Martin Boyd

Ignacio López Tarso in a Mexican adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.

In her article, “Performability versus Readability”, Greek-Canadian translator and translation scholar Ekaterini Nikolarea offers a historical overview of the development of what she calls a “theoretical polarization” in theatre translation, between the notions of “performability” and “readability”. In doing so, she places two authors – theatre theorist Patrice Pavis and translation studies scholar Susan Bassnett – in opposition against one another, as spokespeople for the two conflicting perspectives.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

Juan Rulfo, the legendary Mexican author whose English translators have been unable to do him justice.

In Part 3 of my series of articles on translating Latin America, I explored the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary boom that began in the 1960s. This “boom” has been closely associated with the genre of “magical realism”, characterized in the English-speaking world as the Latin American literary mode par excellence. According to Sylvia Molloy, althoug it is not so much a Latin American invention as a “transculturation” of French symbolism, magical realism was singled out by US readers to signify, “as surely as Carmen Miranda’s fruity cornucopias, ‘Latin America’”, thereby becoming a “regional, ethnicized commodity”, a form of “essentialized primitivism” (374) that reinforces preexisting stereotypes of Latin America as a magical territory, beyond the reaches of civilization, where the laws of science and reason do not apply. Molloy suggests that “[m]agic realism is refulgent, amusing, and kitschy,” but the reality it describes “doesn’t happen, couldn’t happen, here [in the United States]” (375). Unfortunately, the author adds, the fact that only a small number of Latin American authors comfortably fit the magical realist mould has condemned much Latin American literature to the “ever-expanding purgatory of the untranslatable” (375)… unless the work can be “rewritten” to fit into the genre, as seems to be the case of Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, a novel which is surely one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, but whose two English translations have failed to convey the simultaneously Gothic and realist tone of the original.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

“Giants” (Gary Willis, 1992)

In 1992, a friend gave me a copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was the first work of Hispanic literature I ever read, and it opened me up to a world that appeared more vital and powerful than anything I had ever encountered before. At the time, I was sharing a house in London with an artist who was working on a series of paintings featuring Don Quixote, and thus the tragicomic exploits of Spain’s mythical knight errant were combined in my imagination with the singular history of Macondo, both narratives inviting me into the vast, labyrinthine dominions of the Spanish-speaking world.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

The idea that a translation should be a faithful representation of the source text is a widely accepted truism that few would think to question. It is a concept that has guided most writing about translation for the past two thousand years, as debates in translation studies have tended to revolve around questions of the best methods for achieving “faithful” representation, whether it be St. Jerome’s idea of “sense for sense” translation, or Schleiermacher’s recommendation of a “foreignizing” technique; only in a few rare cases has the debate turned to whether such “faithful” representation is even possible… or desirable.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

In an article published in the last issue of the ATA Chronicle, Nataly Kelly raises some interesting questions about the professional impartiality of translators and interpreters. In particular, she points out that many of us cling to dubious beliefs on linguistic matters, such as the belief that one regional variant of a language is “better” than another, or that every language should be kept “pure”, free from foreign influences. Among people with little knowledge about the nature and functions of language, the existence of such beliefs is perhaps understandable; but among linguists such ideas would suggest a lack of professionalism and an ignorance of our own discipline that should worry us.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

The four big authors of the Latin American “Boom”: Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.

In the English-speaking world, the Latin American literary “Boom” that began in the 1960s was understood as a sudden upsurge in literary creativity in Latin America, as if suddenly, Latin Americans were finding a literary voice. But if there was really ever a sudden “boom” in Latin American literature, it probably occurred in the early twentieth century, with the emergence of literary giants like Rubén Darío (1867-1916), Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) and Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938). Sadly, most of the English-speaking world missed out on these authors because at the time they were writing, very little Latin American literature was being translated into English. What really changed in the 1960s was not that Latin Americans suddenly began to write, but that the English-speaking world suddenly began wanting to read what they were writing.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

Another product of Machine Translation?

Sarita me out of the fire, because before you know it the future of humanity I did not care. She showed me the way of the spirit, he informed me that all men are equal, that the only worthy ideal is the class struggle and the victory of the proletariat, I did read Marx, Engels and Carlos Fuentes, and do everything to what? To destroy after his indiscretion.

Readers of the above paragraph could probably be excused for believing it to be the incoherent raving of a lunatic with a somewhat tenuous grasp of the English language.  Actually, it is the direct result of applying Google Translate to the opening paragraph of “La ley de Herodes”, a short story by Jorge Ibargüengoitía, one of Mexico’s greatest comic writers.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

I recently had a discussion with another translator about the use of the English word “alien”. Those of us who grew up subjected to the cinematic expression of Ridley Scott’s terrifying imagination would probably be surprised to know that most English dictionaries do not list “a creature from another planet” as the first definition of the word “alien”. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, gives the following as the first definition of the noun form: “a foreigner, especially one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living”. The extraterrestrial definition of the noun comes second. Three definitions are provided for the adjective form: (1) “belonging to a foreign country”, (2) “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and, finally, (3) “supposedly from another world”. In any case, whatever the recognized uses of the word “alien” may be, I would argue that for most English speakers it invariably conjures up images of frightening lizard creatures or terrorizing mutants, and that it is therefore no longer appropriate to use the term in reference to fellow human beings.

Continue reading →

Martin Boyd

In Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), John Felstiner’s self-reflective study of his approach to translating Pablo Neruda’s classic work Alturas de Macchu Picchu, the translator describes verse translation as “an essential act and art of literary criticism” (Felstiner 2). Since Felstiner wrote these words, the concept of translator as literary critic has become something of a recurring theme in translation theory, although few have developed the concept as fully as B. Folkart Di Stefano did in his article “Translation as Literary Criticism”, published in 1982. Just as Di Stefano argues that a translator must “bring the full apparatus of literary criticism to bear on the text before and while rendering it” (Di Stefano 254), Felstiner presents a solid argument that the process of translating a poem requires the translator “to find, by scholarly and analytic means, how the poet came to write this work” (37). Felstiner presents this task, as daunting as it sounds, as a journey deep into the world of the source text and its author, driven by a desire to truly understand them both: “I wanted some hold on what Pablo Neruda stood for. I could get that by taking his poem on its own terms and then translating it into my own” (10).

Continue reading →