Showing papers in "Poetics Today in 1981"

TYPE, KIND AND INDIVIDUALITY OF TEXT Decision Making in Translation *

Abstract: 1.1. Interlingual translation may be defined as a bilingual mediated process of communication, which ordinarily aims at the production of a TL text that is functionally equivalent to a SL text (2 media: SL and TL + 1 medium: the translator, who becomes a secondary sender; thus translating: secondary communication.) 1.1.1. The use of two natural languages as well as the employment of the medium of the translator necessarily and naturally result in a change of message during the communicative process. The theoretician of communication, Otto Haseloff (1969), has pointed out that an "ideal" communication is rare even when one single language is employed, because the addressee always brings his own knowledge and his own expectations, which are different from those of the addresser. H.F. Plett (1975) calls this factor the "communicative difference." In translating, such differences are, of course, to be taken for granted even more. At this point I distinguish between "intentional" and "unintentional" changes affecting the translation. Unintentional changes may arise from the different language structures as well as from differences in translating competence.

The limits of translatability exemplified by metaphor translation

Abstract: Although in view of its importance and frequency in language use metaphor indubitably constitutes a pivotal issue in translation, it has hitherto received only random attention on the part of translation theorists. Presumably one of the main obstacles for a theory of translation to overcome is the intuitively subscribed and generally accepted "inadequacy of any single generalization about the translatability of metaphor." If however we accept that there is such a thing as a theoretical constituent level on which translation phenomena can be dealt with, we must also accept that it is the proper task of translation theory to make generalizations about such phenomena. To admit the inadequacy of generalizations about the translatability of metaphor is to admit that translation theory as a whole is an absurd undertaking, since it then should be incapable of accounting for the translation of one of the most frequent phenomena in language use. Even if such generalizations must necessarily "fail to do justice to the great complexity of the factors determining the ontology of metaphors why certain metaphors are created and others not; why a metaphor that is strikingly effective in one language becomes peculiar or even unintelligible if transferred unchanged into another [...]; in short, why languages are anisomorphic metaphorically" (Dagut, 1976: 32), it may content itself with the more modest task of laying bare some of the hidden mechanisms governing the translation of metaphors and their theoretic degree of translatability. In this paper it is my intention to make such specifications as seem necessary to provide a theoretical framework in which general statements about the translation of metaphors can be made.

Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis

Abstract: Translators and theorists of translation naturally recall with gratitude the incident of the Tower of Babel as the felix culpa responsible for the crisscross of interlingual chasms which they are constantly urged to survey and as far as possible to bridge. The attitude of writers to this sociolinguistic turning-point is, however, less uniform and certainly more ambivalent. True, it has widened their range of both materials and devices far beyond anything conceivable in a state where "the whole earth was of one language and of one speech." But from another viewpoint, this very asset may be regarded as a liability or at least a mixed blessing. For the disruption of the state of world-wide linguistic homogeneity has made the profusion and confusion of tongues not only a verbal but also an existential fact, and, in addition to the basic tasks of referring to extraverbal reality and reporting verbal messages within the same code, it has laid on each language the burden of reporting messages originally encoded in other languages. This forms of course the common source of all translational problems. But what should be noted is that the complications arising are intratextual as well as intertextual and representational as well as communicative. These complications manifest themselves to some extent whenever we try not, as in standard translation, to substitute our own discourse for an utterance made in another language, but to incorporate this utterance into our own discourse. Such framing and juxtaposition of differently-encoded speech are, however, particularly common within the fictive worlds created in literature, with their variegated referential contexts, frequent shifts from milieu to milieu, abundance of dialogue scenes, and keen interest in the language of reality and the reality

Translation of Children's Literature as a Function of Its Position in the Literary Polysystem

Abstract: In this paper I intend to suggest some preliminary ideas concerning patterns of behavior of translated children's literature. My description will mainly be based on research I did on translations of children's literature into Hebrew. However, I do not intend to present in this article a full and detailed description of the subject, but rather to deal with the main patterns of behavior of translation of children's literature, which I believe are common to other national systems of children's literature as well. My point of departure will be the notion of literature as a polysystem (cf. Even-Zohar, 1978a). Assuming that children's literature is an integral part of the literary polysystem, I will try to show how the behavior of translations of children's literature is determined by the position of the children's literature system in the literary polysystem. Although research of children's literature is still in its formative stages, I have decided to deal with translated and not with original texts, because I believe it is more fruitful to do so when the question of norms of children's literature is at stake. Translational norms expose most clearly the constraints imposed on a text which enters the children's literature system, especially when dealing either with texts which were transformed from adult to children's literature or with texts

Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem

Abstract: There can be little doubt about the importance of the problem of reliability in narrative and in literature as a whole. It arises with respect to every speaking and reflecting participant in the literary act of communication, from the interlocutors in dialogue scenes to the overall narrator to the author himself; and its resolution determines not our view of the speaker alone but also of the reality evoked and the norms implied in and through his message. And the problem is (predictably) as complex and (unfortunately) as ill-defined as it is important. Are reliability and unreliability value-judgments or descriptions? Data or conjectures? Gradable or ungradable contrasts? Autonomous features or products of fixed combinations of other features? Such, in telegraphic style, are the cruxes that the theory of fiction for the most part either neglects or inadequately treats, for reasons that will emerge in due course. I would like to start by outlining what I believe to be the appropriate theoretical framework for the problem of reliability, and then to develop some of the implications that such placing has for the understanding and the analysis of this issue.

Notes on narrative embedding

Abstract: First, the notion of metadiscourse as proposed by Genette (1972:239 e.s.). This notion has given rise to some interesting discussions. Many researchers have been of the opinion that Genette was wrong to use the term to mean the opposite of what it traditionally means. For if in the logico-linguistic tradition the prefix meta-indicates an activity having for its object an activity of the same class, the term metadiscourse should signify: discourse on the discourse, and metanarrative: a narrative on the narrative. The metadiscourse would then always have the function of commentary. Genette's inversion and I think it is less arbitrary than it appears to be produces a more or less opposite

Space and reference in drama

Abstract: If, following Beckett's example, one can banish from a play various elements, such as movement, or even dialogue, the element that must remain constant and be retained in any text written for theatrical performance is, of course, space. A play when enacted must take place somewhere. Its performance must occur in some real, visible space, on a stage or in an area fulfilling that purpose. That much is obvious. But what is perhaps less obvious is how complex space in drama is, once it is subjected to analysis. In the case of narrative, when we talk of space, we are normally referring to one of two kinds of space the space of language (the text itself considered spatially) (Genette, 1969:43-48), or the language of space, namely the words cueing the reader and enabling him to participate in the illusion of the verbal creation of geographic space (cf. Issacharoff, 1976:10-19, 1978:1-5). In narrative, however, since there can be only one channel transmitting space verbal language its mode of existence is relatively simple. Space in narrative, then, is mediated by language, and its perception by the reader can only occur through the verbal medium. In the theater, on the other hand, space is a much more complicated phenomenon, embracing several conceivable theatrical areas. A fundamental distinction must be drawn, first of all, between the two entities: space on stage and space off stage, between what is shown to an audience and what is not. That problem alone is the epitome of controversies and aesthetic theory spanning some three hundred years of French theater! Moreover, dramatic tension is often contingent on the antinomy between visible space represented and invisible space described. I shall return to this distinction later. The main point to bear in mind for the moment is that unlike space in narrative, space in drama is not one-dimensional and it is best classified in accordance with its mode of transmission by the encoder and perception by the decoder.

Formal Correspondence vs. Translation Equivalence Revisited

Abstract: The two concepts which feature in the title of the present paper belong to two different, though (as will be shown) by no means unrelated, activities. Formal correspondence is a term used in contrastive analysis, while translation equivalence belongs to the metalanguage of translation. In principle, perhaps, the two terms could be discussed separately in their two disciplines, and it is indeed possible to imagine a theory of translation which would operate with the concept of equivalence defined without reference to formal correspondence, just as it is possible to imagine contrastive analysis which would rely on the concept of correspondence established without the use of translation. In practice, however, both terms have been found necessary by students of translation and by contrastive analysts. Issues that are raised in connection with formal correspondence and translation equivalence are certainly more than just terminological: a discussion of formal correspondence in translation concerns the role of linguistic units in translation and the place of linguistics in translation theory, while a discussion of translation equivalence in contrastive analysis concerns the role of translation in con trastive work. The relationship between them has been discussed by Catford (1965) from the point of view of translation theory and by Marton (1968), Ivir (1969, 1970), Krzeszowski (1971, 1972), Raabe (1972) from the point of view of contrastive analysis. The present paper will look at each of the two concepts from both ends and try to show why both are needed in translation and in contrastive analysis.

TRANSLATION THEORY TODAY A Call for Transfer Theory

Abstract: "spirit" of the original, that the "meaning" of a text means both "content" and "style," and so on. Not to speak of such approaches where norms are either overtly or covertly stated, i.e., where we are told how translations should look or how they should be conceived of in terms of one or another evaluative norm. This does not happen only at such conferences where innocent translators, never before exposed to contemporary knowledge, rediscover with great amazement time-honored commonplaces. It may very well occur even when so-called professionals meet together. Obviously, this is caused partly by simple ignorance: as with medicine, literature and child psychology, everybody is an expert without even suspecting that there are things to be studied. Advanced translation studies are accessible as yet only to a relatively small number of professionals. But when we speak of "translation theory today," it does not seem valuable to waste time reviewing everything that is being published in the field. It is rather that body of hypotheses which is now crystallizing and which may constitute a more developed theory that I believe worthwhile to consider, no matter how little known it may be. There has recently evolved a set of hypotheses which analyzes translation in the context of the sign-system mechanism of human production rather than in terms of isolated verbal, literary, stylistic or cultural types. Moreover, it seems that a kind of functional approach is gaining ground in which the aggregate of hypothesized functions within the verbal sign

Semantic "Voids" as a Problem in the Translation Process

Abstract: The approach to translation adopted in this paper is linguistic, not literary. That is to say, translation is viewed as an attempt to achieve a relationship of "equivalence" between two languages (the SL and the TL), an attempt which, by its very nature, focusses attention on all those incommensurabilities of the two languages concerned that render such "equivalence" difficult (if indeed possible) of attainment. Translation theory is thus taken to be part of comparative (or rather, in view of the focus on differences, contrastive) linguistics.' The purpose of this paper is, then, to analyze a certain type of interlingual anisomorphism and its implications for our understanding of translation as a linguistic process and of the nature of translation equivalence. The particular languages on which the analysis is based and from which the exemplifications are taken are (contemporary) Hebrew and (contemporary) English, but the findings are applicable, mutatis mutandis, to any two languages. The as yet undefined key-term, "equivalence," is to be understood in the Saussurean sense of equal linguistic "value," i.e., as the relationship existing between an item in SL and one in TL, when the TL item performs as nearly as possible2 the same semantic function in TL as the SL item in SL.

Teller-Characters and Reflector-Characters in Narrative Theory

Abstract: The theory of narrative which I have presented in Theorie des Erziihlens' and from which the following is an extract (mainly of chapter six) concentrates on the process of narrative transmission. It is based on the assumption that mediacy (Mittelbarkeit) is the generic characteristic that distinguishes narrative from drama, poetry and, as a rule, also from film. Being a complex generic phenomenon, mediacy has to be analyzed on the basis of its chief constitutive elements. These are presented in the form of the following oppositions of distinctive features: identity and non-identity of the realism of the fictional characters and of the narrator (first-/third-person narration); internal and external perspective (limited point of view/omniscience); teller-character and reflector-character as agents of transmission (telling/showing). The structural significance of these basic oppositions emerges from the observation that a transformation of a narrative text determined by one pole of one of these oppositions into a text dominated by its opposite elements usually alters the meaning of the narrative. In this way the central chapters of the Theorie attempt a verification of the structural significance of these oppositions. Illustrations are drawn mainly from English, American and German novels, ranging from DeFoe, Sterne, and Goethe, to Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett, M. Frisch, and Vonnegut. In the teller/reflector opposition we perceive two contrary manifestations of mediacy of presentation, the generic characteristic of all narrative: on the one hand overt mediacy, when the process of narrative transmission becomes part of the thematic texture of the story; and on the other hand covert or dissimulated mediacy, which produces in the reader the illusion of immediacy of presentation. Almost all narrative texts, a few shorter stories excepted, oscillate

The Theory of Ironic Speech Acts

Abstract: Ironic speech acts, as Searle and Austin believe, are parasitic since they do infect normal speech acts and, indeed, could be non-ironic speech acts in different contexts. The vehicle of an ironic speech act is a non-ironic speech act. To formulate rules for ironic speech some pertinent conditions they must fulfill will be outlined, then the rules for the use of ironic speech acts will be extracted from those conditions: I thus will follow Searle's procedure in his analysis of the illocutionary act of promising and create a series of constitutive and prescriptive rules governing ironic acts (Searle, 1969:57-71). Just as for non-ironic acts, ironic speech acts have input and output conditions, propositional content conditions, preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential conditions. Irony operates by covertly negating one or more of the conditions and rules underlying most non-ironic speech acts. The illocutionary force of a speech act is retained but rather curiously blunted so that a perlocutionary-like effect is added. This added effect, which blends elements of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects, is what will be termed an affective effect: all ironic speech acts are affective speech acts. It will be argued that illocutionary and perlocutionary effects are more closely linked than Austin and Searle seem to have thought. Language used ironically is superficially deceptive and the deception is intended by the ironist to be detected by his audience: the ironist leaves clues to his ironic intentions. Ironic acts entail at least two propositions instead of the single one found in Searle's analyses of non-ironic acts: ironic acts create multiple layers of meaning by creating opposition, through negation, between the two propositions involved. By necessity, the rules of ironic speech acts will be somewhat more complex and somewhat different than those governing non-ironic acts since two propositions are intimately involved. But ironic uses of languages, like non-ironic uses, are rule-governed and conventions underlying ironic speech acts will be delineated. Initially the analysis will be restricted to short examples of sarcasm and verbal irony so that complexities of ironic situations can be unravelled and displayed

Free Indirect Discourse, Mimetic Language Games and the Subject of Fiction

Abstract: 0. Despite its occasionally flamboyant or contrived rhetoric, the following is just a working-paper. It should be taken as no more than the record of work in progress.' 1. It is the premise, the main thesis and, I'm afraid, also the conclusion of this paper, that the concept of Free Indirect Discourse (henceforth FID)2 can be meaningful only within literary mimesis, and that its limits may be taken to mark some of the limits of the mimetic powers of language. I hope, nevertheless, in the course of this presentation, to say a few things which may clarify the

Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text

Abstract: 1. The dramatic text, unlike other "literary genres," is multidimensional and pluricodified; it is not complete on the written page, but requires realization through staging. This peculiar position of the dramatic text at the same time within and outside the literary genres constitutes the theoretical crux of all the querelles which in recent years have divided analysts of the text from analysts of the performance: should semiotic attention be directed toward the text or rather toward the mise-en-scene? After an initial privileging of textual analysis through the application of narratological and actantial categories (Souriau, 1950; Jansen, 1968; Kowzan, 1968; Pagnini, 1970; Rastier, 1971;

The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel's Theorie des Erzahlens@@@Theorie des Erzahlens

Abstract: The discourse on narrative discourse is still in Babel. Its categories are variously labeled (narrative) perspective, mode, distance, person, register, presentation, situation, point of view, aspect, focalization, field, position, voice, transmission, vision. Its domain is divided in two, three, four, six, eight, twelve. Its models slide along linear scales, square off two-dimensionally, fork into family trees, slice into strata, tabulate and formularize by distinctive features. Not to mention other banes to comparison and communication: \"real\" language barriers, divergent (sometimes alien) corpora, unfamiliar referential frames, arcane theoretical bases. Whether Stanzel's new Theorie des Erziahlens will after translation into French and English' bring us closer to a consensus remains to be seen. There are several reasons why it promises to do so: Stanzel's corpus (primarily English and German, eighteenth to twentieth century) is wide, and will be familiar to most students of narrative. His referential frame is international and

Performance and Perception

Abstract: Since 1975 I have directed a research program in order to investigate the nature of the interaction that takes place in and around (theatrical) performances. Both for obtaining and analyzing empirical data I rely heavily on the ethogenic method as it has been developed by Rom Harr6 and his associates in Oxford. Three large-scale projects have been set up so far in Belgium: (i) an analysis of audience reactions to two performances by the London "fringe" theatre group The People Show (cf. Coppieters, 1977); (ii) an analysis of audience reactions to five performances of the English "performance" ("behavioral"/"body art") group Reindeer Werk (cf. Goossens, 1978; Wuyts, 1978; and Pattoor, 1980); (iii) an analysis of both the intentions of the makers and the reception by the public of a series of performances of a "well-made play" by a Flemish author (Hugo Claus) in a municipal theater (cf. Michielsen, 1978). My present project centers around performances in Amsterdam and New York by The Performance Group (1978-79): the trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island composed by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte and Cops written by Terris Curtis Fox. In 1979-80 two new projects are scheduled.

The Study of Translation in View of New Developments in Discourse Analysis: The Problem of Indirect Speech Acts

Abstract: One way of looking at translation which has not been widely exploited is through speech-act theory. This approach is not intended as an alternative to recent theories such as those of Even-Zohar (1975) and Toury (1976), but is probably complementary to them. The theory of speech acts is based on a functional view of languages. It assumes that the use of language is an integral part of social interaction. Speech-act theoreticians like Austin (1962) claim that by uttering sentences we are performing acts, and these acts may be successful or not. An adequate theory of speech acts should be able to formulate the conditions stipulating which acts are successful in which situations.

Problems of a semiology of theatrical gesture

Abstract: In the semiology of gesture, as elsewhere, the first step is the hardest; but this first step is decisive for the methodology which is used for what follows.' In this way, the semiology of theater, despite its declared protestations and intentions, always retreats from the delicate question of the gesture and of its link (or the absence of such) to speech. One isolates and describes correctly the different stage systems, but one does not comment on their hierarchy, their intersemiotic relation and the production of the global signified which results from their confrontation. This retreat from the obstacle of gesture only re-establishes the traditional concept of the gesture and of the mise-en-scene as a secondary and superfluous expression of the text. Thus, gesture remains at the level of pure incarnation of the word, with all the uselessness, logocentricity, i.e., theology, of this exteriorization. However, this movement of retreat of the semiologist does, one has to admit, have some justification: nothing is easier for the critic or for the spectator than to refer to the text; nothing is more difficult, on the other hand, than to capture the slightest gesture of the actor, or to characterize a type of gesturality! Once gesture becomes the object of a descriptive discourse, it loses all specificity; reduced to the level of a text, it does not give any account of its volume, of its signifying force, of its place in the global stage message. It becomes like any other kind of text, where the gesturality has lost all of its own qualities. Finally, as we shall see, verbal language describes gesture according to its own principles of segmentation, indicating and *Translated by Elena Biller-Lappin. I am very grateful to Michel Bernard for his attentive reading of the manuscript of the present paper. This article appears in Language of the Stage: Essays in the Semiotics of Theatre by the author which will be published in July by Performing Arts Journal Publications, New York. 'We are speaking here of semiology and not of semiotics, as do Greimas and his followers. Semiotics aspires to work out a theoretical meta-language which does not make use of discourse, while semiology recognizes the fact that its system uses the natural languages as an instrument of paraphrase. In this "difference of vocabulary" lies the entire range of problems connected with gesturality: should it be described and "noted" independently of language? Should a mediating language be taken into account?

Intra- and Intercultural Translation

Abstract: It sounds a trivial or rhetorical question. In fact, however, one can assume, at least for the countries familiar to a German student of Romance literature like myself, that the enormous quantitative expansion of academic literary studies has tended rather to harm internal cultural development, and has hardly promoted intercultural exchange either. The reason is simple: although developments such as the expansion of 'literature' as a field of research to proletarian, trivial, and minority-culture texts, the improvement of metalanguage achieved by literary theory, and the attempts to correlate literary systems with social ones, may have been productive in some respects, they have been made mostly under the auspices of 'hermeneutics.' The 'science of literature' is a science of passive understanding, which has since the eighteenth century been moving steadily away from practical knowledge about text production, text processing, and meaning-generation. In other words, literary studies have paid little attention to the tradition of rhetoric and poetics, if they have not abandoned it altogether. Only in the structuralist-semiotic school of the last few decades has a reversal of this process been foreshadowed (see further Kloepfer, 1978 and 1979a). The academic study of literature, therefore, some time ago lost contact with the people who produced the texts. Its definition of itself as an institution for the investigation of understanding and reading or of text-reception in general has now been underpinned by the development of a few theories of a scientistic (S.J. Schmidt, N. Gr6ben, etc.) or neo-hermeneutic (H.R. Jauss, W. Iser, etc.) kind. But making literary studies 'scientific' in this way is more likely to scare people off. There is little or nothing in such a discipline for literary criticism, the essay,

From Text to Performance: Semiotics of Theatrality

Abstract: This essay presents a semiotic formalization of theatrality, i.e., those processes by which theater can be defined as a unique artistic form. As a descriptive system, it will often restate what is evident. On the other hand, some of its working concepts may appear controversial, and the symbolic notations unusual, if not unorthodox. No doubt others could be substituted, but at the expense of clarity and economy. In matters of terminology, always ruled by conventions, adequacy between tools and results should be the standard. Finally, one may regret, or object to, the absence of concrete examples drawn from theatrical experience. In a theoretical essay, the use of such illustrations could only be systematic; and it would have doubled the length of the text. It seemed safer to forsake all illustrations rather than privilege a few, and to rely on readers to supply their