Foreignization/Domestication and the Remainder.
Introduction
This section will introduce four major translation strategies which are, if not widely used in all cases, at least acknowledged by scholars and critics of the 20th century. However different the four strategies may seem, they are widely critiqued and thus known to translators and to all those who are interested in translation theories, and they include: foreignization, domestication, literal translation, and adaptation.
While literary translation and foreignization both aim at preserving the foreignness of a translated text--although to a different degree and with a different purpose--domestication and adaptation counter “the foreign” with the “domestic,” i.e. with all the values familiar to a target audience. The purpose of introducing the four strategies is not only to present them as ‘canonized’ and contrast them with the homophonic translation, but also to facilitate a further discussion of translation in the later chapters, where the introduced terms will be used.
Homophonic translation will be introduced last in this chapter, in order to compare the four major strategies with the fifth marginalized one. Yet, it is only in the conclusion of the project that the differences will fully emerge. In this chapter, only the term “homophone” will be clearly defined, since, as will be seen in the third chapter, there is no clear single definition of homophonic translation.
Foreignization
The purpose of a foreignizing translation is to retain as many ‘foreign’ elements as possible, ‘foreign’ meaning elements of a source language. The elements may include retention of customs, linguistic features and proper names used in the source language, as well as the source language’s acoustic qualities and specific characteristics.
Apart from the foreignizing translator’s conviction that all that is “foreign” has to be retained in the target translation because of his/her aesthetic values, i.e. respect and admiration for the source-text culture, the translator may decide to use the strategy in order to expand the vocabulary in the target language. For the latter reason, it became a prevalent translation strategy in the eighteenth-century Germany, where German literary language was not rich enough and therefore words from other languages had to be appropriated. Schleiermacher, a prominent translator at the time, was of an opinion that “...the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible and moves the reader towards him...” (Venuti 1997:101).
According to Schleiermacher, the reader can be “moved towards the author” if the translator follows the following maxim:
the translator must therefore take as his aim to give his reader the same image and the same delight which the reading of the work in the original language would afford any reader educated in such a way that we call him, in the better sense of the word, the lover and the expert [...] ...he no longer has to think every single part in his mother tongue, as schoolboys do, before he can grasp the whole, but he is still conscious of the difference between that language and his mother tongue, even where he enjoys the beauty of the foreign work in total peace. (Ibid:101)
What is significant in the interpretation of creating the “same image” and “same delight” that the source-text audience would have enjoyed is the fact that the readers are expected to actually feel the difference between their language and the source text’s language while “enjoying the reading.” It is important to consider, therefore, that while the goal of making the audience feel as if they read the text in its original language is shared by other translation strategies, the interpretation of how to achieve this task and to what effect will vary from one strategy to another.
It is interesting that Charles S. Kraszewski calls this translation strategy an informational translation, which, nevertheless, strives the accomplish the same goal:
bringing over of a foreign poem from source to target language in toto. The final product should be--as far as this is possible--the perfect mirror image of both the contents (the ‘message’, meaning, and authorial intent) and the form (verse-line, strophes, rhyme-scheme) of the original work. (Kraszewski 1998:31).
One of the ways to accomplish this task is, according to Kraszewski, to use the largest possible number of cognates found in the original language, cognates being linguistic units derived from the same source. Kraszewski’s discussion of Guenter Grass's poem, “Normandie,” will illustrate how the foreignization of a translation may be achieved.
Where Grass uses the word “koennen” it can be ‘substituted’ with the English “cannot” (because of the context of the poem), the German “General” with English “general,” “Touristen” with “tourists,” etc. A proper name, “Normandie” is also retained in the English title, in order to situate the poem in a very specific context: a Normandie occupied by the Germans, not a peaceful place without geographical of timely significance. The lines with the above foreignizations, compared, first shown in the original will sound as follows: “Normandie .../koennen ihren Beton nicht loswerden,/Manchmal kommt ein halbtoter General/.../Oder es wohnen Touristen” (Ibid :38) becomes: “Normandie, .../cannot get rid of their Concrete,/sometimes comes a halfhead General/.../Or tourists wonder by/... “(Ibid: 40).
What is making the text seem more “German” even in its translated English version is the fact that the translator has decided to leave the nouns capitalized. It is, obviously, not the rule that that is how every German translation would be foreignized, but it shows how the translator’s own creativity and judgment may influence the degree of foreignization of a given poem.
Domestication
The main elements that characterize the domestication strategy are fluency and transparency of translation. A fluent translation is the one that ‘reads smoothly’, without any interruptions imposed by words that might not be easily grasped by the target audience. It is not to say that the vocabulary itself has to be simple; it just means that the flow of the text is not interrupted with excessive numbers of words that sound too “foreign,” as if they were taken from the source-, rather than target language lexicon. The flow cannot be interrupted by the syntax of the source language either, but is rather suited to the linguistic norms of the target language.
The result of a fluent translation is transparency, as Laurence Venuti suggests,
Under the regime of fluent translating, the translator works to make his or her work “invisible,” producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems “natural” i.e., not translated. (Venuti 1997:5)
The goal is quite the same as in the foreignizing translation: to copy the original or, in Venuti’s words, to create an “illusion” that the text is an original, not a copy of a text. Yet, for the domesticating translators this implies not aiming at making the target text sound foreign, but the opposite: to make it sound familiar. In the cultural context, domestication implies that the translated text seeks to underline the values or views of the target culture. Thus, while in the foreignizing strategy proper names were left unchanged to give the most emphasis to the foreignness of the text, the domesticating strategy implies leaving out or changing names to the familiar ones.
One of the instances is The Destruction of Troy translated by Denham. A comparison between the Latin and the English version indicates that the translator has decided to leave out all proper names:
haec finis Priami fatorum, hic exitus illum
sorte Tulit Troiam incensam et prolapsa uidentem
Pergama, tot quodam populis terrisque superbum
regnatorum Asiae. iacet ingens litore truncus,
auulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.
(Mynors 1969:II. 554-558; ibid: 53)
Thus fell the King, who yet surviv’d the State,
With such a signal and peculiar Fate.
Under so vast a ruine not a Grave,
Nor in such flames a funeral fire to havr:
He, whom such Titles swell’d, such Power made proud
To whom the Scepters of all Asia bow’d,
On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King,
A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing
(Denham 1656:II. 542-549; ibid: 153).
As Venuti rightly points out, by omitting the proper names from the Latin version (APriami, “Troiam” and “Pergama”), the English text does not adhere to the Troyan War in ancient Greece, but rather to the domestic wars in Britain taking place a considerable period of time later in history. This idea is enforced by his replacement of the proper name, “Priam” with the King.” Dehham’s reference to a different war which happened in a different historical time period is so complete, that without knowing the Latin version of the poem (or other, less domesticated versions of its translation) it is hard to guess that the poem has been translated from the Latin rather than written in English for an English audience. Had not Denham told the English audience that he was just translating the poem, one could easily assume that it had been his own work.
It is important to keep in mind, that the domestication method has been dominating the Anglo-American translations for a long time, with the exception of the modernist period. It is, therefore, a common practice among reviewers to praise the flow of the translation, as in the following examples that Venuti presents in his introduction:
The translation is a pleasantly fluent one: two chapters of it have already appeared in Playboy magazine.
(Times Literary Supplenent 1969:180)
Rabassa’s translation is a triumph of fluent, gravid momentum, all stylishness and commonsensical virtuosity
(West 1970:4)
His first four books did not published in English did not speak with the stunning lyrical precision of this one (the invisible translation is Michael Henry Heim).
(Michener 1980:108)
Literal Translation
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase (Nabokov, Problems of Translation: Onegin in English)
The literal translation method produces results that are closer to those of the foreignizing, rather than domesticating method. At the same time, its goals do not match those of a foreignizing strategy. When a literal translator wants to recreate the original text in a target language, his strategy is not to foreignize it--i.e. by using cognate words, etc--but to translate it “literally,” following the most exact meaning of the source-text words. The effect may appear somewhat foreignizing, because there may be words that may sound not too familiar for the target audience. The use of these words is, however, motivated by the goal of recreating the text specific to its own time and setting; it is not stimulated by a direct suppression of a contemporary, i.e. “current culture” or by a desire to expand the vocabulary of a target language.
Vladimir Nabokov is one of the proponents of the literal translation method. He has expressed his emphatic support for this strategy in his essay “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” where he compares the literal translation of the classic Russian epic poem, Evgeniy Onegin, to other, more fluent translations. He is clearly against any attempts of domesticating or adapting translations, and tacitly acknowledges the advantages of the literal translation strategy,
I constantly find in reviews of verse translations the following kind of thing that sends me into spasms of helpless fury: A Mr (or Miss) So-and-so’s translation reads “smoothly.” In other words, the reviewer of the “translation,” who neither has, nor would be able to have, without special study, any knowledge whatsoever of the original, praises as “readable” an imitation only because the drudge or the rhymster has substituted easy platitudes for breathtaking intricacies of the original. (Schulte & Biguenet, ed 1992:127)
Nabokov criticizes the “drudges” and “rhymesters” for spending time on coming up with rhymes, which are, most of the time, less sophisticated than in the original version; what is more important, the rhymes cause the translator to ‘drop’ certain words from the source text and to ignore the background information referring to a specific setting and time period that the ‘dropped’ words may clearly indicate.
To show how significant a difference it makes to render the meaning as close as possible, rather than be preoccupied with rhymes, he compares the same lines from Evgeniy Onegin translated by himself as well as several other, more “inventive” translators. In his version of the poem, the lines (that he has transcribed into the Latin alphabet and I have added the ‘exact’ meaning of each word underneath the Russian one) are rendered as:
...Poroy belyanki cherno-okoy
Sometimes white-skinned black-eyed [girl or woman- implied by the gender of “belyanki” and the ending in ‘charno-okoy.’ The endings in both words also imply the possessive case]
Mladoy i zvezhiy potzeluy.
Young and fresh kiss (Ibid:139)
Nobokov renders into:
...sometimes a white-skinned dark-eyed girl’s
young and fresh kiss. (Ibid:139)
This is a very close, literal rendering of the words in the poem. While “girl’s” and “kiss” do not rhyme, other translations of the same lines reveal how distant from the original they may get if one of the primary goals is to seek rhymes, or adjust it to the imagery of the target culture of the eighteenth-century countryside, as it happens in the first example. Nabokov observes, “Spalding stresses the hygienic side of the event
the uncontaminated kiss
of a young dark-eyed country maid;” (ibid:140)
In this rendering, the “girl’s fresh and young kiss” became “uncontaminated; “ the “dark-eyed girl” was changed into a “country maid” and she has lost her “white-skinned” appearance which is supposed to contrast with her dark eyes.
Miss Radin’s translation which Nabokov describes as “dreadful” reads:
a kiss at times from some fair maiden
dark-eyed, with bright and youthful looks; (ibid: 140)
In this rendition, the “white-skinned girl” becomes purer, like a “fair maiden” and it is her “looks” that are “bright and youthful,” not “the kiss.”
In another translation Nabokov points out that “Miss Deutsch, apparently not realizing that Pushkin is alluding to Onegin’s carnal relations with his serf girls, comes up with the incredibly coy:
and if a black-eyed girl permitted
sometimes a kiss as fresh as she; “(ibid:140)
The ‘translations’ of the original lines are so deviant, that they hardly look as renderings of the same lines. In the conclusion of his essay, Nabokov suggests that the translates use lots of footnotes, “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity” (ibid, 1992:143). The footnotes would give the translator a chance to explain the sense of all the words of the poem that may seem too ‘literal.’ The sense and imagery of the poem would then be preserved, and a simple, literal rendering of a “girl,” used to describe village girls in the eighteenth-century Russia, would not have to be changed into “maids” and “maidens” which one could have met at the English countryside at the time.
Adaptation
This method, along with the previously described domestication method, is used to produce a transparent discourse. Yet, when the adapting translator strives to recreate the impression that the audience reads the original text, his aim is not to domesticate the text by stripping it out of its foreignness, but to adapt it to a specific audience: audience of a contemporary, i.e. current period of time. Because of its reference to the contemporary audience, this translation strategy is more in a direct opposition to a literal, rather than foreignizing translation method.
In his essay “Seven Agamemnons,” Reuben A. Brower brings examples of the adapted translations of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, where the tragedy is modified to suit the audience of a specific time period, which determines how the translation has been adapted. Three examples of Agamemnon’s translations will serve as examples of, what may lightly be called “adaptations,” but what should be called more adequately, “concessions” to the audience of a particular time period when the translation was produced. The examples will focus on the passage where Helen--who for Aeyschylus is a symbol of pride which in the end brings ruin--arrives in Troy. The first passage comes from Robert Potter’s (1721-1804) translation:
To Ilion’s tow’rs in wanton state
With speed she wings her easy way;
Soft gales obedient round her wait,
And pant on the delighted sea.
Attendant on her side
The richest ornaments of splendid pride:
The darts, whose golden points inspire,
Shot from her eyes, the flames of soft desire;
The youthful bloom of rosy love,
That fills with ecstasy the willing soul;
With duteous zeal obey her sweet control.
(Harvard Studies in Contemporary Literature 1959:181)
It is interesting that through a translation one may in fact extract the moral and literary values of a given period. This particular translation, for instance, is a manifestation of eighteenth-century British poetry:
The stock “heroic” meaning of the eighteenth century corresponded to something more than the recurrent attitudes evoked by scores of neo-classical epics; it also equaled a certain misreading of ancient history and a code of aristocratic behavior which was in some degree an actuality of contemporary social life. (Ibid: 174)
Since in the eighteenth century, books were overwhelmingly accessible to aristocracy, they could not include the language, metaphors, or ideas that were, so-to-speak, inappropriate. Helen is, therefore, elegant and her love is by no means fierce or “inflamed” with passion, but “rosy.” Moreover, her “control” is not a state that men cannot resist, but rather an innocently “sweet” one. Also, as Brower points out, for this particular eighteenth-century audience, one should not even refer to Helen as “literally” being “a notion of windless calm,” but that it refers to the sea’s calm. Similarly, “delicate adornment of riches” is not Helen herself, but that the ornaments are beside her, presumably symbolizing her ladies-in-waiting.
As a contrast, Bower quotes a nineteenth-century translation by Browning. This translation, which appeared in 1877, did not attract many readers at the time, because it did not adhere to the literary standards of that period:
At first, then, to the city of Illion went
A soul, as I might say, of windless calm--
Wealth’s quiet ornament,
An eye’s dart bearing balm,
Love’s spirit-biting flower.
(Ibid: 188)
In this rendering, the “sweet control” from the eighteenth-century translation has become more forceful: “spirit-biting flower” implies more than just innocence, since it ‘bites’ into a man’s “spirit.” Moreover, in this translation, Helen is the “Wealth’s quiet ornament” as well as the “dart.” Helen is not an image of the elegant and reasoned love anymore, but that of a more powerful and self-assured one. The only “prettiness” of the nineteenth century, as Brower points out, is Browning’s use of “balm.” Otherwise, the translation is quite literal, and a number of lines decreased as a result of not adhering to the stylized poetry of the eighteenth century. Helen’s “youthful bloom” of love is not anymore “rosy,” and there is no mention of “ecstasy” that in the eighteenth century “fills the willing soul.”
The last translation of the same passage comes form the beginning of the twentieth century and has been produced by Gilbert Murray. Brower criticizes the translation for being “Biblical-Christian:”
And how shall I call the thing that came
At the first hour to Illion city?
Call it a dream of peace untold,
A secret joy in a mist of gold,
A woman’s eye that was soft, like flame,
A flower which ate a man’s heart with pity.
(Ibid: 191)
Brower points out that “The ‘windless calm’ is a ‘dream of peace untold.’ Religiose, ineffable peace is--as so often--confused with the secrecy of passion, flame-like, and yet tender” (Ibid: 191). Brower criticizes the translation for going “backwards” to the nineteenth-century style (i.e. love that is meek, often associated with religious love, etc), rather than following the progressive vain of Browning’s translation. He overlooks the fact, however, that the 1st World War has ended in 1918 and a great disappointment and chaos was its result. Therefore, references to religion, not necessarily the positive ones, were not a rarity. T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is probably one of the most known works in the English language that adhere to that subject.
Homophones
“The company now finds itself in dire financial straights.”
(Kilduff, Words the Secretary Must Watch: Homophones, Semi-Homophones, and Homophonic Sequences )
At this point there should follow a definition of homophonic translation, so that it could be compared with the other translation strategies. Its definitions, however, vary quite drastically and there is no single one that is “the right one.” All of them are relevant to homophonic translation and will be discussed in Chapter Three and Chapter Four. Nonetheless, it is relevant to cite several definitions of a ‘homophone’ in order to have a clear idea of what a homophone is, as it will be referred to frequently throughout the thesis.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word homophone was first used in 1623 by Cockeram, who describes it as “[words] having the same sound.” A later explanation adds that in philology “... (Usually in pl.) Applied to words having the same sound, but differing in meaning or derivation; also two different symbols denoting the same sound or group of sounds.” The Dictionary also quotes the explanation of homophones from Edinborough Review from 1826 (XLV, 145): “Each sound may be represented by several homophonous signs”; while Athenaeum from April 16, 1892 (501/1) offers the following example: “The ‘Scott Library’ is sure to be confounded with the ‘Stott Library’, so homophonous are they.”
According to the Webster Dictionary, a ‘homophone’ is “any of two or more letters or groups of letters representing the same speech sound (Ex.: c in civil and s in song).” “Same speech sound” are the key words to remember whenever a reference to homophonic translation is made.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language provides a simple and clear definition: “One of two or more words, such as night and knight, that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, origin, and sometimes spelling.”
It is interesting that although the definitions seem similar, they stress different features of a homophone. In the OED, a basic definition stresses “the same sound,” and the Webster Dictionary emphasizes “the same speech sound,” the American Heritage Dictionary also considers “spelling and etymology.” The last definition, therefore is the most complete of the three.
Conclusion
In this chapter, the aim has been to introduce the four major translation strategies, as they will be referred to in the later chapters and contrasted them to homophonic translation. It is important to remember, however, that the strategies have been introduced in their basic form, sufficient for this project; yet, their in-depth study would reveal their more sophisticated definitions and re-definitions, as well as specific characteristics of each translation strategy applied idiosyncratically by each writer/poet-translator.
For the purpose of this paper, it is important to keep in mind the major differences between the strategies, differences that occur despite the fact that all claim to create the exact image of the source text. While foreignization aims at bringing over lexicon and cultural values from the source- to the target language culture, for instance, in domestication these features of foreignness are suppressed. Similarly, while literal translation strives to preserve the vocabulary and cultural values of a specific time period when the source text was written, adaptation aims at substituting the cultural values and vocabulary of the past, with the values and vocabulary of the present, i.e. the time when the translation was produced.
Homophonic translation, as oppose to the other four, is a marginal translation strategy that does not figure within the canon of translation methods. Yet, since it is the subject of the present study, it will be presented with its variations, specific to each writer/poet-translator. That is why its definition could not be summarized along with the other four strategies, but will be debated in the next chapters. Moreover, at this point it is not possible to point to a single definition of homophonic translation, since it is not largely discussed in numerous books on translation theory. Its definition will therefore be debated and will emerge in the concluding chapter of this research.