On the Translation Strategies Used by Levine and Bly - Maria Antonia Blandon

 

Through a mix of translation theory, practical examples, feminist criticism and even psychoanalysis, Suzanne Levine threads an overview of her translation of the novel Infante’s Inferno (1979) in order to illustrate how translation can create a subversion of the original when engaged in a parody game proposed by the author. This comes from the liberation she felt when translating authors like Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, since the original has been considered as another translation, “Memory is a text translated into another text” (92); considering what is lost and what is gained after crossing the language barrier, and the implications of rereading in trespassing from one context into another, subversion is the strategy of translation. I would agree, then, that her case makes for a very compelling argument in that translation involves constantly seeking fragments that can be reconciled in the resulting text, where the only clue in this task is to find the similar in the dissimilar.

Where Levine’s strategies are more diffusely described in her piece, Robert Bly takes it upon himself to structure the stages for translating a poem, which made me think about the stages of grief; maybe translation involves a little bit of grief, when the idea of easy transference is killed as Bly takes the reader through the intricate path of literal translation, semantic meaning, rewriting, spoken language, mood, sound, naturality and final draft. Following a close example of him translating a random Rilke sonnet, we come across considerations that range from linguistics to semantics, from fluency to sound, which engage different levels of literary appreciation that a reader uses to understand what the poem is saying. Even though I don’t usually translate poetry, I found that his breakdown of translation is most insightful, and, as with Lydia Davis’ article for last week, most useful since there’s not that many accounts of such a thorough exercise as Bly proposes. I quite liked his honest way of approaching this task, because it made the text so relatable in seeing translation as a process that constantly shifts, changes, mutates in front of our eyes, and in that there’s many opportunities for finding the most appropriate choice we feel for the text we are translating.