#self-translation

Can’t barely believe I’ve already translated 15 (FIFTEEN!!!) fanfics already.

The poem is only a body because someone wrote it. If you cannot touch a part of yourself and feel the poem, it has not been written and cannot be rewritten.

Throughout your life, you will be told you are insufficient. Do not believe them. Even if you change, it is not because you were flawed before, it is because you are mid-translation.

There are terrible translators. They enter poems without consent, even when they have a legal agreement. They insist there is a method to love, and will tell you it has been written and researched. They correct you in your language, but when asked about theirs, feign neutrality. They are the bookkeepers. Do not ask for their help. Steal the books.

When your word is the same in both languages, let no one convince you that it must be understood.

For every thing that is withheld by the new language, make sure you are withholding something in return. For everything that is given, give in return.

Prepare the area for the translation. Create an altar of inalterable objects. Make sure it has shells from wherever you were born, an image or an iconoclastic portal. Eat the translation. Dance with it until you are so tired, you feel sore and blissed out.

Care about the words and the people who wrote them. Have opinions that cut through as feelings, vibes, insistences.

Be rude. In fact, be so rude, someone corrects you. Then listen. Come back to your rudeness, sure of where you were and where you are.

Do not believe in transcendence. Do not believe in perfection. Do not believe in universality.  There was no Babel, nor ruins. This is no puzzle, nor are we whole in sameness.

The poet lives in his poems and only through these he can assert his own existence; the poet can be oppressed, censored, encaged, also killed, but until he can write, until there’s someone who reads his poem, he will go on living, he will be free despite all. Deported poets, exiled poets, poets oppressed by a dominant and colonial culture, but still poets, although they have lost their language. And as it’s possible to lose a language, it’s possible to find a new one to tell about the self in verses; this was well-known to Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet and author, moved to the USA because he was condemned for parasitism and for a cultural environment more and more saturated with hostility and suspicion which censored and hinder the publication of his poems, shut his poetical voice through editorial obstructionism, denied his existence as an author, and thus also as human.

Brodsky’s verses didn’t officially exist in the Soviet Union (but read clandestinely and published via samizdat), so he didn’t exist himself as poet, as man and to exist, he had to make the hardest of the choice: leaving his home country, his native language, denying it because this language refused his creative soul. He left Russia after he was compelled by the regime, he moved abroad and reaching the USA, a Country completely different from the Soviet Union, too much free, too much noisy, but perfect for Brodsky’s poetry. There he translated his rhymes in English and his works were officially published, there Brodsky exists, there his art is loved. There’s no way to oppress the voice of a poet, because it will always find a way to speak, as well as self-translation, instruments of poetic (and cultural) resistance, as well as changing the language, the Country, traditions. Also forgoing himself.

Self-Translation is when author and translator are the same person, when an author translate his/her own literary work. As it happens in translation, there’s an original and a translation, or there’s no translation (when the author chooses to write in a language different from his/ native ones, a behaviour that in very common among colonial and post-colonial writers). The Self-Translator is a bilingual and, often, bicultural (because he/she is an immigrant or a child of immigrants, lives between frontiers or in a former colonised country). On the contrary to a translator, the author who chooses to translate him/herself has access to the original intention (i.e. now and why the author chooses to write a certain expression and the original meaning), original cultural context or literary intertext. This possibility has, however, some limits: the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung explained that neither the author is completely omniscient (aware of what he wrote in the past) and «[…] have to read it again and may not even completely understand their own motivation for choosing certain passages, certain examples or a certain style»[1]. The most famous authors who translated their own works were Samuel Beckett (from English to French and German, and vice versa) and Vladimir Nabokov (from Russia to French, and vice versa).

What are the types of Self-Translation?

Michaël Oustinof identified three types of Self-Translation: 1. Naturalising Translation (naturalisante): when an author gives priority to the characteristics of the target language (that is that language a text will be translates into). 2. Decentralised Translation (décentrée): when an author introduces in the target language foreign elements that belong to the source language (that’s the language a text is written in). 3. (Re)Creating Translation((re)créatrice): when an author translate and change his/her literary work (or omit some parts) in order to adapt the text to both the target language and culture.

Who are the authors that translate themselves? 1. Bilingual (or polyglot) authors who wants to expanse their audience or just experimenting. Usually, there’s a relation of symmetry between the source and the target language (e.g. French and English). It’s the case of Samuel Beckett. 2. People who speak minority language but choose to write with a dominant language. It’s the case of Luigi Pirandello who translated his plays in Italian from Sicilian dialects. 3. Colonial or post-colonial author who write both in their native language and colonial language. 4. Exiled or emigrant authors who write in the language of the Country they moved to. It’s the case of the Russian Vladimir Nabokov who, after moving to France, started writing books in French (such as his famous novel “Lolita”) and the same Joseph Brodsky.

The case of Brodsky and other Russian emigrée is a unique case of self-translation. Usually, who translate theirselves are those authors living in a condition of colonialism, i.e. they’re from a colonised from another of more prestige and political and cultural power, consequently their native languages becomes hegemonic to the language spoken by the colonists; the authors who live this kind of experience chose to translate their literary pieces to the dominant language, that is the colonist one, so that their work can emerge from a state of oppression, then reaching a larger number of readers and settling their existence as a creative and make raise their culture from the barriers of the dominant one and speak to the colonists through that; so, we’re talking about a form of cultural resistance.

Emigrant Russian authors didn’t choose to translate their world into the language of the Country which welcomed them, because their native culture weren’t oppressed, but because they were oppressed by their own culture; their works were usually divergent from the aesthetic ideals of the regime, thus they were censored or the official publishing was denied (and, often, neither by Russian magazines abroad); to survive as writers and giving life to their literary pieces, most of these authors chose to translate themselves. This kind of self-translation is, in this case, symmetrical, according to Rainier Grutman, because Russian and Western languages have got the same literary prestige, and the bilinguism here is exogenous (always according to Grutman’s definition) because these languages (especially about the relation between Russians and English) have never shared the same geographical spaces.

What pushed Joseph Brodsky to leave his home country and starting a new life and a new poetic and translating in the USA was the accuse and the arrest for parasitism, happened in 1964 (for which Brodsky was interned in the psychiatric hospital of Moscow and after deported and condemned to the forced labour near Arkhangelsk, on the extreme North of Russia). Thanks to his fame, he was freed in the November 1965 after a petition signed by Russian and foreigner colleagues but for the Party Brodsky was a hostile figure to the regime; in fact, when we requested a permission to go abroad, after he was invited by Robert Lowell to attend the International Festival of Poetry in London, «the Union of Soviet Writers answered there were no poet with that name in Russia: he was crossed out from the official list of Russian writers»[2]; they denied him the right of writing, the natural right to proclaimed himself poet and for a real poet this means denying his life, denying his dignity. Refusing his poetry is to refuse him and thus happened when, in 1972, he was commanded to leave the Soviet Union; that means he was not welcomed by his move country, his Russia, his Russian any longer. So, what can a poet do? Brodsky remembers: «on 10th May 1972 I was called out and they told me:”Take advantage of one of the invitation people make to you to leave for Israel. We prepare a visa for you in two days”. “But I don’t want to take advantage of”. “So, prepare for the worst”. I couldn’t do anything but to give up: I managed to make the gems prolonged to 10th June (“after this date, you’re going to have no identity card, absolutely nothing”): I wanted to pass until my 33rd birthdays with my parent in Leningrad, the last one. When they gave me the expat visa, they make me jump the line: there were many Jews waiting days and night for the visa who looked at me astonished, envying me […]. I past the last night in the USSR writing a letter to Brezhnev. The following day I was in Vienna»[3]. He was in Vienna when he met the English poet Brodsky loved most, Wystan Auden, with whom he attended the International Festival of Poetry in London, event that allowed him to meet other authors from the literary Anglo-Saxon world, such as Robert Lowell, but he already left Vienna to move to the US in the July of the same year: he was offered to work to the University of Michigan (where he taught until to 1980). Thus began one of the most important phase of Brodsky’s work and his path to self-translation, which allowed him to reborn as a man and a poet. He lost his language, his Country, but he found a new language through which thinking, loving, writing, through which expressing himself, through which existing. To write is to exist.

Translating ourselves to exist, translating as that our own work to overcome national and cultural borders, to destroy linguistic barriers, to annihilate the borders. «Civilization is the sum of total of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator and its main vehicle – speaking both metaphorically and literally – is translation. The wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of tundra is translation»[4]. Translation is what allows us to converse with other cultures, with the Other, and the translator is, thus, a cultural mediator that lays between two interlocutors and help them to understand each other, not only linguistically, but also culturally, that let bonds between values, norms and beliefs be understandable to who doesn’t know them. Brodsky gave new life to his poems, already oppressed by the hostility of Soviet regime, and he gave the, new social coordinates, although he destroyed the grammar, i.e. the foundation of English language in order to adapt this language to the linguistic malleability of Russian, in order to everything, the intrinsic structure and so the semantic built by that could persist. «Brodsky […] insisted strongly on a mimetic translation i.e. a translation which would retain a poem’s verse structure – especially its rhymes, verse metre, rhyme patterns and stanzaic design should be preserved above all»[5].

A mimetic translation, them, which doesn’t break the architecture of poetry and it fits, as well, the presence of Russian soul in the English language and so the in grammar and morphosyntax, that comes from Pushkinian tradition, according to the form and the content corresponding and so, none of them should be sacrificed in the translation. A tradition enhanced by the Acmeists (such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam), from whom Brodsky took inspiration. According to the Acmeists, in translation, must be preserved the number of lines, verse metre, rhyme patterns, types of enjambements, rhyme types, linguistic register, types of metaphor, special devices and changes of tone. Following this tradition Brodsky translated his poems from Russian into English, though transforming and upsetting the target language, though drowning bitter criticisms for that which will be have called “Englishness”. Upsetting the language in order to appear himself as a poet, as a Russia. His soul must have to emerge, if he wanted to live through poetry, and the only way to do it, in this case, is to annihilate the rule of the other language, a language chosen to survive. This foreigner who transformed a language that is not his to make it an instruments of resistance, an instruments of existence. The harshest criticism towards his English was from the British School, which blames Brodsky of transforming the language to make it adapt to his needs; a criticism that hide the will to protect the integrity of the language from an “intruder” like the Russian Brodsky. Despite all, the poet received much esteem, especially from the American School which appreciated his experimenting with the language. Experimentalism due to the dissatisfaction of English translation to Russian poems that Brodsky criticized because they were not capable to keep the complex morphosyntactic structure of the poetic of Russian language. He wrote about it: «Translation from Russian into English is one of the most horrendous mindbenders. There aren’t all that many minds equal to this. Even a good, talented, brilliant poet who intuitively understands the task is incapable of restoring a Russian poem in English. The English language simply doesn’t have those moves. The translator is tied grammatically, structurally»[6]. Even though his approach which was very little conform to modern translation theories, even though we can blame him to have turned upside-down the English and so we can speak of Englishness in his poems, Brodsky «[…] approached his translation with a fervour verging on the quixotic, squaring the circle of poetic translation, defying the spell of impossibility and bridging single-handedly the linguistic gap with great energy» [7].

Viviana Rizzo

Notes

1. AA.VV., Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier e Luc van Doorslaer Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, p. 306

2. «L'Unione degli Scrittori Sovietici rispose che non c'era nessun poeta con quel nome in Russia: era stato depennato dalla lista ufficiale degli scrittori russi», in CONDELLO, Anna, “Iosif Brodskij: una biografia intellettuale”, in Russian Echo, web (http://www.russianecho.net/contributi/speciali/brodskij/bio.html retrieved in 28th May 2021)

3. «Il 10 maggio 1972 mi chiamano e mi dicono: "Approfitti subito di uno dei tanti inviti che le vengono per emigrare in Israele e parta. Le prepariamo il visto in due giorni". "Ma non ho nessuna intenzione di approfittarne". "E allora si prepari al peggio". Non potevo far altro che cedere: sono riuscito al massimo a farmi prolungare i termini fino al 10 giugno ("dopo questa data non ha più carta d’identità , non ha più niente"): volevo almeno passare a Leningrado il mio trentaduesimo compleanno, con i miei genitori, l'ultimo. Quando mi hanno consegnato il visto d'espatrio, mi hanno fatto saltare la fila: c'erano tanti ebrei che aspettavano, che bivaccavano là in anticamera giorni e giorni in attesa del visto e che mi guardavano esterrefatti, con invidia [...]. L'ultima notte in Urss l'ho passata scrivendo una lettera a Breznev. Il giorno dopo ero a Vienna», in CONDELLO, Anna, “Iosif Brodskij: una biografia intellettuale”, in Russian Echo, web (http://www.russianecho.net/contributi/speciali/brodskij/bio.html retrieved in 28th May 2021)

4. BRODSKIJ, Iosif, “The Child of Civilization”, Less than one, London, Penguin, 1986, p. 139, cit. in ISHOV, Zakhar, “Posthorse of Civilisation”: Joseph Brodsky translating Joseph Brodsky. Towards a New Theory of Russian-English Poetry Translation, Berlin, Freien Universität Berlin, 2008, p. 2

5. ISHOV, Zakhar, “Posthorse of Civilisation”: Joseph Brodsky translating Joseph Brodsky. Towards a New Theory of Russian-English Poetry Translation, p. 4

6. SOLKOV, Solomon, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, New York, The Free Press, 1998, p. 86, cit. in ISHOV, Zakhar, “Posthorse of Civilisation”: Joseph Brodsky translating Joseph Brodsky. Towards a New Theory of Russian-English Poetry Translation, p. 5

7. ISHOV, Zakhar, “Posthorse of Civilisation”: Joseph Brodsky translating Joseph Brodsky. Towards a New Theory of Russian-English Poetry Translation, p. 3

Sources

1. COCCO, Simona, “Lost in (Self-)Translation? Riflessioni sull’autotraduzione”, in AA.VV. , Lost in Translation. Testi e culture allo specchio, vol. 6 (2009), pp. 103-112

2. GRUTMAN, Rainier, “Beckett and Beyond. Putting Self-Translation in Perspective”, in Orbus Litterarum, n. 68, vol. 3 (2013), pp. 188-2016

3. GRUTMAN Rainier, VAN BOLDEREN Trish, “Self-Translation”, in A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2014, pp. 323-332

4. ISHOV, Zakhar, “Post-horse of Civilisation”: Joseph Brodsky translating Joseph Brodsky. Towards a Mew Theory of Russian-English Poetry Translation, Berlin, Freien Universität Berlin, 2008

5. MONTINI, Chiara, “Self-Translation”, in Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, pp. 307-308

And here it is, the other translation project I was working on!

How are you doing, folks? Fine as always, I hope. This little story was fun. I have to admit, I feel that that was a ton of missed potential by having the story focus on Sally and the triplets. Not that its a bad thing, mind you, but because the concept of having Magica and Scrooge be forced to live with each other and get used to it is something that should see the light of day very soon. Why did nobody think of doing it?

Magica and Scrooge's interactions are hilarious, to me at least. The signs are pretty funny, and I hope I managed to get that funniness across. Their dynamic was interesting, but again, it wasn't explored, which is a crying shame.

As for Sally, she's fun. She appeared in, as stated, issue 696 of my edition of the comics, and she was basically a teenager who, trying to defy her parents' warning about using her abilities, ended up in the Duckverse. She appeared once or twice in my edition of the comics afterwards, but she's a standard magical girl who cares about the environment and stuff. There's no real limit to her powers, unlike Magica, so her abilities often changed depending on the situation, but so far she's not overpowered. Her expressions and movements are lively, so the artist here really did a good job.

The plot was nice, if predictable. The general artstyle does bring the characters to life, and once more, I feel as if this comic tried cramming too many characters in too little space. I personally would've been more than satisfied with a slice-of-life with Magica and Scrooge getting to know more about each other, but you can't have it all, I suppose.

La version française sera prête en quelques jours au maximum. Apologies to my French speaking friends, but I need to sort some grammaire first.

Love and Pedagogy

So as only a casual watcher of Trek (mainly DS9 and Voyager, but some TNG reruns) as a youngling alongside an older sib, I am surprised to be interested in it now. I shouldn’t be, really. I love a good swashbuckle, sea-based narratives and philosophising about the nature of humanity. 

I should also not be surprised that I can find a lot to think about - and enjoy -  in it from the point of view of language, books, and identity. I did not expect to see Unamuno in Star Trek and, as I mentioned in this post, the translation angle just fascinates me: both internally to the narrative and Rios as a character, but also in terms of the meta-construction of the series. Arguably the existentialism isn’t interesting in and of itself, it’s how it gets applied to political philosophy, but that’s by-the-by here.

On the practical side of things, my default is to be skeptical with TV. The book could well just be a convenient shorthand to convey that Rios is a broody existential spaceman An Intellectual™. Still, I’d like to think that using a translation speaks to the creators’ having a certain amount of awareness of how the audience watches the show. In this regard, presenting the book in English opens up a reference which is likely otherwise unheard of to a primarily anglophone viewership. More than this though, it’s collaborative. Building in intertexts which can enrich the experience of watching the series, but aren’t impenetrable at face value, leaves the choice of how to interact with it up to the viewer.

Now, how to knit this into the universe of the show?

As I said before, I don’t remember a lot about Trek, so I have a lot of questions. What, culturally, survives into the 24th Century? How are books produced and distributed? If they’re being replicated, what records are these based on? (and, as a follow-up, are archivists and librarians venerated now as the absolute saints they are?) What does the standard educational syllabus contain these days? How does universal translation fit in to all of this? And language-learning in general? etc. etc. etc... 

It’s entirely plausible that an English version is all Rios could get hold of. Or he was educated in English, so ¿qué más da? However, if I’m indulging my personal preferred flight-of-fancy: the guy’s an honest-to-goodness nerd, to the core. 

I had decided before that he was reading Del Sentimiento Trágico in English for the translation, that he already knew the work. Now @cristobalrios​’ comment gives me further excuse! Supposing for the moment that the Flitch translation is the edition in question, it would be well worth reading if one’s interested in Unamuno. The heavy involvement of the original author in a translation blurs the boundaries between translation and revision, particularly raising issues around what constitutes an ‘authoritative’ version. And thinking about a familiar subject from a new angle exposes new perspectives, as Unamuno himself states in the preface:

For just as a new friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself, as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which, if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is with a new public.

Star Trek: Picard may not address Del Sentimiento Trágico textually, or even in passing again, nonetheless it bears interesting character implications for Rios. It fits with what we’ve seen of the man so far: someone who watches, triangulates his surroundings, and takes emotional soundings; who takes the time to understand why something remains closed. 

So I've been wanting to improve on my translation skills these days, and what do you know? I found this nice comic in my possession.

I really like Magica's expressions in this one. They're so lively! The artist here realy outdid themselves. I don't know why I chose this one in particular, but it's probably due to a mixture of the expressions, the jokes which I wanted to translate and the general story, which I enjoyed.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that Magica De Spell, Queen Of Napoli, Sorcercess Of Shadows, Sister Of That One Nerd Who Does The Dishes, is still one of the unluckiest people in the Duckverse, Donald not included. This comic didn't however, and it makes staying with Magica throughout her adventures a little more endearing. A nice, sympatheic adventure with our favorite villainess as she has to suffer through the horrors of losing an important object in a street.

While this was a warm-up for another project of mine, there are some points that may merit commentary.

1)This is not a 1:1 translation. While that may be obvious and logical, keep in mind that this is not a direct translation and that I added some parts to English in order to enhance/change the experience. In other words, localization.

2) Poe. Yes, I am so in love with a character that we know so little about that I'm willing to explain why he's here. My local Translators created this Head-cannon that Ratface and Poe are one and the same, it's just that after becoming a raven, he now adopts a phonetically similar name in order to hide his identity from his family. This sometimes poses the question of why he's a mute in some comics, like this one, but I generally went off it to please my mind.

3) Leave your thoughts! They're all very much important to me, so leave them, whether it be on the comics itself, the art, or the translation, feel free to comment and do whatever you will with it as it will generally make me happy.

Et pour mes chers amis Francophones, je vous présente ma traduction française! C'est dommage que le français n'est pas vraiment répandu sur Internet, mais ce n'est pas notre sujet.

Pour ceux qui ont vu l'affiche en anglais, je vous présente la même histoire mais en français. Bien entendu, vous noterez quelques différences par rapport à la version anglaise, et c'est parce que celle-ci, comme la précédante, n'est pas 100% comme le text original.

Néamoins, j'espère que ces différences n'affectueront pas la qualité de lecture. J'ai traduit cette histoire en particulier à cause de la qualité des dessins; les expressions du visage de Miss Tick en particulier, les blagues que je voulais traduire et parce que l'histoire était amusante généralement. Vous allez aussi noter quelques détails ici et là qui vous rappelleront (peut-être) des détails de Don Rosa. Bon, voilà.