Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics

433 Pages·2000·2.61 MB·English

by  Shirley Chew

TRANSLATING LIFE
Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics
LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES
General editors: JONATHAN BATE and BERNARD BEATTY
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TRANSLATING LIFE:
Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics
Edited by
SHIRLEY CHEW &
ALISTAIR STEAD
University of Leeds
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 1999 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Liverpool L69 3BX
©1999 Liverpool University Press
The right of Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead
to be identified as the editors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP Record is available
ISBN 0-85323-674-7 (hardback)
0-85323-684-4 (paperback)
Typeset in 10.5/12.5 Stempel Garamond
by BBR, Sheffield
Printed by Alden Press, Oxford
TO
INGA-STINA EWBANK
Acknowledgements
The editors thank Elizabeth Paget for invaluable secretarial assis-
tance; and are indebted to the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute
of Art, University of London, for permission to reproduce the
photographs after page 248 illustrating ‘Thackeray and the “Old
Masters”’.
Contents
Introduction: SHIRLEY CHEW and ALISTAIR STEAD 1
Translations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
STANLEY WELLS 15
Elizabethan Translation: the Art of the Hermaphrodite:
JONATHAN BATE 33
From Stage to Page: Character through Theatre Practices
inRomeo and Juliet: LYNETTE HUNTER and
PETER LICHTENFELS 53
Translating the Elizabethan Theatre: the Politics of
Nostalgia in Olivier’s Henry V: MARTIN BUTLER 75
Tempestuous Transformations: DAVID LINDLEY 99
‘... tinap ober we leck giant’: African Celebrations of
Shakespeare: MARTIN BANHAM and
ELDRED DUROSIMI JONES 121
(Post)colonial Translations in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma
of Arrival: SHIRLEY CHEW 137
Sentimental Translation in Mackenzie and Sterne:
DAVID FAIRER 161
Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion(1823):
Conversations and the Statue: JOHN BARNARD 181
Translating Value: Marginal Observations on a Central
Question: GEOFFREY HILL 199
Browning’s Old Florentine Painters: Italian Art and
Mid-Victorian Poetry: KELVIN EVEREST 215
Thackeray and the ‘Old Masters’: LEONÉE ORMOND 233
viii Translating Life
William Morris and Translations of Iceland:
ANDREW WAWN 253
Aestheticism in Translation: Henry James, Walter Pater,
and Theodor Adorno: RICHARD SALMON 277
Helena Faucit: Shakespeare’s Victorian Heroine:
GAIL MARSHALL 297
‘More a Russian than a Dane’: the Usefulness of Hamlet
in Russia: PETER HOLLAND 315
Translation and Self-translation through the Shakespearean
Looking-glasses in Joyce’s Ulysses: RICHARD BROWN 339
Self-Translation and the Arts of Transposition in Allan
Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star: ALISTAIR STEAD 361
Translation in the Theatre I: Directing as Translating:
SIR PETER HALL in interview with MARK BATTY 387
Translation in the Theatre II: Translation as Adaptation:
JOHN BARTON in interview with MARK BATTY 397
Notes on Contributors 413
Index 417
Introduction
SHIRLEY CHEW and
ALISTAIR STEAD
‘Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light’
Miles Smith, Preface to King James version of the Bible
This volume, comprising many individual but conceptually inter-
related studies, sets out to multiply perspectives on the concept
of translation, making it intellectually generative, an invaluable
prompter to reinterpretation of texts and fresh theoretical reflec-
tions on pertinent critical issues. Mindful that the ideally singular
light radiating from translation as conceived by the translators of
the King James Bible might actually be refracted through mani-
fold interpretations, our twenty-two collaborators read and
reread through what we would call the prism of translation, shed-
ding on the concept and the texts, to bend one of Philip Larkin’s
luminous epithets, a ‘many-angled light’.
The identification of reading with translation has by now a
distinguished literary pedigree (one thinks of a line of modern
writers from Proust to Calvino who have either claimed that
reading entails an act of translation or, more challengingly, that
translation is the only proper way to read a text).1 ‘Reading is
already translation, and translation is translation for the second
time,’ wrote Hans-Georg Gadamer,2 and this is dynamically
related to writing, also seen by Proust as, ideally, translation.3
‘In the act of writing, the author is producing a complicated
translation of the “text” of the world; we generate a second trans-
lation in our attempt to return to the “native tongue of reality”.’4
Others have gone on to multiply the number of translations
involved in these writings and readings, notably Octavio Paz
and Jacques Derrida,5 so that perception, speech, writing,
1
2 Translating Life
reading, criticism, all participate in the same interpretative act.
But the basis of translation proper, and of the interpretations of
and through translation included in this book, remains the same:
that close reading of texts on which translation has always to
depend.
Translation and Transposition
Whatever the temporary inflection we give to the word, trans-
lation is a linguistically and culturally central process, comprising,
grandly, ‘the transforming principle at the heart of all literary
activity’,6 but also more pragmatically, as Susan Bassnett has
argued throughout her many important contributions to
Translation Studies, it is reading and writing across linguistic and
cultural boundaries.7 Where these essays deal with translation in
a restricted sense, that is, interlingual transcoding (as in Andrew
Wawn or Jonathan Bate), it is not ‘routine information transfer’
but ‘literary’ or, more inclusively, ‘literary-philosophic transla-
tion’ which is under consideration.8 In a provocative and fertile
phrase, George Steiner has called translation ‘that exact art of
metamorphic duplicities’:9 ‘exact’ in its heroic (exacting) search
for semantic and functional equivalence between different
languages and cultures; ‘metamorphic’ in its acceptance that not
only is that quest for identity of meaning quixotic, necessitating
changes, but that changes are creatively essential if the transfer is
to be successful, with the original text finding its afterlife in the
‘transformation’ toward which ‘“translation” always tends’.10It is
perhaps significant that, after Shakespeare, it is Ovid, the much-
translated writer on ‘translations’, the Metamorphoses, who is
most frequently cited in these essays.
In this volume, translation is widely understood in its trans-
ferred or metaphorical senses, most fundamentally as a process of
change or a passage from one state to another, as is made most
explicit in Stanley Wells’s study of (not coincidentally Ovidian)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Indeed, translation is itself
commonly identified with metaphor by many writers on trans-
lation (Willis Barnstone, Fritz Senn, Salman Rushdie in Shame)