Juan Goytisolo: Cock-Eyed Comedy
The Translator as Writer
by Peter Bush
1.Why is literary translation a unique, distinctive form of writing?
The literary translator works with a text written by someone else which he transforms into writing in another language. This simple statement hides a complex process of imaginative transformation that remains in deep communication with the original writing. The translator reads, re-reads, writes, re-drafts, self-edits, re-writes. During this struggle to understand and create, like any other reader and writer of literature, the words will appeal to the translator's emotions, memories, ideas within an intense flow of subjective consciousness. It is not an operation in a void, not a clinical transplant of meaning. Just as the words chosen by the original author will have many resonances that remain private to the writer, resonances central to the life of the text, so words chosen by the translator will often also have strong personal resonances.
2. What is the task of the translator?
In the tussle to excavate meanings and create, the translator embarks on an interpretive - intellectual and artistic - adventure that will throw up a series of research tasks: literary, intertextual references, political and historical background, the writer¹s whole work and surrounding scholarship, linguistic varieties - colloquialism, archaic registers... In the course of this to-ing and fro-ing, the translator has to be ever sensitive to ambiguities, images, word-play. These will emerge throughout the drafting process. However, the penetration of the architecture of work being translated, the relation of word to whole is not pursued in order to write an academic article, an analytical discourse of interpretation, but to write a literary work in which the writing reaches to the artistic level of the original.
3. Music not meaning!
The force driving the translation is the music of words powering the movement of the narrative: the music will often suggest the writerly solutions. This is not simple intuition or spontaneous inspiration, it arises from the complex intellectual process of research, reading and drafting. The translation must have appropriate swing.
4. Who are we translating for?
A literary translation takes place in a commercial socio-economic context. The writer wants his work to be read in other languages and cultures, the publisher hopes this will happen, that books will be sold. The translator should have a proper contract vetted by his or her professional association. A living writer, his publisher, a copy-editor may well intervene in the final process of drafting. Although the translator thinks about the eventual readership for his translation, the reader he must translate for is himself as no-one else will ever be so embedded in the struggle between original and nascent texts, will have the mutiple verbal relations on the brink of consciousness in the form of a writing that is coming into being.
5. The context of the case-study
a) The Writer
Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 into the well-to-do family of a small industrialist. As a child, he had bitter experience of the Spanish Civil War: his mother was killed, whilst shopping, by a bomb dropped by Mussolini's airforce on the centre of the Catalan city. He rebelled against the right-wing, pro-Francoist views of his family and became a radical young writer in the 1950s before he became a self-banished Spaniard in 1956 by leaving for exile in Paris. He has never returned to live in Spain. For many years he lived in both Paris and Marrakesh. Since the death of his wife, Monique Lange, he lives in Marrakesh. His life and writing was transformed in the 1960s by his recognition of his homosexuality. He is recognised as one of the most important writers in and beyond the Hispanic world.
b) The Translator
I was born in Lincolnshire in 1946 into a rural working-class family. I read Spanish literature - from medieval to modern - at Cambridge University and this literary knowledge has been invaluable to me as a translator as was subsequent political activity in Oxford, London and Spain in the 60s and 70s. I first made contact with Juan Goytisolo in the 1980s when I edited his travel writing on Almería, Campos de Níjar. I have gone on to translate his autobiography, several novels and books of essays.
c) The Cock-Eyed Comedy
This novel, published by Seix Barral, in 2000, tells the story of the successive transmigrations of the soul of the priest , père de Trennes, a character from a novel by Roger Peyrefitte. Trennes roams through Spanish literature and history from the soul of Friar Bugeo, author of the late medieval Cock-Eyed Comedy to the heady Paris of one Saint Juan of Barbès in a sardonic satire on the Catholic Church and the philosophy of Opus Dei founder, Monsignor Escrivá Balaguer threatened by the enjoyment of the flesh lurking behind many a clerical vow to celibacy It is quite fitting that the translation was launched on October 6 in London, the day of the Monsignor's canonisation. The translation has now been launched and is availble from Serpents Tail.
Read more...Extract 1
Copyright © Peter Bush
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