University of Oregon

The Metonymics of Translating Marginalized Texts

Author(s): Maria Tymoczko
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 47, No. 1, On Translation (Winter, 1995), pp. 11-24
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1771360
Accessed: 21-07-2019 00:29 UTC

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MARIA TYMOCZKO

The Metonymics of
Translating
Marginalized Texts
T IS A CURIOUS FACT of contemporary literary studies that
very different branches of literary theory have converged on
the same insight: every telling is a retelling. In studies of folklore
and oral epic it is agreed that the content, form, and performance
patterns of any given song or tale all belong to established tradi-
tions that the teller or singer inherits and in turn passes on to suc-
ceeding tellers or singers. Albert Lord, following Milman Parry,
the framer of the theory of oral composition of epics such as the
Iliad, Beowulf, and La Chanson de Roland, has summarized suc-
cinctly, "the picture that emerges is not really one of conflict be-
tween preserver of tradition and creative artist; it is rather one of
the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it. The
ideal is a true story well and truly retold" (Lord 29, cf. 99 ff.). Every
creation is a re-creation.

Folk tellers themselves acknowledge their own indebtedn

the tellers who have gone before them, as we see in the st
some of the most famous twentieth-century Irish storytelle
Sayers ends one of her tales, "That's my story, and if there's
it, let there be. 'Tis long ago I heard it from my father. He
world of stories" (Sean O Suiilleabhaiin, Folktales 204). Simila
ter telling a version of the Deirdre story, Eamonn a Bu
cludes, "That's the way I heard that story being told by m
father, William Burke of Aird Mh6r" (O Suiilleabhaiin, Folkl
And again from Eamonn a Buirc, "That's a true story, th
heard it! If 'tis a lie, it wasn't I made it up" (Folklore 119).
Deconstruction, as well as its critical progenitors, has also
at pains to point out that writers do not simply create
texts: to a great extent any literary text is dependent on l
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

texts that have gone before and, moreover, literature

about literature as about life. There are not only text
but a fabric of intertextuality that links texts to o
works, both textual predecessors and contemporari
work like a translation depends on previous texts:
"original semantic unity," both are "derivative and
neous."' Every writing is a rewriting.
Polysystems theorists, notably Andre Lefevere, h
that translation is a form of rewriting. Though tr
"probably the most radical form of rewriting in a lit
culture" (Lefevere, "Why Waste our Time" 241), th
grouped with other modes of processing primary tex
film versions, children's versions, criticism, literary
thologies, and the like, all of which shape the evoluti
ture and culture.2 Texts do not exist simply in their p
rather texts are "surrounded by a great number of
texts" (Lefevere, "Literary Theory" 13; cf. "Mother C
cumbers" 4-8, 16-19). Processed for various audienc
to a particular poetics or ideology, refracted texts ar
in large measure for defining, maintaining, and re
canon. Translation is one form of refraction, a form o
is rewriting.
This discourse of retelling and rewriting is a partic
framework for the discussion of the translation of a noncanonical

or marginalized literature. Since there are many types of non-c

nonical or marginalized literatures, I should explain that he
am talking about translating literature that is marginalized
cause it is the literature of a marginalized culture; the intent is
consider texts that have been excluded or omitted from the

canon-or, more properly speaking, canons-of world li

as defined by a Western perspective. There are often, in
ally, massive obstacles facing translators who wish to
texts of a marginalized culture to a dominant-culture
issues related to the interpretation of material and social
(including law, economics, and so forth), history, valu
world view; serious problems with the transference of lite
tures such as genre, form, performance conventions, and

1 See Lawrence Venuti 7-8, 68-69, 161, and sources cited.

2 See Lefevere's discussions in "Why Waste our Time" 232-41; "Literar
12-20; Translation, Rewriting, chs. 9-12. In "Why Waste our Time" (234
that translation is generally also accompanied by other sorts of rewriti
"by an introduction, which is a form of criticism cum interpretation."

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 MARGINALIZED TEXTS

allusions; as well as the inevitable questions of linguistic

For all these reasons the information load of translations of such

marginalized texts is often very high-in fact it is at risk of b

intolerably high. Because neither the content nor the intertex
framework of such texts is familiar to the receiving audience,
reception problems posed by marginalized texts in translation
acute. Another way of putting this point is to say that wh
marginalized text is a retelling or rewriting for its original au
ence, it is neither for the target audience. The translator is in
paradoxical position of "telling a new story" to the receptor au
ence, even as the translator refracts and rewrites a source text-
and the more remote the source culture and literature, the more
radically new the story will be for the receiving audience. Early
Irish literature is an example of such a marginalized literature,
and translators moving Irish literary works to another culture have
frequently been in the position of "telling a new story."
It has become a commonplace these days to say that literary lan-
guage is defamiliarized language-but it is also generally agreed
that if language becomes too strange or too defamiliarized, it can-
not be comprehended. The information load becomes too heavy
for comprehension, and, in the case of translations, the receiving
audience cannot understand the translated text.3 It is also the case

that human beings are not very good at hearing new stories:
have the tendency to reinterpret them, to reshape them so t
they become versions of stories we already know, as Laura
Bohannan has epitomized with her now classic article about tell-
ing the story of Hamlet in West Africa. Having chosen Hamlet to tell
because she felt the story was "universal," Bohannan discovered in
the course of narration numerous fundamental incompatibilities
between the tale and the expectations of her audience. As any au-
dience will in a traditional oral culture, her listeners soon inter-
vened, "corrected" her narration, and adapted the tale to their
own context with the result that they were satisfied to have heard a
good story, only to leave Bohannan doubtful that it was "the same
story" after all.4 In general, cognitive science suggests that we tend
to assimilate new and unfamiliar information to patterns that are
already recognized and that have already become familiar, and
there is some evidence from studies of the brain that there is a

3 Using a coder-decoder model, Eugene Nida (120-40) discusses the proble

translating the heavy information load of an unfamiliar text or text type fo
ceptor audience.
4 See also Maria Tymoczko, "Translation."

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

biological basis to this tendency.'

The power of this discourse about rewritings and re
framework for the discussion of translations is il
some observations about the characteristics of the rew
retellings that are most familiar to literary scholars a
audiences alike: mythic retellings.6 Every telling i
there are no stories for which this is more true than
which there are no "originals." Myths descend from t
time: this is what it means to be a traditional story. A
suppose that there was a single moment of creation f
cific myth (which most theorists of oral tradition w
the case), behind that moment of creation lies a vast
chetypal patterns which the myth reworks and reanim
John Foley (192 ff.) has argued that when a traditio
is told, the telling is metonymic. For a traditional
telling evokes metonymically all previous tellings of
the audience has participated in and, further, the tel
ates and reifies metonymically the entire tradition th
ence and teller share. The traditional audience hearing Avdo
Mededovid sing a song about Marko Kraljevid in Yugoslavia had
evoked for them all other occasions of Avdo singing the same
song, but also all other singers' versions of the same epic, and be-
yond that all of Marko's various adventures, and the Serbo-
Croatian epic tradition as a whole with all its many epic tales, as
well as the relation of that epic tradition to the culture and the
history of the community.8 At the same time, the form of the epic
was also metonymic of the formulas, the meter, the genre, and the
methods of oral composition in Serbo-Croatian tradition. In
France an oral rendering of "La Belle et la Bate" not only called up
all previous renditions of this tale, but all versions of tale type AT

5 See, for example, Partha Mitter's discussion in 8-14, as well as sources cited.
The tendency to assimilate the unfamiliar to the familiar is a principal factor be-
hind the phenomenon of the simplification of complex and innovatory literary
models discussed by Itamar Even-Zohar (21-22). Edward Said observes, "It is per-
fectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strange-
ness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transforma-
tions on other cultures" (67); grids and codes are imposed "upon raw reality,
changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge" (67).
6 I am using myth in the broadest sense of "a traditional tale."

7 See, for example, Joseph Campbell's study of the archetypal patterns behind
hero tales, as well as Erich Neumann's treatment of archetypes related to narra-
tives about female figures.
8 On these issues see Lord chapter 5 and passim.

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 MARGINALIZED TEXTS

425C (or even AT 425, the entire animal groom cycle),

the traditional lore of France.9 Moreover, its form was m
of the various narrative conventions of wondertales in France,
from the opening and closing signals of the genre to the medieval
ambience of the settings. The Irish audience hearing the story of
Finn trapped in the bruiden (hostel, large banqueting-hall, house,
fairy-palace) in which Conan adheres by his posterior to a bench
has evoked metonymically all previous versions of the same tale, as
well as the genre of bruiden tales as a whole, the entire corpus of
Fenian lore, and Irish traditional literature in general. At the same
time other aspects of the oral tradition in Ireland-such as the
narrative form (including the "runs" of Irish wondertale tradi-
tion), the relationship of the Fenian ballad tradition to the narra-
tive tradition, and the hierarchical prestige of various sorts of tales
with Fenian tales at the summit-are also evoked.'0

Foley's argument can be extended to the case of written

retellings of myth, the most familiar examples of which in Western
tradition are reworkings of classical and biblical myths, though
rewritings of the Arthurian legend and the stories of Don Juan or
Faust could also be used to illustrate the same principles. The
rewritings of classical myths have been a staple of Western litera-
ture, from the Old French Eneas and the Middle English Sir Orfeo,
through Shakespeare's Troilus and Racine's Phedre, to Joyce's
Ulysses, Anouilh's Antigone, and Camus's Mythe de Sisyphe. Any
single version of these myths calls up in a reader all other versions
of the same story: Joyce's Ulysses evokes in the reader not only the
Odyssey but Dante's Ulysses and Tennyson's Ulysses and even
Charles Lamb's version for children entitled The Adventures of
Ulysses. Indeed Ulysses is a perfect example of the metonymic as-
pect of literary rewritings of myths, for in order to understand it,
the reader must already know other versions of the same myth or
come away with a very strange conception of Odysseus indeed and
have absolutely no clue about the classical architectonics of
Joyce's work. Such rewritings stand metonymically also for the tra-
dition of Western written literature all the way back to the Greeks,
as well as the earlier oral Indo-European heritage. It is a paradox
that one must already know a myth in order to recognize a mythic
tale and to apprehend the import of any particular version of the
myth, yet the myth itself does not exist apart from specific ver-
9 Bruno Bettelheim (277-310) discusses the animal groom cycle.
10 James Delargy discusses these and other aspects of Irish oral tradition. A ver-
sion of the tale is included in Jeremiah Curtin 148-56.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

sions.

The metonymic aspect of literary rewritings and retellings is

important aspect in cultural continuity. It permits the adaptatio
of traditional content and form to new circumstances, allowi
change while still maintaining the predominant sense of preserv
tion of larger elements of tradition. It enables traditional aud
ences to correct (and forgive) the mistakes or omissions of tradi
tional tellers, to take enjoyment in tales told in an abbreviated o
cryptic manner, to fill gaps in narrative textures, to understand
literary allusion. It enables young tellers to learn from others, a
correct or improve upon their teachers' versions, and go on to b
come even greater masters themselves. Performance theorists ar
coming to understand how allusions-including references to t
sites of traditional tales-are metonymic tellings of the tales them
selves (Richard Baumann and Charles Briggs 75; cf. Earl Miner 94
151-54).
Literary artists use the metonymic aspect of mythic retelling in
powerful-though different-ways as well. Authors commonly use
a "baseline" version of the myth as an implicit standard of co
parison, against which the audience measures the author's ow
vision. When the twelfth-century author of the Eneas foreground
Aeneas as lover, rather than as the heroic and dedicated (Dido
might even have said monomaniacal) founder of Rome, he is
speaking to his contemporaries about the relative importance of
love and war in a man's life, using the Aeneid as the implicit stan-
dard for his own work. And for that message to make its full impact
on the audience, they must have as a baseline the canonical ver-
sion of the myth. When Giraudoux wrote La Guerre de Troie n'aura
pas lieu, he counted on the fact that the audience knew that the
Trojan War would take place, that they were familiar with the Iliad,
if only through refractions. Though the metonymic aspect of
mythic rewritings is particularly clear because the content of the
texts represents larger wholes (whole families of texts), all litera-
ture works this way and the metonymic aspects of texts are not re-
stricted to content. Aspects of poetics, specifically literary form,
are also metonymic. Thus, for example, any single English sonnet
evokes all the sonnets of Shakespeare and Petrarch, as well as the
entire tradition of sonnet writing. This is so because any writing is
a rewriting.
The special group of rewriters called translators grapples with
the metonymic aspects of literature all the time. In translations of
works from literary systems that are related to the receptor literary
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 MARGINALIZED TEXTS

system-for example, literary systems that with the rece

guage system form a megasystem, such as French and En
erature do-most of the metonymic aspects of the source
transparent to the target audience. Modern English-sp
diences understand fairly well the generic signals of nin
century Russian novels such as Anna Karenina; the plo
character types are familiar, even though certain aspe
culture such as elements of the law or the use of nicknames or the

symbolic significance of samovars may not be. Thus, such works i

translation are able to be integrated into canons of world liter
ture-or at least canons defined within the framework of domi-

nant cultures-with relative ease. But what happens when the

onymic aspects of the story are opaque rather than transpar
the receptor audience? How is a translator to translate a
whose characters, plot, genre, and literary allusions, just to
few parameters of the literary system, are unfamiliar and "u
able" by the intended receptor audience?
The way in which a literary text metonymically represent
tures of its literary system and ultimately features of its who
ture is what makes translating a text of a marginalized cultu
difficult. A translator assumes a large responsibility in under
to produce a text that will become representative of the
literature and, indeed, of the entire source culture for the r
tor audience. As Norman Simms has shown, the politics o
representations are not to be underestimated, and it is the c
of the image of the source culture and the source culture lit
tradition that has made the translation of certain Asian texts so

controversial and "touchy" in the twentieth century. But bey

the question of politics, it is in large measure the lack of famil
with the metonymic aspects of the literary texts of margina
cultures that makes it difficult for the audiences of dominant cul-

tures to integrate marginalized texts into their canons, irrespec

tive of any linguistic barrier. What happens when the audien
doesn't understand the metonomies-when the audience doesn't

understand the literary signals, the form, the genre, the s

What happens, in short, when a translator has to tell a new s
Leaving aside wider cultural questions for the moment, in
like this the amount of literary information to be conveyed
receiving audience is excessive; the translator must eithe
some decisive choices about which aspects to translate-that
a partial translation of the literary information in the
seek a format that allows dense information transfer throug
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

riety of commentaries on the translation. This is why in

lations of unfamiliar texts are so often either popular or
the former are usually severely limited in their transfer
minimally representative of the metonymic aspects of th
while the latter allow a good deal of metatranslation
presenting quantities of information through vehicles s
troductions, footnotes, appendices, parallel texts, and so
a scholarly translation the text is embedded in a shell of
paratextual devices that serve to explain the metonymies of the
source text, providing a set of contexts for the translation. In the
case of a popular translation, by contrast, the translator typically
focuses on a few aspects of the literary text which are brought to a
broad segment of the target audience.
Thus, on the one hand, in his ground-breaking versions of early
Irish narratives published in 1878-80, Standish O'Grady sought to
convey the plots, the characters, and the general historicized tex-
ture of the Irish stories to his Anglo-Irish audience. O'Grady sacri-
ficed the genres, the character types, the linguistic texture, and
even the names found in his source texts; but his works were acces-
sible to any competent reader of English, and they became widely
known, popular, and influential, leading to a demand for more
translations and refractions about Ireland's gods and heroes like
Cui Chulainn. Later translations in turn evoked more adequately
the metonymic relationship of the texts to other features of the
Irish linguistic and literary systems for people who were already
familiar with the content of the tales. Ernst Windisch, on the other
hand, in his 1905 German translation of Tdiin Bd Cuiailnge was able
to present such features as genre and character type and even the
peculiar character of the Irish heroic tradition; but his translation
is a scholarly one, accompanied by an edition of the text as well as
by enormous commentary and footnotes providing masses of con-
textual and intertextual information. Windisch's work was clearly
aimed at a very narrow scholarly population within the target audi-
ence.

Not all the information serving metonym

from an unfamiliar literature or culture can be realized in transla-
tion: the information load is too great, as I have already said, an
the information is coded in textual features that make inconsis-
tent and irreconcilable demands on the translator." Schola
' There is an analogue on the linguistic level. Because of incongruitie
obligatory aspects of language, translation inevitably involves linguistic l
gain, and it is not possible to capture every linguistic feature of the sourc

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 MARGINALIZED TEXTS

translations with their metatranslation devices are abl

more information to the reader, but all translators
scholarly ones, select specific aspects of the metonym
ship between text and literary system or text and cultu
and to privilege. They ask, implicitly or explicitly,
wholes the translation text will point to, stand for, be
Will the translation text, for example, be metonymic
guage of the source culture, of a generic convention in
culture, of the value structure of the source culture, or of other
cultural patterns conveyed by and through literature? A translator
who foregrounds the translation as a window into a new language,
importing or transferring lexis, syntax, and the like into the recep-
tor language, is choosing to have the translation be metonymic
primarily of the source language as a whole (as any text is in part)
and will downplay other metonymic aspects-such as those of
genre-so as to make the information load manageable.'2 Another
translator, who is interested in poetics, may privilege the generic
codes of the source text, preserving these metonymies, while on a
linguistic level playing fast and loose with the text so as to adapt
the text thoroughly to the linguistic norms of the receptor lan-
guage; Pound's translations of Chinese texts might be described
this way. The choice of which metonymies to preserve has much to
do with the translator's purpose, and the translator who wishes to
challenge elements of the privileged center of the target system of
poetics, will probably privilege metonymies of genre or poetics
over those of content or language, while a translator who wishes to
challenge the value structure, say, of the receptor audience will
make different choices.13

either in its paradigmatic or its syntagmatic levels. See, for example, J.C. Catford
on these points.

12 We should note the importance of translations for the linguistic expansion of

any language, but particularly of minority languages; such privileging of language
per se is, therefore, not to be dismissed as a useless, foolish, or trivial strategy.
Latin translations of Greek works served this function as Cicero notes explicitly
(see the discussion in Susan Bassnett and Lefevere 23-24); cf. also the arguments
of Els Oksaar and of Norman Denison.
A similar translation strategy is often also chosen by philological translators
use translations as a sort of extended linguistic commentary.
13 Lefevere, Translation 41, argues that the image cast by a translation is a fu
tion of the ideology and the poetics of the receptor culture. This is to sketch
situation in broad strokes; the issue is rather more complex.
Jifi Levy discusses the multiplicity of choices initially open to a translator,
the ways in which any single value will dictate a path of translation with a conc
tant narrowing of options thereafter. Cf. Dinda Gorl6e, ch. 4, who applies g

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

But this is not the end of the question of metonymy in

lation of marginalized texts. The human tendency to
the unknown to the closest known pattern must also be
with. Even as metonymic aspects of the source text ar
away in the translation process, the translation of the ma
text gets assimilated to existing metonymies in the rece
tem. The translator consciously or unconsciously picks o
tonymies to evoke than those of the marginalized text, sp
the metonymies of the receptor-language literary system
guage. This is what happens when a translator looks for a
cally equivalent" meter, for example. Or the plot of the s
may be altered so as to facilitate assimilation between th
the translation and plots in the target culture; one early
tion of The Dream of the Red Chamber, for example, assimila
love story. Or again there may be a generic shift such as
that occurs when the branches of the Welsh Mabinogi ar
lated to the genre of romance, or when the earliest Irish
the Deirdre tale is interpreted as a love story (cf. Tymoc
mal Imagery"). Or the vocabulary of the translated text
passages in the literature of the target language and s
intertextual resonances. Thus the marginalized text ge
lated to existing structures in the receptor literary syste
sentially presented as a "rewriting" of elements of the re
erary system, even as it brings with it some aspects tha
the receiving system and that remain eccentric.
In a rationale for a descriptive study of translation
Toury has suggested that the investigator needs to loo
norms governing the translations being described. In the
translator's initial norms Toury makes the distinction between ad-
equate translations, which tend "to adhere to the norms of the
original work," the source text, and acceptable translations, which
adhere "to the linguistic and literary norms of the target system";
Toury views these strategies as polar opposites, though he ac-
knowledges that in practice there will generally be some combina-
tion of or compromise between the two extremes (55). Once this
initial norm is selected, Toury posits that the translator picks opera-
theory to translation; the strategy or heuristic with which the game is approached
(as well as Levy's idea of an initial choice which determines others thereafter) can
be compared to the choice of metonymies I have discussed here. One aspect that
Levy and Gorlee underestimate, however, is the extent to which choices made,
heuristics adopted, or metonymies privileged are shaped by the ideology and po-
etics of the context of the translation. Constraints in the interpretive process are
notjust internal, linguistic, or expedient, but also public, cultural, and political.

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 MARGINALIZED TEXTS

tional norms which govern the specific choices of his wo

this all sounds good in the abstract and in fact often off
tools for thinking about translation as a process, when w
actual translations, particularly translations of texts from
marginalized cultures, the situation turns out to be much more
messy: a translation may be radically oriented to the source text in
some respects (hence in Toury's terms the translation is adequate),
but depart radically from the source text in other respects so as to
assimilate it to a norm of the receiving culture (hence the transla-
tion is acceptable in Toury's scheme).
The same sort of ambiguity is found in the translations of
marginalized texts when we try to apply the other sorts of polari-
ties that are commonly put forward to categorize translations: po-
larities such as literal and free, or dynamic equivalence and formal
equivalence.14 Again, with respect to these typologies, translations
seem to have self-contradictory elements in their specific transla-
tion strategies: a text that is "formally equivalent" in language will,
for example, by virtue of the translation process lose the humor of
the text and fail to convey the formal qualities of the humorous
genre being translated, as occurs in the Jones and Jones transla-
tion of the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen. Cecile O'Rahilly's trans-
lations of the Irish Tdin B6 Cuailnge are painfully literal in their
transfer of the syntax of the early Irish texts, but she chooses eu-
phemisms for the lexis (these tone down the humor of the text,
hence shifting the genre, and elide the content, including sexual-
ity and the grotesque) and she homogenizes the register as well.
What are we to do with this seeming breakdown of theory?
In translation studies one sometimes despairs of being a
Wittgensteinian fly trapped in a fly bottle, waiting for the right
philosopher to point the way out. In darker moments one suspects
that the vessel is in fact a Klein bottle. The ways in which me-
tonymy operates in retellings and refractions can be extended to
translation and help to explain the seeming inconsistencies that
appear in translation strategies. In an attempt to avoid informa-
tion overload while at the same time honoring the fact that a
marginalized text does represent its culture and literary tradition,
the translator makes significant compromises, orienting the target

14 On the latter see Nida 159-78.

There are also other polarities used to describe translation types and translation
strategies. For example, Richard Jacquemond (151-55) discusses a dialectic in
translations between what he calls naturalization and exoticization, orientations
not unrelated to the points made here.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

text in two directions. It is the selection of metonymi

and to relinquish, to assimilate and to resist, that pri
acterizes the initial translation norms of marginalize
than the standard polarities that are usually discussed
tion theory. These decisions about the metonymics of
text in turn determine the operational norms. To use
nology of James Holmes (73-81), the question of met
tures the map determining the specific transfer r
source text and target text. The map is typically high
ized rather than a simplistic either/or, thus often re
translation that does not neatly fit any of the conve
mies that figure so often in discussions of translation
understanding of the metonmyics of translated texts
sible to grade more finely the sorts of larger and rela
able classifications of translation strategies that are g
posed in the literature of Translation Studies. At t
awareness of the metonymies of translation are a key
struction of representations that translations pro
representations of history, culture, values, or literary

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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" Clearly the balance between source and receptor metonymies also changes
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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