BY CARLOS MIJARES POYER DATE MAY 12, 2012
GENRE LITERARY TRANSLATION
THE TURNS AND TWISTS OF A LITERARY TRANSLATION
If you have not read anything by american novelist Henry James, anyone who knows would definitely recommend The Turn of the Screw, indeed fluent and paradisiacal. One becomes enamored to this novel that has reached the romantic screen of Hollywood and t.v.
The novel does not seem, but it is a ghost story and a love story. A story of serendipity deep in the English mansions, just read.
I have never tried to translate this novel it would be a daring sin for me, I do not compare, I could translate well, but its title addresses the twists and turns of the literature it is composed of. One must first as a literary translator, have humility in front of the prose one is about to transform to another language, another world.
Sometimes when translating literature from English to Spanish, the second language lacks the pragmatism and nominalism of the first, and I will include here a translation of a stanza of a poem I wrote in English and was translated by someone else, to demonstrate the twist and turn of the prose. The stanza says:
Like an old turtle´s trot
In heavy steps that drop
A low hum from the heart.
Como el lento paso de la vieja tortuga
Angustiosa pesadumbre que entona
Un profundo murmullo del corazón. (My translation).
If you like the translation, comment on it, and add constructively to it; that´s what blogs are for.
Going back to our novel, the Jamesian style, participates in that it propitiates the fluency for translation, because James uses paratactic sentences the reader and his imagination must add to. I am no addict to structuralism but it helps. As a matter of fact the whole story one must add great imagination to the love theme and the obscure and terrifying ghost presence in the content of the novel. This is hard to reach if you try to translate this novel to Spanish, it has been done, but because I am always learning and literature is infinite, this article dear reader encourages you to pick up the novel and rehearse a translation to your language.
A twist in language or the turn of the screw to tightened the art or loosen it when possible, to reach new levels of talent in writing and translation, is there, it´s when you try to work on it that the style reaches your mind and heart. Students should be encouraged to work on this.
The stanza up top could have been more literally translated and say:
Como el lento paso de la vieja tortuga
En pesados pasos que intuyen (o que dejan abismalmente descender)
Un profundo gemir del corazón. (another version of my own creation.)
By the way, for you russian novel lovers, take a peek, I mean good vantage point from your reading chair or desk, and observe how Sarah Burnett translates the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov, indeed a turbulent novel full of mysticism, parricide and of course, literary talent. Read, something always remains, that´s what translator are there for -in serious organizations.
Literary translation, in my opinion, and only in my judgement, should be carried out by a writer or poet with talent and control of the languages at hand. It takes time and it should be well paid, only if the translator has the ability to transport his original writing talent to the translation, and that not always happens. The style of the translator´s writing style may show, it is almost impossible that it does not happen, but it is the style of the prose that must come through, and in poetry, the mistake comes like a boomerang when translating metaphors, or similes and other accented rhyme, like when you try to translate metered rhyme in English Literature to another language.
Who is il miglior fabbro? (the best crafstman). Poet means “maker” (maker or images), and these words sprawled like stars over the vastness of the page may have a meter. Ezra Pound, the american poet, was a vast greek, provencal, latin, and german translator, his translations of Dante´s Inferno, specially the section of the “purgatory” reveal what english poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would write years later in verse. His example is a grand example of comparative arts (the relationships between the arts basically). Coleridge wrote in verse:
In the hexameter rises the fountain´s silvery column
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back
This is the example of the scansion that must face a translator to meet or try to resemble the passion and the essence of the verse into another language. These are cadences of elegies (heroic epics) as was a historical tradition in all literature to write, even Tolkien with his modern 20th Century saga of The Hobbit is a form an elegy, that has reached Hollywood. A six meter rhyme line followed by a five meter line whether it rhymes or not, is the scansion, the fall of the breath and the heartbeats and the motion of the eyes over the verses, that could be translated to spanish as:
En el hexámetro asciende la columna plateada de la fuente
En e pentámetro ay, cayendo en melodía una vez más…
The knowledge of meter in older poetry in any language and the new edition of free verse and its cadences are of symbolic significance in the art of translation of literatura and poetry, and even prose, for in my judgement; when I read the Norton Edition of Dead Souls by russian writer Nikolai Gogol, I find an inner rythm, a sort of sound that emits order and song. And these artistic attitudes are to be met professionally by the translator.
