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THE following group of five papers, some in an abbreviated form, were presented at the 2000 MLA convention in Washington, DC, in a roundtable discussion entitled “Teaching Texts and Translations.” The session was organized in conjunction with the MLA Publications Committee, following initial conversations among the members of the Editorial Board of the MLA Texts and Translations series. As teachers and translators who have experienced a need for more discussion and increased research about the training of translators, several board members decided to propose a session that would address not only the preparation but also the use of translated texts and thus provide a complement to other more theoretical discussions on translation taking place at the convention.
Founded in 1991, principally to provide useful texts for United States classrooms, the Texts and Translations series has published seven titles in French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish. Russian and Italian are forthcoming in 2001, and ten other projects, including works in Urdu and Japanese, are currently in development. The series provides reasonably priced books in a companion two-volume (as opposed to bilingual) format. Judging from very healthy sales figures—close to 42,000 volumes to date—the series has answered a major need in North American colleges and universities.
The panelists in the MLA roundtable discussion included three members of the Texts and Translations Editorial Board (Jane Brown, Carol Maier, and Kathleen Ross) and three colleagues (Jacqueline Letzter, Christine Roulston, and Michael Ugarte) who have used books from the series in their teaching of English, French, German, or Spanish literature. The issues examined, however, were not limited to those directly related to the series. Rather, topics ranged much further afield, addressing questions of methodology and thinking through the implications of literary translations in the curriculum of different types of courses. Those courses include the great books course Michael Ugarte teaches to large numbers of students at the University of Missouri; Christine Roulston’s women’s studies courses at the University of Western Ontario, which cross language divides; courses that, like Jane Brown’s on Goethe’s Faust, focus on a single national tradition; the literary and cultural translation courses Carol Maier discussed, in which students who read works in translation can be made sensitive to the issues involved in translation theory and practice; and the multisection humanities course for honors students at the University of Maryland in which Jacqueline Letzter participates.
Some classrooms mix bilingual with monolingual students (Brown); sometimes reading texts in translation from a tradition unfamiliar to many leads to questioning of canon formation (Ugarte); in other instances, issues of gender emerge from the process of translation made evident by the text itself (Roulston). Letzter contributes observations on teaching both canonical and noncanonical texts and the use of film along with the translated text. Maier offers suggestions for teaching students, even those without a foreign language, to read “in translation,” that is, with a critical eye to subtle cultural differences and resemblances.
This set of papers aims to contribute to a discussion of the problems and challenges presented by the teaching of translations in diverse institutional and disciplinary settings. While such discussion represents an important area of activity within the field of translation studies, it is rarely addressed on the practical level of classroom implementation. As is evident in these thoughtful contributions, questions of translation pedagogy inspire broader considerations of the theoretical and ideological implications of our practice.
Kathleen Ross
New York University
AFTER many years of teaching texts in all genres in the original, in translation from classical and modern European languages, and some also simultaneously in the original and translation, I think I prefer the last mode. I have most often taught Goethe’s Faust to groups in which some students were reading it in German and some in English. I mean, of course, they were reading in those languages with my explicit agreement—I suspect most of us never quite realize (and therefore don’t take advantage of) the extent to which our students are working with texts in translation even when we think we are teaching the original. I have never found it necessary to split classes or even to take account specifically in the structure of the class that students were reading in different languages. The problems that one might anticipate from teaching in translation—the inadequacies of the particular translation, the general incapacity of a translation to communicate the particular flavor of a culture, what one might call the opacities of translation—are in fact such excellent opportunities for reflection on the process of critical reading that I actually find it easier to raise students’ consciousness in such courses than in those in which everyone reads in the same language.
I used to think that one could teach only the ideas of a text in translation—plot and character—but I have come to realize that I was wrong, especially when some students in the class are reading in the original. Classes come alive when a student suddenly pipes up, “But you are ignoring the plant imagery here”—or the defective rhyme or the chiasm or whatever. I am ignoring them, knowingly of course (!), because they are not in the translation. What a great example to students skimming through the text that the details, the particularities of the language, are important. How much more effective it is, as we teach in these days of student-centered classrooms, that the insight comes from other students in the class and not from the teacher.
Even the best translation has its moments of inadequacy—a simple mistranslation, a failure in tone, an image or turn of rhythm that gets lost. Each one is an opportunity to focus on the translator’s goals. As the basic unit of meaning, is the translator focused here on the word? the phrase? the sentence? or the paragraph? Does this translation convey what it feels like to read the text or the meaning of the words or is the issue where in the line or sentence a particular word comes? What does it mean to make such decisions? Students soon realize that the particular inadequacy will depend not only on the translator but also on whether the particular reader is more focused on plot, character, structure, tone, rhythm, imagery, syntax, semantics, the historicity of the language, the disruptiveness of language, or fluent English. More than the students’ range of categories is extended because as soon as the students realize that any act of translation is an act of interpretation, the translation becomes, in effect, another participant in the class discussion, and one with particular authority. Now the students are focused not on the meaning of the text but on the role of the translator-interpreter—and of themselves—in constructing that meaning.
But what about the general opacity of translation, the importance of the particular language for communicating the particular culture? Again, I find mixing groups is a big help. First, there is simply the power of example—one-third to one-half of the people in the room have actually learned the language in which the text under discussion was originally written. If they could do it, maybe it isn’t only professors who use foreign languages. Even in classes in which everyone reads in translation, I often emphasize the limitations of translation to give access to the text, and I use specific examples to share my enthusiasm for the language of the original. But nothing convinces students of the radical otherness of a different culture more than having representatives and students of it sitting next to them and asking somewhat different questions of the text. My American students, for example, never understand the contempt of students who have lived in Germany for Goethe and Faust at the beginning of such courses. They get a quick but very convincing course in Germany’s estrangement from its own tradition. Students knowledgeable about Germany, however, are amazed and usually converted by discovering the significance of the greatest work in the language outside its home culture. And the Americans are again, in their turn, amazed by the conversions. Better yet is the presence of students in the same classroom trained in different disciplines and different cultures. One of the best Faust classes I ever taught had a vocal and committed Americanist who couldn’t get over how dependent his own culture’s heroes, Emerson and Melville, were on this text. Next to him sat a student from Argentina who couldn’t get over the presence of Calderón. It was a radical and uncomfortable repositioning of the text for everyone in the room.
In effect, then, teaching simultaneously in translation and the original is continuous for me with any other kind of teaching of a text. The opacity of translation is really just a particular case of the opacity of language that we want our students to acknowledge and come to terms with. After all, our job is to keep students from taking the text and its meaning for granted and to help them instead to recognize its complexity, the ways in which its meaning shifts and grows depending on the questions put to it. Teaching in a foreign language helps at this task, as most of us have probably experienced. It is, frankly, a lot easier to achieve this kind of alienation of the text with a translation to juxtapose to the original than with a text that students are sure they understand from the very beginning.
Jane K. Brown
University of Washington, Seattle
MY EXPERIENCE teaching literature in translation dates back to a few years ago when I was in a large department of languages and literatures. Every year about five of us in the department (out of approximately twenty-five professors in the College of Humanities as a whole) were given the opportunity to teach a multisection humanities course, loftily entitled Intellectual Traditions of the West. This course was required of all students admitted to the university’s honors program and comprised three one-semester segments to be taken in sequence (antiquity, the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century to the present).
Being an eighteenth-century specialist, I taught the third segment. I was almost entirely free to choose which works I would teach, but the aim was to draw from a variety of national Western literatures. My training and research interests are in French, so I wanted to weight the course toward French works (in addition to several German and Italian, as well as English and American, works). Deciding on the syllabus was not easy, however, because I had no way of knowing which texts various students would have covered in their previous Intellectual Traditions courses, which all had multiple sections and were taught by teachers with varied backgrounds, ranging from philosophy to history and from classical Greek to German. Faced with this difficulty—and the leeway it allowed—I decided to present the students with a mix of canonical and noncanonical works that reflected my own interests, ranging from the theatrical culture of the Old Regime to the intellectual and artistic activity of women in eighteenth-century society.
The practical challenges I faced when selecting texts for this course were availability and cost, both of which pose problems when choosing noncanonical works in translation. Fortunately, I could count on the excellent selection of novels available in the Modern Language Association series Texts and Translations. These publications met all my criteria for excellent teaching translations: they are affordable, come with great introductions, are done by the best scholars in the field, and, best of all for my purposes, focus on noncanonical works, mostly by eighteenth-century women. Imagine my alarm when I heard in 1998 that the Modern Language Association was thinking of discontinuing the series!
Because several works have been added to this series over the years, I have been able to explore different texts with my students each time I taught the class. Isabelle de Charrière’s novel Letters of Mistress Henley (1784) works well because it spurs the students’ interest in the always fertile question of the status of women in marriage. Moreover, students are intrigued by the novel’s presentation of itself as a translation of letters, originally written in English, which brings the novel closer to them. Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (Lettres d’une Péruvienne) (1747) is equally appealing to American undergraduate students, because they can identify with the Peruvian heroine’s experience of severe culture shock when being forcibly transported to France. A study of Zilia’s ambivalent relation to French, the language of translation, is particularly fruitful in the Intellectual Traditions classroom, because it highlights the inevitable alienation of the marginal subject (in this case, doubly marginal, as a foreigner and a woman) in relation to the dominant European culture.
Mixing these noncanonical French works with canonical French works, such as Descartes’s Discourse on Method, Molière’s Misanthrope or The Bourgeois Gentleman, Voltaire’s Candide, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, or selections from Diderot’s Encyclopedia, did not pose any problem per se in this course, because the course aimed precisely at presenting as wide a sampling as possible of the literary, cultural, and philosophical production of the Old Regime. Moreover, for better or worse, students in this course typically had no preconceived ideas—nor, indeed, much knowledge—about the period studied, so for them the distinction between canonical and noncanonical works did not mean much. In fact, one year when I presented to them my research on Isabelle de Charrière’s activities as an opera composer and librettist, I realized that, despite my clarifications, they might come away from this class with the erroneous belief that Charrière was a major figure in the field, simply because they knew so little about eighteenth-century music and opera.1 This was an ironic, but certainly not altogether desirable, turning of the tables in favor of forgotten women composers.
From my standpoint, therefore, the difficulty of teaching noncanonical works became one of situating these works as fully and accurately as possible in the context of their time. This brings me to the importance of choosing translations that include good introductions and explanatory notes. Because students taking these general education courses are usually unfamiliar with the historical and literary contexts of foreign literary works and because the great number and variety of texts presented make it impossible for the instructor to devote class time to lengthy introductions of each of these works, it is essential that students can refer to the best possible material to supplement what they learn in class. I have found that when the translations I selected had minimal or superficial notes and introductions, these attributes tended to hinder rather than to enhance the students’ experience of the texts because students adopted as their own the clichés presented to them.
I found that selecting the right translations was also important when teaching canonical works, such as the comedies of Molière and Beaumarchais. I was originally eager to teach these works in general education courses because I thought they would offer both welcome comic relief and incisive commentary on contemporary society. Unfortunately, in part because of my selection of translations inappropriate for my teaching needs, they turned out to be disappointing teaching tools. To be sure, the fact that humor and word games are notoriously difficult to translate accounted for part of my frustration. But I also made the mistake of selecting translations that boasted, apart from their affordability, their suitability for the modern stage. For Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, the edition I selected (without actually seeing it beforehand; a mistake I promised myself I would never repeat) was in prose fit for Broadway, and although it read well and was funny, it only approximated the language and general flavor of the original play. Even worse from my point of view, large cuts were made in the translated play, particularly of the scenes that interested me most (for example, Marceline’s diatribe about discrimination against women), which made it impossible to convey the play’s contemporary subversive intent. When teaching translations of Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman and The Misanthrope (each of which I have taught once), I found that the translations succeeded even less in conveying to the students the flavor and contemporary impact of the original plays. In an attempt to enhance the students’ experience of these plays, I experimented with showing them excerpts of famous French performances of these plays on video. Although the great majority of these students knew no (or very little) French, most of them were able to make intelligent comments based on this viewing, remarking that they had completely missed several major characteristics of the plays before seeing the performances. The viewing of The Misanthrope, in particular, was revelatory. Students heard that the play was written in verse, whereas their translation had been in prose. They also noticed, with great surprise, that the characters were young, like themselves, and as a result of this they were better able to recognize the social dynamics among the characters. When teaching comedy in translation in the future, I plan to repeat this experiment, further improving it by focusing on one or two scenes in the English translation, so that students can be thoroughly familiar with the text in English before being confronted with the performance in French.
In my brief experience teaching literature in translation I learned through trial and error that some texts lend themselves better to being taught in translation than others and that translations vary widely in quality and approach. In the future I will pay much closer attention to selecting texts whose content and style can be made relevant to American undergraduate students who have little experience reading foreign literatures, especially of an earlier period. However, I do not want to ignore my own values, which favor scholarly translations that stay close to the original texts, because I have found that commercial translations meant for a nonacademic audience sometimes lose all flavor of the original, making it almost impossible for the students to imagine the influence the work had on its contemporary public, which is what interests me most in works of literature.
Jacqueline Letzter
University of Maryland, College Park
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de. The Marriage of Figaro. Adapt. Richard Nelson. New York: Broadway Play, 1991.
Charrière, Isabelle de. Letters of Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend. Trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. New York: MLA, 1993.
Graffigny, Françoise de. Letters from a Peruvian Woman. Trans. David Kornacker. New York: MLA, 1993.
Letzter, Jacqueline, and Robert Adelson. “Un drame d’ambitions déçues: Les opéras d’Isabelle de Charrière.” Revue d’histoire du théâtre 195 (1997): 235–54.
———. Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.
Molière. The Bourgeois Gentleman. Adapt. and trans. Robert Cohen. Orem: Encore Performance, 1993.
———. The Misanthrope. Trans. Henri van Laun. New York: Dover, 1992.
THE MAIN pedagogical challenge I have encountered in teaching translation is how to make students aware that they are reading a translated text. The paradox of translation is that it can efface otherness or difference, presenting itself as if it were the original; that is certainly how students tend to read it. How, then, can a translated text be read to include both languages or at least the echo of the language that is not there? Is reading a translated text necessarily a reductive experience, one that never quite captures the original, one that is always in the position of copying or mimicking?
First, I would like to turn to a more basic question, what does it mean to translate? The Latin noun translatio (f.) has three meanings: a transferring or transporting; a metaphor or trope; a shifting, diversion, exchange. The multiple meanings of the Latin noun speak to the different ways in which we can think about translation as a pedagogical experience. Embedded in all these meanings is the idea of transformation or movement; when things are translated, they do not stay the same; they change or shift. Paradoxically, translation is as much about difference as about sameness. It tries to reproduce the same thing within a context of difference, namely, another language.
In his essay “Shibboleth,” Jacques Derrida speaks of the “bar of translation” (409) that functions as a barrier on the one hand and as a threshold on the other. This bar both blocks and generates meaning; it takes away from and adds to the original text. Translation, in its broadest sense, could be said to encapsulate any act of communication where meaning is always equally generated and lost.
As a way into the question of translation, these concepts of loss and fulfilment and of familiarity and otherness work extremely well within the context of women’s studies. They can be linked to the analysis of gender in explicit ways. I teach a course in English, Women’s Writing and the Literary Tradition, which includes French and English texts, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I always select certain texts in which the question of translation is embedded within the narrative itself. Instead of being simply an external phenomenon, translation becomes an aspect of women’s writing and one of its most potent tropes.
The comparison between French and English texts offers fertile ground for gender analysis; in French, every noun has a gender, and there is no neutral definite or indefinite article. Does this mean that the French language is grammatically determined by gender to a greater extent than English? This question leads to broader questions about language and society: Do these linguistic differences affect the ways in which culture is inhabited by gender? What are the relations between the signified, that is, language, and the signifier, that is, the gendered body?
One of the essays that most successfully addresses these questions is Monique Wittig’s “The Mark of Gender.” It asks probing questions about the function of the pronoun in both French and English: “It is true that, strictly speaking, English does not apply the mark of gender to inanimate objects, to things or nonhuman beings. But as far as the categories of the person are concerned, both languages are bearers of gender to the same extent” (76). Wittig’s essay is extremely fruitful for graduate teaching, in the ways in which it engages with gender in language at both the grammatical and the materialist-feminist levels.
However, issues of gender in translation do not belong exclusively to twentieth-century texts. Earlier works by women can reveal an awareness of the relation between the process of translation and gendered subjectivity. In Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747, 1752), we have an archetypal text about translation. Zilia, the novel’s heroine, is literally carried over one threshold to another. In a temporal leap that did not appear to bother eighteenth-century readers, she is kidnapped by the Spaniards in sixteenth-century Peru and eventually brought to eighteenth-century France. Her journey is geographical, temporal, cultural, but, above all, linguistic. Zilia’s greatest achievement in the narrative is moving from her Peruvian quipos, or knots—the Peruvian system of writing—to mastering the French language. This happens halfway through the novel and is described as follows:
I am still barely able to form these figures that I rush to make the interpreters of my tenderness. I feel myself being brought back to life by this tender occupation. Restored to myself, I feel as if I am beginning to live again. Oh Aza, how dear you are to me, what joy I feel in telling you so, in depicting this fact, in giving this sentiment all the kinds of existence it can have! I would like to inscribe it on the hardest metal, on the walls of my room, on my clothes, on all that surrounds me, and express it in all languages. (80)
The many “kinds of existence” Zilia describes here apply as much to an expanding intellectual world as to romance. While this is a love letter addressed to Aza, Zilia’s beloved, who has also been captured by the Spanish and has been taken to Spain, Aza does not speak French. Therefore, when Zilia writes to him in French and celebrates that experience so vividly, we witness the romantic narrative being displaced by the celebration of female education. Zilia’s moment of mastery is precisely an experience of translation, of mastering the foreign and making it familiar, but it is also one of moving away from rather than toward the original experience of love.
When reading this French text in English, Zilia’s desire to “express [sentiment] in all languages” literally expands in meaning. The students become aware of the interplay between national and gender identities and in particular of how language affects gender construction and vice versa. By the time we get to the work of Luce Irigaray, who argues that women always inhabit a foreign language, a language in which they speak “as if hearing an ‘other meaning’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, in order not to become fixed, congealed in them” (29), students are already familiar with a certain tradition that addresses these questions.
My second example is Isabelle de Charrière’s Letters of Mistress Henley (1784). While this is not so obviously a text about translation, it opens with a scene of translation that informs the rest of the narrative. Although originally English, Mistress Henley has traveled in France, speaks French, and is writing her letters to a French female friend. She is a Francophile with an urban sensibility. These markers become in turn the filters through which she experiences her gender and lead to her fundamental inability to communicate with her all-too-reasonable, country-loving English husband. These oppositions play themselves off against each other in a domestic drama that highlights irreconcilable difference.
In the opening scene, Mistress Henley reads a French text to her husband, in English. In turn, reading Letters of Mistress Henley in English ironically places the reader in the position of the husband, of the one who needs the help of translation. The text being read is Samuel de Constant’s Le mari sentimental (1783), which is the story of an unhappy marriage told from the husband’s perspective. Charrière’s novel is, among other things, a response to Constant, told from the perspective of the wife. In this scene of the shared reading of a translated text, the reader is made to experience translation as an impossible project. While the act of shared reading should bring husband and wife closer together, it places them further apart. Mistress Henley reports her husband’s reactions: “I saw him sometimes smile, sometimes sigh; he muttered a few words, petted his dog, and looked up where the portrait [a portrait of his deceased wife that Mistress Henley has had taken down] used to be” (4). What the translated text engenders is the idea of the untranslatability of language itself; Le mari sentimental speaks in one way to the wife and in another way to the husband, as if it were literally in two languages. The two genders, in turn, become untranslatable from one to the other; the “bar of translation” effectively blocks communication; language becomes inoperative. In this early modern narrative of the failure of domestic intimacy, translation is that which can never make the foreign familiar, and vice versa, thereby epitomizing the paradoxes of gender difference.
My last brief example is an earlier text from 1669; Gabriel-Joseph de Guilleragues’s Lettres portugaises is a text shrouded in mystery, in terms of both gender and language. The novel was hailed as the greatest collection of love letters ever written; many critics felt only a woman could have the sensitivity to express lost love in this way. Guilleragues simply presented himself as the collector of these letters. Over the next two centuries, there was an avid attempt to identify the original author, the Portuguese nun, and the original language, Portuguese. At some point the letters were translated back into Portuguese from the French, and even today the novel is listed as Portuguese literature in certain libraries in Portugal. Here we have a double masquerade; a man writing in French in the persona of a nun writing in Portuguese. The copy is in fact the original, and the original is then reconstructed from the copy. The translation, which never was a translation, and the nun, who never existed, give rise to the most authentic of love letters.
The above texts are dealing with abstract, rather than grammatically concrete, examples of the function of translation in relation to issues of gender. There are also grammatical examples that can be used to illustrate the effects of the “mark of gender” in translation. In Mme de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves, the mother-daughter relationship centers on Mme de Chartres’s desire to shield her daughter from the possibility of falling in love. She is relieved when her daughter declares that, with regard to her future husband, M. de Clèves, “she was not particularly attracted to his person” (Princesse, trans. Mitford, 47). The sentence that follows this declaration is provocatively ambiguous in French: “elle [Mme de Chartres] reçut la proposition qu’on lui faisait et elle ne craignit point de donner à sa fille un mari qu’elle ne pút aimer en lui donnant le prince de Clèves” (Princesse, Garnier, 50; italics added). The italicized elle could refer either to the mother or to the daughter, since “aimer” can mean either “to like” or “to love.” Furthermore, “elle ne craignit point” could mean either “she had no fear that she was giving her daughter a husband that her daughter could not love” or “she was not afraid of the fact that she was giving her daughter a husband that her daughter could not love.” The ambiguity is highlighted by the daughter’s acknowledged lack of attraction for M. de Clèves. In the Penguin translation by Nancy Mitford, the ambiguity is essentially removed: “She felt no qualms; it never even occurred to her that she was perhaps giving her daughter to somebody whom she could not love” (48; italics added). In this particular case, the translation into English has reduced the semantic possibilities and simplified the ambiguities. While it is important to address these translation difficulties, it is equally important to give students who do not speak “the other language” a broader sense of the presence of translation as an ongoing problematic tied to the act of reading itself. It could be argued that we are, to a certain degree, always in the mode of translation, always trying to negotiate the familiar and the foreign, the authentic and the copy.
Christine Roulston
University of Western Ontario
Charrière, Isabelle de. Letters of Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend. Trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. New York: MLA, 1993.
Constant, Samuel de. Le mari sentimental ou le mariage comme il y en a quelques-uns. Ed. Giovanni Riccioli. Milan: Cisalpino, 1975.
Derrida, Jacques. “Shibboleth.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. Trans. Joshua Wilmer. London: Routledge, 1992. 370–413.
Graffigny, Françoise de. Letters from a Peruvian Woman. Trans. David Kornacker. New York: MLA, 1993.
Guilleragues, Gabriel-Joseph de. Lettres portugaises. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which Is Not One.” This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 23–33.
Lafayette, Mme de. La princesse de Clèves. Paris: Garnier, 1966.
———. The Princesse de Clèves Trans. Nancy Mitford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
Wittig, Monique. “The Mark of Gender.” “The Straight Mind” and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon, 1992. 76–89.
IT IS conventional wisdom that translation is a determining factor in canonicity. A work’s translation into x number of languages is an indication in the academy (and even in the market) of its appeal and significance. If the work speaks to readers of different cultures, it has passed one of the canon’s utmost criteria—that the work address itself to universal concerns or anxieties. Writers such as Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot are well known for their insistence that the classics remain immutably on the lists of required reading in university curricula and for their assumption that the great works cross cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Today the spirit of Arnold and Eliot pretends to live on in the likes of bombastic cultural conservatives such as Dinesh D’Souza, who says that in these days of canon busting and cultural studies Arnold and Eliot no longer win over the minds of “tenured radicals” and others who persist in replacing the (formerly) great works with insignificant ones, thereby depriving students of a chance to reach liberal education’s most noble goal: access to and understanding of beauty and truth, values that transcend a specific culture or historic moment.1
It is not my intention here to argue for or against the pedagogical conservatives in the culture wars—although I admit I find D’Souza’s views wrongheaded at best and opportunistic at worst.2 Instead, I would like to raise some questions (albeit anecdotally) about how translations might play a role in educating our students about canon formation: not only about its other well-known determining factors such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, economics, and politics, but also about its quirks. Indeed, there is a certain arbitrariness in the processes through which a work or writers become inducted into high culture’s hall of fame.
The potentially canonical work I have in mind is a novel I have used in several of my courses in modern and contemporary Spanish literature, Mercè Rodoreda’s La plaça del diamant. Written originally in Catalan in 1962, it has been translated into Spanish as La plaza del diamante, into English as The Time of the Doves, and into a myriad of other languages. Arguably the work fits many of the criteria for becoming great. In stunningly vivid and precise prose, it lays bare the anxieties and desires of one of twentieth-century Europe’s most harrowing revolutionary experiences—the Spanish civil war and indirectly, the Russian Revolution as well as World War II—and it does so from the heretofore (i.e., before the contemporary reawakening of feminism) neglected perspective of a woman, a working-class woman at that. Moreover, because of its constant questioning of reality vis-à-vis a first-person perspective, including several dreamlike situations, it offers students a variety of high modernism’s most salient aesthetic features: self-consciousness, absurdity, defamiliarization, several interpretations of a single object or situation. And perhaps best of all in terms of captivating students’ interest, the story line is mesmerizingly emotional while at the same time the narrative maintains a matter-of-fact tone throughout. It creates readerly empathy even if the reader is unfamiliar with the protagonist’s historic or geographic milieu, in the same way, one might suggest, that those canonical nineteenth-century Russian novels by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky beckon us into their world—once we’re there, we don’t want to go back to the banalities of our own. We intuit that something of monumental value is being conveyed to us.
For these reasons, in courses for undergraduate majors of Spanish, teaching La plaza del diamante in Spanish translation from the Catalan is not difficult. For professors responsible for facilitating the understanding of high modernism, the vicissitudes of first-person narration, the labyrinthine nature of mid-twentieth-century European politics and social issues, all in the rubric of building vocabulary and reading skills in a foreign language, La plaza del diamante works on a variety of levels. But if it works in a course that involves a canonical text from a foreign culture taught in the language of that culture—forget for the moment that the original is in Catalan—what about using the English translation of this work in a bona fide great books course, a course purporting to offer students an exploration of the most significant, most beautiful, and truest works of Western civilization?
This (nonscientific) experiment took place at my university in the winter semester of 1999, and the results, in my assessment, reveal the shakiness of the foundation of the canon(s). The great books course (Honors Humanities 104), with its enrollment of some two hundred high-achieving students, is one of the most highly regarded courses taught in our division of arts and sciences. There are weekly plenary lectures and around ten discussion sections. It is the last in a four-semester sequence on Western civilization that includes philosophy and art in addition to literature beginning with Greek and Roman antiquity, followed by the Middle Ages, the early modern period (which ends, interestingly, with Emily Dickinson), and the modern age comprising the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Dickens and finishing—progressively and in my opinion correctly—with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.3 The reasons for choosing certain texts and authors within this monumentally vast expanse of time and space are arbitrary—Shakespeare does not make it, for example, largely because of organizational considerations. The choices are made through lively discussion among the ten or so instructors of the course, who include the coordinators from our honors college and several professors from the departments of English, philosophy, Romance languages, and art history. The texts that win the day are the ones that have the more passionate and eloquent proponents.
Predictably, the most problematic segment of the sequence of courses is the last, and the closer we come to the present moment, the more problematic it seems to be. What, if anything, should this course offer our students in the way of postmodernism? And how should this course deal with the late twentieth century’s inclination to debunk the very notions of value and truth that have provided the unifying threads of the course? Is it not paradoxical that the writers, philosophers, and artists—Nietzsche is a prominent feature of this final sequence—who most compellingly debunk the canon are the ones who are put on the canon for that very reason? The coordinators of the course are constantly in need of representative postmodernists, and if they can designate texts or writers that come from underrepresented groups—since that’s what the late twentieth century is supposed to be concerned with—they will have fulfilled several crucial features of this course. African American writers and artists, women, as well as Latin Americans and Spanish or other southern Europeans—Lorca would be perfect—are chosen if they fulfill the other criteria having to do with postmodern anxieties and concerns.
For several years I contributed to the solution of this annoying dilemma, first with Luisa Valenzuela’s Cambio de armas ("Other Weapons"), a woman’s hauntingly gripping tale of torture and self-discovery as much through language as through politics. In retrospect, I believe this short story was successful, although many of those responsible for teaching the course were not sure it fit the conventional criteria for being great. In fact I felt it was odd that few had considered the many writers and texts of the Latin American boom; I admit I reacted somewhat defensively about my own Hispanic culture. If they wanted canonical writers of the late twentieth century, I thought, there were more than enough to choose from in the Hispanic world: Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and José Lezama Lima, to name a small number of the usual suspects.
So I tried another direction. I suggested Rodoreda’s La plaça, a work I was certain few of my coinstructors had heard of. And if I could manage to convince them of its world canonicity (or at least its potential world canonicity, given that it came from a European culture), I would consider it something of a coup. Like virtually all putsches, however, the success of mine was short-lived. I do not want to say that the novel got a thoroughly negative review on the part of my open-minded colleagues; it did not, however, meet the test of time in terms of remaining on the list of readings. The reasons are difficult to assess, considering especially that the work received wide praise from students, which did not surprise me. I rarely come across a student who dislikes La plaça del diamant in comparison to, say, Azorín’s La voluntad—a novel far more solidly entrenched in the Peninsular Spanish twentieth-century canon yet painstakingly slow-moving and unlikely to awaken the slightest hint of angst (although that’s just what it is supposed to do) in a twenty-first-century youngster devoted to hip-hop.
Looking back on the experience, I find that in addition to acknowledging a variety of possible reasons for La plaça’s having been struck from the reading list (e.g., new course organization, different personnel, the book’s length or availability, perhaps a less than brilliant lecture on it by yours truly), the ultimate lesson I can take from it is the imperviousness of the construction of the canon and the perceived primacy—I do not exclude my own perception—of the culture(s) from which it arises. It is ironic that what makes Rodoreda’s novel quirky as a potentially canonical work is that the culture from which it emerges is anything but primary or universal. Catalan is a minority culture within Spain, and the literature of modern Spain, itself a nation on the margins of Europe after losing its empirical status, is rarely spoken of in terms of the universal Western values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These facts make it all but impossible to open the doors of the world canons to La plaça del diamant.
Yet my experimental coup was by no means a vain enterprise. I would certainly exercise my right to bear arms again if the occasion presented itself. Rodoreda’s novel provided an opportunity to focus on the ways in which cultures enter into conflicts and negotiations with one another; and one of the principal ways in which I accomplished this was by using translations and exploring issues related to translations. Rarely in the course was translation addressed, although in fact nine out of fourteen of these great works were originally in languages other than English. Given La plaça’s unusual status as a novel written not in the majority language of the Iberian Peninsula, that is, not in the language that most of the students in the course were taking to fulfill an arts and science requirement, translation was a difficult issue to avoid. The main character is called Colometa by her husband, Quimet; both are names students are unlikely to have seen in their Spanish classes. As I spoke about Catalan culture and language, I emphasized that minority cultures are a complex matter, especially those in which the clash of languages is a major consideration, and that minority is itself a shaky concept considering that in Barcelona, Catalan has been the culturally dominant language for centuries.
Continuing on the path of indeterminacy of meaning and received knowledge, I had the class compare a paragraph of three of the versions of the novel—the original Catalan, the Spanish, and the English, stressing that translation is often a matter of choices; that certain issues or ideas are emphasized over others; and that accuracy may be difficult to determine, even if all translators posit it as the primary goal. In fact, the ultimate success of a translated work depends on the degree to which the components of the original have been “transported” to a new language, as the famed translator Margaret Sayers Peden implies in a discussion of the successes and failures of multiple translations of a single poem. To what extent has the translator added to or subtracted from the work, thereby questioning the ultimate ownership of meaning? The clearest example regarding Rodoreda’s narrative is David Rosenthal’s elegant change in the translation of the title: The Time of the Doves instead of Diamond Plaza or Plaza of the Diamond, an alteration that emphasizes the fluctuating identity of the protagonist and the multilayered significance of the doves while diminishing the importance of the urban geography of the novel (La Plaça del Diamant is an actual working-class Barcelona locale). There are countless examples of shifting meanings according to choices made by translators. Thus how solid, how absolute, can the meaning of the translated great work be? Those of us in the business of teaching the languages in which these books were written should be the first to (mischievously) point out translations of these books. It is ironic that a recurring characteristic of the great book is precisely its annoying tendency to dismantle what we consider inalterable truths. The translation factor makes the dismantling all the more apparent. Many of us welcome the opportunity to discuss these books with students for that reason, which is why I have enjoyed my participation in the great books course.
However, as a teacher whose expertise is in an area somewhat ill at ease in the domain of what is considered cultural greatness, I offer a (mischievous) piece of advice: use the great books to question the truths of the great books, or, put another way, use the translations of the dead white guys as cannon fodder in the culture wars.
Michael Ugarte
University of Missouri, Columbia
1The term “tenured radicals” is not D’Souza’s but Roger Kimball’s, whose book with that title is cited by D’Souza, a former editor of the Dartmouth Review.
2For an excellent analysis and refutation of the cultural conservative alarmists, see Twilight of Common Dreams, whose author, Todd Gitlin, ironically shares some of Arnold’s and Eliot’s presuppositions about a culture’s shared values. However, Gitlin affirms that D’Souza’s and others’ descriptions of universities’ widespread replacement of the greats with minor and tendentious writers and works is a gross exaggeration. On this I side with Gitlin: as far as I can tell, Homer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes are alive and well (at least in my academy).
3See Howard Fulweiler’s eloquent reading of Morrison’s novel in terms of its relation to the most sacrosanct traditions of “Western civilization,” most pertinently the Christian Bible. Fulweiler is a prominent participant in the shaping of Humanities 104 at my university.
D’Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Macmillan, 1991.
Fulweiler, Howard. “Belonging and Freedom in Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery, Sentimentality, and the Evolution of Consciousness.” Centennial Review 40 (1996): 331–58.
Gitlin, Todd. The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. New York: Holt, 1995.
Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. New York: Harper, 1990.
Peden, Margaret Sayers. “Building a Translation, the Reconstruction Business: Poem 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” The Craft of Translation. Ed. John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 13–27.
Rodoreda, Mercè. La plaça del diamant. Barcelona: Club Editor, 1962.
———. La plaza del diamante. Trans. Enrique Sordo. Barcelona: Orbis, 1965.
———. The Time of the Doves: A Novel by Mercè Rodoreda. Trans. David Rosenthal. Saint Paul: Greywolf, 1986.
IMAGINE the following: a group of undergraduate students who have studied literature in translation for an entire semester without being led to address the fact of translation, without being reminded that they were reading material not originally written in English. They are amazed and intrigued when issues of translation are presented and discussed with respect to one of the works they’ve read in class.
Having made presentations about translation to groups of students similar to those undergraduates and having witnessed the enthusiasm with which the students participated in the discussion, I have come to believe that students can be taught to read as if they were translating into English from a foreign language.1 Provided that they are alerted to the fact of translation and informed about the many ways that translation occurs not only in literary texts but also in all forms of communication, students can learn about the skills and mediation involved in literary translation. For whether or not one is a practicing translator, the issues involved in reading translations require and foster critical associative thinking, heightened reading skills, and an increased interest in and understanding of other countries and cultures. All too often students do not benefit as fully as they might from reading a work in translation, because they read without being prompted to realize that they are encountering translated material and without being asked to consider the many factors that come into play as a translator searches for words and images that will convey unfamiliar concepts and situations. This means that students read translations but they are not reading in translation, because they are not drawn into the activity of thinking critically about subtle cultural differences and resemblances.
The challenge for an instructor, of course, especially one who has little or no experience with translation, is how to draw students in. I discuss two possibilities in the following paragraphs.
One way is to look at theoretical work that addresses the issues outlined briefly above. André Lefevere’s Translating Literature and Lawrence Venuti’s “The Pedagogy of Literature” provide extended comments about enabling students to work actively and knowledgeably with translated material. These readings also contain many suggestions for what Venuti refers to as “defamiliarizing” translations (101), for prompting in students an awareness about translation issues. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier discuss translation and cross-cultural texts and offer suggestions for working with particular aspects of translation. Rosemary Arrojo outlines an “anti-model” (102) for creating a nonauthoritarian classroom that aims to make all aspects of translation as transparent as possible in order that students develop a critical practice of their own for working with the instability of texts. She does not, however, provide specific examples for implementing her method in the classroom.
A second possibility is to develop specific methods, exercises, and tasks that will enable students to read interrogatively by addressing or questioning translation as if they were translators themselves. Here are some suggestions:
Make students aware that they are reading translated material. Ask them to consider the expectations they have for translated texts in general. (They have probably not thought about this before.) Suggest that they review what they know about the country, traditions, and culture from which the work has been translated; ask what preconceived notions they have about them. Consider your own values as an instructor and discuss with the students why you chose the text(s) and corresponding translation(s) for them to work with.
Discuss (and have the students research as necessary) the physical or material aspects of translation. Ask them to look at the book itself (or the book from which an article was taken). Judging from the book’s general appearance, who do they think are most likely to be its readers? Who translated the book and when? Who published it and when? What do the students know about the publisher or the context of the translation? What do they know about the translator? Does the book include ancillary materials such as an introduction or afterword by the author, translator, or another individual? How do the situation and the presentation of the translation and its publication differ from those of the original?
Ask students to research the author’s presence in English. Is the author well known to English-language readers? Have there been reviews of the translation or of other work by the same author or translator? If there have been, how has the work been received? The study of reviews can be very instructive for students. Although many reviewers make no mention of the translator or define the translator’s work with merely a single adjective or adverb, an increasing number of reviewers are addressing issues related to translation; indeed, some publications even seem to be encouraging this.2 If there have not been reviews, consider why the author or the work might have been overlooked.
Discuss the text itself. Show students the original (or part of it, if the work is long). Discuss salient features of the work as an object. For example, layout is especially important for poetry, for poetic prose, and for any text in which typography is significant.
If there is only one version, or one available version of the text in translation, ask students to comment on elements of the work that might have presented challenges to the translator and discuss how they were solved. Sensitivity to this (to appropriate language usage, style, and vocabulary) can be increased by discussing parallel texts in English that exhibit similar features.
Use multiple versions of the text in English if they are available. By working with multiple translations of a given text, students will develop a sensitivity to the role that interpretation plays in translation and to the possibility that there can be more than one valid translation not only of words but of situations as well. They will come to such a conclusion more readily if they are not asked to work prescriptively and make judgments about which version seems better to them. Freed from the pressure to evaluate work with which they are not familiar, students will realize that translators, like writers, have individual styles and ideological commitments; that they are bound by all the other compromises related to the contexts in which they work; that all those compromises bear on their practice as translators; and that such compromises may be harmonious. Students will also learn that, as with writers, it is possible to read a translator’s style or interpretation as well as the words themselves.
In the discussion of these versions, begin with the original text, drawing students to such features as typography and illustrations. As with a single version in English, these features are particularly important. Call the students’ attention to differences among the translations. Such differences often indicate challenges presented by the text, which the translators have resolved in different ways. The discussion of differences among versions can lead to an uncovering of the translator’s interpretation and method. Although a full understanding of the translator’s work can only arise from the study of an entire text, even the comparison of multiple translations of single terms and idioms can prove suggestive and lead to discussions about the effects and appropriateness of different choices with respect to the period and context of the original.3
Ask students to prepare a new version in English of the original text by working with the original and translation or multiple translations of it. Although this assignment is in many ways easier if the students can work with more than one version, it can also be accomplished with a single version and several parallel texts originally written in English. In either case, students will prepare a composite translation that will combine what they consider the most successful aspects of the translation(s), according to their own expectations and criteria.
Ask students to explain their reasons for writing their versions as they did.
Carol Maier
Kent State University
2Here, for example, Peter Campion’s recent comments about Randall Jarrell’s translation of Goethe’s Faust or James Sallis’s review of Montague’s and Smith’s translations of work by Guillevic come to mind.
3For further suggestions for working with multiple versions of a single text, see Cohen; DuPlessis; Hass; Maier; Walters; and Weinberger and Paz.
Campion, Peter. “Signed in Blood. ”Rev. of Faust, Part One, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, trans. Randall Jarrell. Threepenny Review 85 (2001): 16–17.
Cohen, Jonathan. “Oquendo’s ‘Rain’: A Choral Rendering. ”American Voice 10 (1988): 83–113.
Dingwaney, Anuradha, and Carol Maier. “Translation as a Method for Cross-Cultural Teaching. ”Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Ed. Dingwaney and Maier. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996. 303–19.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Copying. ”Sulfur 33 (1993): 257–72.
Hass, Robert. “Poet’s Choice. ”Washington Post 28 Nov. 1999: Book World. 12.
Lefevere, André. Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. New York: MLA, 1992.
Maier, Carol. “Teaching Literature through Translation: A Proposal and Three Examples. ”Translation Review 46 (1994): 10–13.
Sallis, James. Rev. of Carnac, by Guillevic, trans. John Montague, and of Living in Poetry: Interviews with Guillevic, trans. Maureen Smith. Boston Review Oct.–Nov. 2000: 56–57.
Venuti, Lawrence. “The Pedagogy of Literature. ”Translation Review 46 (1994): 10–13. Rpt. in The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998. 88–105.
Walters, D. Gareth. “Five Modes of Translation: About Quevedo’s ‘Miré los muros de la patria mía. ”Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 75 (1998): 55–67.
Weinberger, Eliot, and Octavio Paz. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. Mount Kisco: Moyer, 1987.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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