The politics of literary�translation --�Chekhov into Irish-English�

​

​

Zsuzsa Csikai

​

University of Pécs, Hungary

• How an apparently innocent textual practice can be a manipulative strategy with an agenda – cultural-political practice
• How translation of literature can be the instrument of subjugation as well as liberation of cultures.
• how translation seen as having the power to shape and construct those cultural contexts.
• Lawrence Venuti: translation can be “called a cultural political practice” (The Translator’s Invisibility 1995)

​

literary translation -- political?

​

• translation -- search for the words or phrases in the target language that best convey and match the meaning of the words and phrases of the source language?
• translation -- finding ways to transfer meaning and style from one language into another?

​

Linguistic approach

​

• Still in the 1970s
• Central ideas on translation:
• Definitive translations
• Accuracy
• Equivalency
• Faithfulness

​

Ideologically loaded terminology�

• change as loss – hierarchy:
• Primacy of the original, translation in terms of negativity:
• as secondary, derivative, a copy, a traitor, a slave
• mechanical, inferior, substitute or betrayal of original

Metaphors

​

• 17. century Gilles Ménage, historian and grammarian, about Perrot d’Ablancourt’s translation of classical lit: ‘Les belles infidéles’ – translation can be either beautiful or faithful
• Dryden in his dedication to his Aeneid ‘slaves we are, and labour on another man’s plantation; we dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s’.
• Dryden: “When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments...”

Cultural turn in translation studies in1980s

• Translation as
• not merely a linguistic/textual activity BUT cultural/political
• contextually motivated and defined: “there is a context in which the translation takes place, a history from which a text emerges, and into which a text is transposed” (Bassnett “Proust” 11).
• not innocent, transparent BUT inherently manipulative one.
• Changes are inevitable – motivated by some cultural-political factors
• Study of translation should be concerned with power relations behind textual production.

​

​

New metaphors:

​

​

Challenge the primacy of the original and the lowly status of the translator.

​

​

Emphasize the power of translation to ensure the continued life of the original.

​

Acknowledging that changes are inevitable

​

​

“a translation comes later than the original,( … ) their translation marks their stage of continued life”

Walter Benjamin in his essay The Task of the Translator (1923)

​

Ezra Pound: “my job was to bring a dead man to life, to present a living figure” (1919)

​

Octavio Paz: “Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. (…) Up to a point, each translation is a creation and thus constitutes a unique text.” (1986)

​

Thomas Kilroy: “translation and adaptation is a form of privileged conversation with an author” (1993)

​

​

​

Postcolonial perspectives on translation �

• Realization that translation and colonialism went hand in hand: the power of translation to subdue as well as to resist subjugation.
• Assisting subjugation:
• Eric Cheyfitz: translation was the “central act of European colonization and imperialism in America” (1991)
• Translation is the representation of the other/colonized for the colonizer, serves as proof of inferiority of colonized
• Edward Lane: One Thousand and One Nights (bowdlerized 1859) Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (1859)
• Translation of placenames in Ireland into English in 1830s
• Translation as a means of resistance, cultural assertion
• Brazilian antropofagos
• Irish literary renaissance, Gealic revival

​

.

​

​

The antropófagos in Brazil (1928):�

Europe = great Original, the starting point,

the colonies = copies, or “translations” of Europe.

​

Manifesto Antropófago 1928:

metaphor of cannibalism to assert Brazilian culture: only by devouring Europe could the colonized break away from what colonization imposed on them. “It is both a violation of European codes and an act of homage” (Basssnett 5).

:translation = blood transfusion nourishing the translating culture (Haraldo de Campos)

Translation = patricide, transcreation, transluciferation.

Questions of ethics

• Translation is a primary method of imposing meaning while concealing the power relations that lie behind the production of that meaning.
• Lawrence Venuti: Domestication vs. Foreignization
• Anglophone countries approach: wholesale domestication, fluent translation.
• Result: creating adamantly monolingual cultures unreceptive to and intolerant of the foreign.
• This furthers “the unequal cultural exchanges between hegemonic English language nations and their global others” supporting an attitude of cultural imperialism. (Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility 1995 )

​

​

​

Domesticating vs. Foreignizing translation strategies

​

Douglas Robinson: “assimilative or domesticating translation … is a primary tool of empire insofar as it encourages colonial powers to translate foreign texts into their own terms, thus eradicating cultural differences” “Members of hegemonic cultures are therefore never exposed to true difference”.

(Robinson Translation and Empire 109)

​

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone

​

Crumpets/English muffin, sherbet lemon/lemon drop, Sellotape/tape, sweets/candy, car park/parking lot

Domestication vs. foreignization in translation

​

Venuti: “by producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation masquerades as true semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to English-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the very difference that translation is called on to convey” (Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility 21).

​

Instead: foreignizing as a translation strategy is promoted.

​

Foreignisation finds ways to signal foreignness in order to allow difference to enter the text and thus the recipient culture, achieving “an ethic of difference” (Venuti, Scandals of Translation)

​

-- Foreignization in English can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism” (The Translator’s Invisibility, 1995, 20),

--

Anton Chekhov (Russia 1860-1904)

​

Brian Friel (Ireland 1929-2015)

​

domestication as resistance

Chekhov into Irish-English

• From the 1980s Chekhov retranslated, adapted:
• Brian Friel: Three Sisters (1981) Uncle Vanya (1998) The Bear (2001) The Yalta Game (2001) and Afterplay (2002)
• Thomas Kilroy: The Seagull (1981)
• Frank McGuinness: Three Sisters (1990), Uncle Vanya (1995)
• Michael West: The Seagull (1999)
• Tom Murphy: The Cherry Orchard (2004)

Common features of Friel’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and Kilory’s The Seagull:

• 1. Not “translation proper”
• G. Toury: broad definition of translation: “a translation will be any target language text which is presented or regarded as such within the target system itself, on whatever grounds”
• Lefevere: translation as rewriting.
• 2. Heavily Hibernicized/Irished through:
• - thorough adaptation to Irish milieu (The Seagull)
• - thorough domestication of the plays (TS, UV)
• 3. Motivation behind domestication: insistence on the re-appropriation of Chekhov for Irish audiences.

Why and how?

Why domesticate Chekhov?

European classics are available/channeled for the Irish in Standard British English, Angilcized Chekhov ---- remnants of colonial influence.

​

Ireland, 1980s:. the cultural-political context of “the decolonization of the imagination” promoted by the Field Day Theatre Project

--- promoting cultural dialogue bw North and South of Ireland

--- addressing issues of postcolonial Ireland like political crisis in the North of Ireland (sectarian conflict bw Catholics and Protestants

--- creating a more inclusive Irish identity than the sectarian one

Resistance to the still felt cultural influence of Britain by refusing its role as mediator of culture for the Irish

​

Friel:

​

I think that the versions of Three Sisters that we see and read in this country always seem to be redolent of either Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set. Somehow the rhythms of these versions do not match with the rhythms of our own speech patterns, and I think that they ought to, in some way. Even the most recent English translations again carry, of necessity, very strong English cadences and rhythms. This is something about which I feel strongly—in some way we are constantly overshadowed by the sound of the English language, as well as by the printed word. Maybe this does not inhibit us, but it forms us and shapes us in a way that is neither healthy nor valuable for us. (Friel, “Agnew Interview” 84)

​

Translation strategies

• Adaptation: total translocation into Ireland.

​

• Choice of source text (TS): existing Standard English translations used only

​

• Whole scale domestication of the play (TS , UV)

​

• -- vocabulary
• -- syntax
• -- structure of dialogues
• -- inter-textuality and allusions

​

Irish-English vocabulary:

​

• Hiberno-English idiom: “making an eejit of myself”., “Did you hear tell, Miss,...?” “What sort of a square buck’s that?” “you put the heart across me!” etc.

​

Structure: long speeches/monologues in Russian are broken up into fast-paced dialogues full of questions, question tags: Irish verbosity

​

-

​

- creating intertextuality with and allusions to contemporary Irish culture/ reality:

​

​

• Masha has an “epiphany”

​

​

• pustosh : “the old squabble about the common ground”, and a “discussion document”

​

• Provincial town “has not produced one person of any distinction – not one saint, not one scholar, not one artist” in “land of saints and scholars” = Ireland

​

• a promise of rest (my otdokhnem! )= “all the terrible things we’ve had to endure […] will be swept away in a great wave of mercy and understanding.” “Endure. And peace will come to us”.

Added lines/scenes:

​

​

Doctor Chebutykin’s self-condemning monologue is addressed to his reflection in the mirror in second person >

​

mirror as a recurring image in Irish literature:

​

Synge: The Playboy of the Western World,

Joyce: “the cracked looking glass of a servant” in Ulysses.

The politics of the Irish-English translations of Chekhov

​

​

The wide range of translation strategies are a means to an end:

resistant strategies to achieve cultural decolonization for the Irish

​

displace Standard English Chekhov translations in Ireland and thus resist Br cultural influence.

​

-- cultural assertion by proving that Irish-English is a legitimate medium for the rendering of European classics.

​

Stephen Rea of TS: “it was politically very important, it’s an important assertion” (Pelletier, “Creating” 57).

​

​

​

​

--