Critical analysis of a translation

(4/9/98)

Reflections

I have encountered several difficulties while completing my translation project. Most of the problems I have had to confront were on the level of language. As far as translating Martin Kuku… ín's Neprebudený is concerned, I tried to bring across both its virtues and its shortcomings. What I tend to associate with the virtues of the original has mainly to do with the use of mellifluous sounds and creative expressions, as well as with the fact that Neprebudený has an important place in Slovak literature. Everyone in Slovakia knows this novel and it has acquired nearly a sacred status over the years. Nevertheless, I tried hard not to use this as an excuse to embellish my translation of Neprebudený.

A standardized version of written Slovak was only about 50 years old when Kuku… ín wrote Neprebudený. Moreover, this book represents one of the earliest works of the author. Both these facts explain why I see this piece as an experiment that Kuku… ín undertook to explore the possibilities of a relatively young language and at the same time to find a style that best suited his needs. It is therefore understandable that the original contains stylistic features now deemed undesirable, like for example a constantly recurrent repetition of words. It is of course also possible that such features were part of the poetics and universe of discourse in Kuku… ín's time and context. Nevertheless, before I started translating, I decided to keep the repetitions because I consider them an essential part of the author's style. By putting this decision to practice, I intend to draw the reader of my translation toward the original rather than vice versa.

Nearly a century has elapsed since Neprebudený was first published, which posed another problem. As no language ever stops evolving, some words and phrases of this short story sound obsolete to a modern Slovak ear, not to mention that the orthography of Slovak has since undergone a few changes. Given that the orthographic modifications are minor, I decided to ignore them and to use standard English orthography. I nevertheless tried to write my translation in such a way that it would cause a feeling of awkwardness to an English ear just as it does to a Slovak one whenever the language is used in a manner that no longer is current. Hence, whenever I ran across an outdated word or phrase, I tried to preserve its effect by using an English equivalent that does not tend to be used in the given situation.

Given the constraints described above, I ended up consciously following the "binary" decision making process outlined by Jiri Levy. In other words, whenever I decided to translate X as Y, I continued translating X as Y in the rest of the work. Sometimes I found myself forced to revise my "X and Y" pair of "equivalents". Going back and changing the Ys to revised Ys was facilitated considerably by some features of modern computers. In general, I have found computing technology (together with the vast language resources available online) extraordinarily helpful in my translating efforts. In the "binary" decision making process, it helped me enormously to see the author's use of "X" in different contexts.