Literary translation

Literary translation

文学翻译

practices

实践

Literary translation is the work of literary translators. That is a truism which has to

serve as a starting point for a description of literary translation, an original subjective

activity at the centre of a complex network of social and cultural practices. The

imaginative,intellectual and intuitive writing of the translator must not be lost to the

disembodied abstraction which is often described as ‘translation’.

文学翻译是文学翻译者的工作。这一点作为描述文学翻译的起点，作为在社会和文化实践这一复杂网络中占据中心地位具有独创性和主观性活动，是不言而喻的。译者的想象力、心智及直觉一定不能脱离现实，这就是我们说的“翻译”。

Literary translators have to connive or contend with the well-established hierarchies

in the definitions of what constitutes literature: poetry, drama and prose—usually in

that order, of ‘high’ culture as opposed to ‘lower’ categories such as science

fiction,children’s fiction and ‘pulp’ fiction. These hierarchies are reflected in general

assumptions about both the relative worth and difficulty of translating the constituent

sections of literary production. Such categorizations have been attacked by cultural

theorists, post-modernists and some translation scholars who have pointed out how

the construction of canons has been informed historically by value-judgements

refracted through prejudices of class, gender, nation and race. These attacks have also

undermined confidence in the author’s interpretation of what s/he has written in

favour of the multiplicity of readings by readers: the kingly or queenly author has

been dethroned and replaced by a fragmented realm of individual readers (Venuti

1992). The work of literary translators implicitly and sometimes explicitly challenges

the authority of the canon, the nationalism of culture and the ‘death’ of the author.

文化是由诗歌，戏剧及散文构成，及通常来说，高雅文化是和如科幻小说，儿童小说和低俗小说这类低级文化相对的，对于这两种层面的认识已经约定俗成，文学翻译者要么默认要么打破这些层面的认识。普遍观点认为，这些认识层面又反

映在对文学翻译作品的价值与困难都是相对的。这种分类受到了文化理论者、后现代主义者及一些翻译学者的抨击，他们指出，从历史角度看，经典作品的构建是任何受到阶级、性别、民族及种族歧视等价值判断的影响。作者写作是赞同阅读多样性的：作者权威不在重要，取而代之的是个体读者碎片化理解，而这些抨击又同时打击了作者在这方面的信心。文学翻译者的工作含蓄或者明确地挑战了经典作品的权威，挑战了文化民族主义及作者死亡论。

A literary translator is bilingual and bicultural and thus inhabits a landscape which is

not mapped by conventional geographies; s/he is at home in the flux that is the reality

of contemporary culture, where migration is constant across artificial political

self-styled monolingual dominant cultures, as in the Anglo-Saxon

varieties, that flux is often portrayed as a threatening, if not a pathological state of

being. Literary translators are involved at a keen point of cultural convergence

because they translate those works which, for whatever reason, are selected for

translation and which now exist where otherwise there would be silence. They often

play a key role by suggesting works for translation or regularly writing readers’

reports for publishers on books sent by foreign authors or their agents. The eventual

selection implies the work is representative—even if it is anticanonical—of a

particular quintessential use of language and feeling in the source culture. It also

implies that the publishers believe there is a market for that literary translation. By

definition, nevertheless, any literary translation breaks the nationalist canon because,

however assimilated by the translation and publishing process, it introduces into the

reading space of non-readers of the source language a work that would otherwise

remain an array of meaningless letters or symbols. As the creator of the new work in

the target culture, the literary translator operates at the frontiers of language and

culture, where identity is flux, irreducible to everyday nationalist tags of ‘Arab’,

‘English’ or ‘French’, or to foreign talk seen as irritating jabber.

文学翻译者必须具备双语及双文化能力，因此脑中要有一幅不受传统地理限制而绘制出的格局。文学翻译者处于当代文化的现实流动中，现实中，人们在认为划定的政治边界不断移民。

Literary translators also belong to a cash nexus of relationships and a tradition of

social

practices within the publishing industry. A contract has to be signed, payment agreed,

and

decisions about copyright and deadlines for delivery of the manuscript have to be

reached, usually in the course of the translator’s lone negotiations with a publisher.

Payment may be in the form of an advance on royalties. Usually, the originating

author

accepts a royalty of 8 per cent that in principle leaves 2 per cent for the translator. For

a

publisher who sees the translator as an added expense, a small payment may be made

as

an advance on royalties or a flat fee worked out on the basis of a rate per thousand

words.

Many literary translators argue for an advance based on the actual amount of time

they

estimate the translation may take rather than such piece-work rates. Grants from

sponsoring Ministries of Culture or bodies such as the Arts Council in Britain or the

National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States are sometimes awarded

to

publishers to defray the cost of translation (see PUBLISHING STRATEGIES).

Contracts

usually include some line about ‘providing a language that is faithful to the original’

and

commit the translator to the correction of proofs.

These arrangements may differ from country to country. In countries with a buoyant

demand for translations, a publisher may have an in-house team of translators.

Actes-Sud,

for example, in France, have a company where readers’ reports, the commissioning of

translations and translators, and the whole chain of production is run by literary

translators who are part of the professional administrative framework of the

publishers

(Mattern 1994). In Britain and the United States, it is more likely that publishers will

work with freelance translators they know or will contract them on the basis of

word-ofmouth recommendation (the ‘friend of a friend’), proof of previous work or

by reference

to directories of literary translators.

Literary translators often do not have an agent, because agents are not interested in the

slender earnings to be gleaned from representing literary translators. There are

translators’ associations which will advise on contracts and legal help in disputes, but

characteristically they do not become involved in the actual negotiations over

individual

contracts. Literary translators, like all writers, are a heterogeneous social grouping.

Some

can live on their inheritances or the windfall of a royalty from a best-seller, some may

combine literary translation with full- or part-time academic posts or other work, but

freelance literary translators throughout the world depend on the amounts they receive

for

their translations to pay for the electricity that powers the word-processor.

What then of literary translation and the ‘rebirth’ of the author? The process of

translation differs slightly from translator to translator and is influenced by the

particular

work translated. However, whether there is to be collaboration with a living author, or

study of previous translations in the case of a ‘classic’ work, there are common stages

and problems in the work of literary translators. It used to be the case that translators

did

not write about these issues (George Steiner 1975), but there are now a number of

casestudies written by translators about their mode of operation (for example Felstiner

1980;

Levine 1991).

First, the literary translator confronts words set on the page—in a certain context and

with particular resonances—by an author who may be dead physically or

metaphorically

and now lives in the variegated readings by a host of readers of the source language.

There is at least a minimum commonality to those readings created by the original.

The

literary translator creates a new pattern in a different language, based on personal

readings, research and creativity. This new creation in turn becomes the basis for

multiple

readings and interpretations which will go beyond any intentions of either original

author

or translator. Nevertheless, it is the fruit of thousands of decisions, large and small,

and of

creative activity on the part of the translator.

An essential preparation for the translation will be careful reading and re-reading and

accompanying research of source text and other work by the author. This can include

travel to the writer’s country and historical and literary research. It often helps to read

works that play a similar though different role in the target culture. For Felstiner

(1980),

this meant reading poetry by High Church in order to gauge the right voice

for

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Communist. In the case of a living author, a range of

collaborative possibilities offer themselves. Some authors enjoy participation in the

translation to the extent that the final fruit of the collaboration is a new work in which

they extend and add new sections (Levine 1991). Others may add marginal comments

to

a draft. Sometimes, a translator may decide on very limited collaboration with an

author

in order to further a strategy of translation that is not tied too closely to equivalence,

and

this can give more scope for intervention on the part of the translator (Venuti 1995).

There are translators who opt not to research the scholarly background of the work

they

are translating, presumably in pursuit of a more ‘writerly’, intuitive mode (Peters

1995).

Whatever the strategy adopted by the translator, any translation is ultimately the

product

of multiple readings and drafts which precede and determine the shape of the final

draft

delivered to the publishers. Context is crucial. The process may be truncated or

altered by

external forces: the publication of a book may have to coincide with the release of a

film,

a dramatic script may have to be handed to production so staging can be started and

the

translation be changed in that process, or in a tradition upheld by London theatre

companies a ‘literal’ translation may be given to a well-known writer who then

produces

a literary version.

Different strategies may be necessary to approach a short lyric poem or a long work

of

prose fiction. A translator of fiction has to engage with the different rhythms, the

images

and symbols an author will use in the course of hundreds of pages (Levine 1991).

Repeated reading and research enable the translator to identify such patterns, though

some will be translated subconsciously as part of the process of imaginative rewriting.

In

dense texts resonant with ambiguities and alternative meanings by a James Joyce, a

translator works at disrupting the target culture in the way the original work disrupted

the

standard language and received notions of the source culture (Conde-Parilla 1994).

Literary translation is then a very social, culturally-bound process where the translator

plays a key role in a complex series of interactions.

When a manuscript is submitted to a publishing house, the editing process involves

the

application of a new set of criteria to the translation. There may be a house-style that

an

editor uses across the board, and this may be applied, appropriately or otherwise, to a

literary text in translation. In the English, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds,

for

example, there will be issues of different dialects and editors who will only accept

their

variety of standard. This often leads to partial and usually inconsistent adaptations of

translations into, say, American English or British English. Some leading translators

have

argued against this practice, explaining that ‘editors can play havoc as they try to

anglicize the text’ (Pontiero 1992:303), and some have called for the retention of the

language of the translator (Wright 1993). The editor’s reading, however, need not

simply

be a threatening and standardizing project. A fresh reading brings new insights and

can

eliminate mistakes that would otherwise mar the final version.

Conscious decisions which involve changing the translation are made at every stage,

by editors and translators, in order to cater for the perceived needs of the receiving,

dominant culture; Kuhiwczak (1990), for example, discusses the case of cuts made to

Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke. It is also worth pointing out that many publishing

houses do not employ editors with a knowledge of the source language and there is no

tradition of sub-contracting freelance editors with such knowledge.

A published translation is the fruit of a substantial creative effort by the translator,

who

is the key agent in the subjective activity and social practice of translation. Whatever

the

restraints of the network of social and cultural factors, it is ultimately the literary

translator who makes the thousands of decisions that give a literary work its ‘afterlife’:

an

existence in other languages (Benjamin 1923)