Literary Translation

Translation is a very specialized manifold type of verbal communication through sharing the same text within two different systems of language, thought, and culture. Denotationally, literature involves different types: (a) poetry, which covers lyrical, dramatic and epic poetry; (b) fiction, which covers short stories and novels; and (c) drama, which covers tragedy, and comedy. Thus, literary translation is the most challenging type of translation as it requires more attention to the specific elements of the translated text, whatever the type of literature is. Literary translation can also be seen as a criticism of that work, and a point of view on the author and the text. Literary translation "gives us access to the literature of the world. It allows us to enter the minds of people from other times and places. It is a celebration of otherness, a truly multicultural event without all the balloons and noisemakers. And it enriches not only our personal knowledge and artistic sense, but also our cultures literature, language, and thought" (Wechsler, p. 8). People have the desire to read great books from great writers from around the world. Its by reading those writers and sharing their experiences and having access to other places, other times, other consciousnesses, people become part of a bigger thing, something global. The translation of literary works is considered by many one of the highest forms of translation as it involves so much more than simply translating text: It seeks to duplicate the literary artistry and rhetoric of the source language (SL) text by a communicatively equivalent text in the target language (TL). Literary texts are about persons, implicitly dialogues. The core of literary texts is the original or imaginative metaphor and the neologism. Literary texts are written to be read aloud in the mind, to be slowly savoured, to be judiciously read repeatedly, and increasingly appreciated. Guralnik sees that "all such writings (in prose or verse) considered as having permanent value, excellence of form, great emotional effect, etc. because of their beauty, imagination, etc." (Guralnik, p. 689). So, a literary translator must be capable of also translating feelings, cultural nuances, humour and other subtle elements of a piece of work - structure, style, impact, and appeal. Toury suggests: literary translation involves the imposition of conformity conditions beyond the linguistic and/or general-textual ones, namely, to models and norms which are deemed literary at the target end. It thus yields more or less well-formed texts from the point of view of the literary requirements of the recipient culture, at various possible costs in terms of the reconstruction of features of the source text. (p. 170-171) Some go as far as to say that literary translations are not really possible. In 1959 the linguist, Roman Jakobson, declared that "poetry by definition [was] untranslatable". In 1974 the American poet James Merrill wrote a poem, "Lost in Translation," which in
1

part explores this subject. But, on the other hand, many other critics and thinkers realize the importance of literary translation. Goethe, for example, called literary translation one of the most important and dignified enterprises in the general commerce of the world (quoted in Lefevere, 1992, p. 6). Also Robert Wechsler considers literary translation as an art. He suggests that "[l]iterary translation is an odd art. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing literature that is not his, that has someone elses name on it, that has already been written" (p. 4). Then he claims that "[w]hat makes it so odd an art is that physically a translator does exactly the same thing as a writer" (p. 4). Historically, there are different opinions about the real emergence of literary translation. Some say that the translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. Other opinions go to say that the literary translation found roots in Horace, Cicero, Augustine, and Jerome, "whose principal concerns were the correct rendering of Greek texts into Latin" (Nida, 1991, p. 21). Also, there was literary translation during the Middle Ages. According to translation historian L. G. Kelly, translators during the Middle Ages were not concerned with anything but intellectual information (p. 71). The twelfth century witnessed a turn to literary translation in French and other vernacular languages. This turn is attributed to the change of the reproduction norms. Literatures may be selected as sources for translation because they are considered models to look up to (Even-Zohar, p. 49). In twelfthcentury France translations may have been seen as providing such models for new ways of living, associated as they were with cultures having high prestige. The freedom of translation into French enables France to be the primary nation in literature and innovative literary movements. During this period, translation was used as a vehicle for challenging the dominant poetics of the time by inserting elements of all sorts into the literary system under the guise of the prestige of the source texts and source cultures. Thus, translation in twelfth-century France eventually became an 'alibi' for independent literary creation, as the pseudo translations indicate (see Lefevere, 1979, p. 69). In the early fifteenth century, there was a movement, like that of the Humanist Leonardo Bruni, toward what he had called "stylistically adequate" translations. And in the sixteenth century, there were many serious attempts from English translators to preserve the "form of speaking" of their authors (see Norton). "Translation in Renaissance Europe was not a palliative for the disease of monoglotism, as it is today; it was a part of literature, a part of the passing of literary traditions and creations from language to language, and a part of the often conscious creation of modern vernacular languages that was central to the cause of the Reformation, religiously and politically" (Wechsler, p. 61-2). In the early seventeenth century George Chapman appears to be saying that, given the right conditions, translation can preserve precisely these elusive poetic qualities. In the prefatory poem to his Homer translations, Chapman, having first
2

dismissed "word-for-word traductions" and in the same breath stressed the "necessary nearness of the translation to the example". (Spingarn, I, p. 74-81) Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, exactly between 1620 and 1650, a significant shift took place in literary translation in France and England. From this time onwards, literary translation is conceived as a separate type or category of translation. In England, this shift came as a result of the emergence of the "new" or "libertine" way of translation. On the other hand, in France, the shift was connected to what was known by the "belles infidles". Needless to say, the excellence of the translated literary depends on the cleverness of the literary translator. When a literary translator deals with the literary work, he reads it carefully, he criticizes it, and writes it with the other language, all at the same time. Literary translator, also, must be able to read, understand, and retain, somebody elses ideas, and then render them accurately, completely, and without exclusion, in a way that conveys the original meaning effectively and without distortion in another language. Nida expresses this task as following: A minimal requirement for adequacy of a translation would be that the readers would be able to comprehend and appreciate how the original readers of the text understood and possibly responded to it. A maximal requirement for translational adequacy would mean that the readers of the translation would respond to the text both emotively and cognitively in a manner essentially similar to the ways in which the original readers responded (Nida, 1991, p. 26) The literary translator carries on his own shoulders a number of tasks that must be achieved at the best way so that he might not be condemned of deforming the ST. First of all, the literary translator must know both languages cleverly. The major task of the literary translator is to protect the integrity of a work. The literary translator can be seen as the spokesperson of the author of the translated text: he admits the author's superiority, manipulates the author's characters and images, and expresses the author's vision and ideas. As a result, we can deduct that the literary translator's role can be compared to that of an artist. Robert Wechsler believes that the literary translator looks like a musician. He suggests: Like a musician, a literary translator takes someone elses composition and performs it in his own special way. Just as a musician embodies someone elses notes by moving his body or throat, a translator embodies someone elses thoughts and images by writing in another language.(p. 4)

For a translator, the other fundamental issue is searching for equivalents that produce the same effects in the translated text as those that the author was seeking for readers of the original text. According to Eugene Nida, there are two different types of equivalence: (1) Formal Equivalence, which focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content and aims to allow the reader to understand as much of the SL context as possible; and (2) Dynamic Equivalence, which is based on the principle of the equivalent effect, i.e. that the relationship between receiver and message should aim at being the same as that between the original receivers and the SL message. (Bassnett, p. 33) The translator must concern with the connotative as well as the denotative meaning. He must "assure true rather than spurious equivalents between the source- and targetlanguage texts (Kasparek, p. 135). In order to achieve the above mentioned tasks successfully, the literary translator faces a number of difficulties or complications which he has to overcome. As it is discussed before, the traditional problems of literary translation considers finding equivalents not just for lexis, syntax or concepts, but also for features like style, genre, figurative language, historical stylistic dimensions, polyvalence, connotations as well as denotations, cultural items and culture-specific concepts and values. But there are serious difficulties in literary translation. The first one of these difficulties is the problem of fidelity. The first commandment of literary translation is, Honor thy original and thy author. Thus, there are question that need for answers: Should translation be `literal' or `free'? Should it emphasize the content or the form? Can a faithful translation be beautiful? The fidelity in translation, which is known by "word by word translation", is one of the difficulties that face the literary translator as sometimes this fidelity is not matched with the culture of the reader of the target language - when the source and target languages belong to different cultural groups. Thus, the translator task is the overcoming of the difference between the two cultures. In other words, the translator sometimes find it difficult to be completely faithful to the author, as, for example, when a target language has lacked words or terms that are found in a source language. Sometimes a commonplace word in a source language is so exotic in a target language, so far from the readers reality, that its simply meaningless. The problem faced by the translator is finding terms in his or her own language that express the highest level of faithfulness possible to the meaning of certain words. As translation means "the carrying of a meaning across a border from one language to another" (Gentzler, p. 941), so, in these cases, the literary translator tends to change these words with other ones according to his feeling of them. Here, the translator overcomes the conceptual differences between the SL and TL.
4

The translation of poetry is another difficulty the literary translator faces. Poetry presents special challenges to translators. Poetry is the hardest of all literary genres to translate, since it has so many more linguistic factors to account for (notably sound, rhyme and metre). A great number of writers and thinkers agree that poetry is too difficult to be translated. Edwin Arlington Robinson expresses that [p]oetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said (quoted in Wechsler, p. 45). Gormon commented, Can any translator, not a native speaker, capture that elusive gleam? (Gormon, p. 139) Robert Frost believes that [p]oetry is what gets lost in translation (quoted in Wechsler, p. 45). Frost admits that [t]ranslating poetry loses what poetry is. In other words, In translating a poem, the essence of that poem is lost (quoted in Wechsler, p. 45). Also, Dante wrote, [n]othing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muses can be changed from its own to another language without having all its sweetness destroyed (quoted in Wechsler, p. 45). Octavio Paz joined this party, expressing that poetry is impossible to translate because you have to reproduce the materiality of the signs, its physical properties (Paz, p. 158). Douglas Hofstadter argues that a good translation of a poem must convey as much as possible of not only its literal meaning but also its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.) (quoted in Dokoupil, p. 10). Metaphor is a major component of any poem. But, it is so difficult to be translated. "In literary translation, metaphor is primarily considered a figurative expression by which a word or phrase is altered from its literal reference to a new and often wider field of reference" (Gentzler, p. 941). Researches show that "translators do tend to reduce the polyvalence and resonance of metaphors to more common usages, sometimes omitting the translation of metaphors entirely." (Gentzler, p. 941) To conclude, literary translation is one of the important categories of translation. It plays a lead role in the enrichment of literature all over the world. Literary texts may be translated differently from non-literary ones. Literary translator is the main vehicle of literary translation. Literary translator, in addition to dealing with the difficulties inherent to translations of all fields, must consider the aesthetic aspects of the text, its beauty and style, as well as its marks - lexical, grammatical, or phonological - keeping in mind that one languages stylistic marks can be drastically different from anothers.

Works Cited
Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 2002. Dokoupil, Tony. "Translation: Pardon My French: You Suck at This," Newsweek, May 18, 2009. Even-Zohar, Itamar. Papers in Historical Poetics. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1978. Gentzler, Edwin. "Metaphor and Translation" in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, edited by Oliver Classe. Vol. 2. London; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000. pp. 941- 945. Gormon, Michael. W. S. Merwin Translator Poet, Translation Review 9, 1982. Guralnik, D. B., ed. Websters New World Dictionary.3rd, ed. New York: Websters New World, 1988. Kasparek, Christopher. "Prus' Pharaoh and Curtin's Translation," The Polish Review, vol. XXXI, Nos. 23, 1986, pp. 12735. Kelly, L. G. The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West. Basil Blackwell, 1979. Lefevere, Andr, ed. Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 1992. ----, "Slauerhoff and 'Po Tsju 1': Three Paradigms for the Study of Influence", Tamkang Review 10, 1979. Nida, Eugene A. "Theories of Translation", Traduction, Terminologie, Rdaction. Vol. 4, No. 1, 1991, p. 19-32. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/037079ar Norton, Glyn P. The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents. Genave: Droz, 1984. Octavio Paz, Translation: Literature and Letters, trans. Irene del Corral, from Traduccion: Literaturea y Literalidad (1971), quoted in Theories of Translation. Spingarn, J.E., ed. Critical Eeeays of the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. 1908. Toury, G. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. Wechsler, Robert. Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation. Catbird Press, 1998. http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/translation/articles/types.html