The Translator as Communicator

Sample 10.3
Metamorphosis
The long project, its candling arm
Come over, shrinks into still-disparate darkness
Its pleasuance an urn. And for what term
Should I elect you, O marauding beast of
Self-consciousness? When it is you,
Around the clock, I stand next to and consult?
You without breather? Testimonials
To its not enduring crispness notwithstanding,
You can take that out. It needs to be shaken in the light.
To be delivered again to its shining arm—
O farewell grief and welcome joy! Gosh!…
(italics added)
This text was given as a translation assignment to a group of postgraduate
trainees. For the sake of the experiment, the students were first introduced, albeit
in very general terms, to the poem and the relevant text linguistic as well as
literary-critical aspects.
4
Basically, the poem is stylistically schizophrenic: the
first half (from which the above extract is taken) is characterized by a marked
degree of hybridization with at least three registers present. The items in italics
above point to: an ‘archaic’ register functioning as a marker of poetical language
proper; American ‘colloquialisms’ introducing a dialectal dimension; and
‘bureaucratese’ providing a parody of academic discourse. The second half of the
poem, in contrast, is characterized by total consistency of register membership.
For example:
The penchant for growing and giving
Has left us bereft, and intrigued, for behind the screen Of whatever
vanity…
Structurally and texturally, the two parts are thus deliberately made to confront
one another. The aim of the exercise we undertook with our translator trainees
was to see whether they were able to establish a link between text and context
and incorporate insights yielded by such matching into their translation strategy.
The results of the experiment were disappointing, with the majority of the
renderings not adequately reflecting the motivations behind the deliberate
hybridization that is the hallmark of the source text. Almost all of the students
opted for one basic strategy, namely to neutralize and thus virtually immobilise
TEXT-LEVEL ERRORS 143

---

the salient features in the first part. A crucial level of meaning was thus
jettisoned, and the entire rationale behind the lexico-grammatical choices was all
but irretrievably lost. Although the problem is one of register, failure to handle
the rhetorical dynamism of the text has the effect of compromising both
intentionality and intertextuality. Texture has also been shifted to relay neutral
register values, a wholly unintended effect.