Huda’s talk was inspiring and captivating—definitely my favorite thus far. During the pre-talk, Huda explained to me and Lianbi that she grew up during the Lebanese civil war and was introduced to poetry through her father’s recitations. She offered her distinction between “thought” and “spoken” poetry and outlined the challenges she faced while translating revered poetry like the Mu'allaqat, whose meanings were revealed to her over time. She highlighted the importance of capturing the sound and “silences” of poetry, and I loved her description of poetry as a being that transcends time, a form of writing that “remains urgent despite history.” Time begins again when one writes poetry, and the traditions that poetry represents are in a constant state of becoming. Translation is only one in many attempts at translating, like Huda mentioned, and I feel so grateful that I got to chat with her. No matter how much reading I could have done, I kept wanting to ask more questions and know more. I’ll remember this talk for a long time.
The first article I read for this week was Ritva Leppihalme’s “The Two Faces of Standardization.” This article intrigued me in that it not only included multiple excerpts from Impola’s translation of Päätalo’s Koillismaa, but also an explanation of key translation terms in this context and a note on the readers’ reception of the English translation. Päätalo was my maternal grandmother’s favorite author, so I had heard of his work before but never read it. I enjoyed the cleverness of the humor in the Finnish passages as well as how the rhythm in the speech of different characters was indicated through punctuation—ellipses for hesitation and reticence, and a lack of punctuation for directness and unfiltered thoughts. There were numerous references and word variations that I did not understand without explanation, although I could immediately see how dialect was used to paint a picture of the farmland and forests, contributing to the sociocultural context, individual characters, and humor in Finnish. I appreciate Impola’s efforts in the English translation to clarify and explain the references for English-language, and particularly Finnish-American, readers, although I think that he could have gone further to convey in the English the overt playfulness that the Finnish conveys. The title Koillismaa (northeastern country) immediately signifies that this novel is rooted in its geographical location: the selkonen (wilderness) in northeastern Finland, where Swedish and minority languages like Sami are spoken. I understand that certain elements like idioms and archaisms in Finnish are difficult to convey in English, but when regionalisms are the norm in the writing, I don’t think that a translation that smoothens out the language is sufficient unless it’s specifically to educate. Because writing in dialect here can also be a way to preserve and record this specific variation of Finnish, I think that displaying that more obviously in translation is crucial. Even small touches would have been entertaining to see in the Englilsh, for example recreating a phonological word play like kaupuntin for kaupunkin (city, town) with a single-letter vowel or consonant change in English. As Leppihalme suggests, dialect calls for the creativity and craft that come with translation, meaning that literary translators must work with much more than just “ linguistic choices” (259). Attempting to maintain dialect not only conveys linguistic identity here but also “a place (the Koillismaa region), a time (the early 1930s) and a community (of loggers and small farmers)” (256). I can imagine that translating Päätalo’s Iijoki series is already an extremely taxing and frustrating process, and it’s impossible to find an equivalent of this dialect in English. Nonetheless, I think that Impola could have taken more liberties and employed more compensation techniques to create a similarly playful and endearing effect that the Finnish so strongly suggests.
The second article I read was Serrao’s “From Language to Dialect: de Calvianis quidam,” translated by Thomas E. Peterson. Like Leppihalme, Serrao describes dialect as tool that indicates time and regional affiliation. Serrao mentions that, when he was young, he “spoke, breathed in dialect” (274), showing that dialect can also be an intimate tie to one's heritage. Serrao even uses his dialect in poetry to connect to his father, noting that dialect is “the language of poetry” (274). To Serrao, dialect opposes the “obligation” of the national language, instead providing a richness to writing that creates a way of further growing one's familial roots. Serrao understands the challenges and seemingly impossible task of conveying dialect in translation, but he also acknowledges that facing this challenge is worth a try to give readers an “initial, and indispensable, orientation” (278). I feel like I keep seeing in-depth examples of how not to translate dialect, so that makes me wonder what a "good" translation of dialect looks like (or if that even exists)? Regardless, like all translations, this process requires being open to taking risks and engaging with the creativity, sensibility, and "literary" in translation.
No comments:
Post a Comment