A Translation Autopsy of Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited in Spanish: Literary and Film Coda
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/07374836.2013.806875
ISSN2164-0564
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy." The concluding line in the article is "A postmortem coda now awaits" (104). The full title of McCarthy's genre-blended work is The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form. The range of novelists Murillo Fort has translated includes Cormac McCarthy (nine of his eleven novels), Dashiel Hammett, Barry Gifford, Richard Russo, John LeCarré, Anne Rice, Jean Sasson, Nicholson Baker, Kelly Jones, Philip Pullman, James Carlos Blake, Mary Higgins Clark, Nicholas Evans, Jonathan Franzen, Deborah Eisenberg, James Salter, Evelyn Waugh, and David Vann, among others. 2. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy," 80. 3. During the bioptic shadowing process, early to late-stage drafts of Murillo Fort's literary translation were examined with threaded commentary from the translator, via e-mail, marginal notes, and responses to queries in his manuscript. Murillo Fort had referred to this methodology as "peering through my window from the outside, a witness to a translation work in progress" (e-mail correspondence, August 22, 2011). Electronic communications continued during this subsequent autopsy. 4. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy," 80. 5. The translation process biopsy took place between August and November 2011; Murillo Fort's final translation product, which is the subject of this literary translation autopsy, was published by Random House Mondadori in February 2012. 6. In response to a request for assistance in confirming the Spanish dialects used in the HBO movie subtitles and dubbing, translation and film studies scholar and translator Anton Pujol (from Barcelona) responded that to his eye and ear it was "the same kind of Latino 'middle-of-the-road' that they use on HBO Latino. A no-man's-land kind of Spanish. To me, at times, it sounded more Mexican than anything else" (e-mail correspondence, August 2, 2012). Pujol checked further with two other colleagues, both professors of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. For the colleague from Colombia (Prof. María Lorena Delgadillo Latorre), it sounded like Mexican Spanish, yet for the colleague from Mexico City (Dr. Carlos Coria), "it did not sound Mexican at all." In sum, a generic, hybrid Latin American Spanish, truly from no man's (or no identifiable native-speaker Mexican's or Latin American's) land. 7. Rabassa, If This Be Treason, 12–13. 8. Information provided at the end of the October 2006 Vintage International Edition, n.p. 9. Wood, "The Sunset Limited, by Cormac McCarthy," n.p. 10. Movie dates are from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1510938/ (accessed July 9, 2012). 11. Although the dubbing recordist (Mark Purcell) is credited at the end of the movie (1:29:50), no such credit is given to the subtitle and the dubbing translators. 12. In "A Translation Biopsy," translating is described as "a striving for imperfect perfection, knowing that striking the perfect word or turn of a phrase is inevitably marked by the imperfection of difference. The perfection of sameness is unattainable" (103–4). 13. For more on an earlier methodological use of BT, see Doyle's "'A Whole New Style Seemed to Be Seeking Expression Here,'" 12, and "Five Translators Translating," 50. 14. Process resides in the translator working spaces known as hesitancy, as described and analyzed in Doyle's "A Translation Biopsy." 15. Renowned translator John Felstiner (Translating Neruda, 31) even questions whether translating from Spanish into Italian—two very similar languages with fewer gaps between them than the much more dissimilar Spanish and English, for example—is in fact translation, or to what extent it is really translation. 16. Kaplan, "Un puñado de genios y el difícil arte de la traducción," Literatura en los talones (blog), February 22, 2012, http://literaturaenlostalones.blogspot.com.es/2012/02/un-punado-de-genios-y-el-arte-de-la.html?showComment=1341243328710#c5361307158258703305 (accessed August 1, 2012). 17. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy," 84–85. 18. Following is an example of the reapplication of basic equation methodology for sameness (≈) of meaning. A Translation Autopsy of Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited in Spanish: Literary and Film CodaAll authorsMichael Scott Doylehttps://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2013.806875Published online:08 August 2013Table Download CSVDisplay Table 19. See Doyle, "Theoretical Foundations for Translation Pedagogy," 43. 20. As Moya indicates in his thorough study La traducción de los nombres propios (The translation of proper names), today's convention of nontranslation occurs because "la traducción ha pasado de ser un instrumento para mostrar las semejanzas interculturales a ser un vehículo para sacar a relucir las singularidades de la cultura de origen, como la forma de pensar y expresarse de sus gentes y, por supuesto, su peculiar manera de denominar a los suyos y a sus lugares" (180) (translation has moved from being an instrument that shows intercultural similarities to being a vehicle that highlights the originating culture's singularities, such as the manner by which its people think and express themselves, and of course, their peculiar way of denominating themselves and their places). 21. This tendency was resisted by Murillo Fort during his early translation drafts, as indicated in his e-mail to me of September 31, 2011: "I received first proofs only last week. I sent them back with my comments. Actually there were very minor changes made, some of which I accepted, some I didn't. Now I'm waiting for a second batch to come. All in all, I'll probably regret not having been allowed to have it my way, even knowing it [the Spanish I first proposed using] was kind of weird or un-standard." 22. Page 8 of Murillo Fort's August 27, 2011, translation draft manuscript of The Sunset Limited. 23. Other difficulties that the name Cecil represents for the reader in Spanish are addressed in Doyle's "A Translation Biopsy." 24. Murillo Fort, e-mail correspondence, July 13, 2012. 25. This is well established, for example, by Ortega y Gasset in "The Misery and Splendor of Translation," when he maintains that "it is utopian to believe that two words belonging to different languages, and which the dictionary gives us as translations of each other, refer to exactly the same objects" (96); by Burton Raffel in The Art of Translating Poetry, 11–12; and by Mildred L. Larson in Meaning-based Translation: A Guide to Cross-language Equivalence. 26. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy," 89. 27. Rabassa, If This Be Treason, 6. 28. In "La traducción de dialectalismos en los textos literarios" (The translation of dialectalisms in literary texts) Belén Hernández has written that [l]as técnicas consentidas hoy para reproducir los dialectalismos en la lengua de llegada rechazan la sustitución de un dialecto por otro, aunque éste pueda representar una variedad lingüística paralela en la segunda lengua. Tampoco es satisfactorio acortar las palabras al final, con el objetivo de subrayar que se trata de un habla de campesino ignorante, por ejemplo. Es más adecuado producir un lenguaje jergal natural, para hacer entender que se trata de un dialectalismo, y re-procesar solamente una parte de las palabras del original, justamente las necesarias para hacer entender la función asignada al dialecto. [the techniques commonly accepted today for reproducing dialectal usage in the receptor language reject the substitution of one dialect for another, even though the latter may represent a parallel linguistic variety in the second language. Nor is it satisfactory to cut off the endings of words with the purpose of emphasizing, for example, that one is dealing with the diction of an ignorant peasant. It is more appropriate to produce a jargon-like, natural language in order to convey that this is a dialectal usage taking place, and to re-process only selected words from the original text, only those deemed necessary to convey the function assigned to the dialect.] The problem remains that for sui generis idiodialect there really is no "parallel linguistic variety in the second language." 29. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy," 91. 30. Rabassa, If This Be Treason, 20. 31. Murillo Fort, e-mail correspondence, November 22, 2011. 32. Murillo Fort, e-mail correspondence, September 26, 2011, and November 22, 2011. 33. For more on this, see section IV of "Five Translators Translating," 47–50. 34. Urban Dictionary, s.v. "The Dozens," http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dozens (accessed July 26, 2012). 35. Marginal note of August 29, 2011, 95. 36. Urban Dictionary, s.v. "Trick Bag," http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=trick%20bag (accessed July 26, 2012). 37. Doyle, "A Translation Biopsy," 101. 38. This is very felicitious wording, suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article.
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