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    Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida
    Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida
    Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida
    Ebook367 pages7 hours

    Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida

    By John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte

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    About this ebook

    Spanning the centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth, and ranging across cultures, from England to Mexico, this collection gathers together important statements on the function and feasibility of literary translation. The essays provide an overview of the historical evolution in thinking about translation and offer strong individual opinions by prominent contemporary theorists.

    Most of the twenty-one pieces appear in translation, some here in English for the first time and many difficult to find elsewhere. Selections include writings by Scheiermacher, Nietzsche, Ortega, Benjamin, Pound, Jakobson, Paz, Riffaterre, Derrida, and others.

    A fine companion to The Craft of Translation, this volume will be a valuable resource for all those who translate, those who teach translation theory and practice, and those interested in questions of language philosophy and literary theory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateDec 12, 2017
    ISBN9780226184821
    Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida

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      Theories of Translation - John Biguenet

      world.

      ONE

      HUGO FRIEDRICH

      On the Art of Translation

      Translated by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet*

      In a rather disturbing way, literary translations continue to be threatened by the boundaries that exist between languages. Thus, the art of translation will always have to cope with the reality of untranslatability from one language to another. Actually, one could say that, in a poetic sense, the art of translation is affected by language boundaries in proportion to the shades of subtlety of the original and the demands translators place on themselves. Naturally, translators want to do justice to their own art by accommodating the literary demands on language of the original text. Translators find themselves constantly restricted by those language boundaries and by the pressing necessity to remain, as closely as possible, faithful to the original text.

      Even though the scope of my subject is rather limited, I would like to outline the larger framework within which questions concerning the art of translation should be discussed: Is translation something that concerns the cultural interaction of an entire nation with another? Is translation just the reaction of one writer to another? Does translation resurrect and revitalize a forgotten work, or does it just keep a work alive to satisfy tradition? Does translation distort the foreign in an old work under the pressure of specific contemporary aesthetic views? Do translators pay close attention to the differences inherent in languages or do they ignore them? Does the translation create levels of meaning that were not necessarily visible in the original text so that the translated text reaches a higher level of aesthetic existence? What is the relationship between translation and interpretation: when do the two meet and when does translation follow its own laws? These are some of the questions that fall within the larger context of literary translation.

      In Europe, literary translation has been known since the age of the Romans; translation shows how the literature and philosophy of the Romans gained strength from their Greek models. Ennius’ attempts to transplant Greek texts into Latin were at that time still acts of submission that caused awkward lexical Graecisms to enter into the translations. Later, however, translation from the Greek came to mean something else for the Romans: The appropriation of the original without any real concern for the stylistic and linguistic idiosyncracies of the original; translation meant transformation in order to mold the foreign into the linguistic structures of one’s own culture. Latin was not violated in any form, not even when the original text violated the structure of its own language by deviating from normally accepted conventions through the invention of neologisms, new word associations, and unusual stylistic and syntactical creations. The theoretical underpinning of this attitude can be found in the writings of Cicero, who, with respect to his own translation of Demosthenes, wrote:

      I translate the ideas, their forms, or as one might say, their shapes; however, I translate them into a language that is in tune with our conventions of usage (verbis ad nostram consuetudinem aptis). Therefore, I did not have to make a word-for-word translation but rather a translation that reflects the general stylistic features (genus) and the meaning (vis) of the foreign words." [De optimo genere oratorum]

      During the early Christian period, Saint Jerome adopted these sentences almost verbatim. On the occasion of his Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint, he formulated his views on the art of translation in a treatise (in the form of a letter addressed to Pammachius) entitled De optimo genere interpretandi. Once again it is the target language, Latin, that dictates the rules. It reproduces the peculiar features of a foreign language with those features of one’s own language (proprietates alterius linguae suis proprietatibus explicaret). A few lines later, we find the following statement by Saint Jerome, which sounds even in his words like a declaration of power by a Roman emperor: "The translator considers thought content a prisoner (quasi captivos sensus) which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror (iure victoris)." This is one of the most rigorous manifestations of Latin cultural and linguistic imperialism, which despises the foreign word as something alien but appropriates the foreign meaning in order to dominate it through the translator’s own

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