Perspectives in Translation Studies [1 ed.] 9781443815567, 9781443812566

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Perspectives in Translation Studies

Perspectives in Translation Studies

Edited by

Floriana Popescu

Perspectives in Translation Studies, Edited by Floriana Popescu This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Floriana Popescu and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1256-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1256-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Chapter One. Translation Studies as an Academic Discipline Introduction: From Translation to Translation Studies Floriana Popescu ......................................................................................... 2 Translation Studies as a Fully-Fledged Discipline Mine Yazici ................................................................................................. 6 Chapter Two. Studying Literary Translations Introduction: Interview with a Translator Ruxanda Bontilă and Petru Iamandi .......................................................... 22 Shandying Translation, Translating Shandeism Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă............................................................................ 26 Translation Problems for Lithuanian Translators Raised by English Dysphemistic Forms of Address: the Example of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Neringa Dziedraviþinjtơ.............................................................................. 54 Translating the Poetic Untranslatable Petru Iamandi............................................................................................. 70 Censorship and Ideology in Literary Translations: The Case of Robert Burns’ Poetry in the Soviet Union Natalia Kaloh Vid...................................................................................... 77 Chapter Three. Studying the Translation of Words, Collocations and Proverbs Introduction: Translation and Norm Elena Croitoru ........................................................................................... 96

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Table of Contents

The Translation Potential of Verba Sentiendi in English and Romanian with Special Reference to Verbs of Hearing Gabriela Dima ......................................................................................... 101 Translating ESP Eponyms into Romanian Floriana Popescu ..................................................................................... 110 From Collocations to Harmonic Phrases in Translation Elena Croitoru ......................................................................................... 131 On Translating Proverbs Tamara Lăcătuúu ..................................................................................... 144 Chapter Four. Translating Films, Translating Cultures, Translating Subcultures Introduction: On Film Translation and Interpretation Michaela Praisler ..................................................................................... 166 Globalization Challenges for National Film Translation: Deficiency in Cultural Adaptation Norms Khatuna Beridze ...................................................................................... 169 Contributors............................................................................................. 198 Index........................................................................................................ 200

PREFACE

In 2006, Romania’s prospective accession to the European Union opened new windows to professional translators and interpreters aspiring to develop a successful and rewarding career in European institutions. Representatives of these institutions organized (two) meetings with academics training translators and with professional translators in Bucharest, with a view to exploring the native potential in the field. In the year preceding the accession, this event was equally felt to be incentive to both academic teaching and learning communities, now facing the challenge of providing the system with highly qualified professionals and creating a real sense of competition for students in their search for professional opportunities. The fifth of the largest Romanian towns, situated on the left bank of the Danube in the eastern part of the country, GalaĠi has had a history different from most of the other places in the country. Its geographic position has always facilitated commerce and intercultural communication and along the centuries, it has hosted people or groups of people coming from far and remote countries to construct their own business or do business with locals, to work here for consulates1 and legations, to establish themselves and to live here for shorter or longer stays. Before the world wars Austrians, English, Turks represented the transient minorities who co-existed with better represented minorities like the Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Italians. The two most important industrial sites of GalaĠi, both privatized after the 1989 events, continued the tradition of intercultural exchanges, once the Indian owner of the ArcelorMittal steel plant and the Dutch owner of the Damen Shipyard started developing their business here. In addition, international conferences started being organized in the region and interpreters were required. It is against this background that the Faculty of Letters at “Dunӽrea de Jos” University of GalaĠi, România decided to organize postgraduate 1 In his monographic study on GalaĠi, Istoria oraúului GalaĠi de la origini până la 1918, [The History of the Town of Galati from is Beginnins to 1918] GalaĠi: PortoFranco, Păltânea (1998: 95-183) mentions that at the end of the 19th century the consulates of France, Austria, United Kingdom and Italy were active in the public life of the town.

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Preface

studies to train professional translators. Given the previous experience and the promising future ahead, our faculty hosting an international conference on translation studies was a natural thing to happen. The 1st and the 2nd Annual International Conferences Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views, hosted by the Faculty of Letters2, “Dunӽrea de Jos” University of GalaĠi, Romania in 2006 and 2007, were carefully planned so as to become a forum where the young joined the experienced professionals and academics could share opinions, could talk about their success and their questions which still could hardly find an answer. This is why the contributors herein outline a complex and multilingual perspective on various topics, whose motto could be diversity within unity. In spite of the diversity rising from the envisaged topics as well as the participants’ nationality, its unity was ensured by their one and only major concern, translation studies. The metaphorical structure the book offers (with only one study in both the opening and the closing chapters and its core of two chapters, each with four articles or studies) invites to imagining that between the two “cover” chapters translation studies reveal a never-ending story (where novels will always be written and, some of them, translated and where the migrating labour force requires specialist knowledge, at least for communication purposes) and where the answer to a question will always make room for another question… The authors contributing to this volume provide answers to questions translators may have had to answer in their attempts to make a foreign culture/world look familiar or at least similar to their native environment. They discuss translation strategies which were applied in the translating of English or American novels or poetry into other languages (Georgian, Lithuanian, Russian and Romanian). In its main section, Translation Studies as a Fully-fledged Discipline, chapter one describes the Turkish remake of the itinerary of translation studies from practical concerns into an academic subject. By its introduction, chapter two breaks the seemingly regular pattern of the volume, introducing an interview, for the following two reasons:

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Our heartfelt thanks go to A.N.C.S., the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, “Dunӽrea de Jos” University of GalaĠi, on the one hand, for their generous financial support of this conference, and on the other hand, to the team of the English Department at the Faculty of Letters (Ioana Ivan-Mohor, Isabela Merilӽ, Mariana Neagu, Lidia Mihaela Necula, Ligia Pîrvu, SteluĠa Stan, Daniela ùorcaru, Daniela ğuchel, Antoanela Marta Dumitraúcu) for their steady efforts and dedication in the preparation and unfolding of the event.

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a) the simple wording of both questions and answers will raise (prospective readers/or) learners’ awareness of translation issues (such as, the “life expectancy” of a translation product, a translator’s skills and sound knowledge of two cultures, as well as pedagogical aspects of the translation teaching/learning/assessing process) b) the semi-formal style of the interview underlying both its oral character and its friendly tone provides both insights into a translator’s mind and the fruit of the translator’s decade-long experience. The four contributions making up the body of chapter two uncover problems of the translators of English or American literature and it was thus arranged as to consider both novels and poetry. Research in Translation Studies, as reflected in chapter three, focuses on translational aspects of smaller units of language. The contributions are ordered gradually so as to first present discreet words, such as the verbs to hear and a auzi, as well as recategorized or one-word eponyms. The next approach refers to more complex and difficult lexical combinations, the collocations. Although proverbs represent a sample of traditional legacy, travelling from culture to culture, they were included in the chapter as another example of lexical combination, i.e., the phraseological unit. The study of translational issues in paremiology will be inspiring, due to its double perspective, as both English and Romanian are, in turn, source and target languages. Secondly, the proverbs in focus cover only one topic: friendship and, finally, their analysis is based on obvious parallelism (be it semantic, lexical or syntactic). Even more complex issues on the process and practice of translation have to be solved in the case of film translating explored in chapter four. Fine observations, refined and authorized commentary, a wide range of examples are presented as particular aspects of translation in a globalized world. This book is purposefully compiled to look like the portrait of a conference (at least one in our university), namely with scholarly, welldocumented, accurate, detailed contributions and thorough analyses, on the one hand, and with at least one “playful” and “simple” (please, read accessible) presentation or approach, on the other. As an editor, my conviction is that not only teachers and students concerned with translation studies but professional translators and interpreters as well, will find this book resourceful, practical, accessible and useful in their professional endeavours.

CHAPTER ONE TRANSLATION STUDIES AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

INTRODUCTION: FROM TRANSLATION TO TRANSLATION STUDIES FLORIANA POPESCU

Nowadays, the term translation involves a high degree of complexity notwithstanding that it is a “registered” mark of a particular scientific market equally shared by theorists and practitioners. Bassnett (2002:1121) thoroughly describes not only the meanings assigned to this term1 but also its close relationship with the status accorded to the translator as compared to that of the writer. For centuries, an ever-growing translation heritage has been contributed to. Writings stand as proof that the bulk of literary, scientific, technological, documentary, historic, philosophical, political translation products have transferred ideas from one culture to another serving as a vehicle to present in understandable and interesting form the knowledge which should be passed on not only from generation to generation but also from one culture to another. Practitioners, who undertake the heavy burden of making translations, rarely confess about the hardships they have to go through in their quest of the perfect solution as responsible mediators between two cultures and languages. Gradually, the question of translation evaluation has gained contour and translators themselves comment on translations and “concentrate on exposing the frailties of other translators” (Bassnett 2002: 13). In addition to translators’ explorations and questioning the “quality” of the product translation, theorists have developed debates on the current-state-of-affairs in the same field; they have advanced new theories and created methods of text interpretation or analysis. Now and then, they open new research horizons to their academic or professional readership. Such an opening was witnessed in 1972, when James Holmes “gave a seminal paper on ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ in which he also suggested, through a ‘map’, possible divisions and subdivisions of the new field” (Dimitriu 2005: 17).

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Dimitriu considers this to be the moment when Holmes2 signs “the birth certificate of the modern discipline of Translation Studies” (2005: 17). A few years later, in 1978, Translation Studies is defined to be “the discipline which concerns itself with problems raised by the production and description of translations” (Lefevre qtd in Bassnett 2002:11) whose goal is “to produce a theory which can also be used as a guideline for the production of translations” (Lefevre qtd in Dimitriu 2005: 18). Holmes3, the theorist successful in outlining a new academic field of research, distinguishes two main strands within his suggested framework: pure translation studies and applied translation studies. The former strand (in our tabular mapping) is a double-folded pursuit, in that, theoretical aspects may be related to either the creation of theories developing principles applicable in the description of the translation process or the description proper of the phenomena occurring in the translation process. Under the theoretical branch, Holmes distinguishes between a general translation theory and partial translation theories. These last theories may be medium- or area- restricted or they may concern themselves with “parts” of the translated text, being text-type restricted, time restricted or problem restricted. Descriptive translation studies may be: a) product-oriented–in such a case, approaches attempt to describe already existing translations; b) process-oriented–approaches of this type aim to investigate the mental processes which unfold during the translation process; c) function-oriented–these approaches describe the role translations may play in the culture receiving them. The latter strand, applied translation studies considers those activities addressing practical matters (the training of translators, the aids to be used in translation activities as well as translation criticism). In his paper, Holmes briefly refers to two important research fields: the study of Translation Studies itself and the study of the best methods and models to be applied in the case of particular types of research in the discipline. Now, that the research framework has been established, Translation Studies historiographers, based on the research focus, distinguish the following stages in the evolution of this discipline during the second half of the 20th century: a) in the early 1960s the field of Translation Studies is characterized by “the growing acceptance of the study of linguistics and stylistics

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Introduction: From Translation to Translation Studies

within literary criticism that has led to developments in critical methodology…” (Bassnett 2002: 13) b) in the late 1970s, i.e. its early years, literary translations provide the scope for scientific scrutiny, c) in the 1980s, the focus moves towards cultural studies “involving ideological pressures […] that may be associated with the translator’s work” (Dimitriu 2005: 19); d) in the late 1990s the discipline is seen to address linguistics and thus, “to occupy a new space of its own” (Bassnett qtd in Dimitriu 2005: 19). Familiar with western literature, some of the eastern academics agree with its statements (Croitoru 2007: 205) acknowledge Translation Studies to be “indeed a discipline in its own right: not merely a minor branch of comparative literary study, nor yet a specific area of linguistics, but a vastly complex field with many far-reaching ramifications” (Bassnett 2002: 11).

and bring their colourful touch to the ultimate rank in Holmes’ 1972 envisaged map. Some others aim to verify the validity of the Translation Studies theories put forward by western literature within the Translation Studies framework of their local research community and they succeed in proving it. Chapter 1 provides a description of the stages covered by Translation Studies in its gradual and steady transformation into a fully-fledged discipline. Although Translation Studies also covers a wide range of pedagogical activities, such as the tailoring of translation studies syllabi, the creation of a data base to include both original products and their translated versions, the drawing of comprehensive lists of reliable translation aids – dictionaries, glossaries, lexicons, developing criteria for testing translation skills, patterns or scoring sheets for translation assessment, etc., many of these aspects were avoided in the specialist literature. In her case study, Yazici, creates and comments on a regional research framework wherein she places several paradigms enabling her to focus, among other things, on the empirical study, the system theory and the interdisciplinary character of translation studies, as academic interests. The case is based on the dissertations carried out by PhD and MA students revealing the evolution of these academic interests into the fully-fledged discipline of Translation Studies seen through the Turkish perspective.

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References Bassnett, S. 2002. Translation Studies, London: Routledge Croitoru, E. 2007. “Explicitation and Deletion from the Perspective of Teaching LSP Translation”, in Gálová, D. (ed.) Languages for Specific Purposes: Searching for Common Solutions, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 205-219 Dimitriu, R., 2005. The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies, Iaúi: Editura Institutul European.

Notes 1

Bassnett (2002: 11-21) mentions opinions in the literature to describe translation as “art”, “craft”, “science” and “neither a creative art nor an imitative art… but somewhere between the two”. 2 at the time, James Holmes, taught translation at the University of Amsterdam, and presented his paper at the 3rd International Conference of Applied Linguistics in Copenhagen 3 Holmes (qtd in Dimitriu 2005: 217) maps TS as a discipline with two major branches, but for practical purposes, we present it in a tabular form with letter/number indications to suggest the degrees of subordination: I. “Pure” Translation Studies, a branch which distinguishes between A. Theoretical 1. General 2. Partial a) Medium restricted b) area restricted c) rank restricted d) text-type restricted e) time restricted f) problem restricted B. Descriptive 1. product-oriented 2. process-oriented 3. function-oriented II. Applied Translation Studies which has to consider C. Translator training D. Translation aids E. Translation criticism

TRANSLATION STUDIES AS A FULLY-FLEDGED DISCIPLINE MINE YAZICI

Introductory remarks This paper tackles the adventure of Translation Studies in their timetaking process of becoming a fully-fledged discipline, as perceived from the angle of the Turkish experience, making it a regional research in the field. It first deals with its primary relations with other fields such as literary criticism, linguistics, and sociology; next, it considers secondary relations in the light of sociological approaches and analyzes its position as an autonomous field in maintaining its secondary relations. The issue of the system autonomy as well as its connectivity with other systems is discussed in the light of the system theory posed by Niklas Luhmann. With these concerns in my mind, I have developed a research model to study the position of Translation Studies as a fully-fledged discipline in Turkey. It has two goals: the former is making students gain academic awareness in their research doing and the latter is to prove in what way the interdisciplinary nature of Translation Studies does not create an obstacle in its becoming a fully-fledged discipline. For these purposes, MA and PhD dissertations defended between 1980 and 2006 were randomly selected, at first; next, paradigms such as main subjects, subfields of dissertations, their research topics and methods, goals and theoretical approaches, theoretical supports, the nature of their relations, be they primary or secondary, etc. were identified to determine their relations with other fields and their contribution to the field of Translation Studies in the gradual process of their emerging into a functionally-differentiated system. This case study serves not only to clarify the stages of process Translations Studies has gone through in its becoming a fully-fledged discipline, but it also aims at disclosing how empirical research can be done in the pitch of Translation Studies setting out from a regional research perspective.

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1. Interdisciplinary approaches in Turkish translation studies For the last two decades, Translation Studies has grown into a fullyfledged discipline almost all over the world, Turkey included. The subject of translation had been assumed to be a subfield of philology, linguistics or language teaching departments up till the ’80s. After the mid-1980s, with the opening of departments of translation studies in two leading staterun universities, i.e., Hacettepe University and Bogazici University respectively, their number has increased to fourteen1. Nevertheless, the number of three departments of linguistics has still remained unchanged, although studies in linguistics were first initiated in Istanbul University2 in 1947 by C.E Bazell (Kempson 1985:340-342). The primary relations of the departments of Translation Studies with the above-mentioned departments cannot be ignored. But the question here is whether they continue their relationship or cooperation with these departments or whether they have detached from each other completely. If this issue is to be discussed within the framework of Istanbul University, it can be claimed that they have been isolated from each other. What initiates this isolation refers not only to the relations within the sections, but also to the misconception of scientific autonomy. The division of sections has been made according to the languages studied in both departments; yet, the intra relations of the sections are stronger in the departments of Translation Studies than in the philology departments. The underlying reason for this is that the sections of department of translation studies share the same infrastructure with each other. It is for the same reason that students of different sections of languages have shared not only the same schedule, but they have also taken some common classes in the Translation Studies department. These classes are ‘translation theory’, ‘fields of linguistics’, ‘translation-oriented translation analysis’, philosophy, translation history and media, respectively3. However, this is not valid for the departments of Western languages. They claim linguistic diversity as a reason for the isolation of the sections. Meanwhile, they disregard the mere thing that they share the same field of study. It is true that knowledge of (a certain foreign) language is a prerequisite for the students to be admitted as undergraduates of these departments; yet, language cannot be related to the knowledge of a certain specific field. In other words, they disregard the fact that these departments have been established not on the basis of language knowledge, but on basis of the knowledge in a certain specific field. This results in not only lack of communication within the department, but also in the weakening of its interdisciplinary relations.

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Translation Studies as a Fully-Fledged Discipline

Nevertheless, a discipline gains its autonomy not by isolation, but by interdisciplinary relations. As long as a field has the methods and means to discern, compare and discuss its position and function in relation to the other, it will survive as a fully-fledged discipline. Therefore, one can deduce that ‘specialization’ is directly related to the interdisciplinary relations (Kurultay 2006: 283-296). Nowadays, even conventional disciplines have to conduct interdisciplinary studies to see the multifaceted aspects of truth. This means that, while currently disciplines have to preserve their defining features, they should not avoid getting into contact with other disciplines, at least for the sake of creating new fields of problematization. This approach will actually come to an end with proposing new subfields within the discipline. Otherwise, academic subjects will be condemned to remain as isolated efforts without any function at all. Accordingly, we can neither detach Translation Studies from interdisciplinary relations nor reject its autonomy as a fully-fledged discipline. Translation Studies is interdisciplinary from start to finish. This means that it can bring several findings from other fields, and modify them for its own use in such a way as to yield new theories and models for its own ends. Accordingly, the interdisciplinary research can be defined as a kind of academic study in which researchers introduce results of investigations from complementary fields into their own studies. This brings forth the issue of defining the relations of Translation Studies with other fields of study. There are two types of relations in translations, primary and secondary, and they will be outlined in what follows. Primary relationships can be defined as the relations that contribute to laying the foundations of a discipline. These relations broaden the scope of Translation Studies (TS from now) in such a way as to cause it to flourish as an autonomous field: thereby not only enriching its scope of study, but also helping it develop as an autopoietic (self-producing) system. Accordingly, “TS has primary relations with literature, linguistics, language learning, and sociology” (Munday 2001:182). And it is only through the retrospective rationalization of translations in spatial and temporal dimensions that TS has consolidated its theoretical basis. The direction of the relationship reverses in the case of secondary relationships. They are related not only to the performance of translations in specific fields, but also to the extent of the autonomy the discipline has acquired in the course of time. Just as TS consolidates its foundations by the support of its primary relationships, so does its contribution to translations in other fields increase through secondary relations. As opposed to retrospective direction of primary relations, secondary

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relations have the “prospective end” as a means of transfer of the universal heritage of knowledge (Munday 2001: 183).

2. A sociological account of Translation Studies as an interdisciplinary subject TS can grow into a scholarly study only after it has set up correlations between system and environment. Sociological relations first led to sociocultural studies: however, they have not yielded what is expected from translation studies. Starting from environment without any regard to linguistic material may endanger the foundations of TS, because even if Translation Studies is an interdisciplinary field it has to develop its own identity as well as its object of study out of the existing fields. This leads researchers to focusing their attention on system theories. In Niklas Luhmann's “social systems theory” (qtd in Vermeer 2006), “communication” is what constitutes the structure of a system. Since the main function of translation is to provide international communication, it fulfills the main condition of being acknowledged as a system. However, the existence of a system is bound by its potentiality to create a self reproducing system. Otherwise, it would dissolve back to the environment it emerges from. Therefore, a system can maintain itself as long as it reproduces itself in its own communication. Here, one can ask to what extent both translations themselves as well as the literature of speciality which they trigger will form a translation system or to what extent TS fulfills the conditions of the social system theory of being entitled as “a functionally differentiated system” in spite of its interdisciplinary nature? Moreover, one can question the efficiency of translation studies4 in creating a selfreproducing system. Since the core element of system theory is “communication”, actual translations can be referred to as one of the system fundamental components in terms of the translator's direct relationship with the source text. However, their function in the system is to provide communication not only between source texts and target texts, but also between the expectations of readers and previous translations readers may be familiar with. However, fulfilling the expectations related with anterior discourses has not been enough to form a scientific system. It is only when expectations are filtered and processed in such a way as to yield connectivity between anterior and posterior communications that we can mention the existence of a fully-fledged discipline. In this case, ‘expectations’ as structures of the system fix the conditions of

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Translation Studies as a Fully-Fledged Discipline

communications. That is to say that as long as the structures are in harmony with the process, a system can operate. It is for this reason that Luhmann linked the operation of systems to programmes. In this case, expectations related to translations are the building blocks of the translation system in that they reproduce translations in consideration for the expectations of the target culture (Vermeer 2006:10-33). This brings forth the issue of questioning the function of the syllabi; it is obvious that the main function of the syllabi is to diminish the degree of complexity in communication. However, in the process of complexity reduction, it creates its own language to provide connectivity between communications, which results in creating a self-referencing system. As long as it refers to itself, we can admit the existence of a syllabus of a discipline, be it simply scientific or academic. It can be claimed that a field of study can evolve into an autonomous discipline only on condition that it create such syllabi which process the meaning of the related knowledge in its own terms. Therefore, as long as researchers discern the heterogeneity of other disciplines and create self-referencing syllabi they will be able to claim the autonomy of TS against other disciplines (Hermans 1999:138-144).

3. TS as a fully-fledged discipline vs TS as an interdiscipline In the light of Luhmann's approach to system, it is inferable that gaining autonomy as fully-fledged discipline requires both “identification” and “problematization”. While “identification” refers to demarcating the borders of the field, “problematization” refers to discerning problems experienced in the field of application rather than solving them. A discipline develops as much as it identifies its problems in relation to its environment (Leitch 2005: http://dih.fsu.edu/). Consequently, the higher the problematization is, the higher the specialization is. Holz Mantäri relates “problematization” to “the principle of transfer.” One can infer from this remark that it is “the principle of transfer” that conditions the terms of translations (qtd in Kurultay 2006:286). Therefore, as long as the field of Translation Studies discerns, identifies and questions the problems of translations experienced in other fields, it can provide connectivity between them within its own borders of communication, and it can claim its autonomy. Accordingly, it can be concluded that Translation Studies has indebted much of its autonomy to its interdisciplinary relations bound by the principles of transfer.

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4. A case study on TS dissertations In the light of the brief sociological account of interdisciplinary relations, the next section will deal with the question of whether the interdisciplinary nature of Translation Studies is an obstacle in its becoming a fully-fledged discipline. Our work starts from already stated opinions (Leitch 2005 in http://dih.fsu.edu/interculture/). A case study on randomly selected MA and PhD dissertations defended between 1980 and 2006 will reveal the extent to which the Department of Translation Studies in Istanbul University has fulfilled the prerequisites of initiating and developing a fully-fledged discipline as an interdisciplinary subject.

4.1. Introductory remarks In the light of the theoretical account of TS as a fully-fledged discipline, a case study was conducted on PhD and MA dissertations defended between the years 1985 and 2006 to illuminate what stages Turkish endeavours have gone through in developing it into a fullyfledged discipline. The findings show that this progressive scientific itinerary consisted of three phases: a) the initial phase, which is related to bibliographical records, b) the operational phase, which is related with content analysis and c) the final phase which focuses on the assessment of the interdisciplinary relations. For practical reasons, the first two stages will be skipped over and special attention will be paid to the last phase of the case study in order to disclose the contribution of interdisciplinary relations to the autonomy of TS. The relations between the paradigms are arranged in an algorithmic flow.

4.2. The Preoperational Phase This phase consists of two investigation stages: the former is concerned with approaches to bibliographical records, while the latter is related to the content analysis of the dissertations. This phase can also function as the archive of the department. Moreover, tracing back the relationships between the research paper defense year, its research main subject and its scientific advisor’s name may yield findings not only about

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Translation Studies as a Fully-Fledged Discipline

the performance of the academic staff, but also the way the a (certain) academic has evolved in the course of time. Accordingly, the paradigms of main subjects and of key words follow the bibliographical records. Their identification serves to demarcate the borders of the field. A field of study can develop as long as the number of its fields of specialization increases. Therefore, keeping the record of main subjects will also disclose the subfields of speciality (YazÕcÕ 2004:111-21). However, faced with the multitude of main subjects, they will be narrowed down in such a way as to yield the main fields of specialization. For example, Table 1 below shows the statistical data obtained from the analysis of this case study: Main subject Literary Translation Translation as institution Translation of magazines and comics Criticism Interdisciplinary Oral translation Technical translation

Numerical data Number Percentage 7 35% 4 20% 2 10% 1 5% 1 5% 1 5% 1 5%

Table 1-1. Fields of specialization in TS Based on statistical data, the fields of specialization to further evolve from TS may follow one of the seven main branches presented in the Main Subject column. 4.2.1. Operational paradigms In our case study, the operational paradigms deal with the content analysis of the dissertations in the study data bank. They are arranged in such a way as to yield logical correlations with each other. Accordingly, they were devised for research, analysis, interpretation and presentation and they will be briefly commented upon, in the next paragraphs. 4.2.1.1. Focus of study. The first operational paradigm refers to or considers the object of study. That is to say, a researcher may study the products pertaining to the field of translations. In this particular case, a researcher may have as a starting point either a translation product peculiar to a specific field or may

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as well start from the mental mechanisms and stages any translator goes through during the pains-taking and time-consuming process of translation. While the former approach results in a so-called productoriented study, the latter results in a process-oriented study. Nevertheless, in some cases a researcher may have to apply both alternatives together. Therefore, the focus of study paradigms may be listed as (a) productoriented, (b) process-oriented and (c) product- + process-oriented. 4.2.1.2. Scientific method This is the operational paradigm which refers to the method the researcher has applied in dealing with his/her subject of study and which inserts three variables. They are interpretive variable, the causal variable and the descriptive variable, respectively. Of course, these paradigms are related to the researcher’s logical sequencing. If s/he follows the inductive method, the type of the research is generally descriptive. Yet, in the case of the interpretive method, the researcher generally does her/his reasoning on a deductive basis. As for the causal research, the investigator follows a circular way of thinking as opposed to the linear way of thinking applicable both in the descriptive and the interpretive research. It means that s/he starts from a universal statement or a claim, on whose basis the discussion and commentary unfolds in light of the concrete data the researcher has collected from empirical research. That is to say, a researcher performing a causal method-based research should reason both inductively and deductively in order to rationalize the claims or the hypothesis advanced in the beginning of the research. 4.2.1.3. Field of approach This paradigm aims to disclose what field of scientific study the research aims to approach. There are two basic fields to be placed against the background of scientific research, i.e., the theoretical field and the field of application. In this case study, the variables are related to the field of TS. 4.2.1.4. Consistency The last paradigm to consider is related to the discrepancy between the theoretical basis of the dissertation and the method which is applied in the performing of the study. Although all of the dissertations cover theoretical knowledge which represents a considerable percentage within the whole

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Translation Studies as a Fully-Fledged Discipline

dissertation, it is observed that it hardly plays any role in guiding the researcher to apply to and rely on a certain strategy. However, theoretical knowledge is functional as long as its correlations are set up with the practical aspects discussed in the dissertation. I consider that one of the researcher’s main concerns should be that of providing a high degree of consistency between the theoretical and practical elements of the research paper, in case s/he wants the respective study to have scientific validity. I also believe that consistency lies in the core of a scientific study in terms of its function of providing the touchstone of the self-reflexive system.

4.3. Evaluation The results of the case study operational paradigms are presented in a tabular form to cover the evaluation stage of our research. The table discloses the variables related with paradigms and the findings obtained from them. Focus of study Product-oriented 11, i.e. 55% Process-oriented 6, i.e. 35% Product+process 3, i.e. 15%

Scientific method Interpretive 4, i.e. 20% Discovery 10, i.e. 50% Causal 6, i.e. 30%

Field of approach Theoretical 10, i.e. 50% Applied field 10, i.e. 50%

Consistency Existent 8, i.e. 40% Non-existent 12, i.e. 60%

Table 1-2. Findings of the paradigm-related variables. The concluding findings regarding the variable of consistency are bound by the findings obtained from the previous paradigms. Nevertheless, consistency has not only retrospective relations but also a prospective end as shaping and verifying the paradigms of interdisciplinary relations in the final stage of the case study. For this reason, I would like to focus on the paradigm of consistency in the evaluation of the operational paradigms. As mentioned above, the paradigm of consistency refers to the discrepancy between theory and practice. Accordingly, 8 (40%), of dissertations can seize the correlation between the theory and practice. 12 (60%) of them cannot bridge the gap between the two fields of approach. This means that 12 (60%) of the dissertations cannot contribute to the foundations of TS as an autopoietic system. That is to say, they maintain the interdisciplinary relations but they cannot manage to explain relations within the framework of TS.

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Therefore, we can hardly acknowledge these research studies to be “scientific” in spite of the fact that translation studies reveal an interdisciplinary nature. They only provide translation studies with data without any contribution to the foundations of the discipline. As a result, only 40 percent of the dissertations could be accepted as scientific research in terms of their consistency between the theoretical basis and the thematic flow of the research.

4.4. The Post operational phase Since the paradigms of content analysis are arranged in an algorithmic flow, the data obtained from the previous section have fixed the paradigms in the following section. However, the relationship is bilateral. If the findings in the final phase verify the findings in the operational phase, it will also verify the disclose accountability of the research model. Accordingly, three paradigms are identified in the final stage. The “Starting point” is the first paradigm identified in the model questions and it discloses wherefrom the dissertation sets out. A researcher may start from a field of study, but the claims s/he has proposed in/at the beginning may force her/him to change the course of the investigation in the pursue of the initially-asserted claims. However, the research may draw the researcher to another field in the direction of the criterion he/she is in search for. That is to say, the starting and the end point of the research may not overlap with each other. The second paradigm, “Theoretical approaches”, discloses whether dissertations set out from theories of translation or from the theoretical framework of other fields. The correlations set up between the starting point of study and the theoretical approach will reveal to what extent the dissertation deviates from the borders of Translation Studies. The data obtained from these paradigms will also yield what “type of relations” the dissertations may have with other fields (Williams and Chesterman 2002: 69-82). Thus, the last paradigm, which discloses the primary and secondary relations, is that of the “type of relations”.

4.5. Case study conclusions The findings of the three post operational phase paradigms were processed and, for practical reasons, they are presented in a tabular form.

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Translation Studies as a Fully-Fledged Discipline

Starting Findings point of study Literature 6 (30%) Linguistics 2 (10%) Translation 5 (25%) Studies 7 (35%) Specific Field Total achievement

Theoretical Approach

Findings

Type of relations

Literary Linguistic Sociological

5 (25%) 4 (20%) 11 (55%)

Primary Secondary

Findings 11/4 9/4

8 (40%)

Table 1-3. Findings of the post operational phase paradigms According to the numerical findings in the table, it can be claimed that the Turkish literary criticism of translations, viewed through the perspective of PhD and MA dissertations, has launched scholarly studies in the field of TS. While 6 (30%) of the dissertations start from the field of literature, only 2 (20%) out of a total number of 20 have linguistics as their starting point. Dissertations which start from the borders of translation studies cover only 25% of the whole corpus. This is a low percentage if compared with other fields; however, when considering the defining feature of translation studies to be their interdisciplinary character, then it looks and it is accepted as natural. It is only when the dissertation ends in another field that it can be questioned in terms of its contribution to the making and progress of this discipline. As for the numerical findings of the studies on specific fields, they are higher than those that set out from Translation Studies. Its underlying reason for this result can be related to the function of translations as a means of transfer of knowledge, which may have been, in turn, the underlying reason for its having remained a secondary activity for ages. Compared with Western approaches to translation studies, where linguistics has played the major role in the foundation of TS, in Turkey it is only after the emergence of the literary critiques on translations that researchers have begun to question the interpretive and impressionistic strategies of the Literary criticism of translation. Therefore, as table 3 shows it, the literary approaches preceded the linguistic approaches; thus, an amount of 5 dissertations representing 25% of the created corpus had literature as a “theoretical approach” whereas an amount of 4 (20%) took linguistics for their “theoretical approach”. The slight difference between the two approaches indicates which of the domains of analysis has first paved the way for Translation Studies as a scientific field per se.

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As for the correlation between approaches and primary relationships, it is obvious that the number of dissertations on literature is equal with the number of literary approaches. If this is to be questioned from the point of the interdisciplinary relations, the findings in the case study show it that both literary and linguistic approaches were dominant between 1985 and 1995. Since 1995 onwards, as the foundations of the discipline have gradually consolidated, it has been observed that the number of studies setting out from TS has increased (e.g. 5). In other words, it coincides with the time when descriptive studies on translations have consistently gained popularity and researchers have begun to set up correlations between the linguistic data and culture. This brings forth the adoption of the sociological approach in describing the function of translations in the field of application. The highest rate of sociological approach amounting to 11 dissertations, i.e., 55% of the total number, indicates that TS has been acknowledged as a separate discipline or system since 1995, and it has created its peculiar language of communication ever since. That is also the underlying reason for which the number of studies based on secondary relations has increased to nine since 1995. Therefore, the year of 1995 is a turning point in TS in terms of its determinant paradigms, as would be the case with relationships and theoretical approaches. However, when these findings are analyzed in terms of the relations efficiency, the conclusion is that only 4 dissertations out of the 11 setting out from primary relations, succeeded in supporting the theoretical basis of TS as a fully-fledged discipline. As for the efficiency of dissertations which started from secondary relations, it is only 4 out of 9 that managed to explain the translation activity within the theoretical framework of TS as an autonomous field. These findings characterize 8 research papers, i.e., 40% of all dissertations, which also complement the findings in the operational phase.

Final remarks As demonstrated in the foregoing, the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies does not result from such a practical need as for the organization of accumulated knowledge in the field of practice. It is a different mechanism which acquires its autonomy by maintaining its relations with other disciplines, thereby developing into a separate field of problematization, which is bound by the principle of transfer. On the one hand, this will increase the numbers of problems which result in its further

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division into subfields or even into the expansion of these subfields and, on the other hand, it will consolidate the foundations of TS. Nowadays, it is only after such dynamic interrelationships of disciplines that an autonomous field comes into being.

References Hermans, Th. 1999. Translation in Systems, Manchester: St. Jerome. Kempson, R. 1985. “Obituary: Charles Ernest Bazell”, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 48, 2, 340-342. Kurultay, T. 2006. “Kültür ve øletiúim Bilimlerinde Disiplinlerin AyrÕúmasÕ: Kopuú mu, AyrÕmlaúma mÕ?”, in Karakuú, M. and Oraliú, M. (eds.), Bellek Mekan ømge [Memory, Space and Symbol], 283-297. Leitch, V. B. 2005. Theory, Interdisciplinarity, and the Humanities Today: An Interview with Vincent B. Leitch, http://dih.fsu.edu/interculture/ (retrieval date: July 20, 2007). Munday, J. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies, London: Routledge. Vermeer, H. 2006. Luhmann's “Social Systems” Theory: Preliminary Fragments for a Theory of Translation, Berlin: Frank and Timme. Williams, J., Chesterman, A. 2002. The Map, Manchester: St. Jerome. Yazici, M. 2004. “Çeviribilimde DisiplinlerarasÕ bir yöntem: Sorunlar ve Çözümler”, in DisiplinlerarasÕ Ortam ve Yöntem SorunlarÕ [Interdisciplinary Environment and methodological problems], østanbul: Multilingual, 111-126.

Notes 1

The list of the universities in Turkey is as follows: Istanbul Üniversitesi, Bo÷aziçi Üniversitesi, YÕldÕz Teknik Üniversitesi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi, østanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, 19 Eylül Üniversitesi, Mersin Üniversitesi, AtÕlÕm Üniversitesi, Uluda÷ Üniversitesi, Okan Üniversitesi, øzmir Ekonomi Üniversitesi, YediTepe Üniversitesi, Marmara Üniversitesi, Haliç Universitesi.

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He came to Istanbul in 1942 under the auspices of the British Council and took up a chair of English language, and in 1944 he also established the section of General Linguistics within the department. He returned home 1957 as the chair of the Department of General linguistics. During his office in Istanbul University, he wrote an impressive number of articles on general Linguistics, published in the Journal of Department of English Philology. However, his commitments have not sufficed for linguistics to be acknowledged as a separate discipline by the academia. 3 The syntagms between inverted commas are English versions of the Turkish denominations of the academic subjects. 4 We shall distinguish between the two meanings assigned to the same syntagm: Translation Studies or TS (refers to the academic subject proper) and translation studies (is used as a referent for the practices and commentaries concerning the less or even non-scientific approaches to translations).

CHAPTER TWO STUDYING LITERARY TRANSLATIONS

INTRODUCTION: INTERVIEW WITH A TRANSLATOR RUXANDA BONTILĂ AND PETRU IAMANDI

Editor’s note: The concerns for the problems undergraduates come across when they have to make a translation, determined associate professor Ruxanda Bontilӽ1 to draw a list of frequently asked questions and find out answers adequate to the learners’ level of understanding. Ruxanda Bontilӽ designed the questions so as to create the architecture of an interview meant to offer a glimpse of the torments of the trade, often assimilated to art. The answers were provided by associate professor Petru Iamandi2, a translator of literature whose expertise may prove useful to those who consider making a career in the field of translations. Ruxanda Bontilă: Given your considerable experience in this thorny field of literary translation (translator, both God—albeit temporary—and Ghost), let us try to look into certain matters regarding (1) the life/ aim/ of translation; (2) the torments/ agony of translating; (3) the difficulty of teaching/ learning how to translate. W. Benjamin in his “Task of the Translator,” refers to translation as being “a mode,” in the sense that the original contains the law governing its own translatability. Do you really think that there are works that cry out their translatability and others don’t? Petru Iamandi: Yes. The works that cry out their translatability are written by people who are not keen on experimenting with the language– to them language is just a vehicle. These authors are born storytellers, the stories come to them naturally, in the ordinary reader’s language, therefore they let themselves be carried away by the quick pace of the plot, not caring too much about style. On the other hand, the works that don’t cry out their translatability are written by those who take their time with the language: being interested in exploring the full potential of the language, they play with it, refine it, push it beyond its limits, and make it move according to a logic of its own.

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RB: It is also said that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original (like any manifestation of life has no significance to the phenomenon of life). Yet, by virtue of its translatability, the original is closely connected with the translation. May this imply that a translation issues not from the life of the original but rather its afterlife? PI: Ask ten people to translate the same work and you will get ten different translations. Where’s their significance as regards the original? Definitely in how close the translators have managed to get to the original. The closer, the better. Overlapping is impossible. Which makes them just versions of the original. These versions can be poor, excellent, or … better than the original. Yes, there are cases in which the translator can help a careless author here and there, improving his style or even adding something to the text that the author seems to have overlooked. RB: Who, if any, do you particularly have in mind when performing a literary translation? PI: The author, by all means. Doing a literary translation is probing into the author’s mind, trying to rebuild in your own language the universe he has built in his own language. Rebuilding starts with the exploration of every multi-semantic word, every complex sentence, every complex paragraph, until you get the full meaning of the work and then you come full circle. RB: As there are different theories regarding translation, where do you position yourself? What are your priorities towards achieving that longedfor kinship of languages? PI: I’m not much of a theoretician, although I’ve read quite a number of books on the subject just to know how to go about it. There are several basic rules that I always try to abide by: stick to the author’s style, avoid linguistic copy, make the meaning clear, help the author when he’s in trouble. RB: Do you agree that while the original’s destiny is to endure in its own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal? Is this also part of the torments of the translator?

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Introduction: Interview with a Translator

PI: Yes, to the first question. Most of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, were translated into Romanian in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If a teenager reads them now, he will find them very hard to follow, not to mention that Shakespeare is hard to understand in his own country! Therefore, translations have a limited lifespan and, sooner or later, they will inevitably sound obsolete. As for the second question, I think the translator is too busy doing the translation properly to worry too much about the future. After all, who can anticipate where the language is going? RB: One critic said the best translation is the one that allows the best guesses, or causes the least impoverishment. Does this also link to that element that does not lend itself to translation (the untranslatable)? PI: There’s certainly a lot of guesswork in doing a translation – the author is sometimes deliberately nebulous, trying to incite and confuse the readers, and there’s always the impalpable. Translators have to guess everything first and then help the readers do the same, to the same extent that the author has helped them do it. Thus, the untranslatable can be made to come out of the context. RB: Some voice the idea that it is not the highest praise of a translation to be said that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. Why so? Could it be that a translation should be obliquely reflecting the original too? PI: I think the reader should feel as comfortable when reading a translation as when reading something in his mother tongue. A good translator should have enough tricks in his bag to make that work. Readers know they’re going to deal with a translation even before starting reading a book: They can see “Translated by …” right below the title! RB: Is translation (as a trade) teachable/learnable? Will you please enumerate the blocks you are most frequently faced with when teaching students how to translate? PI: It’s both. But you have to feel it in your bones first. Literary translation is an art and, as any other art, it takes true calling and a lot of apprenticeship/hard work to become proficient in it. There are a few students who might become proficient translators but, no matter how good they are at manipulating their mother tongue, they are helpless when

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they’re trying to do a literary translation: They are tempted to do it word for word, forgetting the requirements of their mother tongue and changing into servants of the foreign language. As I said, apprenticeship takes time.

References Benjamin, W. 1955/1970. “The Task of the Translator” in Illuminations, Zohn, H. Transl, London, Cape, 69-82. Stanciu, V. 2008. DicĠionar de angliúti úi americaniúti români, Cluj: Tribuna.

Note 1

Ruxanda Bontilӽ is mentioned in the dictionary of Romanian specialists in the field of English and American studies (Stanciu 2008: 26). A member of The International Vladimir Nabokov Society, University of Kansas, USA, she has authored books on literature (Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels: The Art of Defining Subjectivism, EDP, 2004) and she has published articles and studies. Her latest publications include Vladimir Nabokov’s “Task of the Translator”: Identity in Need of Editing (in Gonzales, M and F. Tolron (eds.), Translating Identity and the Identity of Translation, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) and Lolita’s take on history: A Romanian Perspective (European Journal of English Studies, Routledge, 2008, 12(03), 277-89). 2 Petru Iamandi is included in the dictionary of Romanian specialists in the field of English and American studies (Stanciu 2008: 65-66), in Who’s Who in the World (1999, 2001) and in DicĠionar SF (1999). He has translated English literature into Romanian (from authors such as N. Gordimer, J. Brunner, A.R. Morlan, G. Dahlquist, J. Chace, R. Humphreys, R. L. Byers, Paul B. Thompson, Margaret Broadhurst-Clegg) as well as non-literary works (out of which mention is made of Susan Strange’ States and Markets published in Romania under the title State úi pieĠe, E. Williamson’s Borges: A Life/Borges–o viaĠă, R. A. Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics/DemocraĠia úi criticii ei, Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist/Orientalistul, Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation/Reconcilierea, Yehuda Berg’s The Power of Kabbalah/Puterea Kaballei). His translations into English include Requiem for the Second Millenium by Vasile Ghica, Polonius and The Little Giant-Tamer by Victor Cilincă, A Hawk’s Lesson and Primitive Rains by Aurel Stancu, Top Priority by Doru Tatar, The Odd Beast by Nicolae Mărăúanu, Lines and The Secret Dew by Maria Weishaupt Sarău, Contemporary Political Doctrines by Anton Carpinschi, GalaĠi–History and Present Times by Grigore Lazarovici and Stefan Stanciu, etc. In 2008, the ”Fani Tardini” Theatre of GalaĠi staged Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party in his translation. He has placed numerous translations of essays, poetry, fiction, and articles in various Romanian publications and several of his translations have appeared in the UK and the USA.

SHANDYING TRANSLATION, TRANSLATING SHANDEISM GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ

Introduction The eighteenth century might be looked upon as a turning point for the history of translations in Europe, especially if one considers the intrinsic relation between the translation practices of the time and the changes in the hierarchy of the canonical genres that favoured the rise of the novel. Though very broadly defined and still conceived as products of “a secondary sort of practice, one of the ‘minor’ arts, like pottery making or weaving, and as such hardly worthy of attention” (St-Pierre 1993: par. 2), “translations” travelled fast across linguistic and cultural borders, facilitating translatio studii (Aravamudan 2005: 54 and McMurran 2001: 51) and, implicitly, the transfer of literary models to be subsequently assimilated and re-invented in national-specific terms. Mostly confined to the prefaces of the translations which were not published anonymously, translation theories revealed indeed the translators’ awareness of their mediating between different cultures, yet their strategies suffered from certain looseness, which the growing interest in national identity making, on the one hand, and the rather unclear delimitation of writing and translation practices, on the other hand, caused to increase. Under the circumstances, especially over the second half of the century, the transnational nature of the novel as a genre, supported by the proliferation and wide-spreading of “translations”, was more and more often challenged mainly in the English and, to some extent, French literary circles, which hoped to encourage, above all, the development of national-specific aesthetic tastes, despite the fact that, paradoxically, book catalogues published on both sides of the Channel proved the readers’ undiminished interest in “translations” of the other’s literary productions. (McMurran 2001: 53, 65) An inquisitive writer and sharp wit like Laurence Sterne, who cast a critical eye on the changing literary and aesthetic conventions of his age,

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could not ignore thus the place of translation in the context of the contemporary debates on (im)morality, cultural encounters, and the metamorphoses of the novelistic discourse. Placed in the “centre of change” (Byrd 1988: 48), drawing on and, at the same time, subverting commonplaces of two co-existing writing traditions, namely the Augustan intellectual prose and the newly-rising sentimentalism, his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) subtly incorporates in its metafictional structure hints to Sterne’s attitude towards some contemporary approaches to translation as seen in the larger framework of his mock-serious exploration of writing and reading habits in the second half of the eighteenth century. For a twentieth/twenty-first century translator, the presence in the Sternean text of an abundance of foreign elements and of instances directly related to a past stage in the development of translation studies might raise additional problems in the process of translation. Nevertheless, the investigation of this particular dimension of the novel might provide fruitful ground for an analysis, in contrastive terms, of the rules and functions of translation as well as of the changing relations between writers, translators, and readers altogether. Therefore, structured in three parts, the present paper aims at combining the diachronic study of the transformations in the theory and practice of translation throughout the eighteenth century, as partly illustrated and/or manipulated for satirical purposes by Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, with the synchronic exploration of the present-day principles of translation put into practice by M. Miroiu and M. Spăriosu in their Romanian translation of Sterne’s novel.

1. Translation in the Eighteenth Century Recent studies on the function and principles of translation in the eighteenth century have emphasised that the translation practices of the age still reflected interpretations of the process (traceable as far back as the Middle Ages) that drew on the very literal meaning of translatio (“to bear across”), hence conceiving translation as transference applied to both language and culture (McMurran 2001: 51). Even before the eighteenth century, translations had freely circulated across national borders stimulating the development of the book market and encouraging the diversification of literary species. The source cultures (SCs) that such translations placed, according to the translatio imperii principle, in a power position (McMurran 2001: 59) widely varied, but, roughly speaking, they fell in two distinct categories: the classical antiquity and the modern cultures of Europe. Therefore, by the end of the seventeenth

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Shandying Translation, Translating Shandeism

century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, two trends had developed in translation practices, engendering different attitudes towards the translated text (TT), yet all with a significant impact on the development of literature in different cultural contexts. On the one hand, throughout the entire Europe, translation practices and theory continued to be “a function of a Latin-based literary culture” (McMurran 2005: 7). In Britain, in particular, the rise of neoclassicism brought about the emergence of ancient models as exquisite representations of Nature, i.e., of the quintessence of men’s moral and intellectual experience, and that encouraged the Augustans to translate from the Latin classics in order to provide their contemporary scholar/writer-fellows with an appropriate basis on which they could construct their own systems of thought and writing: “the hallmark of a gentleman” (Johnson 1901: par. 2). Latin became thus one of the favourite subjects for both study and translation practice in the Augustan Age. However, many of the translators showed more or less “irreverence” towards the Latin source texts (STs) which they approached along the lines of one of the three translation practices delineated by Dryden in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), namely “metaphrase (word-for-word translation), paraphrase (translation with latitude, following sense more than words), and imitation (freely adapting)” (McMurran 2005: 7). All three practices were common; yet, probably highly influenced by the theory of free translation advanced by Denham and Cowley about midseventeenth century, most neoclassical translators seemed to favour imitation in the early half of the eighteenth century. Supporters of the Horatian principle preaching the rejection of the word-for-word translation (“Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus/ Interpres”), Denham and Cowley considered literal translation as inferior to any endeavours of adapting ancient thoughts to modern times (Weinbrot 1966: 436-7, 439). Assuming the task of “dressing” the translation in new English-specific clothes, these “translators” aimed at making the original more accessible to the readership: the “thousand particularities of places, persons, and manners, which [did] but confusedly appear to [their] eyes at so great a distance” (Cowley 1656) needed modernising by adapting the TT language to “the modern cast” (Denham qtd in Weinbrot 1966: 437). Throughout the Restoration and the eighteenth century, this conception of free translation was particularly favoured, hence the terminological confusions that caused translation to be seen as synonymous with imitation and even with parody. The freedom from the original text that this theory recommended was, nonetheless, limited by the need for familiarity with the original without which the “flavour” of the new

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literary product could not be fully appreciated. That is why even typographical conventions were subordinated to and supportive of such practices that allowed for genre overlapping. Many “translators” (actually imitators/parodists) took advantage of the tradition of bilingual editions allowing for the examination “in the mirror” of the source text (ST) and the translated text (TT) in order to attain a double goal: they aimed at wittily remoulding ancient patterns in modern satires and, at the same time, they urged their learned readers to indulge in a pleasant exercise of contrastive reading of the Latin and the English texts, so that they might reinforce their knowledge of literary patterns (Weinbrot 1966: 440-1 and McMurran 2005: 7-8). The resulting “translations”/imitations varied in their degree of departure from the ST. There were indeed cases in which previous knowledge of the original was not a must for the readers, the ST meanings and intentions were preserved and changes in the translation process referred only to place and character names as well as to some scenes. But, given the popularity of the reader-oriented translation theories, especially among the scholarly circles that praised creative writing over translation, there was a growing interest in and demand for witty imitations which altered more or less significantly the STs, while appropriating them, and which would turn out highly challenging for the readers, as the pleasure of reading intrinsically relied on the recognition of the model and the close analysis of the transformations it had undergone. Pope, Swift or Johnson’s “exercises” in free translation ranged among the most appreciated and famous cases in point (Weinbrot 1966: 440). On the other hand, though not “enjoy[ing] the same authority as [translation] from Latin” (Ellis and Oakley-Brown qtd in McMurran 2005: 7), vernacular translation quickly gained ground and developed as an equally important, less restrictive, and new practice which eventually provided “a conceptual foundation for the novel” as a genre (and not only) (McMurran 2001: 66). The same range of translation practices that characterised translations from the classics informed translating between modern European languages and a more or less similar educational mission was attached to them. There are enough sources, namely prefaces that accompanied the translated texts (leaving, of course, aside the “translations” published anonymously), to provide evidence suggesting that, no matter how loose the rules of translation may have been by that time, they still relied on concepts like faithfulness in translation, on a certain awareness of the cultural differences that made the translator’s task all the more difficult with regard to the adequacy of her/his choices in the TT, as well as of the need for an analytical processing of the ST, pondering on who the translator should “pledge his allegiance” to, namely the source culture (SC) or the target

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Shandying Translation, Translating Shandeism

culture (TC). The interpretation and the degree of importance that translators attached in practice to these constants varied, nonetheless, greatly. The examples provided by “the French-British contact zone” (McMurran 2001: 52) are relevant in this respect. Thus, there were indeed translators who considered that their task should be confined to finding strictly linguistic equivalents of the SL terms in the TL. The main trend was, however, against such practices which were seen as doomed to fail in raising the readers’ interest in the outcome of the translation process (Le Vayer de Marsilly 1735 qtd in St-Pierre 1993: par. 9). For most of the modern language translators of the time, equivalence was less about comparing and contrasting the cultural dimensions underlying the ST and the TT, respectively, or about making choices that would adequately render the “special feeling” of the ST in the TL. The translators were, undeniably, aware of the different factors that influenced the production and reception of the original and translated texts as well as of the losses that might occur in translating owing to the gap between the SC values and the TC standards of taste, but they seemed to be particularly responsive mostly to the demands of their own national environment and aimed at pleasing, above all, their home readership sometimes too “entêté[s] de [leur] Goût et de [leurs] Manières” (Armand de la Chapelle 1724 qtd in St-Pierre 1993: par. 9). Those who believed, like Etienne de Silhouette (1737), that “[u]ne traduction ne doit jamais déguiser le goût et le caractère des ouvrages d’une nation” (St-Pierre 1993: par. 9), in other words that one of the functions of translation was not to level culture-specific differences but to underline them so that it might offer to the reader the opportunity of judging them for her/himself, were too few. As in the case of the translations from Latin, the gulf separating cultures and historical frameworks was, more often than not, drastically reduced by the translators in their attempt at complying with the TC readers’ expectations. The ensuing “concave-mirror” effect (Hewson and Martin qtd in Croitoru 1996: 30) entailed modifications in the text structure and in the message to be conveyed, as well as the introduction of entirely new, “creative” supplements by the translators themselves. Consequently, in translating from modern languages too, the preference for free translation, no matter how defective in correctly representing cultural specificity, allowed for the opposition between the translator’s and the writer’s positions to be cancelled by merging translation and original writing practices and paving the way for the emergence of new literary patterns. The best illustrative case which undeniably proves both the rapid proliferation of “translations” and their outstanding contribution to the consolidation of the novel might be that of the Spanish picaresque writings whose very nature, supported by the motif of the journey, seemed the most

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appropriate for the illustration of the interpretation of translation as “migratory transference” (McMurran 2001: 56). Just as pícaros migrated from one social environment to another revealing, in a laughable/cynical tone, specific features of their numerous masters, their stories moved across national borders owing to “translations”, travelling from one cultural space to another, causing thus this type of writing that would become one of the cornerstones of the eighteenth-century realistic novel to change its conventions, to a larger or less significant extent, according to the specificity of the receiving culture, be it Italian, German, French or English. Within the framework of the ruling paradigms of translatio imperii and translatio studii, the most heterogeneous practices of translation, here including also adaptations, imitations, translations of translations and even pseudo-translations, allowed for mediated crosscultural communication and eventually for the “conquest through attraction” of readers from different corners of Europe for whom whether a novel/romance was “homemade” or “translated” from some foreign source seemed of little consequence as long as what they read suited their aesthetic tastes (McMurran 2001: 59). To be more specific, the Spanish picaresque writings of a realistic vein were made very popular among the French readers by the numerous translations which “appeared in France earlier and in greater quantity than anywhere in Europe”, but which also enclosed numerous deviations from the original picaresque pattern resulting from the “translators” cleansing the text of all “moralités superflues” (see the case of Lesage’s ‘translation’ of Guzmán de Alfarache in 1732), lending it comic overtones, and adjusting it to the French sense of decorum by turning pícaros into French “gentilhommes who want to be more than what they are,” “not born dishonourably into poverty, but into a ‘bourgeois’ society,” who use their “wit, tricks, disguises and stories […] to chastise their own society” (Sieber 1977: 38, 45-7). In England, the picaresque genre grew equally popular owing to two mutually “contaminating” traditions, i.e., the English literature of roguery and the intense activity of translation which relied extensively on French “translations” of picaresque novels, instead of the original Spanish versions. The result of this overlapping of influences was the creation of a new type of pícaro to emerge during the seventeenth century and then, later on, during the eighteenth century, one whose “disposition” was “cast in the true English mould” (Smollett 1990: 140), defined by “mercantile interests” and eventually rising above “disreputable backgrounds and poverty to occupy a higher social status” (Sieber 1977: 52-55). Therefore, in both the French and English cultural spaces (as elsewhere in Europe, as a matter of fact), “translations” were, more often than not,

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loose adaptations which remained faithful to the formal elements of the picaresque “mould” but in which elements of “…‘native’ fiction and sensibilities” were poured in order to put forth sequences of adventures “conform[ing] to the peculiar satiric, social and historical contexts of each country” (Sieber 1977: 59), united by the central figures of the pícaros (the French gueux/gentilhomme or the English rogue), that would set the basis for the development, along new lines, of the realistic novel in which national identity affirmation and cross-cultural power clashes would be (more or less) directly addressed. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a growing interest in the potential of fiction of representing national specificity and, consequently, of contributing to national-identity building. Under the circumstances, translators endeavoured to more and more obviously give precedence, in the process of translation, to their readership’s tastes and expectations of finding, even in translated texts, a reflection of their national customs and mores. In the “Anglo-French culture wars” (McMurran 2001: 63), the French at least remained open to translating from the English literature, which they were still discovering: the French writers-translators saw themselves trapped between what they thought it was their duty as “public readers”, shaping the TT by “the anticipated reactions of readers and critics” (Rand 1985: 1098), which implied adjusting to the French decorum “the English lack of balance, order and proportion”, and their desire of winning, nonetheless, the public’s respect for the merits of the original (like the “naturalism and liveliness” of English fiction) that would otherwise go unnoticed (McMurran 2001: 64). On the other side of the Channel, the rising tide of national-identity awareness (however loose a concept as nation still was by that time) put even more pressure on translation/translatio as the foundation of the novel. Writers (e.g. Tobias George Smollett) and critics (e.g. Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbault) strove to present the history of the novel from a different perspective, which, though not denying translatio, related it to the assumption of universality (McMurran 2001: 59-63). Minimising the contribution of French models–made available through “translations”–to the consolidation of the English novel, they urged for the creation of a national novel as a reaction of resistance to the Frenchification of the genre and to the translatio imperii principle that would proclaim the French culture as the source of power and the English one as merely a target for influence. That implied not only encouraging the shaping of the “translated” text discourse in national terms to ensure its “naturalness”, but altogether reacting against translation as a form of importation of French cultural products. Of course, in practice, as book catalogues from that

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period indicate, that did not cause a severe drop in the English readership’s interest in translations of novels from French; on the contrary, they actually remained equally influential and popular (around 30% of the published books in one year, over the late eighteenth century–See McMurran 2001: 53). That is why, one should not be surprised to discover in the funny but awkward and controversial novel Tristram Shandy, next to the prominent intertextual dimension resulting from the presence of numerous quotations and translations from Latin (and occasionally from Greek), an abundance of traces of French-English cross-cultural encounters which raise issues related to translatability, mobility across linguistic and cultural borders as well as novel-writing conventions.

2. Sternean Metafiction and Translation Highly audacious in its satire that reminds of the great wits of the Augustan generation, Laurence Sterne’s meta-, anti-novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) proposes a comic but subversive approach to the established eighteenth-century moral, literary and aesthetic codes. Foregrounding his personal response to a relativitydominated context, in an attempt at defining his position at the crossroads of changing cultural paradigms (i.e., neoclassicism and sentimentalism), Sterne used and abused two of the favourite patterns of the eighteenthcentury literature, namely the picaresque, or rather the Quixotic/“Cervantick” (as he put it in the novel), and the satirical Augustan imitation/parody. In other words, following in the footsteps of “the Gentle Spirit of sweetest humour, […] [his] beloved Cervantes” (Sterne 1997: 527), the novelist cast a mock-serious look on his neoclassical predecessors’ heritage as well as on his sentimentalist contemporaries’ commonplaces and built up a simultaneously digressive and progressive “plea” for the re-evaluation of the moral and aesthetic principles his readers lived and read by, and, implicitly, of the ways in which reality and identity could be represented by means of a subjectively-marked language influenced by the vagaries of the mind and/or of the heart. Sterne’s “history-book […] of what passes in a man’s own mind” (Sterne 1997: 70) takes up the “Cervantick” journey pattern turning it into the perfect mould for the metafictional reconsideration of writing, reading, and, implicitly, translation processes. In particular, some of the lessons that Tristram, Sterne’s narrator, teaches to the readers in order to determine them to shake off their “old” reading habits acquire, at some point, a second function, that of revealing Sternean “opinions” on translation. The use of French words, which, more often than not, are not provided with TL

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equivalents, seems to be part and parcel of this peculiar dimension of Tristram Shandy, and is worth insisting upon. The novel contains a significant number of French words/phrases “naturally” sprinkled throughout the text, but by far the most interesting cases, which give irrefutable evidence on the (metafiction-specific) Sternean delight in incorporating “foreign” material in the narrative discourse, are some extensive quotations in French–either a full letter by the doctors of Sorbonne or large excerpts from a famous non-fictional book–meant as relevant textual illustrations of arguments put forth in Tristram’s sophisticated reasoning system. Thus, Tristram’s attempt at striking his narratee–here in its feminine hypostasis (“Madam”)–as a learned man, conversant in various (non)literary fields, culminates in his quoting in extenso the Mémoire présenté à Messieurs les Docteurs de Sorbonne and the corresponding Réponse that, as his explanatory digression eventually reveals, (perhaps too subtly) lead to the conclusion that Mrs. Shandy was not a papist (Sterne 1997: 51). On the one hand, the two quotations contribute to deconstructing the myth of straightforward reading, the reader being urged “to rebuke [the] vicious taste” of merely following the sequence of adventures and to get “accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions” (Sterne 1997: 48), even if that means to stop and re-read some of the pages or requires making smart connections between apparently disparate pieces of information. On the other hand, they reveal Tristram as “hobby-horsically” fond of theorising as his father Walter Shandy, and ready to launch a stinging attack on the French doctors and on the Roman Catholic deliberations regarding whether a child may be baptised in his mother’s womb. The choice of not providing a translation of the French ST is then both verisimilitude-engendering and relevant for the power relations between two rival nations–the English and the French–and two religious rites–the Protestants and the Catholics. It is true that, in certain eighteenthcentury social and intellectual English circles, the French culture was taken as a model and widely imitated; however, Sterne’s not rendering the French text into English might be seen as a form of resistance to the French influence which exquisitely articulates in Tristram’s final tongue-in-cheek comment: “Mr. Tristram Shandy’s compliments to Messrs. Le Moyne, De Romigny, and De Marcilly, hopes they all rested well the night after so tiresome a consultation. – He begs to know, whether after the ceremony of marriage, and before that of consummation, the baptizing all the HOMUNCULI at once, slapdash, by injection, would not be a shorter and safer cut still; on condition, as above, That if the HOMUNCULI do well, and come safe into the world after this, that each and every of them shall be baptized again

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(sous condition) – And provided, in the second place, That the thing can be done, which Mr. Shandy apprehends it may, “par le moyen d’une petite canulle, and sans faire aucune tort au père.” (Sterne 1997: 51)

Equally untranslated, yet less biting in tone, another French quotation is incorporated in the paratextual framework as one of the largest footnotes in the novel (Volume IV, Chapter X). A summary of Licetus’s life story (born in 1577 a small foetus no larger than his father’s palm, he grew strong and lived to the age of eighty, i.e., until 1657), it is extracted from Adrien Baillet’s Des enfans célèbres in Volume VI of Jugemens des Savans sur les Principaux Ouvrages des Auteurs (1722). Adding to the “pile” of markers of erudition and sophistication that accumulate in Tristram’s narrative discourse and ironically reminding of the medieval use of auctoritates, the quotation is, at the same time, indicative of Sterne’s (serious) intention of taking a stand in the contemporary debate on the definition of the concept of verisimilitude and on its relation to truth: “if faut convenir que tout ce qui est incroyable n’est pas toujours faux, & que la Vraisemblance n’est pas toujours du coté de la Verité” (sic Sterne 1997: 232). Still, eventually, it seems that, just like his French master of wit, François Rabelais, Sterne could not refrain from lending the French sentence bawdy connotations as his narrator uses it to conclude a joke on sex and sleep at the end of Chapter XV in the same volume. Like any “respectable” novel endowed with a prominent pedagogical function, which hopes to imbue the readers with the spirit of Nature (here conceived in a purposely loose manner that leaves room for connotations that move beyond the typical neoclassical interpretation of the concept), Tristram Shandy could not avoid turning also to the classics, hence the numerous quotes in Latin (and sometimes even in Greek), varying in length from mere phrases to complex sentences, some serving as mottos and all invariably functioning as proofs of erudition. They are merely reproduced without the least intention of providing a translated version. That is not, though, the case of the larger pieces of Latin text which the narrator introduces with the professed desire of reminding the readers of certain translation practices. One such case is to be found at the very heart of a volume that is “almost exclusively concerned with imprecations and blights” (Kraft 1996: 58), namely Volume III. A series of incidents involving Dr. Slop, called to attend to Mrs. Shandy whose delivery is imminent, and Mr. Shandy’s servant Obadiah causes the former to grow so angry that he cannot help cursing the latter. Nonetheless, Walter Shandy finds in this unpleasant situation an opportunity to give free vent to his hobby-horsical passion for systems; hence, Dr. Slop is invited to consult an anathema by the Roman Catholic bishop Ernulphus which “will teach him to swear in a fashion

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commensurate with the provocation” (Kraft 1996: 58). The readers are given the chance to judge for themselves the faithfulness of the English translation of Ernulphus’s curse, as the Latin ST and the TT are printed on facing pages. A footnote explicitly connects this particular case of intertextuality with the previously referred to letter by the doctors of Sorbonne, whose genuineness, Tristram claims, was either doubted or denied by the readers, and means to reinforce the illusion of verisimilitude by identifying the source of the Latin original as being the Bishop of Rochester’s twelfthcentury excommunication in Thomas Hearne’s edition of Textus Roffensis (1720). But readers should not be deceived by appearances: verisimilitude is not exactly aimed at and this new piece of non-literary material seems more of a pretext for an Augustan-like exercise in parody which relies less on departures in translation from the ST–as the TT manages to render it quite faithfully–and more on disruptions at the structural level. To be more specific, the traditional rules of chapter devising are obviously ignored as the Latin ST and the English TT surprisingly do not belong to the same chapter XI, as expected; though printed on the pages facing Chapter XI (i.e., the TT), the ST is marked as a chapter in itself, Chapter XXXV. That both spoils the sense of order in the book and creates confusion since there is also another Chapter XXXV in the same volume. Furthermore, the parodic intention can be felt in the contextualization of the ST and TT in one of the key scenes of Volume III: having a papist doctor read aloud from Ernulphus, “Walter (and Sterne) is ridiculing the Roman Catholic practice of excommunication as well as the general human tendency to blame anyone other than ourselves for our misfortunes” (Kraft 1995: 58-9). And, next to the overlapping of Slop’s curse with Toby’s whistling Lillabullero, some of the choices made in the process of “translation” (e.g. “omnisque militia coelestis”= “all the heavenly armies” instead of “heavenly host”–see note 3, Sterne 1997: 581) lend the text bawdy overtones and make it appear truly ludicrous. The other case of significantly extensive use of Latin in Tristram Shandy is Slawkenbergius’s interpolated tale, a digressive interlude which opens Volume IV. Adopting the same Augustan practice of printing the Latin ST and the English TT on mirror pages, Sterne overtly chose to work, this time, along the main lines of the free translation theory. And, whereas, in the previously mentioned examples, the text displayed obvious traces of an at least formally expressed concern for the defense of the authenticity of the quoted material (the sources being consistently acknowledged as real), here invention takes over and the result is the production of an entirely fictitious quotation, attributed to an entirely fictitious author, Hafen Slawkenbergius– actually another narrative mask of Sterne himself. What is even more

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interesting, the readers may be surprised to discover that what the external narrator presents as the Latin ST is, in fact, Sterne’s quite accurate, though incomplete, translation of his own invented tale (Note 1 on Slawkenbergius’s tale in Sterne 1997: 594). Playfully, Sterne pulled his learned readers’ leg by also introducing a footnote on the source of the tale and the narrator’s supposed intention: “As Hafen Slawkenbergius de Nasis is extremely scarce, it may not be unacceptable to the learned reader to see the specimen of a few pages of his original; I will make no reflection upon it, but that his story-telling Latin is much more concise than his philosophic – and, I think, has more of Latinity in it.” (Sterne 1997: 200)

The stress obviously laid on the “Latinity” of the “original” unmistakably draws the readers’ attention to certain semantic choices in the Latin text: e.g. “vaginam,” “crepitare,” “rem penitus explorabo,” “minime tangetur” or the “stranded” Greek word “ȆİȡȚȗȠȝĮIJȑ” (perizomatè). Such words/phrases sustain the parodic bawdy vein underlying this story about “noses” and the interpretation of words, and fit perfectly in Sterne’s well-thought out scheme meant to remind those too much anchored in the Augustan reason-extolling aesthetic and literary practices that both literary developments and life are governed essentially by relativity. Yet, soon enough, the “story-teller” gives up the Augustan-specific practice of paralleling the ST and the TT, on account of his having already made his point by quoting the extensive sample from the beginning of this “original” tale skilfully embedded in the framework of a “Cervantick” kind of romance about Diego, a young man, and his exceptionally long nose. Sick at heart because of his beloved Julia’s mistrust, Diego travels to the “Promontory of Noses”. But as soon as he leaves the town of Strasburg on his way to Frankfurt, the Strasburgers (nuns, priests, ministers, innkeepers, trumpeters, trumpeters’ wives, doctors, bishops, etc.), amazed by his unusual appearance, launch in a fierce debate on whether the nose is true or false. At this point, instead of wasting his time with making further demonstrations on translation practices, the narrator chooses to let only the “TT” flow, as the stress shifts from Diego’s situation to that of the city and its inhabitants. That does not mean that he lets the readers forget that what they read is the result of a translation process; on the contrary, proving that annotation was already a common practice resorted to in order to somehow narrow the gap created by linguistic and cultural disparities between the ST and the TT, footnotes are introduced (either by Tristram-the narrator or by the alleged translator, Mr. Shandy) and they are aimed at fulfilling different functions. The first (Sterne 1997: 208) is given an explanatory function, helping the

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reader understand a case of code-switching, “the Clunienses”. (One might, however, wonder why the other similar cases in the co-text, i.e., “the Praemonstratenses” and “the Carthusians”, are not provided with corresponding explanatory notes, too.) The second is set to explain a semantic choice in translation in the phrase “the dishes of religious orders”: “Mr. Shandy’s compliments to orators – is very sensible that Slawkenbergius has here changed his metaphor – which he is very guilty of: - that as a translator, Mr. Shandy has all along done what he could to make him stick to it – but that here ‘twas impossible.” (Sterne 1997: 209)

The comment the footnote encloses on the translator’s impossibility of rendering what, as Mr. Shandy suggests, was the original “metaphor” may actually be double-edged (as it is often the case with Shandean language): from a translator’s perspective, this remark may have pointed to the fact that the “translation” process was mainly reader-oriented and, consequently, the semantic choice had to comply with the readers’ tastes and avoid, even at the expense of a semantic loss or gain, anything that might have shocked or upset them. Or, this is actually a regular strategy of Sternean wit which delights in ambiguity and hopes to make the readers accept their own ambivalence: if the play upon the denotative and the connotative meanings of the “butter’d buns” so often referred to in the cotext leads to double-entendre, as the editor’s note shows (note 25, 1997: 596), so does–no matter what the “translator” professes–the semantic choice in the “TT”, i.e. “dish” (in slang: “an attractive girl or woman”. See Webster 1996: 412). Finally, two more footnotes in Latin, left untranslated, become part and parcel of the overall picture that the novel provides of Mr. Shandy’s–and Tristram’s–show of erudition, hence the appeal to an impressive number of “underwritten authorities” (Sterne 1997: 213) and the (in)accurate quotation of a Catholic bishop and astrologer’s comment on Martin Luther: “Haec mira, satisque horrenda. 5 Planetarum coitio sub Scorpio Asterismo in nona coeli statione, quam Arabes religioni deputabant efficit Martinum Lutherum sacrilegum hereticum, Christianae religionis hostem acerrimum atque prophanum, ex horoscopi directione ad Martis coitum, religiosissimus obiit, ejus Anima scelestissima ad infernos navigavit—ab Alecto, Tisiphone et Megera flagellis igneis cruciata perenniter. —Lucas Gauricus in Tractatu astrologico de praeteritis multorum hominum accidentibus per genituras examinatis.” (Sterne 1997: 214, my emphasis)

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The result of a new intertextual game, this quotation copied as such from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary, with its wonderful slip–“religiosissimus” instead of “irreligiosissimus”–(see note 36, 1997: 596-7), becomes in itself an important component in the bathos-building process that relies mainly on the juxtaposition of the dispute over the genuineness of Diego’s nose with the religious debate turning the Catholics against the Protestants. Eventually, a chance meeting with Julia’s brother puts an end to Diego’s peregrinations: the letter of repentance which Fernandez gives him dissipates his doubts about Julia’s feelings for him, hence he decides to return to Valladolid. But the Strasburgers will, unfortunately, become the victims of their own curiosity about and obsession with Diego’s nose which causes them to leave the town unguarded and an easy prey to the French who conquer it. Slawkenbergius, the supposed author of the tale, laments the Strasburgers’ sad fate in the following terms: “Alas! alas! […] it is not the first–and I fear will not be the last fortress that has been either won–or lost by Noses” (Sterne 1997: 222). This bawdy pun which rounds off the tale challenges once more the readers to make up their minds about how they would read the text, i.e., with a stress on the connotative, metaphorical bawdiness of the nose-penis, or on the denotative which Tristram recommends when stating that, for him, a nose is “a Nose, and nothing more, or less” (Sterne 1997: 178). Tristram appears to imply that, in his readers’ case, the battle is won by the lewd. They run “the scent the wrong way” (Sterne 1997: 287) and take offence while having focused their thoughts on the bawdy and the licentious. Or, this “delicious mixture” of delicacy and concupiscence is a carefully set up strategy that Sterne adopted for the readers’ education: in their “Endless […] Search of Truth” (Sterne 1997: 73) the readers must accept that everything has two “handles,” that progression and digression, wit and judgment, bawdiness and morality can coexist (Colipcă 2005: 345-6). One should not stubbornly cling to the Augustan and/or sentimental conventions, no matter how helpful in making a certain point in the overall narrative framework, for the only law that rules life/literature/systems of thoughts, etc., is that of ambivalence and relativity. All in all, since Tristram Shandy is not the work of a translator/imitator, the number of examples that raise translation-related issues is not very large. That does not mean that Sterne ignored translation practices altogether; given the close relation between original writing and translation practices, he occasionally subsumed into his metafictional exploration a more or less overt and extensive discussion of the translator’s role, as conceived in Augustan terms, and he delighted in putting on this mask which helped him cast a new light on the writing and

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reception processes as well as on the aesthetic principles (chief among which the so much debated verisimilitude) by which reality could be represented in texts with all its myriad nuances. It is true that Sterne did not seem to have a very well-defined perspective on translation practices in the latter half of the eighteenth century, but, by taking up and, at the same time, subverting the very conventions he worked within, he tried to draw the attention to the need for further transformation and refinement of translation theories manifestly associated with practices of representation of the “marble-like” complexity of human reality across cultural and linguistic borders.

3. Tristram Shandy in Romania Sterne’s fame reached the Romanian cultural space as early as the nineteenth century when the thirst for knowledge of Romanian intellectuals travelling to the great European seats of learning (Paris, Vienna, Rome, etc.) to accomplish their education determined them to look for enlightenment in the books–published in the original or in translation–of the eighteenth-century writers. As Gavriliu mentions, a manuscript of Gheorghe Asachi, written during his studies in Vienna and Rome (1809-1819), compiled, next to excerpts from Pope, Bacon, Chesterfield, Addison and Steele, quotations from Shakespeare, Goldsmith and Sterne (2006: 21). Sterne’s novels–Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey–also appeared among the most prestigious English works included, though in their French version, in the 1847 catalogue of C. A. Rosetti and E. Winterhalder’s bookstore, hence available to the Romanian elite readership (Gavriliu 2006: 116, 146). Despite that, more than one more century had to pass before the Romanian translators Mihai Miroiu and Mihai Spăriosu would take up the challenging task of translating Sterne’s masterpiece having as a source text the English original: ViaĠa úi opiniunile lui Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published first in 1969 (Editura pentru Literatură Universală) and then revised and reedited in 2004 (Polirom) in a context in which very specific norms for translators have been set considering the functions and roles translations have been given within the framework of enhanced intercultural encounters. To enlarge for contrasting purposes on the major developments in translation studies within the framework of which the Romanian translators worked, reference should be made to the unanimously acknowledged position of the translator as a linguistic and cultural mediator who, in order to successfully embark upon the translation process

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irrespective of the nature of the TT, should acquire distinct kinds of knowledge ranging from SL and TL knowledge to text-type knowledge and, last but not least, to cultural and contrastive knowledge (Hewson and Martin 1991 qtd in Croitoru 1996: 30). Translation is not reduced to the mere rendering of a ST into a TL, but it is conceived as involving a process of interpretation and communication which might be indeed problematic, but which must be considered in direct relation with the wider historical and cultural background (Steiner 1975: 45). In other words, any attempt at achieving an effect of overall “equivalence” must be based on the careful examination of both the strictly linguistic and extralinguistic aspects at work in the text (Bassnett-McGuire 1991:13), which pertain to the cultural spaces that the translation aims at mediating between. Numerous difficulties in translation derive precisely from the temporal, cultural and linguistic differences between nations that have specific visions of the world and, therefore, specific manners of analysing and representing it by means of semantic fields (Kohn 1983: 39). The tension-inducing cultural equation that is thus included in the act of translation results from the disparity between languages and cultures and its “solution” depends on a wide range of historical and socio-cultural factors (Croitoru 1996: 25). Accordingly, the twentieth/twenty-first century translator is bound to sell to his “customers” (i.e., readers) a product (i.e., the writer’s work) “without cheating in either quantity, or in its original form, including colours, musicality, etc.” (Bantaú qtd in Croitoru 1996: 33), hence to remain faithful to the writer’s intentions, but also to “the tradition, culture and language from which and into which he translates” (Croitoru 1996: 34). In order to achieve this goal, however, besides developing a proper “bi-cultural vision”, (s)he must–as some of the eighteenth-century French translators had already sensed it–assume the role of a “critical reader” of the text (Hatim and Mason 1990 qtd in Katan 2004: 21), embarking, before translating, on a detailed analysis of the SLT that would reveal, in advance, the “sensitive” points where linguistic and cultural discrepancies could make it difficult for her/him to comply with “(1) the accountability norm or the ethical norm, which means that a translator should be loyal to all parties involved, the writer, his/her readers, him/herself etc.; (2) the communication norm or the social norm, which refers to the need to optimise communication; and (3) the relation norm or the linguistic norm, which calls for an appropriate relationship between source text and target text.” (Chesterman, 1997: 69)

Or, in the case of Sterne’s novel, the number of elements which might

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raise special problems in translation is significantly higher: not only does the language that Sterne used in constructing his discourse abound in twists and turns which exploit to the maximum the subtleties of the English vocabulary, but the play upon a wide range of foreign linguistic elements as well as on intertextuality, next to the extensive use of non-verbal elements (punctuation, drawings, other graphical signs) as means of conveying the message, puts extra-pressure on the translator. As already acknowledged, the non-narrative elements of the novel, i.e., “insertions, ambiguity and visuals” (Juva 2002: 3-4), must be paid special attention to, and, therefore, in order to comply, to her/his best, to the above mentioned norms in dealing with such problematic issues, the translator must, first of all, embark upon a preliminary translation-oriented analysis of the text (Bantaú and Croitoru 1999: 57) aimed at enhancing her/his knowledge and understanding of the culture and period in which the ST was produced, of “the target culture–and target period, [since] a considerable amount of time has passed since the writing of the text” (Juva 2002: 4), as well as of the peculiarities of metafiction as a writing practice. With the Romanian translators, this translation-oriented analysis must have encompassed a thorough study of the Romanian language and culture for the discovery of those equivalents that could adequately convey the meanings of the original, while also rendering its eighteenth-century specific colour. That explains the TT’s drawing extensively on archaic language that not only manages, in most of the cases, to remain faithful to the author’s original terms, but also to occasionally lend a slightly comic touch to the TT. Here are a few relevant examples: SL 1. “The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the younger affirm,‘That he never read a book so bad, but he drew some profit from it.’ The stories of Greece and Rome, run over without this turn and application,–do less service, I affirm it,

TL 1. „Mintea ar trebui să se deprinză a face reflecĠiuni înĠelepte úi a trage concluziuni osebite pe măsură ce înaintează; care deprindere l-a făcut pe Pliniu cel Tînăr să spuie „că n-a cetit nicicînd vreo carte cît de proastă, fără a trage un anume folos dintr-însa.” Poveútile Greciei ori ale Romei– cetite în fugă fără această deprindere úi silinĠă–aduc mai puĠin folos, o zic sus úi tare,

Gabriela Iuliana Colipca than the history of Parismus and Parismenus, or of the Seven Champions of England, read with it.” (1997: 48)

ca istoria lui Parismus úi Parismenus, sau a celor ùapte cavaleri ai Engliterei, cetite cu pomenita deprindere úi silinĠă.” (2004: 67)

SL 2. “I wish the male-reader has not pass’d by many a one, as quaint and curious as this one, in which the female-reader has been detected.” (1997: 49)

TL 2. „Nădăjduiesc că cetitorul n-a trecut pe lîngă nici una la fel de stranie úi de ciudată ca aceea cu care o prinsei cu mîĠa-n sac pe frumoasa mea cetitoare.” (2004: 68)

SL 3. “Mr. Tristram Shandy’s compliments to Messrs. Le Moyne, De Romigny, and De Marcilly; hopes they all rested well the night after so tiresome a consultation. –He begs to know, whether after the ceremony of marriage, and before that of consummation, the baptizing all the HOMUNCULI at once, slapdash, by injection, would not be a shorter and safer cut still;” (1997: 51)

TL 3. „Multe complimente domnilor Le Moyne, De Romigny úi De Marcilly din partea domnului Tristram Shandy, care nădăjduieúte că sau hodinit în lege în noaptea de după acea consultaĠiune aúa trudnică, úi doreúte să afle de nu cumva nar fi un mijloc mai lesnicios úi mai sigur ca după prăznuirea nunĠii úi înainte de săvîrúirea ei să se boteze îndată toĠi HOMUNCULII, d-a valma, prin injecĠiune;” (2004: 71)

SL 4. “As Hafen Slawkenbergius de Nasis is extremely scarce, it may not be unacceptable to the learned reader to see the specimen of a few pages of his original; I will make no reflection upon it, but that his story-telling Latin is much more concise than his philosophic–and, I think, has more of Latinity in it.” (1997: 200)

TL 4. „Cum De Nasis al lui H. Slawkenbergius este un op din cale-afară de rar, poate că cetitorului prea învăĠat nu i-ar fi chiar neplăcut să vază o probă de cîteva file din original. N-o să fac nici o altă reflecĠiune asupra lui, fără decît că latineasca sa din istorisiri e mult mai concisă decît cea din arguĠiile filosofice úi, socot, are ceva mai multă latinitate într-însa.” (2004: 199)

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Shandying Translation, Translating Shandeism SL 5. “It is well worth it, gentle stranger, replied the centinel. - ‘Tis not worth a single stiver, said the bandy-legg’d drummer—‘tis a nose of parchment.” (1997: 201)

TL 5. „ –Apoi dreptu-i că úi merită, bunule străin, înturnă răspuns straja. –Ba nu plăteúte nici o ceapă degerată, se vîrî toboúarul cel crăcănat–nu vezi că-i un nas de pergament?” (2004: 202)

SL 6. “—‘Tis a long journey, Sir, replied the master of the inn– unless a man has great business.—Tut! tut! said the stranger, I have been at the promontory of Noses; and have got me one of the goodliest, thank Heaven, that ever fell to a single man’s lot. […]

TL 6. „ –Apoi, ăsta-i drum, nu glumă, domnule, răspunse hangiul, fără numai dacă omul n-a fi avînd vreo treabă însemnată. –Aú! Aú! zise străinul, am fost la Promontoriul Nasurilor: úi îmi luai unul din cele mai făloase, har Domnului, din cîte fu sortit să aibă un muritor. […] ... Nu-i ăsta oare, îi úopti ea bărbatului la ureche, nu-i ăsta oare un nas măreĠ? –E o înúelăciune, draga mea, zise hangiul, e un nas falú. –Ba nu e falú. –E făcut din brad, zise dînsul, miroase a terebentină. –Ba uite-o bubuliĠă pe el.

… is it not, said she, whispering her husband in his ear, is it not a noble nose? ‘Tis an imposture, my dear, said the master of the inn—‘tis a false nose. ‘Tis a true nose, said his wife. ‘Tis made of fir-tree, said he, I smell the turpentine. ‘There’s a pimple on it, said she. ‘Tis a dead nose, replied the innkeeper. ‘Tis a live nose, and if I am alive myself, said the inn-keeper’s, wife, I will touch it.” (1997: 205)

–Ba-i mort, se împotrivi iarăúi hangiul. –Ba-i viu, cum mă vezi úi cum te văd, zise hangiĠa, úi am să-l pipăi neapărat.” (2004: 202-3)

Covering an extremely wide and colourful range of archaic forms that pertain both to the vocabulary (TL1: “reflecĠiuni,” “concluziuni osebite,” “a ceti”; TL2 and TL3: “a nădăjdui,” “a se hodini,” “consultaĠiune,” “trudnic,” “lesnicios,” “prăznuirea,” “d-a valma,” “injecĠiune”; TL4: “op,” “din cale-afară,” “istorisiri,” “arguĠiile”; TL6: “har Domnului,” “falú,” “bubuliĠă,” etc.) and to the grammatical level (TL1: “să se deprinză,” “să spuie”; TL4: “să vază”; TL6: “fără numai dacă,” “îmi luai,” “fu sortit,” etc.), the equivalents chosen by the Romanian translators contribute to plainly complying with the linguistic norm, given their adequacy in terms of both meaning and register. In particular, the periphrastic and idiomatic constructions (SL1: “run over”ĺTL1: “cetite în fugă,” SL1: “I affirm

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it”ĺTL1“o zic sus úi tare,” SL2: “the female-reader has been detected”ĺTL2: “o prinsei cu mîĠa-n sac pe frumoasa mea cetitoare,” SL5: “replied the centinel”ĺTL5: “înturnă răspuns straja,” SL6: “and if I am alive myself”ĺTL6: “cum mă vezi úi cum te văd,” etc.), the latter often including TC-specific idioms, lend extra-flavour to the TT. They occur, of course, unavoidably, in the framework of cases which may imply slight semantic gains or losses. On the one hand, for instance, the use of “cetitorul” (TL2) to render the English “male-reader” (SL2) may appear, to some extent, a source of ambiguity, given the fact that, in the TL, it could point either to the male-reader indeed or, in more generic terms, to any kind of reader, no gender distinction being implied; luckily, the ambiguity is soon clarified by the opposition that the co-text eventually establishes between “cetitorul” (TL2) and the explicitly feminine “cetitoare” (TL2) to which the Romanian translators have chosen to add the epithet “frumoasa”, connecting thus back in the co-text to “my fair lady” and sweetening, somehow, the misogynistic overtone of the Sternean original. The sentence “Ba nu plăteúte nici o ceapă degerată, se vîrî toboúarul cel crăcănat” (TL5) combines in itself the verb “a plăti”, which hopes to preserve something of the reference to money of the original idiom (“not to be worth a single stiver”), with a Romanian-specific idiomatic construction (“nu face nici cât o ceapă degerată”) that is adequate in terms of meaning, while the reporting verb is changed to “a se vîrî” to suggest, more clearly perhaps than in the ST, the speaker’s interference in Diego’s and the centinel’s conversation. On the other hand, in an above-quoted sample, the original dialogue clearly marks the turns taken by the innkeeper’s wife by means of appropriate reporting verbs “…said his wife/…said she” (SL6), but the TT omits them completely, just as it occasionally omits to translate certain words/phrases: for example, when translating the enumeration of body parts affected by Ernulphus’s curse, the translators seem, at some point, to simply skip over one, namely “his knees” (1997: 145). Besides, the presence in the TT of certain archaic elements of vocabulary that the present-day readers may not be familiar with could, though rarely, make it more difficult for them to understand the text, which might be considered an infringement of the communication norm. Nevertheless, on the whole, the translators’ endeavours of staying as close as possible not only to the meaning but also to the special colour of the original, could not fail to charm the readers and cause them to further immerse in the Sternean world re-encoded in the Romanian language. That is how they could discover the ways in which the translators tackled the more problematic aspects related to insertions in the form of quotations

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from foreign texts and allusions, puns and innuendo, or visual means of expression. Thus, in dealing with the most obvious insertions that consist of quotations from languages other than English–namely French, Latin and, every now and then, Greek–, the translators seem to have resorted to the simplest solution which allows both to preserve the composite nature of the ST to be transferred upon the TT, and to facilitate the readers’ access to the meta-message and the SC frames underlying the construction of Sterne’s metafiction, namely the footnotes. Actually, translation footnotes are integrated in a more complex system of annotations which comprises: (a) explanatory footnotes that help construct a clearer picture of the cultural background the Sternean matter is projected against. They provide at least a minimum of information necessary for the understanding of the direct or oblique references/allusions to more or less well-known writers, artists, philosophers, historians, political figures, clergymen, etc., as well as of the intertextual connections which establish with a wide range of writings as sources one could learn different kinds of lessons from. (b) footnotes that simply consist of the Romanian translators’ versions of the original Sternean annotations to the text (for example, the above quoted note on Slawkenbergius’s tale, 1997: 200 and 2004: 199, respectively). Such notes are duly accompanied by the specification: “nota autorului” [the author’s note]. (c) footnotes that account for certain choices in translation, some of which imply semantic losses that might occur because of the linguistic and cultural disparities that sometimes prevent from finding an adequate equivalent to the writer’s original wordplay. SL 7. “I tell thee again, said the trumpeter, ‘tis a brazen nose.” (1997: 203)

TL 7. „Îti zic, grăi trîmbiĠaúul, că-i de alamă.1” 1 Joc de cuvinte intraductibil; engl. brazen: a) de alamă; b) obraznic. Jocul de cuvinte nu apare în „originalul” latin (scris de Sterne). (2004: 202)

(d) footnotes that consist exclusively of the translations into Romanian of the foreign phrases/sentences/larger chunks of text quoted in the novel. Probably based on the translations into English already given in annotated editions of the novel, such footnotes always end with a proper identification, between brackets, of the language in which the originals were written

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(fr.)/(lat.). The cases in which foreign quotes remain untranslated are extremely few, for instance, an authorial footnote made up exclusively of titles of “underwritten authorities” (2000: 209) and a complex sentence in Latin reproduced in the Sorbonne doctors’ reply to the Mémoire on the baptism of unborn children. The latter, in particular, is not given a Romanian translation in the corresponding footnote, probably because the translators have tried to avoid redundancy in the TT, given that the original French letter already contained a translation of it. (2004: 69) The footnote system gets more complicated when the original authorial notes or the translation footnotes providing the Romanian versions of the foreign quotations embedded in the body of the main text contain in themselves other foreign language citations. Then, in a fashion that goes quite well with the already multilayered structure of Sternean metafiction, the Romanian translators introduced footnotes about the footnotes. (On the other hand, one could not help wondering whether this super-sophisticated accumulation of notes that are hardly distinguished by their different indentations on the page–the numbering style is exactly the same 1, 2, 3, ...–does not, in fact, make things more difficult for the reader, who, too concerned to follow their intricate “ways”, might eventually miss the very beauty and force of the Sternean text.) But the footnotes are not always the best solution, especially when it comes to cases of ambiguity which, relying on “internal relationships within a language, […] can be seen as the ultimately untranslatable elements of a text” (Juva 2002: 6). Creating one explanatory footnote for the translation of each and every pun or innuendo case in the novel would be preposterous. As previously mentioned, such footnotes are occasionally introduced to explain some translation choice (e.g. to show why the ST “hobby-horse” was translated in the TT by “căluĠ de bătaie”–2004: 36) or to point to the “untranslatability” of some polysemy-based pun (see the above quoted case of “brazen”, 2004: 202), which is eventually solved by often going for the denotative meaning. But, more often than not, puns and innuendo are simply rendered in the main body of the TT, without any additional comment, the results ranging, in terms of adequacy, from very inspired translations which manage to preserve the humorous effect and the colour of the original, to verbatim renderings drawing on the denotative which completely miss the fun or sexual allusiveness of the ST. The translation of Slawkenbergius’s tale, for instance, abounds in examples of both appropriate and less appropriate renditions of Sterne’s arts of language:

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Shandying Translation, Translating Shandeism SL. 8 “ODE Harsh and untuneful are the notes of love, Unless my Julia strikes the key, Her hand alone can touch the part, Whose dulcet movement charms the heart, And governs all the man with sympathetick sway.” (1997: 220)

TL 8. „ODĂ Falúă, dogită-i lăuta iubirei, De Julia nu mi-o înstrună, Doar singură mîna ei iscă Partea ce-i Dulce úi miúcă Zvîcnind, pe tot omul stăpînă.” (2004: 216)

SL 9. “The dean of Strasburg, the prebendaries, the capitulars and domiciliars (capitularly assembled in the morning to consider the case of butter’d buns) all wished they had followed the nuns of saint Ursula’s example. In the hurry and confusion every thing had been in the night before, the bakers had all forgot to lay their leaven–there were no butter’d buns to be had for breakfast in all Strasburg–the whole close of the cathedral was in one eternal commotion–such a cause of restlessness and disquietude, and such a zealous inquiry into that cause of the restlessness, had never happened in Strasburg, since Martin Luther, with his doctrines, had turned the city upside down.

TL 9. „Decanul de Strassburg, canonicii, capitularii úi domiciliarii (strînúi în sinod de dimineaĠă spre a cerceta cazul chiflelor cu unt) ar fi vroit cu toĠii să fi urmat pilda ursulinelor. Cum în graba úi zăpăceala din seara trecută brutarii uitaseră cu toĠii să pună la dospit aluatul, în tot Strassburgul nu se găsea nici un fel de chifle cu unt pentru dejun. În întreaga incintă a catedralei era un du-te-vino neîntrerupt–o pricină de neliniúte úi zbucium úi o cercetare aúa plină de rîvnă spre a o dezlega nu se mai pomenise la Strassburg de cînd întorsese Martin Luther tîrgul pe dos cu doctrinele sale. Dacă nasul străinului îúi lua această slobozenie de a se băga în oalele cinurilor religioase etc., ce ospăĠ pe cinste întinsese el printre cele ale mirenilor–” (2004: 205-6)

If the stranger’s nose took this liberty of thrusting himself thus into the dishes of religious orders, &c. what a carnival did his nose make of it, in those of the laity!” (1997: 209)

Whereas in the first given example (8), the TT is imbued with the same spicy overtones as the ST, in the second example (9), the literal translation of “butter’d buns” (SL9) as “chifle cu unt” (TL9) ruins completely the bawdiness of the story which definitely caused the SC reader to snicker, but which the TC reader remains thus completely unaware of. Maybe the

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choice of “poale-n brâu” as a TT equivalent would have been more adequate: despite its implying a slight departure from the denotative meaning of the original phrase, coming, above all, from the difference in shape (round vs. square) and type of filling (butter vs. cheese) of the two kinds of pastry, “poale-n brâu” could have better helped preserve something of the licentious allusions of the ST by its very etymological construction (taken literally, it evokes the image of a woman’s lap or raised skirt folded around her waist). Last but not least, it becomes obvious for whoever ventures to read Sterne’s book that its “verbal and visual elements are so intimately interwoven that they form an aesthetic whole” (de Voogd 1988: 383-4). So, to avoid betraying Master Sterne, translators themselves must always keep visuals in mind as complementary to language in conveying the message. To some extent, Mihai Miroiu and Mihai Spăriosu have maintained within the limits of this ethical norm by preserving the major components of Sterne’s visual games: the wriggly lines (mostly graphic representations of the digressive advancement of the narrative), the straight lines, the asterisks marking that words are left out, the index fingers used to make a point, the blank, black and marbled pages are all in place, even though, as it also happens in other editions as well, their size on the printed page is distorted. (Perhaps the most flagrant such case is that of the entirely black visual marker of grief at Yorick’s death which in the original text extends over two whole pages, but which in the Romanian editions is limited to one small black rectangle squeezed at the bottom of the page.–2004: 50.) Other graphic components of the novel are, nevertheless, omitted: the Gothic letters which appear in the marriage settlement and in some chapter titles in Volume IX are replaced by normal letters, while the front pages of each volume are but a far cry from the original ones. The approach to punctuation is also subject to numerous changes: the dashes that function as a kind of hallmark of the Sternean conversational style are completely eliminated. For a Romanian reader, that may be understandable, even considered adequate, taking into account the differences between the Romanian and the English punctuation. The same argument subsumed to the relevance for the reader rule may also hold valid in the case of the re-arrangement of dialogue sections with the introduction of Romanian-specific markers and, respectively, of the occasional changes in syntax, as sentences separated by dashes in the ST are united into large complex sentences in the TT, which, still, may not seem unnatural to the Romanian reader. The impression of lively conversation specific to the ST is, then, “sacrificed” to the more written

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language-like style that could be easily recognised and accepted by the TC reader. What appears indeed as a grievous loss in the rendering of the visual component of the ST is the translators’ denying the Romanian readers the possibility of contrasting the Latin and the English texts in the chapters that raise, as hopefully the previous section of this study has shown, specific issues related to translation practices and to the Augustan heritage in Sterne’s novel. Despite their producing on the whole more of a SCoriented translation (Katan 2004: 204), Mihai Miroiu and Mihai Spăriosu seem to have missed or paid relatively little attention to such aspects which prove Tristram Shandy the product of a “past-oriented culture” in which the historical and cultural contexts are paramount to understanding, among other things, the play upon translation practices in the eighteenth century (Katan 2004: 236). “The translator, as mediator, needs to be particularly careful to keep the information focus as in the original to retain the construction of reality as the writer saw it” (Katan 2004: 210); or, this is precisely what the Romanian translators somewhat failed to do by ignoring the very point of paralleling Latin and English texts according to the adopted and subverted Augustan translation practices. In doing that, they cancelled the disruptive game of chapter numbers in the case of the Excommunicatio (whereas, in the ST, the Latin text on the even page belongs allegedly to Chapter XXXV and its translation into English on the odd page to Chapter XI, in the TT, both versions, reproduced successively, are simply said to form Chapter XI); furthermore, they occasionally deprived the reader of the pleasure of discovering the hidden meanings of Sternean ambiguity by comparing the form of the Latin words with that of the words used in translation.

Conclusions Mihai Miroiu and Mihai Spăriosu’s translation ViaĠa úi opiniunile lui Tristram Shandy, Gentleman may have its drawbacks, some of which have been signalled above, but that does not mean it is not an outstanding contribution aimed at familiarising the Romanian readership with Sternean wit and humour. Using as a ST the English original and working within the framework of the new system of roles and rules governing the relations between the writer–the translator–the reader or between the SL and TL cultures as set in twentieth-century translation studies, they have done their best to revive Romanian archaisms while recreating, even if only in part, the colour of the eighteenth-century original, and to use the resources of the Romanian language as much as possible in order to find adequate

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solutions to the ambiguities and allusions of an English ST of infinitely rich overtones in which wit and judgment, the bawdy joke and the serious reflection are never very clearly separated. And maybe not all the Romanian readers will understand Shandean reasoning; some will get lost in the web of names, allusions, references which the translators always tried to individualise and explain, even if very briefly, in the footnotes; others will enjoy or look reluctantly upon the richly annotated combinations of foreign language elements and non-literary materials with the main narrative; some will have a hard time following the abrupt shifting from one narrative level to another, others will be amused by the surfacing innuendoes that the translators strived to preserve as often as they could or by the game of visual elements closely intertwined with the narrator’s digressions. Whatever the case, the Romanian readers will have had thus the chance to get actively involved in the process of reading at the end of which they will have hopefully learned more about the art of (anti)novel writing in the eighteenth century or, at least, about the “strange ways” of human nature. Completely different, for instance, from the French translations which circulated in the late years of the eighteenth century and reached for the first time Romania in the nineteenth century, ViaĠa úi opiniunile lui Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is neither a free translation nor an exercise of creative writing in imitation of Sterne’s art; there is no doubt here about the boundaries between the writing and translating practices. It is the result of a carefully handled translation process which offers a challenge to the Romanian readers who might even like to re-read the TT in order to discover whatever meanings they may not have managed to grasp upon a first reading, and, at the same time, an example for Romanian translators proving that, even though losses are sometimes inevitable when mediating between different languages and cultures, the gains for the intercultural relations that are thus established are undeniable.

References Aravamudan, S. 2005. “Fiction/Translation/Transnation: The Secret History of the Eighteenth-Century Novel”, in Backscheider, P. R. and Ingrassia, C. (eds.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, Oxford, Malden, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 48-74. Bantaú, A., Croitoru, E. 1999. Didactica traducerii, Bucureúti: Teora. Bassnett-McGuire, S. 1991. Translation Studies, New York: Routledge. Byrd, M. 1985/1988. Tristram Shandy, London: Unwin Hyman. Chesterman, A. 1997. Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in

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Translation Theory, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Colipcă, G. I. 2005. The Ways of the Novel: or, the Quest for Verisimilitude in the Eighteenth-century French and English Novel, Leiden: UFB/GrafiMedia Universiteit Leiden. Croitoru, E. 1996. Interpretation and Translation, GalaĠi: Porto-Franco. Gavriliu, E. 2006. Primele traduceri româneúti din literatura engleză (1830-1850). Texte selectate úi comentate. Dosare de receptare. Tabel cronologic, GalaĠi: Europlus. Juva, K. 2002. A Bumpy Ride. Translating Non-narrative Elements in Tristram Shandy, University of Helsinki, http://www.turanko.net/kersti/gradu.htm (retrieval date: September 21, 2008) Katan, D. 1999/2004. Translating Cultures. An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators, Manchester, UK & Northampton MA: St. Jerome Publishing. Kohn, I. 1983. VirtuĠile compensatorii ale limbii române în traducere, Bucureúti, Timiúoara: Facla. Kraft, E. 1996. Laurence Sterne Revisited, New York: Twayne Publishers; London, Mexico City, New Delhi, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto: Prentice Hall International. Miroiu, M., Spăriosu, M. trans. 2004, ViaĠa úi opiniunile lui Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Iaúi: Polirom. McMurran, M. H. 2001. “National or Transnational? The EighteenthCentury Novel”, in Cohen, M. and Dever, C. (eds.), The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel, Princeton University Press, 50-72. —. 2005. “Aphra Behn from Both Sides: Translation in the Atlantic World”, in Ingrassia, C. and Ravel, J. S. (eds.), Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture. Volume 34, John Hopkins University Press, 1-24. Rand, N. 1985. “The Translator and the Myth of the Public: ‘Introductory Remarks’ to the First French Translations of Swift, Young, and Shakespeare,” in MLN, Vol. 100, No. 5 Comparative Literature (December), 1092-1102. Sieber, H. 1977. The Picaresque, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Smollett, T. G. 1990. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom–1753, Edited with an introduction and notes by Paul-Gabriel Boucé, London: Penguin Books. —. 1901. “Translations from the Classics”, in The New York Times, Wednesday, March 30, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D00E6D61330E132A25 753C3A9659C946097D6CF (retrieval date: October 12, 2007).

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Steiner, G. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sterne, L. 1997. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman– 1759-1767, Edited by Melvyn New and Joan New with an introductory essay by Christopher Ricks and an introduction and notes by Melvyn New, London: Penguin Books. St-Pierre, P. 1993. “Translation: Constructing Identity out of Alterity,” in Livivs, No. 4, Université de Montréal, 243-252, http://www.histal.umontreal.ca/espanol/documentos/translation_constr ucting_identit.htm+Translators+in+the+eighteenth+century&hl=ro&ct =clnk&cd=83&gl=ro (retrieval date: October 12, 2007). de Voogd, P. 1988. “Tristram Shandy as an Aesthetic Object,” in Word and Image, 4, 383-92. —. 1996. Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, New York/Avenel: Gramercy Books. Weinbrot, H. D. 1966. “Translation and Parody: Towards the Genealogy of the Augustan Imitation”, in ELH, 33, 4, 434-447.

TRANSLATION PROBLEMS FOR LITHUANIAN TRANSLATORS RAISED BY ENGLISH DYSPHEMISTIC FORMS OF ADDRESS: THE EXAMPLE OF J.D. SALINGER’S THE CATCHER IN THE RYE NERINGA DZIEDRAVIýINjTƠ

Introduction Forms of address are very important in literary texts, as through their use not only are the personalities of characters revealed, but also their relationships with other characters in the story. This is especially true in texts with many dialogues in which characters choose particular ways to address each other. As a narrative develops, readers become aware of the major kinds of relationships which are expressed through particular forms of address. In a translation, then, to render the relationships which are often central to the story, a translator has to pay particular attention to the use of forms of address in the source text and to be well acquainted with the possible forms of address in the target language. In this paper, the syntagm “form of address” is used in a wider sense than simply the names, nicknames and second-person pronouns used by characters to address each other. In the context of translation, it is understood as including many elements that contribute to the overall tone of the speech that a character employs while speaking to different people; all these linguistic variables have to be considered by the translator. One of the major problems that translators have to deal with when translating forms of address is the use of dysphemistic forms of address. Although they are not frequent in J.D. Salinger’s novel, dysphemistic forms of address are used by the characters in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) in important episodes. The major goal of this paper is to look at the use of dysphemistic forms of address in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and how the Lithuanian translator of the novel, Povilas Gasiulis, develops strategies to render Salinger’s language1.

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On the corpus choice The main reason for choosing Salinger’s novel for this analysis is that it is rich in dialogues through which the personality of the main character of the story, the adolescent Holden Caulfield is revealed, as well as his relationships with the people that he meets. The Catcher in the Rye is a first-person narrative about an adolescent who spends two days in New York after his expulsion from the fourth private secondary school he has been sent to. Holden Caulfield narrates his thoughts and dialogues with people that he meets, in this way revealing his attitudes toward people, educational institutions and the American society, in general. Although Holden is extremely ironic about the American values and wants to detach himself from the society in which he lives, at the same time he tries to find something in common between himself and other members of society. In addition, at the age of sixteen, he seeks to be treated as an adult rather than a teenager, though this attempt is almost always unsuccessful. The first novel written by Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, quickly gained the status of classic postwar fiction. According to Alexander (1965), the American writer “gained an almost immediate acceptance, as being among the most significant post-World War II American novelists” (1965: 5). As Stringer (1996) puts it, this novel by Salinger “had an enormous success, particularly with the young who were able to identify with the young hero/narrator, Holden Caulfield” (1996: 589). However, at the same time, the novel aroused controversy among readers. In his introduction to New Essays on the Catcher in the Rye, Salzman writes that “[s]ome of the reviewers were clearly impressed”, describing the novel as “unusually brilliant”, “engaging and believable” and “highly recommended” (1991: 4-5), while others were less positive, some even seeing the novel as unacceptable. Alexander explains that “Reviews of the novel were mixed, from out-and-out approval to questions about Salinger’s attitudes, the colloquial style, the focus on an adolescent boy, and of course, the issue that has since attracted attention – whether the book was fit for young readers” (1965:9).

As literary historians show it, because of the criticism on the appropriateness of the novel’s subject and language, the novel was often banned from secondary school and university reading lists (Alexander 1965:9; Salzman 1991:15). Schmitz, in turn, writes that the novel was excluded from many reading lists “in order to ‘protect’ young people from coming into contact with the

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Translation Problems for Lithuanian Translators critical view of American life and the ‘unsavory’ language used in the novel” (1988: 1).

Nevertheless, the book was still widely read and translations appeared on the shelves of book stores in many countries. Povilas Gasiulis (b. 1944), who is the translator of Salinger’s novel, is a prominent figure in the Lithuanian world of literary translation. According to the website of Lithuanian Professional Writers, Gasiulis studied English philology at Vilnius University and, after graduation, engaged in a pedagogical career, while working as a translator (www.rasytojai.lt). Since 1990 Gasiulis has been a member of the Lithuanian Writers’ Association; he currently works as a teacher of English in Saulơ Secondary School in Biržai. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye was his first translation published in 1966 under the Lithuanian title Rugiuose prie bedugnơs (In the Rye near an Abyss). In “Translations of World Literature and Political Censorship in Contemporary Lithuania” (1979), Tomas Venclova writes, that due to a number of political and social factors in Soviet Lithuania, access to Western literature was less limited in the period of 1966-1970. According to Venclova, authors like Salinger “became particularly popular and had quite an evident effect on younger Lithuanian prose writers” (1979:18). It was very positively reviewed by a translation critic Romualdas Kašauskas (1966), while in major review of postwar Lithuanian translation (1980), Gasiulis’ translation is singled out by Vytautas Visockas for its exceptionally rich language and style. In his translation, Gasiulis pays great attention to the dysphemistic forms of address used by the characters in the novel, so that analyzing his strategies is extremely interesting.

Aspects on the translation of dysphemistic forms of address As dysphemistic forms of address may be used for different purposes, the translator has to first identify the speaker’s aim in using them. Allan and Burridge describe a dysphemism to be “a word or phrase with connotations that are offensive either about the denotatum and/or to people addressed or overhearing the utterance” (2006: 31). According to Allan and Burridge, dysphemisms are used “to talk about people and things that frustrate and annoy them that they disapprove of and wish to disparage, humiliate and degrade” (idem). Dysphemistic forms of address are also well described by one of Kroger’s strategic rules for the exchange of forms of address:

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“Treat with contempt, if you wish, those who are powerless and cannot threaten you (by using disrespectful forms of address and by insisting on respectful ones)” (1982: 816).

Still, Allan and Burridge explain that dysphemistic forms of address are not only offensive words and phrases, but may sometimes be also understood as markers of solidarity (2006: 31,77). In translation, different choices are made depending on whether the dysphemistic form is being used to belittle or insult the interlocutor or to claim common ground. It has to be mentioned too, that what is dysphemistic in one language may be neutral in another and the reverse. In “Pragmatic Aspects of the Translation of Slang and Four-letter Words” (1994), Zauberga explains that the use of taboo and swearwords function differently in Latvian and English. A similar situation applies to the use of dysphemisms in Lithuanian literary text, so that translators have to be very creative in such cases in order to produce a similar effect in their translations. In general, translators’ choices for dysphemistic forms of address are greatly influenced by the speaker’s aim in using these forms, social norms that exist in English and Lithuanian and linguistic means that help to produce a translation which would be acceptable for the Lithuanian readers. In his translation, Gasiulis frequently resorts to diminutive forms as forms of address to indicate irony by a character who wishes to depreciate and belittle the interlocutor. A very clear example of this translation strategy can be seen in a dialogue between Holden and Robert Ackley, his next-door neighbor in the school dormitory. Holden is not very fond of Ackley, first because of his poor hygiene and appearance. Holden explains to the readers that he has never seen Ackley brushing his teeth and his face is all covered with pimples. Second, Holden does not like certain features of Ackley’s personality, regarding him as a “very peculiar guy” who never goes out anywhere: he notes that it is strange that nobody calls him by his first name even though he has been at the school for four years (Salinger 1951:26). At the beginning of this episode, Ackley comes into Holden’s room and stands in his light, irritating Holden, who is trying to read a book: SL 1. “[…] How ‘bout sitting down or something, Ackley kid? […]” (28)

TL 1. – […] Gal prisơstum, Ekliuk, ar ka? [...] (30)

Although Holden is younger than Ackley, he feels superior to him. Intending to tease his neighbour, Holden consciously chooses a dysphemistic address form, “Ackley kid”. Holden even explains his

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intentions to the readers: “He didn’t like it when you called him ‘Ackley kid’.” (Salinger 1951:28) He is also aware that his intentions are known to the addressee: “It drove him mad when I called him ‘Ackley kid’” (Salinger 1951:28). For the Lithuanian translator, this offers a chance to use diminutives, a common form in the language. In her MA thesis on the use of Lithuanian diminutives in literary text (2001) Edita Monkutơ explains that diminutive forms may be used to express a scornful and contemptuous attitude towards other people. Therefore, Gasiulis’ choice of the diminutive form “Ekliuk” in this context has the same depreciating function as the original “Ackley kid”. As their conversation continues, Holden keeps repeating the same address form “Ackley kid”, constantly teasing his fellow pupil. In all cases, Gasiulis uses the same strategy, choosing the diminutive form “Ekliuk”. At first, Ackley pretends he is not aware of Holden’s intention to humiliate him and shows no reaction to the dysphemistic address form. However, when Holden states that his roommate, Stradlater, is both rich and generous, while Ackley would not be generous even if he had the same amount of money, Ackley responds angrily: SL 2. “No, you wouldn’t.” I shook my head. “No, you wouldn’t, Ackley kid. If you had his dough, you’d be one of the biggest – ” “Stop calling me ‘Ackley kid’, God damn it. I’m old enough to be your lousy father.” (33)

TL 2. – Jau tik ne tu, – papurþiau galvą. – Tu jau nesišvaistytum, Ekliuk. Jeigu turơtum tiek pinigo kiek jis, bnjtum toks nagas, kad... – Liaukis sykƳ pravardžiuotis! „Ekliuk, Ekliuk!“ Po velniǐ! Aš tau tơvas galơþiau bnjti, mažvaiki! (36)

When he is described as inferior to Stradlater, whom Ackley despises, he feels strongly offended and tries to pay Holden back. Instead of continuing the topic of generosity, Ackley angrily demands that Holden stop calling him “Ackley kid”, using the imperative form and swearing to emphasize his demand. In addition, he exaggerates their age difference, an issue which is important for both teenagers. Ackley’s irritation is also evidenced by the fact that he openly identifies Holden’s choice of an address form as name-calling. In Gasiulis’ translation, Holden’s teasing manner of speech and Ackley’s irritation are just as clearly expressed as in the source text. Gasiulis also uses the imperative in Ackley’s reply, and adds a repetition of the Lithuanian diminutive form “Ekliuk” and an exclamation mark, emphasizing how annoyed Ackley is. Further, Gasiulis also adds an address form that is not present in the source text, “mažvaiki” (little boy),

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which indicates Ackley’s attempt to gain higher status because he is a little older than Holden. In addition, employing the strategy of explicitation, Gasiulis translates the English neutral verb form “calling” by a more specific Lithuanian verb “pravardžiuotis”, which literally means namecalling. As Klaudy puts it, “Explicitation is the technique of making explicit in the target text information that is implicit in the source text” (2001: 80). The use of these translation strategies here emphasizes Ackley’s irritation very effectively. When dealing with the English swearword, Gasiulis chooses to replace “God damn it” by the Lithuanian “Po velniǐ!” which serves a similar function, although there is a difference in the literal meaning. The Lithuanian “Po velniǐ!” means “to the devils” and is a common expression of anger. Gasiulis’ choice of this translation may be explained by the fact that, unlike English, direct references to God in Lithuanian speech usually do not have a strongly negative connotation. Moreover, mentioning God in Lithuanian may be said to be more typical of an older generation’s speech and so it would sound awkward when used by teenagers. In another episode, when Holden knows he has been expelled from Pencey Prep school, he stays in his room before deciding to go to New York, where his family live. Stradlater, his roommate, comes into their room and then goes to the students’ washroom to prepare himself for a date. As Holden has nothing better to do, he follows Stradlater into the washroom, where the two boys engage in a casual teenage conversation. It should be mentioned that, although Holden considers Stradlater to be good-looking, he is not very fond of him, as he believes that Stradlater is hypocritical in some ways. Alexander sees this as a theme in the novel and explains that “Holden is upset by the disparity between appearance and reality” (1965: 21). In his narration, Holden tells the readers that his roommate is “a secret slob anyway” (Salinger 1951:36); he explains that Stradlater’s pleasant appearance masks an unreasonable vanity. Nevertheless, although he does not admire Stradlater, Holden is willing to talk to him, as he is with everyone he meets, because it makes him feel less lonely. When they converse, Holden and Stradlater not only express the solidarity of two equals, but also use their language in what may be called a paradoxical double strategy: both as a means to establish male bonding and as an attempt to assert dominance over each other. The topic shifts to Stradlater’s date for the evening: SL 3. “Who’s your date?” I asked him. “Fitzgerald?” “Hell, no! I told ya, I’m through with that pig.”

TL 3.– Su kuo eini? – klausiu. – Su Ficdžerald? – Pasiutai! Sakiau, kad su ta klizma kvit.

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Translation Problems for Lithuanian Translators “Yeah? Give her to me, boy. No kidding. She’s my type.” “Take her… She’s too old for you.” (39)

– Taaip? Tai perleisk ją man. Kaip draugui. Rimtai. Mano tipas. – Gali imt, kad nori... Bet ji tau per sena (42)

Although Holden feels awkward and confused when approaching girls, he hardly admits this to his friends. Cowan suggests that Holden’s maletalk “stays away for the most part from macho posturings” (1991: 42); however, in this episode, he still engages in a cynical conversation about a girl with Stradlater. Allan and Burridge explain that this type of dysphemistic talk is characteristic of “macho types speaking of women” (2006: 31). The fact that Holden asks permission to date the girl, and that Stradlater agrees to pass her on to his friend are indicative of the act of male bonding. Yet, at the same time, Stradlater exaggerates their age difference, stating that Holden is too young for his girl-friend and, in this way, he asserts superiority over Holden. In the passage, Salinger orthographically imitates the spoken language, using the contractions “who’s” “I’m” and “she’s” and the colloquiallypronounced “told ya” and “yeah”. What is more interesting here is the use of such words as “hell”, “pig”, “my type” and “boy”: the first three referring to the girl and the last one used by Holden to address Stradlater. While words like “hell”, “pig”, “give her”, “my type” and “take her” show a degree of contempt for the girl, Holden’s use of “boy” signifies his claim for solidarity. Brown and Levinson find that the term “boy” is usually used to convey an in-group membership (1987: 107). The combination of these words that both characters use emphasizes the strong male-bonding between the two adolescents and also draws a clear boundary between the male and female worlds in the minds of these teenagers. As many of the European languages, Lithuanian has both a singular (familiar) and a plural (formal) form for the pronoun “you” and its corresponding verbs. Gasiulis chooses to render the male-bonding manner of speech through the use of informal verbs, “eini” (you go), “pasiutai” (you got mad), “perleisk” (give), “gali imt” (you can take) and “nori” (you want). Although the colloquially-pronounced “told ya” is rendered as a standard second-person verb “sakiau” (I told you), Gasiulis does choose to imitate the non-standard pronunciation of the English yes as “yeah” by using an orthographic imitation of how the Lithuanian “taip” (yes) is drawn out in colloquial speech as “taaip”. For the rather rude teenage talk about the girl in the English text, Gasiulis chooses such words and expressions as “pasiutai” (you got mad), “su ta klizma kvit” (I am through with that enema), “perleisk ją man” (give her to me), “mano tipas” (my

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type) and “gali imt” (you can take), which also sound rude in Lithuanian. In order to convey Holden’s claim for solidarity with Stradlater, Gasiulis uses the expression “kaip draugui” (as a friend) which serves the same function as the English generic address term “boy”. Similarly, when translating Stradlater’s words “She’s too old for you” that signal the dominating manner of his speech, Gasiulis is faithful to the text and renders it by “Bet ji tau per sena” (but she is too old for you). In The Catcher in the Rye, one of the prominent features of the teenage talk between Holden and Stradlater is their use of strong swearwords used as interjections and modifiers, such as “for Crissake”, “Jesus”, “Je-sus Christ”, “goddam”, “damn”, “hell” and “sonuvabitch” while addressing each other. There are forty-eight uses of such swearwords in the ten pages of the fourth chapter of the novel, a chapter that is mainly devoted to the conversation between Holden and Stradlater. Thirty-three of these are Holden’s; however, nineteen out of these thirty-three cases of swearwords are found in Holden’s narrative of his own thoughts. Therefore, in terms of the number of swearwords said aloud, Holden and Stradlater are almost equal: Holden uses them fourteen times, while Stradlater says them fifteen times. In one of his articles Schmitz explains that, if Salinger’s novel met with censorship in the country of its origin, it is not surprising that it was also censored outside the United States of America (1988: 4). The translation of swearwords in Holden and Stradlater’s speech causes a major problem for Gasiulis as well, as the traditions for the use of swearwords in English and Lithuanian literary texts differ. Zauberga writes about a similar problem in the Latvian translation of English texts mentioning that: For historical reasons, there is a wide gap between spoken and written colloquial layers in Latvian. Slang, and especially four-letter words, function differently in Latvian compared to English, where they are used much more frequently and have lost their disturbing connotations. (1994: 137; italics in original)

As the same is true of the Lithuanian literary tradition, some measures have to be taken by the translator in order to achieve the similar effect in his translated version. According to Zauberga, “There is a tendency for spoken language to become more and more relaxed and unruly, as opposed to the rigid written language” (1994:140). However, an imitation of Lithuanian swearing in the spoken language, which is influenced by the Russian vocabulary, would not really correspond to the English use of swearwords in the literary narrative. As, in general, the use of substandard

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Translation Problems for Lithuanian Translators

language was not common, except for comic effect in the Lithuanian literature at the time Gasiulis made his translation, its literal translation would have resulted in a much lower register than that of the original text. What sounds mildly rude in written English would sound very vulgar in written Lithuanian, and that would change the readers’ perception of the characters and their relationship. According to Allan and Burridge, “Swearing can act as an in-group solidarity marker within a shared colloquial style” (2006:77); therefore, attempting to adapt swearwords used by Holden and Stradlater to the more conservative Lithuanian literary tradition, Gasiulis employs several translation strategies. Table 4 provides four examples of Stradlater’s favorite swearword, “for Chrissake” with Gasiulis’ translations for each case: SL 4.1. “I don’t know. For Chrissake, I only just met her,” Stradlater said (43). SL 4.2. “Cut it out, Holden, for Chrissake! Stradlater said (39). SL 4.3. “You’re right in my light, Holden, for Chrissake, “Stradlater said (40). SL 4.4. “I don’t know. New York, if we have time. She only signed out for nine-thirty, for Chrissake.” (44)

TL 4.1. – Viešpatie aukštielninkas, aš su ja tik šiandien susipažinau! – sako Stredleiteris (46) TL 4.2. – Atsikabink, Houldenai, nebnjk mažas! – supurkštơ Stredleiteris (42). TL 4.3. – Pasitrauk, Holdenai, ne stiklinis! – pertraukơ mane Stredleiteris (43). TL 4.4. – Nežinau. Tikriausiai Ƴ Niujorką, jeigu bus laiko. Ʋsivaizduoji, jinai išsiơmơ leidimą tik iki pusơs dešimtos! (47)

In the first case Gasiulis chooses to replace the expression “for Chrissake” by “Viešpatie aukštielninkas” (Lord upside down), which is a fairly direct translation, since it also refers to God. The mentioning of God is not offensive in Lithuanian; however, in Salinger’s text, the situation in which the English expression is used shows that it has lost its strong connotative meaning so that its Lithuanian version is equivalent in function. The translation strategy used for the next three cases may be identified as avoidance of repetition, which is identified as one of the universals of translation by Laviosa-Braithwaite (2001:288). In the second example Gasiulis replaces the expression in the source text by “nebnjk mažas” (don’t be a child), which allows Stradlater to exaggerate the age difference between himself and Holden. Example 3 illustrates a translation strategy which is identified by Zauberga as stylistic compensation

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(1994:142). According to Keith Harvey, “Compensation is a technique which involves making up for the loss of a source text effect by creating a similar effect in the target text through means that are specific to the target language and/or text” (2001: 37).

Here, the interjection “for Chrissake” is omitted; however, it is compensated for by the metaphorical Lithuanian colloquial phrase “ne stiklinis” (not made of glass), which is used to replace the more neutral English phrase “you’re right in my light”. The fourth case is a clear case of what Zauberga calls softening (1994:141). The interjection “for Chrissake” is now replaced by the informal form of the verb, “Ƴsivaizduoji” (can you imagine). Gasiulis’ different translation strategies for what was the same expression in the source text can be interpreted as avoiding repetition in the target text. A very similar strategy is employed by Gasiulis while translating Holden’s favorite swearwords, “damn” and “goddamn”, as Table 5 shows it: SL 5.1. “I’m the goddam Governor’s son,” I said (38). SL 5.2. “You’re damn right I know her” (40) SL 5.3. “Her mother and father were divorced. Her mother was married again to some booze hound,” I said. […] Jane said he was supposed to be a playwright or some goddam thing, but all I ever saw him do was booze all the time and listen to every single goddam mystery program on the radio. And run around the goddam house, naked” (42).

TL 5.1. – Mano tơvas – gubernatorius! – sakau (41). TL 5.2. – PažƳstu! (43). TL 5.3. – Jos tơvai išsiskyrĊ. Motina paskui ištekơjo už vieno latro, – aiškinau aš. [...] Džeinơ sakơ, kad jis dramaturgas ar kas toks, bet, kiek aš maþiau, jis, velnias, tik lakdavo kaip šuva ir klausydavosi kiekvieno pašvinkusio detektyvo per radiją. Ir lakstydavo po visą namą nuogas (45).

In the first two examples the swearwords “goddam” and “damn” are omitted in Gasiulis’ translation, leaving only the general meaning of the statements. However, in the third case, Gasiulis uses the strategy of stylistic compensation, using indicators of teenage slang talk in different places than those in the source text. Translating the noun phrase “goddam thing”, Gasiulis uses a neutral phrase which is common in Lithuanian speech, “ar kas toks” (or something like that). However, the interjection “goddam” is compensated by inserting the Lithuanian interjection

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“velnias” (devil) into the sentence and describing the act of drinking as “kaip šuva” (like a dog). The “goddam mystery program on the radio” is replaced by “pašvinkusio detektyvo per radiją” (a stinking detective story on the radio), which does not have a reference to God, but does indicate Holden’s opinion that Jane’s step-father has bad taste. Gasiulis neutralizes the last case of “goddam house” and translates it as “po visą namą” (all over the house), again rendering only the basic meaning of the sentence. In a further episode in the same chapter, Holden’s roommate Stradlater comes back from his date with Jane Gallagher, a friend of Holden’s and a girl that he admires. When Stradlater explains that they did not go to New York as planned, but spent time in the basketball coach’s car instead, Holden is sure that Stradlater took sexual advantage of Jane and becomes furious. Holden even starts a fight, but ends up on the floor with Stradlater sitting on his chest: SL 6. “Get your lousy knees off my chest,” I told him. I was almost bawling. I really was. “Go on, get offa me, ya crumby bastard.” […] “Shut up, now, Holden,” he said with his big stupid red face. “Just shut up, now.” “You don’t even know if her first name is Jane or Jean, ya goddam moron!” “Now, shut up, Holden, God damn it – I’m warning ya,” he said – I really had him going. “If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna slam ya one.” “Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest.” (57)

TL 6. – Kraustykis nuo manĊs! – švokšþiau as. Vos nepradơjau bliauti. Garbơs žodis. – Atsitrauk, šunsnuki, idiote! […] – Houldenai, užsiþiaupk, – sako jis, išpnjtĊs savo idiotišką raudoną snukƳ. – Užsiþiaupk, sakau! – Tu net nežinai, ar jos vardas Džeinơ, ar Džina, idiote prakeiktas! – Po velniǐ, Houldenai, užsiþiaupk gražiuoju. Aš tave perspơju! – sako jis. Gražiai jƳ Ƴsiutinau. – Nebandyk mano kantrybơs, nes apsirasosi! – Nešdinkis nuo manĊs su savo pašvinkusiais keliais! (59-60)

Holden is enraged when he imagines Stradlater having sex with Jane in the coach’s car, and he gets even more frustrated because of his failure to defeat Stradlater physically. As Stradlater presses him to the ground with his knees, Holden shouts a whole range of insults at him, referring to Stradlater’s knees as “lousy knees” and “dirty stinking moron knees”, as well as calling Stradlater a “crumby bastard” and “goddam moron”. In turn, Stradlater gets angry with Holden but he does not want to fight over Jane and, firmly holding Holden, tells him to stop talking several times. Stradlater feels physically superior to Holden and warns him to stop

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shouting or he would “slam” Holden. Stradlater’s use of the phrase “God damn it” does not function here as a direct insult, but rather signals his irritation with Holden. Holden’s inferiority is also emphasized by the orthographic imitation of colloquial speech, “offa”, which shows that Holden is not able to fight Stradlater. Although Allan and Burridge claim that swearing may be a solidarity marker, they also explain that “Most cursing is an emotive reaction to anger, frustration, or something unexpected and usually, but not necessarily, undesirable” (2006:77-78). As Holden is furious about Stradlater’s supposed treatment of Jane, he no longer seeks solidarity with his roommate, and his swearing becomes offensive. Moreover, Holden’s language shows that he has lost the dominance struggle, while Stradlater’s single use of “God damn it” emphasizes his sense of superiority over Holden. Holden’s agitated manner of speech and Stradlater’s irritation with Holden are also emphasized by the use of italics in some of their phrases, which indicates the changing pitch of their voices. In translating the passage, Gasiulis employs several strategies to convey Holden’s offensive manner of speech and Stradlater’s superior tone. Holden’s first reference to Stradlater’s knees as “lousy” in Salinger’s text is replaced by Gasiulis by the informal imperative form “Kraustykis” (get off me), while the “dirty stinking moron knees” with its three derogatory adjectives is rendered by a much shorter insult, “pašvinkusiais keliais” (stinking knees). Translating Holden’s use of “crumby bastard” and “goddam moron”, Gasiulis does not soften them, using the Lithuanian insults “šunsnuki, idiote” (dog’s muzzle) and “idiote prakeiktas” (damn idiot). Here again, as in the translation of some earlier episodes, Gasiulis avoids repetition. Thus, rendering Stradlater’s phrase “shut up”, which is repeated four times in the English text, Gasiulis replaces it by “užsiþiaupk” (shut up), “užsiþiaupk, sakau” (I said shut up) and “užsiþiaupk gražiuoju” (you’d better shut up). Although repeating the informal imperative “užsiþiaupk” (shut up), at the same time Gasiulis avoids complete repetition by adding a verb, “sakau” (I say), and an adverb, “gražiuoju” (nicely). The fourth time that Stradlater tells Holden to shut up, the phrase is translated as “Nebandyk mano kantrybơs” (don’t try my patience), which emphasizes his superior tone. Stradlater’s irritation is also wellexpressed by the use of colloquial “apsirasosi”, which has a similar connotation as the English “I’ll make you sweat”, instead of “I’m gonna slam ya one”; Gasiulis’ choice adds a somewhat comic effect and clearly shows that Stradlater feels physically superior to Holden. Gasiulis’ use of “Po velniǐ” (to the devils) instead of Stradlater’s “God damn it”

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emphasizes his irritation too, even if the Lithuanian solution is milder as a swearword. Although the use of italics and colloquial pronunciation is lost in Gasiulis’ translation, these are compensated for by the use of exclamation marks: while there is only one exclamation mark in the source text, Gasiulis uses seven of them in his translation, in this way using punctuation to emphasize Holden and Stradlater’s agitated manner of speech, and compensating for not using italics, as Salinger does. This episode with Stradlater, like the one with Ackley, reveals Holden’s failure to find common ground with his schoolmates, something which is clearly expressed through the use of dysphemistic forms of address in both the source and target texts. Another very interesting example of a character who uses dysphemistic forms of address appears in the episode in The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden hires a prostitute in his hotel in New York. Here the situation quickly turns into a comic confrontation, as Holden immediately loses his desire to have sex with the prostitute, but still wants to talk to her. Although Holden tries to be polite and introduces himself in a gentlemanlike manner, the prostitute is not interested in his courtesy; she regards Holden as an adolescent rather than an adult. Holden understands that he cannot deal with her and feels relieved when she is gone. Nonetheless, the episode has not actually ended. Holden had hired the prostitute through Maurice, her pimp, who is the liftman in the hotel. Some moments later, after the prostitute leaves Holden’s room, he hears a loud knock on his door. Still standing behind the unopened door, Maurice insists that Holden has not paid the full price for the prostitute’s service and orders him to open the door: SL 7. “Open up, chief.” (132)

TL 7. – Nelaikyk sveþiǐ už durǐ, šefe! (130)

During most of their subsequent conversation, Holden is spoken to by a form of address, “chief” which is highly ironic, considering the circumstances. The literal meaning of “chief”, a person of authority, does not correspond to the situation, for in this encounter Holden is more of a victim than a chief; he has no authority over Maurice and even gets beaten up by him. The function of this address form is consciously ironic: it humiliates Holden and shows him who really controls the situation. Gasiulis uses a direct translation, “šefe”, but Maurice’s use of the informal singular imperative form, “nelaikyk”, instead of the more formal plural, emphasizes the contrast between the literal meaning of “šefe” and its actual function in the text.

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Although Maurice is an interesting figure, for this analysis what is even more notable is that here, for the first time in the novel, Holden becomes offensive when talking to an adult. On his way out, Maurice snaps his finger on Holden’s pajamas, causing an outburst from Holden: SL 8. “You’re a dirty moron,” I said. “You’re a stupid chiseling moron, and in about two years you’ll be one of those scraggy guys that come up to you on the street and ask for a dime for coffee. You’ll have snot all over your dirty filthy overcoat, and you’ll be – ” (135)

TL 8. – SuskretĊs idiotas! – rơkiu jam. Skystakiaušis! Prakeiktas sukþius! O po poros metǐ sơdơsi tarpuvartơj atkišĊs kepurĊ ir kaulysi centǐ! Visas snargliais išsitepliojĊs, purvinas ir... (133)

The dysphemistic insult “moron”, repeated twice, which falls into Allan and Burridge’s category of “ascriptions of mental or physical inadequacy” (1988:11), is translated by a range of Lithuanian insults which could be ascribed to the same category. Gasiulis chooses different terms, “suskretĊs idiotas” (shabby idiot), “skystakiaušis” (weak balls), and “prakeiktas sukþius” (damn cheat) to replace Holden’s repeated use of the swearword “moron”. More importantly, Gasiulis has Holden shift from the use of the Lithuanian formal second-person pronoun “jnjs”, which he used with the prostitute, to the informal verb forms, “sơdơsi”, “kaulysi” and the informal adjective form, “atkišĊs”. Although Maurice is a stranger and an older adult, considering the situation, Lithuanian readers would regard this shift as Holden’s most natural reaction to the events.

Conclusion In general, the translation of dysphemistic forms of address requires a good understanding of the dynamics of relationships and knowledge of the linguistic systems of the two languages. English and Lithuanian differ a great deal in regard to the choices of dysphemistic expressions, so that the translator has to be very sensitive to the use of these particular forms of address in both English and Lithuanian literary texts. Gasiulis is well aware of the shifts in dominance in Salinger’s novel and achieves a very similar effect to the source text when translating episodes in which insults and swearwords are used by Holden and other characters. In his translation, Gasiulis conveys Holden and his fellow pupils’ friendly, malebonding manner of speech and their struggle for a dominant role while teasing each other, the mutually cynical tone when talking about girls, and

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different charcters’ use of offensive language when they lose their temper. Gasiulis avoids heavy repetition, often softening the English swearwords, instead using the strategy of stylistic compensation which results in an appropriate teenage conversation in the Lithuanian text.

References Allan, K., Burridge, K. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, C. A. 1965. J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: a Critical Commentary, New York: Monarch Press. Brown, P., Levinson, S. C. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowan, M. 1991. “Holden’s Museum Pieces: Narrator and Nominal Audience”, in Salzman, J. (ed.), The Catcher in the Rye”. New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gasiulis, P. trans. 1999/1966. Rugiuose prie bedugnơs, Vilnius: Alma Littera. Harvey, K. 2001. “Compensation”, in Baker, M. and Malmkjaer, K. (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 37-40. Kašauskas, R. 1966. “Šauksmas neono džiunglơse” in Pergalơ, 11:170171. Klaudy, K. 2001. “Explicitation”, in Baker, M. and Malmkjaer, K. (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 80-84. Kroger, R. O. 1982. “Explorations in Ethogeny”, in American Psychologist, 37, 7, 810-820. Laviosa-Braithwaite, S. 2001. “Universals of Translation”, in Baker, M. and Malmkjaer, K. (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 288-291. Monkutơ, E. 2001. Deminutyvǐ vartosenos ypatumai meniniame stiliuje. Master of Arts Thesis, Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University. Salinger, J. D. D. 1951. The Catcher in the Rye, New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Salzman, J. (ed.). 1991. New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitz, J. R. 1988. “Suppression of References to Sex and Body Functions in the Brazilian and Portuguese Translations of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye”, in http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/1988/v43

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/n2/004046ar.html. (retrieval date: March 15, 2007). Stringer, J. (ed.). 1996. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Venclova, T. 1979. “Translations of World Literature and Political Censorship in Contemporary Lithuania”, in Lituanus, 25, 2, 5-26. Visockas, V. 1980. “Vertimǐ medžio šaknys ir metnjgơs” in Matuzeviþius, E., and Valionis, A. (eds.), Meninio vertimo problemos, Vilnius: Vaga, 7-62. Zauberga, I. 1994. “Pragmatic Aspects of the Translation of Slang and Four-letter Words”, in Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 2, 137145. Lithuanian Professional Writers website. Access date: May 10, 2007. http://www.rasytojai.lt/writers.php?id=86&jaunieji=0&sritis=rasytojai

Notes 1

for the practical aspects of this approach, the author of the paper uses the 1951 American edition of The Catcher in the Rye and the 1999 Lithuanian edition, whose title is Rugiuose prie bedugnơs and which was translated into Lithuanian by Gasiulis. 2 The use of bold in quotes is that of the author of the paper, while italics, unless otherwise indicated, are those of the writers of the texts quoted.

TRANSLATING THE POETIC UNTRANSLATABLE PETRU IAMANDI

The poet mocks at all the other things that nobody else does. That nobody else can. Our lives mock at us. The poet mocks at our lives. The poet doesn’t care. The poet doesn’t need to have style. Style is a foolish prejudice. If his feet smell, doesn’t that, by all means, mean style? If he sweats like a buffalo every night, and has to change his sheets, pyjamas, and singlet, doesn’t that mean more than style? —Mihail GălăĠanu, The Poet Mocks at All the Other Things

Cautious literary translation theoreticians say, ‘When in doubt, don’t,’ that is whenever a translator comes across something he does not understand or he finds impossible to turn into the target language he would better skip it. But doesn’t that betray the poor unknowing author and diminish the value of his work? Can’t the translator do a little bit of extra sweating and try to find an elegant way out? What solutions could he use in order to be fair both to the author and to the reader himself? Why not take Joseph Conrad’s example? Born into the Polish language, he never forgot to instill many of its phrases and idioms into English, leaving his adopted language richer than he found it when he was twenty-three years of age. Why not brace up and drop the idea of stooping to the dictionary? Why not be creative, dealing with the text in its spirit and not in its letter? Translation, after all, is a matter of choice. To my mind, a translator can be most creative no matter what when it comes to poetry, because that is where the author can do what he wants with the language, even if by that he borders on the irrational. He can push the language to its limits and even beyond, sometimes for the sake of a sound effect, other times to give the reader a glimpse of the untouchable.… Hence all the so-called experimental poetry the last century produced. Romanian poetry has never lacked such experiments; on the contrary, it has always renewed its tools, leaving its mark on the evolution of poetry throughout the world (suffice it to mention Tristan Tzara here). One of the most recent Romanian experimentalists is Mihail GălăĠanu (b. 1963), a poet who is iconoclastic both in content and form. In 2005, he published

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Burta înstelată/The Starry Womb, a collection of poems that brought about contradictory reactions from critics and readers alike, ranging from unrestrained enthusiasm to utter rejection. Wanting to take foreign critics and readers aback too, GălăĠanu suggested I should translate the book into English. Which I did. It was my most challenging experience as a translator with 32 books to my credit, plus dozens of Romanian bits and pieces scattered in Romanian, British, and American magazines. (On second thought, I’d say it was on a par with Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, where you are not allowed to approximate, words stick so much to each other, merge so much into each other that, if you cannot find the right meaning, you compromise the whole sentence, or even paragraph.) Almost every line in every poem posed a problem: stray rhymes, even if the poem was written in free verse, words which sprang up out of nowhere, apparently unconnected to their basic meanings, words coined by the author or used just because they looked similar, tempting the translator to do the same or give up. Of course, I could always use the commonsensical advice of Leon LeviĠchi, the guru of Romanian translators – “translate such ‘poems’ as if they were prose, preserving the division into lines, the punctuation, the lack of punctuation, and so on; and – metaphrase.” LeviĠchi upheld his recommendation with one of e.e. cummings’ poems, MOUSE)WON, suspecting that in it “logical thinking became illogical, therefore its translation had to be illogical too” (LeviĠchi, 1975:93). But I could not agree with this rather derogatory suspicion, as I strongly believe every poem has its own logic, even if it was “written automatically” (as André Breton would put it), and the translator’s first duty, that is the “understanding stage” (Jones, 1989), is to discover it. In the next paragraphs, I am going to show how I dealt with the other two stages of the translating process: “interpretation” and “creation” (Jones, 1989). In New Adventures of My Increation, there is the following stanza1 where lines 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 have the same rhyme, while lines 10 and 11 have a different one. On the other hand, lines 5 and 6 are onomatopoeias and, together with “Lolita-Lorelei” (lines 7, 8, and 9), they are obviously intended to be a pun. (1) Părul meu iubea fetele în somn (2) úi le învelea (3) úi le legăna, (4) gungurindu-le, (5) luri-lu, (6) lori-la. (7) Lorelei, inima.

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Translating the Poetic Untranslatable (8) Lorelei, inima mea. (9) Lolita-Lorelei, într-un singur personaj, sărută-mă (10) Cu numele tău (11) Peste părul meu. (GălăĠanu, 2005:10)

In my translation, I had to make lines 2 and 3 rhyme for themselves because any attempt to keep the original scheme would have spoilt the whole meaning: in this particular case, I am afraid there are no synonymous verbs in the English language to replace the ones I have used and express absolutely the same thing. Then I have kept the onomatopoeias thinking that a clever reader will take them for what they are, italicizing them just in case. I have made lines 6, 7, and 8 rhyme by using the words “from afar” which I think increase the nostalgic tone. Finally, I have found a quite intriguing rhyme for lines 11 and 12, “name – mane,” the same letters, different order. (1) My hair made love to the sleeping girls (2) and tucked them up (3) and rocked them up, (4) prattling to them, (5) luri-lu, (6) lori-la. (7) Lorelei, my heart from afar. (8) Lorelei, my very heart from afar. (9) Lolita-Lorelei, one character, come kiss me, (10) your name (11) covering my mane.

In another poem, Majoring in Your Body’s Mechanics, there is a stanza with an intricate pun, see lines 6 and 7 below, the Romanian word “sama” rhyming with lines 4, 5, and 10, and pairing with “seama” to give a play upon words. (1) ùi ea e doar Fatima noastră (2) care ne face cu ochiul din peúteri, (3) din caverne. (4) E Yama. (5) ùi Kama. (6) E sama (7) Care ne útie de-o seamă. (8) ùi noi de-aia stăm úi de nimic altceva nu suntem buni decât (9) să bem prin taverne: (10) ca să ne amintim, pentru o clipă, clipele în care am stat în mama. (GălăĠanu, 2005:18)

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In my version, I tried hard to find the right equivalent for “sama,” which, I believe, comes from “seama,” like in the idiom “a Ġine seama de,” and which was used by the poet more or less instinctively, for rhyming reasons. I finally found “bother,” meaning “care,” and made it rhyme with “Mother” in line 10. The use of “cut” in line 7 has brought along “but’ in line 8, a rhyme that the author does not use but fits the pattern and does not do any harm to the poem. Who says the translator should not be helpful? (1) And she is only our Fatima, (2) winking at us from the caves, (3) from the caverns. (4) She is Yama. (5) And Kama. (6) She is bother (7) that knows we’re of the same cut. (8) That’s why we just sit and are good at nothing but (9) drinking in taverns: (10) to remember for one moment the moments we stayed in Mother.

In At Perfusion’s (The Fountain of Perfusion), there are two lines, 4 and 5, which seem easy to translate. But, while the English language has the verb “perfuse,” it does not have the verb “illuse” to go with “illusion” – it does have “ill-use,” which means “treat badly.” (1) ViaĠa mea se topea după mine. (2) De fapt, viaĠa mea (3) Se nutrea ea însăúi dintr-o perfuzie, (4) Eram veúnic perfuzionat, (5) cum era altul veúnic iluzionat. (GălăĠanu, 2005:20)

My solution was to give up the hyphen and lend the verb its “illusionary” meaning, something that native speakers of English will realize and forgive me for. I admit that, with so many people dropping the hyphen these days, the new meaning might not be obvious, but poetry takes time to sink in. (1) My life’s heart went out to me. (2) In fact, my life itself (3) fed on perfusion, (4) I was permanently perfused (5) like one who was permanently illused.

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In Against Mother’s Death. Mother Will Never Die. And Mother Died … Very Little, there is a word, “pogan,” in line 7 which is undoubtedly the poet’s coinage, coming, I think, from Mlle. Pogany, Constantin Brâncuúi’s famous sculpture. (1) Mama mea n-o să moară niciodată, (2) Eu însumi am s-o înghit, bucăĠică cu bucăĠică. (3) O voi sorbi úi o voi scuipa la loc, (4) Mai frumoasă (5) úi mai curată. (6) Stropi-o-voi cu isop. (7) ùi mai pogan se va albi. (GălăĠanu, 2005:31)

If I had kept the word as it is, a foreign reader would have understood nothing; maybe a footnote would have helped but a true translator should avoid that as much as possible. Instead, I have chosen to use the name of the masterpiece, without yet solving the problem. Those who are familiar with Brâncuúi’s work know that Mlle. Pogany is black, hence the ingenious contradiction in line 7, which I had to render properly. (1) Mother will never die, (2) I myself will swallow her piece by piece. (3) I will gulp and spit her back, (4) more beautiful (5) and cleaner, aye. (6) I will sprinkle her with hyssop (7) and she won’t get whiter than Mlle. Pogany.

In Death’s Licking Me, there is “mă taie visu’” in line 4, which reminds one of a rather obscene slang expression (roughly, “I feel like pissing”). (1) Două robinete (2) úi din ele izvorăsc (3) cele două râiuri care înconjură paradisul. (4) Mă linge moartea úi mă taie visu’. (GălăĠanu, 2005:41)

However, the fact that the author uses it in relation with a dream changes the status of the expression, ennobling it. Therefore, my choice has been “letting my dream rise” making sure I provide a suitable rhyme for “paradise.”

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(1) Two taps, (2) the two streams that enclose paradise (3) springing from them. (4) Death’s licking me, letting my dream rise.

Finally, in From Mother’s Womb I Looked at the World (Not Even Dreaming I Would Be a Man), line 4 seems to be the most problematic as, again, the poet coins a word of his own, “ghidi-ghidi,” rather onomatopoeic, from “ghiduú”, the Romanian for “funny”; likewise, there is a rhyme in lines 5 and 8 which has to be taken care of. (1) din burta mamei mele, lumea mi se părea de vis. Făcută înadins ca să mă (2) ademenească. (3) Aúa, ca úi când ar fi spus: (4) Hai, ghidi-ghidi, ieúi afară, ghiduúule! (5) Dar eu nu mă dădeam înúelat. (6) Dar eu nu mă dădeam dus. (7) Stăteam acolo, chicotind, cu genunchii la gură (8) úi nici nu visam să ajung bărbat. (GălăĠanu, 2005:68)

Fortunately, the English language here has been of great help: since there is such a word as “merry-maker” which covers the meaning of “ghiduú” quite satisfactorily, I found it easy to translate the onomatopoeia; as for the rhyme, I think “then” and “man” have served my purposes, although because of the different vowel they do not overlap perfectly. (1) from Mother’s womb the world looked like in fairy tales. All meant (2) to tempt me. (3) As if it said: (4) Come, merry-merry, come out, merry-maker! (5) But I couldn’t be lured then. (6) I couldn’t be tempted. (7) I just stayed there, giggling, coiled up, (8) not even dreaming I would be a man. “Translators tend to write of the specific problems they encounter in translating a particular poet and of the solutions they found – often in the form of an apology for the translation – or reflect on the various stages they pass through in the process.” (Connolly qtd in Baker, 2005:172)

The above-mentioned examples, taken directly from a translator’s intimate workshop, do cover most of Connolly’s statement. However, they are not provided in the way of “an apology for the translation” – I am absolutely positive that a translator is a re-creator: he enters into a word or

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an expression, explores it, understands its meaning in the context, and tries to find its equivalent; he re-creates the word or the expression, then passes to another one and so, step by step, he re-creates the whole text. A recreator is entitled to go hand in hand with the creator, and even help him when he is in need – the reader, their master, will only benefit from that. And, why not, a re-creator is entitled to share the creator’s merits. How would the latter manage without the former, I wonder.

References Baker, M. (ed.). 2005. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge. GălăĠanu, M. 2005. Burta înstelată, Bucureúti: Editura Vinea. Jones, F.R. 1989. “On Aboriginal Sufferance: A Process Model of Poetic Translating”, Target, 1, 2, 183-99. LeviĠchi, L. 1975. Îndrumar pentru traducătorii din limba engleză în limba română, Bucureúti: Editura útiinĠificӽ úi enciclopedicӽ.

Note 1 All the lines in this article are extracted from longer poems and are identified by numbers for reasons of demonstration.

CENSORSHIP AND IDEOLOGY IN LITERARY TRANSLATIONS: THE CASE OF ROBERT BURNS’ POETRY IN THE SOVIET UNION NATALIA KALOH VID

Introduction: ideology in translation studies The question about ideological influence has always accompanied translation studies. Fawcett (1998: 107) states that “through the centuries, individuals and institutions have applied their particular beliefs to the production of certain effects in translations”. In his opinion, “an ideological approach to translation can be found in some of the earliest examples of translation known to us” (Fawcett 1998: 106). In an article included in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, he explores a short history of ideology and translation, starting with the Middle Ages. For a proper understanding of the ideological approach to translation study, it has to be noted that language is not only a carrier of message but also a carrier of culture and important cultural components. The differences in the words of each language surely reflect the important cultural characteristics of the things, customs, and various activities of the society that uses this language. Consequently, translation is not only a process of language transfer but a process of culture transplanting as well. As Nida points out, “For truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have meanings in terms of the cultures in which they function” (2001: 82).

According to Fawcett,

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Censorship and Ideology in Literary Translations “With the spread of deconstruction and cultural studies in the academy, the subject of ideology, and more specifically the ideology of power relations, became an important area of study” (1998: 106).

The field of translation presents no exception. When we speak about ideology in literature or in literary translations, we think about different moral, social and political concepts which authors or translators consciously or subconsciously interlace in their work and in this way models the reader’s views, presumptions and expectations. The degree of ideological influence depends on the historical place and extension of an ideology in a specified time and place, as well as on the role it is permitted to have inside a literary work. Ideological influence as such does not contradict the essence of literature until the moment when this influence has started to dominate literary context or to intentionally direct a reader to ideological doctrines. In order to explain the increasing interest of translation scholars in the ideological issues of translations, it is necessary to follow the modification of the whole concept of the “original” text related to the “original” author in post-structuralism, which emphasized the privilege of form over meaning and resulted in a radical reformation of the main models on which translation theory was founded. Poststructuralist translation theories, including critical discourse analysis1 and the functionalist approach2 directed attention away from linguistic-influenced approaches towards political and cultural issues, which are often viewed in a historical context. This widening of translation focus, including social, cultural and historical contexts, has greatly influenced and enhanced a general understanding of translation processes and the role of ideology in translation. In current translation studies (Schäffner 2003, van Dijk 1996, Calzada Perez 2003 and Bassnett 2002), the process of translation is not regarded as merely passing from one linguistic structure to another but as transporting one entire culture to another. These scholars emphasize the fact that translation has come into its most important and also its most complex phase: cultural translation. Considering the prevailing translation theories of the last thirty years, translation is now seen as an intercultural communicative behaviour. As Mary Snell-Hornby notes, as we move toward an understanding of translation that sees it more as a cultural (rather than a linguistic) transfer, the act of translation is no longer “a transcoding from one context into another, but an act of communication” (1990, 82). Thus, the new orientation in translation studies is toward the function of the target text rather than prescriptions of the source text. In this case,

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the translator must not only be bilingual but effectively bicultural as well. This process automatically includes the importance of ideology that underlies each translation. Calzada Perez suggests that translation studies dig into ideological phenomena for a variety of reasons. One of the most important reasons is the fact that all language use is, as critical discourse analysis claims, ideological. This means that translation itself as “an operation carried out on language use” is always influenced by ideology (Calzada Perez 2003: 2). Behind all choices made by a translator, there is a voluntary act that reveals the translator’s socio-political and cultural surrounding. A translator always creates “under pressure of different constraints, ideological, poetical, economical etc, typical of the culture to which he/she belongs” (Alvarez and Vidal 1996: 5). Unfortunately, under the influence of Marx’s primary definition of ideology as a system of rules and values enforced upon the lower levels of society by the ruling class, ideology has gained negative connotations. It will be further assumed that ideology is often defined in a purely negative political sense as “a system of wrong, false, distorted or otherwise misguided beliefs” (van Dijk, qtd in Calzada Pérez, 2003: 3). According to Calzada Pérez (2003: 4), recent definitions of ideology are also associated with the concepts of power relations and domination. In order to be politically correct, most scholars in the field of languagerelated, cultural and translation studies intend to avoid the binary division of ideology into “extremely negative” or “somehow positive” political phenomena and rather extend the concept of ideology beyond the political sphere, defining it in a social sense as “a set of ideas, which organize our lives and help us understand the relation to our environment” (Calzada Pérez, 2003: 5). There is also a socio-political definition of ideology which was proposed by scholars of critical discourse analysis, including van Dijk (1996, 7), who defines ideology as a framework that is “assumed to specifically organize and monitor one form of socially shared mental representation, in other words, the organized evaluative beliefs— traditionally called 'attitudes'—shared by social groups”.

1. The censorship of art in the Soviet Union Only a few months after the October Revolution, the first demands were made that literature should be put in the service of the communist ideology. New ideological propaganda dictated harsh restraints on the production of literary works, aiming to purge the Soviet society of all expressions regarded as destructive to the new order. According to the new

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standards of propaganda, literary works were regarded as being not only for pleasure and enjoyment. Their primary aim was to steer the reader toward both an ideologically desired behaviour and way of thinking. Henceforth, literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with the civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era. Censorship in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics remains the longest lasting censorship in the 20th century3. Blyum suggests that the very concept of censorship, seen as a method of regulation, does not approximately convey the meaning it acquired under totalitarian regimes, the Soviet regime in particular (2003: 1). In totalitarian states its main characteristics and basis are found not in published laws, but in secret instructions issued by the ideological hierarchy and in the establishment of special institutions which controlled the execution of these instructions. In Blyum’s opinion, in such regimes censorship is a phenomenon of an entirely different order, of a very specific kind. The whole concept or restraint on the freedom of speech in the Soviet Union included not only censorship but also other methods of control, established by the Party ideology (2003: 2-3). However, in this article, censorship is considered in its basic meaning, as the state control of the content, publication, and distribution of printed text4. It was in 1922 that the Soviet Government decided to institutionalize censorship “in order to achieve a more effective political supervision of mushrooming publications” (Ermolaev 1997: 3). A new censor body was called Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel’stva5 (The Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs), commonly known as Glavlit (the institute of state administration). Its stated purpose was “to unite all forms of censorship in printed works” which means that Glavlit had to carry out preliminary inspection of nearly all manuscripts and printed material, as well as photographs, drawings, and maps intended for publication and distribution6 (Ermolaev 1997: 3). It had the right to allow (or prevent) the publication of any work and was subordinated to the Communist Party. Glavlit prevented publications and distribution of works which: (1) contained propaganda against the Soviet regime, the Soviet Union, particular political bodies and figures (a censor had to be aware of an author’s political platform and of his loyalty towards the Soviet Union and Communist Party); (2) divulged military secrets; (3) stirred up public opinion through false information; (4) aroused nationalist and religious fanaticism, propaganda of fascism, violence or terror; (5) were pornographic (qtd in Ermolaev 1997: 3-4). Generally speaking, everything that did not fall under the Socialist Realism, a new literary program,

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invented in 1934, with the purpose of defining each aspect of literary works written in the Soviet Union, was forbidden. The central office included three departments7: the Department of Russian Literature, the Department of Foreign Literature, and the Administration and Control Department. The Department of Foreign Literature had two functions: control of importation of books and control of periodicals. In addition, Glavlit controlled the Russian publishers abroad, primarily those in Europe. Of course, the culture of foreign countries could not have been put under control of the Soviet censors. The complete isolation from foreign cultures was impossible, but the limitation of access to foreign publications by housing them only in the major state libraries appeared to be convenient. For that reason, foreign materials had to pass official censorship at the State Committee and were not permitted either in small local libraries or even in private book collections. Any publications from abroad were forbidden to private persons. Each attempt of that kind was suppressed by the customs. Except for diplomatic mailing, publications were confiscated at the very post office. Access to original works of foreign art was strongly controlled by the state8 and Glavlit played a key role in distribution of foreign literature in the Soviet Union, since its local agencies carried out all the practical work. According to Blyum, Glavlit occupied the middle place in the fivelevel pyramid of control. Below it there were filters provided by authors and editors, above it there were the directives of the police and the Party, which had to be carried out rigorously (2003: 7-8). The end product of this system was a “pure” text that conformed in every aspect to the Party’s ideological aims and demands. Above the censorship pyramid stood the figure of the Party General Secretary, the head of the Soviet Union, who presented the final level and whose verdict was beyond appeal (Blyum 2003: 8). The intervention of the Secretary General in the literary field was enormous during the dictatorship of Stalin. Hundreds of poets, writers and authors became his victims, including Bulgakov, Pasternak, Mandel'shtam and Platonov.

2. “Soviet” Robert Burns: adaptation of poetry Robert Burns was taken up by the leading Soviet critics, and in a matter of years he became one of the most famous European poets in the Soviet Union. The new conception of Burns’ poetry as revolutionary and purely communist was pronounced to be “useful” for a new social culture. In the Soviet ideological environment, the term “usefulness” far exceeded

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any poetic qualities. It was particularly emphasized that Burns wrote of rural peoples’ struggle and renewing power of national liberal movement in Scotland. Soviet governments cultivated a sense of deep devotion to the State, with citizens being encouraged to regard the State as being almost like a parent. In the 1930s, pressure on writers to sanction the official image of the Soviet society increased and it was clear that the previous translations of Robert Burns made in the nineteenth century could no longer fulfil the new aesthetic function of literature. New translations of Burns’ poetry would have to follow the main ideological doctrines and include such features as a positive revolutionary hero, heroic acts, optimism, references to communist slogans, criticism of religion and so forth. In the nineteenth century, most of Burns’s love and nature lyrics were translated but his satires, and the democratic lyric which contained appeals to the sentiments of freedom and citizenship, patriotic songs and ironic epigrams remained unknown to Russian readers. The authority of subordinated, usually non-professional, commentators to discuss the arts was inherent in the limitless executive power of the Soviet system. Within the totalitarian ideology, literary criticism became one of the means to manipulate reality and make it conform to the idea. Indeed, whereas all ideologies tend to present the logic of an idea as scientific, totalitarian ideology was unique in the sense that it ignored reality. Among other issues, the Soviet critics advocated the use of biographies as a means of ideological adaptation. For that reason, it was especially important to present Burns’ biography in a way that was necessary for its “proper” interpretation. Thus, Mikhail Gutner, a famous Soviet critic, published an article about Burns’ life entitled “Robert Burns” in Literaturnaia gazeta (1938: 5-10). His partly biographical, partly critical sketch was supposed to establish the main points of a new interpretation to Burns’ poetry, emphasizing those features which would be useful for a new Soviet ideology. One of the most important factors in explaining the “proletarian spirit” of certain authors, regardless of their poetical talent, was their background. Great writers had to emerge from the most revolutionary class, the working class. Gutner draw the attention of the readers to the fact that Burns was born in the poor family of a common farmer who had nothing to do with the aristocratic circles strongly criticized in Soviet literature. He also reminded the Soviet readers that the main reasons why Burns could not assert himself successfully as a poet in England were his sympathies for the French Revolution and his open protest against English aristocrats. Burns’ biography was written by Rita Rait-Kovaleva, a Soviet translator,

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who published her materials about Robert Burns in the journal Novyi Mir (1954: 187-214). She emphasized the fact that little was known about Burns’ life because biographies written in England and Scotland degraded the image of the national poet and never succeeded in revealing the democratic, revolutionary essence of his poetry. According to RaitKovaleva, Burns’s English biographers attempted to present him as an alcoholic and uneducated peasant in order to minimize his significance for the world literature. All previous biographies were proclaimed to be “bourgeois perversions” and Rait-Kovaleva carefully used Burns’ letters and quotes from his poems which were supposed to possess an autobiographical value. Her materials about Burns’s life were warmly accepted as real documents which, eventually, presented Burns in the “true” light. The first translator of Robert Burns’ poetry in the Soviet Union was Tat’iana Shchepkina-Kupernik (1874-1952), an outstanding translator of Byron, Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, but the most famous Soviet translator of Burns became Samuel Marshak9 (1887-1964), one of the few Soviet translators educated abroad, at the University of London. In England, Marshak studied not only philosophy and the English language but also Scottish dialects, travelling around the country and collecting Scottish folk ballads and songs. Marshak10 started his work on Robert Burns’ poetry in the 1930s and the first book of translations was published shortly after the end of the Second World War, in 1947. Burns’ poetry, as well as Shakespeare’s sonnets11, became his life task to which he devoted twenty years of hard work. In fact, Marshak continued to translate Burns’ poetry until his death in 1964. The last book of Burns translations, published after Marshak’s death, contained 215 poems12 and has remained the most extensive summary made in the Russian language until the present time.

3. Translation strategies used by Samuel Marshak Marshak’s main task was to make Burns acceptable to the Soviet readers, which meant to stress his democratic views. The originals did not undergo direct ideologization but many intentional changes are obvious in a careful reading, as Marshak took many liberties working with Burns, including substitution and changing of words or transposing whole lines. He rarely translated those poems which contained religious motives (if they were not satirically coloured), poems with frivolous content (which was usually softened) and poems addressed to the poet’s friends, acquaintances and patrons, if they belonged to the aristocratic circles,

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because “Soviet” Burns could not maintain any connections with the upper classes. In the poems devoted to the current political and social situation, Scotland and England were often replaced with Russia, ɪɨɞɢɧɚ (homeland), ɫɬɪɚɧɚ (country) or other ideologically coloured equivalents. This translation choice totally changed the meaning and political value of these poems, which belong to the most extensive and original part of Burns’ literary heritage. Often Burns’ poems were shortened in translation, as with the poem “The Holy Fair”, of which Marshak translated just fourteen instead of twenty two lines. In what follows, the most interesting examples of ideological adaptations in Marshak's translations will be analyzed. In order to make the translations comprehensible for Englishspeaking readers, chosen lines were translated from Russian into English. The first example is from the poem “The Tree of Liberty”, inspired by the French Revolution. In Marshak’s translation, an appeal to liberty and freedom in Britain, emotionally expressed in the original, takes on the quality of an appeal to world revolution, leaving very little of the “auld England” spirit, so essential to the original poem. In point of fact, Marshak mentions Britain in only one line. On the basis of his translation, one might conclude that Burns was concerned about the revolution all over the world and not just in Britain. The primary translation strategies are the strategy of substitution and deletion, as well as generalizing. In the following lines, Syne let us pray, auld England may Sure plant this far-famed tree, man, And blithe we’ll sing, and hail the day That gave us liberty, man. (Burns, 85-813)

the reference to England was replaced with the more unifying expression, “nations and places”, “Ɂɚɛɭɞɭɬ ɪɚɛɫɬɜɨ ɢ ɧɭɠɞɭ ɧɚɪɨɞɵ ɢ ɤɪɚɹ, ɛɪɚɬ”14 (Marshak, 85), The nations and places would forget about poverty and slavery, brother. This substitution serves to stress Burns’ concern about the revolutionary progress in the whole world and not just in the capitalist England. As an exemplified Soviet translator, Marshak never mentioned God or anything connected with religion, even names from the Bible. For that reason, the phrase “syne let us pray” (Burns, 85) was cut out. Common workers glorified in the poem could not pray for their freedom. The word “man” at the end of each stanza was replaced by “ɛɪɚɬ” (brother), as the word “brother” had more positive connotations in the eyes of the Soviet censors than the mere “man”. In the lines “He’s greater that a lord, man, /an’ wi’ the beggar shares a mite” (Burns, 14-5), Marshak

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translates the word “beggar” as “ɬɨɜɚɪɢɳ” (comrade) which sounded much more “in the communist spirit”. In fact, there could be no beggars in a happy communist society. The word “peasant” in the 13 line was substituted with “kholop” (an old-fashioned Russian word meaning “a designated slave”, or in modern Russian a “subordinated, humiliated man”) and the comparison with the Lord was deleted in the lines “Gif ance the peasant taste a bit, / He's greater than a Lord, man,” (Burns, 13-4). Raising the peasant to God’s level appeared to be offensive. It’s interesting that in Marshak’s translation there appears more or less only one lexical items referring to the word “peasant” which is “kholop”, the apparently more abusive term. For the translator, the context in which the word is used is important as guiding the choice of the potential equivalent. Due to the fact that Soviet literature glorified collective labour as ennobling man and exemplified peasants and workers as new men of Soviet society, possessing superior moral and social consciousness, the word “peasant” couldn’t be used in its original sense to describe the lowest society level. Marshak decided to mention Britain only in the translation of the lines: .

Let Britain boast her hardy oak, Her poplar and her pine, man, Auld Britain ance could crack her joke And o'er her neighbours shine, man, But seek the forest round and round, And soon 'twill be agreed, man, That sic a tree can not be found, Twixt London and the Tweed, man. (Burns, 57-64)

In other translations, Marshak deliberately omitted mentioning of Scotland or Britain, but in these lines Burns criticizes the absence of liberty in Britain which was an often case also in Soviet political propaganda. However, following the main translation trend of domestication, Marshak did not mention London and Tweed in the translation. The original poem was also cut by eight lines, as Marshak erased the lines from 72-80. One of the best examples of criticizing monarchy, another common characteristic in Marshak’s translations, appears in the poem “Macpherson’s Farewell”. The original poem has a historical background and was based on the real Jamie MacPherson's, a highway-robber story. The first two lines “Farewell. Ye dungenons dark and strong/ The wretch’s destinie!” (1-2) were translated “ɉɪɢɜɟɬ ɜɚɦ ɬɸɪɶɦɵ ɤɨɪɨɥɹ, ɝɞɟ ɠɢɡɧɶ ɜɥɚɱɚɬ ɪɚɛɵ” (Marshak, 1-2), Hello to you, the prisons of the king, where slaves

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suffer. Not only is the term “king” added but also the word “wretch” is substituted with “slave”, thus focusing primarily on the negative attributes of monarchy which are not presented in the original. We cannot talk about the strategy of substitution in this case, as Marshak did not substitute but completely changed these lines, promoting the negative image of monarchy. One of the most prominent strategies used by Marshak was also the strategy of deletion which resulted in almost the complete omission of any mention of Scotland in his translations. It can be understood from the translator’s point of view because sometimes mentioning foreign names makes the comprehension of a poem more difficult for the reader and requires additional commentary. As Nord points out, just a quick glance at the translated text can reveal that translators do all sorts of things with names, such as substitute, transcribe and omit them (2001: 182). Obviously, the presence of foreign names in a translation brings with it the risk of creating a linguistic barrier for readers. But the omission of Scotland, as well as the names of Scottish rivers, places, towns and cultural items, became a characteristic feature of Marshak’s translations. As a result of this translation policy, Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, became an international poet who struggled for human rights and glorified the democratic spirit all over the word, not just in Scotland. It should be noticed that this decision is one of the most contentious because this misrepresentation destroys the idea of Burns as the national Scottish (specifically only Scottish) poet. Love and care for the motherland, the most important images for the proper comprehension of Burns’ poetry, are missing in Marshak’s translations. Burns was no more just a Scottish but a “world” poet. It is hard to explain the main reason for this “social demand”. Probably, as a European country and a part of Great Britain, Scotland was also considered a capitalist county and should be omitted. Thus, in the last line of the poem “John Barleycorn: a Ballad” “And may his great posterity/Ne’er fail in old Scotland” (Burns, 59-60), Marshak erases the word Scotland, destroying the originality of the poem based on numerous songs and ballads about ‘John Barleycorn’, popular in the English and Scottish folklore. In the poem “The Twa Dogs”, the word Britain was replaced with “country” in the line “For Britain's guid his saul indention” (Burns, 148). In the same poem the very first line “T’ was in that place o’ Scotland’s isle” (Burns, 1) was deleted. In the poem “My heart’s in the Highland” in which Burns expressed his deep nostalgic feelings, the line “The hills of the Highlands for ever I love” (Burns, 8) was translated “ɧɚɜɟɤɢ ɨɫɬɚɧɭɫɶ ɹ ɫɵɧɨɦ ɬɜɨɢɦ”

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(Marshak, 8), I will remain your son forever. The names of Scottish rivers, lakes, cities and countries are also omitted. In the poem “Elegy on Peg Nicholson” the name of the river Carin is cut out, only the term “river” is mentioned, “But now she’s floating down the Nith/And past the Mouth o’ Carin” (Burns, 56-58). The name “Leith” is not mentioned in the translation of the poem “Go fetch me a pint o’ wine”, The boat rocks at the pier o’ Leith, Fu’ loud the wind blaws frae the ferry, The ship rides by the Berwick-law, And I maun leave my bonny Mary (Burns, 44-8).

In the poem “Rattlin, Roarin Willie”, in the line “As I cam by Crochallan”, Crochallan was replaced by “ɝɨɪɨɞ” (town). In the poem “There Was a Lad”, the place “Kyle” is not mentioned in the first line and in “When Wild War’s deadly Blast was Blawn”, Scotland is also erased in the eleventh line “And of fair Scotia, hame again” (Burns, 11). In the poem “Ronalds of the Bennals” the word “Scotch” disappears in the translation of the line “My coat and my vest, they are Scotch o’ the best” (Burns, 47). The same thing happens in the poem “Contented Wi’ Little, and Carttie Wi’ Mair” in which the word “Scottish” is cut out from the line “Wi’ a cog o’ guade swats and an auld Scotish sang” (Burns, 4). In the poem “Address to the Tooth-Ache”, Scotland was replaced with “ɫɬɪɚɧɚ” (country) in the line “Gie a’ the faes o’ Scotland’s weal/A towmond’s tooth-ache!” (Burns, 34). Following the tendency of domestication, Marshak deleted Scottish traditions and cultural objects as well. Burns’ poetry reflects the social problems and situation of his own times. According to Hagfors, the use of culture-bound elements, such as proper names, food items, measures of length and currency, historical figures, etc., is “one way of demonstrating not only in which culture the story is set but also creating an atmosphere that reflects the values prevalent in that culture and period of time” (2003: 188). She stresses that to translate a book is a special challenge because the translator and the publisher have to decide whether “they want to imply these same values for the target text readers, or whether they want to make adaptations to the text in order to fit it better into the target culture” because their decision will define the text’s “destiny” in the target culture (2003, 118). Thus, “Scotch mile” (Burns, 57) in the poem “The Auld Farmer’s New-Year morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie…” was deleted, as well as “brooses” (Burns, 51), a traditional ride from the church to the

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house of the groom, typical of Scottish wedding ceremonies. In the poem “The Ploughman”, the word “erlay” (Burns, 14), a neckerchief, a traditional part of Scottish dress, and Saint-Johnston (Burns, 18) were deleted. In “Tam O’ Shanter”, “hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys and reels” (Burns, 117) were translated as “Scottish dances”. Often, dealing with cultural elements, Marshak’s translation adopts the strategy of localization/absolute universalization which means that the translator attempts “to anchor a reference firmly in the culture of the target audience” (Davies 2003, 72). Obviously, Marshak considered expressions typical of the English cultural background incomprehensible to Russian readers and decided to erase all possible awareness of a different cultural content. Undoubtedly, this decision created a sense of familiarity and helped the Russian readership to enter the magnificent world of Burns’ poetry. On the other hand, an almost complete familiarization of cultural items can hardly serve as a tool for learning about foreign cultures, times and customs. Marshak’s substitutions extend to the smallest details of the Russian cultural life. Thus, he uses both Russian measures of length and monetary units, Russian clothes, music instruments, etc. Examples of absolute universalization appear in the poem “The Ronalds of the Bennals”, in which the word “laird” (Burns, 5) was translated “ɩɨɦɟɳɢɤ”, a typical Russian expression for a landlord. “Farls” (Burns, 62) in the “The Holy Fair” becomes “ɥɟɩɺɲɤɢ”, a typical Russian food made of corn. Translating “lang Scotch ells twa” (Burns, 37) from the poem “Death and Doctor Hornbook”, Marshak used the Russian archaic expression for a measure of length “ɤɨɫɚɹ ɡɚɠɟɧɶ”. It has been already mentioned that Marshak omits anything connected with religious feelings whenever possible. A poet who was pronounced to be a democrat and a communist could not talk about any feelings connected with religion. The most convenient strategy in this case appeared to be simply the strategy of deletion. Thus, in the poem “To a Mountain Daisy, on turning one down with the plough, in April, 1786” in the lines: “Till wrench’d of ev’ry stay but HEAV’N He, ruin’d, sink” (Burns, 45-6), the word “heaven” was cut out. In the poem “Holly Willie's Prayer” Marshak tried to omit any expressions, motifs or persons from the Bible. In the last line of the third stanza: What was I, or my generation, That I should get such exaltation? I, wha deserv’d most just damnation, For broken laws Six thousand years ere my creation, Thro’ Adam’s cause! (Burns, 13-8)

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the word Adam was replaced by “ɧɚɲ ɝɪɟɲɧɢɣ ɞɟɞ” (Marshak, 18), our sinful grandfather. Marshak also omitted mentioning “Lord” in the poem. Considering the fact that anything connected with religion was strongly forbidden in printed texts, all reminiscences, paraphrases and parodies remained undiscovered in Marshak’s translation. The Soviet readers could not identify all of the hidden satirical shades which were lost in the translation. Again, no comments were offered to help readers to clarify Burns’ satirical intentions. In the poem ”Epistle to Davie” the lines “Alas! how oft, in haughty mood,/God's creatures they oppress” (Burns, 77-8) were modified in order to avoid mention “God's creatures”. The strategy of a low, non-prominent position is observed in the cases when Burns mentions kings, as well as princes, generals, dukes and other members of high society with sympathy, assigning them certain merits. In the revolutionary coloured poems it was always the people and the nation who enabled victory and freedom. Thus, in the translation of the poem “Scots Wha Hae” which has the subtitle “Robert Bruce’s address to His Army, Before the Battle of Bannockburn”, it is impossible to understand that the main idea of the poem is an appeal to the Scottish king. He is not even mentioned and the title is simply translated “Ȼɪɸɫ – ɒɨɬɥɚɧɞɰɟɦ” (Bruce - to Scots). The very first line “Scots, Wha hae” was not translated at all. In the lines “Wha for Scotland’s king and law/Freedom’s sword will strongly draw” (Burns, 13-4) the word “Scotland” was replaced with “ɪɨɞɢɧɚ” (homeland) and “king” was deleted. The deletion obscured the main point of the historical events echoed in the poem. In the poem “Oh Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast” in the last stanza: Or were I monarch o’ the globe, Wi’ thee to reign, wi’ thee to reign; The brightest jewel in my crown, Wad be ma queen, wad be my queen (Burns, 13-6)

the words “monarchy”, “crown”, “reign”, “jewel” and “queen” were deleted and the stanza was translated “ɂ ɟɫɥɢ ɛ ɞɚɥɢ ɦɧɟ ɜ ɭɞɟɥ ɜɟɫɶ ɲɚɪ ɡɟɦɧɨɣ, ɫ ɤɚɤɢɦ ɛɵ ɫɱɚɫɬɶɟɦ ɹ ɜɥɚɞɟɥ ɬɨɛɨɣ ɨɞɧɨɣ” (Marshak, 13-6), If I was given the whole globe/ I would be happy to have only you. Finally, the proletarian literature was not a place for the demonstration of any kind of sexuality. Any reader of Burns knows that he holds a woman's physical love to be one of the best consolations in life. His poetry is full of erotic allusions, referring to sexual intercourse, containing plausible metaphors for sexual organs, and speaking of sexual stimulation (de Prandi 2006: 155-56).

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Marshak was confronted with hard task of softening Burns’ eroticism as much as possible. In the poem “Farewell to Eliza”, Eliza is mentioned only once instead of three times as in the original. The second part of the tenth line “Farewell, farewell, Eliza dear/The maid that I adore” (Burns, 910) appeared to be too passionate to Marshak and, by way of consequence, he decided to soften the poet’s original intentions, translating the line “ɨɫɬɚɜɥɸ ɹ ɜ ɪɨɞɧɨɣ ɫɬɪɚɧɟ” (Marshak, 10), I am leaving you in my homeland. The word “throb” in the line “That throb, Eliza, is thy part/And thine that latest sigh!”(Burns, 14-5) was translated with the syntagm “shaking hands” (Marshak, 15). In the poem “I’am o’er Young to Marry Yet”, a young girl is complaining that she is too young to be married, hinting at sexual relationships with the future husband. Her main concern, expressed in the lines “lying in a man’s bed” (Burns, 3) and “And you an’ I in ae bed” (Burns, 17), was replaced with more innocent expression “ɨɫɬɚɬɶɫɹ ɧɚɟɞɢɧɟ” (Marshak, 3, 17), to be with you alone. In the poem “The Ploughman”, the ploughman’s girlfriend says: “I will mak my Ploughman’s bed,/And chear him late and early” (Burns, 16-7). Such an immoral statement was carefully replaced, and in the Russian translation she just admires “her dear friend” (Marshak, 16) and does not mention bed at all. In the previous stanza the girlfriend also dare to say “Cast off the wat, put on the dry,/And gae to bed, my Dearie” (Burns, 112). In order to avoid any misunderstandings about the relationship between the ploughman and his girlfriend, Marshak replaced her invitation to bed by an invitation to dinner. Marshak faced the same problem in the poem “My Collier Laddie” in which a young woman tells how happy she is with her collier. The lines “And make my bed in the Collier’s neuk,/And lie down wi’my Collier laddie” (Burns, 24-5) could not be translated literally, so Marshak softened them, replacing “bed” with “my little corner” (Marshak, 25) and erasing the words “lie down with wi’ my”. In his translation, the collier’s girlfriend simply sits with her beloved every night in her little corner. In “Jolly Beggars” the words “doxy” “drab” and “chock” were replaced by “mistress” or they were not translated at all. Much of the second half of the poem “Epistle to Davie” deals with the consolation love provides. While speaking of the effect the thought of his Jean has on him, Burns uses several expressions which reiterate the physical warmth that is a token of sexual arousal: It warms me, it charms me To mention but her name: It heats me, it beets me,

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And sets me a'in flame! (Burns, 109–12)

Marshak decided to replace the word “flames” with the word “warm” and the translation goes: “Ⱦɨɜɨɥɶɧɨ, ɧɟɜɨɥɶɧɨ, ɦɧɟ ɜɫɩɨɦɧɢɬɶ ɢɦɹ Ⱦɠɢɧ, ɬɟɩɥɨ ɦɧɟ, ɫɜɟɬɥɨ ɦɧɟ, ɢ ɹ ɭɠ ɧɟ ɨɞɢɧ” (Marshak, 109-12), It is enough for me to remember the name of Jean, and I feel warm and light and I am not alone.

Conclusion The totalitarian ideology of communism in the Soviet Union was one of the most extreme ideological forms. Considering its rigorous influence, we can talk about the existence of the “regime” literary translations which contained only ideologically unquestionable elements and served strongly defined ideological purposes. However, creating his translations, Marshak did not allow himself to change texts completely and to make free imitations, as it was the case of the Romantic translations of the nineteenth century. Following the official standards which could not be avoided, he strove to keep the original meaning. Such priority of ideas above other aspects of translation was also characteristic of Tat’iana Shchepkina-Kupernik’s translation criteria. As a result, Marshak achieved an astonishing assimilation of Burns in the Russian culture, attempting to be accurate both in letter and style, even though such accuracy was difficult to achieve. One more important feature of Marshak’s translations was that he did not write in a dialect, even though the Russian language offered a wide field of dialectal forms. Marshak translated from the Scottish dialect into the standard Russian language. All Russian critics praised his laconic, melodic and contrast language which was pretty close to Burns’ original style, but Marshak never used even one dialect word in his translations. Cleaning Burns’ poetry of its Scottish coloration, Marshak did all his best in order to make readers forget that Burns was the Scottish national poet. Marshak followed the tradition of Robert Burns’ translations which had been formed during the nineteenth century. He summarized experiences of his previous translators and created an adequate and acceptable image of Robert Burns. Flexibility and ingenuity in transferring a poetic work into a different language demonstrated the outstanding talent of Marshak not only as a translator but also as a poet who magnificiently mastered his native language. Marshak’s Burns appears to be the only one possible in the Russian culture. As a result, Marshak unintentionally caused a serious problem for the further generations of Russian translators

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of Robert Burns. Attempting to avoid any comparison with Marshak’s translations, which were called “a second original”, and wishing to reach Marshak’s level, a new generation of translators was induced to use different techniques and to search for different translation methods. It was a difficult task. Famous words, to learn from a master means to compete with him, were prophetic for those translators who wanted to follow Marshak. No translator has ever achieved such popularity and thus he has remained the most popular translator of Robert Burns’ poetry until nowadays.

References Alvarez, R., Vidal, M. C.-A. 1996. “Translating: A Political Act,” Roman Alvarez and Maria Carmen-Africa Vidal (eds.), in Translation Power Subversion, Multilingual Methods Ltd: Clevedon / Philadelphia / Adelaide, 1-9. Bassnett, S. 2002. Translation Studies, London: Routledge. Blyum, A. 2003. A Self-Administered Poison. The System and Functions of Soviet Censorship, Oxford: University of Oxford. Burns, R. 1996. Selected Poems, London: Penguin Popular Classics. —. 1976. Izbrannoe v perevodah Marshaka, Moskva: Raduga. Calzada Perez, M. 2003. “Introduction,” in Calzada Perez, M. (ed.), Apropros of Ideology. Translation Studies on Ideology-Ideologies in Translation Studies, Manchester: St. Jerome, 1-22. De Prandi, J. 2006. “Sexual Imagery in the Verse Epistles of Robert Burns and Anna Louisa Karsch”, in Comparative Literature Studies, 43, 1-2, 153-170. Davies, E.A. 2003. “Goblin or a Dirty Nose?/The Treatment of CultureSpecific References in Translations of the Harry Potter Books”, in The Translator 9, 1, 65-100. Ermolaev, H. 1997. Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917-1991. New York; London: Rowman & Littlefield. Fawcett, P. 1998. “Ideology and translation,” in Baker, M. (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London: Routledge, 106-111. Gutner, M. 1938. “Robert Burns”, in Literaturnaia gazeta, 4, 5-10. Hagfors, I. 2003. “The Translation of Culture-Bound Elements into Finnish in the Post-War Period” in Meta, 48, 1-2, 115-127. Marshak, S. trans. 1963. Robert Burns v Perevodah S. Marshaka: Izbrannoe v Dvuh Knigah. Moscow: Goslitizdat. Nida, E. 2001. Language and Culture-Contexts in Translating. Shanghai:

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Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Nord, C. 2001. Translating as a Purposeful Activity—Functional Approaches Explained. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Rait-Kovaleva, R. 1954. “Robert Burns”, in Novyi Mir, 4, 187-214. Schäffner, C. 2003. “Third ways and new centres: Ideological unity or difference?” in Calzada Perez, M. (ed.), Apropros of Ideology, Manchester: St. Jerome, 23-41. Snell-Hornby, M. 1990. ”Linguistic Transcoding or Cultural Transfer: A Critique of Translation Theory in Germany” in Bassnett, S. and Lefevre, A. (eds.), Translation, History and Culture, London: Cassell, 79-86. Van Dijk, A. T. 1996. Discourse, opinions and ideologies. Discourse and ideologies, Multilingual Matters: Philadelphia.

Notes 1 This new cross-disciplinary method studies the structures of different aspects of language, including translation, and considers both their linguistic and sociocultural dimensions in order to determine how meaning is constructed. 2 Functionalists try to undermine the source text itself by emphasizing the role of the translator as the creator of a target text, giving priority to the purpose (skopos) of producing the target text. 3 Russia's long history of censorship has been well documented in numerous publications both by Russian and Western experts. However, the actual records of the vast number of books and newspapers that were subjected to strict censorship in Imperial Russia and the USSR are still only accessible in special collections, Russian language manual catalogue card archive and printed lists deposited in the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (pre-revolution period) and the Russian State Library in Moscow (the USSR period). 4 It is important to notice that in the last ten years Russian and foreign scholars have collected and analyzed a large number of previously secret documents which enables them to come to certain conclusions and to present a clear picture of ideological pressure. 5 In the article the ALA-LC type of Russian transliteration is used. 6 Publications of the Communist Party, Gosizdat, Glavpolitprosvet, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and scholarly writings of the Academy of Science were exempt from censorship. 7 The power of Glavlit was enormous. In 1922 the Department of Russian Literature denied registration to sixteen publishing houses and twelve magazines in Moscow and Petrograd (Ermolaev 1997, 5). 8 Strict limitation and censorship of the type of art objects to be displayed even in museums both at permanent and temporary exhibitions. 9 He was not only a translator but a talented writer of children's fiction and poetry.

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The fact that Marshak’s translations of Burns’ poetry became an outstanding literary sensation supported his election as honorary president of the Burns Federation in Scotland. 11 Shakespeare’s sonnets were also translated by Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, but because of his enormous success in the West, Pasternak was suppressed in Russia. His translations were forbidden and he remained in the shadow of Marshak until the end of Perestroika. 12 Burns, Robert. 1976. Izbrannoe v perevodah Marshaka. Raduga: Moskva. 13 Quotations are from: Burns, Robert. 1996. Selected Poems. London: Penguin Popular Classics. 14 Quotations are from: Marshak, Samuel. 1963. Robert Burns v Perevodah S. Marshaka: Izbrannoe v Dvuh Knigah. Goslitizdat: Moscow.

CHAPTER THREE STUDYING THE TRANSLATION OF WORDS, COLLOCATIONS AND PROVERBS

INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATION AND NORM ELENA CROITORU

Due to the complexity of real-life situations, translation norms influence the translator’s work to such an extent that even creative translation solutions, like creative uses of language, have to conform to the prevailing norms. Seen from the perspective of translation, norms may range from the initial norm which implies subjecting “to the original text, with the norms it has realized, or to the norms active in the target culture, or in that section of it which would host the end-product” (Toury 1995: 56) to operational norms (ibid.: 58-59) among which the textual-linguistic ones are very important because they govern the actual linguistic formulation of the target text. Mention should also be made that norms differ from one language culture to another, interact in many ways and are variable. They impose socio-cultural constraints in translation (Hermans 1996, Baker 1998) and help in evaluating translations as right and wrong, adequate and inadequate. In other words, they are socially and culturally determined and change over time. Nevertheless, not all translation shifts are due to observing certain norms. They may belong to translation universals, although there is not a clear-cut distinction between the norm-induced translation shifts and those representing translation universals. Considering such aspects, one may realize that there are “languagebound reasons why translations cannot mean ‘exactly the same’ as the source texts do in the source language” (Dollerup 2006: 23). This is one of the reasons why translation “equivalence” is considered to be relative and the term “approximation” is suggested (ibid.: 53), which allows for the use of “adequacy” as “a criterion as to whether users find a translation acceptable or not” (ibidem). As a matter of fact, the relativity of the concept of equivalence was considered by Koller to be

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“determined, on the one hand, by the historical-cultural conditions under which texts are produced and received in the target culture, and, on the other, by a range of sometimes contradictory and scarcely reconcilable linguistic-textual and extralinguistic factors and conditions” (Koller 1995: 191).

Such factors include: 1) the structural properties, possibilities and constraints of the source language, on the one hand, and of the target language, on the other; 2) the linguistic and stylistic properties of the source text, on the one hand, and of the target text, on the other, observing the norms of the source language and of the target language context, respectively; 3) the different realities and the ways of representing them in the target language; 4) comprehensibility of the target text, the target readers’ perception of the translation product; 5) intelligibility, fluency and readability of the target text; 6) the translator’s linguistic and cultural competence as a mediator, “localizer” and “culturalizer”; 7) the translator’s creativity; 8) the purpose of the translation. Translation is more heavily constrained than the original writing. The constraints are caused, on the one hand, by mismatches at the levels of grammar, lexis, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, stylistics, culture, and by failure in ballancing freedom with fidelity and the translator’s knowledge, beliefs and background, on the other. All these constraints determine the translator the find solutions to overcome them and give rise to his creativity. An aspect of utmost importance is that related to how meanings are created in texts, and how they range from routine to creative meanings. This is what Sinclair (1998, 2004) calls semantic reversal referring to the meaning created by a number of units taken together, this meaning being above the dictionary one. Routine meanings are interpreted taking into consideration the recurrent language patterns, i.e. collocational patterns determining the semantic choices of lexical items, on the one hand, and patterns of colligation, on the other. Creativity resides in deviations from such collocational and colligational patterns. Once the meanings of words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.), collocational patterns and fixed expressions have been identified in the source text, it is extremely necessary that the translator should match them with a creative form in the target language. This is extremely important due to the various patterns and interrelationships which words have with one another, on the one hand, the status of fixed expressions, on the other. However, it should not be taken to imply that all language patterns are fixed patterns. The main characteristics of language lie between Sinclair’s (1991, 2004) open choice principle and idiom principle, because not all

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open choices are open and not all idioms are immutably fixed. Nevertheless, analyzing only the semantic features would actually be disfunctional as far as interpreting the text is concerned. It is also the pragmatic and the cultural dimensions of the context that will lead to communicative efficiency. Thus, the translator is both the interpreter and the creator. Furthermore, whatever the language patterns may be, there is a danger which represents one of the greatest problems in cross-cultural communication, namely the speaker’s assumption that the surface language refers the reader or listener to the same shared semantic base (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 63, qtd in Katan 2004: 126). This can be overcome by giving the full semantic represenation of culture-bound beliefs and values. In this respect, we think Katan’s (2004: 167) decoding–encoding or cognitive creation model (DE/CCM) to be a very interesting one, since it consists in “breaking down the source language text into smaller parts, analyzing it and reformulating it in other words, as if the text were being processed through a pipe”.

However, the fact should not be ignored that translation is not only the rendering of the “semantic essence” in another language. “For one thing, that semantic essence is only a small bit of the total information available in the matrix code; any interlingual translation that seeks to transfer only semantics has lost before it has begun. For another thing, placing that semantic information under the constraints of another semiotic code (literally double-coding it ) inevitably binds it to that new code and hence the interlingual translation, long steeped in the preservation of something (meaning, content, etc.), actually gains from the recoding since there is information only in difference, and the differential coding, the recoding, is what allows the interlingual translation to produce any information at all” (Venuti 2000: 257, emphasis in the original).

The idea that translatability and comprehensibility have to be considered in relative terms has lately gained ground. The two principles may be considered in conflict, one excluding the other: if the translator insists on full translatability, the target text will be incomprehensible, and if (s)he insists on full comprehensibility, translation may be on an equal footing with the source text, or the target text may be considered original. With situations of untranslatability, the translator tries to find an adequate ‘equivalent’, or may replace it with a paraphrase to render its

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meaning in the target language, or may even drop it on condition this does not affect the meaning of the sentence in the source text. As Eco says “[…] if, out of ten or twenty terms, one proves absolutely untranslatable, I authorize the translator to drop it: a catalogue is still a catalogue even if there are only eighteen terms instead of twenty” (Eco 2003: 43).

The relationship between the source text and the target text is highly influenced by the communicative requirements of the target readers and by the purpose of the translation. This relationship is closely linked to translatability and comprehensibility raising questions of equivalence. From the target readers’ perspective, the information content of the source text should be quickly and clearly recognizable (this proving the translator’s invisibility), easy to grasp in a functional and contextual way (this being part of the translator’s role of a “localizer” and “culturalizer”) and easy to read (the criteria of relocatability, intelligibility and readability). Last but not least, the criteria of efficiency, comprehension of intent and similarity of response can never be separated from one another and are essential in evaluating translations. The impact of the target text is crucial, because a translation is judged to be “adequate only when and if the response of the target readers is satisfactory” (Hatim and Munday 2006: 163). Moreover, one of the most important ideals to touch in translation being naturalness of expression, the translator works to make his or her work ‘invisible’, producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously makes its status as an illusion: “the translated text seems ‘natural’, that is not translated” (Venuti 2008: 5).

References Baker, M. 1998. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies London and New York: Routledge. Dollerup, C. 2006. Basics of Translation Studies. Iaúi: Institutul European. Eco, U. 2003. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, London: Phoenix. Hatim, B., Munday, J. 2006. Translation. An advanced Resource Book, London and New York: Routledge. Hermans, T. 1996. “Norms and the Determination of Translation: A Theoretical Framework” in Román Á. and Vidal, M. C.Á. (eds.), Translation, Power Subversion, Clevendon, Philadelphia and Adelaide: Multilingual Matters, 25-51.

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Katan, D. 2004. Translating Cultures. An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators, Manchester, UK and Northampton MA: St. Jerome Publishing. Koller, W. 1995. “The Concept of Equivalence and the Object of Translation Studies”, in Target, 7, 2, 191-222. Scollon, R., Scollon, S.W. 2001. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, second edition, Oxford: Blackwell. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1998. “The lexical item”, in Weigand, E. (ed.), Contrastive Lexical Semantics, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-24. —. 2004. Trust the Text. London: Routledge. Toury, G. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam /Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Venuti, L. 2000. The Translator Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge. —. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility, London and New York: Routledge.

THE TRANSLATION POTENTIAL OF VERBA SENTIENDI IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO VERBS OF HEARING: HEAR AND AUZI GABRIELA DIMA

Introduction Twentieth century linguistics witnessed, especially towards the last two decades (Toury, 1980, Baker 1995), a powerful tendency to undertake corpus-based approaches both in its theoretical and practical spheres: “Corpora and corpus analysis software have been around for quite a long time , but their use is only now beginning to extend beyond a restricted segment of language professionals, such as lexicographers, language engineers, as well as linguists in educational and training institutions” (Zanettin 2002: 10).

Such a movement has led to the foundation of some major research paradigms in the domain of contrastive studies where translation plays not only an important methodological role, but also proves a helpful means of contributing to significant generalizations which can be next formulated in terms of linguistic universals. Ipso facto this article has come out as a fragmentary account of a more comprehensive research (Dima 2002) achieved within various linguistic models with a view to emphasize both the semantic and syntactic behaviour of verbs of hearing in English and Romanian under the ‘aeges’ of parallel corpora technicalities. Although the class of hearing verbs consists of several elements (to overhear, to listen, to auscultate, to prick one’s ears as well as a audia, a asculta, a ciuli urechea /urechile, a ausculta), the paper will demonstrate those instances of semantic and syntactic or contextual similarities and dissimilarities which are obvious in

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the case of the verb pair to hear and a auzi.

1. Previous research The research was performed along the coordinates that moved from structural semantics, focusing on componential analysis and semantic fields, to cognitive semantics, focusing on prototype theory (Dima 2005b); from traditional to generative-transformational syntax, focusing on contextual analysis (Dima 2005c); from general pragmatics to discourse analysis, focusing on verbs of seeing as hedge performatives in English and Romanian (Dima 2002). This variation satisfied the conditions imposed by the tertium comparationis which allowed for progress in three complementary stages directions: a. the description of sense perception verbs in English and Romanian on the basis of their representative corpora and the linguistic models selected. b. the comparison of the data obtained c. the underlining of the similarities and differences manifested at the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels. The corpus was dynamically shaped from single units to larger contexts (collocations, idioms, metaphorical expressions) around 113 lexical units, corresponding to 69 sense perception verbs in English and 44 in Romanian, whose distribution is shown in the following Table 1. Verba Sentiendi 113 Verbs of seeing 59 E R 33 26

English 69 Verbs of touching 23 E R 17 7

Verbs of hearing 11 E R 6 4

Romanian 44 Verbs of smelling 10 E R 6 4

Verbs of tasting 10 E R 7 3

Table 3-1. Inventory of verba sentiendi under research Favouring a synthetic approach (Zanettin 2002: 11), the counting was made on the basis of the distinctive semantic feature [+sense perception], retrieved in the lexicographic definitions of verbs of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. The greatest difference in number has been

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provided at large by the17 verbs of touching in English as contrasted to only 7 in Romanian and the 33 verbs of seeing in English to only 23 in Romanian. These quantitative differences directly influenced qualitative aspects such as the configuration of the micro-semantic fields of sense perception verbs in both languages and aspects concerning translation equivalence in both parallel and comparable corpora. The other criterion used in designing the corpus was frequency, as registered in monolingual English and Romanian dictionaries (see Corpus Sources A), which contributed to arrange the verbs hierarchically up to observing that the most frequent were see/vedea; look /privi/a se uita; hear/auzi; listen/asculta; feel/simti; touch/atinge as obvious in Table 3-2. in Annex One.

2. The translation potential of verbs of hearing in English and Romanian. Parallel corpora represent a sound basis for contrastive studies (James 1989, Santos 1996, Aijmer, Altenberg & M. Johansson 1996, Laviosa, 2002, Mauranen, 2002), “translation equivalence being the best available basis of comparison” (James, 1996: i). Among the possible advantages that parallel corpora offer to contrastive studies, Aijmer, Altenberg & M. Johansson (1996:12) specify: - new insight into the languages compared; - increased knowledge about language-specific, typological and cultural differences, as well as universal features; - clarification upon the differences between source texts and translations, and between native and non-native texts; To these, there might be added the provision of data about the repertoires of translation equivalents at the word level and about nonequivalence. Following the line, in the current approach, we shall argue that one of the most effective means to emphasize the points of contrast between the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the verbs of hearing hear and auzi is the use of parallel corpora which can also enable the interpretation of their translation potential in the two languages, target texts being able to “[…] validate usage or identify idiosyncratic or deviant behaviour in the translation process” (Williams 2007: 86). The analysis has been applied on a corpus made up by aligning pairs of sentences from English and Romanian literary works, sentences whose basic feature lies in their containing verbs of hearing in various similar contexts.

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Contextualization has been highlighted by the presence of obligatory determiners whose semantic features have been incorporated by the verb clarifying or modifying its meanings (Dima 2003a, 2003b). Verbs of hearing in English and Romanian show a high degree of symmetric intratextuality in the majority of the translated texts specifically chosen for the purpose of the current analysis. The parallel corpus selected as a sample is bidirectional, which hardly allows for a traditional labeling with SL or TL. The verbs analyzed are hear and auzi whose primary meaning is rendered through their contextualization as both transitive and intransitive verbs, according to the illustrations below. English 1. Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing. 2. I hear some noise within; dear love, adieu! 3. Bring forth the gallant: let us hear him speak. 4. Or I am mad, hearing him talk of Juliet.

Romanian 5. Moúneagul, cum aude glasul cucoúului, iesă afară cu bucurie. 6. Peste un răstimp îi auzii paúii. 7. ... îi auzea chiar bătăile inimii. 8. Cine-o fi ? se gândi auzind cum se scoală sora de caritate din jilĠul de paie. 9. Auzise clar toate zgomotele.

Romanian 1. ùi bine-auzi, dar eúti cam surd. 2. Aud strigând... Adio, dragul meu ! 3. Aduceti pe viteaz: să-l auzim. 4. Ori, auzind de ea, înnebunii.

English 5. On hearing his cock’s cry, the old man joyfully went out. 6. Some moments later he heard her footsteps. 7. He could even hear her heartbeats. 8. I wonder who? he thought hearing the nurse rise from her wicker chair. 9. He had heard all the noises.

Contexts (1-9) describe a rich auditory universe where the subject experiences directly the impact of noises, sounds, words. This is typical for both the English and the Romanian non-agentive verbs hear and auzi which seem to be but natural full equivalents in translation. In addition, they both preserve their primary meaning, that of physical perception, irrespective of the syntactic mould they are shaped in. In context (8) auzi

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is followed by a direct object clause rendered in English by an “accusative plus participle” construction describing sonorous movements which the “experiencer” feels through hearing (Dima 2002: 161). As for the couple of sentences under 9, they show not only a quite similar syntactic structure but a similar morphological structure as well; syntactically, the Romanian sentence consists of verb + adverb of manner + indefinite adjective + noun in the plural, while the English sentence shows the structure: subject + verb + indefinite adjective + noun in the plural. It is true, at syntactic level, the slight difference is made by the presence of the adverb of manner in the former example and by the presence of the grammatical subject in the latter example. Morphologically, Romanian may exclude the grammatical subject for its coordinates (person and number) are involved in the verb inflection. On the other hand, the Romanian tense, Mai Mult ca Perfect is expressed by its perfect English equivalent, the Past Perfect, follwed by a direct object which has a similar structure in both Romanian and English. Used in imperative constructions (pairs 10 and 11 below) with the meaning of urgent advice, the verbs hear and auzi change into the agentive verbs listen and asculta as rendered in the following contexts: English 10. Hear ! Hear! 11. You’d better hear what I have to say.

Romanian 10. Auzi ! Ascultă ! 11. Mai bine ai asculta ce am de spus.

Contexts 12 and 13 contextualize the pair auzi and listen with modal shades of meaning. The idea of possibility which is rendered in English only in the excerpt 13 (you can see), while in Romanian it is hardly mentioned. Nevertheless, pair 12, in spite of its apparent similarity, displays a certain degree of difference in that the Romanian context involves a statement, its English counterpart focuses on the order (Do but listen!) Romanian 12. O auzi cum cheam-acuma Craiul sfatu-i înĠelept! 13. De treci codrii de aramă, de departe vezi albind ùi-auzi mândra glăsuire a pădurii de argint.

English 12. Do but listen! The Wise Council Is convened by the all-high. 13. If you cross the copper forests, gleams you can see far away, Of the silver wood, and listen to the magic of its lay.

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In the excerpts 14 and 15 context of modal will, hear acquires the feature [+volition] denoting a deliberate strong action on the part of the speaker. The same meaning is preserved in Romanian (also excerpts 14 and 15) using asculta modalized by vrea and auzi used in an authoritative manner in the subjunctive mood. English 14. Will you hear this letter with attention ? 15. Go, bear them hence; I will not hear them speak.

Romanian 14. VreĠi să ascultaĠi scrisoarea cu luare-aminte ? 15. Îi luaĠi de-aici, să nu-i aud vorbind.

The figurative meanings of the verbs hear and auzi enter the semantic fields of knowledge through oral communication. Contextual analysis in terms of lexical terms is provided by such collocational patterns as hear news or hear from rendered into Romanian through normalisation and explicitation using the collocational patterns a afla veúti, a da de útire, a primi veúti as shown in contexts (16-18) below. 16. Ere ye come there, be sure to hear some news 17. To Milan let me hear from thee by letters. 18. How often do you hear from your family?

16.‘Nainte de-a sosi afla-veĠi veúti. 17. Dă-mi la Milan de útire prin scrisori. 18. Cât de des primeúti veúti de la ai tăi ?

The translation potential of hear and auzi corresponds to the degree of semanticity of the predicative structures they are part of. The quoted verbs show a high degree of semanticity, hence a high translation potential by entering the structure [Subject_Direct Object] with the DO having the features [±Animate]/[±Human] and preserving the perceptive meaning of both hear and auzi. A change in the nature of the semantic matrix of the DO having the dominant feature [+Abstract] brings about a shift in meaning from perceptual to cognitive , without diminishing the translation potential of the two verbs even when occurring in such predicative structures as [Subject_That/Wh- Clause].

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Concluding Remarks The acceptation of the word “corpora” that we have used in this paper is similar to that described by corpus linguistics proponents and illustrated in Dima (2005a), with the difference that it has been based on traditional resources, as discussed in 1 (Previous research). As far as the translation potential of verbs of hearing is concerned, natural equivalence has prevailed in the majority of contexts due to the tight relationships of these verbs semantics to the external world relationships featuring universals of language.

References Aijmer, K., B. Altenberg & M. Johansson (eds). 1996. Languages in contrast. Lund: Lund University Press. Baker, M. 1995. “Corpora in Translation Studies: An overview and some suggestions for future research”, Target, 7, 2, 223-243. Dima, G. 2002. Verba sentiendi în limbile engleză úi română, GalaĠi: Editura FundaĠiei Universitare “Dunӽrea de Jos” GalaĠi. —. 2003a. Outlines of English Syntax, GalaĠi: Editura FundaĠiei Universitare “ Dunӽrea de Jos” GalaĠi. —. 2003b. Outlines of English Semantics, GalaĠi: Editura FundaĠiei Universitare “Dunӽrea de Jos” GalaĠi. —. 2005a. “Introducing Corpus Linguistics. A Lexico-Syntactic Profile for ’See’,” in Dima, G. (ed.), Colocviile Filologice GalaĠene, Bucureúti: Editura Didactică úi Pedagogică, 44-50. —. 2005b. “A Cognitive Approach to the Semantics of Verbs of Seeing in English and Romanian,” Blumenfeld, O., Andries, R. (eds.), Tradition, Modernity and Postmodernity, Iaúi: Universitas XXI, 289-294. —. 2005c. “Revisiting Perception Verbs in English. Further Feature Elaboration of the Syntax and Semantics of Verbs of Feeling and Touching,” in Croitoru, E., Praisler, M., Tuchel, D. (eds.), Cultural Matrix Reloaded, Bucureúti: Editura Didactică úi Pedagogică, 211-215. James, C. 1989. Contrastive Analysis, London: Longman. Laviosa, S. 2002. Corpus-based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. Mauranen, A. 2002. “Will ‘translationese’ ruin a contrastive study?” in Languages in Contrast, 2, 2, 161-86. Santos, D. 1996. Tense and Aspect in English and Portuguese: a Contrastive Semantical Study, PhD Thesis, Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa.

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Toury, G. 1980. In Search of a Theory of Translation, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University. Williams, I.A. 2007. “A corpus-based study of the verb ’observar’ in English–Spanish translations of biomedical research articles”, in Target, 19, 1. Zanettin, F. 2002. “Corpora in Translation Practice”, in Yuste-Rodrigo, E., (ed), Language Resources for Translation Work and Research, LREC 2002, Workshop Proceedings, Las Palmas de Gran-Canaria, 10-14.

notice

regard stare

see look

E

pândi

observa

privi

R vedea

Verbs of seeing

handle

touch

feel

E

pipăi

mângâia

atinge

simĠi

R

Verbs of feeling

listen

hear

E

asculta

auzi

R

Verbs of hearing

Table 3-2. Frequency range for verba sentiendi in English and Romanian

1-50 50-100 100-150 150-200 200-250 250-300 300-350 350-400 450-500 600-650 800-850 900-950 1000-1050 1050-1100 1450-1500 1650-1700 1700-1750 2300-2350 2450-2500 2550-2600

Frequency interval

Annex One

Gabriela Dima

taste

E

gusta

R

Verbs of tasting

smell scent

E

mirosi

R

Verbs of smelling

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TRANSLATING E.S.P. EPONYMS INTO ROMANIAN FLORIANA POPESCU

The language complexity can be measured […] by the lexical combinations, in terms of collocability, patterns of idiomacity, in the length of words […], and what is most important, in terminology […]. As far as the lexical complexity is concerned, terminology in the most difficult aspect in teaching languages for specific purposes (LSP) and in translation. —Croitoru 2007: 179.

Introduction The terminologies in English for specific purposes (ESP) contain an impressive amount of words derived from proper nouns, no matter whether their source resides in personal or geographical names. Although much of the literature on common words derived from proper nouns roughly divides them into those originating in personal names (eponyms) and those originating in geographical names (toponyms), our approach will focus on the former category, exclusively. The lexicography of the English language benefits from a rich number of dictionaries authored by (non-)British lexicographers and which reflect, on the one hand, the interest in general dictionaries of eponyms (Manser 2004) and the professionals’ need of specialist dictionaries of eponyms, on the other hand1. It is only in 2003 that the Romanian lexicography witnesses the publication of the first two monolingual dictionaries to describe eponyms (Muúat, Laiu-Despӽu). There were, nevertheless, some marginal references to eponyms in the earlier linguistic literature, but they usually were occasional and rather concise. Thus, for only one example, Graur (1965: 151-159) discusses the productivity of proper names employed as common words in terms of affixation.

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Eponymization or the process of eponym coining has been very active for the last hundred years and the interest in the study of eponyms has grown particularly after the 1980s. For the last thirty years, approaches to eponyms have focused on etymological, structural, semantic taxonomies, on basic and derived meanings all these concerns being mostly reflected in lexicographical products and hardly in the literature of Translation Studies. In the conference she presented at the International Colloquium “Specialized Discourse: Theory and Practice” held in Galati, on the 28 and 29 of October 2005, B. Santana Lopes, a young translator and ESP academic at the University of Salamanca, included the translation of eponyms among the most difficult tasks ESP translators have to solve. Also, in the light of our paper motto, the degree of lexical complexity characterizing terminologies becomes even higher when proper names are restrictively used as highly specialized verbs, determiners or nouns. Based on the above statements, this approach was designed to suggest possible ways for the translation of proper names when used to refer to anything else but certain particular persons2. Practical in its aim and structure, this approach consists of two parts: the former briefly introduces ESP eponyms and the latter illustrates several translation strategies applicable when they are translated into Romanian.

1. On eponyms The transformation of proper nouns into common words is a centuryold linguistic practice which became a topic of research interest in the late 1940s. Partridge (1949) produced a first approach to proper nouns seen through the perspective of their being used as common words. The topic was further explored by historian linguists (Wood 1969, Baugh and Cable 1991), and lexicographers. The definition of the term eponym has enjoyed several versions with either restrictive or broad and yet incomplete meanings2. A more recent lexicographical description belongs to McArthur, who assigns to the English term eponym the Greek etymon epónumos, literally meaning “named on”, the following three distinct designations: a) “a personal name from which a word has been derived” (eponym, in our approach) b) “the person whose name is so used” c) “the word so derived” (1996: 350), or eponymism, as tends to become the practice in the approaches published after the year 2000.

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For the sake of symmetry, the threefold meaning of the term in focus should produce a similar approach. Nevertheless, the b) meaning, the person whose name stood for a source of new words may sometimes be of little relevance to translators. This is why persons contributing to the development of specialist terminologies will hardly be alluded to, emphasis being laid on the newly coined lexical product, or eponymism. Eponyms have kept pouring into the daily vocabulary and their contribution to the enrichment of the English vocabulary has been alluded to in the reference to dictionaries of eponyms (see note 1). Through the perspective of the ESP translation practice, eponyms may be classified into several groups depending upon various criteria. Broadly, they may broadly be divided into (a) eponyms which are part of the general word stock and (b) eponyms which are exclusively used in languages for specific purposes (ESP eponyms). The English literature of speciality seems, to our knowledge, to have disregarded ESP eponyms, their etymology, structure as well as resourceful creativeness. They are semantically classified into three categories expressing: a) common units of measurement, b) technical processes and c) names of specific objects (Hellweg 1995: 105). When origin, or the criterion of etymology is considered, i.e., the origin of the scientist whose name they derive from, their great majority are of English, American, French, Italian, German and Russian extraction. Irrespective of their belonging to a specific set of highly specialized terms, most of the ESP eponyms show both a certain degree of interdisciplinary, being shared by related specialist languages (mathematics, physics and chemistry) and a certain degree of synonymy, accounted for by aspects of cultural, geographical and even local bias, cultural history and anthropology, as well as elements of ethnicity. Our object of interest lies in the (very) few ESP eponyms which have their own peculiarities making them difficult to translate into a culture which lacks knowledge about the person(ality) inspiring whatsoever eponym.

2. Corpus description and work method To ensure the production of reliable information on eponyms as well as their translation issues, a younger colleague and I decided to form a twomember team and we designed long-term research project. First, a considerable number of English volumes and their Romanian versions, as

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well as monolingual and bilingual lexicons, glossaries and dictionaries were explored to compile a comprehensive bulk of eponyms recorded as active in languages for specific purposes. Thus, over twenty volumes acknowledged as basic bibliography in the study of our selected topics were scanned and hundreds of examples were extracted, filed, translated or compared within the two languages. The findings are described in four different lists. The former couple of lists include only one language information about the terms in focus and the latter couple of lists are intended as preliminary dictionaries, matching English terms to their Romanian corresponding terms (English and Romanian being, in turn, SL and TL), in the long-term perspective of compiling two dictionaries of specialist eponyms. The making of the bilingual corpora resulted in the following conclusions: a) the English corpus is considerably richer, due, among other factors, to the contribution of remarkable minds of this nation to the progress of humankind, which is reflected linguistically in the creation of numerous eponyms; b) the Romanian corpus has provided instances of lexical gaps and, at the same time instances of apparently unexpected solutions; c) although for years our basic task has been to compare and match the specialist terminologies, we still consider it our greatest difficulty to find the perfect pair of specialist eponyms in the two languages. This is because most of them have been given no entry in general bilingual dictionaries or in Romanian explanatory dictionaries either. In addition, since elements of ESP keep invading Romanian terminologies, as it happens with the English ones, Romanian experts in various fields of science, engineering and technology have been accustomed to borrowing English words and using them as such for their practical purposes. This matching enterprise may sometimes be risky for many experts are just accustomed to simply borrowing the English words they need for their practical purposes (conversations, business correspondence, product presentations, etc), without suggesting any Romanian variant, while occasional lexicographers3 have literally “copied” the English term/syntagm and “pasted” it in the Romanian dictionaries. All in all, the analysis and interpretation of the corpora through the perspective of translation practice showed that a considerable percentage of these patterns may raise no difficulty whatsoever. Since the linguistic material in focus shows common features in most of the instances, while

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Translating E.S.P. Eponyms into Romanian

part of them display features peculiar to their source language, there still exists an amount of eponyms or eponymous patterns which may complicate the translation process. Once translators, most of whom are basically philology-trained university graduates with no reliable source of specialized information, come across eponym-including patterns (or ready-made linguistic structures), which are not accounted for in dictionaries, they must probably feel confused and frustrated not knowing what decision to make. That is why, the major practical reason for the current approach is to devise possible main directions translators should be aware of or may have to follow when they have to work with elements belonging to this lexical category.

3. On Structures of ESP eponyms Structurally, words derived from proper names may be grouped into ‘one-word’ and ‘multi-word’ eponyms. One-word eponyms are names of persons which are spelt in small letters, i.e., recategorized into other linguistic units, which sometimes may accept affixation. Numerous examples of one-word eponyms are to be found in physics, with denominations in the International System of Units. This category of eponyms consists of simple eponyms, such as dalton (< John Dalton, 19th century English chemist), henry (< Joseph Henry, 19th century American physicist), newton (< Sir Isaac Newton, 18th century English mathematician and physicist), lambert (< Johann H. Lambert, German physicist and philosopher), etc. There have also been recorded one-word eponyms revealing the structure of hyphened (ampere-hour, ampere-turn, watt-hour) or solidtype compounds (voltmeter, ohmmeter) which may or may not have a vowel or consonant as an interfix (galvanoscope). The one-word ESP eponyms may be further enlarged to include terms which may take either suffixes or prefixes, or even another word to produce compounds. The more frequently used suffixes include: -ean in Boolean (< George Boole, 19th century English mathematician), -ian in Lorentzian (< Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Nobel-prize winning Dutch physicist), Hamiltonian (< Sir William Hamilton, Irish mathematician), age in amperage (< André Marie Ampère, French physicist), voltage, and -ize in pasteurize (< Louis Pasteur, 19th century French chemist and biologist) and vulcanize (< Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking). A less productive suffix is –ism in faradism. Faradism is a coinage where the suffix is added to a back-clipped form, farad (