Archive
Is that a Frog in your ear? Let’s play with translations
As mentioned in my previous billet, I’m reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos. It’s a fascinating essay about translation. I’m only at the beginning of the book and at a moment, Bellos explains that without prior notice, we aren’t able to recognize a translation from an original text:
In practice, we look at the title page, jacket copy, or copyright page of a book or the byline at the bottom of an article to find out whether or not we are reading a translation. But in the absence of such giveaways, are readers in fact able to distinguish, by the taste on their linguistic and literary tongues, whether a text is “original” or “translated”? Absolutely not. Countless writers have packaged originals as translations and translations as originals and gotten away with it for weeks, months, years, even centuries.
Incidentally, this reminded me of a commercial for Danone that I’ve seen countless times on the French TV when I was a child. In this ad, they were doing a blind test to see if a person could recognise a real Danone among other yoghurts. That’s why I want to play a little game with you: I’m going to choose three quotes and amond those, one is a translation from a French original and the others are English texts. Will you find out which one is the French one? Ready?
Quote 1
“******, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman born a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael.”
Quote 2
“But what he allowed her, even with the addition of her alimony, was absurdly insufficient. Not that she looked far ahead; she had always felt herself predestined to ease and luxury, and the possibility of a future adapted to her present budget did not occur to her. But she desperately wanted enough money to carry her without anxiety through the coming year.”
Quote 3
“He had quite intended to effect a grand catastrophe at the end of this drama by reading out the name, he had come to the house with no other thought. But sitting here in cold blood he could not do it. Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond the nerve of his enmity.”
Now don’t cheat and search for the answer on the internet. So, which one was originally written in French and why? Leave a comment!
January in Japan and a Victorian Lit coincidence
We’re in January now and January in Japan has started. This event is organized by Tony, from Tony’s Reading List and he created a dedicated blog for the event. Check it out here. So it’s all about reading Japanese literature this month and I’m in. And a few days ago, I started reading Is That a Fish in You Ear? by David Bellos. It’s an essay about translation. In a chapter where he tries to define what translation is, Bellos lists the different words that are available to the Japanese speaker to say translation:
Here, for example, are the main words that you have to talk about them in Japanese: If the translation we are discussing is complete, we might call it a zen’yaku or a kan’yaku A first translation is a shoyaku. A retranslation is a kaiyaku, and the new translation is a shin’yaku that replaces the old translation, or ky yaku. A translation of a translation is a j yaku. A standard translation that seems unlikely to be replaced is a teiyaku; equally unlikely to be replaced is a mei-yaku, or “celebrated translation.” When a celebrated translator speaks of her own work, she may disparage it as setsuyaku, “clumsy translation,” i.e., “my own translation,” which is not to be confused with a genuinely bad translation, disparaged as a dayaku or an akuyaku. A co-translation is a ky yaku or g yaku; a draft translation, or shitayaku, may be polished through a process of “supervising translation” or kan’yaku, without it becoming a ky yaku or g yaku. Translations are given different names depending on the approach they take to the original: they can be chokuyaku (literally, “direct translation”), chikugoyaku (“word-for-word translation”), iyaku (“sense translation”), taiyaku (“translation presented with the original text on facing pages”), or, in the case of translations of works by Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, and other popular American writers, chyaku (“translations that are even better than the originals,” an invention and registered trademark of the Academy Press)
Amazing isn’t it? When I read it, I thought about Tony who mostly reads in translation, loves Japanese and Victorian literatures. The coincidence of me reading a non-fiction book, in January and stumbling upon a quote about the word translation in Japanese is so incredible that in matter of coincidences, Thomas Hardy seems like an amateur. Life surpasses fiction, that’s for sure.
And then I wondered about translating Japanese into English or into French. How do they do it? The way of thinking, of expressing thoughts, of putting reality into words is so different from ours that it must be awfully difficult to give back the substance and the music of the original. It’s probably impossible.
I’m also thinking about using the word akuyaku at the end of the quotes I translate from the French when I don’t have a professional translation available. If I continue like this, I’m going to have my own blogging language full of billets, copinautes and enthusiastic akuyakus. But what do you say for a genuinely bad translation of a translation? I do that when I read a Japanese book in French and then write a billet in English about it. A j akuyaku? Seems like Japanese lacks one more word to say translation! Let’s start this with my upcoming review of N*P by Banana Yoshimoto.
PS: More about Is That a Fish in You Ear? pretty soon; I want to play a game with you.
Book Around the Corner 