Today, I have mostly been working on an interview with Robert Chandler for the forthcoming issue of our online magazine. Robert’s a prolific translator, and has produced some fantastic work for us; his achievements were recognised at the 2007 Rossica Prize (of which I’m sure you’re all weary of hearing on these pages…), where he was awarded a Special Commendation. The interview celebrates his forthcoming translation, for Hesperus Press, of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, and expands to themes more generally related to literary translation. This, then, seems a fitting time to open this discussion.
In a fascinating post on ‘Translation as Americanization’ on the ‘Words without Borders’ forum, Professor Lawrence Venuti suggests that…:
Translation is driven by a domesticating impulse. Every step in the process of publishing a literary translation is decisively shaped by what is intelligible and interesting to the receiving culture. The very choice of a foreign work, the strategies used to translate it, the ways it is edited and promoted answer to the receptors’ values, in the end, not to those of the foreign culture. If a foreign work isn’t likely to make sense to readers of the translation, if it might conflict with their cherished ideas or beliefs, it is usually not translated, or it is translated and published so as to be acceptable. Often foreign works are chosen for translation simply because they stand to be recognizable to readers.
The discernible tone of frustration here causes me to wonder where this leaves we publishers who seem to be fighting a very lonely battle to bring foreign fiction to the fore in the British literary scene. As was highlighted in Katya’s now much publicised ‘rant’ of a few weeks ago, very few publishers are prepared to stick their necks out in publishing ‘the author with the funny name’. While, from an academic perspective, I appreciate Professor Venuti’s viewpoint, on a more pragmatic level, surely in order to make these operations viable at all in the current publishing climate, there needs to be some concession to what is ‘recognizable to readers’…?
Does anyone have any views on this? Anyone particularly object to the ‘naturalisation’ or ‘domestication’ of their translations? Or see any way for publishers to please those on all sides of the argument?
ER
I don’t have answers for you, but I have been thinking about this, as I just finished reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and I found the translation I have by David Young to be a little hard to piece together and some other translations I found online to be easier to follow. But I wondered as I read whether the Young translation follows the original more faithfully. I DO want to get a sense of what the original is like, even if it’s challenging. I suppose what I most care about is having the translations available, but after that, I’d prefer to read something difficult that captures the original well rather than a translation that is more focused on being accessible.
I have given a fair amount of thought to this quite recently, as domestication and foreignization was the subject of my master’s thesis, completed in December ‘06. It is certainly a thorny problem. One admittedly evasive position, which nevertheless appeals to me, is expressed by Robert Chandler that appears in the introduction to his translation of Soul, by Andrey Platonov: translation theories can only be posited “provisionally, with regard to a particular work, a particular paragraph, a particular sentence” (xix).
On a more concrete level, I formulated in my thesis a set of guidelines for my particular work in progress, a translation of the boyhood memoirs of Tajik folklorist Rajab Amonov. In sum, I concluded that “a sound guiding principle would seem to be to use foreignizing strategies (described in detail below [in my thesis]) when the expression in question is distinctive enough to draw attention to itself as a Tajik phenomenon, not simply an awkward translation, but the result is sufficiently comprehensible not to require a lengthy explanation that would interrupt the discourse.” Of course, all this is still in the realm of theory, since my incomplete manuscript has neither been published nor read by many English speakers as yet. I did, however, receive a grant for the project, so I hope this indicates that I am on the right track.
I discuss Chandler’s translations of Soul and The Railway, by Hamid Ismailov in my blog, http://birdsbooks.wordpress.com, and would welcome further discussion.
Thanks so much to both of you for your thoughts. I have to say, Dorothy, that I would probably fall in with you in preferring the more challenging read, but I think we may be in the minority. Perhaps I’ll stand next to the tills in my local Waterstone’s and conduct a poll of everyone I see buying translated fiction. Perhaps not.
Jamela, I found your ideas fascinating, and was particularly struck by the Robert Chandler quote you use. Never having done any translation myself (bar a few hundred words of drivel for A-Level French), I’m at a loss to fathom how anyone can undertake such a challenging task, let alone with the added imposition of stringent guidelines. I’ve added your blog to our blogroll and wish you every success with your manuscript!
ER