30.91, Review: French; Italian; Translation: Maestri (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-91. Tue Jan 08 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.91, Review: French; Italian; Translation: Maestri (2018)

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Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2019 15:49:19
From: Roxana Birsanu [roxanabirsanu25 at yahoo.com]
Subject: Translating the Female Self across Cultures

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1365.html

AUTHOR: Eliana  Maestri
TITLE: Translating the Female Self across Cultures
SUBTITLE: Mothers and daughters in autobiographical narratives
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Translation Library 130
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Roxana Birsanu, Romanian-American University, Bucharest, Romania

INTRODUCTION
 
With her book, “Translating the Female Self across Cultures”, Eliana Maestri
delves into the complex cultural and ideological mechanisms that help
construct female identity across cultures through translation. The author
makes an in-depth analysis of French and Italian translations of several
autobiographic works from two distinct literary traditions, i.e. British
(Jeanetter Winterson and A.S. Byatt) and African-Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid).
The purpose of her research is to detect how central concepts related to
female identity are handled in translation and the extent to which this
process of linguistic transfer is influenced by the cultural and literary
context of translation production. The book contains an introduction, six
chapters and conclusions.      

SUMMARY

The first two chapters are dedicated to J. Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit”. In Chapter One, the author assesses how the figure of the mother
is constructed in the Italian translation, with a focus on the techniques of
irony and humour, used to inform the perspective on religion and power. The
analysis reveals that the Italian text has a strong domesticating orientation,
favouring accessibility by imbuing the text with a strong Catholic orientation
and by shaping the mother figure so as to meet the expectations of target
readers. Thus, the target text does not manage to sketch an accurate portrait
of the mother in Italian, and consequently the “distortions and alterations of
the mother figure does not help the reader appreciate the tone of the ST and
the narrator’s intention” (51). The author’s conclusion is that the
translation fails to render into Italian all the complex aspects of the
mother’s personality. This is due to the weakening of any potentially
subversive material (presented in the ST through irony and humour), the main
concern of the Italian translation being to make the text compliant with the
macrotextual factors prevailing in the target culture, especially in
connection with topics such as faith, religion and tolerance. 

In the second chapter, Maestri analyses the French translation of Winterson’s
text. She pursues the same line of investigation related to the construction
of the mother figure, but this time from two different perspectives: the
mother’s sense of class (she belongs to the working class, but has aspirations
to become – herself and/or her daughter – a member of the middle class) and
her sense of emancipation. The examples analysed in both ST and TT reveal
that, although the French version also interferes with the ST under the form
of alterations and distortions, especially at semantic and lexical level, the
end result manages to shed further light onto the figure of the mother, thus
enriching, according to Maestri, the meanings of the original text.  

Chapters Three and Four are dedicated to two short stories signed by A.S.
Byatt, “Sugar” and “Cold”, respectively, and to the influence of the receiving
context on their translation into Italian and French. In Chapter Three,
Maestri looks into the dramatisation of distinct female identities in the
Italian translation against the principles of Diotima, an Italian group of
literary criticism grounded in feminist theories. Using an interpretative tool
frequently met in translation studies, namely lexical cohesion, Maestri pays
particular attention to how Byatt’s Italian translators handled a series of
lexical items (sensory adjectives in particular) in order to “accompany their
readers along the path to a clearer understanding […] by adding textual clues”
(142). She comes to the conclusion that the translators’ choice of translation
strategies (such as compensations and semantic reorganisations) and semantic
fields was actually driven by their feminist agenda. Despite obvious
interferences with the source text in these areas, Maestri is of the opinion
that the major accomplishment of the target text, which is due to the “careful
mediation of the Italian translators” (117), clarifies certain aspects that
are more obscure in the source text. 

While Chapter Three explores issues such as feminine storytelling, feminine
truth or gendered symbolism, Chapter Four looks into how the French
translation of “Sugar” addresses various interpretations of the concept of
“space” in the mother-daughter relationship. The analysis is again placed
against the literary context of the target culture at the moment of
translation production, namely the autobiography versus autofiction debate.
With the help of the same methodological approach used in the previous
chapter, the source and target texts are compared in terms of lexical choices,
typographic solutions and space localizers. The translation strategies which
create new layers of reading in the target text (more complex values of the
mother-daughter space, enhancement of the concept of “house” as a protective
space, reduction of the proximity between mother and child) lead to the
conclusion that, again, the translation of Byatt’s text enhances the meanings
and writing values of the source text and assists readers into better
deciphering the message of the original author. 

The last two chapters evolve around the Italian and the French translations of
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Autobiography”. Chapter Five contextualizes the production
of the Italian translation of Kincaid’s novel, setting it against the
background of feminist theories then prevalent in Italy emerging from authors
gathered under the name of Diotima. Although Maestri warns that his chapter
pertains more to literary criticism than to translation studies, she
investigates how the Italian translator made use of various rhetorical devices
(for instance litotes, chiasmus or mise-en-abyme) to render into Italian key
concepts from the source text such as the abyss, violence, subjugation and
negativity. The analysis in the key of Kristevan semiotics of the negativity
that pervades the ST reinforces the success of the Italian translation to
inscribe the text within the literary polysystem of the receiving culture, but
without diluting the aesthetic value and without betraying the intentions of
the original text. 

Chapter Six applies performance theories from the fields of narratology and
gender studies in order to evaluate to which extent the French version of
Kincaid’s novel manages to render the complex valences of orality, which is
one of the main stylistic achievements of the ST. The background of the
investigation is the French colonial versus post-colonial debate. The
comparative analysis of ST and TT fragments leads the author to the conclusion
that the French translation is not extremely successful, because it tries to
normalise the ST, minimises the value of orality and, by strictly following
the linguistic rules of the target language, diminishes the subversive value
of the language. All these massively interfere with the transmission of the ST
message, since they “display typical traits of Western or Westernized
narrative which go against the grain of African-Caribbean narratives” (266).  

EVALUATION

''Translating the Female Self across Cultures” is a successful illustration of
how distinct methodological and critical approaches can merge into a coherent
and relevant end product. In spite of the fact that the title seems to
inscribe the book mainly in the field of translation studies, the author makes
use of theories from such varied research areas as gender studies, semiotics,
religious studies, literary criticism or work-class research. Although at
first sight this plethora of approaches might discourage someone who is not
familiar enough with concepts from so many distinct fields and although the
author uses specialised terminology specific to them, she also assists her
readers by briefly explaining the concepts employed in her analyses. This
interdisciplinary perspective is precisely one of the reasons which recommend
the book as a valuable reading for both students and scholars interested in
all the above-mentioned fields of study. Another strength of the book resides
in the academic rigour with which the author pursued her analyses. This is
visible in the balanced division of the book (six chapters, two for each of
the investigated authors), the coherent organisation of each chapter and the
very thorough and profound analysis of sentence level units from which the
author extracts the interpretation of how ST ideas, concepts and writing
practices are rendered into the respective target languages. The very rich
critical apparatus is another plus of the book; for convenience purposes and
easiness of consultation, perhaps it would have been useful if the secondary
sources consulted by the author had been organised on specialised fields of
study (gender studies, religious studies etc.). Another minor drawback could
be the fact that quotations in French and Italian are not translated into
English, and thus they are inaccessible to readers who are not familiar with
these two languages. 

The objective of this research is clearly expressed by the author, who claims
that she wishes “to investigate the interplay between mothers and daughters
and the ideology, cultural dis/values and discursive constructions at work in
different versions of the texts” (3). The book fully manages to achieve its
purpose, since each chapter follows the manner in which translators resorted
to various translation strategies in order to reconstruct ST feminine figures
in their respective target languages and the impact upon the translators’
choices and decisions of ideology and power relations which make up the
context of the moment of translation production. In each chapter, Maestri
investigates the French and the Italian translations from distinct angles and
perspectives, and it is the above-mentioned interconnectedness between
translation patterns and the ideological and literary agendas of the receiving
cultures which actually ensures the cohesion of the six chapters. Overall,
this book may serve as a valuable example of how interdisciplinary
perspectives can be fruitfully and coherently used for product-oriented
analyses of translations and of the rich context informing translation
decisions and agendas.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Roxana Bîrsanu is a Lecturer and is currently teaching English for Specific
Purposes and Romanian as a Foreign Language in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a
PhD in Translation Studies, which she obtained at the University of Salamanca,
Spain. Her research interests mainly encompass Romanian translations from
modernist Anglo-American literature, translation norms in the Romanian
literary system, and intercultural communication. She has published numerous
translations of French and English works, both fiction and non-fiction, and
has co-authored textbooks on general and business communication in English.





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