Reflections 3/21

 Guest Speaker: Michael Cooperson 

Last week, we had Professor Cooperson from UCLA speak to us about his work The Imposters. Translating this book is a ginormous project accompanied by many challenges. The most memorable challenge to me was carrying Al Hariri’s word/sound play from Arabic into English. As a student who is obsessed with rhymes, I have a strong desire to bring the rhymes in Chinese into English and often run into the problem of my translation accidentally sounding like a nursery rhyme. However, Professor Cooperson skillfully adopted not just the sound play in arabic (e.g. using only letters with no dots) but also variations of English to realize idiomatic adaptation, and that, to me, is truly an art that he did. He quoted Diyafat at the end to conclude his lecture. The quote goes: 

“The untranslatable is, therefore, not something impossible to translate, but rather something that can be translated infinitely many ways.”

Indeed, the untranslatable is “untranslatable” in the sense that it is impossible to carry over the meaning and word play from one language to another perfectly simultaneously. However, it also means that you can try out many different approaches and pick and choose the most important factor in translating a certain work and deliver that magic to the audience of another language. Take The Imposter as an example, soundplay is a big part of the splendidness of Al Hariri’s writings, so a translation that acts as nothing but a conduit of the literal meaning of the text wouldn’t do justice to the work. Professor Cooperson treats the word/sound play with high importance and makes a good point in isolating domestication of content and idiomatic adaptation, thus attaining the wonderful English adaptation of Al Hariri’s Maqāmāt. 

Readings on translation collaboration. 

This week’s readings concern a topic that has always intrigued me: how do translator and the original author interact? When I translate a text (mostly tanka), there is no way I can consult the original poet for they have deceased over 10 centuries ago. I get to take all the freedom in interpretation after historical background research—being able to interpret poetry freely is one of the tankas has to me. However, the readings suggest to me that one of the most valuable things that come out of the collaboration between the original author and translator is that the author can explain their word choice. Antonio Tabucci explains on page 24 in the authority in literary translation: collaborating with the author article: 

I intervened in the work of my translator to explain some specific words or regional idiomatic phrases. I know how hard it is to translate this book. This is why the French translation will be the only one that I will authorize. 

Nabokov, similarly, has also been giving Petr suggestions and feedback such as “You have a tiny little error: "solnechnik" is an old word for ‘sunshade’” in his letters to his translator. This reaffirms to me that it really is the intricate word choice (especially between translators and authors who are from different ages where the topic of archaic word choice comes into play), that lies in the core of the author-translator collaboration/communication. 

When it comes to translations of East Asian literary works into English where there is more cultural explanations to do, without the excessive use of footnotes, translators will have to weave explanatory sentences of cultural backgrounds into their paragraphs. This, in my opinion, is too much freedom and responsibility for the translator to take alone. However, as revealed in the interview with Juliet Winter Carpenter where she answers the following to professor Elliot’s question: 

A lot of rewriting went into the final version. I don’t know how carefully you compared the translation and the original, but the description of Karuizawa is a good example of something inserted into the text for the benefit of Western readers. I would certainly hesitate to write anything that extensive all by myself. When a longer passage such as that needs to be inserted, Mizumura writes it herself in either English or Japanese, I translate/rewrite it, and then we go over it together—usually quite a few times before it’s finalized. 

JWC’s answer to this question, I think, is really the description of the best solution to cultural adaptation of literature from a culture further from the target language. 

 

Jiayi