I loved James Wood’s talk! It was so thorough, and I appreciated that we got a packet with concrete examples to look through. He helped me see Madame Bovary in a new light with his comments on the novel's manipulation of time and realism. My musical brain was pleased to hear him relate time signatures to the rhythm of the writing, for example when he mentioned the shifting from 4/4 to 6/8. Some translation decisions made me giggle, like “beef-tea” for bouillon (in the music of style, part 1) or variations of delectait from “delighted” to “delectable” to “enchanted” (in the music of style, part 2). He was super humble, continuing to note that he had “never translated” before, yet he brought up extremely relevant points on balancing the “sound” of a piece with the meaning of its words, and I have to say, I am a big fan of his rendering, “The notion of procreation was a delectation.” It sounds like something Lin-Manuel Miranda would write (in a good way, jaja); perhaps James Wood could also consider venturing into spoken word or writing a musical.
The readings for this week were discouraging but not surprising to me. I was shocked to read that even in the UK, with numerous literary translation programs in higher education and one of the largest publishing markets in the world, 2% of its books are translations. When “ the global language does indeed behave more like an invasive species than a lingua franca” (Allen, p. 21), even scholarship on translation is severely Eurocentric and monolingual as it is often based on the language knowledge of that scholar (usually going into or out of English). I don’t understand why a multilingual country like the US would reject a translated book if it is still written in English. Perhaps there might be remnants of the source language in the translated text, but what about bilingual or translingual pieces written and published in the US, or an American author speaking to migration and exile, where various languages are incorporated into the text? While international book awards and the incorporation of translated novels in school curricula can help bring translated works into the light, as Allen mentions, translated literature itself jumps over hurdles to get published: “The first-time novelist who writes in English may well have a publisher with a half-million dollar investment to recover…” (30). Even in other multilingual countries like Papua New Guinea, where hundreds of languages are spoken, English remains the language of instruction and primary literary language, but movements are taking place to publish works in Tok Pisin, one of the island’s main languages of communication.
For the case study, I read about Catalonia. Catalan, the most widely-spoken minority language in Europe, evolves through translation in Spain, and works are often simultaneously translated into Spanish and Catalan and included in the education system. Spain does a great job of preserving the use of its co-official languages and widely accepts translations. For example, in Galicia, textbooks are in Galician, teachers are required to teach at least half of their classes in Galician, and literature in English classrooms often includes translated books from other languages into English. On the Words without Borders website, I decided to explore the multilingual and minority languages of Spain and was amazed to find numerous works (poetry, short stories, interviews with authors and translators) from Catalan, Galician, and Basque, and one article on Aranese. The themes of the works were most often associated with politics, family, longing, and death, and I was amazed that there were different translators for the pieces and sometimes even multiple translators for one piece.
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