Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies

260 Pages·2016·11.63 MB·English

by  Edwin Gentzler

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Translation and Rewriting in the

Age of Post-T ranslation Studies
In Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-T ranslation Studies, Edwin
Gentzler argues that rewritings of literary works have taken translation to
a new level: literary texts no longer simply originate, but rather circulate,
moving internationally and intersemiotically into new media and forms.
Drawing on traditional translations, post-t ranslation rewritings and other
forms of creative adaptation, he examines the different translational
cultures from which literary works emerge, and the translational elements
within them.
In this revealing study, four concise chapters give detailed analyses of the
following classic works and their rewritings:
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Germany
• Postcolonial Faust
• Proust for everyday readers
• Hamlet in China.
With examples from a variety of genres including music, film, ballet, comics,
and video games, this book will be of special interest for all students and
scholars of translation studies and contemporary literary and media studies.
Edwin Gentzler is a Professor of Translation Studies and Director of
Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is
the author of Contemporary Translation Theories (Routledge, 1993) and
Translation and Identity in the Americas (Routledge, 2008). He is the co-
editor (with Maria Tymoczko) of Translation and Power (2002) and a series
editor (with Susan Bassnett) of the “Topics in Translation” series.
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New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Series editors:
Michael Cronin holds a Personal Chair in the Faculty of Humanities and
Social Sciences at Dublin City University.
Moira Inghilleri is Director of Translation Studies in the Comparative
Literature Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies series aims to
address changing needs in the fields of translation studies and interpreting
studies. The series features works by leading scholars in both disciplines, on
emerging and up to date topics. Key features of the titles in this series are
accessibility, relevance and innovation.
These lively and highly readable texts provide an exploration into
various areas of translation and interpreting studies for undergraduate
and postgraduate students of translation studies, interpreting studies and
cultural studies.
Cities in Translation
Sherry Simon
Translation in the Digital Age
Michael Cronin
Translation and Geography
Federico Italiano
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Translation and Rewriting in

the Age of Post-T ranslation
Studies
Edwin Gentzler
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First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Edwin Gentzler
The right of Edwin Gentzler to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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from the publishers.
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978- 1- 138-6 6685- 6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 138-6 6686- 3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 3156- 1919- 4 (ebk)
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by Out of House Publishing
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Contents

List of figures and tables page vi

Foreword by Susan Bassnett viii

Preface and acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Germany 19

2 Postcolonial Faust 69

3 Proust for everyday readers 119

4 Hamlet in China 168

Conclusion 222

Index 234
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List of figures and tables

Figures
1.1 Midsummer in a white box, set design by Sally Jacobs.
Scene: Bottom “translated” with Titania, (III.i.122) Peter
Brook, dir. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RSC, 1970,
© Reg Wilson. page 20
1.2 Oberon in the Reinhardt & D ieterle film A Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1935). 58
2.1 Map of “The Germanies” during the eighteenth century
(Höckmann online). 76
2.2 Faustus in Africa, Handspring Puppet Theater (1995). 97
2.3 Mephistopheles from Murnau’s Faust (1926). 100
3.1 Last page of Time Regained, published posthumously,
© Bibliothèque nationale de France. 141
3.2 Andy Warhol, À la recherche du shoe perdu (1955), © The
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York. 157
4.1 Gravedigger scene from Lin Zhaohua, Hamlet [Hamulaite]
(1989). 207
4.2 Wolf Woman from Hu Xuehua [Sherwood], dir. Prince of the
Himalayas [Ximalaya Wangzi] (2006). 215
Tables
1.1 Translations during the Elizabethan Age (1558– 1603) 26
1.2 Seventeenth-c entury translations of Shakespeare into
German and Dutch 46
1.3 Were Schlegel’s translations better than Shakespeare? 51
2.1 Last lines of Faust translated by Walter Kaufmann and
Haroldo de Campos 74
2.2 Precursors to Goethe’s Faust in German and English 80
2.3 Goethe’s own writings and rewritings of Faust (Boyle
1987: xi– xvi) 82
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Figures and tables vii
2.4 Selected translations of Goethe’s Faust (Frantz 1949; Classe
2000; Heinemann 2012 [1884]) 88
2.5 Theater productions and novel adaptations of Faust 93
2.6 Film adaptations of Faust 101
2.7 Music versions of Faust 107
2.8 Comics and video games of Faust 111
3.1 Innovations preceding the publication of Recherche (Belle
Époque 2015) 129
3.2 Original and two translations of the “madeleine” episode 135
3.3 Editions of À la recherche du temps perdu 142
3.4 Translations of À la recherche du temps perdu into English 146
3.5 Spanish translations of À la recherche du temps perdu 153
3.6 Rewritings of À la recherche du temps perdu 158
4.1 Pre- Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s versions of Hamlet 181
4.2 Translations of Hamlet into Chinese 204
4.3 Rewritings and adaptations of Hamlet in China 210
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Foreword by Susan Bassnett

The prefix ‘post’ has two meanings: it can signify ending, meaning that
something is definitively over and behind you, even that something or
someone is defunct. After all, a post- mortem can only be carried out on a
corpse. Or it can have a much more positive meaning, it can signify the start
of a new phase, of movement towards a next stage that builds on something
that has been and is no more, but out of which comes new life and growth.
In literary studies, we have had post-m odernism, post- colonialism, post-
structuralism, post- feminism and in each of these cases the prefix ‘post’
carries with it not so much a sense of ending, but rather a sense of excitement,
of new beginning, of moving on to new ideas, new ways of thinking.
In coining the term ‘post-t ranslation studies’ Edwin Gentzler is indeed
seeking to create something new. It is, he acknowledges, not a term that
everyone will find comfortable, but then terminology has been contentious
throughout the four decades since translation studies came into existence,
when a small group of angry young international researchers began to meet
in Belgium and the Netherlands. They were angry back then because trans-
lation was sorely neglected in every field: literary studies looked down on
translation as a secondary and derivative practice, unworthy of scholarly
attention, while linguists were still arguing over what constituted equiva-
lence and accuracy in translation, and history, philosophy, politics, theatre
and cultural studies ignored translation altogether. Translators, those men
and women working at the chalk face and actually producing texts were
excluded from any scholarly discussion.
Gradually the new field grew, and translation has been undergoing a glo-
bal explosion of interest since the dawn of the millennium. Inevitably, with
expansion has come diversification, so that today there is little consensus as
to what constitutes translation studies, other than that the subject (some have
even called it a discipline) is concerned with the movement of texts across
linguistic and cultural boundaries. Much contemporary work is technologi-
cally based, a necessary development but a long way from research into the
theory, history, and transmission of literary texts which is where translation
studies started. Interestingly, this kind of research is increasingly happening
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Foreword by Susan Bassnett ix
under the aegis of comparative and World Literature, where investigation
into the cultural history of translation is starting to gain ground.
Edwin Gentzler is mindful of all this, but is also mindful of the fact that,
despite the growing importance of translation in the world today, transla-
tion studies practitioners have not managed to reach out sufficiently to other
fields and all too often talk only to one another. His notion of post-t ransla-
tion, or transdisciplinary translation studies, demands a questioning of older
definitions of translation, and an end to trying to distinguish between so-
called originals, translations, and rewritings. The various case studies he uses
to argue for the breaking down of these distinctions point to the complexity
of intercultural transmission and to the inadequacy of the old terminology
that positioned translations and originals on either side of a linguistic divide.
His is by no means a lone voice: translators and translation scholars such
as Sherry Simon, Lawrence Venuti, Haroldo de Campos, Josephine Balmer,
Bella Brodzki, to name but a few, have all sought to expand the terminology
of translation, as André Lefevere did in the early 1990s when he wrote about
‘refractions’ and then ‘rewritings.’ There is a current resurgence of interest
in Gerald Genette’s work from the early 1980s too, and to this we can add
the growing interest in seeing translation as a plurivocal activity, since many
other voices than those of translator and ‘original’ author combine in the
actual translation process. Research into the production and dissemination
of texts is central to World Literature scholarship and here the potential for
collaboration with translation studies is enormous.
Gentzler invites us to see translation as a revolutionary act, in that it
brings ideas and forms across cultural boundaries, offering life-c hanging
possibilities. Translation, he suggests has infinite potential, and in a world
of increased movement and migration, translation has a vital role to play in
enabling people to cope with multilingual identities. Consequently, the study
of translation should be alive to that role and should acknowledge that the
time has come to rethink what we understand by translation and start to
engage with it in new ways. His proposal is radical: he is not calling for an
end to translation studies, but for expansion of its self-i mposed boundaries,
so that the field can reach out to other disciplines and become more open
to ideas about translational issues coming from researchers who may not be
primarily engaged in translation.
The repercussions of translation are to be seen everywhere and in every
discipline, for translation ‘finds itself on the cutting edge of time,’ bringing
the past back to life and pointing towards an exciting multilingual future.
This book demonstrates how important translation is as a means of ensuring
the circulation of texts across temporal and cultural frontiers. Translation
studies is not moribund; post-t ranslation studies is an exciting new phase for
the subject. We have seen a great many ‘turns’ in translation studies; now is
the time for the Outward Turn as the field redefines itself and begins to enjoy
greater exchange with other disciplines in a mutually beneficial process of