Translating Neruda: Femininity and Sensuality ... - Triceratops Home

Mueller 6
when reading the text in Spanish. For example, when Nathaniel Tarn translates “novia
mía” as “betrothed” in his version of “Oda a la tormenta,” he distances the speaker of the
poem from the contemporary language of the 1970s when the translation was published.
Venuti argues that archaism can be foreignizing, when used as one of “a variety of
linguistic resources [deployed] in order to make…translations visible as translations and
thus to maintain the foreignness of the source text,” but George Steiner makes an
argument for domestication that fits better with the examples seen in translations of
Neruda (Roberts 265). He writes,
The translator labours secure a natural habitat for the alien presence which he has
imported into his own tongue and cultural setting. By archaizing his style he
produces a déjà-vu. The foreign text is felt to be not so much an import from
abroad (suspect by definition) as it is an element out of one’s native past (Steiner
365).
For Steiner, archaism domesticates the foreign text by “exchanging an obtrusive
geographical-linguistic distance for a much subtler, internalized distance in time,” a
strategy that makes sense when trying to style a communist poet who cares deeply about
achieving controversial social change in a way that would appeal to an American
audience in the sixties and seventies.
Several translators also domesticate Neruda’s poetry through their use of
bowdlerization, that is, by effacing the presence of the erotic. These translators alter the
poem, apparently according to their personal sense of propriety, leaving out or altering
key words or phrases in a way that diminishes the sexual implication of both individual
passages and of whole poems. These changes may have to do with the translator’s
understanding of what his readership and the contemporary social values will find
acceptable, and as such is a form of domestication. Through their use of expurgation,