From voice to performance, the artistic agency of literary translators (original) (raw)
Related papers
The translator: Literary or performance artist?
Interpreting and Translation Journal, 2020
This article proposes that in order to understand the nature of literary translation as an art form, we need to complement existing approaches drawing on literary, linguistic and sociological theories with insights derived from performance studies. As a way of exploring what the theorization of translation as performance art could contribute to our understanding of literary translation, I map four basic tenets of performance as restored behavior (Schechner 1985) to two translators' (Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush) accounts of their practice. The mapping is illustrated with writings by and interviews with the translators, focusing on four points of contact: the unresolved dialectal tension between self and other, the deliberate, rehearsed nature of decisions, the need for distance between original and performance/translation, and the role of the audience.
The literary translator as author: A philosophical assessment of the idea
Translation Studies, 2019
In contemporary scholarly literature on translation the idea that literary translators ought to be acknowledged as authors of the works that they produce (TA) is a recurrent one: numerous theorists have engaged with it approvingly, others have sought to undermine it. In this article I scrutinise existing theories and studies on authorship and on the ontology of literary works as undertaken in the field of analytical philosophy of art, in order to assess the notion of TA in the context of literary translations. My assessment affirms neither one of the current antithetical positions on TA: translators, I argue, can be justifiably called authors but, normally, not of the kinds of works that defenders of TA commonly assume; that is to say that, rather than being authors of literary works proper, even of a derivative kind, they are authors of constrained representations of literary works.
THE WORK OF LITERARY TRANSLATION
Offering an original reconceptualization of literary translation, Clive Scott argues against traditional approaches to the theory and practice of translation. Instead, he suggests that translation should attend more to the phenomenology of reading, triggering creative textual thinking in the responsive reader rather than testing the hermeneutic skills of the professional translator. In this new guise, translation enlists the reader as an active participant in the constant re-fashioning of the text's structural, associative, intertextual and inter-sensory possibilities, so that our larger understanding of ecology, anthropology, comparative literature and aesthetics is fundamentally transformed and our sense of the expressive resources of language is radically extended. Literary translation thus assumes an existential value which takes us beyond the text itself to how it situates us in the world, and what part it plays in the geography of human relationships.
Literary Translation and the Making of Originals
This book starts from one main premise: a literary translation makes an original. This is bolstered with a series of related ideas that are fleshed out in five interesting and detailed case studies, further cementing the argument that literary translation does not first and foremost transfer meaning or produce equivalence but stabilizes an unstable original. Karen Emmerich's argument runs counter to the conventional notions about source texts and target texts that have largely framed Anglo-American/European work in academic Translation Studies over the past half-century, and that underlie most non-academic ideas about translation as well – at least in the Anglo-American Eurozone. She states point blank that the binary view of source and target texts and the expectation of " equivalence " and " faithfulness " this brings with it, always condemn translation, to failure and to accusations of " loss " if not treachery.
TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 2000
Technolectes et dictionnaires Volume 8, numéro 2, 2e semestre 1995 URI : id.erudit.org/iderudit/037228ar
The British translation practitioner and theorist Clive Scott has presented an approach to literary translation that integrates the transmedial into textual translation. His translations of poetry contain doodling, handwriting, crossing out, writing over, typographical experimentation, and photo-collages; he even offers photo-poetic translations consisting exclusively of photos. By including such extra-verbal matter, they play with the medium of literature and integrate a rich variety of visual forms. Scott wishes to stress the role of perception in translating; he offers a reader-focused theory of translation. He is much less concerned with translation as a service for people who do not understand the original language than with the act of translating as a school for reading and hence for developing our capacities of perception and self-awareness. The materiality of language plays a major role in such an idea of translation. His approach has little to do with intentional meaning, focusing instead on the accessibility of sense. Translating is a process, and it is the relationship of this process to what Scott rightly sees as the multi-sensory process of meaning-making during reading that is at issue in his theory and practice. By analysing Scott's theory and examples of his translationwork, this paper considers what this approach to translating says about transmediality in a phenomenological sense: it sheds light on how we read and perceive and on what the transmedial elements in these processes do. Scott's transmedial translation theory and practice bring to the fore the multiplicity of media involved in the perception of a text in the reader's mind and thus sharpens the awareness of what language is and does.