Lexicography, Terminology, and Translation: Text-based Studies in Honour of Ingrid Meyer

Chapter 11. Criticizing Translations: The Notion of Disparity

159 Disparity is endemic to the translator’s art. —Georges Mounin, Les belles infidèles (1955)1 Never definitive, a translation, even the best, is a dissonance unresolved! —Marion Graf, L’écrivain et son traducteur en Suisse et en Europe (1998) INTRODUCTION Criticizing a literary translation is not about making subjective value judgments, nor about conveying a feeling, an impression, a pleasure in the reading. On the contrary, it is about performing a close analysis of the work, understanding its deeper meaning and how this meaning is rendered in the target language. As Antoine Berman (1995) demonstrates in reference to a poem by John Donne, the undertaking is more demanding than it may appear. The critic must be able to discern the translator’s project, for every translator worthy of the name is guided in his or her rewriting by a purpose, a plan, be it explicit or implicit. This only makes sense, since translating a literary work is rather like pursuing the same writerly task that produced the original. This global intention determines most of the many decisions that the translator makes throughout the re-creation. Style, rhythm, tone, register, syntactic structures, and vocabulary are only some of the elements weighed. And if the translation in question is historical, then the critic must have equal knowledge of two sets of circumstances: those CHAPTER 11 CRITICIZING TRANSLATIONS: THE NOTION OF DISPARITY JEAN DELISLE 160 Jean Delisle surrounding the translation itself and those surrounding the source text’s creation—the author and his or her era, the prevailing literary and linguistic conventions, the expectations of the target readership.All aspects of historical context are relevant, be they sociopolitical, literary, linguistic, religious, even economical. Once this general context—the work’s original horizon of expectation—has been determined, the critic can analyze the text itself. Although a translation exists as an autonomous work—one should be able to read it independently—it is still an echo of its source, and that is why comparison has an important, if not exclusive, role in criticism. Comparative analysis is not about ensuring that each and every element of the original has been transposed. This pe
y inventorial approach, this checking to see if every word has been rendered in good and due form—this has nothing to do with real criticism. Such a method is founded, rather, on the false assumption that a translated work must be identical word for word to its original, a perfect mirror image. More than one critic has denounced this specular conception, this literal utopia. Translation should not be a “lie trying to pass itself off as something it can never be” (Renken 2002, 96). In essence, to translate is to tell again but to tell differently. A translation is not a photographic reproduction but a representation. The distinction is vital, and its consequences for the criticism of translations are far reaching. History tells us that, on the whole, excessively literal translations have not been well received or considered successful,2 unless of course literalism is the norm for a certain type of text—the Bible, for example— or the norm in a given period or social context. The critic, understanding his task as he should, tries rather to determine whether the translated work offers the same literary properties as the first, the same semantic cohesion, the same aesthetic qualities, the same underlying unity. In a word, the same signifiance. The work’s “signifiance” is its deepest, most integrated level of meaning. For translators, as most criticism seems to suggest (Delisle 2001), it is an ideal rarely a
ained. For the most part, translations actually disconcert, jar, upset the reader, give her what Maurice Gravier has called “translation sickness,”3 a condition resulting from the inevitable “disparity”—sometimes great, sometimes li
le—that target texts demonstrate with respect to their source texts. We might be
er understand the notion of disparity, central to translation theory and translation criticism specifically, by first addressing the term’s definition in commonly consulted dictionaries. This initial lexical exploration will afford insight into the notion’s more Criticizing Translations 161 important implications.4 Appearing in seventeenth-century French, disparate came from the Latin disparatus: “different, dissimilar, unequal.” At first, the word was used in rhetoric and designated a “contradictory statement.” I will note in passing that the word, from the beginning, is rooted...