Overview

This ground-breaking analysis of the cultural trajectory of England's first colony constitutes a major contribution to postcolonial studies, offering a template relevant to most cultures emerging from colonialism. At the same time, these Irish case studies become the means of interrogating contemporary theories of translation. Moving authoritatively between literary theory and linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies, anthropology and systems theory, the author provides a model for a much needed integrated approach to translation theory and practice. In the process, the work of a number of important literary translators is scrutinized, including such eminent and disparate figures as Standishn O'Grady, Augusta Gregory and Thomas Kinsella. The interdependence of the Irish translation movement and the work of the great 20th century writers of Ireland - including Yeats and Joyce - becomes clear, expressed for example in the symbiotic relationship that marks their approach to Irish formalism. Translation in a Postcolonial Context is essential reading for anyone interested in translation theory and practice, postcolonial studies, and Irish literature during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Full Product Details

Author:   Maria Tymoczko (University of Massachusetts, USA)
Publisher:   St Jerome Publishing
Imprint:   St Jerome Publishing
Dimensions:   Width: 17.40cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 24.60cm
Weight:   0.380kg
ISBN:  

9781900650168

ISBN 10:   1900650169
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   01 October 1998
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Introduction The importance of translation data and translation theory for investigations of the colonization and decolonization of Irish culture is outlined, as well as the value of Irish examples of translation for interrogating current positions in translation theory. Chapter 1: The Metonymics of Translation All literary texts evoke metonymically the larger literary and cultural contexts from which they emerge. Issues raised by the translation of texts from postcolonial cultures set in high relief the metonymics of translation, thus challenging theoretical approaches to translation based on binary classifications (e.g. literal/free; domesticating/foreignizing; formal-equivalence/dynamic-equivalence; adequate/acceptable; fluent/resistant). Because dominant-culture audiences are unfamiliar with the culture, literary traditions, and language of texts of colonized peoples, translators of such texts are in the paradoxical position of ""telling a new story"", even as they rewrite a source text. Constructing texts that metonymically stand for the literature and culture of such marginalized peoples, inevitably privileging certain metonymies over others, translators create images of their source cultures in a sensitive process having important ideological implications to be followed out in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2: The Politics of Translating Táin Bó Cúailnge into English Irish cultural nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to create new images of Irish culture that would counter English stereotypes and serve Irish nationalist purposes. The translation record--including the absence of translation--of Táin Bó Cúailnge, the centerpiece of Ireland's heritage of medieval heroic literature, illustrates the impact of ideology on translation and the ways in which translation serves cultural agendas. In English translations the adaptation of the Ulster Cycle to a biographical framework, representing Cú Chulainn as an ideal of militant Irish heroism, and the focus on the Fer Diad episode of Táin Bó Cúailnge, in which violence toward one's friend and brother becomes a necessary price of fulfilling group loyalties, together set a trajectory leading to Easter 1916, as well as later violence in the North. Chapter 3: Formal Strategies for Integrating Irish Hero Tales into Canons of European Literature In part because early Celtic forms and genres are so different from those of modern European literatures, the translation of Celtic literature has generated some of the most intense controversies about translation in European letters. A series of generic codes for the representation of early Irish heroic narrative is examined (including epic, folktale, and a post-Joycean poetics), illustrating that reception of a text from a colonized culture involves a dialectic between assimilation to and alteration of the standards of the receiving culture. Epigonic representations of Irish form in the translations of early Irish literature complement the subversive ideological manipulations of the texts discussed in the previous chapter. The epistemology of translation is set in high relief by the Irish examples, and translation emerges as a mode of discovery, parallel rather than subordinate to learned investigations. Chapter 4: The Two Traditions of Translating Early Irish Literature Translated literature constitutes a system within any given literary polysystem. English translations of early Irish literature form a seemingly radically polarized system, consisting of popular literary translations and scholarly translations, the former monuments of style taking their place among the literary works of twentieth-century Ireland, the latter almost unreadable. This differentiated system of translation illustrates the necessity of close historical analysis in descriptive studies of translation and the unworkability of a facile historical determinism in translation studies. In the case of the English translations of Irish literature, historical and political circumstances related to Ireland's colonial history resulted in a bipolar field of translations that serve the ideological context in complementary ways. The translation traditions are symbiotic, each made possible only by the existence of the other. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the implications of this translation system for approaches to translation theory and practice based on binary typologies. Chapter 5: On Translating a Dead Language Dead languages like Old Irish represent a limiting case for the construction of a comprehensive theory of translation. Because no living linguistic environment remains, ascertaining the meaning of texts in a dead language is problematic, raising in a radical fashion the question of indeterminacy of translation. In such texts meaning is established with reference to other languages, through translation itself, revealing translation again to be an epistemological process where translation precedes understanding rather than the inverse as is generally theorized. Nonetheless, it is argued that translation is no more indeterminate than other forms of knowledge, including the scientific disciplines. The chapter examines the imperialistic presuppositions of Quine's famous indeterminacy argument, showing that seemingly abstract considerations of the translatability of early Irish literature into English shed light on cultural transfer from subaltern groups and colonized cultures as a whole. Chapter 6: On Cú Chulainn's Attributes: Translating Culture in a Postcolonial Context Because language and culture are intertwined, linguistic translation brings with it cultural translation. At the same time, cultural assertion is part of the dynamic of decolonization. Using theoretical perspectives on culture offered by Bourdieu and focusing on several ""signature concepts"" of Irish culture, this chapter argues that the representation of culture--particularly the culture of a colonized people--is never innocent. Three translation strategies are contrasted as responses to the alterity represented by Irish culture--an assimilationist strategy, a dialectical strategy, and an ostensive strategy--and compared with stages in the decolonization of an oppressed people. This chapter explores paradoxes of constructing a national culture, projecting a timetable for change in nations like Ireland that are emerging from colonization and cultural imperialism. Chapter 7: Translating the Humour in Early Irish Hero Tales The comic is one of the few broadly integrated patterns of culture - incorporating language, ideology, social organization, and material culture, among others - discussed by translators, and it is generally acknowledged that comic texts are notoriously difficult to translate. The humorous aspects of early Irish literature delight contemporary readers but they contributed to the reception problems of this literature in English in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter investigates the translation of complex cultural patterns, of which humor stands as a prime example. Drawing on Kuhn's concept of scientific paradigms, the argument proposes that divergence of cultural paradigms can block perception of cultural paradigms in texts from radically different cultures, but that paradigm shifts in the receiving culture are associated with shifts in textual reception. Factors causing interference with the translation of early Irish humorous tales are explored, including nationalistic debates about humor and the nationalist rejection of the stage Irishman. Such interference led to the suppression of humour in translations of early Irish texts; more recent shifts in comic paradigms have made those same comic elements accessible once again. The reception of the humour in early Irish tales stands as an example of the challenges to communicating the central cultural paradigms of colonized peoples. Chapter 8: The Names of the Hound Proper names are essential linguistic markers that individuate persons and places, and naming practices are central to cultural formations as well, differentiating the identity of peoples. Naive translators often see names as resting places where no translation is needed, but in fact names are central textual elements to be translated and the paradoxes of translating phonological, semantic, and semiotic aspects of Irish proper names, including the name Cú Chulainn, illuminate the very essence of naming. The translation of such names, prima facie the least problematic area of translation, in turn takes us deep into the heart of issues having to do with knowledge, cultural power and prestige, assertion of identity and self-determination, and the legacy of colonialism in the modern world. Chapter 9: The Accuracy of the Philologist Philological translations take a positivist attitude toward translation: what can be translated can be translated clearly, what cannot be translated clearly must be consigned to silence. But difficulty, openness, and ambiguity are at the heart of literary language. Under the banner of accuracy, using the tools of clarity and silence, philological translations replace literary texts with non-literary texts, thereby deforming the representation of much of world literature. Examples from the translation history of early Irish literature show how these philological norms of translation, continuing to the present, reenact cultural imperialism on postcolonial peoples. Chapter 10: Metametonymics Translation has been modelled primarily as a process of selection and substitution, a metaphoric process; as a consequence, it has been devalued as a fairly mechanical activity. Roman Jakobson's distinction between the metaphoric and the metonymic offers a point of departure for valorizing the metonymic aspects of translation--the creation of connections, contiguities, and contextures in and through translation. A metonymic approach to translation is key to seeing the translation of early Irish literature into English as one chapter of the history of the colonization and decolonization of Ireland. The case studies of the translation of early Irish literature into English illustrate how translation in a postcolonial context challenges some of the basic theoretical principles about translation."

Reviews

It is hard to represent the breadth and originality of Tymoczko's coverage in a short review. But this is a study of the greatest importance: the first declaredly postcolonial approach to early Irish literature, and an illuminating placing of the various venerated translators in their cultural era. But all this is incidental to her grander exemplary purpose: to show that 'translation is ... a form of intellectual construction and creation, a metonym in the exercise of cultural strength: it is a matter of power'. (Bernard O'Donoghue, Translation and Literature) A(c)2004-2009 St Jerome Publishing Ltd

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Maria Tymoczko

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