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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853599835 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2007 |
| Series: | Translating Europe , #3 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Voices in Translation
GUNILLA ANDERMAN
Introduction
An enlarged European Union, the rapid growth of electronic communication and the emergence of English as the lingua franca of Europe are now providing Europeans with easy access to the cultural and literary heritage of a multitude of other nations. But while the citizens of Europe are beginning to experience different cultures at first hand, many social and cultural concepts that they are now encountering will remain unknown outside national borders and, as a result, lack lexical designation in other languages. How, for example, does a translator render in another language the information that speakers convey when they engage in a dialogue, the way in which English dialect and sociolect interact to make language a unique indicator of class and education? As Bernard Shaw famously remarked 'it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.' Although different factors may come into play in other languages spoken in other countries, speakers still have a voice of their own for which writers have a finely attuned ear. And when the work of the writer reaches the translator responsible for transferring it into another language, a voice has to be found in the new language that closely resembles that of the original. It is equally difficult for the translator to find appropriate means of expression in another language for what speakers may engage in dialogue about: flora and fauna and cultural customs, as well as the social and political conventions that are little known to anyone outside the country in which they form part of everyday life.
This volume focuses on two problems that face the translator of European fiction: voices speaking across cultural borders, and the means of expression to convey the social and cultural milieu in which the speakers are rooted. In particular, attention is given to the work of Bill Findlay – towhom this collection of essays is dedicated.
Speaking across Cultural Borders
For a playwright aware of the importance of the uniqueness of the voice of each character on stage, recognising the problems facing the translator is but a short step, as evidenced by Ibsen's comments in relation to the translation of The Wild Duck:
[...] consistently every character in the play has their particular, individual way of expressing themselves, through which the degree of their culture and education is manifested. When for example Gina speaks we should hear immediately that she never learnt any grammar and that she was born into a lower, social class. And the same applies to all the other characters. The task of the translator is, in other words, not an easy one. (Ibsen, 1891)
Equally attuned to the different voices of his characters is the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. While attending a performance of Doòa Rosita the Spinster, Lorca's cousin Mercedes Delgado García immediately recognised that the protagonist's speech derived from Asquerosa, Lorca's home town (Gibson, 1989: 406). In Brecht's play about the ravages of the Thirty Year War, Mother Courage and Her Children, the protagonist speaks in a language strongly coloured by her Bavarian dialect. And in his commentary to his translation of The Cherry Orchard by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Michael Frayn points out that each of the characters speaks in their own distinctive voice, revealing their education (or lack thereof), place of birth and social class (Frayn, 1995: xxxix–xi). Failure to capture the difference in the speech of the Chekhov characters through simply translating their language into Standard English has resulted, as famously remarked, in creating the impression that all his Russian peasants live in the vicinity of Sloane Square.
Giving each character a voice of his or her own requires, however, that the translator first has an awareness of where the characters live, their social position and their own, personal idiosyncrasies in the source culture, and also the ability to find the lexical and grammatical means of matching expressions in the target language. Dialect in translation, however, is more frequently than not rendered into the standard variety, often as a result of the way translation used to serve as a means of language teaching and learning. Although the last few decades of Modern Language teaching have embraced the so-called communicative approach, pedagogy has long been influenced by the methodology favoured in the instruction of the classical languages.
Spoken Versus Written Language
In the instruction of Greek and Latin, translation was used as a means of ensuring that new vocabulary had been acquired: often students were worried that too creative an effort would be penalised with a bad mark and would settle for as close to a word-for-word translation as possible. In similar fashion, many translators would also simply replace one word in the foreign language with the equivalent written word in the target language. And with spoken varieties of the classical languages no longer in existence, limited attention was given to difference in genre and the fact that people rarely speak the way they write.
The lack of knowledge about the spoken mode of language was, however, not of crucial importance in the theatre, as the speech of ordinary people was not considered to be appropriate language for use on stage. When, in 1914, Shaw's Pygmalion first opened at His Majesty's Theatre in London with Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Professor Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle, the Daily Express took a Charing Cross flower girl, Eliza Keefe, along to the Haymarket, loftily reporting her reactions to the amusement of its readers: 'Well, I've never 'ad such a night in all me natural ...'. What offended the papers was not the social inequity but the use of bad language on stage, especially 'not bloody likely', spoken in Act 3. Indignantly the Daily Sketch headline pronounced: 'Mrs Patrick Campbell swears on stage and cultured London roars with laughter' (Butler, 2001).
As Bernard Shaw's passion with reforming English society grew, so did his interest in reforming language. In the early 1880s he had met Henry Sweet (1845–1912) whose interest in spoken language resulted in the publication of A Handbook of Phonetics in 1877. Adapted in 1890 as A Primer of Spoken English, it became the first scientifically-based description of educated London speech or Received Pronunciation (RP). In the preface to Pygmalion, which in the character of Professor Higgins contains obvious touches of Sweet, Shaw refers to Sweet's 'satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than phonetics' (Butler, 2001). The study of speech sounds was further advanced by Daniel Jones (1881–1967) who, in 1921, became the first professor of Phonetics at London University. Influential in spreading the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) throughout the world, his efforts provided the mechanism for the use of transcription of speech sounds. By the time of his retirement in 1949 Daniel Jones had created a department with a worldwide reputation.
With the interest in the written mode long pre-dating the study of spoken language, it is hardly surprising that, in the teaching of foreign languages, translation paid scant attention to linguistic variation and that texts were routinely translated into the standard variety of the target language. As a result, in the transfer from source to target language, the specific characteristics of the individual voices disappeared and a new blander text emerged, devoid of the force and colour of the original.
Geographical and Historical Re-location
In the case of a play performed on stage, the linguistic as well as the cultural obstacles encountered in the transfer from one language and culture to another are sometimes most easily overcome by transporting the play, either in time, by placing it in a different historical period, or geographically, by finding a different location. Examples of transposition through geographical and/or historical re-location of modern European drama are numerous. In the Yale Repertory Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard in 2005, the characters wore late-19th century clothes for the first half of the play, then were transposed a century ahead to 2005 fashion, language and music. One of the songs they danced to was the Rolling Stones's 'Start Me Up'. An example of a French play transposed to an English setting is the 1996 National Theatre production of Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse, titled The Prince's Play in a verse translation by Tony Harrison that was set in an English music hall. A similar example of complete acculturation of an Italian play would be British playwright Mike Stott's relocation of Eduardo de Filippo's Natale in casa cupiello (Christmas at the Cupiellos) to Yorkshire under the title Ducking Out. An example from Spanish theatre is provided by the 1993 production of Bohemian Lights, where David Johnston replaced the 1920 Madrid of Valle-Inclán with Dublin in 1915, the year before the Easter rising. The permutations are many and varied; in The Blue Room, David Hare transported Schnitzler's fin de siecle Vienna in Reigen or La Ronde, to the end of the 20th century and changed the original location of the play into an unspecified, global metropolis. In contrast, by transplanting the same play to present-day Belfast, Carlo Gebler's 10 Rounds, at the Tricycle theatre in the autumn of 2002, succeeded in providing the sense that the original had of an entire society being eroded, a feature arguably missing in the Hare/Mendes version at the Donmar, with its anonymous urban location (cf. Anderman, 2005, in particular Chapter 1).
In addition to relocation, there are other options available to make 'foreignness' in translation less of an obstacle for English theatre audiences. There is, in virtually all drama translation, some degree of 'acculturation' applied to the final product (Aaltonen, 1996). This process may not be total, but may simply take the form of neutralisation through toning down what is deemed to be too 'foreign' – a practice extending as far back in history as the Romans. Translated from Greek into Latin, the Roman comedies retained their Greek setting and it was made perfectly clear early on in the play that the characters clad in the Greek mantle lived in a Greek city. The action was usually set in Athens, the city that Roman audiences apparently considered to be more Greek than any other location. According to Plautus, the successful Roman adaptor of Greek comedies into Latin: 'Now writers of comedy have this habit: they always allege that the scene of action is Athens, their object being to give the play a more Grecian air' (Gilula, 1989: 102).
Translation into Scots
Whether re-located or just 'acculturated,' the characters of a foreign play or work of fiction still need to retain their individual voices in order to retain the interest of audiences and readers. And this is how Bill Findlay's work as a translator, often together with Martin Bowman, marks an important step forward in Translation Studies. Findlay finds individual voices for the source-language characters by drawing a distinction between English and Scots-speaking characters and by using different Scots linguistic varieties to reflect more subtle distinctions in their approach and personalities. In his translation for the stage, Bill Findlay lifted the language of the characters from the page and gave them a voice of their own.
Little had been written about drama dialect translation until Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman started to discuss the process from the perspective of their work as translators. Together the two brought the plays by playwright Michel Tremblay into Scotland by translating the joual French dialect of Quebec in which they are written, into Scots. Findlay's own translations include his version of Die Weber (1892) by Gerhart Hauptmann, the 1912 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Consistent with Hauptmann's aim to convey socialist ideas in a naturalist setting was the need for The Weavers to be written in the language actually spoken in the region in which the action took place, and the German original was written in the distinctive dialect of Silesia. The first version of the play, called De Waber, was written in uncompromising dialect, but once the stage première of this version was prohibited, Hauptmann set to work on a new version, now called Die Weber. Although Hauptmann's play about the real-life uprising of Silesian handloom weavers in the 1840s appeared in print in 1892, working conditions had largely remained unchanged, and the appearance of the play aroused a storm. When finally performed in 1893, the play became a literary sensation. If transferred into a Standard English medium, however, Hauptmann's original Silesian is likely to become diluted to the point of failing to make credible the social position and working conditions of his weavers. The problem of capturing the robustness of the original dialect in English translation is compounded by the fact that the events described took place a long time ago, and unless the language of the characters is in keeping with the period, there is the potential danger of anachronism. A further linguistic problem for the translator is Hauptmann's German, which is 'masterly handled'; and his reproduction of everyday speech with its subtlest nuances is 'unsurpassed', including the different mixtures of local dialects, colloquial talk and several layers of High German (Grimm, 1994: xiv). In fact, it has been suggested (Maurer, 1982: 50) that 'even the most talented and experienced translator with a perfect command and knowledge of German (including not only several dialects but, in addition, various sociolects and idiolects too) will never succeed in rendering Hauptmann's naturalistic texts entirely satisfactorily'. Part of Hauptmann's talent lies in his ability to imbue all of his characters with distinct, individual voices. 'Each speaks in his own characteristic language with distinctive dialectical inflections, idiomatic peculiarities, syntax, speech rhythm and melody and even gestures' (Maurer, 1982: 50). Hauptmann's plays have been described as not dependent 'primarily on subject matter theme or even location: the stuff of his drama is language' (Skrine, 1989: 19).
As pointed out by Findlay (1998), the particular feature whereby all but the most peripheral of Hauptmann's characters generate and communicate their personalities and shifting social relationships through linguistic variation is a feature also found in Scottish writing. In a position to draw on a varied linguistic resource embracing Standard English, Scottish Standard English and Scots dialect, Scottish writers are able to style-shift between these different linguistic varieties as they see fit. As a result, the numerous linguistic options made use of by Hauptmann can find their match in Scots dialect, offering a number of flexible choices; it can be urban or rural, regional or standardised, historical or contemporary.
In a play such as The Weavers on the theme of worker/management conflict, clear linguistic signals are obviously needed to highlight differences in occupation and/or class. To this end, Findlay made the decision to draw a basic distinction between Scots and English-speaking characters. He then took the process a step further, using a stiff variety of Standard English to help reinforce an attitude of inflexibility in some characters and their concern to uphold the status quo as reflected in their reactions to the weavers' action. Unmoved by their plight, Pastor Kittelhaus shows little understanding or sympathy, which in turn is reflected in his use of a pompously correct and sanctimonious English:
PASTOR KITTELHAUS: When a man has delivered sermons from the pulpit fifty-two Sundays a year for some thirty years – and that's not counting the Holy Days in the calender – of necessity he acquires a sense of proportion. (Findlay, 1998: 97)
(Continues…)
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