Huda Fakhreddine Lecture and Readings - Suis

 I found Huda Fakhreddine very pleasant and eloquent. I particularly liked her point about the importance of bilingual editions. She is an advocate for bilingual editions because the physical presence of the language on the page, whether it is comprehensible to the reader or not, serves as a reminder that the translated text is someone’s reading (or interpretation) of the text, that the original has traveled to us via translation. I find that this is especially true for poetry because I think the process of translating poetry begins first with the reading of the poem in its source language, and then finding your own interpretation of the poem. I loved her readings of the original Mu’allaqāt text and hearing the musicality of the language. Her English rendition of the beautiful alliteration of the phonetic sound “sh”in Arabic, however, didn’t sound as lovely. I feel like in English, alliteration in poetry can be overdone and lose the musicality that it may have in some other languages (or at least I’ve had a professor tell me in a poetry workshop course I took at Berkeley, and I tend to agree.)

For the readings, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova provides a great close reading of Naomi Walford’s English translation of Vilhelm Moberg’s “A Time on Earth,” as well as Juliana Jachnina’s Russian translation of the same book. She prefaces her close reading with the idea that dialects are the author’s “concern” for the “ways of expression” (50). She also mentions that dialect is often used for “characterization of the fictional characters.” Dimitrova notes that “A Time on Earth” uses a “few dialect markers, mainly on the lexical level” (51) and that in Walford’s translation uses “markers of colloquial language” with “no markers of dialect” (58-59). She finds that the Russian translator chose to use “colloquial” speech in place of dialect as well (60). Dimitrova mentions at the end of the article that “the publishing houses and their editors can have a very important influence on the final shape of the target text,” that certain words can be censored (63). The article ends with the note that “translators are likely to feel that there can usually be no connotative equivalence between speech in a source language dialect and speech in a target language dialect” (63). I can really relate to this because I have never felt that the “feeling” I get from reading a Japanese dialect “feels” the same way as any dialect I’ve come across in English. I think one can only attempt to translate into approximations.

In Luigi Bonaffini’s “Translating Dialect Literature,” there are mentions of the “impossibility” of translating dialect. He notes the importance of dialect, quoting Hermann Haller, that there is a “unique expressiveness” to each dialect (285), that some attempts to translate the dialect in Huckleberry Finn to Italian has failed to “capture the eccentricity of vernacular speech, its function as an alternative, a non-normative deviation from the norm” and the importance of the presence of the dialect in this novel (281). Although he admits this is an extreme case, I derive from these two articles that a translator should be aware of the political context of which they are translating (I recall Ken Liu’s lecture here) and that perhaps “the success of any attempt” to translate dialect “ultimately depend[s…] on the linguistic and literary sensibility of the translator” (Bonaffini, 228).