Readers are tempted to attribute such an ironic situation to the imagination of Borges, but what Borges narrates is exactly what really happened to Averroes. Everything Aristotle refers to as tragedy is referred to by Averroes as poetry, and mainly as the poetic genres of vituperatio and laudatio. Averroes says that this kind of epidictic poetry uses representations, but he means verbal representations, that can inspire virtuous actions. Obviously this moralising idea of poetry does not allow Averroes to understand the Aristotelian concept that the tragic action has a cathartic (rather than didactic) function.
At one point Averroes interprets the part of the Poetics where Aristotle lists the components of a tragedy: mûthos, êthê, léxis, diánoia, ópsis and melopoiía (usually translated as plot, characters, diction, reasoning, spectacle and song). Averroes translates the first four terms as ‘mythical statement’, ‘character’, ‘metre’ and ‘beliefs’ and the sixth as ‘melody’ (but he was certainly thinking of a poetic melody, not of the presence of musicians in the theatre). The real drama comes with the fifth component, ópsis. Averroes cannot think of staged actions and defines ópsis (or whatever his sources translated into Arabic) as an argument which demonstrates the moral validity of the represented beliefs. Hermann the German translates argumentatio seu probatio rectitudinis credulitatis aut operationis, and – misunderstanding the misunderstanding of Averroes – explains that such a carmen laudativum or eulogy does not use the art of gesticulation – so excluding the only really theatrical aspect of a tragedy.
When translating from Greek William of Moerbeke properly speaks of tragodia and komodia and seems aware of their theatrical nature. It is true that for medieval authors a comedy was a story with a happy end, so that even Dante’s poem could be defined as a comedy; likewise, in his Poetria Nova John of Garland defined tragedy as a carmen quod incipit a guadio et terminat in luctu. In any case medieval culture knew the plays of jesters or histriones, and the holy mysteries, and so had an idea of theatre. Thus with Moerbeke, ópsis rightly becomes visus, and it is clear that that vision concerns the mimic action of the ypocrita, or actor. Moerbeke gives us a correct lexical interpretation because he knew an artistic genre that, in spite of many differences, medieval culture shared with the Greeks.
Some cases
I have always been intrigued by the possible Italian translations of the first verses of Valéry’s ‘Le cimetière marin’:
Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose des feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!
It is evident that the peaceful roof where some or many doves walk is the sea, scattered with white sails, and if by chance the readers do not catch the metaphor of the first line, the fourth one offers them the key to a correct interpretation. That roof is la mer. However, in the process of disambiguation of a metaphor the reader usually starts from the verbal vehicle, but also puts many evoked images into play, and the first image that comes to mind when one thinks of the sea is that of a blue surface. Why should a roof be blue? Please note that such an image should disturb Latin readers most of all, since in Latin countries the roofs are red (including in Provence where the cemetery is situated). My answer to this conundrum is that Valéry, even though speaking of Provence (where he was born), was thinking as a Parisian. In Paris the roofs are made of slate, and under the sunlight give metallic reflections. When midi le juste arranges its fires on the marine surface it creates silvery glares which suggest to Valéry an expanse of Parisian roofs. I do not see any other reason for that metaphor and I realise that no translation can make it more perspicuous – not without a long paraphrase which would kill the rhythm and every other poetic effect.
Translators usually adopt for famous foreign cities the name used in their own country: thus London in Italian becomes Londra and Roma in English becomes Rome. There is no embarrassment in reading (in Italian) that Sherlock Holmes lives in Londra. But what does one do if in a Russian novel of Soviet times Kaliningrad is mentioned? Should be it translated in German as Königsberg? It becomes, I think, a matter of negotiation: if the Soviet novel tells a story that takes place in the time of Immanuel Kant, then Kaliningrad ought to be named Königsberg even in an English or Spanish translation. If on the contrary the novel represents events, feelings and ideas that refer to Soviet society, then Kaliningrad must remain Kaliningrad.
Source vs target
A translation can be either source- or target-oriented. These are the terms usually employed in translation studies. In other words, given a translation from Homer, should the translation transform its readers into Greek readers of Homeric times or should it make Homer write as if he were writing today in our language? The question is not as preposterous as it seems, when we consider that translations age. Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Italian, is always the same, but if modern French readers read a Dantesque translation from the nineteenth century they feel uncomfortable. Translators, even when trying to give us the flavour of a language and of a historical period, are in fact modernising their source.
I want to refrain from considering questions that, according to me, have more to do with comparative literature than with translation theory, namely, to what extent certain translations have obliged a given language to express thoughts and facts that it was not accustomed to express before. The translations from Heidegger have, over recent decades, radically changed the French philosophical style; in Italy, before the Second World War, the first translations of American writers made by Elio Vittorini (frequently very unfaithful both from a lexical and grammatical point of view, since he misunderstood many American idioms) contributed to the creation of a new Italian narrative style that triumphed after the war as a new form of realism. It is extremely important to study the role of translation within the context of a receiving culture, but from this point of view a translation becomes a purely internal affair between the target language and all the linguistic and cultural problems posed by the original. In this sense one should take a stylistically awkward translation full of lexical mistakes, but which has greatly influenced generations of readers and writers, more seriously than one that critics would define as more correct.
Luther11 used the verbs übersetzen (to translate) and verdeutschen (to Germanise) as synonymous (thus making evident the importance of a translation as cultural assimilation), and answered some of the critics of his German translation of the Bible by saying ‘They are learning to speak and write German from my translation, and so in a sense stealing my language, which they hardly knew a word of before.’
But this has nothing to do with the study of the process from a source text to a target text, which ought to be considered from a different point of view: should a translation lead the reader to understand the linguistic and cultural universe of the source text, or transform the original by adapting it to the reader’s cultural and linguistic universe?
Foreignising and domesticating
The difference between modernising the text and keeping it archaic is not the same as the one between foreignising and domesticating it. Even though there are many translations in which both oppositions are in play, let me consider first of all the opposition of foreignising vs domesticating.12
Probably the most blatant example of a reader-oriented or domesticating translation is Luther’s. For example, discussing the best way to translate Ex abundantia cordis os loquitur from Matthew 12:34, he remarks:
If I followed those jackasses, they would probably set the letters before me and have me translate it ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh’. Tell me, is that how any real person would speak? . . . What on earth is ‘the abundance of the heart’? . . . What the mother in her house and the common man would say is something like: ‘speak straight from the heart!’
Apropos the expressions Ut quid perditio haec? (Matthew 26:8) and Ut quid perditio ista unguenti facta est? (Mark 14:4) he says:
If I followed those lemmings the literalists, I’d have to render that latter question ‘Why was this waste of the ointment made?’ What kind of talk is that? Whoever talks about ‘making a waste of the ointment’? You make a mess, not a waste, and anybody who heard you
