. It is keenly inte embossmented in the historical and semi policy-making dimension of literature.Paradigm shift to use Theo Hermans phrase or the pagan turn in the discipline of translation theory has made a evidential impact in the way we look at translation. translation is as a form of intercultural communication raising the problems that are not merely at the verbal level or at the linguistic level. As Talgeri and Verma (19883) rightly point out, a word is, essentially a cultural memory in which the historical experience of the edict is embedded. H. C.Trivedi (1971 3) observes that while translating from an Indian language into English one is face with deuce main problems first one has to deal with concepts which require an understanding of Indian culture and secondly, one has to arrive at TL meaning equivalents of references to trusted objects in SL, which includes features absent from TL culture. The cognisance that one does not look for merely verbal equivalents but also for cultural equivalents, if there are any, goes a long way in religious serviceing the translator to decide the strategies he or she has to use.Translation then is no longer a problem of merely finding verbal equivalents but also of understand a text encoded in one semiotic placement with the help of another. The notion of intertextuality as formulated by the semiotician Julia Kristeva is extremely signifi gaget in this regard. She points out that any signifying proof or practice already consists of other modes of cultural signification (198859-60).A literary text would include not only other verbal texts but also other modes of signification like food, fashion, local medicinal trunks, metaphysical establishments, traditional and customary narratives like myths, lit erary texts, legends as well as literary conventions like genres, literary devices, and other symbolic structures. It would be almost tautological to state that the elements of the text, which are specific to the culture and the language, would be untranslatable. The whole enterprise of finding cultural equivalents raises awareness of the difference and mistakableities between the cultures .It also brings into focus the important question of cultural identity. Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira (199942) remarks that it is ultimately impossible to translate one cultural identity into another. So the act of translation is intimately related to the question of cultural identity, difference and similarity. A rather interesting approach to literary translation comes from Michel Riffaterre (1992 204-217).He separates literary and non-literary use of language by state that literature is different because i) it semioticicizes the discursive features e.g. lexical selection is made morphophonemicall y as well as semantically, ii) it substitutes semiosis for mimesis which gives literary language its indirection, and iii) it has the textuality that integrates semantic components of the verbal episode (the ones open to linear decoding)-a theoretically open-ended sequence-into one closed, finite semiotic, brass that is , the parts of a literary texts are vitally linked to the whole of the text and the text is more or less(prenominal) self contained. consequently the literary translation should reflect or imitate these differences. He considers a literary text as an artefact and it contains the signals, which mark it as an artifact. Translation should also imitate or reflect these markers. He goes on to say that as we perceive a certain text as literary based on certain presuppositions we should render these literariness inducing presuppositions.Though this seems rather like traditional and formalist approach, what should be noted here is that Riffaterre is perceiving literariness in a rather different way while considering the problems of literary translation literariness is in no way the essence of a text and a literary text is, for Riffatere one that which contains the signs which makes it obvious that it is a cultural artefact.Although he conceives of literary text as self-contained outline, Riffatere too, like many other contemporary approaches sees it as a sub-system of cultural semiotic system. However, if one is to consider Riffateres notion of text in contrast to Kristevas notion of intertextuality one feels that Riffaterre is probably simplifying the problem of cultural barriers to translatability. The assumption that literary text is a cultural artefact and is related to the other social systems is widespread these days.Some of the most important theorization based on this assumption has come from provocative and insightful perspectives of theorists like Andre Lefevere, Gideon Toury, Itamar Evan -Zohar, and Theo Hermans. These theorists are indeb ted to the concept of literature as system as propounded by Russian Formalists like Tynianov, Jakobson, and Czechoslovakian Structuralists like Mukarovsky and Vodicka, the French Structuralists thinkers, and the Marxist thinkers who considered literature as a arm of the superstructure.The central idea of this point of gaze is that the study of literary translation should begin with a study of the translated text rather than with the process of translation, its role, occasion and reception in the culture in which it is translated as well as the role of culture in influencing the process of decision making that is translation. It is fundamentally descriptive in its orientation (Toury 1985).Lefevere maintains, Literature is one of the systems which constitute the system of discourses (which also contain disciplines like physics or law. ) usually referred to as a civilization, or a federation (198816). Literature for Lefevere is a subsystem of society and it interacts with other systems.He observes that there is a control factor in the literary system which sees to it that this particular system does not fall too far out of pace with other systems that make up a society (p.17). He astutely observes that this control function works from outside(a) of this system as well as from inside.The control function within the system is that of supreme poetics, which can be said to consist of two components one is an inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, symbols the other a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be, in the society at large. (p. 23). The educational establishment dispenses it.The second controlling factor is that of financial support. It can be exerted by persons, not necessarily the Medici, Maecenas or Louis XIV only, groups or persons, such as a religious grouping or a political party, a royal court, publishers, whether they have a virtual monopoly on the book trade or not and, last but not least, the media. The patronage consists of three elements the ideological component, the financial or economic component, and the element of spot (p. 18-19).The system of literature, observes Lefevere, is not deterministic but it acts as a series of reserves on the reader, writer, or rewriter. The control mechanism within the literary system is represented by dilettantes, reviewers, teachers of literature, translators and other rewriters who will adapt works of literature until they can be claimed to correspond to the poetics and the ideology of their time. It is important to note that the political and social aspect of literature is emphasised in the system approach.The cultural politics and economics of patronage and publicity are seen as essential from literature. Rewriting is the key word here which is utilize by Lefevere as a convenient umbrella-term to refer to most of the activities traditionally connected with literary studies criticism, as well as translatio n, anthologization, the writing of literary history and the alter of texts-in fact, all those aspects of literary studies which establish and validate the value-structures of canons.Rewritings, in the widest sense of the term, adapt works of literature to a given audience and/or bring the ways in which readers read a work of literature. (60-61). The texts, which are rewritten, elegant for a certain audience, or adapted to a certain poetics, are the refracted texts and these maintains Lefevere are responsible for the canonized positioning of the text (p179).Interpretation (criticism), then and translation are probably the most important forms of refracted literature, in that they are the most influential ones he notes (198490) and says, One never translates, as the models of the translation process based on the Buhler/Jakobson communication model, featuring disembodied senders and receivers, carefully separate from all outside interference by that most effective expedient, the cover line, would have us believe, under a sort of purely linguistic bell jar.Ideological and poetological motivations are always present in the production, or the non production of translations of literary works Translation and other refractions, then, play a vital part in the organic evolution of literatures, not only by introducing new texts, authors and devices, but also by introducing them in a certain way, as part of a wider design to try to influence that evolution (97) . Translation becomes one of the parts of the refraction the rather long term dodging, of which translation is only a part, and which has as its aim the manipulation offoreign work in the service of certain aims that are felt cum laude of pursuit in the native culture (1988204).This is indeed a mesomorphic theory to study translation as it places as much deduction to it as criticism and interpretation. Lefevere goes on to give some impressive analytical tools and perspectives for studying literary tra nslation, The ideological and poetological constraints under which translations are produced should be explicated, and the dodge devised by the translator to deal with those constraints should be described does he or she make a translation in a more descriptive or in a more refractive way?What are the intentions with which he or she introduces foreign elements into the native system? Equivalence, fidelity, freedom and the like will then be seen more as functions of a strategy adopted under certain constraints, rather than absolute requirements, or norms that should or should not be imposed or respected. It will be seen that great ages of translation occur whenever a given literature recognizes another as more prestigious and tries to emulate it.Literatures will be seen to have less need of translation(s) when they are convinced of their own superiority. It will also be seen that translations are often used (think of the Imagists) by adherents of an alternative poetics to challenge t he dominant poetics of a certain period in a certain system, especially when that alternative poetics cannot use the work of its own adherents to do so, because that work is not yet written (198498-99).Another major theorist working on similar lines as that of Lefevere is Gideon Toury (1985). His approach is what he calls Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). He emphasizes the fact that translations are facts of one system only the level system and it is the target or recipient culture or a certain section of it, which serves as the initiator of the decision to translate and consequently translators enlist first and foremost in the interest of the culture into which they are translating.Toury very systematically charts out a cadence by step guide to the study of translation. He stresses that the study should begin with the empirically observed data, that is, the translated texts and topic from there towards the reconstruction of non-observational facts rather than the other way round as is usually done in the corpus based and traditional approaches to translation. The most interesting thing about Tourys approach (1984) isthat it takes into consideration things like pseudo-translation or the texts foisted off as translated but in fact are not so.In the very beginning when the problem of distinguishing a translated text from a non-translated text arises, Toury assumes that for his procedure translation will be interpreted to be any target-language utterance which is presented or regarded as such within the target culture, on whatever grounds. In this approach pseudotranslations are just as legitimate objects for study within DTS as genuine translations.They may prove to be highly instructive for the establishment of the general notion of translation as shared by the members of a certain target language community. Then the next step in Tourys DTS would be to study their acceptability in their respective target language system followed by mapping these texts, Via their organic elements as TRANSLATIONAL PHENOMENA, on their counterparts in the appropriate source system and text, identified as such in the course of a comparative degree analysis, as SOLUTIONS to TRANSLATIONAL PROBLEMS.Then a scholar should proceed to break and describe the (one-directional, irreversible) RELATIONSHIPS obtaining between the members of each pair and finally to go on to refer these relationships- by means of the mediating functional-relational notion of TRANSLATION EQUIVALENCE, effected as pertinent to the corpus under study-to the overall CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION be the corpus. It is these last two concepts which form the ultimate goal of systematic studies within DTSonly when the nature of the prevailing concept of translation has been established will it become possible to reconstruct the possible process of devotion and DECISION-MAKING which was involved in the act of translating in question as well as the set of CONSTRAINTS which were actually accepte d by the translator. (198521) Tourys step by step procedure is descriptive, empirical and inductive, beginning with the observed facts and then moving towards uncovering the strategies and techniques used by translator and the implicit notion and presupposition of comparison rather than treating the notion of equivalence as given.The concept of constraint puts him in the company of Lefevere. The essential question is not of defining what is equivalence in general, whether it is possible or not, or of how to find equivalents, but of discovering what is meant by equivalence by the community or group within the target culture. These approaches are also extremely useful in the area of comparative literary studies and comparativists like Durisin (1984184-142) whose approach is in many ways similar to Lefevere and Toury in focusing on function and relation of literary translation in the target or the recipient culture.He is of opinion that it is impossible to speak of theories of transl ation without applying the comparative procedure, as the aim of analysis of a translation is to determine the extent to which it belongs to the developmental series of the native literature.He like the other two theorists discussed, considers the translation procedure as well as the selection of the text being primarily determined by the integral need of the recipient literature, by its capacity for absorbing the literary phenomenon of a different national literature, work, etc.and for reacting in a specific manner (integrational or differtiational) in its aesthetic features as well as the norm of time.This type of theorization is far from the traditional paradigm of translation theory that is obsessed with the ideas of fidelity and betrayal, and the notions of free vs. literal translation. Thanks to the proponents of system approach to literary translation, translation studies can boast of becoming a discipline in its own right due to the development of significant theoretical m odels.However, the problem with Leferverian system is its terminology. The words refracted and rewriting presuppose that a text can be written for the first time and that it exists in a pre-non-refracted state. These presuppositions take him dangerously close to the very corpus based approach he is so vigorously attacking. Perhaps Derridian philosophy can explain why one is always in danger of be to the very system of thought one is criticizing. Another obvious terminus ad quem of these types of theories is that they are rather reductionist in their approach.Though Lefevere maintains that the system concept holds that the refracted texts are mainly responsible for the canonized status of the corpus and the essential quality alone could not have given canonized status for them he fails to point out the exact features and qualities of the literary text which crochet refractions.Then there are problematic words like the system which Lefevere points out refer to a heuristic construc t that does not unimpeachably possess any kind of ontological reality. and is merely used to designate a model that promises to help make sense of a very complex phenomenon, that of writing, indication and rewriting of literature (1985 225). Besides types of theories are descriptive and hence have a limited use for the translator as well as translation criticism, which is a rather unattended branch of translation studies till date. Lefevere says that translation criticism hardly rises much above, he is wrong because Im right level (198499).He also points out that it is impossible to define once and for all, what a good translation is just as it is impossible to define once and for all what good literature is. And critic A, judging on the basis of poetics A will rule translation A good because it happens to be constructed on the basis of the principles laid down in A. Critic B, on the other hand, operating on the basis of poetics B, will blessed translation A and praise translat ion B, for obvious reasons (1988176). He believes, Translators can be taught languages and a certain awareness of how literature works. The rest is up to them.They make mistakes only on the linguistic level. The rest is strategy. (198499). The perspective of course is that of a value relativist and a culture relativist, which seem to be the politically correct and in stances today, but the stance can be seen as symptomatic in the light of deeper moral crises in the big philosophical scene. An ambitious and insightful essay by Raymond van den Broeck, Second Thought on Translation Criticism A exercise of its Analytic Function (1985) attempts to go beyond the mere descriptive and uncourageous approach of Lefevere and Toury which tries to incorporate the ideas of their theories.Like Toury and Lefevere, Broeck stresses the importance of examination of the norms among all those involved in the production and reception of translations and remarks that it is the foremost task of transla tion criticism to render greater awareness of these norms but he also gives room for the critics personal value judgements. The critic may or may not agree with the particular method chosen by the translator for a particular purpose. He is entitled to doubt the effectiveness of the chosen strategies, to criticize decisions taken with regard to certain details.To the extent that he is himself known with the functional features of the source text, he will be a true(predicate) guide in telling the reader where target textemes balance source textemes and where in the critics view, they do not. But he mustiness never confuse his own initial norms with those of the translator (p. 60-61). Broeck attempts a tax deduction of the target culture oriented inductive descriptive approach and the disreputable task of evaluating translation and the result is indeed very useful and applaudable as translation evaluation is a neglected branch of translation studies.As opposed to this descript ive approach is Venutis The Translators Invisibility (1995). With a normative and extremely insightful point of view he examines historically how the norm of fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English. He makes a strong case for foreignness and awkwardness of the translated text as a arbitrary value in the evaluation of translation. The other approaches to the study of translation which seem to be gaining ground lay greater emphasis on the political dimension of literary translation.The more recent literary theories like parvenue Historicism are interested in reading the contexts of position relations in a literary text. In his critical exposition of New Historicism and Cultural materialism, John Brannigan (1998) states, New Historicism is a mode of critical interpretation which privileges power relations as the most important context for texts of all kinds. As a critical practice it treats literary texts as a quadric eps femoris where power relations are made visible (6). Such a perspective when applied to the texts that communicate across cultures can yield very important insights and open an exciting way of thinking about translation.Tejaswini Niranjanas book Siting Translation, History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (1995) examines translation theories from this perspective. In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and in peerity of relations between peoples, races, languages. In translation, the relationship between the two languages is hardly on equal terms.Niranjana draws attention to a rather overlooked fact that translation is between languages, which are verticalally related, and that it is a mode of representation in another culture. When the relationship between the cultures and languages is that of colonizer and colonized, translation produces strategies of containment. By employing certain modes of representing the other-which it thereby also brings into beingtranslation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what Edward verbalize calls representations or objects without history (p.3).She points out in the introduction that her concern is to dig into the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity in several kinds of writing on translation (p. 9). Harish Trivedi (1997) has demonstrated how translation of Anatole Frances Thais by Premchand was distinctly a political act in the sense that it selected a text which was not part of the literature of the colonial power and that it attempted a sort of liberation of Indian literature from the tutelage of the imperially-inducted master literature, English.St-Pierre observes the fact that translators when faced with references to specific aspects of the source culture may use a signifier of tactics, including non-translation, as part of their overall strategy and use many other complex tactics in order to reinvent their relations in a postcolonial context (1997423). Mahasweta Sengupta has offered a rather engaging and perceptive reading of Rabindranath Tagores autotranslation of Gitanjali. She points out giving numerous examples, of how Rabindranath took immense liberties with his own Bengali originals in order to refashion his Bengali songs to suit the English sensibility.He modified, omitted, and rewrote his poems in the manner of the Orientalists to cater to his Western audience (1996). Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) believe that the hierarchic opponent between the original work and translation reflects the hierarchic opposition between the European colonizer culture and the colonized culture. This hierarchy, they observe, is Eurocentric, and its spread is associated with the history of colo nialization, imperialism and proselytization. Because of these historical reasons, radical theories of translation have come up in the former colonies.Recalling how members of a sixteenth century Brazilian tribe called Tupinamba ate a Catholic priest, an act which could have even been an act of homage, Bassnett and Trivedi extract that the metaphor of cannibalism could be used for the act of translation as it is one of the ways former colonies might find a way to stir themselves and their own culture and to reject the feeling of being derivative and naming copy, without at the same time rejecting everything that might be of value that comes from Europe.Else Ribeiro Pires Viera has considered the translation theory of Haroldo de Campos, a renowned Brazilian translator who uses very interesting metaphors for translating like, perceiving translation as blood transfusion and vampirization which actually nourishes the translator and thus subverting the hierarchic polarities of the pri vileged original and inauthentic translation in a post colonial context. This type of approach to translation promotes the awareness of political and historical field in which translation operates among the readers as well as the translators.Another significant statement on The Politics of Translation comes from Gayatri Chakaravorty Spivak (199895-118) who conceives of translation as an important strategy in pursuing the larger feminist agenda of achieving womens solidarity. The task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the working of gendered agency. Translation can give access to a larger number of feminists working in various languages and cultures.She advises that a translator must surrender to the text, as translation is the most intimate act of reading. It is an act of submission to the rhetorical dimension of the text. This act for Spivak is more of an erotic act than ethical. She also advises that ones first obligation in understanding solidarit y is to learn other womens mother tongue rather than consider solidarity as an a priori given.