Chapter 4: Revisiting the premise
4.3 A method with a past
Finally, I would like to revisit a quote by Lawrence Venuti from earlier in the thesis:
A translated text, whether prose or poetry […], is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text – the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” (Venuti 2008, 1)
There is probably plenty of truth to Venuti’s statement; a translation is better received when it reads more fluently, the less we perceive the foreignness of the writing. While this might give the reader the impression that the translation is close to the original, how would one know unless one compares the two directly? A French reader might perceive Coursaud’s Honte et dignité as fluid; in fact, it may be more digestible due to the conventionalizing of the novel’s vocabulary, verbal tenses, and techniques. After all, he is an acclaimed and awarded
translator; it would be strange if his products were not fluid reads, considered in isolation.
However, Venuti’s implied argument is that fluency does not fully illustrate the nature of translation. What interests me as a researcher is the transformation that happens as the literary work is transmitted from one cultural-linguistic domain to another, and the subsequent transformation of the object, the creation of alternate text. Source- or target-oriented translational strategies, descriptive or processual approaches to analysis aside, there is little doubt to me that the object produced by a translator is a different object from the source text. Venuti would probably agree, a translation’s ‘originality’ is nothing but an illusion. The best way I can think of to highlight, explore, and analyze this incongruity between original and translation is to pay the closest possible attention to the alteration of minor details, and compare the details side by side.
This matches Jakob Lothe’s definition of close reading in Litteraturvitenskapelig leksikon (2007) (Lexicon of comparative literature) as a “concentration on the literary work as an aesthetic object” (Lothe 2007, 157, my translation).31 Jakob Lothe ties this to the approaches of Formalism and New Criticism in mentioning how origin and effects are disregarded in close reading (Lothe 2007, 157), but I would still claim this method is the progenitor of my own. While I do compare the data from the close reading to its source text and tie it to the translator as creator, these are the comparative elements of my approach. The
31 Original quote: “konsentrasjon om det litterære verket som estetisk objekt” (Lothe 2007, 157).
50 data that is compared is the data uncovered by the careful and detailed analysis of the object;
the project starts in the small details; the broader observations result from these.
In the same volume, Christian Refsum defines the comparative research method:
A comparative study can compare single works, authorships, themes and formal traits in different works, artistic movements or epochs. The perspective can be linguistic, rhetoric, thematic, historical or sociological. The term is also used across different schools such as Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction and New Historicism and Postcolonialism. (Refsum 2007, 112, my translation)32
As Refsum explains, the origin disciplines of close reading, Formalism and New Criticism, are also known for their employment of comparative research paradigms. The combination of the two methods is nothing new; they have been mainstays in literature research for about a century. This omnipresence is what makes their absence from the translation studies’
methodological surveys so striking. Nevertheless, the multitude of schools might be a testament to their ubiquitous presence.
The unacknowledged implication of the method would, in that case, probably only be valid in the case of the comparative method. After all, Andrew Chesterman felt the need to separate this method from other approaches and attribute it solely to two subdisciplines of translation studies research, contrastive and corpora linguistics. Because of this, I have chosen to focus on close reading in the title. Even though none of the anthologies include a separate section dedicated to comparative method, I feel it would have been slightly
misleading as an overarching focus. Corpora studies do compare corpora, Pym compares cultures, Venuti compares interpretations. I like to think I compare readings, close readings, and I think we should take this tool back out of the metaphorical toolbox and reapply it more honestly and earnestly in translation studies research. The two methods are historically linked; there is plenty of valuable information discovered through this synthesis.
32 Original quote: “En komparativ studie kan sammenligne enkeltverk, forfatterskap, temaer og formelle trekk i ulike verk, kunstneriske bevegelser eller epoker. Perspektivet kan være lingvistisk, retorsik, tematisk, historisk eller sosiologisk. Betegnelsen brukes også på tvers av skoleretninger som formalisme, nykritikk, strukturalisme, dekonstruksjon og nyhistorisme og postkolonialisme” (Refsum 2007, 112).
51
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