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A couple of weeks ago Jacek Dehnel had an article in Polityka in which he described his visit to Vienna. This week it’s Michał Witkowski’s turn: he was in Jerusalem and writes an interesting piece on it, on Polish-Jewish relations and on stereotypes. Here are the last lines: “What is the truth? What is a stereotype? I don’t know. I’m no expert. I’m just an ordinary tourist who wants to take a photograph but can’t because it’s the sabbath.” This is why I prefer Witkowski to Dehnel.

Congratulations to Micahel Cronin and all at Routledge, who have put out Mr. Cronin’s book, Translation Goes to the Movies, bearing the date 2009. You can find it in bookshops already, three months before time. Then again, Cronin is so prolific it may have been a good idea to spread things out a little.

Translation Goes to the Movies

“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, Neruda are just a few examples.” Thus writes Lynne Long in her “History and Translation.”

What is there to say here? I can just about swallow things like “the average person regards the act of translation as a mechanical rather than a creative act” but do Translation Studies experts really think people interested enough in literature to read Tolstoy are unaware that he is Russian? I mean, come on!

Long’s articlce can be found in: A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau.

The fledgling discipline of Walking Studies finally looks set to emerge onto the world stage as more and more scholars start to take it seriously, no longer regarding it as an unscientific field of study, or at best an adjunct to Running Studies. In the early years of this globalised new millenium it has started to make a noticeable interdisciplinary contribution to the Academy. This has led to increased recognition of the invaluable work carried on by walkers, a long-maligned and neglected group of people. Once perceived as a marginal activity, walking is beginning to be seen as a fundamental act of human exchange. Today interest in the field has never been stronger and the study of walking is taking place alongside an increase in its practice all over the world.

Walking has a crucial role to play in traversing an increasingly fragmentary world. The walker, as the Irish scholar Michael Cronin has pointed out, is also a translator, someone engaged in a journey from one culture to another. The coming century surely promises to be the great age of travel, not only across languages, cultures and space, but time. Significantly, a major development in Walking Studies of late has been research into the history of walking, for an examination of how walking has helped shape our knowledge of the world in the past better equips us to shape our own futures.

The immediate task of the Walking Studies student is to establish a viable, scientific, empirically based theory of walking. In this field great strides have been made. The old dichotomous model of A–>B has long since been rejected as too simplistic and a plethora of exciting new approaches have made their appearance, each attempting to fundamentally re-interogate the nature of walking.

The dictionary tells us that walking is going from place to place by using one’s legs. But how many legs? And does a dancer not go from place to place? How much may one bend one’s knees before a walk becomes a run? International Sports Associations have sought to define this for the purposes of organising walking races. But such definitions are arbitrary and, as we shall see later, are open to accusations of patriarchalism and colonialism. What all of the approaches to Walking Studies which we will look at now have in common is their attempts to wrestle with the knotty problem of defining the activity of walking. It is hard to keep pace with developments, but an all too brief overview of some of these new definitions would have to include the following:

Skopos Theory (from the Greek skopos meaning “huh?”)
The German scholars, Katarina Verloren and Hans Verpasst, laid out the basis of skopos theory in their seminal Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Schulenstheorie. The question here is not “where?” but “why?” How does the destination of one’s walk influence the nature and speed of the walk? It is immediately apparent that not all walkers will have the same motivation and therefore old A–>B traversion models are revealed as inadequate for explaining the phenomenon. The walk is seen not as a movement from one place to another but a goal-based activity resulting in the transposition of the subject from a position of sub-optimal location to one of equal (or higher or lower) locationality. Directionality is of key importance in this approach.

Relevance Walking
Directionality is also at the heart of relevance walking. This theory is based on the work of Sperber and Wilson in the related field of cognitive projectile avionics. Sperber and Wilson posited that objects moving in an elliptical path take the same time to complete the second half of their arc as the first half if and only if a relevant point of contact can be found with the minimum of cognitive effort. Ernest Goodman transferred this insight to the field of Walking Studies in his thought-provoking Relevance Walking. The walker will always choose the path of least resistance as long as the context (by which is understood the immediate pedal environment) is of equal relevance to the walker in both his starting point and destination. The “relevance equation” envisages a zero-sum of context-relevant pedal environmental factors pre- and post- walk. Relevance Walker scholars are currently engaged in researching ways to quantify the pedal environmental factors which would enable the equation to be solved. A breakthrough is expected in Brazil soon.

Multisystems Theory - the Budapest School
Traditionally, walking has been seen as a self-contained system. How we walk now is determined by how we used to walk, how other cultures walk and by technological developments in the area of walking. Multisystems seeks to place walking in the context of other series of systems. Walking is seen as only one modality in a multitude of competing systems. To change the status of one modality means changing the status of all the others. Tourier has demonstrated how the invention of the internal combustion engine radically altered the nature of walking, even though petrol seemingly has nothing to do with feet.

Postwa(l)king and Deconstruct-ion
Multisystems has been criticised by de-construction(i)sts for being in thrall to structuralism. Postwa(l)kers seek to deconstruct the very nature of walking. Finding great impetus from Walker Benjamin’s “The Task of the Walker,” they question the binomial distinction between walking and not-walking. One is in fact a continuation (or “afterlife”) of the other and without being nowhere it would be impossible to go some(w)here. For this reason some scholars prefer the label “Somehere Studies.” Attention is drawn to marginal instances of wa(l)(k)ing: scholars are particularly fascinated by somnambulism and tight rope walking. The motto of this school of thought might be: “you have to learn to walk before you can crawl.”

Feminist Walqueen, Walkhers and Postcolonists
An important contribution to Walking Studies has been made by feminist theorists, basing their work on the writings of Alain Sokal and Jean Bricmont, phersicists who shifted the paradigm of enquirative studies in the 1980s. Far from remaining faithful to the goal (destination) of the walk, feminists reserve the right (or duty) to deviate from the path set out by the per-normative modes of patriarchal imperialism. It is not surprising, then, that they find common cause with Postcolonists, who struggle to reassert the identity of the starting point of the walk contra the hitherto privileged destination.

Quo Vadis?
The common threads that link the many diverse ways in which walking has been studied over the past two decades are an emphasis on diversity; a rejection of the old terminology of walking as movement and leaving an original point of departure; the foregrounding of the pedipulative powers of the walker; and a view of walking as bridge building across the place between source and target. This celebration of in-betweenness, which scholars from outside the field of walking have also stressed, reflects the changing nature of the world we live in. Once upon a time, it was deemed to be unsafe and undesirable to occupy a space that was neither here nor there, a no-person’s land with no precise identity. Today, in the twenty first century, boundaries are perceived as more fluid and more easily walked over than ever before. In such a world the role of the walker takes on a greater significance. This is why walking is so avidly discussed and in such demand. We have barely begun to imagine the potential for walking with the expansion of the World Wide Web. As electronic walking becomes more sophisticated, so Walking Studies will need to develop. It seems set to do so for the forseeable future.

The belief that the translation should be free of the original, which some would have you believe is no more than a necessary evil, is an obsession in some areas of translation studies. Here’s Theo D’haen in his article “Antique Lands, New Worlds? Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, Translation” taken from a special number of the Forum for Modern Language Studies (2007:2):

‘When it comes to labelling the re-writing relationship obtaining between postcolonial works of literature and their colonial predecessors, instead of speaking in terms of “influence”, which would imply a hierarchically construed historical relationship valorising the work in the “mother” culture over its postcolonial counterpart, we would do better to speak of what I will call “bound intertextuality”, something that is stricter than a mere referential use of intertextuality, yet looser than what we usually label a “translation”.’

Can something which comes later influence something which came earlier? Of course not. Can it “intertextually bind” an earlier text? Errrr…. yes, probably. Well at least, I would imagine so. What time’s the game at? I’m sorry, what exactly is “bound intertextuality” again? I’m not the only one on uncertain grounds with the language used here. In one sentence D’haen puts five words (or so-called “words”) in inverted commas: transgressive, translating, classics, rewritings and translations. On another page the following words you used to think you understood but were sadly mistaken about get the scare quotes treatment: describing, Others (four times, always capitalised), speak, over-write, his-story (sic), translation (twice), translationally, giving voice, autoethnography, re-writes, and poor old classic and even white.

In the same periodical there is an article by Eleonora Federici, “The Translator’s Intertextual Baggage,” whose abstract contains this sentence:

‘The translator becomes a cultural mediator who, dialoguing between cultures, carries on a transcultural interaction.’

Unfortunately, the verb dialogue is not vague enough to shield her from accusations that the sentence is circular.

Here’s Peter Bush, in his “The Writer of Translations,” on The Way Things Are for translators: they are dead; their names appear on “…the back flap [of books] as a bleak epitaph to the months of labour that selflessly, neutrally and most economically secreted the new spread of words.”

It is simply not true, as Bush implies, that the translator’s name is relegated to the back flap. In the English speaking world it is usually on the front page, along with the book’s title and the author’s name. The back flap is where you are most likely to find information about the author. And what does he mean by “selflessly”? Do translators not charge for their work? Why not?

Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush eds., The Translator as Writer

The offending article on Google Books

Pym, this time, in an article called “On Cooperation,” telling us what translation students should be trained to do. Translate? Well, yes, that too but there are all sorts of other exciting things: “training programmes should progressively be oriented to the production of intercultural mediators.”* This would reflect what is already happening at the “commercialised top end of the current [2000] labour market,” the world of the “intercultural management assistant,” “language service provider” and “multi-tasking translator” — or flunky, to you and me. A kind of general dogsbody that can not only relay your barked instructions in a comprehensible language to the fawning lackies in the hotel lobby but also have your laundering dropped off to the pier where your Panamanian schooner is moored.

Maeve Olohan, ed. Intercultural Faultlines

* “Programme,” “progressive,” “production.” Pym is a wordsman; he must be aware of the Manchurian Candidate overtones in his choice of vocabulary.

House, quoted in Kiraly, quoted in Kelly (under heading “What not to do!”), paraphrased by me:

Don’t set translation students a text to translate that is full of traps, let them prepare it and then go through it sentence by sentence, student by student, eliciting alternative translations for each sentence before plumping for the one “right” answer. This is “naturally very frustrating for the students” House wrote way back in 1980, if I recall correctly.

Later on Kelly suggests what to do, for example “brainstorming.” This is the spontaneous generation of ideas. It is useful for finding solutions (to translation problems) and showing that there is rarely if ever one “right” way to translate something. “It foments creativity…” That sounds not a million miles away from going through a text and getting the students to suggest numerous alternative ways to translate sentences or phrases. If you call it “brainstorming” it foments creativity. If you don’t it “frustrates” (naturally).

Dorothy Kelly, A Handbook for Translator Trainers.

“Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or ‘tolls’ the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices.” (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture)

Stirring stuff, eh? A ringing clarion call to scholars of translation everywhere. So much so that no less than three different contributors to Translation Translation, (ed. Susan Petrilli) quoted at least one of those two sentences.

Poles accepted Harold Pinter’s Nobel prize with good grace, despite the high hopes they had for local boy Ryszard Kapuściński. Old interviews with Pinter and newer ones with his translator were run in the papers and parallels were drawn between him and another local boy, playwright Sławomir Mrożek. Both men have lent their names to their respective languages: �like something out of Mrożek� is used to describe absurd situations.

Polish commentators were certainly far more gracious than Dorotea Bromberg, who complained that the award had gone to a dramatist, and not a “creator of literature.” Not many people will want to read a play, she complained. Her disappointment might be explained by the fact that she runs a company which publishes books.

A cynic might say that the generous amount of space given over to Pinter in newspapers is aimed at heading off any accusations of pettiness. A Pole denigrating Pinter would be open to accusations of allowing political differences to obscure his literary judgement: Pinter has excoriated Bush, Blair and the war on Iraq, in which Poland is an eager combatant.

“Poland,” in this context, means its politicians, who of course don’t see any actual combat, eagerly or not, in far away Iraq. Still, the question of continuing the war has not been an election issue. In fact, more attention has been paid to whether the grandfather of one of the candidates enlisted in the Wehrmacht or was conscripted. Yes, that’s “grandfather” and “Wehrmacht”: we’re talking about World War Two here. Only a cynic, or perhaps a Pinteresque playwright, might suggest that this concentration on the second world war to the exclusion of the war on Iraq is, indeed, “like something out of Mrożek.”