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Transcript of Boyd_Reforeignizing the Foreign_Annotated Re Translation
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 1
RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN
AN ANNOTATED RETRANSLATION OF JUAN RULFO’S PEDRO PÁRAMO
MARTIN BOYD
For millennia, Western discourse on translation has revolved around the notion of “fidelity” to
the source text. From the debate over “word for word” vs. “sense for sense” raised by Cicero in the 1st
century B.C. (Baker and Saldanha 35) to prescriptive statements in contemporary translator handbooks
that a translation “should be a faithful rendition of the [original] work” (PEN Center 16), metalanguage
on translation points to an assumption that translators have a duty to “faithfully” represent the texts
they translate. This assumption of course raises numerous questions, most notably how to define such
“fidelity”; and, as Susan Bassnett points out, it is embedded in an ideological perspective heavily
influenced by Biblical translation, whereby the text is treated “as a fixed, solid object that has to be
systematically decoded in the „correct‟ manner” (Bassnett 65). But for the purposes of this re-
translation project, what interests me here is how this ideology of fidelity is interpreted, refracted or
even undermined by what may be viewed as a conflicting assimilationist ideology, which Lawrence
Venuti suggests is the prevailing ideology in contemporary translation into English. According to
Venuti, translation into English is dominated by “domesticating theories that recommend fluent
translating”, through which a translation “inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial
to English-language values, reducing if not simply excluding the very difference that the translation is
called on to convey” (Venuti 21). In the interests of restraining this “ethnocentric violence” (ibid. 20),
Venuti proposes a “foreignizing” strategy, which treats the translated text as “a place where a cultural
other is manifested”, and which may be used as “a form of resistance against [the] ethnocentrism and
racism” of Anglo-American hegemony (ibid. 20). Venuti‟s anti-hegemonic proposal is transparently
ideological, and as such I felt that applying this ideological viewpoint to re-translate a translation that
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 2
was clearly influenced by the assimilationist ideology that it seeks to resist might produce some
interesting results.
The translation I chose for this experiment is itself a re-translation: Margaret Sayers Peden‟s
translation of the Mexican novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. The novel was first translated into
English by Lysander Kemp in 1959, and in its own peritextual support Sayers Peden‟s re-translation is
purported to be a response to the author‟s dying wish to have the novel appear in an “accurate” English
translation (Sontag x).
The original novel, published in 1955, is considered one of the classics of Mexican literature. In
Mexico, the novel is often viewed as a criticism of the failure of the Mexican Revolution. By 1955, it
was apparent that the revolution had not brought the improvements to rural living conditions that it had
promised; rural communities suffered ever greater hardships, with many turning into ghost towns as
more people moved to large urban centres in search of a living. In Pedro Páramo, Rulfo takes us into
Comala, a mythical Mexican town which is quite literally a ghost town, as all the inhabitants are dead,
but nevertheless continue to walk the earth as shadows. Internationally, the novel is viewed as a
precursor to the so-called “magic realist” movement, the literary style that characterized the Latin
American literary boom of the 1960s, led by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and
Mexico‟s own Carlos Fuentes.
Sayers Peden‟s translation was funded by the US National Endowment for the Arts, and
published by Grove Press, a large New York publisher known for publishing quality avant-garde
literature. As such, I believe this translation to be very much a US production for a US readership.
Sayers Peden is a highly accomplished Spanish-English translator; in the 1980s she translated several
of Carlos Fuentes‟ novels, and subsequently went on to translate almost all of the novels of Chilean
author Isabel Allende. Indeed, her success as a translator is hinted at by the fact that her name is
included on the cover of the book – although it doesn‟t appear in print as large as the name of Susan
Sontag, who provides a very short foreword to the novel.
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 3
In her preface, Sontag appears to distance Pedro Páramo from its Mexican origins, defining it
as “one of the masterpieces of 20th
century world literature” (Sontag ix). If we interpret this assertion
through the filter of Venuti‟s description of Anglo-American “cultural narcissism” (Venuti 19), we may
view it as an implicit allusion to an agenda to extract Pedro Páramo from its Mexican context and
domesticate it for global consumption (“global” understood in this case to refer exclusively to the
global hegemonic power of the United States). It is my contention that Sayers Peden adopts an
ideological approach to the translation of this novel that similarly attempts to distance it from Mexico
and relocate it in a domestic cultural context familiar to US readers. She does this in a number of ways,
but in the passage I chose to analyze, I focus on one particular strategy she uses involving the
respective registers of the narrative and dialogue. In the original text, Rulfo maintains an even,
articulate colloquial Mexican register for both narrator and characters. I believe this has the effect of
positioning the narrative voice very much within the setting of the novel. But in the translation, Peden
raises the register of the narrator to make it more poetic and erudite, while lowering the register of the
dialogue of the characters to a more colloquial, uneducated level, positioned in a kind of “American
wild west” context. This strategy may be viewed as a two-pronged strategy of domestication, which
can be illustrated through the application of the taxonomy of “deforming tendencies” proposed by
Antoine Berman in his negative analytic for “ethnocentric, annexationist translations” (Berman 286).
From this perspective, we might argue that the narrative voice is deformed through “ennoblement”, a
stylistic exercise of rewriting that treats the original text as “raw material” in need of “enhancement”
(Berman 290), in order to attain an assumed standard of “world literature”. Meanwhile, the dialogue is
deformed through a process “destruction of vernacular networks” (Berman 294), replacing the Mexican
vernacular with a supposed US equivalent, in an apparent effort to transport the characters into a
domestic context. As Berman notes, such a strategy is rarely successful because “a vernacular clings
tightly to its soil and completely resists any translation into another vernacular” (Berman 294). But
Sayers Peden‟s specific choice of domestic vernacular (which, as will be demonstrated, evokes the
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 4
lawless settlements of the US southwest in the 19th
century) is particularly unfortunate, not only
because of the loss of the lexically richer Mexican vernacular (constituting another of Berman‟s
deforming tendencies, that of “qualitative impoverishment”), but also because such associations with
the American Wild West serve to reinforce a denigrating Anglo-American ideological view of
Mexicans as “backward, ignorant, bloodthirsty and immoral” (Stacey 741).
In my re-translation, I seek to redress these instances of Anglo-American “ethnocentric
violence” through a strategy based on Venuti‟s notion of “foreignization”. In some instances, this has
meant adopting a more literal approach to the translation of words and phrases so that their
“foreignness” appears more marked in the translation. In others, it has meant a conscious attempt to
avoid the “deforming tendencies” Berman identifies as typical of ethnocentric, annexationist
translations. On the other hand, Venuti himself acknowledges that the process of translation necessarily
involves a certain degree of domestication, as “in the translating process, foreign languages, texts and
cultures will always undergo some degree and form of reduction, exclusion, inscription” (Venuti 310).
With this in mind, to the degree that my re-translation must inscribe the source text in the culture of the
target language, I have sought at all costs to avoid the very specific domestication of the Mexican
characters into a rural, pre-modern North American setting, which, as mentioned above, I believe is
indicative of a particular ideological agenda with regard to the “translation” of Mexican identity for US
audiences. To this end, where necessary I have sought to domesticate the language of the characters
using formal English phrasings generally more typical of British English.
For the purposes of reference, Rulfo‟s original Spanish text is included as Appendix A. In
Appendix B is Margaret Sayers Peden‟s translation, annotated with my notes highlighting the
manifestations of the translation strategy I believe she has adopted, as discussed above. For the
purposes of analyzing Sayers Peden‟s lexical choices, I have adopted an approach drawn from Critical
Discourse Analysis, and particularly from the work of Jeremy Munday in his critical analysis of
translational stylistics and his use of corpus-based tools in the evaluation of lexicogrammatical choices
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 5
“in an attempt to ascertain the norms of the lexical items under consideration” (Munday 37). For the
purposes of this analysis, I have chosen to use the Google search engine of websites and books as my
corpus. I justify this choice on the basis of Munday‟s observations that, “although Internet search
engines such as Google are relatively disordered,” they can prove useful for determining “whether a TT
item is a neologism, or conversely very frequent” (ibid. 38). As I believe is demonstrated in the
annotations in Appendix B, they may also be useful in suggesting the types of texts in which a given
lexical selection may be more likely to appear, and other words that it more commonly collocates with.
Appendix C contains my re-translation, with annotations explaining my solutions in dealing with the
issues raised by Sayers Peden‟s translation in order to re-adapt the target text to my ideological agenda
as outlined above.
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 6
WORKS CITED
Baker, Mona, and Gabriela Saldanha. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. 2nd
Edition.
London: Routledge, 2008.
Bassnett, Susan. “Transplanting the Seed: Poetry and Translation.” Constructing Cultures: Essays on
Literary Translation. London: Multilingual Matters, 1998: 57-75.
Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”. Translation Studies Reader. L. Venuti
(ed.). London: Routledge, 1999. 284-297.
A Handbook for Literary Translators. 2nd
Edition. New York: PEN American Center, 1991.
Harrap’s Dictionary: Español-Inglés / English-Spanish. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 2003.
Larousse Diccionario Español-inglés / English-Spanish. Mexico: Larousse, 1998.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. 12th
reprint. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Tran. M. Sayers Peden. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
Sontag, Susan. “Introduction.” in Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Tran. M. Sayers Peden. New York:
Grove Press, 1994: i-x.
Stacy, Lee (ed.). Mexico and the United States. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2002.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York: Routledge, 1995.
WordReference.com. Online Dictionaries. WordReference.com, Vienna, VA. Web. 10 Feb. 2011.
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 7
APPENDIX A
SOURCE TEXT
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. 12th reprint. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973: 32-34
[Context: At the Media Luna Ranch, of which Pedro Páramo is the "patrón". It is the end of the day,
after the funeral for Pedro's son, Miguel, an infamous womanizer who died when he fell off his horse a
few days earlier. The hands are discussing rumours that have reached the ranch that Miguel's horse is
still running madly along the country road, as if looking desperately for its owner.]
Esos chismes llegaron a la Media Luna la noche del entierro, mientras los hombres descansaban
de la larga caminata que habían hecho hasta el panteón.
Platicaban, como se platica en todas partes, antes de ir a dormir.
-A mí me dolió mucho ese muerto –dijo Terencio Lubianes-. Todavía traigo adoloridos los
hombros.
-Y a mí -dijo su hermano Ubillado-. Hasta se me agrandaron los juanetes. Con eso de que el
patrón quiso que todos fuéramos de zapatos.–Ni que hubiera sido día de fiesta, ¿verdad Toribio?
-Yo qué quieren que les diga. Pienso que se murió muy a tiempo.
Al rato llegaron más chismes de Contla. Los trajo la última carreta.
-Dicen que por allá anda el ánima. Lo han visto tocando la ventana de fulanita. Igualito a él. De
chaparreras y todo.
-¿Y usted cree que don Pedro, con el genio que se carga, iba a permitir que su hijo siga
traficando viejas? Ya me lo imagino si lo supiera: "-Bueno -le diría-. Tú ya estás muerto. Estate quieto
en tu sepultura. Déjanos el negocio a nosotros.” Y de verlo por ahí, casi me las apuesto que lo mandaría
de nuevo al camposanto.
-Tienes razón, Isaías. Ese viejo no se anda con cosas.
El carretero siguió su camino: “Como la supe, se las endoso."
Había estrellas fugaces. Caían como si el cielo estuviera lloviznando lumbre.
-Miren nomás –dijo Terencio- el burlote que se traen allá arriba.
-Es que le están celebrando su función a Miguelito -terció Jesús.
-¿No será mala señal?
-¿Para quién?
-Quizá tu hermana esté nostálgica por su regreso.
-¿A quién le hablas?
-A ti.
-Mejor vámonos, muchachos. Hemos trafagueado mucho y mañana hay que madrugar.
Y se disolvieron como sombras.
Había estrellas fugaces. Las luces en Comala se apagaron.
Entonces el cielo se adueñó de la noche.
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 8
APPENDIX B
TRANSLATION
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Grove Press, 1994: 28-30.
That story1 reached the Media Luna on the night of the burial, as the men were resting after the
long walk back from the cemetery.
They were talking, as people talk2 everywhere before turning in.
“That death pained me in more ways than one,” said Terencio Lubianes. “My shoulders are still
sore.”
“Mine, too,” said his brother Ubillado. “And my bunions must have swelled an inch. All
because the patrón3 wanted us to wear shoes. You‟d have thought it was a holy day, right, Toribio?”
“What do you want me to say? I think it was none too soon he died4.”
In a few days there was more news5 from Contla. It came with the latest ox cart.
“They‟re saying that his spirit is wandering over there. They‟ve seen it rapping at the window
of a lady friend. It was just like him. Chaps and all.”
“And do you think that don Pedro, with that disposition of his, would allow his son to keep
calling on the women? I can just imagine what he'd say if he found out: 'All right,' he'd say. 'You're
dead now. You keep to your grave. And leave the affairs to us.' And if he caught him wandering
around, you can bet he'd put him back in the ground for good6.”
“You‟re right about that, Isaias. That old man doesn‟t put up with much.”
The driver went on his way. “I‟m just telling you what was told me7.”
Shooting stars. They fell as if the sky were8 raining fire.
“Look at that,” said Terencio. “Please look at the show9 they‟re putting on up there.”
1 “story”: Peden lifts the register with a formalized rendering of “chismes” (more literally, “pieces of gossip”), which,
combined with her subsequent translation of the same word as “news” (see below) eliminates the evaluative element, positioning the narrator as neutral (and thus more distant) observer. 2 “…talking, as people talk”: By translating the colloquial Mexican verb “platicar” with the Standard English “talk”, Peden
elides the casual, colloquial usage of the original and thus formalizes the voice of the narrator. Her translation of “como” with “as” (rather than the more colloquial option “like”) also indicates a conscious decision to opt for a “higher” register wherever the opportunity presents itself. 3 As a foreignizing strategy, Peden has chosen a very small number of words repeated frequently throughout the text
which she presents in the original Spanish (patrón, burro, señor, señora, rebozo). The choices are all obvious Spanish words which could just as easily be associated with the US southwest. 4 “muy a tiempo” (lit. “right on time”): Peden’s translation of this expression as “it was none too soon” points to a
conscious strategy to favour phrasings associated with the 19th
century US ‘Wild West’; a Google search of books with this phrase brings 3,820 hits, dominated by works of fiction on US rural life such as: None But a Mule by Barbara Woolicott; Wolf Canyon by J.F. Whiteaker; and numerous short stories from a magazine entitled Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. 5 “news” (chismes): see Footnote 1 above.
6 “grave..... ground for good”: Rulfo’s lexical choices of “sepultura” and “camposanto” are somewhat more eloquent than
the more frequently used terms for these concepts (“tumba” and “cementerio”); Peden’s decision to translate these concepts with more bland English words “grave” and “ground” renders the character’s speech more mundane, and in the second case, the poetic quality of “camposanto” (lit. “holy field”) is lost completely. 7 “I’m just telling you what was told me”: A literal rendering of the original Spanish phrase is closer to “As I heard it, I pass
it on to you.” Peden re-casts the sentence completely, employing a phrasing with a pre-modern rural US flavour. The only other usage Google gives for this phrase comes from a quote by a former slave in 19
th century Virginia, in the book Weevils
in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves, by Charles Perdue and Thomas Barden. 8 “as if the sky were”: the use of the subjunctive “were” gives the translation a marked formal quality not present in the
original Spanish (where the subjunctive carries no such overtones of formality).
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 9
“Must be celebrating Miguelito‟s arrival,” Jesus put in.
“You don‟t think it‟s a bad omen?”
“Bad for who10
?”
“Maybe your sister‟s lonesome11
and wants him back.”
“Who‟re you talking to?”
“To you.”
“It‟s time to go, boys. We've traveled a long road 12
today, and we have to be up early tomorrow.
And they faded into the night like shadows.
9 “show”: Peden chooses to render the rather obscure usage “burlote” with a very common English term, which
suppresses the originality of the character’s speech. 10
“for who?”: In contrast to the formalism of the narrator’s voice, characters are invariably given more informal language usage, as demonstrated by the use of “who” (rather than “whom”) here. 11
“lonesome”: a curious choice for the translation of the Spanish word “nostálgica”, for which the most common English translations given in bilingual dictionaries is “nostalgic” or “homesick” (see, for example, Harrap’s Spanish-English Dictionary; Larousse’s Diccionario español-inglés and wordreference.com). A search in Google suggests that “lonesome” very frequently collocates with “cowboy” (255,000 hits, as opposed to “lonesome man” – 80,000 hits; “lonesome woman” – 24,500 hits; “lonesome gentleman” – 427 hits), suggesting a very clear association with images of the Wild West 12
“traveled a long road”: another example of where Peden elides the originality of the characters’ use of language; the
original Spanish verb “trafaguear” (meaning “to be very active”) is highly unusual, yielding only 185 hits in Google; Peden’s
translation is a common cliché in English which produces a total of 64,700 hits in Google.
Martin Boyd: “RE-FOREIGNIZING THE FOREIGN” Page 10
APPENDIX C
MY RETRANSLATION
That gossip13
reached the Media Luna on the night of the burial, while the men were resting
from the long walk to the grave and back.
They were chatting, like people do14
everywhere before they go off to bed.
“That death gave me so much pain,” said Terencio Lubianes. “My shoulders are aching me
still.”
“And me,” said his brother Ubillado. “Even my bunions have grown bigger. All because his
lordship15
wanted us all to wear shoes. As if it were a feast day, don‟t you agree Toribio?”
“What do you want me to tell you? I think he died not a moment too soon16
.”
More gossip soon arrived from Contla, brought by the latest truck.
“They say his soul walks about over there. They‟ve seen it knocking at the window of a certain
young lady. Exactly like him. In chaps and all.”
“And do you suppose that Master Pedro, with that dark mood that fills him, would allow his son
to continue his traffic with women? I can imagine what would happen if he knew. “Well, then,” he‟d
say, “You‟re dead now. Stay still in your tomb. Leave that business to us.” And if he were to see him
out and about, I‟d almost lay money that he would send him back again to the hallowed ground17
.”
“You‟re right, Isaias. That old man has no time for such things.”
The truck driver went on his way. “As I heard it, I lay it upon you18
,” he said.
Shooting stars appeared, falling as if the sky was drizzling fire.
“Just look,” said Terencio, “look at the fanfare19
they‟re carrying on with up there.”
“They‟re throwing a party for young Miguel,” offered Jesús.
“Might it not be a bad sign?”
“For whom?”
“Perhaps your sister is longing20
for his return.”
“To whom do you speak?”
“To you.”
“Best that we leave, lads. We‟ve been bustling21
all day and tomorrow we must rise at dawn.”
And they dissolved like shadows.
13
“gossip” (cf. Footnote 1): My intention is to retain the colloquial flavour and evaluative dimension of the original word choice. 14
“…chatting, like people do” (cf. Footnote 2): Again, I am seeking to retain the narrator’s informal, colloquial voice. 15
“his lordship” (cf. Footnote 3): I have rejected the strategy of maintaining words like “patrón” in Spanish, as I view it as a questionable foreignizing strategy. In Mexican Spanish, “patron” is often used with a hint of sarcasm when alluding to employer-employee relations; my intention is to capture this aspect of the original. 16
“not a moment too soon” (cf. Footnote 4): Contrary to Peden’s choice of US 19th
century rural phrasings, I have consciously chosen more formal English phrasings for character dialogue. 17
“tomb… hallowed ground” (cf. Footnote 6): My intention here is to represent more closely the poetic formalism of the original. 18
“As I heard it… upon you” (cf. Footnote 7): Based on Venuti’s “foreiginzing” strategy, a more literal rendering of the original to produce a markedly atypical phrasing in English. 19
“fanfare” (cf. Footnote 9): I’ve attempted to find a less bland term than “show” to better represent the original “burlote” 20
“longing” (cf. Footnote 11): I feel this is a more semantically accurate choice, and avoids associations with images of the Wild West. 21
“bustling” (cf. Footnote 12): My attempt to avoid what Berman refers to as “qualitative impoverishment” of the dialogue, by searching for language that convey some of the originality of word usage in the ST dialogue.