马里恩·马乔：斯洛伐克诗歌翻译札记

马里昂·马霍（Marián Macho），著名斯洛伐克语学家。

NOTES ABOUT TRANSLATION OFSLOVAK POETRY

斯洛伐克诗歌翻译札记

马里昂·马霍  MARIÁN MACHO

The topic of translatingliterary texts from a language of limited diffusion into the language of globalcommunication requires conducting fundamental research that would providefurther researchers with the bibliography of the published translations andstatistical data. An up-to-date comprehensive research of this kind for Slovakliterature in English translation has not been published yet: the databasesthat can be found online are not exhaustive and bibliographies that came out asbooks are out-dated.

Over the course of the last twenty years or so, English translations ofauthors of the Slovak young generation /so called “text generation”/ have beenpublished in anthologies and magazines and can also be found online. Hopefully,this situation will change, since the poetry of the text generation and ofpoets inspired by its experiments might arouse the interest of theEnglish-speaking world.

Poetry of Katarína Kucbelová (born in 1979) has captured the attention ofthe Slovak critics; her poetic voice seems to be highly promising, so I willconcentrate on the translation of her poetry. She has authored four volumes ofpoetry—Duály \Duals\ (2003), Šport [Sport] (2006), Malé veľké mesto [Little BigCity] (2008）， and Vie, čo urobí [He Knows What He Will Do] (2013) andseveral of her poems in English translation have been published online, inliterary magazines and in anthology.Because of their high degree of semanticcoherence, abstraction and conceptual character, Kucbelová's books of poetry,especially the first three of them, are sometimes understood by the critics asbook-length poems.              

Observing the degree of the preservation and disruption of this unity istherefore significant if the translator's strategy and goals are to becharacterized. These operations are most noticeable in the translations oftexts of Kucbelová´s third book of poems, Malé veľké mesto /Little Big City/. Afragment of the English translation of the book was published in SlovakLiterary Review in 2012, and in the same year a more extensive—indeed almostcomplete—text became part of Kucbelová´s volume of Poetry Reaching Out.

The first of the twotranslations reassembles text fragments and remixes them so that they form anew unity—a text consisting of six parts (numbered 1—6), entitled, inaccordance with the original tide, "Little Big City". The parts ofthe newly-created poem were taken from various sections of the original: thefirst part is a translation of section XXV; section IV follows, then the readeris presented with a translation of section X; the fourth part is thetranslation of section XV; section XXIX comes next and a new poem, created fromtranslations of the reassembled parts of the original, ends with thetranslation of section XXII.

  The analysis of the motives behind the choice and arrangement of the partscan provide glimpses of the position and identity of the English translationsof Slovak literary texts. The new poem begins with a text containing fragmentedflashes of local history and mentions a prison. These two elements create aculturally specific historical and political background which is, it seems,essential if a literature from a relatively unknown cultural space is to beintroduced to the English-speaking world.

The opening lines of the magazine-published translation supply anotherelement of a potentially successful piece of translated literature—the tone ofauthenticity:

"we shouldn't have movedfrom the Town

(Leopoldov)

Dad was promoted and transferredto another prison

(she said)

who eighty-three years ago

(thirty thousand days)

was born in the city

(on Kapitulska Street)

in the Town I wouldn't have lostmy memory

because we had family there

(you talk to each other yourefresh memories)

all of them now areunderground"

Subsequent sections do not contain any culturally-specific references butaddress the issues contemporary art and humanities are intensely interested in— consumerism, ecology and the anonymity of urban life which questions theexistence of human solidarity. The remix ends with a section that states theethical message of Malé veľké mesto [Little Big City] so explicitly that it waseven accused of straightforward moralizing by Slovak critics.

It is only when a target text is confronted with a source text that thetranslatorial act becomes visible—it was not the translators' intention to makeit so. Since to the model target reader, the original Slovak text remains bothphysically and linguistically inaccessible, he/she is only presented with theresult of the translation which, contrary to the detected violence thetranslators inflicted on the original, reads fluently, conforming thus to theideal of English-language translation, which is largely based on the assumptionthat "[t]he more fluent the translation, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text"/Venutti/.

CONCLUSION.

These particulars of the translation reveal the internal conflicts therequirement of fluency gives rise to not only with respect to the reception ofthe translation but also as to the position of the translators who are—tocontinue in Venuti's terms—made invisible by the fluency of the text.

These observations enable us to see the degree of respect for thecanonized original in direct proportion to the position and value of anauthor/whole literature on the (international) market (size of readership, nameas a brand that sells/reaches the audience, etc.).

When looking at the current situation in global culture from thisstandpoint, the translated text — since it offers an experience of"cultural dislocation" /Berry/ — is a potential tool of producingtranscultural subjects (translators, readers or authors) who are offered thechance to fulfil the "desire to escape the limitations of a singularculture [...] as a fundamental means of self-construction, even evolution"/Berry/.

Bibliography

BERRY, E. E.: Nomadic Desiresand Transcultural Becomings. In: EPSTEIN, M. - BERRY, E. E.: TransculturalExperiments. Russian and American Models of Creative Communication. New York :St Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 121-140.

KUCBELOVÁ, K.: Malé vel'kémesto. Bratislava : Ars Poetica & Atelier Pluto, 2008, 56 pp.

KUCBELOVÁ, K.: Little Big City.Trans. John Minahane. In: Slovak Literary Review, 2012, vol. 17, no. 1. pp. 24– 25.

KUCBELOVÁ, K.: Poetry reachingout. Trans. Zuzana Starovecka and John Minahane. Bratislava : Ars Poetica,2012, 66 pp.

VENUTI, L.: The Translator'sInvisibility. London, New York: Routledge, 1995, 353 p.

斯洛伐克诗歌翻译札记

马里恩·马乔

导读：2020年11月17日，国际诗酒文化大会暨"一带一路"背景下的世界诗歌译介与国际传播圆桌会议正式举行，著名斯洛伐克语学家马里恩·马乔在会上做了精彩发言。他提出：当我们用此观点思考如今的全球文学文化时，我们会发现，因为译文中产生的文化差异，译文会给读者提供一个逃离单一文化的阅读机会，让读者能够有机会提升自己，甚至超越自我。

将一种地方性语言的文学作品翻译成能在全球传播的英文文学作品是需要进行大量的基础研究的，而这些研究成果也会为今后的研究者提供关于已出版译文的书目及其统计数据的参考文献。而在这方面，斯洛伐克文学英译方面的研究还并未与时俱进：可在网上找到的数据库是十分有限的，并且作为书籍出版的书目也已过时。

 但在过去20多年的时间里，斯洛伐克年轻一代作家（即所谓的“文本一代）的作品已大量在被翻译成英文并在选集和杂志上发表，同时也上传到了网上。希望文本一代的这些诗人及其他们翻译成英文的诗歌会引起英语世界的兴趣并改变斯洛伐克诗歌作品在世界上无知名度的情况。卡塔里娜·库贝洛娃（Katarína Kucbelová）出生于1979，她的诗歌成功的吸引了斯洛伐克评论家的注意，她的诗歌是十分具有潜力的，因此我选择集中精力翻译她的诗歌。她已经创作了四卷诗集《杜阿利·杜阿尔斯》（2003）、《体育》（2006）、《小城市》（Maéveľkémesto）（2008）和《Vie，čo urobí》[He Know He Know HeWill Do]（2013）她的一些英文翻译诗歌已在网络、文学杂志和文集中发表。 由于其高度的语义连贯性、抽象性和概念性，库贝洛娃的诗集，尤其是前三部，有时被评论家理解为“诗一般的书籍”。因此，如果译者想要明确翻译的策略与目标的话，仔细思考对原作品特性的保留程度是非常重要的。这些方法在库贝洛娃的第三本诗集《小城市》的文本翻译中最为明显。2012年，《斯洛伐克文学评论》（SlovakLiterature Review）出版了这本书的一部分英文译本，同年，一篇内容更为广泛、更完整的译本也成为了库伯洛娃《伸出援手》诗集的一部分。两个译本中的第一个译本将文本片段重新组合从而形成了一个新的统一体——一个由六个部分组成的新文本（编号为1-6），依然按照最初的潮流命名为“小城市”。新创作的诗歌部分取自原作的各个部分：第一部分是对第二十五节的翻译；第四部分是第十节的翻译；第四部分是第十五节的翻译；第二十九节是新诗，从原著的重新组合部分翻译而成，以第二十二节的翻译结束。通过对部分选择和编排背后的动机的分析，可以窥见斯洛伐克文学文本英译本的思路和地位。这首新诗以一段支离破碎的地方历史片段开头：一座监狱。如果一个文学从一个相对未知的文化空间介绍到英语世界，创造了一个文化上特定的历史和政治背景是有必要的。该杂志出版的译文的开场白也是奠定该翻译文学作品成功的另一大要素：富有真实性的基调。
“我们不该搬离镇上（利奥波多夫）爸爸升职后被转到另一所监狱 （她说）八十三年前（三万天）出生在这座城市（卡皮图尔斯卡街）在城里我就不会失忆了因为我们在那里有家人 （你们互相交谈，让记忆焕然一新）如今他们都在地下了
随后的章节不再包含任何文化上的具体参考，但讨论了当代艺术和人文学科非常感兴趣的问题——消费主义、生态学和城市生活的匿名性，这些问题都质疑了人类团结的存在。在这整合后的结尾里，有一个版块专门表达了这篇作品对斯洛伐克批评家门的过于的强调道德的不满。往往只有当译文与原文有冲突时，翻译痕迹才变得可见，虽然这并不是译者的本意。但由于对目标读者来说，斯洛伐克语原文无论在物理上还是语言上都是不可接近的，读者们只能看到译文，而译者并未改变原文本来的意境，译文读起来流利，符合英语翻译的理想，这在很大程度上是基于这样一个假设：“翻译得越流利，外国文本的作者的意思就能越明显”。 
结论

译文的这些细节揭示了原文本意与其译文的流畅性之间的矛盾性，这不仅涉及到读者对译文的接受与尊重，也涉及到译者的得失，用韦努蒂的术语来说就是为了让译文流畅易读而牺牲了翻译家的风格与个性。

这些观察使我们能够看到对经典原著的尊重程度与作者或者整个文学作品在（国际）市场上的地位和价值是成正比的（读者人数、作为一个品牌能接触到的读者数量等）。

当我们用此观点思考如今的全球文学文化时，我们会发现，因为译文中产生的文化差异，译文会给读者提供一个逃离单一文化的阅读机会，让读者能够有机会提升自己，甚至超越自我。

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