Translation of Literary Language
Translation of literature poses serious problems for the translator because creative writing uses words with multiple purposes. Here content and form are equally important. The ancient Indian theoretician Anandavardhana has stated that the distinctive feature of literary/poetic language is  dhvani or the range of suggestions contained in the work. The translator has to bring this world of connotations alive in the TL also, which is not a mean task. S/he also has to reproduce the stylistic beauty of the SL text. The beauty of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, lies in the splendour of Marquez's magical realism; the translator has to be skilled in both Spanish and English to do justice to the SL text. Idioms and metaphors which abound in poetic use of the language are often difficult to recapture in the TL because of the structural differences between languages. In fact some feel that complete translatability is not a criterion of good craftsmanship as far as a literary work is concerned. Justin O'Brien who has translated Camus from French into English, quotes Raymond Guerin: “the most convincing criterion of the quality of a work is the fact that it can only be translated with difficulty, for if it passes readily into another language without losing its essence, then it must have no particular essence or at least not one of the rarest” (qtd by Nida in The Translation Studies Reader 133). It is the awareness of all these challenges that is behind the concept of the impossibility of perfect equivalence.
The challenges multiply when the SL text is in verse, as the language of poetry is densely packed with allusions and other poetic ornaments like metre and figures of speech. The verse form is the most difficult to transfer to another language as the natural rhythm and syllabic patterns of languages differ from each other. How does one translate the majestic sweep of Shakespeare's blank verse into an Indian language? Nobody can deny that the metre and rhythm of the verse add to its grandeur. The sonnet with its stipulations of 14 lines and a specific rhyme scheme is hard to reproduce in a language that is completely different in speech rhythm and metre. In the case of a creative work there is a perfect marriage of form and content; the good translator has to render both adequately. This is perhaps why Robert Frost made the observation that poetry is what gets lost in translation. |
