Although there is a large body of work debating the issues that surround the translation of poetry, far less time has been spent studying the specific problems of translating literary prose. One explanation for this could be the higher status that poetry holds, but it is more probably due to the widespread erroneous notion that a novel is somehow a simpler structure than a poem and is consequently easier to translate. Moreover, whilst we have a number of detailed statements by poet-translators regarding their methodology, we have fewer statements from prose translators. Yet there is a lot to be learned from determining the criteria for undertaking a translation, as has been demonstrated above.
For a number of years I have used an exercise designed to discover how the translation of a novel is approached. Students are asked to translate the opening paragraph(s) of any novel and the translations are then examined in group discussion. What has emerged from this exercise, time and again, is that students will frequently start to translate a text that they have not previously read or that they have read only once some time earlier. In short, they simply open the SL text and begin at the beginning, without considering how that opening section relates to the structure of the work as a whole. Yet it would be quite unacceptable to approach the translation of a poem in this way. This is significant because it shows that a different concept of the imaginary distinction between form and content prevails when the text to be considered is a novel. It seems to be easier for the (careless) prose translator to consider content as separable from form.
As an example of what can happen when the translator stresses content at the expense of the total structure, let us take the following extract; the opening of The Magic Mountain:
An unassuming young man was travelling in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of Grisons, on a three weeks' visit.
From Hamburg to Davos is a long journey—too long, indeed, for so brief a stay. It crosses all sorts of country; goes up hill and down dale, descends from the plateaus of Southern Germany to the shores of Lake Constance, over its bounding waves and on across marshes once thought to be bottomless.
(tr. H.T.Lowe-Porter)*
* I am grateful to my colleague, Tony Phelan, for bringing this example to my attention.
This fast-moving, energetic passage, consisting of three sentences with four verbs of action and movement pulls the reader straight into the narrative. The no-nonsense details of the journey and the time of the young man's proposed stay combine with the authorial value judgement on the brevity of the visit. In short, what we have here is a strong descriptive opening, with a powerful authorial presence, and the world picture painted here has close affinities with what the reader perceives as his own rational world.
The problem with this translation comes when it is set against the original German text, and the extent of the distance between the SL and the TL versions is compared. Mann's novel opens as follows:
Ein einfacher junger Mensch reiste im Hochsommer von Hamburg, seiner Vaterstadt, nach Davos-Platz im Graubündischen. Er fuhr auf Besuch für drei Wochen.
Von Hamburg bis dorthinauf, das ist aber eine weite Reise; zu weit eigentlich im Verhältnis zu einem so kurzen Aufenthalt. Es geht durch mehrerer Herren Länder, bergauf and bergab, von der süddeutschen Hochebene hinunter zum Gestade des Schwäbischen Meeres und zu Schiff über seine springende Wellen hin, dahin über Schlünde, die früher für unergründlich galten.
In this opening passage, the reader is given a series of clues that key him in to some of the codes operating through the novel. It is, of course, not restricted within the boundaries imposed by the realist world and depicts the ideological struggle between such dramatic opposites as health and sickness, life and death, democracy and reaction, and is set in a sanatorium where the characters are 'on holiday', removed from the struggle for existence. The journey depicted in the first few sentences is therefore functioning on more than one level: there is the young man's actual journey; the symbolic
journey across a nation; the journey as a metaphor for the quest on which the reader is about to embark. Moreover, in Mann's description of the journey there are deliberate devices (e.g. the use of the classical term Gestade for shore) recalling eighteenth-century modes, for another major line through the novel is an attempt to bring together two stylistic modes, the lyrical and the prosaic. The English translator's compression of Mann's sentence structures reduces the number of levels on which the reader can approach the text, for clearly the translator's prime concern has been to create a sense of rapid movement. So the second sentence has been integrated with the first to form a single unit and the fourth sentence has been shortened by deliberate omissions (e.g. zu Schiff—by boat). The stylized terms describing places have been replaced by straightforward, geographical names and the stately language of Mann's text has been replaced with a series of clichés in a conversational account of an overly long journey.
上一篇：Translating Drama into Scots
下一篇：The Conflicted Fictional Translator in The English Patient
微信公众号搜索“译员”关注我们，每天为您推送翻译理论和技巧，外语学习及翻译招聘信息。