Allen, Bernofsky In Translation; Translators on Their Work and What It Means

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.Four years after his return, he un-derwent a spiritual crisis and left the ministry to pursue a literary careerin which the translation of Mar�a was one of the early steps.He also be-gan writing for magazines, including The Nation, to which he contributeda number of editorials that marked him as one of the Anti-Imperialists agroup that included Henry and William James, William Dean Howells,and Mark Twain.Translation was, for Ogden, a response to U.S.imperi-alism, which he well understood to be cultural as well as political.In anThe Will to Translate891895 editorial for The Nation on the apparent decline of interest in mis-sionary work in the United States, his stance is clearly derived from hisexperience in the mission fields and his work as a translator: In the faceof [our] better knowledge of many of the people whom we have beenwont promiscuously to call heathen, it has been getting more and moreimpossible to be so sure that they have everything to learn from us, andwe nothing from them. 12By then, Ogden was on the staff of the New York Evening Post, of which, in1903, he would become chief editor a position previously held, from 1828to 1878, by William Cullen Bryant, sometime translator of the Cubanpoet Jos� Mar�a Heredia.Ogden s continued interest in Latin America isevinced by his 1904 biography of the historian and Hispanist William H.Prescott, eminent chronicler of Spain s conquest of America.13 In 1920, heleft the Post to join the staff of The New York Times, becoming its editor-in-chief within two years; he remained in that position until his death,twenty-five years later.When Ogden passed away on February 23,�1937,�hisobituary appeared on the front page of the Times, outlined in a black box.Fifteen years after Ogden s death, Saul Bellow published his land-mark novel The Adventures of Augie March.In an early section of the novel,as he contemplates his humble Chicago origins and future prospects, itseponymous picaresque hero comments, But when there is no shepherd-Sicily.�.�.but deep city vexation instead, and you are forced early intodeep city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service in thetemple, nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to go and study Greekin Bogot�, but land in a poolroom what can that lead to of the high-est? 14 In this string of rapid-fire allusion shepherd-Sicily may referto the Greek pastoral poet Theocritus (third century B.C.), who hailedfrom Sicily, while it was certainly the Old Testament prophet Samuelwho wore his ephod to serve Eli as a child (1 Samuel 2:18) the one seton a horse by his sisters to go and study Greek in Bogot� is the narratorof Jorge Isaacs Mar�a.Ogden s version of Mar�a then and now the onlypublished translation of the book into English thus makes a cameo ap-pearance in one of the canonical U.S.novels of the twentieth century;Augie March both claims and rejects it as an antecedent, a model ofsome literary ideal, unavailable to him, that he calls the highest. Fewreaders of Bellow s novel can have caught the reference; Mar�a remains arather obscure work among English speakers.15 But there it is: the prosefiction of Latin America and that of the United States catching eachother s eye in a fictional character s fleeting dismissal of the models forPart I: The Translator in the World90living proposed by the universe of world literature a universe that,here at last, includes Latin America.III.Harriet de On�sThough Latin American writers who lived and wrote in Spanish innineteenth-century New York were beyond the margins of Anglophoneliterary culture, they were strongly rooted within their own languagecommunity; theirs was not a tragedy of neglect.As exiles or immigrants,their lives were divided and they faced prejudice, but they did not feeltorn between two languages.Mart� had a gigantic literary reputationthat extended across the hemisphere, and even a writer like Rivera y Rioreturned home to an established, if minor, place in Mexican literature.16Whether or not they dreamed of one day influencing U.S.literature inthe same way it had influenced them, the possibility of translation was soremote that its unavailability was simply part of the order of things anddoes not seem to have been particularly destabilizing.It isn t until the firsthalf of the twentieth century that the language politics of Nueva Yorkproduced writers who endured what Pascal Casanova calls the tragedyof translated men, 17 writers caught in a double bind between two lan-guages, at home in neither, and deeply suspicious of translation.Thefullest exploration to date of these writers and their dilemma is offeredby Gustavo P�rez Firmat in a study eloquently titled Tongue Ties.18Calvert Casey (1924 1969), for example, was born in Baltimore butraised largely in Havana; he began his writing career in English and thenswitched to Spanish, but returned to English to write an unfi nished noveltitled Gianni that he then attempted to destroy.Casey died by his ownhand in Rome, at the age of forty-five.Felipe Alfau (1902 1999) was thechild of Spanish parents who immigrated to New York when he was four-teen.He made the decision to write his novel, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, inEnglish because, a note on the author explains, he felt he could not reacha Spanish audience. 19 The main character of Locos is named Fulano or So-and-So and is described thus: It seems that about Fulano s person-ality, if we are to grant him a personality, hung a cloud of inattentionwhich withstood his almost heroic assaults to break through it.In an interview with Ilan Stavans in 1993, the elderly Alfau, whomStavans had tracked down in a retirement facility, exhibits supreme indif-ference to writing, literature, publication, and translation.20 He declaresThe Will to Translate91himself a radical outsider to every language he speaks, a writer whoclaims to write for no one and to care not at all whether anyone reads him. Better to be all alone, he tells Stavans. Alone and silent. Alfau s secondnovel, Chromos, not published until forty years after it was written,21 is setin New York among Spanish-speaking immigrants, a fact its first para-graph reflects upon:The moment one learns English, complications set in.Try as one may,one cannot elude this conclusion, one inevitably comes back to it.Thisapplies to all persons, including those born to the language, and, attimes, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards.Chilean Maria Luisa Bombal, whose childhood was divided betweenLatin America and Paris, emigrated to the United States in 1940, at theage of 30, leaving behind a growing literary reputation.She would spendthe next three decades reworking two of her early tales into English andloading them with so much additional material, in what seems to havebeen an attempt to make them palatable to a U.S.audience, that sheended up destroying much of their original interest.Her 1935 surrealistnovella La �ltima niebla, for example, metastasized over a 12-year periodinto a 243-page English novel called House of Mist.22 Agreement on thesuperiority of the earlier work is unanimous, and The Final Mist waslater published in an English translation by Richard and Lucia Cun-ningham as part of a collection of short stories.23During the same period, the figure of the translator was coming morefully into view [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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