Surprised in Translation by Mary Ann Caws (review)

Abstract

140Women in French Studies Caws, Mary Ann. Surprised in Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp [i]-xi; 145. ISBN 0-226-09873-7. $25.00 (Cloth). In her newest work, Surprised in Translation, renowned translator of surrealist poetry Mary Ann Caws offers an intelligent and helpful discussion of translating French to English and English to French with numerous precise examples of the advantages and disadvantages of accepted methods of translation. Always a scholar who summarizes, evaluates, and reworks the views of others as she formulates her own theories, opinions, and analyses of translation. Caws includes a helpful bibliography of the more than 1 20 works referenced in her book. Her eight-chapter study includes examples from the works of Char, Reverdy, Mallarmé, Woolf, Pound, Beckett, Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, and Bonnefoy. This work on translation is thus of great value to Anglophone and Francophone students of world literature, feminist studies, poetry, French and English. For each author, she provides more than one translation ofthe cited passages and discusses the beauties and insufficiencies of each translation. Several authors, such as Mallarmé and Beckett, figure as both authors of their own original works and translators of others. Caws humbly points out her own past translation errors, offers her more recent solutions, and comments on how her opinions have changed over time. The book opens with three chapters treating general thoughts on spoken communication and amusing misinterpretations that sometimes result from inattention, ignorance, or noise. Similarly in texts, what a reader comprehends often relates little to the original message. In better circumstances involving spoken or written messages, the listener or reader perceives the essential and simply remembers or records it as something more poetic. For Caws, it is the product of this slippage, in which one slightly transforms and beautifies what one hears or reads, that yields the most fortuitous translations. Translating well, as she explains, involves readjustment, rereading, reclassifying, reshaping, and often much rewriting. Since her examples do not consider translations of scientific or philosophical texts in which rendering the precise and literal meanings of words might be of major importance, and focus rather on the poetry of language in fictional texts, she can argue convincingly against simple mimesis, parroting, or literalism as "relatively boring" which "flattens . . .thought that is complex, and rhythm that is crafted." Nevertheless, her balanced analysis also considers the poetic situations (such as some of Fry's translations of Mallarmé) in which more literalism sometimes justifiably reproduces the static quality and the lack ofemotion found in the original text itself. In her discussions, she interweaves anecdotes presenting useful rules for translation. A good translation provides the equivalent airy or heavy feel of the original text. The best translator has opinions, interests, and a background similar to those of the author being translated or has done significant research on them. Good translators also familiarize themselves with the general time period of the text being translated. A translator who cares immensely about the sound Book Reviews141 and feel of language, about reproducing similar rhymes, alliterations, onomatopoeias, repetitions, and wordplay, produces better translations. Overall, Surprised in Translation by Mary Ann Caws is a useful tool for helping all students of language and literature to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to put a feeling or a mental image into words, transforming those words into written language, and then translating that language into another. In today's world of global misunderstandings, her book might offer insights into managing the surprising slippage that occurs with daily crosscultural communication. Barbara KlawNorthern Kentucky University Cuillé, Tili Boon. Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in EighteenthCentury French Texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp [xi]xxi , 284. ISBN 0-8020-3842-5. $75.00 (Cloth). In this work, Cuillé explores the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of eighteenth-century intellectual culture by demonstrating the ways in which writers and thinkers used musical metaphors to further political debates about aesthetics, nationalism, morality, and gender. Cuillé focuses in particular on the use of musical tableaux, literary devices which suspended fictional narratives and, as she suggests, offered the opportunity for trenchant social and cultural critiques. Operatic quarrels dominated the French intellectual landscape throughout the eighteenth century, from the early deliberations between...