Venuti - The Translator's Invisibility (2ª ed., 2008)

The Translator's Invisibility (2ª ed., 2008)

Invisibility

Há um regime da fluência que age como único critério ao avaliar tradução, a facilidade de leitura do texto como se ele não fosse uma tradução. O autor chama de invisibilização do trabalho por ilusão de transparencia. Menciona o neologismo "tradutorês" como um adjetivo para traduções não fluentes.

A gathering of such excerpts indicates which discursive features produce fl uency in an English-language translation and which do not. A fl uent translation is written in English that is current (“modern”) instead of archaic, that is widely used instead of specialized (“jargonisation”), and that is standard instead of colloquial (“slangy”). Foreign words or English words and phrases imprinted by a foreign language (“pidgin”) are avoided, as are Britishisms in American translations and Americanisms in British translations. Fluency also depends on syntax that is not so “faithful” to the foreign text as to be “not quite idiomatic,” that unfolds continuously and easily (“breezes right along” instead of being “doughy”) to insure semantic “precision” with some rhythmic defi nition, a sense of closure (not a “dull thud”). A fl uent translation is immediately recognizable and intelligible, “familiarised,” domesticated, not “disconcerting[ly]” foreign, capable of giving the reader unobstructed “access to great thoughts,” to what is “present in the original.” Under the regime of fl uent translating, the translator works to make his or her work “invisible,” producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems “natural,” that is, not translated. 4-5

Questão de autoria. O texto do autor é visto como uma fonte pura não intermediada, enquanto o tradutor como representação de segunda-mão, no máximo uma cópia. Assim, é necessária a ilusão de transparência para trazer o tradutor de volta. 6
Em resenhas literárias americanas e britâjncias, raramente se menciona o tradutor 7. No copyright americano e britanico o tradutor é e não é autor, o trabalho é uma adaptação de uma obra orignal. No Brasil o tradutor é considerado autor. 8
Fala dos problemas contratuais relacionados aos royalties que o autor ganha em cima do trabalho da tradutor. Há uma defasagem entre pagamento e custo de vida nos EUA e Brit, o que faz com que os profissionais tenham que trabalhar muito rápido limitando a qualidade do trabalho 10
Os grandes conglomerados anglofonos vendem muito mais livros para serem traduzidos do que compram direitos de tradução. 12
Definição de tradução

Translation is a process by which the chain of signifi ers that constitutes the foreign text is replaced by a chain of signifi ers in the translating language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation. [...] Both foreign text and translation are derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signifi cation, inevitably exceeding and possibly confl icting with their intentions. As a result, a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fi xed only provisionally in any one translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specifi c social situations, in different historical periods. Meaning is a plural and contingent relation, not an unchanging unifi ed essence, and therefore a translation cannot be judged according to mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence. Appeals to the foreign text cannot fi nally adjudicate between competing translations in the absence of linguistic error, because canons of accuracy in translation, notions of “fi delity” and “freedom,” are historically determined categories. Even the notion of “linguistic error” is subject to variation, since mistranslations, especially in literary texts, can be not merely intelligible but signifi cant in the receiving culture. The viability of a translation is established by its relationship to the cultural and social conditions under which it is produced and read. 13-4

Há uma violencia na tradução que tem que desmembrar o texto fonte e remontá lo para outro público. 14
Remonta a escolha apresentada por Schleiermacher em 1813, domesticação ou estrangeirização. 15
A estrangeirização, ou seja, a "falta" deliberada de fluencia, é importante em tempos anti emperialistas. Critica Nida por sua violência etnocentrica 16

In view of this violence, how can a translation possibly produce an effect on its receptors that is equivalent to the effect produced by the foreign text on its initial audience? 17

Sobre os termos

The terms “domestication” and “foreignization” indicate fundamentally ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture, ethical effects produced by the choice of a text for translation and by the strategy devised to translate it, whereas terms like “fl uency” and “resistancy” indicate fundamentally discursive features of translation strategies in relation to the reader’s cognitive processing. Both sets of terms demarcate a spectrum of textual and cultural effects that depend for their description and evaluation on the relation between a translation project and the hierarchical arrangement of values in the receiving situation at a particular historical moment. Those values must always be reconstructed, whether by the translator or by the translation scholar, and the reconstruction must start with patterns of linguistic usage, literary and cultural traditions, and translation practices that have become traditional or conventional because of repeated and widespread use over time. Any signifi cance assigned to the terms “domestication” and “foreignization” or “fl uency” and “resistancy,” any application of them to a specifi c translation project, must be treated as culturally variable and historically contingent, dependent on acts of interpretation that are informed by archival research and textual analyses and, like every interpretation, are subject to challenge and revision on the basis of different critical methodologies and in response to developing cultural debates. 19

Symptomatic reading

A humanist practice of reading translations elides these discontinuities by locating a semantic unity adequate to the foreign text, stressing intelligibility, transparent communication, the use value of the translation in the receiving culture. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, locates discontinuities at the level of diction, syntax or discourse that reveal the translation to be a violent rewriting of the foreign text, a strategic intervention into the receiving culture, at once dependent on receptor values and variously in conformity with or abusive of them (cf. Althusser 1970: 28–9). 21
Symptomatic reading can thus be useful in demystifying the illusion of transparency in a contemporary English-language translation. In some translations, the discontinuities are readily apparent, unintentionally disturbing the fl uency of the language, revealing the inscription of the receiving culture; other translations bear prefaces that announce the translator’s strategy and alert the reader to the presence of noticeable stylistic peculiarities. 24
The symptomatic reading is a historicist approach to the study of translations that aims to situate canons of accuracy in their specifi c cultural moments. Critical categories like “fl uency” and “resistancy,” “domesticating” and “foreignizing,” can be defi ned only by referring to the formation of cultural discourses in which the translation is produced, and in which certain translation theories and practices are valued over others. At the same time, however, applying these critical categories in the study of translations is anachronistic: they are fundamentally determined by a cultural political agenda in the present, an opposition to the contemporary dominance of transparent discourse, to the privileging of a fl uent domesticating practice that masks both the translator’s work and the asymmetrical relations – cultural, economic, political – between English-language nations and their others worldwide. Although a humanist theory and practice of translation is equally anachronistic, inscribing the foreign-language text with values that are current in the receiving culture, it is also dehistoricizing: the various conditions of translated texts and of their reception are concealed beneath concepts of transcendental subjectivity and transparent communication. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, is historicizing: it assumes a concept of determinate subjectivity that exposes both the ethnocentric violence of translating and the interested nature of its own historicist approach. 32

[Cientismo (domesticador segundo movimentos culutrias) na standard edition de Freud 21, analisa outras trads a frente]
Método de historiografia genealógica de Foucault e Nietzsche anti teleológico.
Sobre tradução técnica

hroughout, the emphasis is on humanistic translation, literary in the broadest sense (including not only conventional literary genres such as poetry and fi ction, but also biography, history, philosophy, and psychology, among other genres and disciplines in the human sciences), as opposed to technical translation (commercial, diplomatic, legal, scientifi c). This emphasis is not due to the fact that humanistic translators today are any more invisible or exploited than their technical counterparts, who, whether freelance or employed by translation agencies, are not permitted to sign or copyright their work, let alone receive royalties (Fischbach 1992: 3). Rather, humanistic translation is emphasized because it has long set the standard applied in technical translation (viz. fl uency), and, most importantly for present purposes, it has traditionally been the fi eld where innovative theories and practices emerge. As Schleiermacher realized long ago, the choice of whether to domesticate or foreignize a foreign text has been allowed only to translators of literary and scholarly texts, not to translators of technical materials. Technical translation is fundamentally constrained by the exigencies of communication: since World War II, it has supported scientifi c research, geopolitical negotiation, and economic exchange, especially as multinational corporations seek the expansion of foreign markets and the creation of overseas workforces and thus increasingly require fl uent, immediately intelligible translations of international treaties, legal contracts, technical information, and instruction manuals (Levy 1991: F5). Although in sheer volume and fi nancial worth technical translation far exceeds the translation of literary texts (a recent estimate values the worldwide translation industry at $26 billion: Downey 2004), humanistic translation remains a cultural practice where the translator can experiment in the choice of foreign texts and in the development of discursive strategies, constrained primarily by the current situation in the receiving culture. 34

Canon

John Denham publica uma tradução sem autoria em 1656. Segue explicitamernte o conselho de Horacio da Ars poetica (1605) de não traduzir palavra por palavra. Contudo advogava por menos adrencia ao original, como era costume da tradição didática da época. Outros já haviam feito isso décadas antes (inclusive na frança). Faz uma análise profunda da ideologia de Denham, havia uma função "Royalist" na tradução.

enham consolidated the several-decades-long emergence of a neoclassical translation practice in aristocratic literary culture. It may have seemed “new” to him, not because it did not have any previous advocates, but because it did: it was a modern revival of an ancient literary practice, making Denham’s translation a simulacral “Copy” of Virgil’s true “Original,” rationalized with a Platonic theory of translation as the copy of a copy of the truth: “I have made it my principal care to follow him, as he made it his to follow Nature in all his proportions” (Denham 1656: A3v ). But Denham’s sense of his own modernity was less philosophical than political, linked to a specifi c class and nation. Coming back from exile in France, he may have found his translation practice “new” in the sense of foreign, in fact French. French literary culture in the 1640s was characterized by theories and practices advocating the free translation of classical texts, and Denham, among such other exiled royalist writers as Abraham Cowley and Sir Richard Fanshawe, was no doubt acquainted with the work of its leading French proponent, Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, a prolifi c translator of Greek and Latin.2 D’Ablancourt’s freedom with Tacitus set the standard. 39

Denham foi um dos pioneiros da fluency

A free translation of poetry required the cultivation of a fl uent strategy in which linear syntax, univocal meaning, and varied meter produce an illusionistic effect of transparency: the translation seems as if it were not in fact a translation, but a text originally written in English.6 In the preface to his 1632 Aeneid, John Vicars described “the manner, wherein I have aimed at these three things, Perspicuity of the matter, Fidelity to the authour, and Facility or smoothnes to recreate thee my reader” (Vicars 1632: A3r ). In Denham’s words, the translation should “fi t” the foreign text “naturally and easily.” Fluency is impossible to achieve with close or “verbal” translation, which inhibits the effect of transparency, making the translator’s language seem foreign: “whosoever offers at Verbal Translation,” wrote Denham: shall have the misfortune of that young Traveller, who lost his own language abroad, and brought home no other instead of it: for the grace of Latine will be lost by being turned into English words; and the grace of the English, by being turned into the Latin Phrase. (Denham 1656: A3r ) 47
Fluency assumes a theory of language as communication that, in practice, manifests itself as a stress on immediate intelligibility and an avoidance of polysemy, or indeed any play of the signifi er that erodes the coherence of the signifi ed. Language is conceived as a transparent medium of personal expression, an individualism that construes translation as the recovery of the foreign writer’s intended meaning. As Denham’s preface asserted, “Speech is the apparel of our thoughts” (Denham 1656: A3r ). Now it will be worthwhile to recall the recurrent metaphors used in the translators’ prefaces, the analogy of translation as clothing in which the foreign author is dressed, or the translated text as the body animated by the foreign writer’s soul. The assumption is that meaning is a timeless and 50 Canon universal essence, easily transmittable between languages and cultures regardless of the change of signifi ers, the construction of a different semantic context out of different cultural discourses, the inscription of translating-language codes and values in every interpretation of the foreign text. “W.L., Gent.” noted that his versions of Virgil’s eclogues involved their own violence against the foreign texts, “breaking the shell into many peeces,” but he was nonetheless “carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation.” Some translators gave more of a sense that they faced a welter of competing “Commentaries” (Wroth 1620) from which they selected to rationalize their translation strategy. But none was suffi ciently aware of the domestication enacted by fl uent translation to demystify the effect of transparency, to suspect that the translated text is irredeemably partial in its interpretation. Denham admitted that he was presenting a naturalized English Virgil, but he also insisted that “neither have I anywhere offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem mine, and not his” (Denham 1656: A4r ).
Fluency can be seen as a discursive strategy ideally suited to domesticating translation, capable not only of executing the ethnocentric violence of domestication, but also of concealing this violence by producing the effect of transparency, the illusion that this is not a translation, but the foreign text, in fact, the living thoughts of the foreign author, “there being certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words” (Denham 1656: A3r ). Transparency results in a concealment of the cultural and social conditions of the translation – the aesthetic, class, and nationalist ideologies linked to Denham’s translation theory and practice. And this is what makes fl uent translation particularly effective in Denham’s bid to restore aristocratic culture to its dominant position: the effect of transparency is so powerful in domesticating cultural forms because it presents them as true, right, beautiful, natural. Denham’s great achievement, in his translations as well as his poems, was to make the heroic couplet seem natural to his successors, thus developing a form that would dominate English poetry and poetry translation for more than a century 49-50

Dryden foi influenciado por Denham.

As with Denham, the domestication of Dryden’s translation practice is so complete that fl uency is seen to be a feature of Virgil’s poetry instead of the discursive strategy implemented by the translator to make the heroic couplet seem transparent, indistinguishable from “the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and Canon 53 the Magnifi cence of his Stile.” And, much more explicitly than Denham, Dryden links his fl uent, domesticating translation to aristocratic culture. Thus he explains his avoidance of specialized terminology in his version of the Aeneid – “the proper terms of Navigation, Land-Service, or […] the Cant of any Profession” – by arguing that: Virgil has avoided those proprieties, because he Writ not to Mariners, Souldiers, Astronomers, Gardners, Peasants, &c. but to all in general, and in particular to Men and Ladies of the fi rst Quality: who have been better Bred than to be too nicely knowing in the Terms. In such cases, ’tis enough for a Poet to write so plainly, that he may be understood by his Readers. (Ibid.: 1061)
Dryden’s remark is a reminder that free translation was modelled on poetry, that Denham was using translation to distinguish a literary elite from “them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith” (Denham 1656: A3r ), and that this valorization of the literary contributed to the concealment of the cultural and social conditions of translation, including Dryden’s own. For, as Steven Zwicker has shown, Dryden also designed his Virgil to intervene into a specifi c political struggle: it “is a meditation on the language and culture of Virgil’s poetry, but it is also a set of refl ections on English politics in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution,” argued Zwicker, “a time when William III’s reign was not fi xed with the certainty it assumed late in the decade, a time when Stuart restoration might still be contemplated, and not wholly as fantasy” (Zwicker 1984: 177). The triumph of the heroic couplet in late seventeenth-century poetic discourse depends to some extent on the triumph of a neoclassical translation practice in aristocratic literary culture, a practice whose greatest triumph is perhaps the discursive sleight of hand that masks the political interests it serves. 52-3

A partir de Dryden, a domesticação dominou a tradição de tradução inglesa nos trabalhos de Pope e no Essay on the principles of translation de Tytler (1791).

In the eighteenth century, stylistic elegance in a translation can already be seen as symptomatic of domestication, bringing the ancient text in line with literary standards prevailing in Hanoverian Britain. 54 [...] The dominance of domesticating translation extended to popular genres like the novel where it was practiced by translators from different classes, both men and women 55

Canon de precisão é definido localmente e historicamente.

It is important not to view such instances of domestication as simply inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy are always locally defi ned, specifi c to different cultural formations at different historical moments. During the early modern period, the fi rm distinctions that we draw today between original compositions, translations, and adaptations did not obtain. Translators deliberately resorted to rhetorical practices like amplifi cation to develop aspects of the foreign text in accordance with the demands of form and theme (McMurran 2000). They recognized that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs in the translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal relationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, always somewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and a supplement. Yet they also viewed their domesticating practice as the most effective way to control this equivocal relationship and produce versions adequate to the foreign text. As a result, they sometimes castigated strategies that either rigorously adhered to foreign-language textual features or played fast and loose with them in ways that they were unwilling to license, especially in cases where a translation insuffi ciently adhered to the canon of fl uency. Dryden “thought it fi t to steer betwixt the two Extreams, of Paraphrase, and literal Translation” (Dryden 1958: 1055), that is, between the aim of reproducing primarily the meanings of the Latin text, usually at the cost of its phonological and syntactical features, and the aim of rendering it word for word, respecting syntax and line break. And he distinguished his practice from Abraham Cowley’s “imitations” of Pindar, partial translations that revised and, in effect, abandoned the foreign text. Dryden felt it was Denham “who advis’d more Liberty than he took himself” (Dryden 1956: 117), permitting Denham’s substantial liberties – the editing of the Latin text, the English architectural lexicon – to pass unnoticed, refi ned out of existence, naturalized by the majesty of the style. The ethnocentric violence performed by domesticating translation rested on a double fi delity, to the foreign text as well as to the translating culture, and especially to its valorization of transparent discourse. But this was clearly impossible and knowingly duplicitous, accompanied by the rationale that a gain in English intelligibility, cultural force, or didactic function outweighed the loss suffered by the foreign text and culture. 57-8

Tytler foi responsável pela canonização da fluency, acreditava que tradução deveria produzir um texto equivalente que transcendesse culturas. É um universalista.
Aprova a adição e correção do original 59.

Tytler states, is “That the translator ought always to fi gure to himself, in what manner the original author would have expressed himself, if he had written in the language of the translation” (ibid.: 201). But the translator must also conceal the fi gural status of the translation, indeed confuse the domesticated fi gure with the foreign writer. 60
Ultimately, Tytler’s bourgeois valorization of transparent discourse to the exclusion of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque” reveals a class anxiety about the simulacral status of the translated text and the threat it poses to an individualistic concept of authorship (Bakhtin 1984). 61
For Tytler, the threat posed by translation to the author’s transcendence is answered by liberal humanism, the contradiction between a general human nature and the individualist aesthetics embodied in the concept of “correct taste.” His explicit intention is to address “the subject of translation considered as an art, 62 Canon depending on fi xed principles” (Tytler 1978: 4; my italics). The translator with “correct taste” is in fact an artist, an author: “none but a poet can translate a poet” (ibid.: 208); “an ordinary translator sinks under the energy of his original; the man of genius frequently rises above it” (ibid.: 42). And it is transparency that signifi es the translator’s authorship in the text: the ease of originality occurs in “specimens of perfect translation, where the authors have entered with exquisite taste into the manner of their originals” (ibid.: 142). The translator’s authorship hinges on a sympathetic identifi cation with the foreign author – “to use a bold expression, [the translator] must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs” (ibid.: 212) – but in the translation what gets expressed is less the foreign author’s “soul” than the translator’s: “With what superior taste has the translator heightened this simile, and exchanged the offending circumstance for a beauty”; “in such instances, the good taste of the translator invariably covers the defect of the original” (ibid.: 89, 88). The anxiety that translation complicates authorial self-expression by mediating the foreign text with “low” discourses is allayed by Tytler’s erasure of the distinction between translator and author, largely on the basis of an illusionistic effect of textuality, now the sign of “correct taste.” 61-2

Tradução é ameaçadora para a noção transcendentalista, burgesa, individualista e transparente. Isso justifica uma tradução/edição que purifique o original canonico.
As outras edições acumularam mais exemplos e o livro foi bem aceito na comunidade de Tytler. Houve questionamento quanto ao 'melhoramento" da tradução, já se pedia transparencia total.
Na virada do XIX a domesticação e transparencia já estavam estabelecidas no discurso, mas ainda havia traços de elitismo que permitiam o "melhoramento' do texto. (ver Frere e outros 65-8)
Fluencia e fidelidade

A fl uent strategy can be associated with fi delity because the effect of transparency conceals the translator’s interpretation of the foreign text, the semantic context he has constructed in the translation according to receiving cultural values. 66

Síntese do que foi visto até agora

The canonization of fl uency in English-language translation during the early modern period limited the translator’s options and defi ned their cultural and political stakes. A translator could choose the now traditional domesticating practice, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to dominant cultural values in English; or a translator could choose a foreignizing practice, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text. Around the start of the nineteenth century, the values in question, although stated somewhat contradictorily in various treatises, translators’ prefaces, and reviews, were decidedly bourgeois – liberal and humanist, individualistic and elitist, morally conservative and physically squeamish. 68

Contraste entre Lamb (1821) e Nott (1795) nas traduções de Catullus. Nott era mais estrangeirizante e menos higienista com o original, Lamb é domesticador e pudico e muito mais fluente que Nott (Ver análise de Nott 78-80) e Lamb (80-2).

n the thirty years that separated Nott’s Catullus from Lamb’s, the Whiggish aristocratic milieu in which they lived and worked underwent a substantial change that infl uenced the fate of their translations and translation practices. Fluent, domesticating translation was valorized in accordance with bourgeois moral and literary values, and a notable effort of resistance through a foreignizing practice was decisively displaced. Nott’s translation foreignized Catullus by assimilating the Latin text to cultural values that were residual in the 1790s and marginal by the 1820s: a mimetic concept of translation grounded in the paradigm of representation was yielding to a communicative concept of translation grounded in the paradigm of expression; and the casual sexual morality of the aristocracy was challenged by a movement towards moral reform that affected both aristocrat and bourgeois. Nott and Lamb exemplify two options available to translators at a specifi c moment in the canonization of fl uency. Perhaps most importantly, they show that in foreignizing translation, the differences of the foreign text can only ever be fi gured by values in the receiving culture that differ from those in dominance. 82

Nation

Tradução estrangeirizante teve mais vez em outros contextos:

In 1813, during the Napoleonic wars, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lecture Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersetzens (“On the Different Methods of Translating”) viewed translation as an important practice in the Prussian nationalist movement: it could enrich the German language by developing an elite literature and thus enable German culture to realize its historical destiny of global domination. And yet, surprisingly, Schleiermacher proposed this nationalist agenda by theorizing translation as the locus of cultural difference, not the homogeneity that his ideological confi guration might imply, and that, in various historically specifi c forms, has long prevailed in English-language translation, British and American. Schleiermacher’s translation theory rested on a chauvinistic condescension towards foreign cultures, a sense of their ultimate inferiority to German-language culture, but also on an antichauvinistic respect for their differences, a sense that German-language culture is inferior and therefore must attend to them if it is to develop. 84 [...] Schleiermacher was enlisting his privileged translation practice in a cultural political agenda: an educated elite controls the formation of a national culture by refi ning its language through foreignizing translations. 86

Traduzia literatura nichada para a burguesia, assim justificava sua escolha estrangeirizante para se diferenciar da literatura popular na análise de Venuti.
[Sobre francesismo na alemanha 88-9]

Presented to the Prussian academic establishment on 24 June 1813, at the height of the confl ict with France, Schleiermacher’s lecture constructs a role for translation in a nationalist cultural politics. His theory of foreignizing translation should be seen as anti-French because it opposes the translation practice that dominated France since neoclassicism, viz. domestication, making the foreign author travel abroad to the reader of the translation 90
The passage is a reminder that Schleiermacher is setting up the understanding of language associated with a particular national cultural elite as the standard by which language use is made intelligible and judged. Hence, in the case of foreignizing translation, “the reader of the translation will become the equal of the better reader of the original only when he is able fi rst to acquire an impression of the particular spirit of the author as well as that of the language in the work” (Lefevere 1977: 80). [...] In the case of German foreignizing translation, then, the translator enables the German-language reader to understand the individuality of the foreign author so as to identify with him, Nation 95 thereby concealing the transindividual, German-language ideologies – cultural (literary elitism), class (bourgeois minority), national (“German”) – that mediate the foreignizing representation of the foreign author. Such thinking about language and subjectivity is clearly more consistent with domesticating translation, oriented towards conformity with receiving cultural values, and so can do little to question the dominance of transparent discourse in translation today. On the contrary, Schleiermacher’s psychologization of the text assumes transparency, the illusory presence of the foreign author in the translation. 94-5

Sumário de Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher shows that the fi rst opportunity to produce a foreignizing effect occurs in the choice of foreign text, wherein the translator can resist dominant discourses in British and American cultures by restoring excluded or marginal texts and possibly reforming the canon of foreign literatures in English. Schleiermacher also suggests that foreignizing translation puts to work a particular discursive strategy, close adherence to the foreign text in conjunction with an avoidance of the most familiar language in the receiving culture. “The more closely the translation follows the turns taken by the original,” he observes, “the more foreign it will seem to the reader” (Lefevere 1977: 78). To be sure, whether this strategy can be applied to foreign texts in every humanistic genre in every cultural situation, regardless of their themes or arguments, seems doubtful. Schleiermacher’s concepts and practices respond to a specifi c historical moment, although they are not themselves historicist; hence any application or further development of them must take into account the moment when a translation is produced or studied. Nonetheless, Schleiermacher’s recommendations possess an undeniable practical value: they oppose the foregrounding of the signifi ed by which fl uent translation produces the effect of transparency; for him, a translation can be foreignizing only by approximating the play of foreign signifi ers, and this can take various forms, including experimentation with language that is intelligible but less 98 Nation widely used, especially in translations, as well as close adherence to the foreign text

Critica Lefevere por discordar da tradução estrangeirizante, afirmando que ele é influenciado por Nida 98
Newman foi um dos primeiros tradutores britâncios influenciados pelo estrangeirismo alemão.
[Crítica de Newman a especialização do conhecimento "division of labor" 100]
Seu posicionamento anti domesticação era alinhado a sua ideia de educação liberal e ampla reconhecendo diferenças culturais. Newman sobre seu processo:

One of these is, that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work. Of course a necessary inference from such a dogma is, that whatever has a foreign colour is undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in English. From such a notion I cannot too strongly express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite; – to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be, – whether it be a matter of taste, of intellect, or of morals. […] the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native compositions. (Newman 1856: xv–xvi) 101

Reclamava do mercado editorial que condenava a linguagem necessária para tradução estrangeirizante. As criticas às suas trads foram ferrenhas.
Arnold escreveu uma "resposta" a Newman com princípios completamente inversos. Prefiria transparencia e transcendencia como pilares de tradução.

In this remarkable analogy, Arnold’s translation “principles” assumed a Christian Platonic metaphysics of true semantic equivalence, whereby he demonized (or fecalized) the material conditions of translation, the translating-language values that defi ne the translator’s work and inevitably mark the source-language text. Current English “modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling” must be repressed, like a bodily function; they are “alien” excrement soiling the classical text. This is an antiquarianism that canonized the Greek past while approaching the English present with a physical squeamishness. Arnold didn’t demonize all English values, however, since he was in fact upholding the canonical tradition of English literary translation: following Denham, Dryden, Tytler, Frere, he recommended a free, domesticating practice to produce fl uent, familiar verse that respected bourgeois moral values. The difference between the foreign text and English culture “disappears” in this tradition because the translator removes it – while invisibly inscribing a reading that refl ects English literary canons, a specifi c interpretation of “Homer.” 108
The social function Arnold assigned translators like Newman was to “correct” English cultural values by bringing them in line with scholarly “opinion.” Translation for Arnold was a means to empower an academic elite, to endow it with national cultural authority, but this empowerment involved an imposition of scholarly values on other cultural constituencies – including the diverse Englishreading audience that Newman hoped to reach. The elitism in Arnold’s concept of a national English culture assumed an unbridgeable social division: “These two impressions – that of the scholar, and that of the unlearned reader – can, practically, never be accurately compared” (ibid.: 201). Translation bridges this division, but only by eliminating the nonscholarly.110

Newman respondeu arnold com um livro inteiro sobre tradução. Havia um problema de público alvo entre eles

Newman questioned the authority Arnold assigned to the academy in the formation of a national culture. He pointed out that England was multicultural, a site of diverse values, and although an academic himself he sided with the nonacademic: Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a fi nal sentence on questions of taste in their court. (Ibid.: 2)

Conclusões

Yet the “foreign” in Newman’s foreignizing translations was defi ned precisely by his resistance to academic literary values, by his aim to encompass rather than exclude popular forms affi liated with various social groups. Foreignizing translation is based on the assumption that literacy is not universal, that communication is complicated by cultural differences between and within linguistic communities. But foreignizing is also an attempt to recognize and allow those differences to shape cultural discourses in the translating language. Arnold’s advocacy of domesticating translation also did not assume a homogeneous national culture – indeed, for him the diversity of English literature meant chaos. Arnold’s response to cultural differences was to repress them, hewing to the dominant tradition in English-language translation and empowering an academic elite to maintain it. Newman demonstrated, however, that foreignizing translation can be a form of resistance in a democratic cultural politics.
The Victorian controversy also offers a practical lesson for contemporary English-language translators. It suggests that close translation, what Arnold called Newman’s “literalness,” does not necessarily lead to unidiomatic, unintelligible English. Schleiermacher recommended this strategy, and Newman likewise argued that “in many passages it is of much value to render the original line by line” (Newman 1856: viii–ix), incurring Arnold’s satire for verbatim renderings of Homeric epithets – “ashen-speared,” “brazen-cloaked” (Arnold 1960: 165). But Newman’s close adherence to the lineation and word order of the Greek text was matched by an equally close attention to a distinctly English lexicon, syntax, and range of literary forms. Close translation certainly risks obscure diction, awkward constructions, and hybrid forms, but these vary in degree from one foreign text to another and from one receiving situation to another. Charges of “translationese” assume an investment in specifi c linguistic and cultural values to the exclusion of others. Hence close translation is foreignizing only because its approximation of the foreign text entails deviating from dominant receiving values – like the current standard dialect and transparent discourse.
What is “literal” about this approach is that it focuses on the letter of the translation as well as the foreign text, emphasizing the signifi er, the signifying play that routinely gets fi xed in English-language translation, reduced to a relatively coherent signifi ed. Newman’s foreignizing translation released this play, adding a surplus of meanings to the foreign text by encompassing various English-language cultural discourses, past and present, elite and popular, poetic and novelistic, English and Scottish. In foreignizing translation, the ethnocentric violence that every act of translating wreaks on a foreign text is matched by a violent disruption of receiving cultural values that challenges forms of domination, whether nationalist or elitist. Foreignizing undermines the very concept of nation by invoking the diverse constituencies that any such concept tends to elide. [...] quite clear not only that foreignizing can cross the cultural boundaries between elite and popular readerships, but that it can change reading patterns by broadening the spectrum of linguistic forms used in translating and thereby redefi ning commonly accepted notions of fl uency. Readability in translation need not be tied to the current standard dialect of the translating language. 120-1

É falsa a ideia de que estrangeirizar é para as elites, também que a elite só prefere estrangeirização. Há varios modos de misturar os dois estilos.

Today, however, both elite and popular readers must learn how to read a translation, not as a simple communication of a foreign text, but as an interpretation that imitates yet varies foreign textual features in accordance with the translator’s cultural situation and historical moment. Without such a reading practice, translation will remain invisible – regardless of the translator’s discursive strategies or of the reader’s knowledge and interests 124

Dissidence

he search for alternatives to the domesticating tradition in English-language translation can locate different kinds of foreignizing practices, both in the choice of foreign texts and in the invention of translation discourses. A translator can signal the foreignness of the foreign text, not only by using a discursive strategy that deviates from prevailing discourses (e.g. dense archaism as opposed to transparency dependent on current standard usage), but also by choosing to translate a text that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the translating language. Foreignizing translation is a dissident cultural practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developing affi liations with marginal linguistic and cultural values in the receiving situation, including foreign cultures that have been excluded because their differences effectively constitute a resistance to dominant values.1 On the one hand, foreignizing translation enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text merely by using a discourse in the translating language to render that text, but also by enlisting it in a political agenda in the translating culture, like dissidence. On the other hand, it is precisely this dissident stance that enables foreignizing translation to signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text and perform a work of cultural restoration, admitting the ethnodeviant and potentially revising literary canons in the translating language. 125

Sobre o plagio de Sheley no formato de tradução para o italiano por Tarchetti:

Tarchetti’s plagiarism violated this notion of authorship not by merely copying Shelley’s tale, but by translating it. Because his plagiarism was a translation, it introduced a decisive change in the form of the original, specifi cally in its language; his assertion of authorship simultaneously masked this change and indicated that it was decisive enough to mark the creation of a new text which originated with him. Tarchetti’s plagiarism covertly collapsed the distinction that an individualistic notion of authorship draws between author and translator, creator and imitator. Yet because his plagiarism remained undiscovered and unrationalized – at least until today – it continued to support this distinction; it did not refl ect or contribute to any revision of nineteenth-century Italian opinion concerning the aesthetic and legal status of translation. All the same, the fact that Tarchetti’s plagiarism was covert did not in any way mitigate its violation of authorship – nor its effect as an eminently foreignizing translation practice. Because his Italian translation was a plagiarism, it was especially subversive of bourgeois values in the major language. On the one hand, Tarchetti’s text fl outed bourgeois propriety and property by fraudulently exploiting the process of literary commodifi cation in the Italian publishing industry; in this way, his plagiarism exemplifi ed the nonconformist tendency of the scapigliatura to identify with socially subordinate groups, particularly the worker, the poor, and the criminal, professing a dissident refusal of the dominant by affi liating with the subcultural (Mariani 1967). On the other hand, Tarchetti’s text deterritorialized the bourgeois fi ctional discourse that dominated Italian culture precisely because it was a plagiarism in the standard dialect, because it passed itself off not just as an original Gothic tale, but as one written originally in the Italian of Manzonian realism and therefore foreignizing in its impact on the Italian literary scene.
Yet Shelley’s authorship comes back to worry the ideological standpoint of Tarchetti’s intervention by raising the issue of gender. To be effective as a subversion of bourgeois values that deterritorialized the Italian literary standard, his text was required to maintain the fi ction of his authorship, referring to Shelley’s tale only in the vaguest way (“imitation”). At the same time, however, this fi ction suppressed an instance of female authorship, so that the theft of Shelley’s literary creation had the patriarchal effect of female disempowerment, of limiting a woman’s social agency. This would seem to be a consequence which Tarchetti did not anticipate: some of his other fi ction explicitly addressed male domination of women and the social construction of gender, whether in the graphic depiction of Paolina’s oppression or in the gender dislocations of his fantastic experiments (Caesar 1987). Most importantly, the tale he chose to plagiarize interrogates patriarchal images of male power and female weakness. Grounded in an antifeminist suppression of Shelley’s authorship, Tarchetti’s plagiarism nonetheless circulated her feminist fi ctional project in Italian culture. This ideological contradiction is further complicated by the fact that Tarchetti’s text is a translation. In order for Shelley’s tale to perform its political function in a different culture, it underwent a radical transformation that was simultaneously faithful and abusive, that both reproduced and supplemented the English text. The clearest indication of this uneven relationship appears in the subtle differences introduced by the Italian version: they questioned the class and racial ideologies which informed Shelley’s tale. 137-8
Yet Tarchetti’s reliance on plagiarism to forward his political agenda, as well as his deletion of a literary allusion he probably did not understand, gives a fi nal twist to Lewis’s concept of abusive fi delity in translation. Both moves show that the foreign text can cause “a kind of unsettling aftermath” in the translation, indicating points where the latter is “foreign” to its own project or where it confl icts with the translator’s intention. As soon as Tarchetti’s theft is known and his deletion located, Shelley’s tale enacts an ideological critique of his translation which reveals that he imported her feminist fi ction into Italy with some violence, suppressing her authorship and her construction of a feminist literary tradition. The antifeminist effects of Tarchetti’s text constitute an egregious reminder that translation, like every cultural practice, functions under conditions that may to some extent be unacknowledged, but that nonetheless complicate and perhaps compromise the translator’s activity – even when it aims to make a strategic political intervention. 151
Tarchetti’s translation practices cannot be imitated today without signifi cant revision. Plagiarism is largely excluded by copyright laws that bind translators as well as authors, resulting in contracts designed to insure that the translation is in fact a translation, and that it does not involve the unlicensed use of any copyrighted material. .... The shrewdness and sheer audacity of Tarchetti’s plagiarism may make it attractive to dissidents in British and American literary cultures – especially dissident translators interested in upsetting current practices in the publishing industry. Yet the fact remains that to publish an unauthorized translation of a copyrighted foreign text is to invite legal proceedings whose cost can far exceed the translator’s income from even a bestselling translation. .... Tarchetti’s choice to translate Shelley’s Gothic tale was foreignizing in its introduction of a fi ctional discourse that challenged the dominant realism, and his translation, along with the few other Italian translations of foreign fantasies that had already been published, initiated a change in literary taste that culminated in a signifi cant canon reformation. 152

A tradução deteriora o efeito feminista do original. Porém traz questionamentos de classe e raça inéditos.
Sobre a possibilidade de ver outras culutras em uma tradução (adendo, a vendagem de traduções é muito baixa no mercado anglofono)

Only a reader who had uncritically participated in the realist illusion would take Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novelistic descriptions of Swedish society at face value, simply as true representations. Translation complicates such descriptions by decontextualizing them, removing them from the social developments with which segments of the writers’ fi rst Swedish readership would have been acquainted, whether or not a reader shared their politics. Those developments would be unknown to most British and American readers at the time and ever since, so that any sense of Swedishness is reduced to place names and descriptions as well as the proper names chosen for characters. The crimes then become generalized, if not generic, and along with the possibility that they can happen elsewhere comes an appearance of familiarity.

Ver 163 sobre o poder do canone social na definição do que será traduzido para cada mercado.

Margin

O modernismo (que ressaltava a independencia da tradução em relação ao original) do inicio do seculo XX ofuscou um pouco a primazia da transparencia. Mas ela retornou
Sobre o modernismo de Pound

Yet Pound’s translation theory and practice were various enough to qualify and redirect his modernist appropriation of foreign texts, often in contradictory ways. His concept of “interpretative translation,” or “translation of accompaniment,” shows that for him the ideal of aesthetic autonomy coincided with a kind of translation that made explicit its dependence on cultural values in the receiving situation, not merely to make a literary difference in the translating language, but to signal the differences of the foreign text. 167
Pound’s theory and practice of interpretative translation reverse the priorities set by modernist commentators on translation like Mayor, Bunting, Eliot, and Pound himself. Interpretative translation contradicts the ideal of autonomy by pointing to the various conditions of the translated text, those specifi c to the foreign as well as the receiving culture, and thus makes clear that translation can make a difference in the translating language only by trying to signify the differences of the foreign text. The discursive heterogeneity of Pound’s interpretative translations, especially his use of archaism, was both an innovation of modernist poetics and a deviation from current linguistic and literary values, suffi ciently noticeable to seem alien. Pound shows that in translation the foreignness of the foreign text is available only in cultural forms that already circulate in the translating language, some with greater cultural capital than others. In translation the foreignness of the foreign text can only be what currently appears “foreign” in the receiving culture, in relation to dominant values, and therefore only as values that are marginal in various degrees, whether because they are residual, survivals of previous linguistic and cultural forms, or because they are emergent, transformations of previous forms that are recognizably different, or because they are specialized or nonstandard, forms linked to specifi c groups with varying degrees of social power and prestige. The foreign can only be a disruption of the current hierarchy of values in the receiving culture, an estrangement of them that seeks to establish a cultural difference by drawing on the marginal. Translation, then, always involves a process of domestication, an exchange of foreign-language intelligibilities for those of the translating language. But domestication need not mean assimilation, that is, a conservative reduction of the foreign text to dominant values. It can also mean resistance, through a recovery of the residual or an affi liation with the emergent or the dominated – choosing to translate a foreign text, for instance, that is excluded by prevalent English-language translation practices or by the current canon of foreign literature in English and thus forcing a methodological revision and a canon reformation.
The remarkable thing about modernist translation is that, even though in theoretical statements it insists on the aesthetic autonomy of the translated text, it still led to the development of translation practices that drew on a broad range of discourses in the translating language and repeatedly recovered the excluded and the marginal to challenge the dominant. Pound’s translations avoided the transparent discourse that has dominated English-language translation since the seventeenth century. Instead of translating to produce a narrowly defi ned variety of fl uency, foregrounding the signifi ed and minimizing any play of the signifi er that impeded communication, pursuing linear syntax, univocal meaning, current usage, standard dialects, prosodic smoothness, Pound increased the play of the signifi er, cultivating inverted or convoluted syntax, polysemy, archaism, nonstandard dialects, elaborate stanzaic forms and sound effects – textual features that frustrate immediate intelligibility, empathic response, interpretive mastery. And by doing this Pound addressed the problem of domestication that nags not just his own claim of aesthetic autonomy, but also the transparent discourse dominating English-language translation. Transparency inscribes the foreign text with dominant English values (like transparency) and simultaneously conceals that domestication under the illusion that the translated text is not a translation, but the “original,” refl ecting the foreign author’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text; whereas modernist translation, by deviating from transparency and inscribing the foreign text with marginal English values, initiates a foreignizing movement that points to the linguistic and cultural differences between the two texts (admitting, of course, that some of the values inscribed by modernists like Pound are neither marginal nor especially democratic – e.g. patriarchy).
This is not a concept of translation that modernism theorized with any consistency, but rather one that its translation theories and practices make possible. It won’t be found in a modernist critic of modernism like Bunting, Eliot, or Hugh Kenner, because such critics accept the claim of aesthetic autonomy for the translated text. “Ezra Pound never translates ‘into’ something already existing in English,” wrote Kenner, “only Pound has had both the boldness and resource to make a new form, similar in effect to that of the original” (Pound 1953: 9). Yet what can now be seen is that a translation is unable to produce an effect equivalent to that of the foreign text because translation is domestication, the inscription of cultural values that differ fundamentally from those in the foreign language. Pound’s effects were aimed only at Anglophone cultures, and so he always translated into preexisting English cultural forms – Anglo-Saxon patterns of accent and alliteration, pre-Elizabethan English, Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, modernist precision, American colloquialism. In fact, Pound’s reliance on preexisting forms erases his distinction between two kinds of translation: both interpretative translations and translations that are new poems resort to the innovations of modernist poetics, and so both can be said to offer “a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of the statue” (Anderson 1983: 5) – the side selected and framed by Anglophone modernism. The discursive heterogeneity Pound created may have made the translated texts look “new” – to modernists – but it was also a technique that signalled their difference, both from dominant English values and from those that shaped the foreign text. Modernism enables a postmodernist concept of translation that assumes the impossibility of any autonomous aesthetic value and views the foreign as at once irredeemably mediated and strategically useful, a culturally variable category that needs to be constructed to guide the translator’s intervention into the current situation in the receiving culture.176-9

Fitts (modernista ambivalente)

The fi rst thing worth remarking is how much Fitts’s practice was indebted to modernist translation, especially Pound’s work. The assertion of the aesthetic independence of the translation, the decision to submit the foreign text to “revision,” the reliance on contemporary English, even the swipe at academic translations, presumably too literal and therefore not literary – all this characterized Pound’s translation theory and practice (but also earlier fi gures in the history of English-language translation: some of Pound’s views, like Bunting’s, date back to Denham and Dryden). Fitts knew and reviewed Pound’s work, corresponded with him during the 1930s, and, at the Choate School, taught Pound’s poetry to James Laughlin, who launched New Directions and published Fitts’s Palatine Anthology as well as many of Pound’s books (Stock 1982: 322–3; Carpenter 1988: 527–8). Fitts’s most signifi cant departure from Pound in this volume, a departure that was now determining Pound’s reception both in and out of the academy, was the refusal of different poetic discourses, including archaism. Preexisting cultural materials fade into “ghosts” with the claim of aesthetic autonomy for the translation, which can then carry out a thoroughgoing domestication that inscribes the foreign text with translating-language values, both linguistic (fl uency) and cultural (a JudeoChristian monotheism – “writing ‘God’ for ‘Zeus’ ”). 182

As inovações do modernismo contudo permaneceram marginais em relação a tradição da transparencia.
[Fala-se muito sobre plágio neste capítulo]
Blackburn e o modernismo

English translation theorists from the seventeenth century onward had recommended a sympathetic identifi cation between the translator and the foreign author. In Alexander Tytler’s words, “he must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through his own organs” (Tytler 1978: 212). Yet this sort of sympathy was used to underwrite the individualism of transparent translation, the illusion of authorial presence produced by fl uent discourse: it was Tytler’s answer to the question, “How then shall a translator accomplish this diffi cult union of ease with fi delity?” Blackburn’s modernist sense of identifi cation acknowledged that there could never be a perfect sympathy, that the translator developed a “projection,” a representation, specifi c to the receiving culture, that interrogated the foreign author, exposing “his hang-ups.” When Blackburn’s translator is “there,” the sense of immediacy comes not from any direct apprehension of the foreign text, but from living out an interpretation that enables the translator to “hold the poem,” rationalize every step in the translation process, every choice of a word. 212

Gutrie em resposta a Blackburn

What did not seem “legitimate” to Guthrie was the modernist experimentalism of Blackburn’s translation: the foreignizing effects deviated too widely from dominant American values in the reception of archaic texts, especially scholarly annotation and a narrowly conceived fl uent discourse.
Guthrie’s own work with troubadour poetry in the 1920s had assumed the modernist ideal of translation as an independent literary text: he published his translations as poems in their own right, identifying them as translations only in vague footnotes that omitted any precise identifi cation of the Provençal texts. In 1958, however, Guthrie did not recognize Blackburn’s pursuit of this same modernist ideal, his emphasis on the literary qualities of the translation at the expense of annotations, which he limited to the Provençal titles and to the vidas and razos that accompanied the texts in manuscripts. Guthrie wanted Blackburn’s translation to have a more academic cast, even while acknowledging “the general reader” 220
Inevitably Blackburn’s more inventive experiments provoked Guthrie to domesticate the translations, revising them for fl uency, but also deleting the political satire enabled by the mixed lexicon. 222
The key moments I have considered in Blackburn’s career suggest that his work as a translator responded powerfully to his cultural situation. He followed the modernist innovations that were developed by Pound but marginalized by the regime of fl uency in English-language translation. This meant cultivating an extremely heterogeneous discourse (a rich mixture of archaism, colloquialism, 232 Margin quotation, nonstandard punctuation and orthography, and prosodic experiment) that prevented the translation from being taken as the “original” and instead asserted its independence as a literary text in a different language and culture. Blackburn’s experimentalist practices were foreignizing: their challenge to fl uency, among other values in contemporary American culture (academic criticism, linguistic elitism, bourgeois propriety, realism, individualism), enabled his translations to signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign texts. Yet Blackburn was also appropriating these texts for his own cultural agendas: in the construction of his authorial identity through a rivalry with Pound; in the prosodic and thematic development of his own poetry; and in a dissident political intervention designed to foster a leftwing internationalism during the Cold War, when an American foreign policy of containing ideological opponents led to a domestic surge of nationalism that excluded cultural differences. 231-2

Omitir notas pode acentuar a estrangeirização. 221
Conclusão

At the end of the twentieth century, the most urgent question raised by American modernist translation was in fact whether the search for foreign writing did not devolve into a self-confi rming form of appropriation. The modernist project of being different at home, of challenging dominant linguistic and literary values in the receiving culture, seems to have limited the American translator’s openness to the linguistic and cultural differences that had been so important to early modernism, but that had amounted to more than locating another modernist experiment, another stylistic innovation, in a foreign literature. End-of-the-century modernist poets used translation to advance their agenda, opposing “the primacy of the individual voice” that Bernstein has treated as the hallmark of “offi cial verse culture” as well as the illusion of transparency so prized in that culture (Bernstein 1992: 2, 6). Yet this aim weakened the impact of any foreignizing effects that the translations may have produced by confi ning them to modernist foreign poetries that were recognizable as such and hence assimilable to Anglophone modernism. The very practice of translation, if driven by the pursuit of the foreign, demands a constant rethinking of experimentalism so that foreign poetic traditions without a strong modernist tendency do not fall victim to a new exclusion. 236

Simpatico

Na fluencia deve haver uma simpatia entre autor e tradutor, uma identidade entre eles para além da estética e gosto pessoal. Isso remonta ao século XVII. Contudo:

[...] the notion of simpatico actually mystifi es what happens in the translation process. Most crucially, it conceals the fact that, in order to produce the effect of transparency in a translated text, in order to give the reader the sense that the text is a window onto the author, translators must manipulate what often seems to be a very resistant material, that is, the language into which they are translating, in most cases the language they learned fi rst, their mother tongue, but now also their own. Transparency occurs only when the translation reads fl uently, when there are no awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings, when clear syntactical connections and consistent pronouns create intelligibility for the reader.[...] These formal techniques reveal that transparency is an illusionistic effect: it depends on the translator’s work with language, but it hides this work, even the very presence of language, by suggesting that the author can be seen in the translation, that in it the author speaks in his or her own voice. If the illusion of transparency is strong enough, it may well produce a truth-effect, wherein the authorial voice becomes authoritative, heard as speaking what is true, right, obvious. 248-9

Trad por resistencia, descarta a fluencia visando manter (ou acentuar) a discontinuidade do original. 251

A strategy of resistancy thus results in an abusive fi delity which constructs a simultaneous relationship of reproduction and supplementarity between the translation and the foreign text. The precise nature of this relationship cannot be calculated before the translation process is begun because different relationships must be worked out for the specifi c cultural materials of different foreign texts and for the specifi c cultural situations in which those texts are translated. This makes translation labor-intensive, but also serendipitous, with the translator poring over dictionaries, developing many alternative renderings, unexpectedly fi nding words and phrases that at once imitate and exceed the foreign text. 255-6
: by making simpatico an impossible goal, the formal discontinuity of the Italian has forced me to question fl uency, the dominant translation strategy in English, exposing its link to the individualism of romantic and modern theories of transparent discourse, dislodging me from the position constructed for the English-language translator by his manifold relations with editors, publishers, reviewers, and, as my friend’s advice suggests, other translators. [...] A discursive practice like translation seems particularly vulnerable to shifts in positioning, displacements of identity: its function is to work on linguistic and cultural differences which can easily initiate an interrogation of the conditions of the translator’s work. Thus, although the hegemony of transparent discourse in contemporary British and American cultures has made fl uency the hegemonic strategy in English-language translation, De Angelis’s poetry can still enlist the translator in a cultural contradiction: I was Simpatico 263 led to implement a resistant strategy in opposition to the discursive rules by which my work would most likely be judged, and yet that strategy, far from proving faithful to the Italian texts, in fact abused them by exploiting their potential for different and incompatible meanings.262-3
It is this sort of liberation that resistancy tries to produce in the translated text by resorting to techniques that make it strange and estranging in the receiving culture. Resistancy seeks to free the reader of the translation, as well as the translator, from the cultural constraints that ordinarily govern their reading and writing and threaten to overpower and domesticate the foreign text, annihilating its foreignness. Resistancy makes English-language translation a dissident cultural politics today, when fl uent strategies and transparent discourse routinely perform that mystifi cation of foreign texts. [...] My translations of De Angelis’s poetry obviously can never be completely free of English and the linguistic and cultural constraints which it imposes on poetry and translation; that line of escape would preempt any translation and is no more than a capitulation to the major language, a political defeat. The point is rather that my translations resist the hegemony of transparent discourse in English-language cultures, and they do this from within, by deterritorializing the translating language itself, questioning its major cultural status by using it as the vehicle for ideas and discursive techniques which remain minor in it, minoritizing the major language by opening it to the nonstandard forms that it excludes (cf. Venuti 1998: 9–13). [...] If the resistant strategy effectively produces an estranging translation, then the foreign text also enjoys a momentary liberation from the receiving culture, perhaps before it is reterritorialized with the reader’s articulation of a voice – recognizable, transparent – or of some reading amenable to the dominant aesthetic in English. The liberating moment would occur when the reader of the resistant translation experiences, in the translating language, the cultural differences which separate that language and the foreign text. 263-4

ResistÊncia torna o texto estranho para o autor, tradutor e leitor. 259
Conclusão

Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures – particularly similar messages and formal techniques – but it does this only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities. It can never and should never aim to remove these dissimilarities entirely. A translated text should be the site where linguistic and cultural differences are somehow signalled, where a reader gets some sense of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best signal those differences, that sense of otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures. In contrast, the notion of simpatico, by placing a premium on transparency and demanding a narrowly conceived fl uent strategy, can be viewed as a cultural narcissism: it seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and fi nds only the same culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other. For the translator becomes aware of his intimate sympathy with the foreign writer only when he recognizes his own voice in the foreign text. Unfortunately, the irreducible linguistic and cultural differences mean that this is always a misrecognition as well, yet fl uency ensures that this point gets lost in the translating. Now more than ever, when transparency continues to dominate British and American cultures, ensuring that simpatico will remain a compelling goal for English-language translators, it seems important to reconsider what we do when we translate. 264

Call to action

Sobre Blanchot (1971)

Every step in the translation process – from selecting a foreign text to implementing a translation strategy to editing, reviewing, and reading the translation – is mediated by the diverse values, beliefs, and representations that circulate in the translating language, always in some hierarchical order. The translator, who works with varying degrees of calculation, under continuous self-monitoring and with active consultation of cultural rules and resources (from dictionaries and grammars to translation strategies and other translations to original compositions, both canonical and marginal), may submit to or resist the forms, practices, and institutions that have accrued the greatest prestige and power in the translating language, with either course of action susceptible to ongoing redirection. Submission assumes an ethics of domestication at work in the translation process, locating the same in a cultural other, pursuing a cultural narcissism that is imperialistic abroad and conservative, even reactionary, in maintaining cultural hierarchies in the receiving situation. Resistance assumes an ethics of foreignization, locating the alien in a cultural other, pursuing cultural diversity, signalling linguistic and cultural differences and unsettling the hierarchies in the translating language. Resistance too can be imperialistic abroad, appropriating foreign texts to serve its own cultural political interests. But insofar as the resistance is directed against values that exclude or marginalize certain foreign texts, it performs an act of cultural restoration which aims to question and possibly re-form, or simply smash the idea of, canons in the receiving culture. 266

Reitera a dominância da domesticação na tradição tradutória anglófona, especialmente quando comparada a estrangeirizante alemã.

. For the most part, English-language translators and their publishers have let their choice of foreign texts and their development of translation strategies conform to dominant cultural values in English. Foremost among these values has been a fl uent discursive strategy that conforms to the current standard dialect and thereby produces an illusion of transparency – even if what actually constitutes a fl uent translation has changed from one period to another as linguistic norms and stylistic canons have changed. 267
[...] he domesticating translation that currently dominates British and American cultures, both elite and popular, can be challenged only by developing a practice that is not just more self-conscious, but more self-critical. Knowledge of the sourcelanguage culture, however expert, is insuffi cient to produce a translation that is both readable and resistant to a reductive domestication. Translators must also possess a commanding knowledge of the translating language and culture, past as well as present. And they must be able to deploy this knowledge in writing. The selection of a foreign text for translation and the invention of a discursive strategy to translate it should be grounded on a critical assessment of the receiving culture, its hierarchies and exclusions, its relations to foreign cultures worldwide. Before a foreign text is chosen or a translation commission is accepted, translators must scrutinize the current situation of the genre or text type, fi eld or discipline in which they are working. Literary translators should be familiar with the canons of foreign literatures in English as well as the canons of British and American literatures, set against patterns of intercultural exchange and geopolitical relations (for a powerful example of this sort of cultural diagnosis, see Said 1990). Translators working in other disciplines of the human sciences should be familiar with the body of foreign texts that have achieved authority in British and American academic institutions as well as the Anglophone scholarship that is regarded as authoritative, similarly set in a global framework.
The ethnocentric violence of translation is inevitable: in the translation process, foreign languages, texts, and cultures always undergo some degree and form of exclusion, reduction, and inscription that refl ect the cultural situation in the translating language. Yet the domesticating work on the foreign text can be a foreignizing intervention, pitched to question existing cultural hierarchies. I. U. Tarchetti’s plagiarized translation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic tale shows that a dissident translator can not only choose a foreign text that is marginal in the receiving culture, but translate it with a canonical discourse, developing a foreignizing fl uency that produces the illusion of transparency and enables the translation to pass for an original composition, ultimately reforming the literary or scholarly canon in the translating language. Or a dissident translator can choose a foreign text that is canonical in the receiving culture, but translate it with a marginal discourse, reforming the canon of the foreign literature or scholarship that currently exists in translation by introducing a signifi cantly different interpretation of the foreign text. Here Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s work with Russian novelists like Dostoevsky has been illuminating: not only have they sought to adhere more closely to the Russian texts than previous Englishlanguage translators, but they have experimented with the prevailing form of fl uency by varying the standard dialect with such nonstandard items as archaisms and colloquialisms. 267-8
No foreign text or discursive strategy is inherently foreignizing. Their value in a translation project is contingent on the cultural hierarchies in the receiving situation at a particular historical moment. For the translator, this value is primarily cast in linguistic terms, as a practice of writing in which verbal choices inscribe interpretations in the foreign text and create a cumulative ethical effect – although the history of translation presented in this book has shown that dissident translators may also command an extensive knowledge of the hierarchies that enable and constrain their work. For the scholar, the choices that comprise a translation must always be described, explained, and evaluated in relation to the cultural and social contexts in which that translation is produced and received. The contexts of production and reception may be riven with confl icts and contradictions that outstrip the translator’s conscious control and complicate the ethical effect of the translation. Still, these contexts need to be reconstructed in a nuanced form because they are the key factors in any evaluation. What hangs in the balance is an understanding of the ethics of an intercultural relation and its potential cultural and social consequences. 268
Because of the legal risk, the considerable freedom of Robert Graves or the editorial emendations of Pound are not likely to be adopted by many translators – at least not with foreign texts that haven’t yet entered the public domain. Since “faithful rendition” is defi ned partly by the illusion of transparency, by the discursive effect of originality, the polylingualism of the Zukofskys and Blackburn is equally limited in effectiveness, likely to encounter opposition from publishers and large segments of Anglophone readers who read for immediate intelligibility. Nevertheless, contemporary translators can experiment with nonstandard linguistic forms as well as forms of intertextuality like allusion and quotation where they are appropriate to an interpretation of the foreign text. Fluency need not be abandoned, but rather reinvented so as to create new kinds of readability that provide more sophisticated pleasures by calling attention to the secondary status of the translation and by signalling the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text. Translators committed to changing their cultural marginality can do so only within the codes that are specifi c to the receiving culture. This means, on the one hand, limiting their discursive experiments to perceptible deviations that may risk but stop short of the parodic or the incomprehensible and, on the other hand, expanding their repertoire as writers to encompass a wide range of registers and dialects, styles and discourses drawn from the history and current state of literatures in English.
Translators must also force a revision of the codes – cultural, economic, legal – that marginalize and exploit them. They can work to revise the individualistic concept of authorship that has banished translation to the fringes of British and American cultures, not only by developing innovative translation practices in which their work becomes visible to readers, but also by presenting incisive rationales for these practices in prefaces and essays, lectures and interviews. Such self-presentations will indicate that the language of the translation originates with the translator in a decisive way, but also that the translator is not its sole origin: a translator’s originality is second-order, revealed in the choice of a particular foreign text and in the development of a particular discursive strategy in response to an existing cultural situation (see Venuti 1998: chap. 2). Recognizing translation as a derivative form of authorship does not displace the foreign author, but rather questions the individualism of current concepts of authorial originality by suggesting that no writing can be mere self-expression because it is derived from a cultural tradition at a specifi c historical moment. 273-4

Sobre a praticidade da teoria da tradução e seus efeitos socioculturais ver 274-277. É uma conclusão do livro como um todo.

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