|
©
Anthony Pym 2000
Paper presented to the V Jornadas Internacionales
de Historia de la traducción, Universidad de León,
29-31 May 2000
The accumulation and
ordering of facts is a very necessary task; it constitutes the
archaeology at the basis of any history. If the facts are wrong,
they should be corrected. Yet the task of translation history
itself, to trace the trails of relations between cultures, requires
more than raw data. Some principles of method, and debate about
the same, may be in order.
The following notes
run through suggestions for two such principles. They have evolved
from a series of case studies, mostly from the Hispanic past (1).
As such, they cannot aspire to any universality of thought or
application. Field-restricted, they might yet be of interest to
those tilling similar soils.
Principle 1:
Study translators, then texts
Instinctively, we
filólogos reach for a text, to check its language, to
compare it with a source or, more profitably, to compare translations
with alternative translations. It is a normal thing to do. Yet
as soon as we do this normal thing, we find ourselves dealing
with an issue of sides: target and source, here and there, home
and away, even when one of the sides is only virtual (as might
occur when comparing various translations of the one source).
Thus are we invited never to question the line separating those
two sides, nor the correlated belonging of whatever should be
on either side. Over there everything is in English, with English
turns of phrase, English mentality, and all the stereotypes
one could hope to attach to such things. Over here we find the
same but in Spanish. We are invited not to see the amount of
Englishness that is in things Spanish, nor viceversa, nor the
extent to which our epistemological borders conceal the middle
grounds.
The two-sided models
flounder rather badly when we enter something like the Hispanic
twelfth century (Toledo and all that). There, one side is Arabic
and Islamic and respectably other, ‘our’ side is Latin and Christian
and familiar enough, but in the overlaps we find translating
Jews, Mozarabs, the occasional Morisco, not to mention the oral
use of Romance, or some kind of Castilian, or Leonese, or Aragonese,
or Catalan, or indeed written Hebrew texts. All those languages
and modes of thought, including the Islamic, might legitimately
claim to be Hispanic, all within the one geopolitical mess.
In such cases, the basic binary divisions are of remarkably
little help.
A facile way to deal
with such problems is to manifest them, to describe the ways
all language products, including translations, escape homogeneity
and manifest difference. Such might be the application of theory
that can only discover itself. A more radical step, however,
is to question whether our object of study need be a language
product at all. After all, if the here-or-there border is a
function of texts as translations, the overcoming of that border
might simply involve looking at something else. Translators,
the human producers of translations, might also be legitimate
objects of knowledge. The history of translators is at least
as valid a general organizing principle as have been the various
focuses on source-text authors, source texts, or target-vs.-source
languages, cultures or nations.
Once one starts to
look at translators rather than translations, several realizations
are likely to dawn:
- First, in the
Hispanic field as elsewhere, one soon finds that remarkably
little is known about most translators (2). In fact, the few
exceptions tend to be translators who found fame wearing a different
hat (as authors, political figures, polemicists, whatever).
Considerable archival work is often required to piece together
the elements of a biography; far more is needed before something
like a character can emerge. Yet the searches are mostly possible.
What they reveal is not only a hidden labyrinth of textual history,
but also, indirectly, a few of the historical reasons for the
longstanding suppression of translators as significant cultural
figures. For example, here we have a fairly obscure Catalan
translator of poetry, responsible for some eight anthologies
of translated verse, in Castilian, between 1914 and 1921. His
contribution to Spanish literature is quantitatively impressive,
yet few literary histories bear mention of Fernando Maristany.
Finding out about his life is rather like unearthing a tomb.
Why should this be so? The reasons for his marginal status must
include the rupture of the Civil War, and perhaps his cultural
position as a Catalan in Spanish letters. Yet this is not to
pretend there has been some kind of canonical conspiracy against
him because of his status as a translator. Nor, in general,
is it useful to set out to right a major wrong in the name of
oppressed translators. There may be great human qualities to
be revealed through translation history. But in this particular
case, no, Maristany, along with many of his ilk, was wilfully
marginal, casting himself into a service role, adopting grossly
conservative or derivative stances on most issues, and producing
some occasionally ghastly verse. Uncovering and admitting such
things is part of the fun of the game.
- Even when less
than heroic, the translators of the past tend to force recognition
of what we might call multidiscursive mediation, perhaps just
as fancy name for the fact that translators usually do more
than just translate. Maristany, for example, was an editor,
publisher and author in his own right as well as a translator
(family money saved him from lowly obligations). Many others
use translation as one leg of a multifarious career, perhaps
in initial attempts to enter the literary world, in the leisurely
creativity of retirement, or, particularly in Hispanic history,
as a means of survival in years of hardship or exile. The resulting
connections and overlaps between the various professions and
forms of cultural mediation can be of great methodological use.
To appreciate why, consider for a moment the directives of a
method that would have us look at translations first and receiving
(poly)systems second. Such a method obliges us to move from
the several thousand shifts embodied in a translated fragment
(wherein many a descriptive scholar already becomes lost) and
confront the whole churning dynamic of a culture, supposedly
in search of some kind of explanation for the translation. Where
should the researcher start? One could only talk about things
as vague as canons and genres, since anything more specific
must be invisible in the multitude. To get a handle on the systems,
at least, it is eminently useful to consider the human mediators,
to look at the discourses they brought together, to try to see
the way those discourses configured intercultural space, and
then to look at the main debates in which those discourses spoke
to each other. If we are in the twelfth century, look at the
church and the monastic orders: most of the translators were
working for them, arguing quietly about the status of pagan
science. In the thirteenth, consider the role of the Jews and
Italians under Alfonso X, in the context of implicit debates
about the role of service minorities in a fledgling national
system. In the fourteenth, look carefully at the mediating positions
of Catalan and Aragonese, with underground problematics that
have survived through to the autonomías of today. And
so on.
- Once we can see
translators as mediators on many domains, it becomes quite normal
to question their cultural allegiance to any one side. Were
the protoscientific translators of the twelfth century entirely
on the side of Christian doctrine? One suspects not. Were the
Jewish astronomers paid by Alfonso uniquely interested in the
well-being of their king? Américo Castro (2) suggested
they worked into Castilian so as to undermine the Latin of Christendom.
Such hypotheses undoubtedly require numerous secondary considerations.
Yet the questions themselves only become possible once we abandon
the preconception that mediators work—or should work—for one
side only. No, intercultural professions also work for themselves,
for their own material well-being, and perhaps even for some
ideals that will withstand the decline of national sovereignties.
- Find the translators,
see who paid them, see what discourses they borrowed and mixed,
what minor elements of power they thus found. Usually, unsurprisingly,
we also find considerable mobility. Mediators tend to move,
from genre to genre, client to client, sometimes country to
country. This mobility no doubt increases with the development
of transport systems. Yet it is by no means new. Consider the
case of the Englishman Robertus Ketenensis (many other names
are possible), mostly responsible for the first Latin version
of the Qur’an (c.1143). He did the job ‘in the region of the
Ebro’, but in the pay of the Order of Cluny. So was he an ideological
footsoldier of Christendom? Perhaps, since immediately after
the translation he was appointed archdeacon at Pamplona, probably
as a reward. Yet he could not have stayed there long. Robertus
signed a translation in Segovia in 1145 and drew up astronomical
tables for London in 1149. Vocational integration into the church
structure was obviously not his personal aim. His mobility reveals
his allegiance, to science more than to church or state structures.
We can trace the history of such moving feet.
So much for what
we might discover by looking at translators rather than at translations.
Good scholars will object here that our distinction is naïve,
that it suggests the immediate availability of people long dead,
that what we are working on is always a series of texts, be
they translations or biographical documents. Yes, of course,
our historical translators are products of language. Yet there
is a difference involved, a very fundamental difference. On
the one hand, a certain set of research questions focuses on
reconstructing social profiles, financial transactions, dates
and movements, the archeological details that might piece together
a system rather than just assume it. On the other, we find attempts
to privilege translators as a ‘voice’ within the textual translation
(4). Such attempts are interesting reading performances, destined
to find results. But the questions they are asking, like the
methods they employ, reveal something hidden (translatorial
subjectivity is indeed often suppressed) that remains quite
obvious in the external existence of historical translators.
There seems little reason why translation history should deploy
intricate textual criticism when it could attain many of its
goals more directly by asking biographical and sociological
questions. That is, by seeking its points of departure in translators
rather than in translations.
Principle 2:
Look for intercultures
We have mentioned
‘intercultural space’ and ‘intercultural professions’ without
properly explaining what the terms mean. For us, that ‘inter-’
is not to be confused with things that go from one culture to
another (‘cross-cultural seems an adequate adjective for that),
nor with heterogeneity within a social space (‘multicultural’
would suffice there). Instead, it implies an overlap or intersection
like the following:
![]()
Here we see two cultures
(there could be more) intersecting each other, where a symbolic
translator could placed in the intersection. This is a model
(a set of explanatory hypotheses); it is not a law of translation;
it is not a definition of all translators. The model might be
useful in that it implicitly challenges axiomatic beliefs in
fidelity to the source (as if all translators were mere agents
of Culture 1) or loyalty to the target (as if they were all
wholly determined by the systems of Culture 2). The model thus
questions both fidelity-based evaluations and target-based systemic
approaches. It suggests that translators may work in a fairly
specific locale, drawing on more than one culture (they have
at least learnt something of another language) but wholly determined
by none.
In the Hispanic context,
such interculturality might most obviously be seen in the position
of the translating Jews and Mozarabs from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries, alongside the various travelling scholars
from many parts of Europe. It might be continued through to
the various Protestant and protesting translators forced to
leave the Spain of the Counter-Reformation and enter the Spain
of European exile. It might also be found the Sephardic and
Morisco diasporas, in the tradition of cultural mixes and renegade
churchmen in the Americas and Philippines, in the waves of intellectuals
expelled as Jesuits, afrancesados, Liberals and Republicans
(to name but a few historical causes). Hispanic interculturality
has a rich past in medieval mixes, and a tragic modernity on
the fringes of a robust monocultural core. The translators tend
to be found in those mixes, along those fringes, in those exiles,
quite logically because of the interculturality they were born
into or had imposed upon them. Translation is one of the services
a minority cultural group can render; it is one of the ways
an exiled intellectual can earn a living. We should thus not
to be shocked to find translators among such groups. But the
discovery might not be possible if we start from Toury’s model
where “translators are members of a target culture, or tentatively
assume that role” (5).
So much for the abstract
qualities of ‘intercultural’ and ‘interculturality’. When we
talk of ‘intercultures’ we are actually going quite a few steps
further. The non-abstractive substantive suggests that the middle
space has structures and dynamics that are something like those
of cultures themselves. Rather than a convenient and transitory
accident of history, this overlap would function as a social
space, with its own membership rites, norms of behaviour, ideologies
and ethics. Do we have any real grounds for using such a model?
In the Hispanic field,
the notion of an ‘interculture’ cannot be construed to refer
to a particular ethnic group. There is certainly no pueblo or
Volk whose members are exclusively translators. There is no
question of membership by birthright (although birthright-based
mediatory groups can be found in West Africa and the Sparta
of Herodotus, at least). Further, there is a marked lack of
historical awareness underlying any apparent continuity. The
exiled Spanish Protestants translating the Bible in the sixteenth
century expressed no particular identification with the position
of Hispanic Jewish translators in previous centuries (although
they certainly borrowed from Jewish translators of the Bible
into Castilian), nor with the position of northern European
translators in medieval Hispania (who linked with the cultural
networks of the Jews). We might argue that the translators should
have thought about such connections. Yet the weight of primary
cultural identification, the constructed continuities of nationalist
histories, means we cannot really expect such translators to
act in term of century-spanning intercultures.
At the same time,
significant historical networks are frequently formed between
translators in ways that constantly cross cultural borders.
We might think of the Jews, Christians and Mozarabs brought
together in the translation teams of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, or of the European protestants moving between the
centres like Wittenberg, Leuven, and London in the sixteenth
century, of the many foreigners brought together in the translation
schools and agencies of Spain today. These intercultural groups
certainly had a sense of community and common purpose. It would
perhaps be counterproductive to expect much more.
Let us then
restrict our notion of an interculture on the following fronts:
- Membership is
determined according to professional criteria, more than any
form of primary belonging (birthright, race, ethnicity, mother
tongue). Translators would thus have a sense of community simply
because they are translators. That, however, is factitious.
We have already allowed that translators usually do more than
translate; this multidiscursive status could only contradict
any membership exclusive to translators. We fare rather better
when looking for relationships between what we might call mediatory
professions, covering all the various forms of text localization.
An interculture might thus include diplomats, churchmen, foreign-influenced
authors, foreign-language teachers, journalists, negotiators
at all levels, and increasingly the marketers, business executives,
scientists and academics working in globalizing sectors. In
each case, we must be prepared to follow the links that lead
to such configurations, even at the risk of producing something
more than translation history.
- Viewed as such,
intercultures would always need the support of more primary
structures of cultural belonging. That is, they would always
present themselves as being in some way secondary to the relations
upon which they operate. Translators would thus work on or for
Culture 1 or Culture 2, and if they should function in the name
of either side, it is as agent and not principal. For example,
when Alonso de Cartagena debated translation strategies with
Leonardo Bruni in the years between 1430 and 1437, he was not
so much representing Spain or acting as a Spaniard as he was
defending a certain tradition for the translation of Aristotle.
The debate was situated in a meta position, second to the more
primary division of cultures. Cartagena and Bruni could thus
find retain their primary identities while at the same time
finding much common ground. Both were concerned with the use
of classical texts to better their respective societies (they
differed on the means, not the end); both probably had interests
in the wool trade that connected Burgos and Florence (6). This
professional ‘secondness’, not to be confused with the Peircean
use of the term, makes discursive as well as social sense. Indeed,
it would seem highly pertinent to the translation form, which
by definition presupposes an initial separation of languages
and cultures.
- Because they are
professionally based and condemned to secondness, intercultures
would seem to be transitory. People with different skills and
competencies come together to work on cross-cultural relations
in a given sphere of human affairs; they do their work; they
translate; then their professional relations loosen as the historical
task diminishes. This might account for the lack of historical
awareness; intermediaries have no history as a social group.
It might also say why Julio-César Santoyo, in introducing
his anthology of Hispanic translation theory, observes that
the various fragments “no constituyen una ‘tradición’,
ni dependen genéticamente unos de otros” (7). Traditions
in translation theory might be the exception rather than the
rule; the fundamental problems are perhaps never resolved, they
merely lose importance for a while. They come and go, with the
intercultures themselves.
- Deprived
of great diachronic wealth, intercultures would appear to wax
and wane in accordance with circumstance. For Columbus, translation
was a problem solved by taking along a polyglot Jew and, failing
that, captured natives. From that humble beginning grew the
wide intercultures promoted by church and state in the Americas
(Cisneros argued for the development of a native-born control
caste), historically mediating until that middle overlap grew
so wide as to have become a new culture in itself (virtually
everyone learnt Spanish). And more or less parallel to that
growth of a culture from an interculture, the mediatory caste
working from Latin declined in historical importance and power,
becoming a thin intersection surviving as good conscience or
taste in our churches and universities today. Intercultures
may disappear either by becoming general or by shrinking away.
More important, at a point of relative generalization (as in
the case of English-Spanish exchanges today) we might expect
to find a very wide range of professions interacting in the
same intercultural space as translators; translators’ clients
and readerships would not be in primary cultures but in the
extensive and growing intersection; everyone would be a bit
of a translator; the quality of everyday translating might be
expected to decline. Such hypotheses should not be excluded
from translation history.
- Where are the
intercultures physically located? The question can be rephrased:
Where are the networks between professions most intense? Where
do people of different cultural backgrounds come together? The
answer, usually, is to be found in cities, particularly big
cities, the hubs of cross-cultural communications. Translators
consequently tend to be either in cities or in the networks
centred on cities. Electronic space might be expected to change
such concentrations, yet the age of globalization has at the
same time brought about the world cities specializing in complex
communications. Is it productive to ask if translators belong
to one culture or another? Was Maristany Spanish or Catalan?
Was Cartagena Castilian, Converso or part of the European church?
If we think in terms of cities and networks, such questions
become rather meaningless. The places of intercultural belonging
are not the rural expanses and seas of nation-states.
Envoi
Some ten years ago,
at the second Jornadas de Historia de la Traducción in
León, I presented a series of complaints about the methods
being used in translation history (the paper had the undeserved
honour of becoming the first article in the first issue of Livius).
Since then, as was to be expected, I have found it rather more
difficult to construct histories than to criticize the work
of others. Now, in a situation of relatively abundant research
activity, there are no real fights to be fought against alternative
approaches. It is enough to do what we are happiest with. I
want to look at translators, others at translations; I like
intercultures, others like target systems. And more: I seek
large-scale historical relations, others keep track of names,
dates and places; I like to start from the study of debates
about translation, others are content to locate translation
norms. Each side of these equations can help the other. The
sum of all those parts will be translation history, and we should
be most grateful to those who carry out the tasks that interest
us the least. No matter how benighted or short-sighted I might
personally consider the various nationalisms still projected
onto translations (since translations separate cultures, they
are eminently useful to nationalisms), much can be learnt from
the data thus found. And we may yet hope that the intercultural,
if uncovered, will eventually convert reseachers to its cause.
It is in bemused but still evangelistic spirit (call it middle
age) that the above principles are put forward.
Notes
1. Most of the case
studies are included or summarized in Anthony Pym, Method in
Translation History, Manchester: St Jerome, 1998; and, Negotiating
the Frontier. Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History,
Manchester: St Jerome, 2000.
2. Hispanic letters
nevertheless probably have a greater tradition in this field
than do most cultures. We might trace our projects back to Juan
Antonio Pellicer y Saforcada’s Ensayo de una bibliotheca de
traductores españoles, Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1778,
and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s Biblioteca de traductores
españoles, vols. 54-57 of Obras completas. Santander:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1952-53.
The series of Jornadas de Historia de la Traducción in
León would also seem without parallel in other climes.
Hispanic translation history might nevertheless benefit enormously
from a project along the lines of the Oxford Guide to Literature
in English Translation, ed. Peter France, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
3. Américo
Castro, España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos,
Buenos Aires, 1948, 454-478.
4. See, for example,
Theo Hermans, “The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative”,
Target 8 (1996), 23-48; and “Some Concluding Comments on the
Debates and Responses”, Current Issues in Language and Society
5 (1998), 135-142, esp. p. 40.
5. Gideon Toury,
Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1995, 172.
6. See Nicholas Round,
‘Libro Llamado Fedrón’. Plato’s ‘Phaedo’ translated by
Pero Díaz de Toledo. London: Tamesis, 1993, 72.
7. Julio-César
Santoyo, Teoría y crítica de la traducción:
Antología, Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona, 1987, 19.
|
