últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

JOANA MATOS FRIAS/PAULA RAMALHO ALMEIDA–TRANSLATING ALLEN GINSBERG
Octavio Paz advocates the universality of translation by taking us back to the infant
child asking a parent the meaning of a word. He writes: “Learning how to speak is to learn
how to translate”, concluding that “no text is entirely original, for language itself, in its
essence, is already a translation” (Paz 1971: 7-9). In fact, the sense of a word is actually its
translation by another sign which can replace it, as Charles Peirce made clear by creating a
concept such as the interpretant – any sign or set of signs that translate a previous sign, thus
generating an unlimited semiosis. Therefore, the question related to the so called “fidelity”
is truly a matter of ideology, for no sign can be faithful or unfaithful to what it replaces. In
any given semiotic system, even if we are facing iconic signs or synonymous words, perfect
replication is of course impossible, and the translator must be quite aware of this fact when
he approaches such a unique system as poetic language. Translation then, as all language,
creates a difference.
In his essay titled “Transposing Presuppositions on the Semiotics of Literary
Translation” (Schulte 1992: 204), Michael Riffaterre pertinently stressed that literary
translation is different from translation in general for the same reasons that literature is
different from nonliterary uses of language. This evidence has been responsible for the
assertion that poetry is untranslatable, from Arthur Schopenhauer to Benedetto Croce and
Roman Jakobson. Both Schopenhauer and Jakobson prefer to talk of transposition, thus
defending a priori any literary translator from being accused of inaccuracy, while Octavio Paz
prefers the term transmutation, which Jakobson in fact uses regarding intersemiotic translation.
And here we face perhaps the greatest paradox of poetry: since the separation of Babel, every
poet has tried to re-establish the Adamic or Cratylian universal language lost by punishment.
In its essence, poetry is this universal language, and yet it is said to be untranslatable. We
would then rather agree with Meschonnic, for whom poetry is no more difficult to translate
than prose. As he points out, this statement of impossibility comes from an ornamental
notion of style as deviation, as a surplus. Now, the very essence of poetic language lies in
connotation, a semiotic regime which rules the permanent movement of language created
by each rhetorical figure. It is this very metabolism of language the literary translator must
reproduce. And the words transposition or transmutation, just as translation, still contain that
fundamental element, trans-, whose etymology emphasizes the seme of movement and
crossing involved in every translation, as a mode of heterotopia. Accordingly, we must
always think of literary translation as the search for a dynamic equivalence. If the poem is,
as Valéry once wrote, a long hesitation between sound and sense, so too must a translated
poem perpetuate that fundamental dilemma. And the task of a literary translator is always
that same hesitation between sound and sense.
The aesthetic code is a frail code, an idiolect. Consequently, while translating such a
unique idiolect, the literary translator must respect each portion of the sign, both internally
and externally – not only within the sign, the close and motivated connection between
signifier and signified, but also the paradigmatic relations the sign establishes, and above all
its syntagmatic co-relations. The translator must then work hard in order to achieve an
isomorphic target-text, where the content-form and the expression-form of the source-text
have been made visible. This means he must achieve the same kind of relations the poet
meant, not necessarily the same signs, which will lead him to adopt a kind of iconic
translation, based on a similarity in structure. This iconic translation will obviously increase
the rate of aesthetic information. While working within a very different linguistic system,
the translator will have to search for equivalent co-relations between sound and sense,
between signs within the system, and between signs within the speech. Using Saussure’s
terminology, it is the value of the sign that really matters. Thus, when we speak of literary
translation, the notion of text as texture is unsurpassable, for we essentially stand before a
very special kind of intertextual relationship.
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