The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice

by Willis Barnstone

In a lucid, pioneering volume, Willis Barnstone explores the history and theory of literary translation as an art form. Arguing that literary translation goes beyond the transfer of linguistic information, he emphasizes that imaginative originality resides as much in the translation as in the source text―a view that skews conventional ideas of artistic primacy.

Barnstone begins by dealing with general issues of literalness, fidelity, and with translation as metaphor, aesthetic transformation, and re-creation. He looks as well at translation as a traditionally stigmatized genre. Then he discusses the history of translation, using as his paradigm the most translated book in the world, the Bible, tracing it from its original Hebrew and Greek to Jerome's Latin and the English of Tyndale and the King James Version. Citing the way authors intentionally mistranslate for religious and political purposes, Barnstone provides fascinating insights into how, by altering names in the Gospels, the Virgin Mary and Jesus cease to be Jews, the Jews are turned into villains, and Christianity becomes an original rather than a mere translation. In the next section Barnstone analyzes translation theory, ranging from the second century B.C. Letter of Aristeas to Roman Jakobson's linguistic categories and Walter Benjamin's "Task of the Translator." The book ends with an aphoristic ABC of translating.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic

313 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Willis Barnstone is an American poet, memoirist, translator, Hispanist, and comparatist. He has translated the Ancient Greek poets and the complete fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. He is also a New Testament and Gnostic scholar.

Reviews

[Melvyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the first two sections full of useful insights into the historical and philosophical background behind literary translation, well worth dwelling upon, but then the third section on Walter Benjamin's idealist theories starts off with great promise of profound insight and then after pages of detail admits the idea forever remains at an abstract, inapplicable level, which left me feeling too disappointed to take the final apophthegms very seriously. Too often I find translation theorists who get out of the habit of giving examples start making themselves at home in the clouds of ideality and sounding a bit manic. Still, there are some eye-opening insights:

Bloom, George Steiner, and Fredric Jameson all remind us that reading and translation are intermingled activities.

so Noah and his flood purport to be unique rather than a late reincarnation of two millennia of Mesopotamian flood stories; so Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus stands alone, without reference to Chaucer's genius in revising versions from Boccaccio and from French epic love poetry,

translation in its larger sense may conquer the world of mind, writing, and existence itself, for ever since God translated himself into being, we imitate that furious activity until we die.

Reading is a mystical union. A secular one, usually.

Let us explore translation as an activity underlying all perception, reading, and writing, a process infusing the mind's most banal response to ordinary sense data, and an instinctive device directing the mind's most self-conscious moments of artistic creation

Literalism is a feature of boorish translators (interpretes indiserti).
Cicero, De orator

Translation is not metaphor but synecdoche and metonymy,

Translation reconciles the complementarity of languages that each single tongue strives for and intends

Jesus is an English translation of Latin Iesus, from Greek Iesous, from Hebrew Yeshua or Yeshu, a contraction of Yehoshua (Joshua), from Yah, "Yahweh,"Ya- hoshia, "to help," meaning "help of Yahweh."

King James Version (1611), as its title and preface suggest, is not a formal translation but a version, or rewording, of earlier English Bibles—Tyndale (1525), Great (1539), Geneva (1562), Bishops' (1568), and Rheims (1582).

Antony and Cleopatra is a translation of a translation, for Shakespeare did a free version of Thomas North's translation of Plutarch.

translation is frequently a historical process for creating originals.

Translation denies itself.

Diatheke (covenant) was mistranslated into Latin as testamentum (testament),

Book of Songs (Shying), a wondrous collection of popular poems, including love poems, became in the hands of Confucius and his followers texts for moral instruction and examples of the highest wisdom. Thereby an ordinary love poem becomes, through the alchemy of allegorical annotation, a paradigm for the ruler's love for his subjects

Egyptians have proverbs in the hieroglyphs of the wise man Ameno-em-ope from about 1400 B.C. which are sometimes virtually identical or parallel to many lines in the biblical Proverbs

Hermes Trismegistes, a pagan Gnostic, produced an immense literature that persists to this day

Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own

The translator shapes words into an appropriate creation. At that instant the translator becomes the interpreting creator.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very very interesting. I found Part 2: The Bible as Paradigm of Translation, to be the most interesting followed by Part 1, which has some interesting observations on name changing (translation) in the New Testament. As for Part 3 it is for those who like to cloak interpretation (all kinds of interpretation) in semiotics, hermeneutics, and other "etics". To be honest some (a very small part) of Part 3 is interesting, it can be by the author's admission very obscure. The first two parts are the priceless gems of this book.