Literature in Translation: Teaching Issues and Reading Practices

“Toto, I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in KansasAnymore”: Reading and Presenting Textsin Translation from “Familiar” Cultures

reading and presenting texts from “familiar” cultures 31 31 “Toto, I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore”: Reading and Presenting Texts in Translation from “Familiar” Cultures Isabel Garayta The difficulty in confronting any literary text, translation or not, is relative to our distance from it in any of the myriad ways we might define “distance.” Mostcriticalandpedagogicalapproachestoliteratureattempttoshedlighton particularaspectsofa work inthehopethat illuminating atext orsome aspect of it will shorten the distance between it and the reader, or at least enable the readertotraversethedistanceonsurerfooting.Onewaytogaugethedistance between reader and text may be, on the simplest level, to ask how “foreign” a text seems to a reader and to his or her experience. Under this trope, what critics and teachers attempt to do is move text and reader closer together in order to help the reader bridge some of the text’s distance or “foreignness” and better understand its “language,” even if not completely. The challenges presentedbytextsinone’snativelanguage,writtenastheyarewithinaculture and literary tradition in which one has grown up and been educated, almost inevitablymultiplyinthecaseofatextfromaforeigncultureandlanguage,for inadditiontothedistancethatmustbetraversedbetweenanyreaderandatext written in her own language, the reader of a translation will almost certainly findherselfseparatedfromthesourcetextbyfurtherdistances—ofgeography, language,culture,historicalviewpoint,andliterarygenreanditsexpectations, to name only a few types of “alienation.” Thus, readers of translations can be said to be at two removes of foreignness from the original text. Although reading translated texts from what might be called “familiar” cultures (for example, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, which for historical reasons have a strong presence in North American culture) requires less effort than reading texts from cultures that seem more distant, it is also important to recognize that a sense of familiarity might entail a false sense 32 literature in translation of comfort. A reader might be lulled into thinking that she “knows things” about the translated text, its characters, and its message that she in fact does not know. Moreover, when moving around in cultures that seem “not so foreign,” one may find that a sense of familiarity is not reliable. Even though theremaybesharedhistory,politics,orevengeography,thereadermaybeless conversantwiththeliterarycultureandtraditionfromwhichthetextemerges. To return to a trope I used earlier, one’s footing may be less sure on this literary ground than one assumes, and approaching the text as “transparent” (in both language and “content”) may lead to misreading or underreading it. If and when the realization comes that there is something odd about the work or one’s experience of it, the “we’re not in Kansas anymore” syndrome may have set in: the language sounds familiar, and the world looks sort of like what one thinks it should, but some things seem slightly off, and one begins to find oneself in unfamiliar territory, whose rules are not quite clear. Fortunately, this discomfort may be the first step toward an awareness that one is reading a translation. Curiously, if this sense of oddness or unfamiliarity does not arise as one reads a text from a familiar yet foreign culture, then the reader would be well advised to ask, “Why not?” She should also try to become alert to how the mediation of translation has robbed her of that experience of “otherness” that is one of the reasons we prize translations—robbed because the familiar but distant has been reduced, for the reader’s “comfort,” to the identical or the known. In the following pages, teachers will find suggestions for ways to help students approach these translated texts with a better understanding of the mediation wrought upon them (specifically as a result of translation, but also of publishing practices). Without an awareness of that mediation and a sensitivity to the difference or “otherness” that the translation may have elided, hidden, or camouflaged, a reader is deprived of the experience of “otherness” that is one of the gifts the reading of a foreign text offers. No matter the degree of distance students experience with respect to a text in translation, the first step in approaching it must be an overt recognition of the fact that they are reading a translation, or reading in translation , and concurrently, that an act of mediation has brought the work into their language and culture. This elementary recognition may seem just that—elementary—but anyone who doubts the invisibility of translation in academia has only to try, I predict fruitlessly, to remember the names of the reading and presenting texts from “familiar” cultures 33 translators who gave them access to the texts they consider central to their education. Likewise...