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

GABRIEL MOYAL–SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION IN THE 19 TH CENTURY: P. PINEL
principle or “general rule” of “ease of composition” is the one which presents the greatest
difficulty. Like Batteux, whom he quotes at length, Tytler points enviously at the original
author’s infinite freedom of composition and invention in opposition to restrictions the
translator must submit to in order to faithfully reproduce the very soul of the original.
While the author is absolute master of his creation, adopting or rejecting at whim what
suits or does not, “le traducteur n’est maître de rien; il est obligé de suivre partout son
auteur, et de se plier à toutes ses variations avec une souplesse infinie” 7 . Or, as Tytler
puts it: the translator “must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through
his own organ” (ibid.: 212). To make his point, Tytler uses the metaphor of the painter:
It is difficult, even for a capital painter, to preserve in a copy of a picture all the ease
and spirit of the original; yet the painter employs precisely the same colours, and has no other
care than faithfully to imitate the touch and manner of the picture before him […] The
translator’s task is very different: he uses not the same colours with the original, but is
required to give his picture the same force and effect […] the more he studies a scrupulous
imitation, the less his copy will reflect the ease and spirit of the original (ibid.: 211-212).
This “soul” which seems to obsess and fascinate translation theory by the promise
it appears to hold of metonymically yielding the whole – at once the essence and the
minutiae of the original – is also the concern of the fledgling psychiatrist Pinel. And this
concern is not at first made explicit about the souls, the psyches of patients, but indeed
about translation.
In a private letter to his brother, Pinel reproaches him for the poor quality of a
translation of Virgil he had produced at his (Pinel’s) request. Clearly speaking from
experience and practice, Pinel insistently brings forward his own principles for translation.
It is not, for him, a matter of simply rendering the meaning (“le sens”) especially when one
is dealing with a poet such as Virgil: “you have to put yourself in the author’s place and
adopt his stance when he composed the poem” (Pinel 1859: 49, letter of April 28, 1785).
And Pinel too adopts the pictorial metaphor to make the lesson clear: “Üt pictura poesis”,
he writes. But Pinel takes the image a step further. For him, it is not simply a matter of
imagining the scene depicted in Virgil’s original text, rather, the translator should imagine
Virgil imagining himself – as somehow he must have – as a painter painting the scene he
wants to create in words. And, in Pinel’s example, the emphasis is not so much on colour
as on the distribution of light and darkness, on perspective, in short, on getting inside
Virgil’s own imagination:
It is not enough to simply take a passage of Virgil and translate it directly as you
have done. Before translating, you should close your eyes, and, by firing up your imagination,
strive to put yourself in Virgil’s frame of mind. Imagine yourself in Carthage, in the queen’s
palace, imagine actually seeing her there, her features clear and well defined. Then, when your
imagination is really inflamed, when you truly feel moved, only then will you begin to follow
the drift of the poet’s thought. Only when saturated with his feelings will your soul yield his
thoughts 8 .
In the end it is not just the soul of the poet which must be captured, but the soul
of creation. To truly understand what Queen Dido means when she speaks when she
knows she is about to be abandoned by Aeneas, one must, according to Pinel, imagine
7
Charles Batteux (1713-1780) “De la construction oratoire”. In Principes de la littérature (1777), quoted in Fraser
(p. 211). 8 My translation. The original reads: “Il ne suffit pas, comme tu l’as fait, de prendre un morceau de Virgile, de le
traduire tout de suite; il faudrait avant cela, en fermant les yeux et en montant son imagination, tâcher de se mettre au
ton où était Virgile lui-même, se croire transporté à Carthage, dans le palais de la reine, l’y voir, lui assigner des traits fixes
et marqués, et ensuite, quand l’imagination serait peu à peu montée, qu’on se sentirait attendri, on suivrait la gradation
des pensées de l’auteur; il faut que l’âme, pénétrée, laisse échapper ses pensées […]” (Pinel 1859: 49).
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