Читать книгу Kreativität und Hermeneutik in der Translation - Группа авторов - Страница 31

When we consider translation, “interpretation” and “creativity” might intuitively seem almost to be opposites. Surely, when we interpret what a text says, we are trying to get as close as possible to what was meant? And when we write a new text based on our interpretation, accuracy, not creativity, is what is needed, we might think.

What I intend to argue in this contribution is that, in the translation of literary texts, and especially of poetry, it is never simply a question of accuracy, but rather that accuracy and creativity go hand-in-hand, both in the reading of the original text and in the writing of the translation. This is so because poetry, even more than other literary forms, works by engaging its readers and encouraging them to think, to reflect, to re-think and to change their view of the world. There have been many studies that emphasise this aspect of our reading (see e. g. Richards 1960: 43; Oatley 2011), and I have argued elsewhere (Boase-Beier 2015: 71–72; and see also Attridge 2004: 79–83) that these reading processes are themselves creative. It has also been noted by many translation scholars working on or within the hermeneutic approach (cf. Venuti 2012: 485) that is often traced back to Schleiermacher’s famous 1813 talk “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” (On the different methods of translating) (see Schleiermacher 2012), that “the problem of translation is the problem of understanding” (Hermans 2007: 135), and that understanding involves individuals and their own context and background, especially in literary translation (see, for example, Stolze 1994: 181–212; 2011: 9; 2015). According to Siever, Schleiermacher, whose concern with creativity needs to be understood as part of the early Romantic tradition in German writing (Siever 2015: 154–156), was the first theorist to emphasise the creativity of literary translation.

But translating poetry does not only involve creative reading of the source text and creative re-writing to produce a target text. It also involves understanding and reconstructing the creative processes of the poet that have resulted in a work with which readers can fully engage. These poetic creative processes stem from what we might call the “poetics” of a particular writer, that is, the particular way of creating poetry peculiar to that writer, manifested in the style we see in the poems in question. The reader (whether a translator or not) has no direct access to a poet’s mind or the poetics that arises from that mind, but reading a text in order to translate it could be said to involve an imaginative reconstruction of these mental states and processes which has its basis in close, analytical reading (see Boase-Beier 2015: 14–15). Reading for translation involves paying particular attention to what has been referred to as mind-style (see Fowler 1977: 103), that is, the way the style of a text reflects the state of mind that informed it. Especially in the case of a poet like Celan, whose background was multilingual (see Boase-Beier 2015: 91f.), we would expect the translator to go beyond the non-translating reader, and also beyond the critic who is not considering translation, in that an inevitable part of the way a translator reads is to consider what might happen to linguistic, stylistic and poetic forms, such as metaphors, images, ambiguities and repetitions, when they cross a language boundary. In fact, as Siever (2015: 168) points out, Schleiermacher noted that part of the interpretation (and therefore also the translator’s interpretation) of a text involves exactly this consideration of the prospective new text, and its potential effects on the language it will become part of (see Schleiermacher 2012: 54). The translator’s reading is thus a particularly engaged type of reading (see Boase-Beier 2015: 87–101), and, it could be argued, a type of reading especially appropriate to Celan’s poetry, which, according to Derrida, embodies an awareness of German as a language “to struggle with” (Derrida 2005: 100). This awareness in part arose from Celan’s knowledge of the fatal consequences of striving for linguistic purity in Nazi Germany (see, for example, Klemperer 2015). Derrida argues that Celan’s poetics already contains a sort of translation from standard German to “a kind of new idiom” (Derrida 2005: 100). Though Derrida mistakenly assumes that German was not Celan’s native language, he was right to recognise the multilingual context of Celan’s poetics. In fact, Celan wrote in the immediate aftermath of the war in both Romanian and German (see Cassian 2015). For Celan’s translators, it is first and foremost necessary to understand the sources of his creative engagement with the German language: his poetics.

Translation also involves reflecting something of these creative processes and the poetics that gave rise to them in the translated poem, and this is only likely to be possible if translation itself is seen by the translator as a creative process. The end result, if one considers poetic translation in this way, is a translated poem which can do far more than accurately reflect the original. It has its own poetics, so it allows its new readers to engage creatively with it. That is, it allows readers to think, to reflect, to re-think, to change their views of the world, just as the original poem did. If I read a Celan poem translated by Michael Hamburger, for example, I can only engage with it fully if I know it is a poem written by Hamburger that translates a poem written by Celan. The reading process is different because not only is the work different but so is the reading context, and the background knowledge against which it is read, that is, the cognitive context of the reader. The reader needs to be aware of this difference. If translation is the type of writing that ensures the survival of the text, because a text, as Walter Benjamin said, has an inherent characteristic of “translatability” (Benjamin 2012: 76), then such survival is only possible if new readers can engage fully with the translated text, thus allowing the original text “to exceed its own limitations” (Brodzki 2007: 2).