LINGUIST List 22.3010 Tue Jul 26 2011 Review: Translation: St. André (2010) Editor for this issue: Monica Macaulay <monicalinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Pierre-Yves Modicom , Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors Message 1: Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors Date: 26-Jul-2011 From: Pierre-Yves Modicom <pymodicomlaposte.net> Subject: Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-4837.html EDITOR: James St. André TITLE: Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors PUBLISHER: St. Jerome Publishing YEAR: 2010 Pierre-Yves Modicom, U. Paris-Sorbonne and Ecole Normale Supérieure SUMMARY The book is a collection of ten papers written by different authors. Their common topic is the use of metaphors to describe the translation process: those metaphors are examined for their presuppositions, their implications and their methodological fruitfulness. The ten chapters are divided into four parts. The first part, ''Something Old'', consists of three chapters. The first paper, by Ben Van Wyke, explores the body/clothes metaphor commonly applied to the original text and to its translation. This metaphor has been used in the Early Modern period to legitimate sense-for-sense translation and adaptation, then by German romanticists to criticize such a conception and is still discussed today in reflections on faithfulness in translation. Van Wyke's thesis is that there is a link between such a metaphor and theories of truth dating back to Plato. After a short presentation, he comes to the praise of mask and disguise by Nietzsche and its echoes in contemporary literature to advocate translation as a test for deconstructing absolutist truth theories. In the second paper, Yotam Benshalom deals with the dramatic and theatrical metaphors for translation. Following Robinson (2003), he explores the problem of spontaneity and then discusses the methodological implications of such a metaphor according to the correspondent underlying theories of impersonating, presented as an alternative between Diderot's ''automatic'', functionalist paradigm, and Stanislavski's method based on identification and empathy, which he explicitly favors. Celia Martín de Leon's paper is much more concerned with overall metaphor-theoretical issues in the perspective of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). She distinguishes two great cognitive types of metaphors for translation: those based on a transfer schema, e.g. the body-clothes scheme, and those centered on imitation and action. Each type is divided into several subtypes and illustrated by examples from early modern times. Of course, those types have consequences on the conceptualization of translation: the focus lies on the content or message of the text in the first case, on the translator's own activity in the second. The second part, ''Something New'', is devoted to bias that can be involved by the cultural area where translation is conceptualized. First, Maria Tymoczko, still following Lakoff and Johnson, discusses the underlying assumptions of the ''Western tradition'', which dismisses collective practices and orality, sets literacy standards and reserves translation for intercultural exchanges. She exposes the etymological bias responsible for that situation and compares it with Arabic, Nigerian, Chinese and Tagalog alternatives. Finally, in a more historical section, she discusses the shift from the Ciceronian, more speech-act oriented conceptions, to today's conceptualization, which she associates with theological and political bias expressed among others in the translations of the Bible. The contribution which follows, written by Valerie Henitiuk, is devoted to early English and French translations and scholarship dealing with Japanese literature. She introduces the incongruous metaphors used in that context, which resort to ''squeezed jellyfishes'' and chemical manipulations, and she shows how they are induced by the discrepancy between Japanese literature and the expectations of the European public regarding literature. ''Sublimation'' and ''distillation'' metaphors betray the translator's assumption that the public would find Japanese literature ''dull''. The third part, ''Something Borrowed'', consists of three papers. In the first one, Rainer Guldin uses the very concept of metaphor as a metaphor for translation. After commenting upon previous attempts in the same direction, he follows Cheyfitz's (1991) theories on translation and power to explain how both metaphor and translation question and deconstruct schemes of identity and domesticity: they represent ''the presence of multiplicity, opening from inside the apparent unity of monolingualism'' (p. 177). After Black (1979) and Flusser (1996), Guldin defends an interactional model highlighting the reversibility of semantic focuses and ends up calling for translation studies to provide cultural studies with a general theory of conceptual exchanges. Enrico Monti, in the following paper, discusses the schemes used to describe the translation of metaphors. ''Problem'', ''challenge'' and ''limit'' are the most frequent items found, but Monti signals the existence of interactional, dynamic models involving semantic forces and presenting translation as a composition of energies. Finally, Stéphanie Roesler comments upon the special case of the French poet Bonnefoy, who is also a translator. She shows how his metaphors for translating (encounter, friendship, closeness, listening to a voice, deciphering a secret, bringing someone else's fruits to maturity) all lead to a conception of speech centered on subjectivity. Translating a poem is re-enunciating it or even producing a new poem. The last part, ''Something Blue'', includes two papers involving cultural studies and especially queer theories: Sergey Tyulenev discusses the metaphor of translating as smuggling (coming from Canadian author Philip Stratford) in a perspective centered on identity smuggling. Translation can be a game with social constraints but is hidden, unlike the ''hijacking'' conceptualizations advocated by some feminists. For instance, (pseudo-)translations of Shakespeare enabled Boris Pasternak to smuggle his political diffidence in Stalinist Russia. Tyulenev's second case study is the translation of La Fontaine by gay politician and poet Dmitriev at the end of the 18th century. In the final paper, James St. André proposes a metaphor of translation as cross-identity performance summarizing the aspects explored previously: disguise, confusion of identities, performance, sociological bias and cultural transfers as well as the criticism of individualistic, author-centered conceptions. EVALUATION The first great virtue of the present collection is its high degree of theoretical and conceptual transparency. Unlike many essays in translation theory, the papers do not excessively resort to jargon and meta-theoretical developments, thus making the book easily accessible even for a non-specialist. This pedagogic quality is completed by the fact that the theoretical perspectives advocated for in this collection are quite diverse, although the main concern is heavily indebted to d'Hulst (1992): they include cultural studies, different tendencies within cognitive grammar and conceptual metaphor theory as well as more classical attempts inspired by Black (1979) or Flusser (1996). In this inter-theoretical framework, the authors always begin their papers with a few introductory explanations concerning their general underlying assumptions. In this respect, the book can even be regarded as a good introduction to several methods and theories of current metaphor and translation studies. The general plan of the collection and the partition of the four parts is somewhat curious, but St. André, in his foreword (p. 8), justifies this original classification and suggests that other ones could have been chosen. Among those alternatives, two would have been possible according to general theoretical lines that structure the whole collection and upon whose limits we shall concentrate in the following: the relation to the cultural and critical developments of metaphor theory on the one hand and the question of translation as an autonomous activity and not a mere transfer on the other. The first line echoes the concerns of several authors, including Van Wyke, Tymoczko, Guldin, Tyulenev and St. André, who all suggest that translation theory, especially when it is coupled with metaphor studies along the lines of Lakoff and Johnson, could constitute an overall theoretical paradigm for cultural studies. Quoting Derrida, one could have spoken of deconstructing the notion of identity in the cultural sciences, as brilliantly shown by Van Wyke or Guldin (the latter implicitly alludes to Michel Foucault's ''Archaeology of Knowledge'' (1969/2007). The essays in the last part also prove how fruitful such a critical perspective can be. It is all the more disappointing to see that the historical interaction with other domains of culture is often neglected, even though it should be at the heart of such an ''archaeology'' and of any attempt to explain the constitution of a cultural paradigm such as the one which is now supposed to be deconstructed. More generally, one often has the impression that history is treated as a mere illustration or is taken as it is without further comments on the origin and causes of the depicted phenomena, Timoczko being here the most notable exception. A deeper critical analysis of the historical developments at stake here would also have prevented some regrettable mistakes, such as Benshalom's claim (p. 64) that ''the German dramaturg Gotthold Lessing'' developed a system in Diderot's continuity ''in the 1850s''. Actually, Lessing, who was mainly a playwright and a philosopher, wrote his ''Hamburgische Dramaturgie'' as a journal for theater between 1767 and 1768, and not 80 years later as claimed here: Diderot and Lessing wrote and lived at exactly the same time, the age of Enlightenment. This mistake has quite problematic consequences regarding the intellectual background of the disputed theory: both authors were theorists advocating a central role for emotions on stage and are the fathers of the so-called ''sentimental drama'' as well as prominent members of the philosophical tendencies which ultimately led to the notion of the author as a genius. The question of the date thus takes a decisive importance: Lessing's and Diderot's theory of the actor as an automaton is embedded in a much brighter framework, actually not so far from Benshalom's own perspective, since it includes a reflection on feelings being conveyed by translations and on the role of spontaneity and emotions. But here, that part of their theory is overshadowed by their representation as forefathers of ''automatic acting''. Echoing Van Wyke's or St. André's concern, one could also remark that Diderot's and Lessing's functional conception of performing is linked to the emergence of the figure of the author as genius and semi-god: the playwright/actor and the writer/translator couples are thus both echoed by a quasi-religious metaphor with strong ties to the traditions exposed by Van Wyke and Timoczko, according to which translation theories in the West are under the influence of epistemological, if not theological, schemes granting to the source text the status of an absolute truth. More generally, one could regret that the translator is not depicted here as forming a pair with the author, a relationship which can be understood as an opposition in a very structuralist way: the status of each is defined only in opposition to the status of the other. That couple is briefly evoked by some contributors, but is not described in depth -- except for the special case of poet and translator Yves Bonnefoy, which has consequences for the other main line of argumentation within the papers, namely the topic of translation as an activity, but it leaves unanswered that question of critically deconstructing that cultural paradigm of the translator as doppelgänger of the (divine) author. Benshalom, Martín de Leon, Tymoczko, Monti (regarding the dynamic, quantificational metaphors), Roesler, Tulyenev and St. André all deal more or less overtly with this question of the paradigm of translation as an activity or a creation and not a mere transfer. This approach is extremely stimulating and fruitful, yet, as a linguist, one cannot help regretting the lack of some references: for instance, pragmatics and speech act theory are not considered. There is not a single mention of any work by such canonical authors as Austin or Searle, which could have been extremely useful in such a context. Roesler, in her paper about Bonnefoy, quotes Henri Meschonnic, a French translation scholar very influenced by speech act theory, but even here, the linguistic part of the problems are left out. For instance, when she evokes the opposition between what she calls speech and language in Bonnefoy's work, she says that this opposition corresponds to the French terms ''parole'' and ''langage'', and quotes a text where Bonnefoy actually speaks of ''parole'' and ''langue''. Linguists reading this have already recognized the old distinction coined by Ferdinand de Saussure, and the descriptions given by Bonnefoy and Roesler correspond to this. Yet, this theoretical transfer is not mentioned and de Saussure is not named in the paper, thus depriving us from relevant developments. It actually seems that excepting those of Lakoff, Johnson and Pinker, only few fundamental linguistic concepts have really made their way in these essays. The many fine and subtle intuitions underlying most of the present essays are thus doomed to lack the accurate developments they would undoubtedly have been worthy of. In other words, the present collection of papers might be very interesting for people who are generally interested in translation studies and metaphor theory, but reading them with the linguist's eye is a call for more pragmatists and speech-act theorists to move to that field of translation studies with their own concepts in order to turn rhapsodic intuitions into that more solid theoretical frame which action-oriented translation theories still seem to lack. In this respect, the present book should work as a fruitful base for future reflections. REFERENCES Black, Max. 1979. ''More about Metaphor'', in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19-43. Cheyfitz, Eric. 1991. The poetics of Imperialism: translation and colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. D'hulst, Lieven. 1992. ''Sur le rôle des métaphores en traductologie contemporaine'', Target 4 (1): 33-51. Flusser, Vilém. 1996. Kommunikologie. Mannheim: Bollmann. Foucault, Michal. 1969/2007. The archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2003. Becoming a translator: An introduction to the theory and practice of translation. London, New York: Routledge. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Pierre-Yves Modicom is a graduate student in Paris. He holds a B.A. in Germanic studies and an M.A. in Linguistics from U. Paris-Sorbonne. He currently studies German Literature and Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Linguistics at U. Paris-Sorbonne. 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