Translation - "Rebeling against one's own language"

"Translating often means rebelling against one's own language." - Eco
I see translators as purveyors of language, students of language, and probably lovers of language in most cases. As such, the urge to exploit the target language would be strong, and it would be difficult to restrict the use of the language to translate a simple or austere text. I think the tendency is in us to think more is better: higher diction is better; word play is better; detailed imagistic description is better. We want to push language to its limits, stretch into all of its corners. Like Kelly and Zetzsche say, "Languages are living breathing entities that can be formed into virtually any shape or form that a translator wants them to inhabit" (111). I would imagine that an inexperienced translator could justify adding some flourishes by thinking that he was correcting "deficiencies" in a source text . What I understand Eco to mean by his statement "translating often means rebelling against one's own language" is that the translator must resist the urge to do everything I have described above. In fact, not just resist the urge, but be vigilant against creating something in the translation that is not in the source text even incidentally, just as he describes in his example using the word "sylvie."

I got a little taste of this when working on our first translation problem, translating the slogan. My product was green tea. However, no part of the slogan dealt with the fact that it was "green" tea. Only tea. However, knowing that I was going to lose the word play that exists between the homonyms tea and you in Italian (the/te), I was tempted to reach beyond the message of the slogan and pull in an idiom using "green" (such as "green with envy") to preserve some of the playfulness. In the end, I decided it was inappropriate because doing so would bring in ideas and associations that are not at all present in the original. Still, I see that the temptation to do so is there.

Translation Problem #2 - Moira Egan poem

Parthenocissus triscuspidata

I see another
plant in the dark garden and
I think he must be
a weeping willow
but when I ask him, he says: No,
he is a laurel
bound in an immense maze
of ivy that hangs from him.
Ivy does not
harm the host, hangs
symbiotically, and that's it,
in poetic pose.
Viola! he disappears
another lugubrious illusion,
I say, and he laughs.

I tried briefly to maintain the syllabics of the poem, counting the number of syllables in the Italian phrases and comparing them to what I was coming up with in English. I quickly realized that there was no way that this could be productive, as the Italian version inevitably has more syllables than the original English version due to the structure of the languages. If I had known the number of syllables in each line of the English original, then perhaps I could have tweaked mine to match.

I kept the line breaks the same, though I don't agree with all of them as I have it phrased here. Line 2 is particularly troublesome. I would almost never end a line on "and." If this were my poem, I would break the first three lines as follows:
"I see another plant
in the dark garden
and I think he must be"
In this case, however, I felt like it was important to keep the line breaks as they were.

I chose to leave the title in Latin. I didn't think anything could be gained from translating the title, since the Latin is the actual genus and species of the plant and isn't translated in the Italian version either. Also, I knew going into it that the poems that Moira shared with us in class had Latin titles as well.

Most of the decisions about wording were made kind of instinctively. It seemed to me that the gender of the weeping willow/laurel was revealed in the last line as "he," so I used that information to determine the pronouns leading up to the last line. I kept in mind that adjective usually follows the noun in Italian and switched them accordingly back into English. In my limited experience with Italian, it also seems that they add "a" and "that/this" in many phrases where an English-speaker would not, so I dropped "a" and "that/this" in several lines where it seemed awkward (lines 5 and 8). I struggled most with lines 8-9 and 13. In line 13, I chose to go with the more outrageous (and perhaps risky) "Viola!" because it is in fact outrageous and funny and seems most likely to spark the laughter in line 15. For that same reason, I kept "lugubrious," despite the fact that it is a word of much higher diction than the rest of the poem. It added to the over-the-top exclamation that seemed most likely to produce laughter.

Regardless of which phrase I used at the beginning of line 13, I really wanted that line to end with a comma, but there isn't one there. Each phrase I came up with seemed to demand a pause between "disappear" and "another." I didn't add the comma, and I am still slightly dissatisfied with the line as a result.

Refraction, not Reflection

What do we mean when we say that a translation does not reflect another culture, but refracts another culture?

Refraction, with regard to light, disperses a ray of light into its various wavelengths. This reveals the spectrum of colors contained in the original beam of light. Therefore, refraction does not create anything new – the frequency of the light remains the same and is determined by the source of the light (paraphrased from http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/geoopt/refr.html). Refraction only reveals what is already there. It exposes the parts of the whole by separating them, but nothing is created or destroyed in the act.

If translation refracts another culture, it opens up the text in a way that can be understood by those outside of that culture and yet experienced in the same way that those of the parent culture would experience it (i.e. invoking emotion, humor, morale, whatever…). A mere reflection of another culture would often fall flat in a different language. The humor’s not the same; the history’s not the same; the social mores aren’t the same. If the goal of the original (before translation) is to teach other cultures about the culture from which the work originates, then perhaps a reflection would be adequate. However, if the elements of the story are in service to some larger objective of the work, then reflection of the original elements likely would not accomplish this with a reader reading it in translation. A translation refracts the story to reveal its essence or intent, so that this can be communicated in another language. It is this essence/intent that is far more important than the individual words.

Slogan Translation - Translation Problem #1

The product I chose is San Benedetto thè verde (green tea). Their slogan is “Unico come thè,” which, literally translated, is “unique like tea.” Of course, in Italian you have the pun of thè and te, so the slogan is also saying indirectly “unique like you.” I thought about trying to rhyme with “tea:” me, we, he, and so on, but none of the rhyming words worked with what I need to say, so I abandoned that approach.

Next, I paired the two phrases communicated by the original:

Unique like tea

Unique like you.

Since the pun doesn’t work in English, this falls a bit flat. Plus, tea isn’t really unique, so it doesn’t make much sense. Instead, I began to play with phrases that would communicate this same idea:

You’re unlike any other, your tea should be too – San Benedetto green tea

This was better, but not great. Next I tried:

You’re one of a kind. Your tea should be too. San Benedetto verde

I went back and forth with whether or not to translate the word “verde.” My thinking was that “verde” is similar enough to “green” in Spanish that many Americans would recognize it, and keeping the Italian word would add an exotic feeling to the name – something to set it apart from other green teas. I even toyed with adding some play on “green,” such as “they’ll be green with envy,” or “your friends will be green with envy.” But in the end, this seemed way too heavy handed and too far outside the message of the slogan, so I nixed it.

My final slogan: “You’re one of a kind. Your tea should be too. San Benedetto verde.”