Trans(a)l(e)atory Studies or the Translator as a Performer: "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce in Polish Translation (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Concept of Intersemiotic Translation and its Application to the Analysis of a Musical Work
Musical Analysis. Historia - Theoria - Praxis, 2021
The border between musicology and translation studies still remains an underexplored research area. As the Turkish-British researcher Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva points out, this might be caused, on one hand, by the limited competencies of most translators in the field of music. Musicologists, in turn, are still very carefully entering an unknown area, so far exclusive to linguists, and therefore rarely reach out for research tools rooted in the field of translation theory. Meanwhile, the use of these tools can prove to be extremely valuable support in research into a musical work. The experience of the author of this article with the topic so far has led to the formulation of the concept of musical translation, defined as a rendition of the work in its entirety, which involves necessary changes and transformations resulting from the time, place and purpose of the new version. It is a category which includes phenomena such as transcription, arrangement, development or cover. In a translator’s words, this would be the so-called intrasystemic translation, taking place only within the system of musical signs. A separate category is called intersystemic (intersemiotic) translation, occurring between different sign systems, for example between music and words or between music and an image. This phenom- enon is sometimes equated with the concept of ekphrasis. The point of departure for Umberto Eco’s concept of translation is the assumption that each translation is also an interpretation. Therefore, any exegesis of musical phenomena, in particular the verbalisation of musical meanings, bears the features of translation. The article discusses the significance of the concept of intersemiotic translation for the analysis and interpretation of a musical work on the examples of verbal interpretations of selected Preludes of Fryderyk Chopin.
LITERARY TRANSLATION AS PERFORMANCE. THEORETICAL QUESTIONS AND A LITERARY ANALOGY
Armenian Folia Anglistika Vol. 17, Issue 1 (23), 2021, Yerevan, 2021
The aim of this essay is to propose a view of literary translation as "performance", i.e., as both an art and an activity endowed with specific affinities with those of the actor or the musician. Actors and musicians offer subjective interpretations of the dramatic texts and of the musical scripts that they present on stage and in the concert hall. Likewise, the translator presents her/his interpretation and her/his rendering of a specific text to readers whose mother tongue and culture may either be close or remote from the ones of the original. In other words, a translator of artistic literature is 'a performer' and each translation an 'execution' i.e., a unique 'rendering of the script' (T1), and it is both a recognizable prior text (T1) and yet also a specific variation of it (T2). After some theoretical observations on translation (Part 1 of the essay), my thesis will be developed in connection with an interpretation of the character of Bottom, the weaver-actor in A Midsummer Night's Dream, because his experience and 'personality', seem to bear interesting metaphorical affinities with those of the translator as performer of poetic texts (Part 2 of the essay).
Respectus philologicus, 2019
By positing that translation is the main manifestation of “interliterarity” (in D. Ďurišin’s conceptualization) that brings to the fore the meta-creational capacities of the target literature, the present article attempts (1) to study a translatability potential of a hypertext as based on the Ukrainian translation of James Joyce’s novel-hypertext Ulysses, and (2) to justify the role of its reception in the Ukrainian literary field as a force for language and culture development. The synthesis of a “verbal music” with a mosaic of texts and narratives – imitated, playfully transformed or directly quoted – is claimed to be a key source of hypertextuality in Ulysses. In this line of reasoning, the paper particularly focuses on (1) the role of both overcoming cultural barriers and leaving a space for reader’s co-creativity while transferring of intertexts; (2) the approaches to interpretation of parody and pastiche as forms of writing-as- translation practice; (3) J. Wawrzycka’s concept regarding translation of musicalized fiction as trans-semantification, i. e. attending to literariness of the text; (4) the idea of translator’s visibility attributed to the Ukrainian re-languaging of musicalized fiction.
From Theory to Practice in the Translation of Emiliya Dvoryanova’s Novel Concerto for a Sentence
2012
In the first part of my thesis, I use a theoretical model proposed by Antoine Berman in the 1980s to elicit the difficult points in the translation of Emiliya Dvoryanova’s text with special attention to the practices of foreignization. Berman’s theory proposes a twelve-point classification of the deformation tendencies—forces that prevent translation from transporting the foreign elements in the target text. I choose four of the deformation tendencies from Berman’s list to analyze my translation of Concerto for a Sentence with the goal to creatively enforce foreignization practices. Then, I delve into the theoretical discussion regarding the translator and his/her choices of a text and the consequences in the receiving culture. I conclude that the positionality of the translator is a complex issue dependent on several variables: the dominant ideology in the receiving culture, its capacity to tolerate dissident voices, and the relationship between the two cultures—that of the text’s ...
(Translation): Textual Implications of Re-Languaging Joyce.
Joyce and/in Translation. Joyce Studies in Italy 10, Bulzoni Editore 2007, pp. 39-50.
“Translation” is a testy term when applied to Joyce’s writing. In this essay, I propose that such terms as “trans-semantification” or “re-languaging” (rather than Jakobson’s “rewording”) reflect more closely the complexities of processes connoted by μεταφράζω, transfere, Übersetzen, переводить, tłumaczyć, traduit, et cetera. The term “translation” has outlived its utility; it has come to denote largely an interlingual transference of a work either via simple lexical substitution, as in literal, word-for-word transfer, or a more complex sense-for-sense transfer (often both, depending on textual demands imposed by the original). By proposing the term “trans-semantification” to name the process of transferring a literary work of art into another language, I wish to denote the complexity of literary re-languaging that, in spite of replacing lexical surface of a literary work, manages to attend to sound, rhythm and semantic coloration of words, phrases, and syntactical units of the original, as well as to take cognizance of cultural references embedded in lexical structures (e.g. names, rhetorical formations, stylistic repetition colloquialisms or invectives) by scrupulously re-fostering them in target language even—or particularly—at the risk of busting the normative boundaries of that language. Trans-semantification means that the very literariness of a literary work is “carried across” and re-created in another language, while largely accounting for the aspects of all aesthetically significant strata and for the “polyphonic harmony” in which these strata co-exist in the original.
Przekładaniec
The article deals with the complex issue of the interrelation of the elements of the linguistic texture with the elements of sense produced thanks to the decoding of the graphic layer. The departure point for the argument will be the concept of conceptual blending, deriving from cognitive linguistics. This concept describes the blending of two semiotic spaces, here the iconic space and the symbolic space, to create a new emergent space, which escapes unequivocal interpretation, especially if a given text intensifies the role of its graphic form. The analysis of such an emergent space will be understood as a typographic analysis of glyphs, their interdependencies, patterns and, ultimately, their relations with the meaning decoded in a given language. The interpretative act will proceed according to poststructuralist premises, based mainly on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who applies the term dissemination to describe the radically ambivalent character of sense production, not limited to semanticism, but taking into consideration all aspects of the textual tissue (graphic, phonetic, syntactic etc.). To describe the specific interpretative state of a reader/translator, who, faced with the totality of an experimental literary work, cannot prioritise various possible ways of interpretation, the study applies * This article was originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec 2017, vol. 35, pp. 57-72. The English version was published with the financial support from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (DUN grant).
Studies in Polish Linguistics, 2017
Th e article refers briefl y to the development, over the last half-century, of the sub-discipline of literary linguistics called literary semantics in anglophone tradition (mostly British), pointing out its roots in other scholarly paradigms (among others Russian formalism and the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics) and its close connection with cognitive poetics. Th e author mentions also a development of studies on artistic language in contemporary Polish linguistic theorizing. Conceived by Trevor Eaton as a broad linguistic approach to literary texts, interdisciplinary in nature, literary semantics-in a natural way-enters into dialogue with translation studies in the area of research called comparative stylistics. Th e author discusses the notion of semantic dominant, introduced into linguistics by Roman Jakobson in 1976 and into the Polish critical theory of translation by Stanisław Barańczak (2004) to designate the most salient element of the poem's complex structure, acting as a clue to its interpretation and translation. Th e examples provided by Barańczak, voiced as metalinguistic comments on the construal of his own translations of selected English poems as well as critical evaluation of other translators' output, lead us to the conclusion that the concept of semantic dominant should be renamed stylistic dominant, the term that better refl ects a peculiar characteristic of a multi-level and oft en multimodal nature of meaning in poetic texts (plurisignation, aft er Wheelwright 1954/1968). What is more, we should talk about sets of stylistic dominants (rather than their single occurrences) that act as keys to complex semantics of poetry. An important dominant remains fi guration (troping in particular) but the orchestration of the poem (the totality of its phonetics and versifi cation) and oft en its graphic layout are of no less import in meaning construction.
"Meaning & musicality: striking a balance in poetry translation"
In adopting the genre of metred, rhyming poetry (as opposed to 'free verse'), the poet is making a conscious decision to let her expression, her choice of words, be governed not by semantic considerations alone but also by the sounds, syllables and stress-patterns they happen to contain. This might be termed the 'musical' (or 'artistic') dimension of the poem, which in this particular genre is as integral to the poem as its semantic meaning. In translating such poetry between languages there is an inevitable trade-off between the two criteria, and the balance in many cases seems to be weighted in favour of meaning and against musicality. But if the poetic translator is to be faithful to the whole range of dimensions of the original, he must apply the same principles governing word-selection to the translation as the poet applied to the original work and choose his words with as much respect to their sounds, syllabic content and relation to other words in the poem as to their semantic signification; otherwise his translation will be only partial and unfaithful to the original genre. For a display of the graphics (originally shown on overhead during the conference presentation), please go to: http://kanadacha.ca/academic/feb02.html