THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

marked by a contradiction:
A. TRANSLATORS often lament:
(1) that translation is still considered in many academic circles a
secondary, mechanical activity rather than creative;
(2) the lack of a market for their work;
(3) that their work lies on the margin of academic investigation.
B. EMERGENCE of national schools in Translation Studies on both
sides of the Atlantic:
(1) Europe: Moscow School, Prague School, in the Low Countries,
in the two Germanies, in Israel;
(2) America: the American Translation Workshop;
in the early 1960s there were NO TRANSLATION WORKSHOPS in
the US universities and translation was regarded as a marginal activity;

 Edmund Keeley The State of Translation:

In 1963 there was no established and continuing forum for the purpose: no
translation centers, no associations of literary translators as far as I know, no
publications devoted primarily to translation, translators, and their continuing
problems.

A series of major events occurred in the 1960s:

(1) Paul Engle, Director of the Writers Workshop at the Univ. of Iowa
expanded the Creative Writing Program by including international
writers = creative writing knows no national boundaries!
(2) in 1964, Paul Engle hired a full-time director for the first
translation workshop in the US;
(3) in 1965, the Ford Foundation offered a $ 150,000 grant to the Univ.
of Texas at Austin for the establishment of the National Translation
Center;
(4) in 1965, Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort edited the 1 st issue of
MODERN POERTY IN TRANSLATION;
(5) in 1969, the National Translation Center published the first issue of
DELOS
Literary translation had acquired a small, established place in
American culture!

 The

process of growth and acceptance continued in the 1970s:

(1) advent of translation courses and workshops at important US

universities: Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Iowa, Texas, etc.;
(2) degrees were conferred upon students;
(3) establishment of ALTA (American Literary Translators Association);
(4) official acknowledgment by the US government of the process of translation
in 1977 and the establishment of the National Endowment of the
Humanities grants for literary translations;
(5) despite the growth between the1960s-1980s, much adversity and reluctance
is still felt at academic level = LITERARY TRANSLATION is considered a
secondary and low-status activity!
EDWIN GENTZLER mentions as possible reasons:
1. the monolinguistic character of American culture;
2. since TR is derivative, emphasis is laid on the pursuit and consumption of
original meaning;
3. Translations = part of an anti-establishment and counter-cultural
movement.

Ted Hughes in Introduction to Modern Poetry in

Translation (1983) described the attraction for translation
in the 1960s and the 1970s:
That boom in the popular sales of translated modern
poetry was without precedent. Though it reflected only
one aspect of the wave of mingled energies that
galvanized those years with such extremes, it was fed by
almost all of them Buddhism, the mass craze of
Hippie ideology, the revolt of the young, the Pop music of
the Beatles and their generation That historical
movement might well be seen, as an unfolding from
inwards, a millennial change in the Industrial Wests
view of reality.
this anti-establishment view was shared by a multitude of
contemporary American poets who actively translated: Robert
Lowell, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth
Bishop, W. D. Snodgrass, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc.

 They rebelled against:

- traditional literary institutions;
- national and international policies of their government;
- Western society in general.
Paul Engle in the Foreword to Writing from the World II (1985)
summed the cause of literary translation in the contemporary world:

As this world shrinks together like an aging orange and all

peoples in all cultures move closer together (however
reluctantly and suspiciously) it may be that the crucial
sentence for our remaining years on earth may be very
simply:
TRANSLATE OR DIE.
The lives of every creature on the earth may one day depend
on the instant and accurate translation of one word.

THE AMERICAN TRANSLATION WORKSHOP

I. A. RICHARDS (1893-1979) first READING WORKSHOP =
precursor to the later workshops for CREATIVE WRITING +
TRANSLATION!
experiment at Harvard in the late 1920s;
a threefold aim :
(1) to introduce new kind of documentation into contemporary
American culture;
(2) to provide a new technique for individuals of discovering for
themselves what they think of poetry;
(3) to discover new educational methods.

method employed: cutting student + text off from society;

effect produced: students conform to the existing tastes and
prejudices of those in control of literary institutions!
OVERALL AIM: to establish new educational techniques leading to
perfect understanding of the text and to unified and correct response!

 RICHARDS sought:
- unified solutions to communication problems
- to generate rules and principles by which individual
interpretations
could be made and judged;
Practical Criticism (1929):
The whole apparatus of critical rules and principles is a means of
attainment of finer, more precise, more discriminating communication
When we have solved, completely, the communication problem, when we
have got, perfectly, the experience, the mental condition relevant to the
poem, we still have to judge it, still to decide upon its worth.
RESULT: (a) his model presumed
proper education
primary poetic experience
(b) his students learned to think and judge the way he did!
Through the Reading Workshop the students had:
(1) to discover rules and principles that help attain the firmer and
more discriminating communication;
(2) to achieve primary experience and then rearticulate it.
Richards reading model postulates a unified meaning.

 Richards assumed that

readers can understand what the

author said and then via interpretation they can recover
that same meaning by discovering for themselves!
His theory postulated the possibility of a perfect reader !
His translation theory was formulated in Toward a Theory of
Translation (1953) = based on the same theory of meaning like the
Reading Workshop;
His project was unsuccessful = the fields of comparison were too
broad!
SOLLUTION:
(1) to narrow the field;
(2) to choose the right methodology for the relevant purpose.
If translators agreed on their purpose, then it would not be difficult to
determine the appropriate methodology:
In the concrete, in the minute particulars of practice, these comparison-fields
are familiar enough All we have to do is to arrange, in a schema as
parsimonious as adequacy will allow, a body of experience so common that if
the purposing of our arrangement could be agreed on, there might be little we
would then differ about.

 RICHARDS believed that:

- the field consists of texts containing a primary body of only few readers
(the elite) could discern;
- with proper training a consensus could be reached what that experience
might be.

RICHARDS sketched an encoder decoder communication model!

The original message is divided into 7 components that carry meaning
and require decoding:
- a sign: (1) indicates some thing;
(2) characterizes (adds something new about things);
(3) realizes;
(4) values;
(5) influences;
(6) connects;
(7) purposes (attempts to persuade).
For RICHARDS = MEANING = something very complex which has:
implicit (indirect/implied)
explicit (direct/plainly expressed) aspects.

 Richards 1953

model was specifically tailored for the

translator who aimed to arrive at a proper translation!

He admitted:
- that the translation process may very probably be the most complex
type of event yet produced in the evolution
of the cosmos.
- that translators with proper education and practice can come to
know the proper methodology to achieve the correct understanding
of the primary text (SLT).
He believed that despite the complexities, the original message can be properly
decoded and recoded into another language!

We are guardians (valuers) and subject therefore to the paradox of

government: that we must derive our powers, in one way or another from
the very forces which we have to do our best to control. Translation
theory has not only to work for better mutual comprehension between
users of diverse tongues; more central still in its purposing is a more
complete viewing of itself and of the comprehending which it should
serve.

 FREDERICK WILL:
- Literature Inside Out (1966) focuses on naming and meaning;
- The Knife in the Stone (1973) deals with practice of
translation.
Different languages construct separate realities!
One cannot determine precisely what any particular word refers to!
Reality can only be learned through the names we give it!
Hence, LANGUAGE is a creator of reality!
WILL: without the power to name, we would have remained savages.
LANGUAGE: takes our own character, our rhythm, our desires and
reveals our true inner selves!
the selfs effort in naming is not mere verbal play but is part of its
overall effort to translate the outer into the human. This situation follows
from the unity of the self. In such unity the expressions of a coremovement, the self, all bear the character of that movement. Each
expression bears the cores character.
CONCLUSIONS: we translate ourselves into language and the latter
helps us better know our inner selves!

 Literature embodies truth and knowledge;

a work of literature is a deeply unified verbal event occurring in a self.
in a work of literature the words are merged with the whole and are, in
some sense, literally one.
FREDERIC WILL: words have 5 levels of meaning: dictionary,
contextual, symbolic, interpretative, inner aural and visual overtones
(i.e. denotation + connotation);
In the second volume The Knife in the Stone his concept of text becomes
less a unified and coherent whole!
Translation is used as a testing ground :
the inter-translatability of languages is the finest testing ground and
demonstration ground for the existence of a single ideal body of literature.
If there is any meaning to the idea of such a body, it will show itself
through as effort to equate literature in one language with literature in
another.
He wanted to prove that one universal common ground enjoys intertranslatability
the single body of literature!
His initial presuppositions did not confirm!

 the GYLA ILLYES test presented in the essay The Oneness of

Literature
FREDERIC WILL had to alter his conception of translation
The Knife in the Stone he reviews his experience in translation at Iowa;

In Translation WILL had more to do with the energy of the expression

and less with the meaning of the text;
Language is indeterminate and we never have access to the meaning
behind a specific language!
we should trust what language does, not what it says!
WILL advocates an approach which translates the ENERGY, the
thrust of a work!
Translation is par excellence the process by which the thrust
behind the verbal works of man can be directly transferred,
carried on, allowed to continue Works of literature are highly
organized instances of such thrust These block force themselves
on, through time, from culture to culture.
Hence, Translation is seen less as a carrying over of the content from
one language to another but as a carrying on of the content in
language!
In Translation texts are REBORN, GIVEN NEW LIFE,
STIMULATED WITH NEW ENERGY!

 FREDERIC WILL enters dangerous ground!

He allows the translator to make the necessary changes to retain
something which he arrives at intuitively!
His view offends translation theorists + linguists + scholars!
His view is antithetical to the established definition of translation = a
transfer of message through decoding and encoding.
for FREDERIC WILL translation is: a re-creation of the work
according to the translators views and force of perception, according to
his intuition.
The translation activity reveals the translator that language is
simultaneously unstable and stable!
Texts are interwoven in reality and in a tradition of fiction!
Man, as a complex being, is subjected to language and the systems of
discourse!
Man is capable of creating language and new relations in the present!
Universals/deep structure = make translation possible!
Specific moments/surface structure = make translation impossible!
Language always refers backward and forward trapped in an
intertextual network!

EZRA POUNDS THEORY OF THE LUMINOUS

DETAILS
I. A. RICHARDS theory of proper translation achieved through:
proper education
proper practice
starting from the correct understanding
proper methodology
of the text (i.e. proper decoding and
recording of the message)

Unlike Richards, EZRA POUNDs theory is based on the concept of

energy in language and focused on the precise rendering of details, of
individual words, of single/fragmented images = SCULPTED IMAGES.
ideas on TRANSLATION played an important role in Pounds
evolution from Imagism to Vorticism;
In On Technique (ninth installment of the Osiris series) POUND talked
about words as electrified cones = words charged with the power of
tradition, of race consciousness, of agreement, of association!

 VORTEX= a form (or as an evolving system of forms, or energies) which

revolves round a center (place or person) which draws in
whatever comes near;
a cluster/network of words brought together in a radiant node.

in the first issue of Blast (1914):

The vortex is the point of maximum energy All experience
rushes into the vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is
living Impressionism, Futurism, which is only an accelerated sort
of impressionism, DENY the vortex The vorticist relies not upon
similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry An Image is
that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism
and romanticism of the movement.
POUND about Imagism:
not an equation of mathematics, not something about a, b, and c,
having to do with forms, but about sea, cliffs, night, having
something to do with mood.

 POUND (1970):
The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I
can and must perforce call a VORTEX, from which, and through
which, ideas are constantly rushing.
words = things with energy and in action;
words = are always seen in a network of relations, capable of being
compounded and metamorphosized
energy of language.
in Cantos Pounds languages ceased to exist as separate languages and
they became CLUSTERS = an interweaving of words binding people
regardless of nationalities!
MEANING can never be fixed, it changes as language changers!
in essay How to Read (1937), LANGUAGE is charged or energized via:
a) melopoeia [song making]= musical property of language;
b) phanopoeia [making something visible] = visual property;
c) logopoeia [making of words] = the most complex property which
includes the direct meaning and the
play of the word in the context
the dance of the intellect among words (Pound)

 POUND:
a) melopoeia is difficult to translate except half a line at a time;
b) phanopoeia can be translated almost, or wholly intact;
c) logopoeia does not translate.
Logopoeia does not translate; though the attitude of mind it expresses
may pass through a paraphrase. Or one might say, you can not translate
it locally, but having determined the original authors state of mind,
you may or may not be able to find a derivative or an equivalent. (1937)
to understand logopoeia, the translator must understand time, place
and ideological restrictions of the text to be translated;
translators must allow themselves to be subjected by MOOD,
ATMOSPHERE and THOUGHT PROCESSES of the text in time;
MOOD and SENSIBILITY (in time and place) must be transported to
the present culture for the translation to become a contemporary text;
Solution: to create new connections in the present!
Basics are:
a) real speech in the translated version;
b) fidelity to the original in terms of meaning and atmosphere.

 MEANING: something that is always already located in historical flux,

i.e. the atmosphere in which that meaning occurs.
to grasp and convey that meaning one has to know the history and
reconstruct the atmosphere in which that meaning occurred!
POUND did not focus on syntactical connection!
POUND focused on specific images, individual words, fragments and
luminous details (rhythm, diction, etc);
TRANSLATOR + POET = CATALYSTS!
each word (with its etymology and its way of combining) gives insight
into new possibilities!
WORDS can move
backwards (historically),
sideways (juxtapositionally)
forward
CONCLUSIONS:
POUND used translation in order to challenge and to change the
prevailing literary norms = A CULTURAL STRUGGLE!