Literature and Translation

This thematic issue of Ilha do Desterro focuses on themes of literary translation. If literature can and has been studied away from translation, and translation handled within scopes distant from Literary Studies, it is also true that to think literature in its full complexity is to think translation, to put forth the question that intertwine literature and translation. One cannot understand the depths of literary history without encountering a multitude of languages and lives crossing in manners that bend and break the limits of each language. As was constantly stated by the Brazilian poet, critic, and translator Haroldo de Campos (2017), translation is a mode of reading and critique essential to literary practices and production. It is a form of cultural connection and dialogue, a mode of learning and confronting the difference which lies in all texts.

Intertwining paths

One cannot think of English language literature without the constant contact and appropriation of other languages and traditions through translation. One may think on Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard’s sisteenth century attempt to emulate the Latin canon, which may bring to mind certain imperial undertones, and transverse Petrarch’s sonnets to English as a way of constituting new forms of literature. In terms of large-scale translation, one may also mention modernists writers’ attempt to reconfigure English literature by means of translation, in line with other intertextual procedures, allowing us to question to what extent is anglophone modernism in debt to this constant reworking of languages, a theme that Steven G. Yao's Translation and the Languages of Modernism (2002) explores quite well.

Ezra Pound explicitly attempted to restructure English poetry and language, bringing them closer to the romance languages by translating provençal poets. He delve into Chinese literature with the aid of Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts. These rhythms and forms of comprehending language found their way into his own poems, in an ambiguous movement where one cannot tell what is “originally” Pound and what is a translation. T. S. Eliot built into his poems a score of translations and paraphrases, dialogues which can be seen in the commentaries and notes of the astounding 2015 edition of his poems edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. As analyzed by Eileen Gregory (2012), H.D. translated and incorporated ancient Greek poems and drama into her work, in a way that complexifies and blurs the boundaries of each act. This goes without mentioning the marvelous cases of multilingual authors such as Samuel Beckett, in whose work translation could be understood as a compositional principal. And even when one is not famous for his translations, as is the case with James Joyce regarding his translations of Irish literature into Italian, translation nonetheless must be understood as playing a large role within the context of a transnational way of living in part tied to twentieth century’s technological turn to mobility and media outside of national limits, and the migrations caused by the horrors of war.

In more recent times, there have been numerous anthologies organized and edited by authors that represent an interest not only in literatures outside of the anglophone world, but also an interest in the work of translators as essential for contact with other literatures, such as Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil’s An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972), Bishop herself a translator of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, or The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry (1984) edited by Paul Auster, who also began his career translating poets such as André du Bouchet, not to mention the extreme importance of a series of anthropologist translators interested in collecting, translating, and bringing to public light Native American poetry, most notably in the hands of Jerome Rothenberg, Dell Hymes, and Dennis Tedlock.

Literary translation in a plural space of reflection

If literary translation has been around for so long, the academic field of Translation Studies itself is relatively young, sharing this characteristic with the field of Literary Studies, and more precisely Literary Theory, as being a new area confronted with a longstanding object of research and a wide variety of reflections on it.

In 1990 André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett evaluated, based on observations from the area’s growth in the 1980s, that the discipline of Translation Studies “has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the 21st century” (LEFEVERE, 2017, p. vii). This prognostic confirms itself, undoubtedly, through the enormous vitality that may be regarded in the current state of Translation Studies, which can be observed, for example, in the sheer quantity of recent publications and events held around the world. Within this framework, the space of academic thinking on translation has expanded considerably and has developed new subareas of investigation, such as postcolonial translation and gender and translation, in addition to the perspectives that have been coined as “material turn” and “performance turn” in current Translation Studies. All of this is framed upon the need to critically elaborate on a history and survey of the field itself, as can be seen in the massive multivolume The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, and an attempt, as stated by Walter Carlos Costa (2015), to come to grips with other adjacent areas, such as Comparative Literature.

Ilha do Desterro has accompanied this development especially by means of its thematic issues on the subject, which can be seen as among the references that mark the area’s trajectory through Brazil, as noted by Maria Paula Frota (2007) in her “Um balanço dos Estudos da Tradução no Brasil” and, in a more comprehensive manner, has sought to contribute to a better understanding of the different aspects and processes involved in translation. The present issue hopes to continue this role to the area, more specifically on what concerns the relation between translation and literature. With their plurality of approaches, the works gathered in this issue on literary translation reflect the different paradigmatic directions which are part of the current field of Translation Studies.

This issue begins with Vanessa Lopes Lourenço Hanes’s “(Re)pensando o conceito de tradução indireta em obras literárias”, which analyzes a yet elusive concept and practice within the field of Translation Studies, that of indirect translation. Hanes affirms that, still plagued by the stigma of a marginal practice, this procedure requires an attentive study so as to map out its different manners and modes of operation. The article analyzes three cases: what Hanes names as pseudo-indirect translation, the translation into Brazilian Portuguese of the Beowulf saga from J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation from the Anglo-Saxon, and the complex mixed relation among graphic novel adaptations and translations. In “‘Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa’: literature, retranslation, and interference”, Davi Silva Gonçalves tackles the concepts of plagiarism and retranslation, through the theoretical notion of creative infidelity, and by comparing his translation of “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” to that of João Reis, with the aid of the WCopyFind software. Keeping in view the use of computational softwares in the practice of translation, Philippe Humblé in his “Machine translation and poetry. The case of English and Portuguese” approaches the evermore pressing topic of machine translation by analyzing three translations into Portuguese of three English poems, “A Letter is a Joy of Earth” by Emily Dickinson, “To a Stranger” by Walt Whitman, and “Sandra” by Charles Bukowski, and comparing them to the translations done by Google Translate. This pragmatic procedure leads to interesting findings and allows us to reevaluate some longstanding notions about the role of translation software in literature.

Once more returning to the notion of retranslation, and moving to more specific case studies, in “The retranslation of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Of Mere Being’” Paulo Henriques Britto returns to his translation of the poem published in his well-known 1987 translation of Wallace Stevens’ poetry and compares it to its revised version included in the 2017 edition of the work. Britto pays special attention to semantic and formal differences that have sparked his critique and reworking of his own translations, contributing thus with a deep study of Steven’s poems and their translation. Carolina Paganine in her article “Tradução de poesia e performance: ‘Still I Rise’, de Maya Angelou” examines various translations of Maya Angelou’s famous poem and proposes her own translation, focusing on its possibility and place for performance, an extremely relevant element (though many times ignored when confronting the text), above all when we perceive the longstanding tradition of orality and rhythm in African-American literature. In “Do projeto de tradução de Liffey Swim, de Jessica Traynor para o processo de tradução do poema ‘Sin-Eater’”, Monique Pfau, Sanio Santos da Silva, and Noélia Borges de Araujo elaborate a collaborative translation project taking into consideration the complexities of poetic translations aligned to concerns with Irish culture and history. Beatriz Guimarães’s “Traduzindo The Awful Rowing Toward God, de Anne Sexton, para o português brasileiro através da perspectiva dos estudos feministas de tradução” also deals with a proposal of poetic translation, yet in her case the main concern lies in assuming a feminist approach to translation mindful to the fact that “grammatical gender can reflect hierarchies of sexual gender”, and thus need be taken into consideration if one wishes to produce a non-sexist translation. Still within the scope of understanding translation as a contextualized political act, Eliza Mitiyo Morinaka’s “Agnes Blake Poor e os Pan-American Poems” analyzes the translations of Brazilian poets in Poor’s anthology Pan-American Poems, a governmental translation project, aimed at promoting the idea of Pan-Americanism in times of war. According to Morinaka, these elements are at hand in determining aspects of textual translation choices.

The following articles move to a genealogical approach so as to understand a tradition in translating certain classical works of literature. Daniel Padilha Pacheco da Costa’s “As traduções e as adaptações para o inglês de Ali Babá e os Quarenta Ladrões nos séculos XVIII e XIX” focuses on the editorial tradition of the first English version of “Ali Baba, and the forty thieves” and its different editions and adaptations from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In “Genji Monogatari - Traduzindo a literatura japonesa do século XI para o leitor ocidental contemporâneo”, Gisele Tyba Mayrink Orgado turns to Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century Heian period The Tale of Genji, and the translational paths that have brought it to contemporary Western countries, with special focus to the English translation. Furthering the problematics of a historical translation trail and the concept of retranslation, Caetano W. Galindo and Vitor Alevato do Amaral’s “Houaiss.... Pinheiro. Galindo: and what the future holds for Ulysses translations in Brazil” analyzes the Brazilian translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses, noticing a continuous dialogue in which each edition establishes the problems and conditions for the production of yet another translation of this epitome of translational twists and turns.

The three following articles carry out paratextual studies and emphasize the influential role of translations and their accompaniments as (re)readings of works and authors in different literary traditions. Marcela Lanius and Marcia Amaral Peixoto Martins’s “Uma vasta surpresa: os prefácios ao romance de Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald” analyzes the part of Harry T. Moore’s preface - which accompanied the 1968 edition of Save me the Waltz and its re-editions until 2001, as the authors inform us - in the formation of a negative authorial image of Zelda in North-American culture, and then examines how this identity is constructed in the Brazilian context, considering, above all, the preface written by Caio Fernando Abreu for Rosaura Eichenberg’s translation, Esta valsa é minha. Amin Amirdabbaghian and Krishnavanie Shunmugam, in turn, construct in “An Inter-Semiotic Study of Ideology on the Book Covers of Persian Translations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm” a comparative study of the covers of two translations of Animal Farm into the Persian language - the first, by Amir Amirshahi (1969), published in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the second, by Saleh Hosseini and Masoumeh Nabi Zadeh (2003), published in the post-revolutionary era -, in which they discuss the ideological differences represented therein.

The article of Zhihua Hu and Maria Teresa Roberto and that of Livia Souza deal with the delicate subject of linguistic and cultural hybridism in literary translation. In “Tradução do hibridismo: análise da versão portuguesa de The Joy Luck Club de Amy Tan”, Hu and Roberto investigate how the Portuguese translation of Amy Tan’s novel - O Clube da Sorte e da Alegria (1993), accomplished by Ana Maria Chaves, Ana Gabriela Macedo, and Maria da Graça Alves Pereira, with revision by Ana Maria Chaves - solved the connection that occurs between English and Chinese languages in the expressive development of the original work (1989). The translation into Spanish of the relation between English and Caribbean Spanish, present in Junot Díaz’s writings, is the theme of Livia Souza’s “A tradução como mediação cultural: as traduções da obra de Junot Díaz”. Both articles raise questions regarding translation and postcolonial literature, although these are not their central concern; nevertheless the articulation between Translation Studies and Postcolonial Studies is at the center of the discussion brought forth in Mirian Ruffini and Gabriel Both Borella’s “Pós-colonialismo e tradução: uma análise do romance Half a Life e sua tradução para o português”, which deals with the translation of V. S. Naipaul’s novel Half Life (2001) into Brazilian Portuguese as Meia Lua (2002), a work by the translator Isa Mara Lando.

The linguistic approaches to literary translation are represented in the issue by Taís Paulilo Blauth and Célia Maria Magalhães’s “Quem é Shar em NW e suas traduções para o português? Um estudo da representação da personagem baseado em valores atitudinais” and by Nilson Roberto Barros da Silva’s “A tradução de jogos de palavras em um corpus literário: uma revisão do modelo de Delabastita com o auxílio da linguística de corpus”. Adopting the viewpoint of translation as an interlingual reinstantiation, based on a Systemic-Functional Linguistics perspective, Blauth and Magalhães analyze the role of Valuation in the representation of Shar’s character in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), and in the Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese translations of the novel: NW, translated by Sara Grünhagen (2017), and NW - História de Uma Cidade, translated by José Lima (2013). Silva’s work, in turn, employs the theoretical-methodological framework of Corpus Linguistics to observe the translation of word games, particularly in the direction from English to Portuguese; for this he compares word games of Jô Soares’s novel O Xangô de Baker Street (1995) with their translation in A Samba for Sherlock (1997), done by Clifford Landers. The results of this analysis lead Silva to propose the expansion of Dirk Delabastita’s model of translation strategies for word games.

This issue closes with a translation of Anthony Pym’s article “Overt Translation Strategies in the Histories of Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound”, “Estratégias de tradução manifesta nas histórias de Robert Lowell e Ezra Pound”, whose analysis of Imitations and The Cantos points out that these poet-translators consciously utilized translation errors as a compositional principle “for the construction of knowledge through the distance of foreign documents”.

We would like to thank the valuable contribution of the authors of the articles here gathered, as well as the work of the reviewers who participated in the editorial process of this issue of Ilha do Desterro.

Works Cited

• AUSTER, Paul (Ed.). The Random House book of twentieth-century French poetry New York: Random House, 1984.
• BISHOP, Elizabeth; BRASIL, Emanuel (Ed.). An Anthology of twentieth-century Brazilian poetry Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1972.
• CAMPOS, Haroldo de. Metalinguagem & outras metas São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2017.
• COSTA, Walter Carlos. Estudos da tradução e literatura comparada: conflito e complementaridade. Cadernos de Tradução, Florianópolis, v. 35, nº especial 1, p. 31-43, jan/jun. 2015.
• ELIOT, T. S. The Poems of T. S. Eliot: volume 1 collected and uncollected poems. (Ed. RICKS, Christopher; MCCEU, Jim). New York: Farra, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
• FROTA, Maria Paula. Um balanço dos Estudos da Tradução no Brasil. Cadernos de Tradução, Florianópolis, v. 1, n. 19, p. 135-169, abr. 2007.
• GREGORY, Eileen. H. D. and translation. In: CHRISTODEULIDES, Nephei; MACKAY, Polina (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to H. D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• LEFEVERE, André. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame Routledge Translation Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
• YAO, Steven G. Translation and the languages of modernism New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  29 Aug 2019
• Date of issue
  2019