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Traducción,
emigración y culturas.
Edited by Miguel Hernando de Larramendi and Juan Pablo Arias.
Pp 286. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla–La
Mancha, 1999. Pb. € 12.02.
Orientalismo,
exotismo y traducción. Edited by Gonzalo Fernández
Parrilla and Manuel C. Feria García. Pp 247. Cuenca:
Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla–La Mancha, 2000.
Pb. € 12.02.
Traducir
la edad media: La traducción de la literatura medieval
románica. Edited by Juan Paredes and Eva Muñoz
Raya. Pp 465. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada,
1999. Pb. No price indicated.
©
Anthony Pym 2001
Review written
for Translation & Literature
Translation Studies
is alive and well in Spain. At last count the country had
some 27 universities with specialized translator-training
of one kind or another, teaching almost 7,000 students at
any given moment. This is a significant institutional base
for serious academic work. A few fundamental reference texts
are also well in place, notably Julio-César Santoyo’s
excellent anthology of Hispanic translation theory since
the 14th century (Teoría y crítica de la
tradución: antología, Bellaterra: Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona, 1987) and Francisco Lafarga’s
similarly essential mutlilingual anthology of Western translation
theories (El discurso sobre la traducción en la
historia, Barcelona: EUB, 1996). More recently we have
José Francisco Ruiz Casanova’s reference archeology
(Aproximación a una historia de la traducción
en España, Madrid: Cátedra, 2000), which
systematically lists translators and translations for each
century of Spanish literature. In the background, the extent
of research may be grasped from the 6,000 or so Hispanic
books and articles on translation listed in Santoyo’s Bibliografía
de la traducción (León: Universidad de
León, 1996). And beyond that lie the growing lists
of corpora and theses from Spain’s ten or so doctoral programmes
in Translation Studies. Each year Spain probably organizes
more conferences on translation than any other country,
attracting the main international names and exchanging reams
of papers. There is a whole lot of Translation Studies going
on.
Yet very little
of this activity has had much impact outside of Spain; few
of the names are cited; virtually none of the books are
translated out of Spanish. One of the reasons for this is
obvious enough to be dispensed with forthwith: many of the
publications, including those to be addressed here, are
heavily subsidized and are printed by university presses
that are relatively unconcerned with distribution and sales.
Many, including the random sample that has fallen to us
here, are thinly disguised conference proceedings, edited
with few visible selection criteria, very roughly organized
in terms of thematics, and strung together without minimal
scholarly apparatuses like abstracts, notes on authors,
or indices of names and subjects. Everyone goes to the conference,
almost everyone gets published, and the result is too often
a curriculum-building jamboree where any linear reader of
the product simply has to take the rough with the smooth.
As a result, much of the quantitatively impressive work
in Spanish Translation Studies remains relatively unstructured
and unfiltered, tapering off into parallel play as mutual
respect. Notably lacking are across-the-board evaluative
criteria or central points of reference, such as might be
in evidence if Spain had a solidly refereed academic journal
like Translation and Literature, to name just a random example.
There is no such journal; the publications generally do
not function as qualitative filters; we have to work with
what is there. Which, if understood against this background,
is sometimes surprisingly good.
The volume Traducción,
emigración y culturas (Translation, emigration
and cultures) brings together papers presented at a conference
organized by the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo en 1996.
As such, it might be taken as a worthy representative of
the many interesting symposia and courses put together by
this young institution, founded in 1994 and ostensibly dedicated
to exchanges between Hispanic, Arabic and Hebrew cultures
(recalling the mission of the Toledan translators of the
12th and 13th centuries). What we have here is an admirably
interdisciplinary and intercultural volume. It starts with
broadly sociological surveys of immigration policies in
France, Holland and the Spanish education system, presenting
a European social reality that is only now becoming truly
problematic in Spain, long a country of emigration rather
than immigration. This forms the backdrop for a series of
texts on ‘cultural markets’, focusing specifically on the
situation of Arabic culture within European contexts: the
politics of publishing, of journals, of the Arabic service
of the BBC, and of various NGOs. Only then do we enter the
very pragmatic problems of translation, with Roberto Mayoral
and others writing on the translation of official texts
for immigrants, and Karima Hajajj and Manuel Feria García
explaining their work as sworn interpreters in legal settings.
Amidst several displays of irrelevant erudition, this same
section also includes texts that we would recognize as straight
criticism and theory. Basil Hatim, published in English,
analyzes the way Arabic literature tends to be excessively
domesticated (through ‘overshooting’) when translated into
English. Ovidi Carbonell, whom we shall soon meet in a slightly
different context, mulls over various postmodern and postcolonial
approaches to these problems and warns against their ‘facile
macrological solutions to problems that can only be solved
micrologically, in the everyday processes of opposing, constructing,
representing and displacing’ (172). And that is perhaps
the basic message to be gleaned from the interdisciplinary
perspective of the volume: despite the grand theories, the
cultural situations configured by immigration are irredeemably
complex, to be worked at phrase-by-phrase, at the level
of practice. In keeping with this vision, the final section
of the book offers five reflections on literature and exile,
written by exiled writers, all of them translated here from
Arabic or, in the case of the Turkish writer Emine Sevgi
Özdamar, from German. If read by themselves, these
final texts might seem just so many writers spinning out
their writerly platitudes. In this context, however, the
personal experiences, often tragic yet narrated in calm
and sometimes ironic voices, show human souls within the
social statistics. There, perhaps, we also locate the practical
role of literary translation in the vital and turbulent
remix of cultures: this is a book that not only accords
translation a role, but sets about achieving that task by
translating. If only other collective publications were
as clear in their aims.
Orientalismo,
exotismo y traducción (Orientalism, exoticism
and translation) is another set of proceedings from the
Escuela de Traductores de Toledo (actually number 8 in the
series), tackling many of the same themes and in some cases
with the same contributors. Far from applying the critique
of orientalism such as found in Edward Said, the volume
starts from an orient within, namely that Semitic part of
Hispanic culture that was indeed the first Orient for the
West. Introductory historical studies thus seek to undo
the ‘essentialist’ myth of an ideal Islamic element in the
Hispanic Middle Ages. Eduardo Manzano Moreno does this by
tracing the development of Arabic studies in Spain, seen
as a historical discipline emerging in the 19th century
and participating in the identity search triggered by the
defeats of 1898. The tone here is self-confident critique
of one’s own past. The classical research in which Miguel
Asín Palacios proclaimed the Islamic within Hispanic
glory, arguing for example that a Toledan translation from
Arabic influenced the eschatology of Dante, is here criticized
through simple guilt by association: the same Asín
Palacios apparently believed that cultural affinity also
made Moroccans fight in Franco’s army (33-35). Thus would
the current historian (Manzano Moreno) distance the idealizations
of the past. Spain is no longer under Franco; many myths
can be undone. Yet the democratic critique still does little
to address the historical facts, nor does it provide many
new ideas about the part of the Hispanic that remains undoubtedly
Semitic and quite possibly exotic. Further, philological
investigation here offers unfortunately little help with
such questions. Federico Corriente, for example, defines
the term ‘culture’ in such a way that ‘in the Iberian peninsula
there were only two cultures in the Middle Ages: the Hispanic
in the Christian kingdoms of the north, and the Arabic,
following by all the inhabitants of Al-Andalus’ (45). One
or the other, us or them, no matter what the role of the
Mozarabs, Jews, Moriscos, Berbers, French and other cultural
groups that were all at work there. This is essentialist
binarism, of precisely the kind that other historians are
seeking to undo. So what are the writers, translators and
translation scholars to make of such questions?
A few pages
by Salvador Peña, vaguely inspired by Baudrillard,
claim that answers will come by considering the logic of
Al-Andalus from within, from its language, and by questioning
the reigning concepts of the exotic. What this means in
practical terms is anyone’s guess. A long study by Eva Lapiedra,
on the Medieval Arabic terms used to describe Christians,
might seem to fit the bill. It produces many interesting
words yet few clear conclusions, apart from a certain admiration
for the ‘blurring of the division between the self and the
other’, considered ‘an important part of Islamic-Christian
relations’ (77). This might be a case of internal philological
understanding coming up with many actual answers, if only
the initial questions had not been lost in the process.
Much the same could be said for the series of studies that
then trace the ways North Africa was seen by a various writers.
All very interesting, but to what purpose? Further, such
things appear to have little relation to Alberto Gómez
Font’s engaging study of official translators in the Spanish
protectorate in Morocco, faced with the dilemma of working
into Classical or Moroccan Arabic. This, at least, was a
real historical dilemma, with a range of historical answers.
The strongest
section of this book is undoubtedly the last, where the
problems of exoticism and translation are dealt with most
directly. Bernabé López García presents
a rich and detailed survey of the way translations were
a necessary part of the development of Arabic studies in
Spain, with numerous links with the French Romantic tradition.
Juan Pablo Arias recounts Spanish receptions of the Qur’an,
revealing on the one hand a tradition of wilful ignorance
lasting some four centuries, and on the other a wealth of
translations since 1951. Richard van Leeuwen, published
here in English, then traces European receptions of the
Thousand and One Nights, superficially entertaining because
of receptive ambivalence between fairy tales and pornography,
yet also operative here as a contribution to the theoretical
debate. Van Leeuwen argues, with the art historian John
Mackenzie, that orientalism was never a system ‘but rather
many different representations of the Orient reflecting
a variety of attitudes organized within cultural currents’
(198). This is indeed more like what one tends to find in
any history of translations. And that position—which becomes
Bakhtinian dialogue for van Leeuwen—can usefully be opposed
to the Foucauldian model of Said, whose systemic concept
of orientalism here receives a further drubbing. For van
Leeuwen, exoticizing translation can thus work within serious
attempts to come to terms with the other. Unfortunately
he finds no particular place for the Hispanic in this dialogue,
and Dolors Cinca’s appended study of Spanish translations
of the Thousand and One Nights reveals little more than
that the text still sells. Further, the few texts offered
here by actual translators do little more than argue against
the ‘exotic’ in the name of ‘exactitude’ or ‘understanding
cultural institutions’, an opposition that was scarcely
at stake in the debate as such. Ovidi Carbonell, who criticized
broad postcolonial approaches in the volume reviewed above,
nevertheless partly follows van Leeuwen in directly tackling
the question of why exoticizing strategies remain commercially
successful when presenting things Arabic (cf. Paul Bowles).
He proposes that the exotic is in some way necessary to
literary translation, as part of not only the literary itself
but also as a way of presenting the other as a coherent
alternative to the known (179). Such arguments make Carbonell
one of the real thinkers in a new generation of Spanish
Translation Studies. Yet one suspects he has left much unsaid.
The article presented here remains paradoxically exoticizing
in its non-definition of exoticism, in its fragile generalizations
of ‘literature’ and ‘the Arabic’, and in blindness to an
easy contradiction: if Western literature requires the exotic,
then exoticism is surely presenting no substantial alternative
to that tradition. And so we would drift back to Said, without
real fulfilment of the hope, held out by the first articles
in this volume, that Spain’s historical complicity with
the Semitic would produce something thoroughly new on the
subject of exoticism in translation. What we have in Carbonell
is nevertheless a vast improvement on previous ideas of
one culture against the other. More, it takes careful position
in a way that one regrets not finding in María Carmen
África Vidal’s short but fine parody of the postmodern
intellectual, with which the volume closes.
The third Spanish
volume to land on the editor’s desk last year is Traducir
la edad media: La traducción de la literatura medieval
románica (Translating the Middle Ages: The Translation
of Medieval Romance-Language Literature). Published by the
university press at Granada, this perhaps is a more typical
set of conference proceedings. I tried to find a price for
it on the publisher’s website, but to no avail; this is
not a commercial operation. The book has no visible sections,
no obvious criteria underlying the order of presentation,
no abstracts or indices, and mistakes not only in English
(for example pp. 46, 86, 109, 134, 166, 174, 175) but also
in Romance languages (73, 134, 167, 174, 175, 222, 239,
after which point I ceased to care). Editing such things
is always a thankless task; here it seems to have been done
with little concern for any actual eyes that might be following.
So what is focus
of the volume? The 26 articles talk about contemporary translations
of Medieval texts, about Medieval translations of other
texts, about Medieval ideas on translation, and occasionally
about philosophical theorizing that seems not to go anywhere.
That is, the volume has no centre. Eva Muñoz Raya’s
introductory text contextualizes the offering in terms of
contemporary translation theory yet is restricted to references
published in French and Spanish, which is a very problematic
limitation these days. Julio-César Santoyo provides
a more solid introduction, covering a thousand years, no
less, of what has been written about translation in Romance
languages. As pretentious as that might sound, Santoyo really
does have the necessary resources: you turn on the tap and
out it comes, a millennium, as clear as desalinated water.
Yet the sea of those citations has little to do with the
contemporary translation of Medieval texts, nor with many
of the other diverse concerns that scurry across these pages.
There may be
a common field here, but it is not easy to see paths across
it. Most of the writers are academics and occasional translators,
which might explain how easily they shift between the study
of historical texts, the handing down of pedagogical norms,
and sometimes quite subtle appreciation of very practical
translation problems. Carlos Alvar, for example, who offers
a very careful comparison of three recent translations of
the Paulo and Francesca episode of the Commedia, mixes close
criticism with blunt dictates such as ‘the best translator
is the one who least interposes their presence’ (151). Similarly,
in discussing Castilian translations of Ausiàs March,
Enrique J. Nogueras and Lourdes Sánchez start from
the prescriptive belief that ‘verse is virtually indispensable
’ (171) then shift to the descriptive position that ‘in
principle, all options are legitimate’ (202). There are
also texts full of major ideas that avoid contradiction
by offering little practical application to the Middle Ages.
Joaquín Rubio Tovar dismisses the use of archaizing
registers because ‘we are not Hölderlin’ (62), which
seems a non-argument. Fernando Carmona, who has interesting
things to say on Cervantes’ references to translation, sails
between wandering rocks of fidelity, objectivity and interpretation
that might have stabilized had a few examples been offered.
And there are other contributions, like Isabel de Riquer’s
long study of Medieval references to dress codes, that give
numerous details without any clear organizing ideas.
This volume
lacks the kind of theorizing that might distinguish the
ethical from the descriptive, or establish concepts with
a clear grounding in practice. More to the point, there
is little sign of evidence-based academic debate; the norms
of Hispanic intellectuals seem to prohibit such things.
Indeed, only in Alan Deyermond’s study of English translations
of Ausiàs March do we find references to theoretical
pronouncements by others in the field, notably to Alvar,
Rubio Tovar and Conejero, reaching out in search of dialogue
or disagreement. The Spaniards, on the other hand, usually
cite each other only to agree, as a sign of scholarly recognition.
Deyermond also uses a simple idea that might have moderated
many of the tired dictums concerning the visibility of the
translator, whether to use archaisms, whether to render
verse as prose, and so on. He finds that translations are
different because they are trying to do different things:
some are guides to the original, others attempt to evoke
a historical location, and still others seek to function
as literary texts in their own right. This basic functionalism
might have undermined many of the positions adopted in other
articles. It might also have relativized Anxo Fernández
Ocampo’s defence of archaisms and foreignizing translations
(à la Berman), with which the volume closes. But
the theorization of functionalist categories was locked
up in German-language Skopostheorie for a number
of decades; it remains without visible effect on these Romance-language
translators and researchers.
There must be
doubt as to whether much new is to be expected from these
various approaches to ‘Romance-language translation’. The
limits of that field remain untested (is it really so different
from any other language family?); its problems are not clearly
formulated. If anything, the points of convergence are here
defined by the fact that most of the researchers are also
teachers of Spanish and French literature, losing students
to English and sometimes saving their academic skins by
jumping aboard Spain’s numerous translation faculties. The
concerns of these scholars remain very close to traditional
literary studies, and not especially on the trail of Translation
Studies in any disciplinary sense. This compares poorly
with the work being achieved by the Escuela de Toledo, whose
volumes are not only rather more multilingual and multidisciplinary,
but are firmly anchored in immediate intercultural problematics.
If the Romance-language teachers are looking to the past
and ultimately to literary studies, the Toledan project,
working from one of Spain’s most vital places in the world,
might yet open up new horizons for Translation Studies.
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- Last update
17 April 2001
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