On Style in Translation: Reflections on the Translation of Three Stories About Women by Mindanao Writers
By Timothy R. Montes
A funny thing happened while I was in the middle of my translation project. The author of one of the stories I was translating, Don Pagusara, arrived from Davao and decided to live with me for five days as he waited for the Palanca awarding ceremonies on September 1. His short story “Talia Migrante” which I had decided to translate for my class in Literary Translation had won second prize in this year’s Palanca derby. While living and interacting with Don may have been a good opportunity for me to be able to capture the author’s sensibility (inasmuch as translation is a form of re-dreaming the poet’s dream), I found myself more embarrassed than pleased at this turn of events.
Sure I learned more about Don Pagusara as a person — his biography, his politics, his three marriages, even his physical ailments at 65 years old — but even in the personal intimacy and friendship that developed, I could not muster the courage to tell him that I was translating his story to English. I myself am a writer in English (or as Jimmy Abad chooses to call it, from English) and I know that Don himself is a very good translator of works from other languages to Cebuano. (According to a poet-friend of mine, Don’s translation to Cebuano of the short story “In the Village Called Talim” by Aida Rivera Ford[1] is better than the original, but I did not like his English translations of his own poems from Cebuano.) Why, then, was I reluctant to share my translation with him? More than the fear of being criticized by the author for failing to do justice to his work, I felt that I had as much claim to my translation now as the author had over the original. It felt like I had given birth to a story of my own, not merely a shadow of the original.
If there was one crucial thing that I realized in the process, it was the realization that translation is not a mechanical act. It is as creative as any original work that a writer undertakes. This insight was further bolstered by my post-translation assessment of my work. After translating the three stories from Cebuano to English, I reread them with a sense of personal claim over them. The voice, the style, was mine, not the authors’ anymore. It was as if I could identify my own writerly voice in my work. Even if the stories had different narrators, even if they were written by different writers (two by young women and one by the sexagenarian Don), I could identify my own verbal tics and stylistic flourishes. The rhythms were mine. Sometimes, I could even claim some original imagery in my effort to achieve equivalent literary effects. My penchant for using subordinate clauses, my use of parenthetical clauses — all these I could identify as my own stylistic fingerprint.
Compare the original and my translated version of the first few sentences of Blanche Gutib’s “Si Ate Weng, Si Mama, ug Ako”:
Sa pagkakita nako sa reaksyon ni Ate Weng sa dihang nasayran niya ang pagkamatay ni Kuya Noel, unang nisulod sa akong hunahuna si Mrs. Mallard nga nabasa nako sa sugilanon nga gisulat ni Kate Chopin. Lahi ra ang gipakita ni Ate Weng kon itandi sa gipakita sa ubang tawo nga anaa sa iyang kiliran. Gigakos siya ni Mama, dungan silang nanghilak, pero nagsiga ang mga mata ni Ate Weng. Murag gipugngan nga motulo ang iyang luha.
As I watched Ate Weng’s reaction to the news of Kuya Noel’s death, I remembered the character of Mrs. Mallard in the story by Kate Chopin. Compared to the other relatives around her, Ate Weng seemed to take the news of her husband’s death with more equanimity. Mama hugged her while crying, but Ate Weng, eyes almost bulging in the effort to keep back her tears, remained dry-eyed.
In the second sentence of my translation, I started with an introductory subordinate phrase that is unlike the rhythm of the source text. The word “equanimity” is my own addition and not found in the Cebuano. In the third sentence, “eyes bulging in the effort to keep back the tears” is a parenthetic phrase, creating a peculiar rhythmic effect quite different from the original. It was my own stylistic decision to create tension and firmness in that sentence, instead of hewing close to the prose style of the original.
Often in translation studies, what is emphasized is the literary style of the author which has to be approximated, echoed, formally imitated by the translator. But translation (literally “to ferry across”)[2] is such a strange process, and I would make the dangerous claim there is enough room for originality in translation as there is in creative writing. If one uses the analogy of “ferrying across,” I’d say that the translator starts out with the same cargo, but by the time he/she arrives at the other shore the cargo will have inevitably transmuted into something else. If the cargo happens to be mangoes, they can get rotten in transit; a good translator, however, will arrive at the destination with the fruits intact, even fuller and juicier. In fruits as in translation, ripeness is all.
I think it is high time that focus should also be given to the literary style of the translator. For it is now a truism that a translation is a different order from the original, and I think it might even be possible for a translation to be “better” than the original. For while it is true that there will be an inevitable loss in the process of translation, there is also something gained in the rendering of a work in another language. A superb translator can render a new verbal, imaginative reality totally different from the original even if the same content or invariable matter is concerned.
For isn’t it true that the literary style of Constance Garnett is as present in her translations of Russian literary masterpieces? The novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy have the same sound and verbal tics and tonal register because what comes out is Garnett’s voice that weaves through the warp and woof of the translated work. If one wants to experience the authentic style of Tolstoy, one should go to the original; the translated work is as much the style of the translator as that of the author. When we read One Hundred Years of Solitude, we are getting the style of Gregory Rabassa as much as that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. My impression of the ponderousness of German literature comes from H. T. Porter Lowe as a translator, not necessarily that of Thomas Mann in the original.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why there have been controversies between writers and translators.
Milan Kundera is a Czech writer who, after the Spring Revolution in Prague during the sixties, chose to live in exile in Paris rather than stay on in his home country under Soviet regime. It was around this time that he, by choice, started writing novels in French. By the 1980s, when his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being was made into a movie, he became a literary celebrity. However, when his novel was translated into Czech by a countryman of his, he repudiated the translation because, according to him, he could not see himself in the translation. The result of this controversy has been tragic: his own books until this time cannot be read by his countrymen (Nehring 67).
This, then, my dear Kundera, is my point. Style is not a mere verbal ostentation, like icing to the cake. “Style,” according to the French critic de Buffon, “is the man” (qtd. in Xiaoshu and Dongming), and the translator cannot really reproduce the writer. Even writers, if they decide to do their own translations, will only be frustrated by this effort of reproducing themselves in another language. In the effort, they will end up like a puppet trying to sound like the ventriloquist. Translation is really an act of re-writing, not a computer program that automatically transcribes words into another language. The translator, then, can only reproduce himself because a system of stylistic cloning has not been developed yet.
For exactly what is it that a translator tries to imitate in the original — -the rhythms, the syntax, or the sentence lengths? Prose style is something slippery and, in fact, inimitable. Virginia Woolf, that great prose stylist of the stream-of-consciousness, pinned down style to rhythm: “Style is a very simple matter,” she wrote. “It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong word” (qtd. in Yagoda 25). From a writerly perspective, this is, indeed, a simple matter, but from a translator’s perspective, it is not. Can the same rhythms be captured when one uses another language? Each language imposes its own sound-sense such that fluidity in, say, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in French can become floridity in English if the syntax would be preserved. English that tries to sound French is not French but awkward English.
If de Buffon is right, style cannot be imitated because a man cannot be duplicated. In the 19th century, Macaulay was the literary craze in England, which resulted in a host of other writers who imitated his sentence structures and rhythms. The critic George Lewes had this to say about Macaulay’s prose imitators: “They cannot seize the secret of his charm, that charm that lies in the felicity of his talent, not in the structure of his sentences; in the fullness of his knowledge, not in the character of his illustration” (qtd. in Yagoda 229). Yagoda, the contemporary expert on literary style, comments further that imitation, whether by translators or by copy-cat writers, is a futile act. “Imitation of Marlon Brando,” he says, “will only be impersonation good for party laughs, and not much else” (229).
Perhaps it would be better to look at literature as a performative art, not as an iconographic codal medium. The critic J.O Urmson opines that literature is closer to music than to any other art form. Unlike film or sculpture or painting, we don’t get what we see in literature. Literature is just a set of instructions for the actual performance of the imagination (329).
Analogously, a musical score is not music per se but mere notations on the page that need to be performed by a pianist, violinist, or guitarist. A musician has to interpret/bring to auditory reality the musical notations of, say, Beethoven in the Kreutzer Sonata. Every reader looking at words on the page is like a performer, with the imagination as a flexible instrument.
Along this vein, I would like to think of translation as a form of musical re-arrangement that would bring different harmonics, tone colorings, and emotional textures to an original piece of composition. This is necessary in order bring out the peculiar qualities of language, in the same way that a different arrangement is needed for a solo flute compared to an original version of the music composed for a string quartet by Mozart. The translator is a verbal musician, trying to suit the sonorousness of language to different instruments. The worst kind of translation is one so faithful to the original that it doesn’t make sense anymore in the new language. The violin is made to sound like a sliding trombone.
Between the ego of the writer and the freedom of the translator to create something new based on the original, I cast my ballot in favor of the latter. A dead composer cannot dictate to a musician how the music ought to be interpreted. Every pianist has a signature touch, and who can say if Cecil Licad’s interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on Theme by Paganini is inferior to the interpretation of Rachmaninoff himself?
Sometimes, I think that Saul Bellow’s translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Gimpel the Fool” is stylistically the translator’s — the jumpy ease of the voice, the syntax that calls to mind Bellow’s own novels like Henderson the Rain King or The Adventures of Augie March. It is only in this particular story by Bashevis Singer, thanks to the translator, that I feel the energy and humor of Yiddish American spirit. His other stories translated by others don’t have the same zing and vigor. If I decide to read the latest translation of Mann’s Death in Venice it will be to experience the hand of the translator in the same way that I try to feel the hand of a new director when I watch a remake of an old movie. To compare it to the original would only end in dissatisfaction and frustration.[3]
The spirit of reading translation, then, should not be that of always looking for correspondences with the original. In his poem “On First Looking on Chapman’s Homer” John Keats couldn’t have experienced the exhilaration of a translation if he kept looking at Chapman as a cheap imitation of Homer’s original. Instead, he created new metaphors for the experience to make us understand how the freshness and vigor of the original was embodied in the translation. According to him, he felt like a “watcher of the skies” (astronomer) watching a new planet “swim into his ken” (discovery) and ends the poem with a caesura, a long pause to approximate the feeling of the Spanish explorer on top of the mountain when he first saw the Pacific Ocean — “Silent upon a peak in Darien.”
In translation, the creation of new metaphors is an active process that makes each sentence, each image, each sonic tonality a process of creation by the literary translator. The translator is an artist, not a transcriber, and as such is entitled to his or her own style.
It is in this spirit that I present my translation of three stories about women from Mindanao. It is not an anthology of contemporary short stories written by different writers from Mindanao, more like my collection of stories which I happened to co-author with three other writers.
The ferryboat has docked, I have come upon a fresh horizon, and I hope the mangoes in the cargo hold are ripe enough for eating in this new land.
Works Cited
Nehring, Christina. “The Unbearable Slightness: Why Do We Love Milan Kundera Again?” Harper’s Nov. 2002: 66–69.
O’Hehir, Andrew. “Just How Gay Is Death in Venice? A homoerotic “master text” or a cryptic parable of art, arrogance and self-deception? A fresh translation helps pry Thomas Mann’s classic from too-literal interpretation.” Salon Magazine Online. 10Aug.2004. http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2004/08/10/venice/index_np.html
Urmson, J.O. “Literature as a Performing Art.” In Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1997, pp. 323–330.
Webster’s 3rd New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. Springfield, Mass.: Webster’s, 1993.
Xiaoshu, Song and Cheng Dongming. “Translation of Literary Style.” Translation Journal 7. 1 (January 2003). Online. http://accurapid.com/journal/23style.htm
Yagoda, Ben. The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing. N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2004.
[1] This translation is included in Aida Rivera Ford’s short story collection Born in the Year 1900, UP Press, 2000.
[2] The word comes from the ablative of the Latin word ferre, which means to move to another point. It is the same root word as “ferry.” (Webster’s 3rd New International Dictionary of the English Language) Unabridged)
[3] The idea of translation as a form of re-writing/re-interpretation is evident in the latest translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In a recent Salon.com review of the translation made by UCLA linguist Michael Henry Heim, the reviewer has this to say about the translation: “Heim has thrown open the windows of Aschenbach’s gloomy hotel and let the sea breezes in….Aschenbach seems like a more comprehensibly human and sympathetic character here, and Mann’s ironic treatment of him less overtly cruel (and frankly funnier), than in H.T. Lowe-Porter’s deeply coded, overly British translation. Mann’s dense, overgrown language feels lighter, more burnished with Venetian beauty, than ever before in English.” As such, the homoerotic element in the novella becomes clearer in the recent translation.
