Abstract
Within the wider context of (re)translation and reception, this paper outlines a model for assessing how literary review publications address (re)translated works and whether there has been any discernable evolution in their approach over the period during which Translation Studies has emerged and consolidated itself as an academic discipline: the corpus comprises all issues over three separate years (1980, 2000 and 2018) of two international, English-language literary reviews (The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books). The analysis covers all reviews of works of literature translated from any language into English, both for the first time and retranslations, assessing whether there is any observable diachronic change over the time period in question. Although the scope of the material under inspection is limited, this study outlines the methodology developed for analyzing the manner in which reviews address translated texts and, more specifically, retranslations: this methodology, which involves classifying the corpus according to a taxonomy of features typical of the genre, is applicable to wider investigations across different languages, text types, time spans, platforms. Issues examined include how the reviewers assess the quality of the (re)translations; how texts are quoted; the significance of paratextual elements; the figure of the reviewer; whether retranslation is highlighted and/or reviewed differently to first translations. Future applications of the model are also considered.
Highlights
Rainer Schulte sums up the situation as follows: Since artistic creations affirm the complexity of the world, critics should help us to decipher that complexity and make us comfortable navigating through intricate layers of artistic insights. [...] They can establish meaningful links with present and past authors who might have influenced the texts under consideration [and have] the ability to illuminate aesthetic affinities between a new work and its anchor in past literary traditions (2000:1)
A case in point is that highlighted by Ronald Christ who, in 1982, ISSN 2424-3590 eISSN 2029-7033 VERTIMO STUDIJOS 13, 2020 publishes an exchange of letters in the Translation Review, entitled On Not Reviewing Translation: the correspondence begins with him taking a number of American literary reviews to task for not acknowledging the role played by the translator Helen R
As Christ reports: The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times ignored the translation in their reviews and eliminated all credit to it in the book’s listing, as though Sábato had written a novel, On Heroes and Tombs, in English. When it came to the so-called New York establishment–literary or trade–neither Publishers Weekly, The Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, nor The New York Review of Books mentioned the translation (1982: 16)
Summary
A practical example of this might be the division of the following sentence as illustrated in the table below: This long essay, published as a small book in German in 1969 and in English in 1974 as Kafka’s Other Trial, excellently translated by Christopher Middleton (Schocken Books), has been retranslated by Joachim Neugroschel and is included in The Conscience of Words, the selection of Canetti’s essays in Continuum Books’s admirable program for bringing virtually all of Canetti into English (Susan Sontag reviewing seven works by Elias Canetti, NYRB 25th September 1980).
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