Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Spelling, Translation and Transliteration
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
- 1 Unknown Languages and Unruly Selves: Thinking through Translation
- 2 ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
- 3 ‘The queerest sense of echo’, or Translating Imprudent Movables
- 4 Editors’ Choice: Craftsmanship and the Marketplace
- 5 Biographical Writing in Translation, or Variations on the Meaning of ‘Life’
- Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Spelling, Translation and Transliteration
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading the Russians, or Translation as Explanation
- 1 Unknown Languages and Unruly Selves: Thinking through Translation
- 2 ‘Representing by Means of Scenes’: Translating Voices
- 3 ‘The queerest sense of echo’, or Translating Imprudent Movables
- 4 Editors’ Choice: Craftsmanship and the Marketplace
- 5 Biographical Writing in Translation, or Variations on the Meaning of ‘Life’
- Conclusion: Only Inter-connect? Translation, Transaction, Interaction
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
the middle state of the writer, poised between his own idiolect and the vast sound-wave and sewage-wash of the language's total availability
(Heaney 1999: 14)While the first chapter suggested how the texts encountered in co-translation may have triggered a sense of strange recognition in Mansfield and Woolf that echoed in refracted forms in their own poetics, the present chapter moves away from such ‘necessary possibilities’ to focus on translation as a theatricalisation or multiplication of borrowed voices. It picks up on the various masks and disguises which make the boundaries between characters and speakers increasingly porous, with the translator-as-ventriloquist ‘teetering on the verge’ of ‘tidy structures’, enabling words from the page to become patterns in performance (D. Robinson 2001: 11, 132). From this perspective, thematic or referential similarities count less than a sensually alert feel of the text: sounds, sights, echoes and colours as carried by the ‘speakingness’ of living language. Barbara Folkart's call for a poetics of translation as rewriting and reenacting is operative here, despite her insistence on the singularity of the writing subject and the writerly qualities of the text:
It is time we had a new type of theory, […] a writerly theory, in short, of doing, one that would prioritise the writing subject, the subject in and behind the text, the subject who constructs herself in the act of writing and texts herself into – or out of – the poem that she is making or re-enacting.
It is time, I think, we had a theory – a poetics of translation whose intense focus on the act of writing frees it – like the act of writing itself – to get at what lies in the crevices of the already-said. (Folkart 2007: 81)
Koteliansky's working set-up with his co-translators was a first step in initiating such re-enactments ‘of the already said’. Not that there was anything at all novel in practising translation in partnership. As Reinhold points out, much continental translation practice worked exactly this way; a first translator as native speaker provided a rough translation of the source text, then a second translator ‘polished’ the target text, to ensure grammaticality and readability (Reinhold 2003: 11).
- Type
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- Information
- Translation as CollaborationVirginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky, pp. 52 - 82Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014