THEORIES OF LITERARY TRANSLATION



Octavio Paz and "Translation: Literature and Letters"by Mültezem BOYDA?Octavio Paz was born in 31 March 1914 in Mexico City. Thanks to his grandfather's large library, Paz came into contact with literature when he was a child. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist.Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which triggered the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1945 he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and participated in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India which is a milestone in the poet's both life and work. His most known works he has produced during his stay in India are The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's suppression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, and founded two important magazines for arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 which is the most prestigious award in the Spanish speaking world - and the American Neustadt Prize in 1982. In 1990, he was awarded the?Nobel Prize for Literature. He died of cancer on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City.Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic structure is backed up by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." An outstanding prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, on poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics, culture and theories of literary translation which we will be dealing with mostly. "Translation: Literature and Letters""Translation:Literature and Letters" is an outline of Paz's discussion of poetry and poetic translation. In his essay, Octavio Paz observes that translation is a universal human activity. He asserts that language is, above all,?translation. As we learn to speak we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar into the simple words he already knows.In this sense, translation within the same language is not essentially different from translation between two tongues, and the history of all peoples parallels the child's experience." (Paz, 152) Translation?is always a literary operation, since it is an artistic or scientific work as it includes a “transformation” of the original that is literary in the sense that it uses literary resources such as metonymy and metaphor.Paz reminds us that "Language is not universal; rather, there is a plurality of languages each one alien and unintelligible to the others." (Paz, 152) At some point of our lives through some contact with other tongues and languages we become aware of the strangeness of our own language. Robert Lane Kauffmann, who was spanish professor in Rice University until he retired in June 2015 asserts that: "If there is no universal language we can still learn to communicate and travel between and across any cultures via the bridge of translation." (Kauffmann, ) Paz's own view on this matter is the same as he argues that: "All people can communicate with and understand each other. And they can do so because in any language men always says the same thing." (Paz, 152)Octavio Paz argues that translation was once a tool to reveal the commonness, and " a guarantee of the existance of the spiritual bonds"(Paz, 152) of the societies but with the coming of the modern age and the vast array of customs, it has become a tool to reveal the differences between them. "Foreignness was no longer an exception, but the rule...A plurality of languages and societies: each language is a view of the world, each civilization is a world." (Paz, 153) Paz observes that each nation is imprisoned by its language, social classes and generations. Moving from this point of view, Kauffmann suggests that Paz's essay also embodies a slight allegory of modernity and how it seperated humanity. From this perspective it seems like translation is impossible and the translators should give up their efforts. However, Paz says that there has been a "contradictory and complementary trend to translate even more."(Paz, 154) While translation leaves the differences between languages behind, it also reveals those differences even more and Paz calls this process paradoxical. According to Paz, each translation is unique, however, it is the translation of another text. All texts are original since each translation has its own characteristics. There Paz suggests that each translation is a creation partly independent from its source. Paz rejects the idea that poetry, which he considers as universal, is untranslatable as everything can be translated for him, even poetry. “The connotative meanings can be preserved if the poet/translator successfully reproduces the verbal situation, the poetic context into which they are mounted”.(Paz, 156) He strengthens his point by saying that "many of the best poems in every Western language are translations, and many of those translations were written by great poets." (Paz, 155). Yet there appears to be some problems in poetry tranlation as most poetry translators tend to focus on some elements of the poem at the expense of others and the outcome of this translation is a work which is completely unbalanced in structure. Bassnett also dwells on this problem and suggests: "the translator has the right to differ organically, to be independent, provided that independence is pursued for the sake of the orginal in order to reproduce it as a living work." (Bassnett, 85)Further on in his essay Paz dwells on how a poetry translator should perform his task. He states that: "Translation is an exercise in which what is decisive, given the necessary liguistic proficiency, is the translator's initiative, whether that translator be a machine programmed by men or a living human being surrounded by dictionaries." (Paz, 157, 158) Paz later on quotes a french scholar, Arthur Waley's suggestion that translators "should make themselves invisible behind the text and, if fully understood, the texts will speak for themselves."(Paz, 158) He questions whether the poet or the translator should translate the poems or proses. He states that in theory only poets should translate poetry but most of them are not good translators. These poets use foreign poems as their source in producing their own. But a good translator's aim is to go parallel but not identical to the original poem. According to Paz: "The good translator of poetry is a translator who is also a poet or a poet who is also a good translator." (Paz, 158) So we can understand that both the poet and the translator should possess skills in translation and writing a poem in order to produce a good poetry translation. Paz explains that the reason why most poets fail translating poetry is not psychological, but rather functional; since poetic translation as he defines it, is "a procedure analogous to poetic creation but it unfolds in the opposite direction."Paz also compares prose and poetry in his essay, digging into their characteristics. To him, poetry is the preservation of a plurality of meanings whereas a prose revolves around a single meaning. "Poetry radically transforms language in the direction opposite to that of prose." Paz asserts that in prose, words can be replaced or translated by other words. They are interchangeable. He says that "whenever we ask ourselves what does this phrase mean?" the answer is always another phrase. However, when it comes to poetry, words lose their mobility and interchangeability. The meanings of a poem are multiple and changeable according to the point of view, yet the words in that poem are immobile and irreplaceable. According to Paz, if one word in a poem is taken out or changed by another word, that poem is destroyed.Paz then moves onto explaining the phases of translation of a poetry by the translator and makes a distinction between the translator and the poet. "A poet chooses a set of words, combines them and contructs his poem which is made of irreplaceable and immovable characters." A translator's starting point however is not choosing words or combining them like the poet, but the fixed language of a poem which Paz defines as the frozen but "living" part of the poem created by the poet. The translator is creating an unchangeable text like the poet but he dismantles the elements of the text and returns them to the language. The translator's activity in the first phase of poetry translation according to Paz is no different from that of a reader or a critic. To him: "each reading is a translation; each criticism is an interpretation."(Paz, 159). The second phase of the translator's activity is parallel to the poet's, but this time with an important difference. As the poet composes his poetry, he does not know where his poem will lead to and how it will come to an end conveying its messege, but the translator knows the boundaries of his poem since it has to convey the message of the original text. The result as Paz states, is the "reproduction of the original poem in another poem that is, less a copy than a transmutation."Towards the end of his essay Paz submits that "translation and creation are twin processes."(Paz, 160) Most of Baudelaire's and Pound's works has proven that they are indistinguishable. However, the most creative periods of western poetry was accompanied by intercrossings between different poetic traditions. So Paz suggests that the creation has mostly been triggered by influence from other works belonging to different traditions and authors. Paz concludes his essay by giving examples of these influences and intercrossings and the most remarkable of those is as follows:"At the end of the last century, French poetry amazed and scandalized Europe with the solo begun by Baudelaire and brought to close by Malarme. Hispano-American "modernist" poets were among the first to develop an ear for this new music; in imitating it, they made it their own, they changed it, and they sent it on to Spain where it was once again recreated. A little later the English language poets performed something similar but on different instruments in a different key and tempo: a more sober and critical version in which Laforgue, not Verlaine, occupied the central position. Laforgue's special status helps explain the character of Anglo-American modernism. Pound and Elliot, following Laforgue's lead, introduced criticism of symbolism in to symbolism itself. This critical perception produced poetry that was not modernist but modern, and thus they initiated, together with Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and others, a new solo-the solo of contemporary Anglo-American poetry. Laforgue's legacy to English and Spanish poetry is a prime example of interdependence between creation and imitation, translation and original work."(Paz, 161) CONCLUSIONIn his Essay Translation: Literature and Letters" Octavio Paz provides many usefull information which are pivotal for the designing of literary translation. He defends the translateability of poetry and honors the process of translation as a different but still original and creative activity. He discusses the challanges of poetic translation and praises the interdependence between creation and imitation, translation and original work in the process beginning from the original poem to a new, original translation.REFERENCESBassnett, Susan. "Translation Studies". London: Routledge, 2002.Kauffmann, R. Lane. "Cruzando Puentes: Literature as Translation". Literal magazine. Literal, Latin American Voices, December 2013. 25.10.2015.web: < , Mabel. "Octavio Paz on Literary Translation and Yang Lian's Poems on Poetry". Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparee. Vol. 23, No: 4, 1996. 943-958.web: <, Octavio. "Translation:Literature and Letters" , trans by Irene del Corral. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derida, ed. by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 152-162. ................
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