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Reconstructing collaborative (self-)translations from the archive: The case of Samuel Beckett
Abstract
When literary authors translate their own work, they sometimes collaborate with other writer-translators. While such “collaboration” is often acknowledged on the title pages of the resulting publications, the nature of each joint venture is typically very different in practice. Surviving archival traces often allow for a more detailed reconstruction of the varying working methods that were adopted for every co-translation, but it would be naïve to assume that even the most completely preserved record will make it possible to conclusively identify the function of every participant in the creative process. In this article, we will combine genetic criticism and genetic translation studies on the one hand, with microhistorical and social approaches to translation on the other, as complementary methodologies to further investigate the understudied notion of collaborative (self-)translation. By using as our test case the extant draft versions and other related materials that document the collaborative relationships between Irish bilingual author Samuel Beckett and his co-translators in French, English and German, the purpose is to show that a process-oriented and interdisciplinary approach to translation can help overcome some of the challenges and limitations presented by digital editions and archives such as the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP).
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.
This essay is an attempt to come to terms with a phenomenon that characterizes many authors’ oeuvres: the concurrent composition of several works. My suggestion is to refer to this phenomenon as creative concurrence, drawing on experiences from two related disciplines, bibliography and the history of the book — notably D. F. McKenzie’s “sociology of texts” and the concept of “concurrent production” — in order to cross-pollinate genetic criticism.
Starting from the critical notion that we should be asking questions of contemporary importance - and that 'importance' itself must be defined - Anthony Pym sets about undoing many of the currently dominant models of translation history, positing, among much else, that the object of this history should be translators as people, that researchers are subjectively involved in their object, that cultural systems are based on social will, that translators work in intercultural spaces, and that a model of cooperation through negotiation may be applied to the way translators (and researchers!) work between cultures.
At the same time, the proposed methodology is eminently constructive, showing how many empirical techniques can be developed and applied: clear illustrations are given of corpus selection, working definitions, deceptive statistics, and the construction of networks and regimes, incorporating elaborate examples drawn from medieval and modernist fields, as well as finding space for notes on practical problems like funding research. Finding its focus in historical debates, this book cannot help but create contemporary debate: its arguments seek not only to revitalize the historical study of translation but also to develop the wider concerns of intercultural studies.
In this essay self‐translation will not be addressed as some kind of freakish accident of nature, but rather as the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Beneath the water dwell many more bi‐ or even multilingual writers, to which we gain access by going beyond traditional models of literary history and criticism. In fact, the best‐known cases of self‐translation (Beckett, Nabokov, and Green yesterday, Huston, Semprun, and Dorfman today) embody but one of two categories: “horizontal” transfers between symmetric pairs of widespread languages. In many other instances, however, “asymmetric” linguistic configurations saddle the act of self‐translation. At least three categories of self‐translators whose linguistic repertoire is characterized by such asymmetry can be distinguished: (1) “(post)colonial” writers who alternate between their native tongue(s) and the European language of the former colonial powers; (2) recent immigrant writers who expand on work begun in their home country while staking out new ground for themselves in the language of their adoptive country; (3) writers belonging to traditional linguistic minorities because of the multilingual make‐up of the State of which they are citizens. While drawing attention to the existence of those writers, this article will also develop a typology of self‐translators, thereby looking beyond the famous case of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has often been constructed as a hapax legomenon, the quintessential exception that confirms the unwritten rule of monolingual writing, a situation that stands in the way of a better, more general comprehension of self‐translation as such. In this essay, we want to show that Beckett can help us gain many precious insights into self‐translation, but only if we allow ourselves to look beyond him, instead of staying in the shadow he casts.
This article charts the emergence of a new form of translation research that we term genetic translation studies. It explores the foundations of this approach in the French school of critique génétique, which developed a methodology for studying the drafts, manuscripts and other working documents (avant-textes) of modern literary works with the aim of revealing the complexity of the creative processes engaged in their production. This methodology draws upon different theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches (poetic, linguistic, philosophical, psychoanalytical, phenomenological, etc.) and has since been adapted to the study of other media, including music, cinema, photography, painting, architecture, and the translated text. This article analyses how genetic approaches have been applied to translated texts by both genetic critics and translation scholars. It highlights, furthermore, the opportunities as well as the challenges for literary and other forms of translation research when a genetic approach is adopted.
A genetics of translation may suggest a unidirectional link between two fields of research (genetic criticism applied to translations), but there are many ways in which translation and genetic criticism interact. This article’s research hypothesis is that an exchange of ideas between translation studies and genetic criticism can be mutually beneficial in more than one way. Their main function is to enhance a form of textual awareness, and to this end they inform each other in at least five different ways: genesis as part of translation; translation of the genesis; genesis of the translation; translation as part of the genesis; and finally the genesis of the untranslatable. To study this nexus translation/genetic criticism the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett will serve as case studies.
When the English Molloy was published in 1955, jointly by Olympia (Paris) and Grove (New York), a long and difficult translation process had ended, on which Beckett worked both alone and together with Merlin and Patrick Bowles. This article is the first attempt to approach this somewhat neglected topic by way of manuscripts, notebooks, letters and other related materials, in order to establish a basic chronology of the English Molloy. In so doing, our purpose is to shed more light on a relatively obscure period in Beckett's literary career and examine critically the role of each party involved.
In the 1950s, Samuel Beckett worked together with a number of writer-translators on English, French and German versions of his novels and plays. This article studies the material traces of these collaborations to analyse the collaborations as a crucial phase in a 4-step process toward a poetics of bilingualism, consisting of (1) writing in another language, (2) collaborating on the translations, (3) eventually giving preference to self-translation, and (4) finally presenting his work as a bilingual oeuvre. Beckett also appears to have played a greater part in his German translations than hitherto assumed, which calls for a reassessment of Beckett's "trilingual" engagement with his work in the development of a "bilingual" poetics.
Despite the growing scholarly attention received by self-translation in the last few years, collaborative self-translation has not yet been studied in depth. In this chapter I consider the self-translator and the translator proper as part of a team in order to observe the particularities of their joint work when a minority language such as Basque is involved. The existing relationship between the two collaborators is examined by means of two paradigmatic examples drawn from Basque literature, namely two close relationships writer/spouse and writer/publisher. My purpose is to analyse the role played by each of the actors involved in the process of collaborative self-translation, also bearing in mind the power relations between the languages and cultures involved in the literary exchanges, as reflected both in the process and in the final product. Since self-translations are vastly produced in multilingual contexts throughout Europe, this example from the Basque literary context illustrates the lack of visibility experienced by collaborative self-translation in asymmetrical language combinations.
La secondarité de la traduction par rapport à l’ œuvre que l’on dit « originale » est une donnée essentielle de la configuration qui se présente au généticien. Ses conséquences – fragilisation de l’auctoritas du traducteur, marginalisation de la traduction au sein de l’espace littéraire – pèsent sur la disponibilité de l’archive et sa nature. À partir de quels documents et selon quelles procédures peut-on envisager une approche génétique des traductions, telle est la question à laquelle l’article s’efforce de répondre en illustrant sa visée théorique d’exemples concrets.
After attending the premiere of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953, there was no doubt in Elmar Tophoven’s mind that this was a play he must translate and without delay. Willing to risk translating Beckett’s tragicomedy without first obtaining the rights, he deposited the completed German Godot on Jérôme Lindon’s desk three weeks later.
This essay focuses on the translation of Claudio Magris' novel Blindly (Alla cieca) into English and the collaboration between author and translator during the course of the project. Magris' willingness to become an active participant in the translation process confirmed his frequent observation that 'the translator is truly a co-author, part accomplice, part rival, part lover.' Specifically, the essay examines the themes, imagery, and stylistic elements employed by Magris to render the multiple, interwoven strands that form the river of the narrative, spanning geography and history, space and time, to describe a story of senseless actions and wrongs endured and inflicted. Of revolutionaries and those who persecute them, victims and oppressors, hunter and prey. Of the betrayed and their betrayers everywhere. And over it all the pall cast by those unwilling to lift the shroud of silence and bear witness to the truth: those who prefer to live 'blindly.' © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
In descriptive studies, where the source and target texts are the main primary sources (‘primary text products’), ‘extra-textual’ sources are looked at with ‘circumspection’. However, in historical research methodologies they are central. This article examines the use and value of archives, manuscripts and, especially, translator papers, post-hoc accounts and interviews in producing a history of translation and translators. Rather than informing a ‘traditional’ Rankean history of facts and major personalities, the article underlines the potential value of such material in creating a ‘microhistory’, reclaiming the details of the everyday lives and working processes of sometimes little-known or forgotten translators and contextualising them to construct a social and cultural history of translation and translators. Sometimes these sources are housed in collections where translation may not be very visible, which creates problems of location. Examples are given from the autobiography of A. Birse and research on the working papers of Sam Hileman, Andrew Hurley, Bernard Miall and Margaret Sayers Peden.
This paper discusses the application of research methodologies from history and literary studies to the analysis of the translation process. Specifically, this concerns the use of literary archive and manuscript material to investigate the various stages in the construction of the translation product. Such material has been drastically underexploited in translation studies to date. The paper describes the type of material available for researchers and how this has been used. This is followed by a case study involving the detailed textual analysis of a translator’s drafts and revisions. The paper considers the value of such research methods in investigating the translation process and how they might complement and interact with other methodologies.
This edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase.
A replacement of the author's well-known book on Translation Theory, In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980), this book makes a case for Descriptive Translation Studies as a scholarly activity as well as a branch of the discipline, having immediate consequences for issues of both a theoretical and applied nature. Methodological discussions are complemented by an assortment of case studies of various scopes and levels, with emphasis on the need to contextualize whatever one sets out to focus on. Part One deals with the position of descriptive studies within TS and justifies the author's choice to devote a whole book to the subject. Part Two gives a detailed rationale for descriptive studies in translation and serves as a framework for the case studies comprising Part Three. Concrete descriptive issues are here tackled within ever growing contexts of a higher level: texts and modes of translational behaviour — in the appropriate cultural setup; textual components — in texts, and through these texts, in cultural constellations. Part Four asks the question: What is knowledge accumulated through descriptive studies performed within one and the same framework likely to yield in terms of theory and practice?
The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation
- Joanna Huss
- Trzeciak
The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Play/Comedie and Film
- Olga Beloborodova
Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture
- Anthony Cordingley
How to Fail: Notes on Talks with Samuel Beckett
- Patrick Bowles
The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies
- Hélène Buzelin
The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation
- Anthony Cordingley
Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age
- Anthony Cordingley
- Frigau Manning
Éléments de critique génétique: Lire les manuscrits modernes
- Almuth Grésillon
The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape/La dernière bande
- Dirk Van Hulle
Author-Translator Collaborations: A Typological Survey
- Partick Hersant
The Tender Hour of Twilight. Paris in the ‘50s, New York in the ‘60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age
- Richard Seaver
La traduction transparente
- Elmar Tophoven
Glückliche Jahre: Übersetzerleben in Paris, Gespräche mit Marion Gees [Happy years: a translator’s life in Paris, conversations with Marion Gees
- Erika Tophoven
Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable
- Dirk Van Hulle
- Shane Weller
Dreiunddreißig Jahre Vergegenwärtigung Beckettscher Werke [Thirty-three years translating Beckett’s work
- Elmar Tophoven