From Comparative Literature to Translation Studies
Source: Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993.
Lily
Thesis Statement: 一篇「翻譯」被虧待的紀錄和重振雄風的歷史
(兼論翻譯與CL和後殖民文學的糾葛)
I. The relationship between CL and Translation study has been a complex and problematic one. In recent years, CL↓ but Translation study↑.
A. Traditionally, Translation has tended to be regarded as an activity involving little talent and creativity, as something that could be carried out by trained hacks and financially rewarded accordingly.
B. From the 17th century onwards, the situation of T went down; to 19th century, the status of a translation was generally considered to be lower than that of original.
C. Studies of CL tend to assert the primacy of reading in original.
1. Binary comparative studies stood firmly against the idea of translation. A good comparatist, according to the binary model, would read original texts in the original languages.
2. North American model, based on notions of universal values in literary texts, ignored the question of T altogether. (T→not useful object)
3. Translation’s low status marginalized: in editorial practice → juvenilia category; poor remuneration; in the ranking less than critical works when determining criteria for promotion.
II. Translation Studies has been gaining ground↑since 1970s and has come to be seen as a discipline in its own right, especially with professional associations, journals, publisher’s catalogues and a proliferation of doctoral theses.
A. The voice in history redressing a miscarriage of justice
1. Hilaire Belloc’s view in his 1931 Taylorian Lecture: “The art of Translation is a subsidiary art and derivative. T has never been granted the dignity of original work….This natural underestimation of its value has had the bad practical effect of lowering the standard demanded. The corresponding misunderstanding of its character has added to its degradation: neither its importance nor its difficulty has been grasped.”
2. Evan-Zohar from Tel Aviv in his ‘Translation Theory Today’: The article[1] summarized the prevailing views on translation and they still emphasized the original and viewed the translation with negative terminology such as ‘betray’, ‘traduces’, ‘diminishes’,…parts of the original. He exposed the prevalence of a curiously schizophrenic position of the literary world with regard to translation when in this age Borges has suggested that the concept of the definitive text belongs only to religion or fatigue and post-structuralist critics have shown the fallacy of believing in a single, definitive reading. (139-140)
3. Lori Chamberlain (a feminist translation scholar): She draws attention to the sexualization of this terminology ‘betrayal’ of the original. She stressed the cultural complicity between fidelity in translation and in marriage. “…Translations should be either beautiful or faithful (as women)…by the fact that the word ‘traduction’ is a feminine one….This tag owes its longevity; it was coined in the seventeenth century; what gives it the appearance of truth is that it has captured a cultural complicity between the issues of fidelity in translation and in marriage.” A substantial number of feminist translation scholars such as the author, Barbara Johnson, Sherry Simon, Suzanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood began to rethink the view of translation that sets the original in a higher position that text created for a new target audience; they all began using metaphors of ‘infidelity’ or alternative marriage contract in their writings on translation in the 1980s.
III. Instead of reading for ‘truth’, we now read as decoders.
A. The author: The challenge to the original like the challenge to the cannon or to the notion of correct, single reading is clearly part of a wide-ranging post-modernist strategy.
B. Barbara Johnson: the whole activity of reading and rereading reveals ever more gaps and uncertainties.
IV.A great shift of translation---Evan-Zohar (and Gideon Toury’s) great contribution
A. The first one to mount an offensive against the dominance opinions.
B. He noted although translation appeared to have played a major role in the development of national cultures, this fact was almost ignored by historians of culture. (no research on the function of translated literature within a literary system) Ex. The Renaissance= a time of intensive translation activity, but no systematic assessment had taken place.
C. He developed polysystemic approach to translation: All kinds of questions now can be asked.(142) such as …Why do some cultures translate more and some les? What is the status of those texts in the target system and how does it compare to the status of the texts in the source system? How do we assess translation as an innovatory force? These questions testify the great shift in perception about Translation: marginal activity→ primary shaping force within literary history.
V. Three major conditions determine high T activity in culture by Zohar
A. when a literature is in an early stage of development.
1. Ex. Maria Tymoczko argues that translation played a central role in the great 12th century shift from epic to romance; elements of romance can be traced in antecedent translations, and that romance emerged from a multicultural context.
B. when a literature perceives itself to be peripheral or ‘weak’ or both.
1. Ex. Contemporary figure on translated texts compiled from publishers lists: The percentage of published translations into English (1984~1990: 3.5% for American and steady decline) contrasts with that into Italian (1980s: 26% to 70% from English).
C. when there are turning point or crises of literary vacuums.
VI.Vladimir Macura (from Czech)’s aggressiveness about translation
A. When an emergent national literature seeks to extend its range of models through the means of translation. (with intension and symbolic sense)
B. Definition: “Translation was an active, even aggressive act, an appropriation of foreign cultural values… as an invasion undertaken with the intent of capturing rich spoil of war….as a literal act of revenge for the damages.”(144)
C. Macura reinterprets the case of Jung-mann’s translation of Paradise Lost, as a newly emergent literary system a text that represented an amalgam of different culture (Jewish, pagan) united in an epic of human culture consciously and therefore as a means of stressing the universality of pan-Slavic origins.(144)
VII. Jose Lamber and Rik van Gorp’s contribution
A. They endeavoured to record the vocabulary, style, poetical and rhetorical conventions of both source and target systems; analyzing how a translation is termed (‘adaptation’, ‘imitation’, or even an ‘original.’)
B. They mapped the history of translation theory and criticism in particular literatures; tracing the role of T in the development.
C. The main scheme is that it enables us to bypass a number of deep-rooted traditional ideas concerning translational ‘fidelity’ and even ‘quality’ which are mainly source-oriented and normative.
D. Their book The Manipulation of Literature marked another stage: for the focus of the book was on the idea of translation not only as a shaping force in literature but also as a primary manipulative textual strategy.
VIII. Three phases of development of theory of translation studies
A. The First phase
1. Heavily influenced by polysystems theory (direct challenges to the established discourse on translation.)
2. Decontextualized work in linguistics
3. Equivalence of translation and original.
4. “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” By Sapir Whorf.
B. The second phase
1. 19th century, T is still a slave and servant of source text.
2. TS (translation study) mapping, tracing patterns of translation activity.
3. The source system predominantly on the target system.
4. Moving away from the structuralist origins of polysystems theory (146)
5. A step on the road towards post-structuralist translation studies
6. Clusters of metaphors and figurative language used by translators reflect their thinking abut the role and status of translation in their own time.
7. T as slave is a powerful metaphor that endures well into the 19th century. (Foucault points likewise to immense changes in language: ‘In the sixteenth century, one asked oneself how it was possible to know that a sign did in fact designate what it signified; from the 17th century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified.’(147)
8.
C. The third phase
1. = the post-structuralist stage. TS became a discipline with methodology
2. No study of comparative literature can take place without regard to translation. ( T became a major shaping force in the development of world culture.)
3. By the ‘manipulation school’ in the mid-eighties, work in the field of translation studies as a whole had diversified enormously. (norm disappears.)
4. Translation as one of a range of processes of textual manipulation, where the concept of plurality replaces dogmas of faith fullness to a source text.
(原作此概念被各種角度和觀點批判) (147-8)
5. Ideology was introduced into TS by polysystems theory.
6. Andre Lefevere argues that translation should be studied alongside what he called ‘rewritings’.
a. “Rewriting (being it in the form of criticism or of translation), turns out to be a very important strategy which guardians of a literature use to adapt what is ‘foreign’ (in time, geographical location) to the norms of the receiving culture; and rewriting is evidence of reception. (148)”
b. Translation needs to be seen as an important literary strategy and the examination of translations within a framework of rewriting will reveal patterns of change in reception in a given literary system.
(此研究加重了rewriting study在文學理論或CL的重要性)
7. Dryden: ‘possession’ and ‘accuracy’
a. A translator “ought to possess himself entirely and perfectly comprehend the genius and sense of his author, the nature of the subject and the art of subject treated of,” then they can create something as much life as an original. This implicated that an original translation wouldn’t ‘copy’ word for word.
b. A different dimension of T activity: ‘accuracy’ is also a necessary instrument. The bilingual dictionaries, grammar books and text books for language learning based on word for word transfer between languages.
IX. In the practical world of 17th century
A. Increasing need for translation.
1.
2. Huge amount were translations.
The mergence of a new market of readers
3.
B. To meet the demands of market place, translations often made at speed and by people with minimal competence.
C. The confusion caused because the high quality translation (classical texts or pedagogic ones) and translation as hack work for the mass shared the same terminology about T.
D. So that is why translation triggers differing sets of responses, related to different sets o f assumptions and expectation. →pedagogic role have acquired the greatest power. →accuracy as something that can be measured is all-important. (150)
X. The disappearing of the negative terminology of translation
A. Ezra Pound comments on the fallacy above. (150)
1. His concept of translation is target focused.
2. His task is finding a readership for a dead poet.
B. Walter Benjamin: in his famous introduction of Baudelaire’s Tableux Parisiens (1923)
1. He also uses the metaphor of the translation as afterlife.
2. Translation takes the life-enhancing role: “since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life” (151)（T有回魂術功能）
3. His essay was also rediscovered by translation theorist in the 1980s → becoming the most significant texts of post-modern translation.
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