Translation and Literature 21 (2012)

Transcription

1 Translation and Literature 21 (2012) which discusses Kundera s deeply ideological conception of Central Europe in relation to Russia and the West. There is also relatively little close-up investigation of the details of particular texts, something perhaps all too characteristic of certain branches of Translation Studies. Only a few essays pay close attention to linguistic detail, and the relation between originals and translations: László Scholz s study of Hungarian translations of Latin American fiction (which reveals a reluctance among translators to translate jodido, fucked up, accurately), Natalia Olshanskaya s contribution on versions of Zamiatin and Voinovich, and Aleksei Semenenko s on twenty-first century translations of Hamlet. This is, for the most part, a book on literary translation which only rarely considers the objects of study as literature, rather than as historical phenomena or tokens of cultural exchange. One cannot necessarily hold an editor responsible for this. Editorial success is in other respects mixed. It is traditional for reviewers to complain about the decline in the standard of proof-reading; yes, there are too many errors in the text, but none of them goes beyond the obvious and mentally correctable. It would have been useful to make transliterations of Cyrillic uniform: the index has, for example, separate entries on Mayakovsky, Vladimir and Majakovskij, Vladimir. At the other end of the volume, we should take at face value Baer s statement in the introduction that he hopes future studies of the region will deal with some of the topics this book omits: it represents a useful start on what is obviously a fascinating field of study, but it is very much a collection of first attempts. Pervyi blin komom further investigation is to be looked forward to. James Womack Complutensian University of Madrid DOI: /tal To the Winds Our Sails: Irish Writers Translate Galician Poetry. Edited by Mary O Donnell and Manuela Palacios. Pp Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Poetry, Pb. e15. With roughly forty works recorded as having been previously translated into English, 2010 proved to be an excellent year for the export of Galician literature through translation. Antonio Raúl de Toro s Breogán s Lighthouse: An Anthology of Galician Literature and Jonathan Dunne s Contemporary Galician Poets were among the initiatives which helped to place the cultural and literary heritage of Galicia, an 133

2 Reviews autonomous community in north-western Spain, within the reach of an English-speaking readership. However, the publication of the collection To the Winds Our Sails must be considered the year s highlight, as it embodies the long-awaited response to the glances Galicia has cast towards Ireland over many centuries. As she writes in the introduction, it was precisely after having noticed the clear interest in Irish writers by Galician scholars and poets over the years that Irish author Mary O Donnell felt the need to embark on this project. She was joined by the Galician scholar and translator Manuela Palacios. The result is a trilingual (Galician, English, and Irish) selection of contemporary Galician poetry written by women, contained in a volume where the role of translators is continually made visible from the subtitle to the list of authors and translators side by side on the back. The translators visibility is also a feature of the Table of Contents, where left-hand pages stress through bold type the names of the ten Galician writers presented in the collection Luz Pozo Garza, María do Carmo Kruckenberg, Xohana Torres, Marilar Aleixandre, Luz Pichel, Chus Pato, Ana Romaní, María do Cebreiro, María Lado, and Xiana Arias while the rectos leave those names in italics and embolden the names of their translators, a number of them Irish poets of some repute: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, Celia de Fréine, Mary O Malley, Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Lorna Shaughnessy, Maurice Harmon, Caitríona O Reilly, Máighréad Medbh, Paddy Bushe, Rita Kelly, and Martin Nugent. O Donnell s introduction is followed by an essay by Palacios: Galician Women Poets Today: Moving from Strength to Strength. An Appendix offers bio-bibliographical information about the Galician poets as well as on their Irish translators. The mechanics of the enterprise become clearer from an acknowledgement of the contribution of Minia Bongiorno García, who was in charge of producing preliminary literal English translations of the Galician originals which each of the authors personally selected to represent their work abroad. The editors dual hope for their volume is that it might become the unequivocal answering-call to the sometimes visionary work of our sister-poets down the Atlantic seaboard and that a two-way channel between our cultures has been forged. The warm reception of the collection in Galicia, where the fact that some very recognizable voices in Irish writing undertook the task of mediating Galician poems into English or Irish form has not gone unnoticed, suggests the first aim has been realized. The attainment of the second could be said to rest on the 134

3 Translation and Literature 21 (2012) success of the translations themselves on whether they individually and collectively achieve a cross-cultural exchange. So here are some samples (my italics throughout). Máighréad Medbh s translation of tres by María Lado evokes the hardships of making a living by the sea but also, perhaps, the ear-catching sibilance of the Galician spoken in the area the poem refers to (percebes are a type of shellfish; the emphasis on the word is present in the original): novembro é o lugar onde o mar desexa a carne sabe os nosos nomes íntimos e é por iso que os percebes enganan con voces de serea. november is the place where sea seeks flesh. It has learned our secret names and percebes sing them like sirens. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill s translation of Luz Pozo Garza s Os palacios de inverno expands on or amplifies cumpría : E todo se cumpría naquela primavera de auganeve en Dublín. And all that was to happen came to pass that sleety spring in Dublin. On the other hand, Ana Romaní s Por que sei que te vas ás veces loses in its English translation a number of images which open and close the poem, providing it with a circular structure (vas and volves make reference to leaving and returning, roce e roza to grazing, and silveiras and póla to brambles and a branch): Por que sei que te vas ás veces Because I know you sometimes leave esintooroce do teu corpo and feel your body tangle contra as silveiras with the thorns por ser a póla da memoria to be the limb from the past que docemente te roza that softly trembles against you cando volves when you turn A channel for cross-cultural exchange would also need to cope with the historical and cultural frameworks Galician poets are inscribed into, such as art, religion, or gender. The most frequent strategy for translating artistic or literary references here is to transpose them 135

4 Reviews without any gloss in text or notes. An exception is Caitríona O Reilly s version of María do Cebreiro s A Terra Devastada ( The Wasteland ), where the translator does away with the explicit references to Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, O Reilly no doubt feeling that the poem s title and certain other allusions were sufficient pointers. This may be correct, but her decision has also resulted in the loss of a beautiful image created by the play on the words martelo castelo, which evoke Woolf s thoughts while manually setting Eliot s words letter by letter at the Hogarth press. Foron aparecendo diante dela, os que T.S. chamara para que lle deixaran escribir e o insomnio desfixese aquel fero martelo de palabras. Ou sería un castelo? Iso pensa Virginia, pero non se confunde. Os dedos case nunca se confunden. She can hear the hanged man he invoked speaking to her in the voice of a bird. It will not let her sleep. Only her sensitive fingers can say what kind of edifice they have made. Where religion is concerned, Galicia and Ireland both have a dual spiritual tradition, in which the strong influence of institutionalized Catholicism jostles with millenarian forms of spirituality connected to nature or even to magic and the supernatural. A lively instance of the occasional clash between both traditions is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill s translation of Luz Pozo Garza s Bosque de Rododendros : Nesta mañá tan fría de Dublín nun domingo de marzo vaiamos miña nai á montaña de Howth a ese lugar sagrado... On this freezing cold Dublin morning in March Mother, let us go to the Hill of Howth and that sacred place of magic. Eliminating Sunday and adding magic effectively rejects the association of the Hill of Howth with the first of the above-mentioned traditions. 136

5 Translation and Literature 21 (2012) As for the third cultural construction I specified gender this can be either obscured or made explicit by means of semantic or morphological choices. Translators will reflect on whether the poetic voice of their original can be identified with one or more specific genders or with none. There is, in addition, an added difficulty with the translation into English of a Romance language such as Galician in which masculine and feminine alternatives are available for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. The necessary care is apparent in the translation of Xiana Arias s Isto non é literatura feminina by Paddy Bushe, who, facing the grammatical constraint of having to associate a subject with the main verb, opted for a gender-neutral noun: Isto non é literatura feminina, dixo mentres escribía unha obra de teatro para nenos. This is not feminine literature, the author said, while writing a play for children Furthermore, rituals of presence, where the poetic voice shows and vindicates its gender, are not hard to find in contemporary poetry written by women. In the present volume we find instances of both the effacement of gender identification, such as Celia de Fréine s translation of Xohana Torres s Ofelia Todas morremos no curso que é a vida nós mesmas, expoliadas na vixilia We die many times during life robbed of being even while awake. and of the translation of strategies which heighten gender identities, as in Lorna Shaughnessy s rendering of Chus Pato s A voz era pánico as con outros moitos e moitas na nosa condición surrounded by wo/men in the same predicament. To the Winds Our Sails does create contact between cultures, establishing inspiring links between creators. And eventually, the beauty and naturalness of the translated versions in this collection seems to bear witness to the links between Galician and Irish cultural backgrounds. This vessel, which sets sail with a dedication to languages no longer spoken and languages not yet born, replicates the journey, centuries back, of the mythical Galician king Breogan s son, Ith, in 137

6 Reviews search of the green land he had glimpsed from the top of a tower. Hopefully, this volume will entice readers from Irish shores, and others, to look towards Galicia. Vanessa Silva Fernández University of Vigo DOI: /tal Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English. By Brigid Maher. Pp Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, Hb. $128/e85. As Henri Bergson has shown, discussing humour is a serious, even a grim business, and translating humour is notoriously awkward, verging on impossible. Attempting to combine the two in an analytic work is a daunting task. But Brigid Maher has succeeded in providing a quite excellent study of the topic. She is well versed in the scholarship of Translation Studies and she contributes novel insights of her own. In addition, she writes in a clear, even sprightly, style. It is odd that so little critical attention has been dedicated to the issue of the translation of humour across languages and cultures. Maher starts out by attempting to pin down the notion of humour, identifying the various forms it takes in literature irony, satire, parody, farce, wordplay and the grotesque and the assorted functions it performs. She mentions Pirandello s celebrated, but idiosyncratic, essay on Umorismo, but neglects Bergson and Freud, who might have strengthened her case. Humour is born of the peculiar cultural, historical and social background of a group of people, she says, meaning that humorous styles are, or can be seen to be, in large part culture-bound. This is the crux of the matter. P. G. Wodehouse, who is not discussed here, flopped in Italian not because of any deficiency on the part of his valiant translators, but because the world of the idle drones who frequent gentlemen s clubs in London had no recognizable equivalent in Italian society. The posh language expressing essentially vacuous notions could be rendered in Italian words but the mindset was unintelligible, and any apparatus of footnotes simply weighed unduly on the lightness of Wodehouse s idiom. There are other instances. Plainly, puns, as any viva voce interpreter will confirm, rely on the resources of one language, and it is pure luck if a specific piece of wordplay can be conveyed in another language. Is that the case with humour in general? 138