to confirm the presumption of optimal relevance 1 (Gutt 1991: 121) with the ... Finally, a linguistic plane: How can they encode these cognitive and cultural ... sale de las manos de la niñera nos lo han cambiado, como en los cuentos ..... which is followed by a consecutive clause, consequence of the expected âyesâ answer.
Contrasting Relevance in Poetry Translation Perspectives: Studies in Translatology Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2009, 1-14 ABSTRACT
Although Relevance theory has mainly been applied to spoken discourse, in the last years it has also been used in many other instances of human communication. We believe this cognitive approach offers excellent working tools to explain the processes performed in the translation of literature. This paper focuses, from a relevance-theoretic perspective, in two different translations of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 into Spanish rendered one by two professional translators and the other by a literary person. Although both offer good translations, they have also produced texts that differ both linguistically and cognitively from their sources. As a result, such translations demand different comprehension efforts from their readers which, in different ways, may modify substantially the original intention-ostention/inference process of interaction. Key words: Literary and poetry translation, relevance theory, intention, inference, implicature, poetic effects.
1. RELEVANCE THEORY AND LITERARY DISCOURSE. A great deal of research on linguistics, literary criticism, semantics and pragmatics has been done from the hearer, reader or informant side. As recipients of messages and texts coming from outside, critics, analysts and translators try to understand them, guess the possible meanings, and find those interpretive solutions which they think comply with their expectations. In the case of many literary works, the speaker’s or author’s intended meanings are not accessible either because their authors may have died a long time ago or because they are not present or available when we read their texts. A long debate is in progress about the appropriateness of applying relevance theory findings to written discourse in general and literature in particular (see for discussion and confronting views, Black 2006; Clark, B. 1996; Escandell Vidal, V. 1994, Green, 1993; 1997; Toolan 1992; Pilkinton 1992; 1996; 1997; 2000; Reboul 1987; Uchida 1998). In that respect, an immediate problem may arise about the feasibility of applying a theory which requires the active presence of both interlocutors to a kind of discourse where communication usually happens in absentia of one of them, and which seems to be more centred on creativity than on communication. While oral exchanges include ostensive data (which can be instantly reorganized by the hearer if communication fails or contextual clues change), stimuli which can be modulated, and the use of paralinguistic devices to ensure understanding, these comprehension mechanisms are uncommon in writing. Furthermore, authors can only make their meanings explicit through their texts. The literary context is built up as the text progresses, so the contextual assumptions 1
derived by the readers should be found in its earlier sections (Pilkington 1996). Literary writers very often conceal their true intentions in order to provoke the reader’s reaction through different interpretations caused by an intentional ambiguity. Poetic effects may elicit the reader’s uncertainty about which of the implicatures obtained respond to the author’s intentions (MacKenzie 1995, Constable 1998), but their load of weak implicatures can also extend the range of possible assumptions thus making inference a much harder process. Even if the speaker or writer is present we can never be sure that what s/he says or writes is really what s/he means, or that everybody who listens or reads is going to infer the same information. Relevance theory is a theory heavily centred on interpreting texts, and on describing the processes hearers or readers use to pursue meanings in the most convenient way for their purposes, discarding many other possibilities. According to the principle of relevance, it is the speaker’s or writer’s task to communicate their utterances or texts in the most ostensive way so that their addressees’ decoding efforts are not too great. We process speech through inferring what we assume to be the speaker’s intended meanings, and through choosing the ones that best suit our personal expectations. Oral discourse allows for a series of adjustments of the encodingdecoding processes (both linguistic and paralinguistic) until a satisfactory communicative goal is reached. Hearers, as has been mentioned above, build sets of implicatures which try to access the speaker’s intended meanings. These are called in relevance theory strong implicatures. Literary texts, on the other hand, are fixed. As Trotter (1992: 11) puts it: “writers frequently raise the costs of processing their ‘utterances’, and promise in exchange a yet richer contextual effect... Literature tests to the limit not our powers of encoding and decoding, but our powers of inference”. In short, as intentions are much less clear so are the implicatures readers derived. We talk then of weak implicatures. This is a crucial difference in order to understand why most oral and written exchanges are easier to translate than poetic or metaphorical ones (both oral and written) which in extreme cases are practically untranslatable. Weak implicatures are, for example, typical of poetic texts which tend to require more inferential efforts from their readers than other literary texts. Following this idea, literary paraphrase, for example, (a method often used in poetic translation) would be inappropriate or impossible (Pilkington 1997) because the translator by using it would try to make explicit (explicatures and strong implicatures) what the original author had thought to be implicit (weak implicatures) and poetic. Weak implicatures fail to confirm the presumption of optimal relevance 1 (Gutt 1991: 121) with the consequences we shall analyze in section 2. This phenomenon, typical of literature discourse, can also be applied to other instances of writing with the exception, perhaps, of technical discourse. Many written texts do not usually help the reader to process all their meanings. They are normally less ostensive or, to borrow Blakemore’s dichotomy (1987), less procedural and more conceptual than oral discourse. Very often, readers only see the literal representation and the semantic meaning of the words they read while lacking a full grasp of other communicative aspects such as context, shared and encyclopedic knowledge which, for many reasons, may not be explicitly included in the text 2. Although writers look carefully for the right words to reflect their intentions, they may wish, at the same time, to disguise these intentions by blurring meanings in complex syntax and style, (in)cohesive devices and collateral information. Other texts, on the contrary, look for clarity of meaning offering all the ostensive stimuli that allow readers to infer the right intentions.
2
According to relevance theory (Papafragou 1996; Vicente 1996), explaining literary communication and its poetic effects is not different from explaining other types of communication. “What distinguishes poetic effects is that extra processing effort is required because of the lack of readily accessible contextual assumptions that might lead to a range of satisfactory contextual effects” (Pilkington 1996: 159). And even here, the difference between literary and non literary communication may not be so great, because understanding a poem, for example, presupposes that experienced readers have sufficient literary competence to allow them to extract accurate meanings from their cognitive literary frames with the minimum effort, fully complying with the principle of relevance (Green, 1993). 2. RELEVANCE THEORY AND THE TRANSLATION OF LITERARY DISCOURSE According to relevance theory and in Weber’s words (2005, 54): “translation is an interlingual, text+context-mediated relation between a SL author’s meaning (intention) and a RL reader’s meaning (an interpretive resemblance to the speaker’s intention)”. Therefore, any literary text translated from one language into another should comply, under this cognitive approach, with the following criteria: a) The translated text (TT) should try to convey the same or similar meanings as the source text (ST). This means the use of equivalent propositional content by the translator which allows for a similar descriptive decoding; b) the TT should try to produce on its readers the same or similar cognitive effects as those produced on the original ST. The TT should deliver ostension, stimuli and contextual effects equivalent to those of the ST, permitting the TT reader a similar interpretive inference; c) the ST author’s manifested or inferable intentions should try to be recorded in the TT as faithfully as possible. The translator, by mediating between the original author and the target language reader, should be able to ensure the latter’s appropriate recognition and understanding of the former’s manifested intentions. This final condition implies that the translator should know and take into account the psychological, linguistic, sociological, cultural and encyclopedic contexts displayed by the ST’s author in his/her work; d) the stylistic features (poetic effects) displayed by the ST should be paralleled in the TT; and finally e) the TT should adequate its lexical selection and (if possible) grammatical layout to the original ST, encoding a set of propositions similar to those in the ST. Translators should work then on three areas: firstly, on a psycholinguistic or cognitive plane where they should have to elucidate questions such as: What were the author’s intentions? How are they displayed in the text? What cognitive mechanisms (stimuli) are offered by the author to foster comprehension? What are the contextual effects produced by the text? What are the inferences readers should derive by reading it? What are the (weak/strong) implicatures contained in the text? etc. Secondly, all this cognitive apparatus is embedded in a culture which determines meanings, beliefs, social behaviours and so on. This cultural background is normally shared by the authors and many of their readers, and is usually different from that of the target language (TL). Finally, a linguistic plane: How can they encode these cognitive and cultural environments in TL words and grammar? Translators know that whatever literary text they work on, it will undergo diverse 3
linguistic and cultural adapting processes. In some texts, for example those belonging to distant cultures or time periods, it might be more important to fulfil the TT addressee’s assumptions than to be scrupulously faithful to the original ST thoughts and language. Cognitive constraints will prevail over the linguistic and semantic layout. In fact, “what needs to be rendered is not the words and phrases themselves but the inferences they carry” (Assimakopoulos 2002). Translating is a mediating job. The translator tries to make communication possible between an addressor and an addressee who use different linguistic and cultural codes. This fact implies that the translator must work with two different mental models: one belongs to the SL which he has to interpret and transfer to the TL mental model. Translators seem to have a split personality (Neubert, 1997) one that receives the ST and another that produces the TT. They know from the beginning that something might be inevitably lost on the way as they are usually aware of the difficulty to reproduce exactly in the TL the communicative relevance and power of the original text. As Neubert (1997: 8) puts it: “ironically, although the translator is keenly aware of the divergence of source and target, the translator’s objective is to disguise any divergence from the target reader”. Basic aspects of communication, especially when viewed from a relevance-theoretic perspective, are severely altered in the translation process. Let us consider, for example, the case of situational context, that is, the mutual cognitive environment where interlocutors make their intentions manifest. In the case of translation, the original single content is divided into three contextual moments: (a) The SL author communicates to his/her readers, including the translator; (b) the translator becomes a mediator between the SL author and the TT reader and (c) the TT reader closes the circle by pretending s/he is communicating with the original author, although the words s/he reads are those written by the translator. Another alteration generated in the translation process is what we could call added creativity or the well-known fact that translations of the same text are always diverse. Translators, by using one word or another, one propositional content or an equivalent, consciously or unconsciously, add new effects to the original text which never reads the same. Creativity is also related to experience: “as experience with translational tasks increases, the demand for cognitive expenditure decreases... cognitive resources are then freed for the exercise of translational creativity” (Wilss 1992: 40). Finally, we cannot forget that translation alters the directedness of a text (Neubert 1997) as it focusses on audiences distinct from those originally intended. Translation should be considered a different kind of communication but, as communication in itself, it can be explained using relevance theory tools. Most interpretive translation (see Gutt 1990; Mateo 1998; Weber 2005), which generally focuses on original quality literary texts, demands from translators great efforts in their pursuit of faithfulness to the original texts. As we have seen above, weak implicatures and poetic effects make literary texts and especially poetry subtle and multimeaningful. Long experience in this type of communication is necessary to enable the translator to access successfully many of the author’s intended meanings. Literature is one of the SL’s cultural layers translators should be familiar with3, therefore translators specialized in literature should also be experienced literature readers in both the SL and the TL. One unfortunate consequence, often deriving from the translator’s lack of literary competence in the SL, is that the cognitive efforts and meaning processing displayed by the reader of the translation may be inevitably greater than those evidenced by the original language reader. This can be explained because the cognitive, contextual and cultural modifications made in order to adapt the ST to the cultural knowledge of the TT reader, have 4
often been excessive, small, minimal, or non-existent. The translator has failed to make the original ostension explicit to the recipient reader who lacks the cognitive and cultural background to understand the ST, and who depends entirely on the translator’s faithful understanding of the ST author’s world. As an example of our words, let us include a brief sample of Pinto’s 4 (1994:202) analysis of a translation into Spanish of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque and other papers: “and the child of our imaginations is always a changeling when it comes from nurse.” (Pag. V). T: “y mientras tanto, cuando el niño que hay en nuestra imaginación sale de las manos de la niñera nos lo han cambiado, como en los cuentos de hadas 5.” (Pag. 15). As Pinto writes (our translation): “The extra information offered by T «como en los cuentos de hadas (as in the fairy tales)» is inappropriate because in the TL folklore the subject of stolen or exchanged children is not immediately associated, as it happens in the Germanic folklore, with fairy tales”. The translators’ task then appear to be two-fold: on the one hand, they should try to transfer the way the ST is formally presented (propositional form and poetic effects) and on the second hand, a harder task to achieve, they should not ignore its conceptual and cultural background and will try to reflect it into the TL. In short, they will divide their efforts between being as faithful to the writer’s original intention and message as they can, and facilitating the ST reader’s decoding and inferring mechanisms. Many theoretical approaches to translation put their emphasis on the way the ST presents meanings in its formal wrapping (verse, prose, metaphors, puns, etc) which are given prominence over other considerations. A translator’s fundamental objective implies the successful mediation between the two ends of the communication process: the original author (original text) and the target language reader (translated text). S/he should be able to produce a translation which: “would be a receptor language text that interpretively resembled the original” (Gutt 1990: 100-101). According to the principle of relevance, two conditions which summarize the six detailed at the beginning of this section, should be observed: a) the translator should deliver a text which resembles the original; and b) the translated text must comply with the presumption of optimal relevance: maximun number of contextual effects, minimum cognitive effort, in the same terms intended by the original author. 2. CONTRASTING RELEVANCE IN POETRY TRANSLATION: TWO EXAMPLES. Gutt’s straightforward statement does not imply that translation should be an easy job as decades of translation studies and theories on the matter can prove, but shows the way it should follow especially since translation is a social task that is performed daily, and on which our modern world depends a great deal. In this section, we would like to focus on two typical cases, common in poetry translation, where on the one hand, the translator tries to be as faithful as s/he can to meaning at the expense of purely poetic devices suchs as rhyme and rhythm and, on the other 5
hand, the case where the translator, often a literary person, produces a text which not only interprets the original but in some ways becomes a modified version of it. The author’s intentions are adapted or changed by the translator with the result that the text in the TL can differ in many of the inherent aspects that made it relevant to the ST reader. What the literary translator considers important (relevant) very often does not coincide with what seemed to be relevant for the original writer. Translators then practically become authors and their text is more than just a translation. The issue of added creativity, a cognitive mechanism present in many translations, has been mentioned earlier. Translators have different perceptions of their own language and of the language they are translating. These perceptions include linguistic, cultural and cognitive information and content. They also have different translation experience and knowledge. All these factors contribute to multifarious translations. One translator may have a perfect command of the SL which enables him/her to understand complex linguistic procedures in the SL and look for equivalents in the TL. Others may have more experience in the specific field they are translating. This experience allows them to look up items in their memory stores and find valid equivalents in the TL. Finally, there is the case of those translators who take this added creativity to its limit, and produce new texts which loosely resemble the originals they come from. This will be our focus in the following pages. Literary texts usually show, as Dancette (1997, 82-83) states, “a semantic gap between literal and pragmatic meaning (because of metaphorical expressions, irony, and so on), these rhetorical devices of indirect meaning force the reader to modify his or her interpretations. In such cases, the variability of interpretations constitutes the ‘richness’ of the text”. Translators are readers in the first place so they are also influenced by these “devices of indirect meaning” (which we have also defined as poetic effects produced by the text’s weak implicatures). Their translation decisions depend on their perceptions of these effects and implicatures which, very likely, will both prompt different cognitive responses and possibly new (creative) effects and implicatures in the TT. We could reasonably conclude that the TT reader may be often involved in a case of conflicting outcomes of relevance, arising from a clash between the author’s original intentions and the translator’s set of his/her own cognitive representations of them. As a consequence of this, the original cognitive stimuli (explicatures and implicatures) which produced distinct contextual effects on source text readers may have been transformed in the TT due to factors such as the translator’s derived creativity, interpretive options or personally-added TL effects. This outcome of conflicting relevance could be more common than we imagine. For instance, it is not easy to say how much of Shakespeare’s work available to present day readers of different languages was originally written by Shakespeare himself and how much by the successive copiers and translators. There are well-known examples where the translator, usually a more or less renowned author in the target culture, has changed the original so much that his/her work could hardly be described as a translation. These modifications can range from subtle to plain. Let us consider two cases of poetry translation as an illustration of our points. We shall center our analysis in two different translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 into Spanish. They 6
present two opposite ways of approaching the translation of poetic discourse: (1) as a text which tries to observe original relevance and linguistic conditions but which misses important poetic features, and (2) as a text which interferes with these conditions by modifying them and adding new cognitive and poetic effects. The Sonnet reads: Sonnet 130 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare. The first translation6, which reflects case (1), reads: Los ojos de mi amada no son para nada como el sol; el coral es mucho más rojo que el rojo de sus labios: si la nieve es blanca, por qué entonces sus senos son oscuros, si los cabellos son alambres, alambres negros crecen sobre su cabeza. He visto rosas damascadas, rojas y blancas, pero no veo en sus mejillas tales rosas, y en algunos perfumes hay más deleite que en el aliento que mi amada emite. Amo oírla hablar, y, sin embargo, sé bien que la música tiene un sonido mucho más placentero: reconozco no haber visto nunca a una diosa caminar: mi amada, cuando camina, pisa la tierra. Y, sin embargo, por el cielo, considero a mi amada tan especial, que no puedo hacer con ella ninguna falaz comparación. The Spanish translators seem to have been extremely careful to transfer the original meanings from English into Spanish faithfully. Theirs is practically a literal translation. As is usually the case in poetry translation, they had to pay the price of missing fundamental poetic devices such as rhyme, rhythm, verse length, etc. The sonnet reads like poetic prose, therefore an important part of the message is lost because Shakespeare’s intended meaning is also manifested in his use of such poetic devices. Poetry readers assume not only a propositional content which includes all the ideas and emotions intended by the author, but also a special formal layout which is conveyed by 7
the rhythmical patterns of poetic language. Shakespeare’s main informative intention seems to be equally understood by the potential Spanish readers. As is widely known, Shakespeare’s purpose was to criticize the established conventions of love poetry of his time for being ridiculous and exaggerated. His sonnet (in the three quatrains) subverts the established Petrarchian metaphors by misleadingly applying them to his mistress. However, the final couplet reveals his true intention which was to proclaim that love does not need these pomposities in order to be real. Original ostensive devices and linguistic stimuli in similes such as “eyes like the sun; lips like red coral or breasts like white snow” are similarly conveyed into Spanish: “ojos como el sol; labios como el rojo coral; senos como la blanca nieve, etc” which is not surprising if we consider that love poetry conventions were shared by most Western European literatures of the time. One of the images: “hairs like wires” deserves a brief commentary. In Elizabethan poetry “golden wire” was used to describe the prototypic blonde hair where “wires” had the meaning of those gold “threads” used in jewellery and rich embroidery. A modern English reader might inevitably think of “wire” as a metallic industrial object and would therefore build odd implicatures which could reinforce the burlesque tone of the second part of the verse: “black wires grow on her head” but would not understand its presence in the first more conventional and laudable half: “If hairs be wires”. It would contradict the principle of relevance present in the rest of verses where the same pattern of meanings is followed: a conventional simile, followed by a burlesque comparison, unless this reader was aware of the meaning this word had in the Renaissance. The Spanish translators have used the word “alambre” (wire) with refers to the metallic threads normaly made of iron or cupper. The equivalent metaphor used in Spanish love poetry was “cabellos de oro” (lit. gold hairs) 7 where the noun modifier “de oro” implies the metal and its shape in threads. Using “alambres” in the first half of the verse, may cause the same perplexity to the Spanish reader but with the difference that English readers can adapt their cultural background to further knowledge of English love poetry where, as we have said above, “wires” were synonym of “threads” while the Spanish reader can not access to the same knowledge as it does not exist. In that respect, part of the contextual effects achieved in the translation are similar to those in the original verse, but, as we said above, an important communicative part is missing. Meanings and intentions (strong and weak implicatures are correctly interpreted) have been successfully transferred, but the formal flavour of verses (the reader’s perception of textual intricacy, woven layers of words, accents, beats and offbeats, careful syllabic count, etc.) is lost. Shakespeare wrote his sonnet using iambic pentameters (ten syllable lines divided into five pairs or iambs each formed by one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one). Rhyme and rhythm convey most of the implicit poetic information which constitutes fundamental artistic and aesthetic layers in this sonnet. Poetic effects, as Dahlgren (1998: 30) writes, “arise essentially when the audience is induced and given freedom to open up and consider a wide range of implicatures. Rhyme and rhythm ofter cross-cut syntactic structure and increase the range of possible interpretations”. Poetic effects in sonnet 130 are achieved by the combination of form (use of rhythmical and metrical patterns) and meaning (use of misleading metaphors with the famous final twist). The Spanish translators have not considered this fundamental aspect of the Shakespeare’s sonnet. Theirs is not really a sonnet; its resemblance to the English original is only the fourteen lines and their division into three quatrains and the final couplet. Unfortunately, they 8
have sacrified rhyme and rhythm in their search of explicitness and fidelity to the original meaning. The first quatrain: Los ojos de mi amada no son para nada como el sol; el coral es mucho más rojo que el rojo de sus labios: si la nieve es blanca, por qué entonces sus senos son oscuros, si los cabellos son alambres, alambres negros crecen sobre su cabeza. is a good example of our point. The Spanish translation does not rhyme and the number of syllables per verse vary: The first verse has 18 syllabes; the second, 17; the third, 19 and, finally the fourth has 22. Spanish sonnets typically have hendecasyllables or verses with 11 syllables with a metric structure ABBA ABBA y CDC DCD or CDE CDE while the Shakespearean sonnet has ten syllable lines divided into five pairs or iambs with an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme. Spanish readers are left with the bitter-sweet sensation that, in spite of understanding the verses well, they are deprived of fully appreciating the dynamics of poetic language where word choice and collocations are not casual but convey the author’s deliberate intention. Perhaps the translators should have read Emerson’s words: “in true poetry, the thought and the metre are not painfully adjusted afterward, but are born together, as the soul and the body of a child” (cited in Constable 1997: 178). Nevertheless, we must concede that translating poetry is not an easy task. Poetry implies a restrictive use of the language. The verse-form itself curbs the writers’ communicative purposes, so they have to express themselves within the tight limits of verse length and rhyming patterns. The translators of sonnet 130 had to make decisions and their decision was in a way in accordance with the principle of relevance which meant making Shakespeare’s communicative intention explicit, so the readers did not have to make extra efforts to understand it. The second translation follows case (2): Los ojos de mi dama brillan mucho menos que el sol; más que sus labios roja es la cereza; ¿la nieve es blanca?: pues sus pechos son morenos; y si hebras son, son negras las de su cabeza. Rosas he visto rojas, blancas, escarlatas, más tales rosas su mejilla no me enseña; y hay en ciertos perfumes delicias más gratas que en el aliento que se exhala de mi dueña. Me gusta oírla hablar, y empero, bien conozco que la música suena más cerca del cielo; nunca a una diosa he visto andar -lo reconozco: mi dama cuando anda pisa sobre el suelo. Y sin embargo, a fe, mi amor por tanto cuenta como otra que con falsos símiles se mienta. The Sonnet has been translated by Agustín García Calvo, a contemporary Spanish poet. He considered the production of a text according to the poetic conventions of sonnets (rhyme or number of syllables). He thought it more important than transferring the meaning of the original 9
English words and syntax faithfully and accurately into Spanish. He felt free to make some lexical changes for the sake of rhyme and syllable count. The result is a sonnet, but is it Shakespeare’s sonnet translated or is it an adaptation of the original? The answer might lead to a long discussion on the appropriateness of much translating work, but from a relevance-theoretic perspective, García Calvo has modified in some respects the TT reader’s inferential process because the cognitive representation of the poem has also been modified. Although changes do not affect the overall understanding of the poem, the target language reader may have to use deeper cognitive strategies that the source language one to infer the right meaning of some verses, as we shall see below. The translation still offers the fundamental impression of equivocal intentions that lead to the reader’s misinterpretation until the final rhyming couplet, but the paths chosen by the translator some times differ from those originally thought of by Shakespeare. Let us compare again the first quatrain: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. Los ojos de mi dama brillan mucho menos (Lit. My mistress’ eyes shine much less) que el sol; más que sus labios roja es la cereza; (than the sun, more than her lips, the cherry is red) ¿la nieve es blanca?: pues sus pechos son morenos; (is snow white? then, her breasts are dun) y si hebras son, son negras las de su cabeza. (and if strands are, black are the ones on her head) In the first verse, the translator modifies the comparison “eyes ≠ sun” into “ojos brillan mucho menos que el sol (eyes shine much less than the sun)”. He also splits the first English verse before the end for rhyming purposes. Shakespeare compares his mistress’ lips with “coral” while García Calvo prefers “cherries” (another Petrarchian simile but with similar inferential effects). Shakespeare’s conditional sentence in the third verse “snow = white, breasts = dun”, becomes a rhetorical question in the translation with hardly any comparing effect: “is snow white? then, her breasts are dun”. This verse and the next one (“and if strands are, the ones on her head are black”) seem to demand a higher cognitive effort from the Spanish reader as we shall see next. Shakespeare used a similar type of sentence in verses three and four: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. While the Spanish translator, as we said, used a rhetorical question followed by a consecutive clause in the third verse and an incomplete conditional in the fourth: ¿la nieve es blanca?: pues sus pechos son morenos; y si hebras son, son negras las de su cabeza. It seems clear that it is more difficult to establish a relation of meaning in “¿la nieve es blanca?” with “pues sus pechos son morenos” than in “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;” mainly because of the different syntactic patterns used. In Shakespeare’s verse, “If” is a condition 10
that is elucidated in the main clause. In the Spanish translation however it is more difficult to establish a link of meaning in an unanswered rhetorical question that expects an implicit “yes” and which is followed by a consecutive clause, consequence of the expected “yes” answer. The fourth verse is semantically more complex because the first clause seems to be incomplete: “y si hebras son (and if strands are”). The translator has omitted the second part of the comparison (what “are strands”? We should infer García Calvo is referring to the mistress’ hair). In the second clause: “son negras las de su cabeza” (“the ones on her head are black”), the reader must infer that he is elliptically using “strands” which metaphorically refers to “hairs” in the use of “the ones” while Shakespeare’s verse is undoubtedly clearer. They Spanish translated verses become obscure, and perhaps more effort-demanding than the original ones. As we have said above, the translator has somehow sacrificed the semantic meaning to poetic form; a decision that should not be surprising in a poet translator who could choose between being faithful to word meanings or rearrange them to enhance the weak implicatures and the poetic effects that meter and rhyme provide. The apparent result is that the Spanish readers grasp the music, but read different words and occasionally even with more difficulty. Once the decision has been taken, the translation continues in the same vein. Sometimes it downgrades the semantic meaning of words by tempering Shakespeare’s mocking intention (“reeks = exhale [exhales]; treads = pisa sobre el suelo [steps on the groud]”) who tried to amplify the sonnets’ illocutionary force by including such derogatory words when applied to a lady, thus making the contrast between his words and his real intention more evident in the last couplet. On other occasions, the translation upgrades this meaning by enlarging the original poetic image (“music hath a far more pleasing sound = la música suena más cerca del cielo [music sounds closer to Heaven]”). The translation of the final couplet is again semantically complex and perhaps more effort-demanding than the original in English. As we know, it serves to explain the real intention of the preceding verses and allows readers to understand the psychological game of misunderstandings Shakespeare was using in order to convince her lady of the true nature of his love. A literal translation of this couplet (“Y sin embargo, a fe, mi amor por tanto cuenta // como otra que con falsos símiles se mienta”) would say: “And yet, by heaven, my love/lover counts as much as another who/which is deceived/talked about with false similes”. The semantic complication here is twofold: a) First, “mi amor por tanto cuenta // como otra” is again an incomplete clause where “amor” can mean both “love” and “lover” and the object is not explicit; “my love counts as much as another … [what?]”; b) Second, “mienta” has two possible interpretations: “mention” and “lie or deceive” because it displays the same form for Spanish verbs “mentir – lie/deceive” and “mentar – mention/talk about”. c) It is difficult to tell whether these verses are deliberately ambiguous or forced by the constraints of rhythm and rhyme. Whatever the cause may be, it is clear that an extra processing effort is required to understand the Spanish translation, which complicates the task of the Spanish reader to understand clearly the core intention of the poem. The translator’s intention (the way he presented the sonnet) has seriously affected the 11
relevance of Shakespeare’s poem. He has translated a sonnet which is not only Shakespeare’s but also a product of his own creativity with new propositions, implicatures and ostension and has adapted the metrics of the English sonnet to Spanish standards. The contextual effects obtained by TT readers are, then, different from those in the ST. The result is a poem which includes both Shakespeare’s words and intention and García Calvo’s own presumption of relevance and poetic abilities. 3. CONCLUDING REMARKS. In relevance theory terms, any translated text should convey a presumption of relevance similar to that of the original text. This implies that the cognitive efforts displayed by TT readers should equate with those manifested by ST recipients. Translating is a careful task performed by a mediator who tries to transfer the linguistic and cultural input of a text written in one language into another. At the same time, s/he works to adapt the cognitive and pragmatic content inherent to the ST into the TT. The translation then becomes a delicately woven system of intentions, words, meanings, implications, cultural and encyclopaedic knowledge and poetic effects. Sometimes, professional and non-professional translators, such as target language literati, forget these premises and produce texts that result in what we have defined as conflicting relevance causing their readers to give different cognitive responses in their comprehension process. REFERENCES. Assimakopoulos, Stavros. 2002. Drama Translation and Relevance. MA thesis (ms). University of Surrey, UK. Auad, Fátima and Pablo Mañé. 1975. William Shakespeare. Poesía completa. Madrid: Libros Río Nuevo. Black, Elizabeth. 2006. Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, Billy. 1996. Stylistic Analysis and Relevance Theory. Language and Literature 5, no. 3: 163-178. Constable, John. 1997. Verse Form: A Pilot Study in the Epidemiology of Representations. Human Nature 8, no. 2: 171-203. _____ 1998. The Character and Future of Rich Poetic Effects . The View from Kyoto: Essays on Twentieth-Century Poetry, ed. Shoichiro Sakurai, 89-108. Kyoto: Rinsen Books. Dahlgren Thorsell, Marta. 1998. Relevance and the Translation of Poetry. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 11: 23-33. Dancette, Jeanne. 1997. Mapping Meaning and Comprehension in Translation. Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting, eds. Joseph H.Danks, Shreve, Gregory M., Fountain, Stephen B. and Michael K. McBeath, 77-104. Thousands Oaks: Sage. Escandell Vidal, Victoria. 1994. La noción de estilo en la teoría de la relevancia. Foro Hispánico 8, no. 3: 55-64. García Calvo, Agustín. 1974. Shakespeare, William, Sonetos de amor. Barcelona: Anagrama. Gommlich, Klaus. 1997. Can Translators Learn Two Representational Perspectives?. Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting, eds. Joseph H.Danks, Shreve, Gregory M., Fountain, Stephen B. and Michael K. McBeath, 57-77.Thousands Oaks: Sage. Green, Keith. 1993. Relevance Theory and the Literary Text: Some Problems and Perspectives. Journal of Literary Semantics XXII, no 3: 207-217. 12
Gutt, Ernst-August. 1990. A Theoretical Account of Translation without a Translation Theory. Target 2, no. 2: 135-164. _____ 2000(1991). Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Blackwell. MacKenzie, Ian. 1995. Relevance and Writing. Journal of Literary Semantics XXIV, no. 2: 104116. Mateo , José. 1997. La fuerza ilocucionaria y su relevancia en la traducción del inglés al español. Pragmalingüística 3-4: 77-88. ______ 1998, Be Relevant: Relevance, Translation and Cross-culture. Revista Alicantina de estudios ingleses 11: 171-182. Neubert, Albrecht. 1997. Postulates for a Theory of Translatio. Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting. eds. Joseph H.Danks, Shreve, Gregory M., Fountain, Stephen B. and Michael K. McBeath, 1-25. Thousands Oaks: Sage. Papafragou, Anna. 1996. Figurative Language and the Semantics - Pragmatics Distinction. Language and Literature 5, no. 3: 179-193. Pilkington, Adrian. 1992. Poetic Effects. Lingua 87: 29-51. _____ 1996. Introduction: Relevance Theory and Literary Style. Language and Literature. 5, no. 3: 157-162. _____ 2000: Poetic Effects. A Relevance Theory Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. _____ et al. 1997. Looking for an Argument: A Response to Green. Language and Literature 6, no.2: 139-148. Pinto Muñoz, Ana. 1994, La traducción: lo literal y lo literario. Estudio comparado de dos traducciones al español de una obra de Robert Louis Stevenson. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 2: 197-203. Sang, Zhonggang. 2006. A Relevance Theory Perspective on Translating the Implicit Information in Literary Texts. Journal of Translation 2, no. 2: 43-60. Shakespeare, William. 1976. The Sonnets. London: Everyman’s Library. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Toolan, Michael. 1992. On Relevance-theory. New Departures in Linguistics. ed. George Wolf, 146-62. New York: Garland. Trotter, David. 1992. Analysing Literary Prose: The Relevance of Relevance Theory. Lingua 87: 11-27. Uchida, Seiji. 1998. Text and Relevance. Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications. Eds. Robin Carston and Seiji Uchida, 161-178. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vicente, Begoña. 1996. On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Metaphor: Coming Full Circle. Language and Literature 5, no.3: 195-207. Weber, David. 2005. A tale of two translation theories. Journal of Translation 1, no.2: 35-74, http:/www.sil.org:8090/siljot/2005/2/siljiot2005-2-04.pdf (accessed April 1, 2008). Wilss, Wolfram. 1992. Translation as a Knowledge-Based Activity: Context, Culture, and Cognition. Language, Discourse and Translation in the West and Middle East, eds. Robert de Beaugrande, Abdullah Shunnaq and Mohamed Helmy Heliel, 35-43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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1
According to Sperber and Wilson (1995: 270), the Presumption of Optimal Relevance is defined as: (a) The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it; (b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences. 2
This is particularly the case with translation where text informativeness may differ depending on whether the recipient is a source language reader or a target language one. The presumption of relevance (greater contextual effects, smaller cognitive efforts) may not be the same for both addressees as we will see in the examples commented on. 3
Literary texts contain cultural knowledge expressed in words, ideas, attitudes or beliefs. As Gommlich (1997: 62) puts it: “meaning (s) arise within a cultural-situational context... all meanings are dependent on that context. This meaning dependence derives from the notion of ‘cultural relevance’.” Translators should be aware of the cultural context in which a literary event occurs to facilitate both their work and the TL reader’s comprehension. 4
Ana Pinto compares two translations into Spanish of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque and other papers. The first translation was published in 1943 by Eulalia Galvarriato in a book titled Ensayos and published in Madrid by Escelicer. This translation is version E. The second translation was published in 1979 with the title of Virginibus Puerisque by Taurus, but the analyst does not include the translator’s name for courtesy reasons. This is version T. 5
Lit. “and in the meantime when the child that lives in our imagination leaves the nurse’s hands it has been exchanged as in the fairy tales”. 6
Translation by Fátima, Auad y Pablo Mañé. (1975) William Shakespeare. Poesía completa. Madrid: Libros Río Nuevo.
7
Cervantes wrote in a similar guise in the second part of his Don Quixote (II, 10; 709–10) when he describes the process undergone by his beloved Dulcinea as a consequence of an enchantment in a clear parody of Petrachian love conventions: Dulcinea’s “cabellos de oro purísimo” (pure gold hairs) have turned into “cerdas de cola de buey Bermejo” (red ox tail bristles). Or her “perlas de sus ojos” (eyes like pearls) into “agallas alcornoqueñas” (cork oak galls) a protuberance common in this kind of tree.
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