Доклад о переводах Лукьяненко (М.Десятова)

[Dragon's Eye]

Предлагаем в этой теме обсудить очень любопытный доклад Марии Десятовой "Анализ зарубежных концепций литературного перевода (на примере переводов произведений С.Лукьяненко)".

[MrsDee]

В жж Лукьяненко уже обсуждают

http://dr-piliulkin.livejournal.com/37443.html

[L.B.]

Сопоставления занимательные, но к чему такие заявы: "Анализ зарубежных концепций литературного перевода," - если не в состоянии их подкрепить ничем, кроме ученического "Делать какие-то глобальные выводы по одному произведению, конечно, не имеет смысла, однако, думаю, не будет преувеличением предположить..." Bait and switch?

[MrsDee]

[L.B.]

А, так это вы Маше удружили! Сколько, однако, пустых слов о традициях, принципах, когда могли бы просто привести название в соответствие с содержанием доклада...

[Tabby]

Вот так всегда, название критикуют, а нет, чтобы по содержанию высказаться...

[Widdershins]

L.B., во-первых, я против названия совершенно не возражала, так что выпады в адрес MrsDee считаю несправедливыми.

Во-вторых, возможно, это не последний доклад на подобную тему, и со временем анализ станет более полным (все же и на конференции есть регламент, и пробный шар каждый имеет право запустить). Так что считайте подобное "громкое" название заявкой на будущее.

[L.B.]

[удалено модератором]

отрывок из статьи Лоренса Венути "Перевод, сообщество, утопия". [удалено модератором]

===

In current practices, a translation of a novel can and must communicate the basic elements of narrative form that structure the foreign-language text. But it is still not true that these elements are free from variation. Any language use is likely to vary the standard dialect by sampling a diversity of substandard or minor formations: regional or group dialects, jargons, clichés and slogans, stylistic innovations, archaisms, neologisms. Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls these variations the "remainder" because they exceed communication of a univocal meaning and instead draw attention to the conditions of the communicative act, conditions that are in the first instance linguistic and cultural, but that ultimately embrace social and political factors (Lecercle 1990). The remainder in literary texts is much more complicated, of course, usually a sedimentation of formal elements and generic discourses, past as well as present (Jameson 1981: 140—1).

Any communication through translating, then, will involve the release of a domestic remainder, especially in the case of literature. The foreign text is rewritten in domestic dialects and discourses, registers and styles, and this results in the production of textual effects that signify only in the history of the receiving language and culture. The translator may produce these effects to communicate the foreign text, trying to invent domestic analogues for foreign forms and themes. But the result will always go beyond any communication to release target-oriented possibilities of meaning.

Consider a recent English translation of an Italian novel, Declares Pereira, Patrick Creagh's 1995 version of Antonio Tabucchi's "Sostiene Pereira" (1994). Creagh's English consists mostly of the current standard dialect. But he cultivated a noticeable strain of colloquialism that sometimes veers into underworld argot. He rendered "taceva" ("silent") as "gagged," "quattro uomini dall'aria sinistra" ("four men with a sinister air") as "four shady-looking characters," "stare con gli occhi aperti" ("stay with your eyes open") as "keep your eyes peeled," "un personaggio del regime" ("a figure in the regime") as "bigwig," "senza pigiama" ("without pyjamas") as "in his birthday-suit," and "va a dormire" ("go to sleep") as "beddy-byes" (Tabucchi 1994: 13, 19, 43, 73, 108, 196; Creagh 1995: 5, 9, 25, 45, 67, 127). Creagh also mixed in some distinctively British words and phrases. He rendered "orrendo" ("horrible") as "bloody awful," "una critica molto negativa" ("a very negative criticism") as "slating," "pensioncina" ("little boarding house") as "little doss-house," "sono nei guai" ("I'm in trouble") as "I'm in a pickle," "parlano" ("they talk") as "natter," and "a vedere" ("to look") as "to take a dekko" (Tabucchi 1994: 80, 81, 84, 104, 176; Creagh 1995: 50, 51, 54, 64, 115).

Within parentheses I have inserted alternative renderings to highlight the range and inventiveness of Creagh's translating. The alternatives should not be regarded as somehow more accurate than his choices. In each case, both renderings establish a lexicographical equivalence, a similarity to the Italian text consistent with dictionary definitions. Creagh's choices communicate meanings that can be called "invariant" only insofar as they are reduced to a basic meaning shared by both the Italian and the English.

Creagh's translation, however, varies this meaning. The variation might be called a "shift" as that concept has been developed in translation studies since the 1960s (see, for example, Catford 1965; Blum-Kulka this volume; Toury 1995). If Creagh's English is juxtaposed to Tabucchi's Italian, lexical shifts can indeed be detected, shifts in register from the current standard dialect of Italian to various colloquial dialects in British and American English. In response to my queries, Creagh admitted that "some phrases are more colloquial in English than in Italian," making clear that his shifts are not required by structural differences between the two languages, but rather motivated by literary and cultural aims: "I even tried," Creagh stated, "to use only idioms that would have been current in 1938," the period of the novel, "and to hand them to the right speaker, to make slight linguistic differences between the characters" (personal correspondence: 8 December 1998).

Yet the notion of a shift does not entirely describe the textual effects set going by Creagh's choices. His translation signifies beyond his literary and cultural intentions by releasing a peculiarly English remainder: the different dialects and registers establish a relation to English literary styles, genres, and traditions. In terms of generic distinctions, Tabucchi's novel is a political thriller. Set under the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, it recounts how one Pereira, the aging cultural editor of a Lisbon newspaper, is slowly radicalized over a few weeks which climax when he prints an attack on die fascist regime. Creagh's polylingual mixture of standard and colloquial, British and American, gives his prose an extremely conversational quality that is consistent with Tabucchi's presentation of the thriller plot: Pereira's narrative takes an oral form, an official testimony to an unnamed authority (hence the curious title). Yet the slangy English also alters the characterization of Pereira by suggesting that he is less staid and perhaps younger than the elderly journalist presented in the Italian text.

At the same time, the British and American slang refers to moments in the history of English-language fiction. It recalls thrillers that address similar political themes, notably such novels of Graham Greene as The Confidential Agent (1939), which, like Tabucchi's, is set during the Spanish Civil War and involves an attempt to aid the Republican side against Franco. By virtue of this literary reference, Creagh's translation in effect invites the reader to distinguish between Tabucchi's leftwing opposition to fascism and Greene's more cautious liberalism (Diemert 1996: 180—1). Greene saw his thrillers as "entertainments" engaged in social and political issues, designed "not to change things but to give them expression" (Allain 1983: 81). The linguistic resemblances between Creagh's translation and Greene's novel highlight the ideological differences that distinguish Tabucchi's and Greene's treatments of the same historical event.

Thus, although Creagh's translation can be said to communicate the form and theme of Tabucchi's novel, neither of these features escapes the variations introduced by the inscription of an English-language remainder. The remainder does not just inscribe a domestic set of linguistic and cultural differences in the foreign text, but supplies the loss of the foreign-language differences which constituted that text. The loss occurs, as Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, because in any "tradition-bearing community" the "language-in-use is closely tied to the expression of the shared beliefs of that tradition," and this gives a "historical dimension" to languages which often fails to survive the translating process (MacIntyre 1988: 384). MacIntyre argued that this problem of untranslatability is most acute with "the internationalized languages-in-use in late twentieth-century modernity," like English, which "have minimal presuppositions in respect of possibly rival belief systems" and so will "neutralize" the historical dimension of the foreign text (ibid.). In English translation, therefore,
"a kind of text which cannot be read as the text it is out of context is nevertheless rendered contextless. But in so rendering it, it is turned into a text which is no longer the author's, nor such as would be recognized by the audience to whom it was addressed".
(ibid.: 38S, Maclntyre's emphasis)

Creagh's translation at once inscribed an English-language cultural history in Tabucchi's novel and displaced the historical dimension of the Italian text. This text occupies a place in a narrative tradition that includes resistance novels during and after the Second World War, as well as novels about life under fascism, Alberto Moravia's Il conformista (1951; The Conformist), for instance, and Giorgio Bassani's Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis). The very fact that Italian history contains a fascist tradition ensured that Tabucchi's readers would understand the Salazarist regime in distinctively Italian terms, not merely as an allusion to Mussolini's dictatorship, but as an allegory of current events. Sostiene Pereira was written in 1993 and published the following year, when a center-right coalition gained power in Italy with the election victory of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia movement. As Tabucchi himself said of his novel, "those who didn't love the Italian political situation took it as a symbol of resistance from within" (Cotroneo 1995: 105, my translation). Invested with this peculiarly Italian significance, Sostiene Pereira sold 300,000 copies within a year of publication.

Although favorably received by British and American reviewers, Creagh's translation hardly became a bestseller. Within two years of publication the American edition published by New Directions sold 5,000 copies. Creagh maintained a lexicographical equivalence, but the remainder in his translation was insufficient to restore the cultural and political history that made the novel so resonant for Italian readers, as well as readers in other European countries with similar histories, such as Spain.

[Dragon's Eye]

Cпасибо, L.B., любопытная статья!
P.S. Ту часть Вашего поста, которая противоречит правилам общения на нашем форуме, я как модератор позволила себе стереть.

[L.B.]

[Dragon's Eye]