BABEL-AFIAL Nº 14

Nยบ 14 - Ano 2005

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SERVIZO DE PUBLICACIร NS

UNIVERSIDADE DE VIGO

DIRECCIÓN Elena de Prada Creo (Universidade de Vigo) SUBDIRECCIÓN Cristina Larkin Galiñanes (Universidade de Vigo) Beatriz Figuroa Revilla (Universidade de Vigo) COMITÉ DE REDACCIÓN Enrique Alcaraz Varó (Universidad de Alicante) Carlos Buján López (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) José Luis Chamosa González (Universidad de León) Mª Ángeles de la Concha Muñoz (UNED Madrid) Francisco Garrudo Carabias (Universidad de Sevilla) Pedro Guardia Masó (Universidad de Barcelona) Ramón López Ortega (Universidad de Extremadura) Félix Martín Gutiérrez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Manuel Míguez Ben (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) Rafael Monroy Casas (Universidad de Murcia) Catalina Montes Mozo (Universidad de Salamanca) José Siles Artés (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Eduardo Varela Bravo (Universidade de Vigo) Fernando Galván Reula (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares) Manuel González Piñeiro (Universidad de Vigo) Este volume publícase cunha subvención da DIRECCIÓN XERAL DE INVESTIGACIÓN, DESENVOLVEMENTO E INNOVACIÓN DA XUNTA DE GALICIA.

BABEL-AFIAL Nº 14; Ano 2005 EDITA Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade de Vigo Campus das Lagoas - Marcosende 36310 VIGO, España IMPRIME Oficode, S.L. ISSN 1132 - 7332 DEP. LEGAL PO - 603 - 02 © Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade de Vigo, 2005

Índice Massimiliano Morini Translating Scottish Poetry

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Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration? Silvina Ocampo Translates Emily Dickinson

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Sonia Petisco Martínez A Theoretical and Practical Approach to Literary Translation: The Case of Poetry

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Marta Dahlgren Translation and Relevance: The Appraisal of Poetry

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Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo Negotiating Borders between "New Mannism" and "Laddishness" in British Men's Magazines' Problem Pages: A Case Study

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Laura Filardo LLamas y Marta Mª Gutiérrez Rodríguez Lexical Creativity in English: Minor Methods of Word Formation

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María J. González Rodríguez Estrategias de acomodación del género noticia en función de su propósito comunicativo

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María Teresa González Mínguez Cummings and Campion: Are Literary Works Definitely Over?

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María José Corvo Sánchez Historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa (II): Antigüedad clásica - Grecia

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Massimiliano Morini Translating Scottish Poetry

Translating Scottish Poetry Massimiliano Morini University of Bologna

It is often argued that translators must mediate between two languages and two cultures: but there are cases in which more than two languages and cultures are at stake, and in those cases translators have to base their work on a sound sociolinguistic basis. Translators of Scottish poetry, and of Scottish literature in general, must grapple with Scotland’s ‘within-group multilingualism’, i.e., with the fact that many writers alternately use English and Scots.

In what follows, the three traditional methods used to render this alternation are described, and a fourth method is proposed; also, the variables are examined which come into play when the source text is not only synchronically, but also diachronically removed from the translator.

Se dice que los traductores tienen que intermediar entre dos lenguas y dos culturas: pero a veces el acto de traducción implica más que dos idiomas y dos culturas, entonces los traductores tienen que fundar su mismo trabajo sobre un profundo conocimiento de la situación sociolingüística. Los que traducen poemas escoceses, y en general la literatura escocesa, tienen que afrontar una situación de “multilingüismo interno”, que en literatura se traduce en el uso alternado de inglés y Scots. En lo expuesto se describen los tres métodos tradicionales para reproducir esta alternancia, y se propone un cuarto método; además, se examinan las variables que entran en juego cuando entre el texto de origen y el traductor hay una distancia no solamente sincrónica, sino diacrónica.

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Keywords: English and Scottish Language, Scottish Literature, Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Translation.

Palabras clave: Lengua Inglesa y Escocesa, Literatura Escocesa, Lingüística Aplicada, Sociolingüística, Traducción.

1 INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE, TIME, PLACE, TRADITION The conscientious translator of Scottish poetry, and of Scottish literature in general, must dabble in sociolinguistics and language history, as well as literary criticism and translation studies. Scotland is a multilingual land, characterized by what J.A. Fishman terms ‘within-group (or intragroup) multilingualism’ – a situation in which ‘a single population makes use of two (or more) “languages” or varieties of the “same language” for internal communicative purposes’ (Fishman 1971/1972: 15). In this case, there are two ‘varieties of the “same language”’ – English and Scots – and, though less widespread, a language belonging to a different IndoEuropean family – the Gaelic. In what follows, I will deal with the dualism English/Scots, i.e., the two tongues which are mastered and spoken by most Scottish people, and used as alternative or complementary languages by a number of Scottish writers. Just as Scottish people choose either Scots or English according to personal preferences, topic, domains of language behaviour, role and power relations, register, so writers’ choices may well be personal, but have cultural and sociolinguistic roots and consequences. If the translator is to be a cultural mediator (Taft 1981: 53), he/she has to take all these aspects into consideration and inform his/her reader about them, either within the text or in the notes and commentary.

The mediation can be further complicated by the introduction of variables which distance the source text not only from the translator and his/her reader, but also from the contemporary Scottish reader: if the source text was written in a different epoch from the ‘present’ or the ‘immediate past’, and in an earlier version of English and/or Scots, the translator must decide if and how to reproduce its diachronic dimension.

In André Lefevere’s terms, ‘the freedom of the theme is [...] inevitably circumscribed by the concentric circles of language, time, place, and tradition’ (Lefevere 1975: 19). Now, whereas language is an element

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which the translator can not but take into account, the elements which Lefevere terms tpt (time, place, tradition) take up more importance as the cultural and literary gap between author and translator becomes wider.

According to Lefevere, the translator, when faced with a source text displaying tpt elements which distance it from the target culture, must choose one of five strategies: 1) he/she can simply ignore the problem; 2) he/she can produce a calque and not worry about the reader’s understanding of it; 3) he/she can produce a calque and furnish it with explanatory notes; 4) he/she can translate tpt elements as he/she translates language; 5) he/she can elucidate the text by means of amplification and paraphrase (Lefevere 1975: 85-92).

As Schleiermacher wrote almost two centuries ago, the translator must often choose whether the burden of translation is to be borne by the reader or by the original author (Schleiermacher 1816: 152): but what Schleiermacher called the two ‘methods’ of translating produce countless techniques through which the translator can make his/her readers acquainted with the referential, rhetorical, and stylistic properties of the source text; in what follows, some of these techniques will be reviewed as a series of Scottish-Italian ‘bi-texts’ (Harris 1988) from various epochs are examined.

2 CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH POETRY: ENGLISH AND SCOTS The most typical problem for the translator of contemporary Scottish literature is the co-presence in the same text of English and Scots. The first half of the twentieth century saw a heated debate between the supporters of Scots as a national literary language (Hugh MacDiarmid) and those who were convinced that Scottish writers had to write in English because Scots was a dead or dying tongue (Edwin Muir). For a Scottish writer of the twentieth century, choosing either language, or both, is no mere literary dilemma: it is a cultural and a political issue which the translator has no way of incorporating in his/her target text, if notes and commentaries are not considered part of the target text. Admittedly, the translator must not translate the dialect (or the language variety) itself, but the function that dialect (or language variety) has in the source text (Newmark 1988: 194-95): nevertheless, part of the reason for using Scots, part of its function, resides precisely in its cultural and political significance

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– if Scots is used in order to identify the narrator, or a character, as Scottish, how can we reproduce that function in the target text?

Though there are a number of twentieth-century texts written in Scots or in English, there are also many texts which are based upon linguistic dualism. In fictional prose, for instance, English is traditionally reserved for the narrative parts, Scots for the dialogues. A classical example is George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901), the first great novel of modern Scottish literature: In a dull little country town the passing of a single cart is an event, and a gig is followed with the eye till it disappears. Anything is welcome that breaks the long monotony of the hours, and suggests a topic for the evening’s talk. ‘Any news?’ a body will gravely enquire; ‘Ou aye,’ another will answer with equal gravity, ‘I saw Kennedy’s gig going past in the forenoon.’ ‘Aye, man, where would he be off till? He’s owre often in his gig, I’m thinking –’ and then Kennedy and his affairs will last them till bedtime. (Douglas Brown 1901/1985: 41) In un noioso paesello di campagna il passaggio di un solo carro è un avvenimento, e un calesse viene seguito con gli occhi finché non scompare. Si accoglie con piacere qualsiasi cosa spezzi la lunga monotonia delle ore, e suggerisca un argomento per la chiacchierata serale. “Novità?” chiederà uno, con aria grave; “Oh, sì, [Oh yes]” risponderà un altro con aria altrettanto grave, “Ho visto passare il calesse di Kennedy, stamattina.

[I saw Kennedy’s gig passing, this morning]” “Ah sì? E dov’è che andava?

Lo prende un po’ troppo spesso quel calesse, secondo me – [Did you?

And where is it he was he going? He rides a bit too often in that gig, I think]” e a quel punto Kennedy e i suoi affari sarebbero loro bastati fino all’ora di coricarsi.

As shown by the back-translations of the characters’ speeches, such a version bridges the gap between characters and narrator, a gap that is one of the main stylistic features of the novel (the narrator, probably a native who has studied in England like the author, is at the same time a knowing chronicler of the small community he describes and a stranger to it). Of course, the Italian language, like any language, provides the translator with the means to render this distance: the dialogues (which in the above version are rather dull) can become more colloquial, dialectal, even syntactically and morphologically incorrect (‘Sì eh? Ma indov’è

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che va? Fra un po’ lo consuma, quel calesse’): but the dualism English/Scots, which has a precise cultural and political significance, is lost in any case, and can be recovered only by means of explanatory notes and commentaries.

An alternative solution is for the translator to produce a cultural adaptation of the text. An Italian region can be substituted for Scotland, the Italian dialect of that region substituted for Scots (the house with the green shutters can become a farmhouse in the Italian countryside). But in our epoch, even though ‘adaptation’ has been described by many as a permissible translation procedure (cf. for instance Vinay and Darbelnet 1958/1977: 52-54), such texts are not considered translations ‘proper’, and can be produced only by well-known authors who can ‘sign’ the end product as if it was entirely their own.

A lot of twentieth-century Scottish poetry is based upon linguistic dualism. In poetry as in prose, English and Scots can be used in isolation: but when they are combined within a single work, English is usually the narrator’s language, the language of written speech and of established culture; Scots the characters’ (or some characters’) language, the language of oral speech and of family conversations.

This is shown very neatly in the opening lines of ‘Condensation’,

by Glaswegian poet and playwright Liz Lochhead: After a two and a half years with His Mother, We were no longer love’s young dream When me, him and the weans got a hoose o’ wur ain In a four-in-a-block in this scheme. (Lochhead 1991: 16) The English spoken by this young disillusioned woman is itself full of colloquial turns of phrase like ‘a two and a half years’ and ‘in this scheme’. The code-shift from English to Scots (‘a hoose o’ wur ain’, ‘weans’) marks a further descent into the language of everyday family life.

Since in Italy there are no two languages standing in the same relation as English and Scots, the Italian translator must reproduce the effect by different means. Most translators, faced with a passage such as this, would choose one of three methods. First of all, the translator can

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ignore the problem altogether, and translate the whole passage in plain Italian, as if the source text was written only in one language – a solution which does not seem a solution at all, and yet is of some use when the original is printed alongside the translation, above all in those cases when the target text serves as an illustration of the source (school textbooks, cribs). What is lost can then be recovered by adding notes and commentaries: Dopo un due anni e mezzo con Sua Madre, Non eravamo più la giovane coppia da sogno Quando io, lui e i bambini mettemmo su casa In una quadrifamigliare in questo progetto.

Secondly, as with The House with the Green Shutters, the translator can substitute Scots with a social or a geographical dialect of the target language. As Hatim and Mason point out, there are dangers associated with this method: if ‘rendering ST dialect by TL standard has the disadvantage of losing the special effect intended in the ST [...] rendering dialect by dialect runs the risk of creating unintended effects’ (Hatim and Mason 1990/1992: 41). The use of dialect transfers the ‘situation’ of the original into a different context, and turns a translation into something of a cultural adaptation. Furthermore, rendering Scots by an Italian dialect is risky if the source text is not humorous or the translator is not a proficient speaker of that dialect. The risk is that of incurring ridicule: Dopo un due anni e mezzo con Sua Madre, Non eravamo più la giovane coppia da sogno Quando io, lui e i babèn trovammo una cà cl’era nostra In una quadrifamigliare in questo progetto.

Thirdly, the translator can render the effect obtained through codeswitching in the original by different means, i.e., by lowering the register within the standard variety of the target language or by interspersing his/her translation with spelling and grammar mistakes. The drawback here is that by choosing this strategy, the translator equates speaking Scots with making mistakes and employing a low register, thus perpetuating a cultural prejudice which may not be warranted by the source text.

Furthermore, the ghost of one or another Italian dialect is always lurking behind every attempt to write incorrect or informal Italian:

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Of course, none of these methods is fully satisfying: the first method is simplistic, the second and the third create misunderstandings and court ridicule. The translator, of course, will choose the method or the combination of methods which he/she thinks best given the particular source text he/she has to translate, the needs of those who take part in the transaction (readers, initiator, publisher, author, the translator him/herself), and the conditions in which the target text or the bi-text will be published (with the original facing the translation or not, in a literary magazine or in a school textbook).

2.1 A fourth method? Synthetic Scots By considering source texts written in English and Scots, I seem to be giving it for granted that the dualism English/Scots is relevant only when actualized through code-switching. But that dualism is so strong that it leaves some traces even on those texts where only one of the two languages is used: a Scottish novel or long poem written entirely in English is no oddity; but a Scottish novel or long poem written entirely in Scots evokes the ghost of English. For most Scottish writers, Scots is the language of family and everyday life, English the language of formality and education. Therefore, writing a whole novel or poem in Scots is a conscious choice, and presupposes an exclusion which is often undeclared, but not without reason or consequences. How can the translator, then, reproduce the marks of that exclusion within the target text?

Hugh MacDiarmid’s long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle can serve as both an illustration and a solution of this dilemma.

In his masterpiece, written almost entirely in Scots and published in 1926, MacDiarmid managed to turn a dialect (or a bundle of dialects) into a full-fledged literary language. For a spell, Scots became one of the languages of European modernism, on a par with English and French: I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune.

It’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless Wi’ Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like, And I’m no’ juist as bauld as once I wes. (MacDiarmid 1992: 26) Sono stanco più che ubriaco. Esausto.

E’ un duro lavoro, tracannare bicchiere su bicchiere

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Con Cruivie e Gilsanquhar e quelli come loro, E io non sono più quello di una volta.

[I am tired rather than drunk. Exhausted.

It’s hard work, gulping down glass after glass With Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like, And I am not the man I used to be.]

The above Italian translation was produced for a literary magazine in which source texts are published alongside target texts, and is written into a language which sacrifices prosodic and metrical precision to accurately reproduce the referential dimension of the lines. Furthermore, as shown by the English back-translation, in this version no attempt is made at signalling the fact that Scots, and not English, is the language of (almost all) the original. It is true that since Scots is considered by MacDiarmid to be on the same cultural and literary level as English, it would be misleading to translate it into an Italian dialect or into incorrect Italian. Nevertheless, part of the significance of the original lies in the fact that it is written almost entirely in Scots – a characteristic which endows it with a linguistic strength the target text does not display.

A possible solution is contained in the source text itself, suggested

by Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘invention’ of ‘synthetic Scots’: ‘synthetic Scots’, as used in A Drunk Man and in various other short poems of this early period in MacDiarmid’s career, is a language which exists yet is not to be found anywhere, a new tongue made up of various actual and literary Scottish dialects. By analogy with synthetic Scots, in translating a novel or a long poem (that is, a work which gives him/her room for experimenting), the translator can try to give shape to a ‘synthetic’ Italian which reproduces the Scots terms used in the original and goes alongside the Italian if the source text is characterized by the dualism English/Scots.

This ‘synthetic’ language can be of literary or dialectal origin, found or invented, and ideally would come to replace Scots not only on a particular occasion, but also in other works by the same translator, and, if the cultural operation is successful, in translations done by other professionals.

3 TRANSLATING MIDDLE SCOTS Problems of a different sort arise when the source text is not only

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at a geographical, but also at a temporal remove from the translator and his/her readers, thus complicating the question of how Lefevere’s tpt elements can be rendered, substituted or explained in the target language/culture. James S. Holmes points out that the translator must choose whether to employ ‘archaizing’ or ‘modernizing’ techniques on three different levels – ‘linguistic’, ‘literary’, and ‘socio-cultural’ (Holmes 1971/1978: 37): on the linguistic level, the translator must decide whether to employ the current standard version of the target language or an earlier one; on the literary level, he/she must decide how to render the metric and prosodic forms and conventions of the original; on the socio-cultural level, he/she must decide whether those social and cultural references which may be difficult or incomprehensible to his/her readers have to be kept, obliterated, or modified.

The applicability of this model and the urgency of these choices become evident if a sample text like the opening stanza of William Dunbar’s The Thrissil and the Rois is analyzed for the problems it poses and the possibilities it offers. Dunbar’s poem is an allegorical celebration of a royal marriage, written in highly aureate language and in a metrical form suited to the theme (‘rhyme royal’, a stanza made up of seven lines rhyming ABABBCC). It opens on the traditional description of the awakening of nature at the beginning of spring: Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past, And Appryll had, with hir silver schouris, Tane leif at nature with ane orient blast; And lusty May, that muddir is of flouris, Had maid the birdis to begyn thair houris Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt, Quhois armony to heir it wes delyt; In order to produce an ‘archaizing’ version of this stanza at all levels, the translator must find historical equivalents for its language, literary form, and cultural context. As for the latter, it would perhaps be improper to modify the traditional natural description, with its reminiscences of the Roman de la rose and the Canterbury Tales: the literary allusion is perhaps less obvious to the contemporary reader than to the reader/listener of the fifteenth century, but that can be remedied through a footnote. The linguistic level poses a stronger dilemma: Dunbar’s Middle Scots is at

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a great temporal and geographical remove from today’s Scotland and Italy, and that distance would disappear were the stanza to be rendered in contemporary Italian. As for the form, if it is easy enough to reproduce the structure of the stanza (it can be done, though it is difficult to recreate all the rhymes), we must ask ourselves how to render Dunbar’s iambic pentameters. Italian prosody is almost entirely syllabic, whereas English prosody is half accentual, half syllabic.

There is no single strategy to produce an ‘archaizing’ version, or, for that matter, a ‘modernizing’ one: the translator of poetry, as James S. Holmes has written, is a ‘metapoet’, i.e., he/she has to make his/her choices not only as a ‘secondary author’, but also as a literary critic (Holmes 1969/1978: 11), and with an eye to the context in which his/her version will be published. In producing a version of the whole poem for an Italian literary magazine, I thought it expedient to render the Scottish iambic pentameters with Italian hendecasyllables, Dunbar’s Middle Scots with Petrarch’s Tuscan (or, the imitation Tuscan of Petrarch’s successors).

This variety of Italian, or Tuscan, was chosen for both literary and pragmatic reasons: on the one hand, Petrarch’s Tuscan was the most popular Italian idiom in the British isles between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries; on the other, the use of a concise poetic diction, where elisions could be employed, made it easier to contain the ten syllables of the Scottish line in the eleven of the Italian.

If one remembers that the stanza form and the rhymes had to be kept as well, the translation became a sort of tour de force, for the reader even more than the translator: Fuggito Marzo e’ suoi cangianti venti, E poi ch’Aprile e le argentate piogge Levaron l’ultima bufera a Oriente, La madre d’ogne fior, splendente Maggio, Facea gli augelli cominciar lor canti D’in tra i teneri bocci e bianchi e rossi, Dalla dolce armonia a gioia mossi; [Once March and its changing winds had flown, And when April and its silver rains Had taken away their last storm in the East, The mother of all flowers, dazzling May, Made the birds begin their song

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Between the tender red and white buds, Moved to joy by this sweet harmony;] This version of the first stanza, because of the effect of ‘closure’ of metre and rhyme, can appear perfectly well-done: actually, in order to obtain the ‘archaizing’ effect, some inaccuracies have been committed.

First of all, the tenses are different: the past perfect of the source text, which should be matched by Italian trapassato prossimo or remoto, and which was followed in the second stanza by the simple past (Italian passato remoto), has been rendered, for the sake of brevity, with Italian passato remoto from the third line onwards. Secondly, some details of the description have been altered: April ‘taking its leave of nature’ in the source becomes April ‘taking away its last storm’ in the target text; in the source, the birds’ song was ‘harmony which it was a delight to hear’, while in the target text the birds are moved to joyous singing by the harmony of the flowers. The translator, if he/she wants to write a fullfledged ‘archaizing’ version, must pay a price in terms of micro-textual precision.

Obviously, such a translation can be of some use if it is to be read by men and women of letters: it would perhaps be wrong to submit it to a widely-distributed publishing house or to one printing school or university schoolbooks. If a wider audience were to be addressed, the translator could choose the first of the three methods outlined above, i.e., produce a ‘crib’ for the reader to decipher the original; or he/she could write a ‘modernizing’ version at the formal and linguistic levels. Such a version would allow the translator to follow more accurately the consecutio temporum and the descriptive details: Quando Marzo se ne fu andato coi suoi venti cangianti, E Aprile, con le sue piogge d’argento, Si fu congedato dalla natura con una bufera a oriente, E la bella Maggio, la madre dei fiori, Ebbe fatto intonare agli uccelli i loro canti Fra i teneri odorosi fiori rossi e bianchi, La cui armonia era una gioia udire; [Once March had gone with its changing winds, And April, with its silver rains, Had taken its leave of nature with a storm in the east,

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And beautiful May, mother of flowers, Had made the birds strike up their songs Among the tender red and white flowers, Whose harmony it was a joy to hear;] This version does not renounce all rhetorical ornamentation, as seen in the web of rhyme/assonance/consonance (cangianti/argento/oriente/canti/bianchi; fiori/udire): but the liberation of the poem from the cages of rhyme and metre makes for livelier lines. It is to be noted that it would have been difficult to write a version displaying ‘archaizing’ features at the formal level and ‘modernizing’ features at the linguistic level, because the hendecasyllables need the condensation of Petrarch’s Tuscan. At the socio-cultural level, however, the poem is not ‘modernized’, if not for the estranging effect produced on the original material by the ‘modernizing’ form and language.

3.1 A compromise The translator is fortunately not compelled to choose only one ‘archaizing’ or ‘modernizing’ option at each level, just as he/she is not compelled to choose only one ‘foreignizing’ or ‘domesticating’ strategy in translating contemporary works written in English and Scots. In the actual process of translating, different techniques and strategies are used at different points of the ‘bi-text’. In translating a poem written in ‘middle Scots’, the translator may well mix Petrarch’s with Montale’s Italian, rhymed hendecasyllables with unrhymed longer lines – also because at any stage of his/her work, the translator is concerned not so much with what is right and correct as with what is possible and feasible.

A compromising strategy yields excellent results in translating William Fowler, a Scottish poet who followed James VI of Scotland when he moved to London to become James I. Fowler’s sonnets are of good, but not of the highest, quality, and therefore, the translator need not be afraid to make them worse: Newe wondar of the world, one mo then seaven, whose presence was my pryde and absence payne, whils this vyld pest in distance heth vs driven, I equal absence loss with deaths agayne:

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for quhen by her we mortallye lye slayne, to the immortall thrones our soule dois flie, euen so my harte in this impatient payne abondons this my corss and fleyes to thee. deathe maks vs leave the derest things we see, this pest depryvs me of your heunlye face; deathe cruell is, so absence is to me; deathe full of frayes, all ioyes doth absence chase: yet death putts end to all our noysome caire, bot in this absence myne revius the maire. (Fowler 1914: 160) This sonnet is a very good sample of Fowler’s technique. Fowler’s models are Italian, above all Petrarch and Petrarch’s imitators (in this case, the starting point is poem CCCIX of Petrarca’s Canzoniere: ‘L’alto et novo miracol ch’à dì nostri’). Fowler’s sonnets, though, are not translations but free imitations: here as elsewhere, he picks up the first line from Petrarch and writes a modified version of that line which gives him the cue to write an original poem. Fowler’s imitation is free in form as well as in language, because he prefers the English to the Italian sonnet form.

I translated this sonnet for a literary magazine, more precisely for an issue about the English (and Scottish) imitators of Petrarch.

Therefore, also given Fowler’s methods, I thought that the allusion to Petrarch had to be perceptible but not direct; that the form of the sonnet could be free – neither the Italian nor the English form; that the sonnet had better be written in a half ‘archaizing’, half ‘modernizing’ language, half Petrarch’s Tuscan, half contemporary Italian. The resulting poem is more readable than the ‘archaizing’ version of Dunbar: Del mondo nuova, ottava meraviglia, gioia se resti, doglia quando parti, questa peste in esilio ci ha mandati, nella distanza ch’è come una morte: come quando senz’anima si giace ai troni eterni volano le anime, così il mio cuore pesto senza pace la mia carcassa lascia, e vola a te.

La morte tutto ciò che amiamo invola,

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tuo volto celestiale questa peste; sì fera la morte, sì per me distanza; la morte pena, non meno l’assenza: ma morte pone fine ad ogni cura, assenza ogni mia cura aumenta ognora.

[Of the world new, eight wonder, joy if you remain, grief if you go, this plague has exiled us, in the distance which is like a death: as when one lies soulless and one’s soul flies to the eternal thrones, so my beaten heart which has no peace leaves my carcass, and flies to you.

Death steals away all we love, this plague your heavenly visage; as fierce death, so distance is to me; death grief, absence no less grief: but death brings every care to an end, absence increases my care more and more.]

This version is close to both Fowler’s original and Fowler’s models, and yet it adheres to neither. It is written in hendecasyllables, but the rhymes are more or less free (the sonnet form is neither Italian nor Scottish): I have put in a rhyme, an assonance or a consonance wherever possible, and at all costs only in the final couplet. The target text modifies the diction, the syntax, the tenses, and the rhetorical organization of the source rather freely.

From the point of view of poetic diction, modern (‘pesto’, ‘carcassa’) and archaic (‘doglia’, ‘fera’, ‘cura’) words are combined. From the point of view of syntax, ‘archaizing’ clauses (‘come quando senz’anima si giace’) are set beside less estranging ones (‘ai troni eterni volano le anime’). Since Fowler’s is a free imitation of an Italian sonnet, the translator produces a sort of imaginary original of the Scottish sonnet, but in such a way as to make it readable for the contemporary reader.

4 CONCLUSION In his famous essay on translation, ‘Des tours de Babel’, Jacques Derrida notes one common shortcoming of translation theories, that in

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dealing with the passage from one language into another (‘des passages d’une langue a l’autre’) they usually do not consider the possibility that a text be written in more than one language (‘la possibilité pour des langues d’être impliquées à plus de deux dans un texte’). What Derrida has in mind are those literary texts whose authors, like James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, employ more than one language to explore the possibilities of literature and human communication (Derrida 1987: 207208). Such extreme cases demonstrate that very often, it is not enough for the translator to possess expert knowledge of two languages and two cultures: for there are source texts which force him/her to have at least a passing acquaintance with languages and cultures other than those directly implicated in the transaction.

The translator of texts belonging to bilingual or multilingual countries (or, to countries where two or more varieties of the same language are spoken) is in a slightly different situation, and has to face slightly different problems. In order to translate adequately, or at least consciously, the translator has to possess sociolinguistic notions about the environment which has produced the source text – i.e., notions about the settings, participants, purpose, key, and channels which motivate the use of one code or another (Coulthard 1977: 42-46). Once he/she has reached an understanding of the sociolinguistic context of situation of the source text, he/she is left with his/her doubts as to rendering: how can those variables be transferred or accounted for in the target text?

The translator of old texts, written in an outdated form of the source language, has to face similar dilemmas and to ask him/herself similar questions – for after all, from the translator’s point of view, diachronic layers are technically equivalent to synchronic ones; a text written in Middle Scots posits an implicit dualism between Middle and Contemporary Scots, just as a contemporary text may posit an implicit or explicit dualism between Scots and English. Again, even if the translator is in possession of the necessary historical notions to fully understand the original, those notions define a range of possibilities but leave the final decisions in the his/her hands.

As always happens in translation, the answers to all questions and doubts are ultimately atomistic – each translator, faced with each single translation task, will choose different strategies – but not empirical: for

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the translator’s strategy will at best be dictated not only by personal taste, but also by a thorough knowledge of the sociolinguistic situation and historical development of the source language and culture.

WORKS CITED Coulthard, M. 1977. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis.

London: Longman.

Derrida, J. 1987 ‘Des tours de Babel’ in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée.

Douglas Brown, G. 1901/1985. The House with the Green Shutters.

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Fishman, J.A. 1971/1972 ‘The relationship between Micro- and Macro-Sociolinguistics in the Study of Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When’ in J.B. Pride, Janet Holmes, eds. Sociolinguistics.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 15-32.

Fowler, W. 1914. The Works of William Fowler: Secretary to Queen Anne, Wife of James VI. Edited with introduction, appendix, notes and glossary by Henry W. Meikle, Vol. 1. Edinburgh/London: The Scottish Text Society.

Harris, B. 1988 ‘Bi-text: A New Concept in Translation Theory’.

Language Monthly 54: 8-10.

Hatim, B., I. Mason 1990/1992. Discourse and the Translator.

London/New York: Longman.

Holmes, J.S. 1969/1978 ‘Poem and Metapoem: Poetry from Dutch to English’ in Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 9-22.

Holmes, J.S. 1971/1978 ‘The Cross-Temporal Factor in Verse Translation’ in Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 34-44.

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Lefevere, A. 1975. Translating Poetry. Seven Strategies and a Blueprint. Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum.

Lochhead, L. 1991. Bagpipe Muzak. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

MacDiarmid, H. 1992. Selected Poems, ed. by Alan Riach and Michael Grieve. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Newmark, P. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. Prentice Hall: Hemel Hempstead.

Schleiermacher, F. 1816 ‘Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’. Abhandlungen der philosophischen Klasse der KöniglichPreussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften aus den Jahren 1812-1813: 143-72.

Taft, R. 1981 ‘The Role and Personality of the Mediator’ in S. Bochner, ed. The Mediating Person. Bridges Between Cultures. Cambridge: Shenkman, 53-88.

Vinay, J.-P., J. Darbelnet 1958/1977. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Methode de traduction. Nouvelle édition revue et corrigée. Paris: Didier.

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 23

A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson Fiona J. Mackintosh University of Edinburgh

The Argentinian poet Silvina Ocampo’s translation of Emily Dickinson has gone through three editions, and was praised

by Jorge Luis Borges as ‘a sort of happy transmigration’.

Borges implies that the versions are respectful, literal, and that the translation is an authentic expression of Dickinson’s poetic diction. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the accuracy of Borges’ description and to examine the thorny questions of ‘faithfulness’ and ‘literalness’ in order to find out whether Ocampo’s apparent mistranslations might be part of a deforming tendency.

Las traducciones que hizo la poeta argentina Silvina Ocampo de Emily Dickinson se han reeditado tres veces, y Jorge Luis Borges las ha calificado de ‘una suerte de venturosa transmigración’. Borges implica que las versiones de Ocampo son respetuosas, literales, y que las traducciones expresan auténticamente la voz poética de Dickinson. El propósito de esta ponencia es evaluar la certeza de la descripción de Borges, y examinar las cuestiones espinosas de la ‘fidelidad’ y la ‘literalidad’, para investigar si, quizás, lo que parece mal traducido por Ocampo podría ser parte de una tendencia deformadora generalizada.

Key words: Silvina Ocampo – Emily Dickinson – Jorge Luis Borges – translation – faithfulness - literalness - poetry - transmigration Palabras clave: Silvina Ocampo – Emily Dickinson – Jorge Luis Borges – traducción – fidelidad – literalidad – poesía – transmigración

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Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Silvina Ocampo is one among many translators into Spanish of the New England poet Emily Dickinson’s poetry.1 Her volume Poemas de Emily Dickinson, first published in 1985 in time for the centenary of Dickinson’s death and containing a selection of nearly 600 poems, has gone through three editions.2 This book appeared in Spain in the prestigious series Marginales, whose title implicitly engages with the politics of canon-formation, a question which concerns scholars of both Ocampo and Dickinson in their respective spheres, since both women were notorious for their resistance to self-promotion (though Dickinson’s self-confinement was more severe).

I shall begin by briefly putting this substantial translation project of Ocampo into context. Ocampo had been working on these translations for several years prior to their publication, and as far as I know the commission (using Vermeer’s term) to translate Dickinson was her own.3 Ocampo (1903-1993) maintained throughout her life a significant relationship with poetry in the English language, through her various activities as reader, translator and writer. Although Silvina Ocampo was not as pro-active in promoting pan-American and transatlantic cultural exchange as her elder sister Victoria, who founded the influential literary and cultural magazine, Sur, nevertheless – partly thanks to her family’s governesses - she read and spoke English and French before Spanish,4 and translated poetry (and some short prose) from both these languages.

She contributed translations to various special issues of Sur, and was actively involved in the production of the 1949 anthology Poetas líricos ingleses, ‘inglés’ here being interpreted broadly as ‘English-language’ and including such poets as Walt Whitman, to whose poetry Ocampo’s own has been compared.5 Her main contribution to the Poetas líricos ingleses was in the form of a long introductory survey essay, which she concludes with a vision of intertextual poetic links and the importance of translation, particularly that carried out by poets, from which we can reasonably deduce that she felt that the translation of poetry in particular was a task for poets. los versos […] forman universos con sus diálogos […]

Un parentesco los une, una voluntad divina va […] asociándolos a otras vidas futuras. […] Nunca se harán bastantes traducciones (traducciones llevadas a cabo por poetas), ni se tratará bastante de hacer pasar de un idioma a otro la voz inmortal e inspiradora de los poetas .6

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 25

Dickinson’s poetic universe or ‘mental picture’ (to use Ortega’s term) can be seen to be associated with a future life in the work of Ocampo.7 We can sense the similarities, since many of the Dickinson poems Ocampo chooses to translate resonate with themes from her own poetry and prose. A few examples of this affinity: Dickinson’s poem 167, whose second verse depicts “homesick feet / Upon a foreign shore — / Haunted by native lands, the while — / And blue — beloved air!” touches a chord with Ocampo’s perversely homesick poem, ‘El balcón’.8 Likewise, Dickinson’s poem 33 “If recollecting were forgetting, / Then I remember not” (EDJ, 21) calls to mind many of Ocampo’s poems which play with the conceits of memory and oblivion; Ocampo’s own ‘Alquimia traslúcida’ (PC II, 32) echoes the kind of poetic voice so frequent in Dickinson which imagines itself into objects, plants, birds or insects in nature.

Ocampo also indulges, in the ‘Poemas breves’ collected posthumously

by Noemí Ulla, in the kind of aphoristic philosophical reflections beloved of Dickinson; compare for instance Ocampo’s ‘Perpetuidad’: “¡Qué hermafrodita es el remordimiento!” (PC II, 272) with Dickinson’s Poem 21: “We lose — because we win — / Gamblers — recollecting which / Toss their dice again!” (EDJ, 15) or various of Ocampo’s other epigrammatic poems, many of which are reminiscent of Dickinson: ‘Sacrificios Puros’ Le basta a la mentira, la mentira. / ¡Pero cuántas mentiras la verdad necesita / para que la comprendan! (PC II, 270) ‘Estado de gracia’ Con qué bondad nos escuchaba dios / cuando aún no sabíamos hablar. (PC II, 275) ‘Apremio’ Nuestra impaciencia por morir proviene / de tener que morir sin remisión. (PC II, 277) Gender ambiguities are also a link between the universes of the two writers; critics have probed Dickinson’s passionate letters to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson,9 and likewise have scrutinized Ocampo’s relationship with the Argentine poet, Alejandra Pizarnik.10

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Returning now to Ocampo’s insistence in the earlier quotation on the importance of poets translating other poets, this would seem to suggest that Ocampo would prioritize the overall poetic impact of the new version in her approach to translation. This, however, appears not to be the case in her versions of Dickinson, which are described in somewhat ambiguous terms by Jorge Luis Borges in his prologue. The dust jacket of the book labels him as ‘portavoz de esta “comunión”’ [between Dickinson and Ocampo]; as spokesperson he implicitly defines Ocampo’s skopos as one of respect and faithfulness, but with something of a coded criticism stemming from his own views on translation: He sospechado que el concepto de versión literal […] procede de los fieles que no se atrevían a cambiar una palabra dictada por el Espíritu. Emily Dickinson parece haber inspirado a Silvina Ocampo un respeto análogo.

Casi siempre, en este volumen, tenemos las palabras originales en el mismo orden.

No es cotidiano el hecho de un poeta traducido por otro poeta. Silvina Ocampo es, fuera de duda, la máxima poeta argentina; la cadencia, la entonación, la pudorosa complejidad de Emily Dickinson aguardan al lector de estas páginas, en una suerte de venturosa transmigración.11 Borges’ delicately skeptical handling of the ‘concept’ of a literal version implies criticism in its use of the phrase ‘no se atrevían’; we infer that Borges would be more bold. Saying that Ocampo’s translations give us ‘las palabras originales en el mismo orden’ is obviously provocative, since many words do not have a direct equivalent from English into Spanish, or those that appear cognate have a set of connotations and associations which do not exactly overlap or coincide. However, Borges is suggesting a certain kind of ‘syntactical’ fidelity, which, in general, Ocampo does observe. At this point, a consideration of Borges’ own ideas on translation is apt, excellently summarized by Efraín Kristal: For Borges, a literal translation attempts to maintain all the details of the original, but changes the emphasis (understood as meanings, connotations, associations, and effects of the work). A “recreation,” on the other hand, omits many details to conserve the emphasis of the work,

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and it may add interpolations. Since a “copy” maintains both the details and the emphasis that matter in a discussion of a work, most translations, especially prose translations, include some measure of “copying”. A faithful translation, for Borges, retains the meanings and effects of the work, whereas an unfaithful translation changes them. A literal translation that changes the emphasis of the work is therefore unfaithful.12 Taking all these subtle distinctions into account we should reassess Borges’ description of Ocampo’s achievement. By drawing an analogy between her translation praxis and ‘los fieles’, Borges deliberately evokes the notorious translation minefield of ‘faithfulness’ or ‘fidelity’ to the original, and raises the question in our minds of whether or not Ocampo’s versions are faithful. Saying that ‘la cadencia, la entonación, la pudorosa complejidad de Emily Dickinson aguardan al lector de estas páginas’ implies a kind of spiritual ‘recreation’ which aims primarily at the poetic effect, including aspects of sound and rhythm, but this would also imply changing details in order to prioritize and achieve that effect. Therefore, the ‘faithful’ who dare not change a word of Scripture, may make – in Borges’ terms – unfaithful translators. His final phrase ‘venturosa transmigración’ suggests that Ocampo’s versions give a sense of Dickinson’s soul having passed into Ocampo’s body. What is at stake here is what exactly constitutes this soul. It is true that Ocampo often gives a translation that is close to the original in that it follows Dickinson word for word, but that does not guarantee a ‘faithful’ reproduction of the way that Dickinson’s English invites us to make sense of her poems; not only because word-for-word versions can have perverse effects with the inevitable shifts in register, connotation and often number of syllables that this entails, but also because there are many other ‘semiotic codes’ (see note 13) of Dickinson’s for which Ocampo shows less respect. We therefore cannot easily reconcile all aspects of Borges’ ambiguous description. By examining various phrases from Dickinson’s poems alongside Ocampo’s versions of them, I aim to demonstrate that not only did those translations which are (in Borges’ terms) analagous to a version by ‘los fieles’ lead Ocampo into distortions in her renderings of Dickinson, but also that Ocampo has - to use Berman’s terms - certain ‘deforming tendencies’, arising from her unfaithfulness to these other semiotic aspects of the poetry such as connotations and typography, which belie or at least complicate Borges’ notion of the ‘venturosa transmigración’.

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Most visually apparent of these deforming tendencies is her cavalier attitude towards ‘semiotic codes’ such as Dickinson’s trademark capitalization of letters and use of the dash, both commented on by Lisa Rose Bradford in her study of several Spanish versions of Poem 712, ‘Because I could not stop for Death’.13 Ocampo is not alone in this amongst translators – see for example the French translations by Guy Jean Forgue, which are also fairly free with the punctuation.14 This omission of some punctuation can have quite marked consequences, for instance in Poem 268, where ‘Me, change! Me, alter!’ (EDJ, 122) – in which the comma inserts a note of questioning and disbelief – becomes ‘¡Yo cambio! ¡Yo altero!’ (Poemas, 61), which sounds like a triumphant, almost defiant assertion. In Poem 62 there is also serious disregard for multiple semiotic messages given through punctuation and typography – compare the two versions below: May this “dishonor” be? (EDJ, 32)15 ¿Puede esto ser deshonor? (Poemas, 27) In the English, the italics place a strong emphasis on ‘this’ (which the reader struggles to identify – is it the poet’s present circumstance or something more/less tangible?) as distinct from ‘others’. Putting ‘dishonor’ in speech marks highlights its status as a quotation (from the first line of the poem, which in turn quotes the Bible, ‘sown in dishonor’) but also indicates a certain distancing and skepticism on the part of the poetic voice, which is the dominant mood of the poem. Neither of these typographical or punctuation details are present in Ocampo’s version; such flattening or distortion of the ambiguous attitude towards religion found in Dickinson is a recurrent feature of Ocampo’s versions, and is strikingly at odds with her ‘faithfulness’ to the syntax.

In terms of omitting capital letters (which Ocampo does almost universally), various vital effects of heightened allegorical, portentous or religious tone are lost. For example, in Poem 7, Dickinson capitalizes almost every noun: Crocus, Vassal, Hallelujah, Bargemen, Diver’s, Sea, Pinions, Seraph’s, Canvas, Immortality, Village, Angels, Cantons, Classics and Dark, but does not capitalize either ‘resurrection’ or ‘faith’, which seem therefore deliberately highlighted by the absence of capital letter.

In her translation, Ocampo capitalizes only one word, ‘Serafín’, which appears arbitrary in the context. Again, this is an aspect in which Ocampo

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 29

could unproblematically be ‘faithful’, therefore not do so suggests either carelessness or a deforming tendency.

In the following example from Poem 18, which is a good example of Ocampo giving us ‘las palabras originales en el mismo orden’, the purely poetic effect of alliteration, heightened by capitals, is inevitably lost in translation, since the ‘equivalent’ Spanish words do not alliterate, although they do incidentally have a pleasing assonance and rhythmic patterning. However, retaining the capitals in Spanish would at least have retained in a visual typographical dimension Dickinson’s subversive gesture towards an alternative Trinitarian formula to the standard patriarchal Father, Son and Holy Ghost: Summer — Sister — Seraph! […]

In the name of the Bee — And of the Butterfly — And of the Breeze — Amen! (EDJ, 14) ¡verano — hermana — serafín […]

En el nombre de la abeja — y de la mariposa — y de la brisa — ¡amén! (Poemas, 19) Most linguistically striking of her deforming tendencies are Ocampo’s many apparent mis-translations. For example, Poem 23, ‘When the woods were painted’ (EDJ, 16), referring to autumn colours, is rendered as ‘cuando se pintaron las maderas’ (Poemas, 20) giving us a carpentry or DIY semantic field, rather than nature; Ocampo’s version of Poem 458, ‘Like Eyes that looked on Wastes — ’ (EDJ, 220), where wastes refers to a wilderness (as confirmed by line 4), rather than transporting us imaginatively to the pampas or the llanos gains a more urban Latin American flavour through the unfortunate phrase ‘Como ojos que miran las basuras — ’ (Poemas, 118), conjuring up heaps of trash.

Other apparent mistranslations seem due to false friends, though make some sense, for example Poem 249, ‘Might I but moor — Tonight — / In Thee!’ (EDJ, 114) becomes ‘¡Ah! ¡si pudiera morar — esta noche

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— en ti!’ (Poemas, 55) where ‘morar’ though looking cognate means to stay or dwell and loses the nautical allusion entirely, which would require the verb ‘amarrar’ in Spanish. The verb ‘morar’ gives the Spanish version a quasi-mystical connotation, perhaps calling to mind for Spanish readers such poems as Santa Teresa de Jesús’ ‘Castillo interior o las moradas’.16 Poem 280 contains the line ‘And then a Plank in Reason broke’ (EDJ, 129), continuing a metaphor of wooden boards, which Ocampo has apparently read as ‘blank’, providing us with ‘y luego un vacío en la razón, se quebró’ (Poemas, 67), which becomes immediately more philosophical and less easily visualized. In Borges’ terms, both such translations might be regarded as unfaithful yet at the same time in some way successful (see Kristal, p. 33), particularly since the first example does have something of Dickinson’s ‘soul’ by applying words associated with divine love to a human relationship (see later discussion of poem 405).

Less obvious, and more ambiguous in its intentionality is Ocampo’s ‘destruction of underlying networks of signification’, to use Berman’s category, such as the network which relates to issues of religious faith and belief, an area of significance of paramount importance in Dickinson’s universe.17 Her tendency appears to be towards replacing this network with words associated with chance or fate, or simply grounded in more tangible experience. The question is, was she simply a careless translator with an insufficiently sophisticated command of English, or are there patterns of meaning relating to overall philosophical and religious beliefs in Ocampo’s poetic universe which do not coincide with those of Dickinson and which therefore emerge reshaped in translation? Certain apparent careless mistranslations may in fact fit into the overall pattern of this deforming tendency as being dictated by a differing world view. Similarly, questions of gender and personal relationships, so complex and multilayered in Dickinson (as explored by H. Jordan Landry and Sylvia Henneberg18) are often blurred or altered by Ocampo in a way which is characteristic of the deliberate gender ambiguity of much of her own poetry and prose.

In Dickinson, there are many key words which recur in a variety of different poems, and which therefore make intertextual links between the poems. Since there is often very little context in Dickinson’s poems to assist the translator as reader in initial interpretations of the poems (as

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 31

Lynn Shakinovsky has observed)19, these key words take on greater importance as signifiers in their own right. Ocampo as a translator appears not to make these connections, despite her earlier quoted remark about ‘poems […] creat[ing] universes with their dialogues’, which would suggest a holistic approach within and beyond an individual poet’s work.

Ocampo therefore destroys an element of unity in the Dickinson œuvre by translating these key words in different ways. For example, ‘Robin’; Ocampo variously translates this as ‘pájaro’ (poem 5) or ‘tordo’ (poems 23, 128 and 188) but never as ‘petirrojo’, and never capitalizes the word, thus removing both the inter-poem links and the possible productive ambiguity of this looking like a proper name as well as a bird.20 Moving from the level of individual words to that of the phrase, one which Dickinson repeats in two different poems is ‘The Debauchee of Dews’ in Poem 128 (EDJ, 60), which recurs as ‘Debauchee of Dew’ in Poem 214 (EDJ, 99). A careful translator who wished to preserve the link this distinctive and memorable phrase naturally creates between the two poems in the mind of the attentive reader would consider, at least, translating them in the same way (though observing the plural/singular change). Ocampo, however, translates it in Poem 128 as ‘disoluta del rocío’ (Poemas, 38) and in Poem 214 as ‘pervertida de rocío’ (Poemas, 49), giving the second a different, more sexual charge, and ignoring the plural, ‘dews’.

To illustrate some of the more ambiguous deforming tendencies in the Ocampo versions which ‘destroy underlying networks of signification’, I will give a few concrete examples; firstly regarding the blurring of gender in Poem 46, and secondly regarding the distortion of philosophical, religious or emotional signification from Poems 18, 254, 269, 322 and 405.

Poem 46 (EDJ, 26; Poemas, 23-24) centres around the pledging of an oath by the poet, but rather than swearing on the Bible, the poet pledges by insects and flowers (recalling Poem 18 discussed earlier).

However, all the flowers named by the poet also have a feminine charge, some also doubling as girls’ names in English, a fact which is heightened

by Dickinson’s use of capital letters: ‘I bring my Rose’, ‘By Daisy called from hillside’, ‘Blossom and I’. The feminine charge is reinforced in the following and penultimate line, ‘Her oath, and mine’. Ocampo’s version

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omits the capitals on ‘rosa’ and ‘margarita’ (despite the fact that both of these could also double as girls’ names in Spanish), pluralizes daisy to ‘por las margaritas de la montaña’ making the pledge less intense and personal, and renders ‘Blossom and I’ as ‘Florecimiento y yo’, where the Spanish word is much more metaphorical than literal, reserved for expressions like ‘el florecimiento de la cultura renacentista’. It is also a masculine word, whereas choosing ‘flor’ (a girl’s name in Spanish) would have kept the feminine charge of the original. And of course, ‘her oath’ becomes ‘su promesa’ in Spanish, non gender-specific and meaning either his or her, only avoidable by a phrase such as ‘de ella’ which Ocampo has not chosen to use. In this way, the underlying feminine (and possibly lesbian) charge of the poet’s link to nature is lost.

In terms of altering the philosophical, religious or emotional charge behind certain of the poems, it is worth considering again Poem 18 (EDJ, 14; Poemas, 19). Despite offering, as I have mentioned, an alternative Trinity in this poem, nevertheless there is an underlying sense of trust in a higher power in the phrase ‘We trust that she was willing — / We ask that we may be’, referring to a person at the moment of death. Ocampo alters and undermines the sense of this entirely, giving us ‘creíamos que ella estaría de acuerdo — / preguntamos si lo estaba’, that is, ‘we believed or thought that she would be willing — / we ask whether she was’. The second phrase therefore serves to cast doubt on the first, rather than binding the poet and congregation to the recently dead person in a spirit of trust.

Similarly in her translation of Poem 254 (EDJ, 116; Poemas, 56), Ocampo makes two significant changes to the sense which render her version less hopeful than Dickinson’s. Firstly, where Dickinson declares that ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’, which – by using the definite article – gives hope a specificity and a tangible form and presence, Ocampo omits the definite article, substituting instead the vague ‘algo’, something: ‘ “Esperanza” es algo con plumas’, which makes hope seem less substantial and less immediately graspable. In the second stanza of this same poem, Dickinson further bolsters hope by saying that ‘sore must be the storm — / That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm’, in other words, it would have to be a really terrible storm to dash all hope. Ocampo, by her alteration of tenses from what should logically be conditional and/or imperfect subjunctive in Spanish, makes

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it sound as though the storm succeeded. Her translation is rather nonsensical, however, since she translates sore in its literal sense as wounded, ‘herida’, and translates ‘so many’ as ‘so much’, with the effect of removing the community of people with hope and closing the bird in on itself for warmth in a pathetic kind of way: ‘y herida tiene que estar la tormenta — / que pudo abatir al pajarito / que reservó tanto calor’.

The translation of Poem 269 gives a slant which again is more in keeping with Ocampo’s own poetic aesthetic, which is one of not trying to limit pain or grief, but simply to probe its intensity and find images in which to do so. Whereas Dickinson’s original poem urges us to ‘Limit — how deep a bleeding go!’ (EDJ, 123), Ocampo’s version simply measures – but does not attempt to staunch – the loss of blood: ‘¡Mide el fluir de la sangre!’ (Poemas, 61). A similar intensification of, and dwelling on, pain comes in Poem 322, which in Dickinson ends: To that new Marriage, Justified — through Calvaries of Love — (EDJ, 153) Ocampo makes the Calvaries singular, Calvary, thereby defining the whole quality of love as a painful trial, rather than a series of smaller instances of suffering: para esa boda nueva, vindicada — a través del calvario del amor — (Poemas, 79).

The gloomier aspect this reveals on interpersonal relationships becomes further complicated in Ocampo’s version of Poem 405. In the original, this poem intertwines love for another person with the vocabulary of divine love, referring to ‘the Sacrament — of Him — ’ and to the possibility that Hope (of his arrival) might ‘blaspheme the place — / Ordained to Suffering’ (EDJ, 193). Ocampo maintains the religious associations in ‘sacramento — de él’ (Poemas, 102) but instead of hope blaspheming, hope might ‘violar el lugar’, violar being a verb associated not only with violating a sacred place, but also – and more commonly – with sexual violence. Admittedly Dickinson’s transitive use of the verb blaspheme is idiosyncratic, and ‘blasfemar’ is usually intransitive in Spanish, but could not a case be made for carrying over the idiosyncratic verbal trope into Spanish, rather than bringing in the negative sexual connotations of ‘violate’, which makes the religious aspect of the dynamics

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of desire spelt out by Dickinson less prominent? Where Dickinson’s poem uses religious language to idolize the absent desired one, the jarring note of the verb ‘violar’ in Ocampo’s version suggests that the person’s arrival would not be upsetting the sacred space of Loneliness but rather intruding unwantedly upon the speaker herself. The final stanza changes from a religious network of signification to a geographical one, referring to the desired meeting with the loved one as ‘Land in Sight’ and ‘My Blue Peninsula’.

It might be easier To fail — with Land in sight Than gain — My Blue Peninsula To Perish — of Delight Ocampo, again, maintains the semantic field, but rather than simply gaining, or reaching, this Peninsula, Ocampo reads the verb ‘gain’ in the sense of acquiring territory. She therefore brings a colonial feel to the translation with the verb conquistar: ‘conquistar — mi azul península’ (Poemas, 102) as if she were engaged in a struggle for territory with the loved one. This again seems to show Ocampo bringing – subconsciously or otherwise – the kind of relational dynamics which recur in her own poetry to her translation of Dickinson, twisting or distorting Dickinson’s network of religious, sentimental and natural vocabulary and its carefully loaded capitals and presenting the Spanish reader with a soul which has neither the rhythm, intonation nor modest complexity of the original, but is rougher and less trusting.

Returning then to Borges’ careful wording in describing Ocampo’s translatorly practice as analagous to ‘los fieles’: his reference to her wordfor-word adherence to Dickinson’s syntax should perhaps, then, be read as somewhat skeptical – skeptical not only about the very concept of a ‘versión literal’ but also about the merits of being literal on the level of individual words, and thereby sacrificing some of the effects of the original. We can see Borges’ skepticism towards ‘faithfulness’ in general if we look at another such prologue that Borges wrote for Ocampo in a book published only one year earlier than these Dickinson translations, namely Breve santoral, a collaborative work of poetry and visual art on twelve Saints, produced by Ocampo and Norah Borges, Jorge Luis’ sister.

In his prologue, he relativizes the Saints, making them as real or fantastic

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 35

as Roman Gods, and says that rather than having faith, the artist need only accept them in his or her imagination and play with them.21Likewise, in this ‘communion’ between the ‘soul’ of Dickinson and Ocampo, Borges – reading between the lines – perhaps sees Ocampo’s ‘faithfulness’ as something equally mythical. With his excellent command of English, he would no doubt see that these ‘literal’ versions (in the syntactical sense alone) were sometimes taking Ocampo off in quite different directions from the original as regards the other necessary elements of poetry such as rhythm and sounds, and overall effect. Perhaps the way to interpret Borges’ provocative prologue is therefore to read it as hinting that the transmigration of Dickinson’s soul into Ocampo has been accomplished, but that in a new ‘body’, the soul acquires different characteristics. This transmigration is inevitably accompanied by a transmutation, a shift of emphasis and effect in the nature of ‘faith’ and of other key networks of signification within the poetry. The adjective ‘venturosa’ may have to be interpreted as describing a serendipitously felicitous (and occasionally infelicitous) - but not unchanged - expression of Dickinson’s soul.

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NOTES 1

Other versions of her poetry in Spanish are: Emily Dickinson Poemas (Madrid: Visor, 1979), selection and translation by Maria Manent; Emily Dickinson, Poemas (Barcelona: Bosch, 1980), introduction, verse translations and notes by Ricardo Jordana and María Dolores Macarulla; Emily Dickinson Obra escogida (Madrid: Torremozas, 1989), selection, translation and biographical note by Ernestina Champomain and Juan José Domenchina; Emily Dickinson Poemas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987; 1992; bilingual edition in 2000), edited and translated by Margarita Ardanaz; Emily Dickinson: La soledad sonora (Madrid; Buenos Aires: Cruz del Sur, 2001), selection, prologue and translations by Lorenzo Oliván; Emily Dickinson: Algunos poemas (Granada: La Veleta, 2001), selection and translation by Carlos Pujol, and Emily Dickinson: Crónica de plata (Madrid: Hiperión, 2002), selection and translation by Manuel Villar Raso. Thanks to Marta Dahlgren for information on recent translations.

2

Emily Dickinson Poemas, selected and translated by Silvina Ocampo, prologue by Jorge Luis Borges (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1985).

Subsequent editions published in 1988 and 1997. Henceforth Poemas.

3

Hans J. Vermeer, ‘Skopos and commission in translational action’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 221-32, p. 229. Translation by Andrew Chesterman.

4

Patricia Marco refers to Ocampo’s ‘multilingual imagination’. See http://www.filo.uba.ar/contenidos/novedades/cont/listado/veran o_extracurriculares#3. Consulted February 2004.

5

See Helena Percas, ‘La original expresión poética de Silvina Ocampo’, in Revista Iberoamericana 19:38 (1954) 283-98, pp. 283-4 and 286.

6

Poetas líricos ingleses, selected by Ricardo Baeza, with preliminary study by Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Jackson, 1949), pp.xliiixliv.

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 37

7

José Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Misery and the Splendor of Translation’, translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 49-63.

8

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1960), p. 79. All subsequent references to Dickinson’s poems in English will be taken from this edition, henceforth EDJ. Silvina Ocampo, Poesía completa in 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2002 (vol.1) and 2003 (vol.2)), Vol. 1, p. 45. Subsequent references to Ocampo’s poetry will give just a volume (PC I or PC II ) and page number.

9

See Martha Ackmann, ‘Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson’, Review Essay on book of that title edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, The Emily Dickinson Journal 8.2 (1999), 111-13.

10

Alluded to by Marcelo Pichon Rivière in his suggestively titled article, ‘La vida misteriosa de Silvina Ocampo’, where he notes the existence of ‘cartas de Alejandra [Pizarnik] a Silvina, que entretejen una historia amorosa.’ He continues in voyeuristic tone: ‘Lentamente, esa historia apasionante […] abre las puertas de su recinto secreto.’ In Clarín, Cultura y Nación section, Buenos Aires, 6 September 1998, pp.4-5, p.5.

11

Transmigration or metempsychosis is a concept also explored by Ocampo herself in some of her early short stories, such as ‘El impostor’: ‘Pensé en la transmigración de las almas. Recordé algunas frases relacionadas con el dogma de la filosofía india: “El alma está en el cuerpo como el pájaro en la jaula”. “El cuerpo hace largos viajes y cuando […] perece lo abandona, como al casco de un barco, para buscar otro y gobernarlo como al anterior.”’

In Cuentos completos I, p.112.

12

Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2002), pp. 32-33.

13

Lisa Rose Bradford, ‘La visión de las versiones: un estudio de diferencias/resistencias en Emily Dickinson’, in CELEHIS: Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas 4:4-5 (1995) 117-32.

Bradford highlights Dickinson’s ‘uso idiosincrático y, por ende,

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de especial carga semántica de rayas y mayúsculas’ (p.120), saying that Ocampo’s version of poem 712 was criticised by Bradford’s translation workshop for its ‘falta de respeto hacia las marcas líricas y genéricas del poema’ (p. 121). Bradford disagrees openly with Borges’ statement about Dickinson’s ‘cadence’ awaiting the reader in Ocampo’s versions; she states that ‘las incongruencias y la irregularidad rítmica borran lo “pudoroso” de la complejidad, y también alteran la cadencia sencilla característica de Dickinson’ (p. 123). In her opinion, in order to render faithfully the poetry of Emily Dickinson into another language, ‘El discurso semiótico de la poeta […] debe traducirse con todos sus componentes – mayúsculas, rayas, y ritmos – para transplantar el valor prerreferencial [Bradford uses this in a Kristevan sense] que contiene en el nuevo idioma’ (op. cit., p.126).

14

Emily Dickinson, Poèmes (bilingual edition), French version by Guy Jean Forgue (Paris: Aubier, 1970).

15

The poem references 1 Corinthians 15, verses 42-44 on the resurrection of the dead.

16

In Místicos españoles, ed. by Luis Santullano (Madrid: Instituto-Escuela junta para ampliación de estudios, 1934), pp. 96-100.

17

Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, translated

by Lawrence Venuti, in The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 28497, p. 288. For one of many critical discussions of this network of signification in Dickinson’s work, see Kim Hosman, ‘Emily Dickinson’s Poetics of Translation’, in The Emily Dickinson Journal III.1 (1996) [consulted online, at http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/], which discusses Dickinson’s manipulation of the vocabulary of Calvinism.

18

H. Jordan Landry, ‘Animal / Insectual / Lesbian Sex: Dickinson’s Queer Version of the Birds and the Bees’, in The Emily Dickinson Journal IX:2 (2000) 42-54 and Sylvia Henneberg, ‘Neither Lesbian nor Straight: Multiple Eroticisms in Emily Dickinson’s Love Poetry’, in The Emily Dickinson Journal IV:2 (1995) [consulted online, see note above].

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 39

19

Lynn Shakinovsky, ‘No Frame of Reference: The Absence of Context in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry’, in The Emily Dickinson Journal III:2 (1994) [consulted online, see note above]. Shakinovsky states that Dickinson’s poetry is characterized by the ‘absence of the provision of a frame of reference inside which to read the poem’.

20

Such punning but on another name, Sue – which would obviously present great difficulty for the translator – is discussed by David Sullivan in ‘Suing Sue: Emily Dickinson addressing Susan Gilbert’, in The Emily Dickinson Journal V:1 (1996) [consulted online, see note above].

21

‘Coleridge dejó escrito que la fe poética es una suspensión voluntaria, o complaciente, de la incredulidad; en lo que se refiere al artista, basta que su imaginación acepte un hecho, que puede ser histórico o fabuloso. Juega parejamente con los doce trabajos de Hércules y con los exorcismos que obró Jesús.’ In Breve Santoral by Silvina Ocampo and Norah Borges (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1984), p. 5.

WORKS CITED Ackmann, Martha, 1999. ‘Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson’, Review of Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, eds. Open Me Carefully. The Emily Dickinson Journal 8.2, 111-13 Berman, Antoine, 2001. ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, translated by Lawrence Venuti, in Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. 284-97 Bradford, Lisa Rose, 1995. ‘La visión de las versiones: un estudio de diferencias/resistencias en Emily Dickinson’. CELEHIS: Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas 4:4-5, 117-32 Dickinson, Emily, 1960. Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.

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Dickinson, Emily, 1970. Poèmes, (bilingual edition), French version by Guy Jean Forgue. Paris: Aubier.

Dickinson, Emily, 1985. Poemas, selección y traducción de Silvina Ocampo, prólogo de Jorge Luis Borges. Barcelona: Tusquets.

Henneberg, Sylvia, 1995. ‘Neither Lesbian nor Straight: Multiple Eroticisms in Emily Dickinson’s Love Poetry’. The Emily Dickinson Journal IV:2 [Consulted online, at http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/] Hosman, Kim, 1996. ‘Emily Dickinson’s Poetics of Translation’.

The Emily Dickinson Journal III.1 [Consulted online, at http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/] Kristal, Efraín, 2002. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation.

Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Landry, H. Jordan, 2000. ‘Animal / Insectual / Lesbian Sex: Dickinson’s Queer Version of the Birds and the Bees’. The Emily Dickinson Journal IX:2, 42-54 Marco, Patricia,http://www.filo.uba.ar/contenidos/novedades/ cont/listado/verano_extracurriculares#3 [Consulted February 2004] Místicos españoles, 1934. Edición de Luis Santullano. Madrid: Instituto-Escuela junta para ampliación de estudios.

Ocampo, Silvina and Norah Borges, 1984. Breve Santoral. Buenos Aires, Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone.

Ocampo, Silvina, 1999. Cuentos completos I. Buenos Aires, Emecé.

Ortega y Gasset, José, 2001. ‘The Misery and the Splendor of Translation’, translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. 49-63 Percas, Helena, 1954. ‘La original expresión poética de Silvina Ocampo’. Revista Iberoamericana. 19:38, 283-98

Fiona J. Mackintosh A Happy Transmigration?: Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson 41

Pichon Rivière, Marcelo, 1998. ‘La vida misteriosa de Silvina Ocampo’.

Clarín, Cultura y Nación. Buenos Aires: 6 de septiembre, pp. 4-5 Poetas líricos ingleses, 1949. Selección de Ricardo Baeza, con estudio preliminar de Silvina Ocampo. Buenos Aires: Jackson.

Shakinovsky, Lynn, 1994. ‘No Frame of Reference: The Absence of Context in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry’. The Emily Dickinson Journal III:2 [Consulted online, at http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/] Sullivan, David, 1996. ‘Suing Sue: Emily Dickinson addressing Susan Gilbert’. The Emily Dickinson Journal V:1 [Consulted online, at http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/] Vermeer, Hans J., 2001. ‘Skopos and commission in translational action’, translated by Andrew Chesterman, in Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. 221-32

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A theoretical and practical approach to literary translation: the case of poetry Sonia Petisco Martínez Universidad Complutense de Madrid

It is very important to emphasise that everything, that is, everything worthwhile, everything truly human, is difficult, very difficult; so much so, that it is impossible.

José Ortega y Gasset

This paper gives a brief and general account of theories of translation, addressing frequent problems such as the differences between the systems of signifiers and signifieds of two languages or the difficulty in reproducing the authorial style of a poem. The theories developed by Nabokov (“absolute fidelity to the original”) and Bonnefoy (“enriching the language”) will be discussed. As a practical example, translations of the American poet Thomas Merton into Spanish will be presented, together with a comparative analysis of some of the versions by the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, paying attention to usual errors in the practice of translation.

Este artículo incluye un breve compendio de diferentes teorías sobre traducción y aborda algunos de los problemas más frecuentes, entre ellos, las diferencias entre los sistemas de significados y significantes de dos lenguas distintas o la dificultad en reproducir el estilo de un autor determinado.

El estudio se concentra en las reflexiones de Nabokov y su teoría de la “absoluta fidelidad al original”, y de Bonnefoy y su énfasis en la importancia del “enriquecimiento de la lengua”. Como ejemplos prácticos, se ofrecen varias

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traducciones al español del poeta norteamericano Thomas Merton, junto con un análisis comparativo de algunas versiones realizadas por el escritor nicaragüense Ernesto Cardenal, prestando especial atención a errores comunes en la práctica de la traducción.

Key words: translation theory, Nabokov, Bonnefoy, fidelity, recreation, usual errors.

Palabras clave: teorías de traducción, Nabokov, Bonnefoy, fidelidad, recreación, errores comunes.

Throughout the history of linguistic and literary thought, literary texts (a category itself notoriously hard to define) have been described by many linguists as being particularly untranslatable, with poetic texts being the most resistant of all. The purpose of this paper is to show that this is not the case, that poetic translation is not only possible but also one of the most powerful means to transgress political, social, and linguistic boundaries and to say “no” to the apparently insurmountable but only illusory differences between cultures and individuals.

The idea about the impossibility of translation was central to the Romantic conception of language and was maintained in Saussure´s model of linguistic sign. According to romantic authors such as Schleiermacher or Humboldt, poetic texts resist translation insofar as the authorial style they embody is not determined by the language, but exists in a personal relationship to the language, which it would be the translator´s impossible goal to replicate. As Schleiermacher has clearly pointed out, if one looks at a master’s word formations in their totality, at his use of related words and word-roots in a multitude of interrelated writings, how can the translator succeed here, since the system of concepts and their signs in the translator’s language is entirely different from that in the original language, and the word-roots, instead of being synchronically identical, cut across each other in

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the strangest directions? It is impossible, therefore, for the translator’s use of language to be as coherent as that of his author (Schleiermacher 1992:45-46).

This is to locate the crux of the problem of translating literary texts at the division between what is socially shared and individually creative in language –the interface between Saussure’s langue and parole.

The question of authorial style and the differences between the systems of signifiers and signifieds of two languages was also studied

by Humboldt. In fact, he wrote about the difficulty in finding an exact equivalent for metaphors in poetical texts: it has repeatedly been observed and verified by both experience and research that no word in one language is completely equivalent to a word in another, if one disregards those expressions that designate purely physical objects […] then, could a word, whose meaning is not transmitted directly through the senses, ever be the perfect equivalent of a word in another language?

(Humboldt 1992:55-56) This romantic view was also shared by linguists such as Ferdinand Saussure. Saussure thought that meaning cannot exist independently from the language system and that it derives from the place a word occupies in relation to other words and in opposition with them. Therefore, his theory of linguistic signs was shaped by the view that no word in one language is completely equivalent to a word in another language, and, consequently, it follows that translating is also, if not impossible, at least a risky task, as it involves the confrontation of two completely different systems of signs. He wrote that not only the signifier but the signified as well is particular to a given language, and that not only words but their meanings are language-specific (see Saussure 1922:158-162).

Moreover, the French linguist goes beyond Humboldt´s thought and says that this is as much the case for “purely physical objects” as for abstract concepts, because in his view the physical object does not determine the meaning of the sign. Rather the meaning or value of the signified is only determined by the relations between this particular

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signified and all the other signifieds in the language. Consequently, it could be said that Saussure liberated the linguistic sign from its attachment to the objects of the world, a common belief in traditional semiotic theory.

Jakobson and other semioticians in the second half of the 20th century have followed Saussure´s view on translation as the confrontation of two completely different systems of signs (both at the level of signifiers and signifieds). The interesting problems from this point of view are: a) how translation overcomes the differences in the systems of signifieds, and b) how translation recreates effects which operate at the level of signifiers in the original text.

One of the possible answers to all these problems concerning translation might be to consider it under the perspective of translationas-reading. There are theories, such as those of Jauss, Iser or Gadamer which firmly state that any translation is, before anything else, a reading, an individual creative act performed upon a text. Gadamer explicitly wrote that “every translator is an interpreter” (Gadamer 1975:349).

In other words, what the translator renders into another language is his or her particular reading of the text, even though he or she is the author of the original text. That reading is not the only possible reading: the translation generates a new text, which will itself undergo multiple readings. And this is precisely the reason why translation might seem impossible: because “true”, definitive reading is impossible.

This is more evident in the case of poetic texts. A poetic text is, in Saussurean terms, one which creates signification not simply between signifier and signified in chains of signs, but among the signifiers of different signs, to create such effects as rhythm, rhyme and alliteration; among the signifieds of different signs, to create for example metaphor and metonymy, as well as symbolism; and among signs in a way that extends beyond the linear chaining of words, to create textual cohesion (see Halliday & Hasan: l976). All these significant effects exist in the poetic text. But, according to hermeneutic theory, not all readers and translators of the poetic text will achieve the same significant effects.

There will be different readings, some richer (to the point of becoming rococo), some sparer (to the point of being an impoverished reading), but even if the translator had supreme skill for recreating the poetic effects

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of the original in the target language, his or her reading cannot be the text. It will be the effects contained in the reading which are being reproduced.

Despite the evidence that there might be some obstacles to translation in general, and most particularly, to the translation of poetical texts, everyday experience suggests that translation is really possible, even if it does project an utopian idea. Let us move on and examine two theories of literary translation, which may help us in our own practice as translators. We will concentrate on the thought of Nabokov and Bonnefoy as they are the exponents of two quite divergent attitudes towards translation.

Nabokov wants absolute fidelity to the text and, as the romantics Humboldt and Schleiermacher, he tries to bring the reader to the writer.

In his view, the term “literal translation” is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation of a parody. He believed in literality and in the fact that it is possible to find exact equivalents between the systems of signifiers and signifieds of two different languages. Moreover, he saw the need to add footnotes which might help the reader understand the “real meaning” of the text, as if the text had only got one true meaning: “I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers […] I want such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding” (Nabokov as quoted in Schulte & Biguenet 1992:134; 143).

Although Nabokov tries to get rid of the problem of translation as textual interpretation and the problem of authorial style by means of complete fidelity to the original text, he does not take into account several relevant issues: 1) That literal translation is not free from interpretation as it keeps considering poetry as a mere text conformed by a system of signifiers and signifieds and, therefore, it continues dealing with the meaning of text.

2) That it cannot boast of being endowed with universal truth because many times what we can find on the surface of a text where a translator thinks he has made a true reading of a work is just a partial and

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subjective interpretation full of canonic vocation, a reflection as in a mirror of its reader, a kind of portrait of the translator himself.

3) That translation of poetry cannot be reduced to finding the equivalents both at the level of lexical content and at the level of grammatical relations. We can all feel the evidence that meaning is not what makes a poem be what it is. What really seduces us in a poem is not what it says, its content, but its capacity to make us feel something new beyond the habitual way of seeing and knowing.

4) That very often a literal translation does not convey the “sense” of the original, but distorts it to a great extent and obscures its understanding.

5) That literal translation can spoil the poetical expression not only of the original poem but of the language into which this poem is going to be translated.

Opposing Nabokov´s theory, the French writer Yves Bonnefoy does not consider “literal translation” as something realistic, as it has been proved that many times the verbal matter of a language (its morphology, phonology, prosody) has not got a close equivalent in another language. Moreover, he thinks that the particularities of the concepts are untranslatable and also that these concepts are influenced by their use throughout the many centuries in which the language has been spoken.

Similarly, Walter Benjamin, writing a few decades before Nabokov or Bonnefoy, believes that Fidelity in the translation of individual words can almost never fully reproduce the meaning they have in the original. For sense in its poetic significance is not limited to meaning, but derives from the connotations conveyed by the word chosen to express it (Benjamin as cited in Schulte & Biguenet 1992: 78-79).

Therefore, Bonnefoy is going to be less concerned with fidelity than with enriching the language, with poetry rather than the poem: “You must realize that the poem is nothing and that translation is possible which is not to say that it is easy; it is merely poetry rebegun”. This idea of enriching the language can also be found in authors such as Walter

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Benjamin or Ortega y Gasset who thought that the task of the translator is to find the “intention” of the original text as an effect upon the language, and to echo that intended effect in the target language, so as to be able to develop its potential virtues and get to know its own silences. Besides that, Bonnefoy points out that the same difficulties arise in translating a poem as in writing one: […] as in the original, the language (langue) of translation paralyses the actual, tentative utterances (parole). For the difficulty of poetry is that language (langue) is a system, while the specific utterance (parole) is presence. But to understand this is to find oneself back with the author when translating […] (Bonnefoy as cited in Schulte & Biguenet 1992:188-89) What will be essential for the French thinker is the transmutation of the translator to the original moment of creation, this “hic et nunc” of the poetic experience during which the individual self disappears and merges into the rumour of language, the speaking of the non-historical presence beyond signifiers and signifieds.

Consequently, his thought is relevant to our study, as it seems to tackle the two main problems of poetry translation we have previously mentioned: the problem of translation considered as a mere textual interpretation and the problem of authorial style. He criticizes the understanding of the poem just as text, as relations of words on the blank page, of signs in perpetual movement, and not as the result of an experience of presence: “si queremos descifrar verdaderamente la poesía como poesía, hay que olvidar, al menos en un primer momento, todos esos trabajos del análisis parcial y todos esos juegos sobre el texto: porque es el decir lo que en el plano de lo específicamente poético importa e importa únicamente” (Bonnefoy 2002:31).

Bonnefoy leaves behind the world of which one can speak, the world of meanings, and enters the realm where language or common reason speaks by itself and where there is not a distinction between author and translator. He believes that there is a truth in the poem, a “shared truth” which cannot be grasped by any subjective textual analysis, a speaking that both the poet and the translator need to listen to and give

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shape within the poem. What will be important for the latter is not the semantic confusion of the textual material but rhythm, that music of the verses which helped the author transgress the sphere where words are just concepts and which allowed him to bring language and life experience together. Through his reading of the original poems he should be able to let himself be drawn by this rhythm, so as to achieve the same “singing state or mood” as the author´s and be one single voice.

Although Bonnefoy does not deny the existence of meaning within poems, he thinks they only find their justification and reward in the transgression of the limits imposed by this meaning. In his theory, these conceptual nets, these series of metaphors, comparisons, symbols, etc… are nothing but word constructions, traps of the author in the fiction of his relation with his own ego, who is himself made up of words and meanings. I agree with him that true poetry and therefore true poetic translation (both considered by him as one and the same activity) would need to have the virtue of liberating the voice which is under the domination of this false self and penetrate a pre-grammatical field which is previous to the imposition of words with a meaning and prior to the emergence of “I” and “You” first as proper names and then as persons with a defined identity. In doing so, they might become a form of honest action against established knowledge and a way of freeing ourselves from the chains of an isolated individual “I” in favour of an “I” who is nobody, and, therefore, is everybody; an “I” who is free from the chains of personal interests and who can “speak truth.”

It should not be forgotten that the etymological meaning of “poetry” is “action” (from the Greek “poiesis”) and that the action of poetry is that of “speaking against”. As Bonnefoy himself has pointed out, the translation of poetic texts --as long as it implies the liberation of the universal, the opening of reason-- has a redemptive function in our present society: that of choosing those great poets who strongly deny any phantom or illusion, in other words, those who criticize the lies of their society and their language and help to overcome any sort of alienation and idleness within it.

In the light of some of these theories of translation, the next part of this paper will be mainly focused on my own practice as translator.

After having completed a doctoral thesis on the poetry of the American Trappist monk and social critic Thomas Merton (1915-1968) --a research

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which included an initiative of translation of the poet´s love poems from English into Spanish--, in this paper I will reflect on my own process of translation, explaining the underlying theories I have followed, the linguistic strategies I have employed, the main obstacles I have found and the way I have been able to tackle them.

First of all, and as a brief introduction to the writer, it should be said that Thomas Merton was a prolific writer of many works in prose and in verse which had a great impact on the field of American Literary Studies and on the society of his time. According to Luce López-Baralt, he was “the most important mystic of the United States”(López-Baralt y Piera 1996:17). He lived twenty seven years at the Trappist Abbey of Getsemani (Kentucky), and during this time he wrote, published and translated fifty books and more than three hundred articles, reviews and poems. He composed fascinating journals and literary essays on writers such as William Faulkner, Boris Pasternak, James Joyce, Albert Camus or Louis Zukofsky and he kept a wide correspondence with well-known people from the political, religious and intellectual world such as the Pope Paul VI, the Zen master D.T. Suzuki, Boris Pasternak, the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, Czeslaw Milosz, Abraham Heschel, Aldoux Huxley, Henry Miller or Erich Fromm. Within his religious community, he also became “master of novices” and “master of scholastics” and he gave lectures on various topics such as art, poetry, Marxism, or Sufism among others. By the end of the 50´s, Merton´s interest mainly focused on the study of oriental mysticism, most particularly on Buddhism Zen, and during the 60’s he wrote widely about non-violence in the nuclear era. At the same time he was also concerned with monastic life and saw the need of a deep reformation of the Church and of his cistercian order under the inspiration of the II Vatican Council. As all true mystics, he was a free man. Due to the difficulty in finding solitude and peace within his community (at least the solitude he needed in order to give free rein to his contemplative and creative thrust) he retired to a hermitage in the woods of the monastery where he stayed for three years until he began a journey to Asia in order to take part in a Conference of World Religions.

Unfortunately, that would be the last trip of this simurgh (a bird of high flight in Persian mythology), as he died in Bangkok, apparently electrocuted by a fan, shortly after having finished his lecture on Marxism and Monastic Perspectives.

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However, Merton´s voice is still alive and can be heard throughout his whole literary production which includes books of poems such as Early Poems, Thirty Poems, A Man in the Divided Sea, Figures for an Apocalypse, The Tears of the Blind Lions, The Strange Islands, Original Child Bomb, Emblems of a Season of Fury, Cables to the Ace, or The Geography of Lograire, or his love poems collected under the title Eighteen Poems.

With regard to my own experience as translator of Merton´s poetry, I should point out that, far from thinking that translation is impossible, I consider it very necessary. As Walter Benjamin has underlined, “of all literary forms, translation is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own” (Benjamin as quoted in Schulte & Biguenet 1992: 75) It is as if his poems themselves were asking for more life, a vita postmortem. However, much more attention has been devoted to the translation of Merton´s prose (see “Mertoniana” 2002:697-700) and there are not many translations of his poetic production yet, apart from those done by José María Valverde, Ernesto Cardenal, Luis M. Schökel, Margarita Randall y Sergei Mondragón, José Coronel Urtrecho o Miguel Grinberg.

My work has concentrated on his love poems, although I have also translated other lyrical pieces from different books.

I agree with Bonnefoy that any worthy translation cannot be reduced to the level of textual interpretation. It should mainly stand as a poetic transgression. Its aspiration should be the liberation of thought, the never-ending rebirth of common reason and the direct criticism of the collective illusion of separatedness present in our societies and our languages. Moreover, I see translation as the discovery of the falsity of one´s own self by means of listening to the other´s voice, and also as the result of a fruitful dialogue between both the writer and the translator: a dialogue that begins early in time (when one gets to know whether or not he is going to be able to converse with an author) and that little by little becomes more intimate, so that they both become one single song, one single chorus, one action without a face.

Due to reasons of space, I will only analyse the translations I have made of two poems: “For Margie in October” and “The Harmonies of Excess”. The first one is addressed to Margie, the nurse who took care

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of Merton after his spine surgery in March 1966 and with whom he would keep a love relationship until the autumn of the same year (see Furlong 1980:314). In the journal of these years he describes this affair with Margie as an experience of radical change and metamorphosis: "I cannot regard this as "just an episode". It is a profound event in my life and one which will have entered deeply into my heart to alter and transform my whole climate of thought and experience: for in her I now realize I had found something, someone that I had been looking for all my life" (Bochen 1997:328). Indeed, Merton “loved greatly and was greatly loved” (Mott 1984:438), and his compositions are the highest expression of this human but also divine love which has been praised by so many other mystics from different religious traditions such as San Bernardo de Claraval, San Juan de la Cruz, Ibn’ Al Arabi or Rumi. Let us listen:

FOR M. IN OCTOBER

PARA M. EN OCTUBRE

If you and I could meet up there In that cool cloud Like two sun Beams or birds Going straight to South America Or distracted spirits Flying together innocent In midair

Si tú y yo pudiésemos coincidir en lo alto de esa nube serena como dos rayos de sol o como aves que emigran a Sudámerica o distraídos espíritus que inocentemente vuelan juntos en el aire

Or if we could be Together like two barges in a string Or tight wandering rafts Heading downriver to St. Louis or New Orleans

O si pudiéramos estar unidos como dos barcas amarradas o como sólidas balsas errantes que se deslizan río abajo hacia St. Louis o New Orleans

If we could come together like two parts Of one love song Two chords going hand in hand A perfect arrangement And be two parts of the same secret (Oh if we could recover And tell again Our midsummer secret!)

Si fuera posible fundirnos como los dos versos de una canción de amor dos acordes sonando al unísono un acompañamiento perfecto y ser dos símbolos del mismo enigma ( ¡Oh, si se nos permitiera recuperar y contar otra vez nuestro sueño de verano!)

If you and I could even start again as strangers Here in this forsaken field Where crickets rise up Around my feet like spray Out of a green ocean…

Si incluso tú y yo pudiésemos comenzar de nuevo Como dos extraños en este campo abandonado en donde los grillos saltan alrededor de mis pies como la espuma de un verde océano...

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But I am alone Alone walking up and down Leaning on the silly wind And talking out loud like a madman

Pero estoy solo solo deambulando de arriba a abajo reclinado en el viento absurdo y gritando como un loco

“If only you and I Were possible”

“Si solamente tú y yo fuésemos posibles”

Never mind: Tonight the moon is full And (you over buildings I over trees) We will watch it rise together.

No importa: Esta noche es luna llena y (tú cimbreándose en los edificios yo sobre los árboles) la veremos salir juntos.

In translating this poem, I have avoided rendering the translation of line after line. As I said before, what has been most important is to see the poem not simply as a written text but as words born out from and pointing out to the unspeakable. What has been essential is to let yourself be brought by the poem into the “hic und nunc” of its composition and, above all, to keep the same strength of denial of the original: that is to say, Merton´s denial to accept the impossibility of his love affair with the nurse just because he was a monk. It is this capacity of negation which gives both the poem and its translation their power and their strength.

From the phonological point of view, the translation of the text does not present many problems. As it is free verse, I did not need to worry about finding a proper rhyme for each line, or even a fixed number of syllables as it is the case of poems which follow a conventional metric system.

As far as the semantic level is concerned, in the first stanza I have found difficulties in translating the adjective “cool” in “cool cloud”. In Spanish it is not possible to render a literal translation “nube fresca”, so we have opted for the word “serena” whose meaning differs from the original but it is more in harmony with the use habits of our language.

Another problem has been the translation of “midair” in the last line of the first stanza: once again, the literal translation would sound extremely strange in Spanish (“mitad del aire”). Therefore, I have used a more general term “aire” where the English version uses a much more specific term.

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Turning to the second stanza of the poem, it can be seen that Merton repeats the word “together” twice, I have translated “together” not as “juntos” (like in the previous stanza) but as “unidos”, in order to avoid redundancy and, as Bonnefoy suggests, enrich the language of the text. Similarly, in the third stanza, I have translated “if we could come together” as “ si fuera posible fundirnos”. From the grammatical point of view, this has implied a change of grammatical category as the adjective has been turned into a verb; nevertheless, this choice has not altered the meaning conveyed by the original.

Moreover, I have altered the signifieds of several words within the poem in order to embellish it, although this can be questioned and criticized. In the second stanza, I have translated “heading downriver to St. Louis” as “deslizándose río abajo hacia St. Louis”. The word “deslizar” in Spanish contains the idea of movement and direction implied by “heading” in English, but it also adds the extra meaning of “flowing” and contributes to the whole internal coherence of the second stanza.

Besides, in the third stanza I have translated the word “chords” (which refers to the physical object) as “acordes” (which refers to the effect caused by the playing of the chords). Therefore, the whole line “two chords going hand in hand” reads as “dos acordes sonando al unísono”, which is somehow a free translation but which definitely sounds much better than a literal one and is more in accordance with the whole corpus of methaphors of the stanza. In addition, it should be said that Merton loved music and musical images and that his whole poetic production is full of these kind of symbols. For this reason, we have also translated “arrangement” as “acompañamiento”, following Merton´s musical inclinations.

In the same stanza, “parts” have been rendered as “”símbolos”, once more in order to enrich the language. Besides, an awareness of the situation in which the poem was written has led us to translate “if we could recover” as “si se nos permitiera”, using the impersonal form but indirectly referring to the obstacles that the Church, and most particularly, Merton´s community saw in his relation with Margie. As it may be seen from all these examples, our reading and interpretation of the poem does not consider the text as an isolated entity but considers it within a particular context and in relation with other texts. Something similar happens with the translation of “midsummer secret”. It appears in the Spanish version

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as “sueño de verano” due to the influence of intertextuality, in this case of Shakespeare´s Midsummer´s Night Dream. Although symbolism is specific to a particular literary work, it is also true –as Ritafferre has also pointed out—that it connects this work to the symbols used in certain other literary works, together with which the first work constitutes an “intertext”(Ritafferre as quoted in Schulte & Biguenet 1992:204).

In the fifth stanza, I have respected Merton´s choice of the expression “leaning on the silly wind”, and made quite a literal translation in order to preserve the rather ironical sense of the verse, even if this combination of words is not very usual and goes against habitual semantic rules of collocation. Finally, in the sixth stanza, our translation adds a word “cimbreándose” (referring to the moon) which is not in the original.

This has been done in order to clarify syntax, which is somewhat confusing in the original as it places the adverbial phrases “over buildings” and “over trees” before the verb and the object of the main clause. Without this addition, the text would might remained obscure, or at least, quite ambiguous.

Let us move onto the next poem I have chosen to analyse and share with you. It is entitled “The Harmonies of Excess” and is about the miracle of the resurrection of love and lovers within a poem.

THE HARMONIES OF EXCESS

LAS ARMONÍAS DEL EXCESO

The hidden lovers in the soil Become green plants and the gardens tomorrow When they are ordered to re-appear In the wet sun’s poem

Los amores ocultos en la tierra mañana serán vergeles cuando la lluvia y el sol en el poema los resucite

Then they force the delighted Power of buds to laugh louder They scatter all the cries of light Like shadow rain and make their bed Over and over in the hollow flower The violet bonfire

Ellos apremian el vigor delicioso de los capullos a que ría más alto derramando gritos de luz como lluvia sombría y formando su lecho una y otra vez en la concavidad de la flor la hoguera violeta

They spin the senses of the mute morning In an abandoned river Love’s wreckage is then left to lie All around the breathless shores Of my voice

Ellos tejen el significado de la mañana silenciosa En un río olvidado Luego los restos del naufragio del amor son esparcidos por las orillas sin aliento de mi voz

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Which on the coasts of larking meadows Invented all these children and their mischievous noises

que en las playas de las divertidas praderas imaginó a todos estos chiquillos juguetones

So the lovers teach April stars To riot rebel and follow faithless courses And it doesn’t matter The seed is not afraid Of winter or the terrible sweetness Of spring’s convivial nightmare Or the hot surprise and dizzy spark Of their electric promise

Así que los amantes enseñan a las estrellas de Abril a rebelarse y seguir el curso increíble de sus órbitas Y nada importa La semilla no se asusta del invierno o de la terrible dulzura del exceso alegre de la primavera o de la abrasadora sorpresa del rayo con su descarga eléctrica

For the lovers in the sleeping nerve Are the hope and the address Where I send you this burning garden My talkative morning-glory My climbing germ of poems.

Para los amantes durmientes son la esperanza y el destino al que te envío este jardín ardiente Mi gloriosa súplica matutina Germen trepador de mis poemas.

This poem is interesting from the point of view of lexis. There are some instances in which a literal translation of a word or phrase within this composition makes no sense in Spanish. For example, in the first line, I had better use the abstract noun “amores” instead of “amantes” because the metaphor “los amores ocultos en la tierra” seems to work better in Spanish as if we said “los amantes ocultos en la tierra”. In the same stanza, a literal translation of “when they are ordered to re-appear/ in the wet sun´s poem” would sound extremely ackward in Spanish.

Therefore, in this case I have decided to change the syntax of the original and consider “wet sun” as the subject of the sentence. Moreover, I have also changed the grammatical category of “wet” (which is an adjective) and replace it for a noun: “la lluvia”.

In the second stanza we have translated the noun “shadow” of “shadow rain” as an adjective “lluvia sombría”, as we all know that in English many nouns function as adjectives. In the case of “hollow flower”, I have made a change in grammatical categories as I was not happy with the literal translation “flor hueca”: consequently, what was an adjective has been converted into a noun and what was a noun has been replaced by a prepositional phrase: “la concavidad de la flor”. In the third stanza, I have done a rather free translation of the last line. So, I have translated “mischievous noises” just as a single adjective: “juguetones”. Without altering the original meaning, I have tried to embellish the “form” of the verse and make it sound more poetical, although this choice might be criticized as being a matter of personal taste.

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I have faced tremendous difficulties when translating the last two verses of the fourth stanza which read: “or the hot surprise and dizzy spark/ of their electric promise”. I have understood that “dizzy spark” might be alluding to “rayo” and I have slightly changed the syntax and morphology of the verses: “dizzy spark” has been converted into a complement of “hot surprise”, and the possessive adjective in the phrase “of their electric promise”, (which in the English version anaphorically points to “winter” and to “spring”), has been made to have number agreement with “dizzy spark”. Nevertheless, this line is quite ambiguous and we would have needed to ask the author about the precise meaning of these metaphors.

Finally, in the fifth stanza, I have kept the literal translation of “lovers” as “amantes” (as opposed to what I did in the first stanza), and we have substituted the adverbial phrase “in their sleeping nerve” for a present participle: “durmientes”, therefore omitting the translation of the noun “nerve”. There has also been a change in grammatical categories in the verse “my talkative morning glory” which has been rendered as “mi gloriosa súplica matutina”: the adjective “talkative” has been converted into the noun “súplica” in our translation; the noun “glory” has been changed into an adjective “gloriosa”; and the noun “morning” (which is a noun but functions as an adjective in the English version) has been replaced by an adjective “matutina”. Without altering the general meaning of the poem, all these changes in grammatical categories seem to make it sound better in the Spanish version.

To conclude, the last part of this paper will be devoted to a comparative analysis, discussion and criticism of Ernesto Cardenal´s translations of two poems by Merton in the light of my own translations.

First of all, it should be said that the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal was a novice in the Abbey of Gethsemani and that he was under the spiritual guidance of Thomas Merton during the seven years he spent there. Although he had to leave the monastery due to health problems, they kept a wide correspondance which has recently been published in Spanish. He tells that Merton used to say that his poetry sound better in its Spanish translation than in English (see Cardenal:199-201).

Among the translations Cardenal has done of the monk´s poetry, I have chosen two compositions: “The Ohio River-Louisville”, and

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“Whether there is Enjoyment in Bitterness”. He sent me these translations in a letter dated 18th August 1998. They belong to a book of poems translated by the author from Merton´s work and published by Universidad Nacional de México in 1961 (nowadays this edition is out of print). The first one is from Merton´s book “A Man in a Divided Sea” (1946) and it is a good example of the poetry he wrote in his first years at the monastery, when he abandoned the hectic urban life and took refuge in the solitude of his abbey. The English version reads as follows:

THE OHIO RIVER-LOUISVILLE No one can hear the loud voice of the city Because of the tremendous silence Of this slow-moving river, quiet as space.

Not the towering bridge, the crawling train, Not the knives of pylons Clashing in the sun, And not the sky-swung cables; Not the outboard boat Swearing in the fiery distance like a locust, Not the iron cries of men: Nothing is heard, Only the immense and silent movement of the river.

The trains go through the summer as quiet as paper, And in the powerhouse, the singing dynamos Make no more noise than cotton.

All life is quieter than the weeds On which lies lightly sprawling, Like white birds shot to death, The bathers’ clothing.

But only where the swimmers float like alligators, And with their eyes as dark as creosote Scrutinize the murderous heat, Only there is anything heard: The thin, salt voice of violence, That whines, like a mosquito, in their simmering blood.

Hereby I reproduce first Ernesto Cardenal´s translation and then my own translation:

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EL RÍO OHIO-(LOUISVILLE) No se oye el clamor de la ciudad Por el tremendo silencio De este río despacio, quieto como el espacio.

Ni el enorme puente, el serpenteante tren, Ni los cuchillos de los pilones Entrechocando en el sol, Ni tampoco los cables atravesando el cielo; Ni el bote de motor Con su palabrota en la ardiente lejanía como una cigarra, Ni los gritos férreos de los hombres: Nada se oye, Solamente el inmenso y silencioso movimiento del río.

Los trenes cruzan el verano con quietud de papel, Y en la central eléctrica los dínamos cantando Producen tanto ruido como el algodón.

La vida toda está más quieta que la hierba, Donde han quedado fláccidas, Como aves blancas que fueron tiradas, Las ropas de los bañistas.

Pero sólo donde los nadadores flotan como caimanes, Y con sus ojos oscuros como cerosota Escudriñan el calor asesino, Sólo allí se oye algo: La delgada, salada voz de la violencia, Que gime, como un mosquito, en su sangre hirviente.

Ernesto Cardenal

EL RÍO OHIO-LOUISVILLE No es posible oír la algarabía de la ciudad Debido al gran silencio De este lento fluir del río, sereno como el aire.

Ni el puente elevado, ni el tren que avanza sigilosamente Ni los filos de las torres de alta tensión Batiendo al sol Ni los cables suspendidos en el cielo Ni el motor fuera borda

.

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Blasfemando en la vehemente distancia como un crustáceo Ni los gritos férreos de los hombres Nada se escucha Sólo el discurrir callado y majestuoso del río.

Los trenes circulan durante el verano mudos como de papel Y, en la central eléctrica, la canción de la dínamo Es tan sutil como el algodón Toda vida es más apacible que la hierba Sobre la que levemente reposan Como blancos pájaros yacentes Las ropas de los bañistas. Únicamente donde los nadadores flotan como caimanes Y con ojos tan oscuros como la creosota Escudriñan las malvadas pasiones Sólo allí algo se percibe: La fina voz salada de la violencia Que se lamenta, como un mosquito, en su hirviente sangre.

Sonia Petisco

A general reading of both translations shows that Cardenal´s version is much more literal than my own version. In the first line, Cardenal translates “loud voice” as “clamor” (and, therefore, he keeps the personification of the city), whereas I have chosen “algarabía” which refers more to the noise caused by other agents within the city but not by the city itself. In the second line, he translates “tremendous” as “tremendo”, whereas I have chosen “gran” due to the influence of intertextuality (in this case, I remembered “el gran silencio solar” of which the German mystic Böehme used to talk). In the third line, he also does a literal translation of “quiet as space” as “quieto como el espacio” and makes “espacio” rhyme with “despacio”. However, his translation of “slow-moving river” as “río despacio” is not (at least grammatically speaking) correct because in Spanish a noun cannot be modified by an adverb. In my version I have decided to change the grammatical category of “slow-moving” and make it a noun “lento fluir del río”.

In the second stanza, Cardenal´s translation of “towering bridge” as “enorme puente” does not convey the same meaning as the original.

We have chosen to translate it as “puente elevado”, which is closer to the

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English version. In contrast, his translation of “crawling train” as “serpenteante tren” seems to be a better translation than my own version (“tren que avanza sigilosamente”) because he does not alter the grammatical category of the adjective “crawling” and at the same time he employs a well-chosen metaphor: that of the serpent. Nevertheless, I am not very happy with the translation he makes of the second verse: “ni los cuchillos de los pilones/ entrechocando en el sol”. What does this mean in Spanish?

It seems to be out of context. I had better translate this verse as “los filos de las torres de alta tensión”. In the fifth line, Cardenal translation of “outboard boat” as “bote de motor” and my translation as “motor fuera borda” show obvious differences between the Spanish spoken in Spain and the one spoken in South America; in the sixth verse Cardenal changes the grammatical category of “swearing” for a noun (“palabrota”) which is not usually found in a poem and which does not sound very poetical.

The seventh verse is one of the very few examples in which both translators have rendered the same version: “ni los gritos férreos de los hombres”. This shows something we have mentioned in the previous pages: that every translator is an interpreter, and that there can be endless readings of the same text which can greatly differ from one another.

Finally, in the eight verse Cardenal repeats the verb “oír” that he has already used in the first line of the first stanza, whereas we have translated it as “escuchar” in order to enrich the text and avoid redundancy.

Nevertheless, I must say that Cardenal´s option is also interesting because by repeating the verb “oír” the text gains textual cohesion and rhythm.

The last verse of this stanza shows that his translation continues being very literal as he translates “the immense and silent movement of the river” as “el inmenso y silencioso movimiento del río”, whereas our translation “el discurrir callado y majestuoso del río” places the adjectives after the noun and finds a more adequate term (more adequate as far as the semantic field of the word “river” is concerned) for conveying the idea of the movement of the river: “discurrir”.

Moving onto the third stanza, it must be pointed out that Cardenal´s literal translation makes the Spanish version sound rather ackward. Just to take an example, in the first line, Ernesto translates “the trains go through the summer quiet as paper” as “los trenes cruzan el verano con quietud de papel”: the use habits of Spanish do not contemplate the verb

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“cruzar” accompanied by a direct object such as “el verano”. Besides, the adjective “quiet” does not mean “quieto” as Cardenal has written but “callado, silencioso, mudo”. In my version, I have translated the whole verse as “los trenes circulan durante el verano mudos como de papel”.

Within this stanza, Cardenal writes another literal translation which does not convey the meaning of the original: he translates “the singing dynamos/make no more noise than cotton” as “los dínamos cantando/producen tanto ruido como el algodón”, a comparison which would not be expressed using these terms in Spanish. In fact, we do not have a metaphor like this one in our language, and even my own version “la canción de la dínamo es tan sutil como el algodón” is still a little bit unusual for our ears. Here we can see how each language has its own metaphoric “repertoire” and how, sometimes, as Humboldt or Saussure pointed out, it is quite difficult to find perfect equivalents for these metaphors.

In the same stanza (4th line), the adjective “quiet” is repeated for the third time, both in Merton´s and in Cardenal´s versions. In order to avoid the repetition of this word, I have used the word “apacible”, which is not completely literal but which is in harmony with the general meaning and mood of the poem. In the sixth line Cardenal´s literal translation of “like white birds shot to death” as “como aves blancas que fueron tiradas” shows one more the difference between the South American Spanish and Castilian Spanish (we would never say “tiradas”, but “disparadas” or “tiroteadas”). In contrast, my version “como blancos pájaros yacentes” places the emphasis not on the action of “shooting” but on the result of the action.

In the last stanza, Cardenal continues translating word by word.

In the second stanza, he commits a mistake which is quite common in the translation from English into Spanish. In his translation of “and with their eyes as dark as creosote”, he keeps the possessive adjective and writes: “y con sus ojos oscuros como la creosota”. We all know that English always uses the possessive when referring to parts of the body, but this is not the case in Spanish. Therefore, our translation has omitted this adjective and says “y con ojos tan oscuros como la creosota”. In the next line, Cardenal renders another literal translation of “murderous heat” as “calor asesino”, whereas I have done a more free translation and

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consider “heat” as metaphor referring to “passion or desire”: “las malvadas pasiones.” However, my translation might fail to convey the strong connotation of the adjective “murderous”, which is quite relevant to the understanding of the critical nature of the poem. In the fourth verse of the same stanza, Cardenal repeats the verb “oír” for the third time. As I said before, this repetition can endowed the poem with textual cohesion and coherence, although it can also be quite redundant and poor. Once more, in order to avoid this redundancy, we have chosen the word “percibir” on this occasion.

Let us move on and analyse another translation by Ernesto Cardenal of the poem “Whether there is enjoyment in bitterness”. When Merton wrote this poem, he was undergoing a severe crisis of identity; he had a conflict between his monastic vocation which called him to solitude and silence and this other concern for the problems of the world around him which could no longer be ignored. First, I will transcribe the English version, then Cardenal´s, and, lastly, my version:

WHETHER THERE IS ENJOYMENT IN BITTERNESS

SI HAY UN GOCE EN LA AMARGURA

This afternoon, let me be A sad person. Am I not Permitted (like other men) To be sick of myself?

Esta tarde, dejadme Estar triste. ¿No tengo Derecho (como los demás) De estar cansado de mï?

Am I not allowed to be hollow, Or fall in the hole Or break my bones (within me) In the trap set by my own Lie to myself? O my friend, I too must sin and sin.

¿No se me permite estar hueco, O caer en el hoyo O quebrarme los huesos (por dentro) En la trampa de mi propia mentira A mí mismo? Oh amigo mío, Yo también debo pecar y pecar.

I too must hurt other people and (since I am not exception) I must be hated by them

Yo también debo herir a los otros y (puesto que no soy una excepción) También ser odiado por ellos.

Do not forbid me, therefore, To taste the same bitter poison, And drink the gall that love (Love most of all) so easily becomes.

Do not forbid (once again) to be Angry, bitter, disillusioned, Wishing I could die.

No se me prohiba, por tanto, Probar el mismo veneno amargo, Y beber la hiel que el amor (sobre todo el amor) tan fácilmente se vuelve No se me prohiba (otra vez) tener Furia, amargura, desilusión Deseando morir.

Sonia Petisco Martínez A theoretical and practical approach to literary translation...

While life and death Are killing one another in my flesh, Leave me in peace, I can enjoy, Even as other men, this agony.

Mientras la vida y la muerte Se asesinan en mi carne, Dejadme en paz. Yo puedo gozar Aun como los otros, esta agonía.

Only (whoever you may be) Pray for my soul. Speak my name To Him, for in my bitterness I hardly speak to Him: and He While he is busy killing me Refuses to listen.

Solamente (quienquiera que seas) Reza por mi alma. Háblale de mí a Él, porque en mi amargura Yo apenas le hablo: y Él Mientras está ocupado en matarme No me oye.

Ernesto Cardenal

My own translation reads as follows:

¿EXISTE GOCE EN LA AMARGURA?

Esta tarde, permitidme Estar triste. ¿Acaso No puedo (como otros hombres) Estar cansado de mí? ¿Acaso no es lícito sentirme vacío o caer en el abismo o fracturar mis huesos en la trampa que yo mismo me he tendido? Oh, amigo mío, yo también he de pecar y peco.

Yo también debo herir a mis semejantes y (puesto que no soy ninguna excepción) ser odiado por ellos.

Por tanto, no me prohibáis Probar vuestro mismo veneno amargo Ni beber la hiel en la que el amor (el amor más que cualquier otra cosa) tan fácilmente se transmuta.

No me neguéis (una vez más) Sentirme Colérico, resentido, desilusionado, Anhelar morirme.

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Mientras la vida y la muerte Se debaten dentro de mí, Dejadme tranquilo. Puedo ser feliz, Incluso más que otros hombres, en esta agonía.

Sólo (quienquiera que seáis) Rogad por mi alma. Recordadle a Dios Mi nombre, porque en mi amargura, Apenas converso con Él; y Él Mientras está ocupado en destruirme No quiere escucharme.

Sonia Petisco

In this poem, we encounter the difficulty of translating the imperative forms which are ambiguous in English because they can be singular or plural. Ernesto Cardenal translates them differently on each occasion: in the first stanza the imperative is in its 2nd person plural form “dejadme”, in the fourth and fifth stanza he renders an impersonal form “no se me prohiba”, probably led by the fact that the addressee of the poem is unknown; in the sixth stanza, he uses again the 2nd person plural imperative form, but in the last stanza, he uses the 2nd person singular imperative form, which seems to be much more appropriate if we take into account that the vocative “oh, amigo mío” is singular. My version of the poem uses the 2nd person plural in all the stanzas, although it is clear that the vocative is singular. However, this addressee is unknown and the 2nd person plural form of the imperative seems to convey this impersonality better than if we used the second person singular form.

Another case of ambiguity is found in the last verse of the second stanza: “I too must sin and sin”. Ernesto translates as “yo también he de pecar y pecar”, whereas I have translated the same sentence as “yo también he de pecar y peco”.

With regard to the semantic level, Ernesto repeats several words as the verb “prohibir” in the fourth and fifth stanza or the noun “amargura” in the fifth and seventh stanza, while we have looked for other words to enrich once more the vocabulary of the poem. In the second stanza he renders a literal translation of “to be hollow” as “estar hueco” but we have preferred to translate this expression in its metaphorical sense as “sentirme vacío”. In the fifth stanza he changes the grammatical categories

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of the adjectives “angry, bitter, disillusioned” and replaces them by nouns functioning as direct objects of the verb “to have”. In this case, I have done a more literal translation and have made no change of grammatical categories at all. Besides, in the last verse of this stanza, Cardenal translates “wishing I could die” as the present participle “deseando morirme”. He does not seem to realize that in the English version “wishing” is the continuous form of the infinitive “to be wishing” and that this infinitive depends on the verb “forbid”. Therefore, grammatically speaking, his translation is not very appropriate. To conclude, in the sixth stanza, Cardenal renders a literal translation of “while life and death/ are killing one another”, whereas I have chosen to give a less literal version which, in my view, seems to be much more suitable as far as the use habits of the Spanish language are concerned.

CONCLUSION As we can see through the study of all these versions of Merton´s poems, there can be many translations or readings of a text. Even the original could be said to be a translation of the nonverbal world. As Octavio Paz has pointed out:

each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation on another text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is another translation- first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase. However, the inverse of this reasoning is also entirely valid. All texts are originals because each translation has its own distinctive character.

Up to a point, each translation is a creation and thus constitutes a unique text (Paz as cited in Schulte & J. Biguenet 1992:153).

However, what I consider important for both a writer or a translator is to transcend the level of textual interpretation and reach the level of transgression. That is to say, either a poem or a translation should be able

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to break the limits and definitions imposed by the specific vocabularies of the different languages of Babel and introduce us into the presence of the unspeakable.

If I acknowledge the possibility of translation it is because there is obviously something outside the realities conformed by words with a meaning which is common to all of them. It is not true that a “rose” consists only of its name. It is evident, that under the name of “rose”, there is something. In addition, there are many words in a language which have no meaning (deictics, pronouns such as “I” or “We”, numbers, quantifiers like “something”, “much” etc…) all of them pointing to a pre-grammatical field (see García Calvo 1991:190-225), which cannot be named (what Wittgenstein called “das Unausprechliche”). This field is the field of common reason, which speaks through the mouths of people who are nobody, no matter what particular language is used. It goes beyond signifiers and signifieds and it denounces the falsity of ourselves as isolated individuals made up of names and ideas. As Merton once wrote: “We are already One but we believe we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity.” Let us hope that poetry writing and translation creates a space of authentic communion where Logos is allowed to speak by itself, and where both writer and translator can disappear and get lost in the mystery of true life, which is always unknown.

WORKS CITED Bochen, C. M. (ed.). 1997. Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton 1966-1967. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

Bonnefoy, Y. 2002. La Traducción de la poesía. Valencia: PreTextos.

Cardenal, E. 1999. Vida Perdida. Barcelona: Seix Barral.

Daydí-Tolson, S. (ed.).1993. Thomas Merton y Ernesto Cardenal: Correspondencia 1959-1968. Madrid: Trotta.

Furlong, M. 1980. Merton: A Biography. London: Collins.

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Gadamer, H.G. 1975. Truth and Method, New York: Seabury.

García Calvo, A. 1991. Del Lenguaje I. Zamora: Lucina.

Halliday, M.A.K.and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English, London: Longman.

Howard Griffin, J. 1993. Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton. New York: Orbis Books.

Humboldt, W. 1816. “Introduction to ‘Aeschylos Agamemnon metrisch übersetzt’” Leipzig: Fleischer.

López-Baralt, L. y L. Piera. 1996. El sol a medianoche. La experiencia mística: tradición y actualidad. Madrid: Trotta.

Merton, Th. 1977. The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, New York: New Directions.

--------.1985. Eighteen Poems. New York: New Directions.

Mott, M. 1984. The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Paz, O. 1990. Traducción: literatura y literalidad. Barcelona: Tusquets editores.

Rafael de Pascual, F. (ed.). “Mertoniana” en Cistercium 228/229.

Julio-Diciembre 2002.

Saussure, F. de. 1922. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris and Laussanne: Payot.

Schleiermacher, F. 1813. “Methoden des Übersetzens” in Friedrich Schleiermachers sämtliche Werke. Treatise read to Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 24 June 1813.

Schulte, R. & J. Biguenet. (eds). 1992. Theories of Translation.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marta Dahlgren Translation and Relevance: The Appraisal of Poetry

Translation and Relevance: The Appraisal of Poetry Marta Dahlgren Universidad de Vigo

In this article I argue for a critique of poetry and poetic prose in translation which takes into account the degree of pragmatic relevance attained by the translator. In a translation, the aim should be to attain full relevance on the levels of phonetics/phonology, syntax and semantics and pragmatics. Poetry presents extreme difficulties in translation, mainly due to the fact that poetry depends for effect on phonetic elements. Many translators focus on syntactic and semantic elements and produce paraphrases and explications. Very few produce translations that are poems in their own right. Some translations become unintelligible due to deviance in pragmatic meaning. In order to illustrate this, a critique of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry translated into Spanish is presented with special reference to the translation of ambiguity and point of view.

En este artículo presento una crítica de la traducción de la poesía y prosa poética que tiene en cuenta el grado de relevancia (pertinencia) pragmática conseguido por el traductor. En una traducción, la meta debe ser la consecución de relevancia plena en los niveles de fonética/fonología, síntaxis y semántica, y pragmática. La traducción poética es de una dificultad extrema, debida sobre todo al hecho de que la poesía depende para su efecto de elementos fonéticos. Muchos traductores tienen en cuenta únicamente los elementos sintácticos y semánticos y producen paráfrasis y resúmenes explícitos. Muy pocas traducciones son poemas por derecho propio. Algunas traducciones son imposibles de entender por las desviaciones en el significado pragmático. Como ilustración presento una crítica de una selección de la poesía de Emily Dickinson traducida al español, con especial referencia a la traducción de la ambigüedad y el punto de vista.

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Keywords: translation, poetry, literary pragmatics, relevance, Emily Dickinson Palabras clave: traducción, poesía, pragmática literaria, pertinencia, relevancia, Emily Dickinson

POETRY IN TRANSLATION Poetry presents extreme difficulties in translation. It is generally supposed that critique of poetry translations is an even more difficult task and that there is no way of telling what is acceptable and unacceptable in translated poetry. This is partly true and it is to a large extent due to the fact that poetry depends for effect on phonetic elements. Very few translators aim for imitation of the prosodic elements in the source text: meaning dependent on such elements is simply not taken into account.

What is generally considered as ‘meaning’ is thought to be based only on syntactic and semantic elements. When the phonological level of a poem is obviated, the translation tends to become a simple paraphrase and cannot be considered a poem in its own right. The other extreme occurs when poets translate poetry. In this case, rhythm and sound effects are very often preserved, but deviations in lexical and syntactic meaning tend to abound. Poets translating poets often present highly subjective interpretations — the famous belles infidèles.

With regard to the much-discussed issue of translatability, I part from the view that translation of poetry is possible and that success in this endeavour is just as much a question of degree as in any other kind of translation. Translatability of poetry is intimately related to what is commonly called “poetic essence”. It is true that poetry has been defined as “what is untranslatable” (allegedly by Robert Frost. I quote Benn 1951 as cited in Holmes, 1994). It has also been described as what is left after rhythm, rhyme and the words have been taken away (allegedly by Federico García Lorca), which comes to the same thing, and presumably points at some lyrical essence that floats around and impresses conveniently sensitive souls. As this essence is not bound to any linguistic element in particular, the conclusion has been drawn that poetry is impossible to translate.

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What, then, is this ineffable poetic essence? I have argued elsewhere (Dahlgren, 2000; 2002; 2005) that, for the purpose of analysis, a division of poetic discourse into the levels of phonology and phonetics, syntax and semantics, and pragmatics, is convenient. Pragmatics is a useful tool in analysing poetry translations, as pragmatics deals with inference and implicature. Actually, the mysterious free-floating essence (lyrical or not) can be traced in linguistic elements in the poem (inference triggers) and/or attributed to implicature. The latter is a notion similar to that of connotation in poetry, but it can appear without any connection to a specific word or expression (Sperber and Wilson, 1986 (2000), Blakemore, 1989; 1993, Carston, 2001), while connotation is bound to a certain lexical element or utterance. Implicatures have been analysed mainly as they appear in spoken dialogue and in literary dialogues and lately also in narrative discourse. Literary pragmatics is, according to Jacob Mey the kinds of effects that authors, as text producers, set out to obtain, using the resources of language in their efforts to establish a 'working cooperation' with their audiences, the consumers of the texts. Such efforts rely on a precise understanding of the conditions of use of those resources, when directed at a particular audience among the consumers of the literary work.

These pragmatic effects cannot rely on the linguistic elements involved alone. [...] What is required beyond those linguistic techniques is a thorough exploitation of all the contextual factors determining the use of those linguistic items (Mey, 1999: 12).

It is generally accepted that spoken dialogue can be translated by means of consecutive or simultaneous interpreting, and dialogues within literary works are not treated as different from the rest of the discourse for translation purposes. The inferences that occur in such discourse are perfectly translatable. Inference and implicature also appear in poetry, just as in any other type of discourse. It is of vital importance that inference lines and implicature in the source text are carried over into the translated text.

Among the levels of discourse (phonetics and phonology, syntax and semantics, and pragmatics), the level of phonetics and phonology plays an important part in all genres and discourse types. In poetry it is vital. The phonological meaning of poetic discourse depends on the distribution of stress and pitch, recurrence, rhythm, assonance and alliteration.

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Prosody is of extreme importance for the effect of the poem on the reader, and it is the first element to be lost in translation. As translation of prosody is a tricky matter, most translators simply do not even make an effort at imitation, and concentrate on syntactic and lexical meaning.

With regard to the imitation of rhythm produced by a certain type of stanza, this can be illustrated by the evident difficulties in transferring the iambic stanza favoured in English poetry into Romance languages. To this we must add the problematic issue of the imitation of end-rhyme. The Spanish language rhymes easily, but rhyming words mostly come in the shape of verb endings (-ar, -ía, -ido) and adjective endings (-oso, -osa).

There is a scarcity of convenient monosyllabic words to use for rhyming.

Translators into Spanish therefore take recourse to assonance and alliteration.

In the case of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry is analysed in this article, the hymn-like rhythm present in much of her poetry is extremely difficult to imitate, and none of her translators has managed to produce versions which come in any way close to the prosody of the original.

THE PITFALLS When discussing poetry translation with poets who translate other poets, the objection is often raised against the expression ‘howler’ when used by scholars in analyses which are part of general faultfinding.

Searching for howlers is admittedly an activity that adds little to the appraisal of poetry. This being so, it has to be pointed out that howlers are serious lexical mistranslations, due to lack of knowledge of the source language or simply to sheer laziness: the translator has not thought it worth while to look a certain word or expression up in a dictionary.

Silvina Ocampo’s translation of Emily Dickinson is a case in point: the lexical mismatches are so serious that they alter the context of the poem or simply make the translation incomprehensible.

Another pitfall which is especially prominent in the translation of poetry is the reproduction of the source text syntax, which produces unacceptable or inappropriate target texts. The result of such reproduction is “foreignising” (Venuti 1995). Unacceptable target language is often due to a lack of understanding of the poem, something that has to do with the fact that poetry is a form of literary art where redundancy is not present and ambiguity is a not a flaw but an asset.

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The preservation of source text ambiguity is one of the most difficult matters in poetry translation. In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, ambiguity, or rather lack of definition, is one of the hallmarks. What some translators seem to have done is to add ambiguity in places where the original has none, in order to make up for the failure in preservation of ambiguity elsewhere in the poem. The point is whether implicit or inferred information can be made explicit. In translation, implicit information that was shared by the original authors and their audience will also have to be made accessible to the target language audience.

Gutt (1991: 79-94) argues that the difference between implicit information and absent information can depend on the speaker’s intention to convey it. However, Gutt says, since the audience has no way of knowing the communicator’s intention, it cannot tell which interpretation is the valid one. Misconceptions abound in such cases. In a spoken non-fictional dialogue immediate feedback clears up such misconceptions, but in fiction this is not possible. This is exemplified in metaphors and in ambiguous expressions. The problem in translation is how to preserve the range of ideas present in the original. Ambiguities should be preserved in translation whenever this is possible. However, pragmatically, it is just as inadequate to create an ambiguity where the source text had none (Dahlgren, 1998: 26-27). In poetic discourse, there is not only explicit information, but also information that is not given but derived from some specific linguistic expression, i.e. inferred from it. If I say “it is cold out there” this is a statement that informs the hearer about certain facts. But it can mean more than this: —I do not want to go out —Put on your warm coat —Stay in bed and forget about the jogging Etc.

When inference is based on an utterance such as the one mentioned above, inference is language-based, and in this case, the range of inferences that can be drawn are limited. Inference can also be based on attitudes, in which case the range of possible interpretations is enormous. In poetry we have a type of inference based on imagery and emotions, which is difficult to pin down, and which has therefore not been seriously studied.

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Another pitfall that is extremely common in poetry translation and especially in the translation of Emily Dickinson’s poems is change in point of view. Change in point of view, alteration of the narrating persona, mistakes regarding who sees and who speaks in the poem, are all extremely dangerous as these mistakes produce in-depth changes in meaning. To this we must add the elements of deficient knowledge of the source language, deviance in interpretation, and the elimination of inference triggers. This, often with a failed effort to produce what is commonly thought to be ‘poetry’, produces translations that come close to nonsense. An adequate interpretation of the original and a version that does not cause the reader to give up reading because the effort is too great produce relevant translation.

TRANSLATION STRATEGIES AND RELEVANCE Generalising heavily, it can be said that the effects of translation depend on a limited number of strategies followed by translators. I would classify these strategies broadly into three categories, which are —paraphrases (explicating, trivialising, ‘de-poetising’) —‘poetising’: introducing additions of ‘poetic’ elements from target language poetic tradition —relevant translations, as close as possible to the source text on all levels: phonetic, syntactic-semantic and pragmatic. Relevant translation is an appropriate balance of all these elements.

Cureton (1997: 2) says that “to summarize what a poem relates reduces it to prose; a poem’s language is its art”. Paraphrasing is a strategy that is perfectly valid if used with the intention of making the gist of a poem accessible to those who lack the sufficient knowledge of the source language to appreciate it in the original. More often than not, paraphrasing is used in overt translation (House 1981): the paraphrase is a translation which is explicitly presented as such. The translator might make claims to producing a poem, but the effect on the reader is in this case very different from that produced by the original, and even if the translated poem contains poetic forms, it cannot be considered a poem in its own right. Another type of overt translation, presenting both the original and

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the translation, is clearly the most common one in translations into Spanish today. It might be presupposed that in these cases the translator aims at producing a poem in its own right. If we follow House 1981, this type of translation is overt translation, as it presents a version that is meant to be compared (and comparable) to the original. In covert poetry translation, only the translated poem is presented, clearly with the intention of producing an equivalent of the source text, i.e. a poem.

Paraphrasing reduces the poem to prose, and what is more, due to the fact that an explanation of the poem is produced, it has a trivialising and ‘de-poetising’ effect. It is evident that these strategies are used by translators with the aim of facilitating the comprehension of the poem in the target language. When appraising a translation we must start out with the conviction that the strategies of explication and paraphrasing is used by the translator with a view to illuminating the reader, or to facilitating an understanding of the poem in its original version. A strategy that has the opposite effects but can be just as jarring is ‘poetising’. This occurs when the translator takes recourse to poetic elements from the target language literary tradition or from universal poetry, using a ‘poetic’ word order and lexical items that are traditionally considered ‘poetic’.

In other words, poetising occurs when the translator makes use of what is traditionally considered poetic resources (change in word order, consonance, assonance, change of register etc). This is done in poetry translation even on occasions when the original does not exhibit any of these traits. This strategy more often than not produces a target text that is more difficult to interpret than the source text, at times obscuring meaning, and even to the point of producing sheer nonsense.

Schulte (2002: 1) says that “the work of a translator transcends the scholarly intensity that scholars and critics display in their interpretation of works of literature”. The translator who interprets the original adequately and uses the appropriate resources in the target language in order to facilitate the subsequent interpretation is a translator who works with this kind of scholarly intensity and such a translator aims at nothing less than achieving full relevance in interpretation.

The notion of relevant translation is based on the pragmatic principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 2000). In a nutshell, the principle of relevance states that in its search for meaning, the human

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mind tends to balance the effort used in interpretation and the results of such an effort. The different strategies mentioned above all tend to maximise the effort in search of an acceptable interpretation. If they are balanced, i.e. if the translator on the one hand steers clear of overexplication and on the other hand manages to avoid causing the target text to become more obscure than the source text, such a balance is achieved. Relevant translation is thus the middle way between explication and poetising. As in all efforts of understanding, there is a reward that comes after making sense of a poetic metaphor, but when the effort becomes too great and the reward is withheld for too long, the reader experiences an unpleasant feeling of impatience. Relevance is not a set, unchanging parameter: there are degrees of relevance, produced by the balance of effort and reward.

EMILY DICKINSON IN TRANSLATION Emily Dickinson’s poems have suffered severely in translation.

Many translations exist of her work into Spanish (Champourcin, 1946; Jordana & Macarulla, 1980; Castillo, 1984; Manent (Dickinson, 1979); Ocampo (Dickinson, 1985 (1997); Ardanaz (Dickinson, 1992 (2000); Oliván, 2001; Pujol, 2001; Villar Raso, 2002; and many more). There are several reasons for the fact that her poetry presents such extreme difficulties in translation. Some of them she shares with the general characteristics of poetry as a concentrated form of language where much is inferred and many ambiguities can appear. Dickinson’s poems have many readings, and translators have highlighted different aspects of her poems: when reading Dickinson in several different translations we also read different poems. In order to interpret Dickinson it is not absolutely necessary to be aware of her socio-cultural background and personality.

It is, however, highly advisable to be so, as many clues to interpretation are to be found in her personal circumstances. The prevailing image of Dickinson, at least in Spain, has for long been that of a romantic spinster who wrote little ditties about the flowers in her garden, and then turned into a slightly odd little old lady due to deceptions in sundry love-affairs.

Most of the websites on Dickinson now acknowledge the results of recent research, even if most recent findings with regard to her possible mental illness and her relationship to her sister-in-law Susan are carefully obviated (see http/www.epdlp.com/Dickinson.html).

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TRIVIALIZATION Examples of trivialization abound in Dickinson’s translators. The examples presented here have been taken from one of the most ambitious selections and translations of Emily Dickinson in the Spanish language.

Margarita Ardanaz presented the first edition of her impressive effort in 1992, and due to the success achieved, a second edition came out in 2000.

Ardanaz wrote an introduction to her own translations, and indicates very clearly what her guidelines have been: not to explain the text, not to improve the poem (a statement that could have been obviated), not to try to make the language more poetic (embellecer (beautify)), and then she says: Hemos procurado, siempre que ha sido posible, mantener el ritmo del verso en castellano, pero siendo siempre más fieles a su palabra que a ninguna otra consideración.

(We have tried, whenever possible, to maintain the rhythm of the poem in Spanish, but more than anything else we have tried to stay faithful to its words.) (Ardanaz’s foreword in Dickinson 1992: 43; my translation).

Ardanaz goes on to say: El concepto de la traducción correcta bordea, con frecuencia, los límites de la incorrección gramatical y se aproxima, a veces, en su vano intento de trasladar todo lo trasladable [...] a un nuevo tipo de entendimiento y de creación... (The concept of correct translation frequently borders on the limits of incorrect grammar and sometimes comes close, in its vain attempts at transferring what is not transferable […] to a new kind of understanding and creation […]) (Ardanaz’s foreword in Dickinson 1992: 43; my translation).

Ardanaz states in her foreword that she aims at preserving the rhythm of the original, and in personal communications she has repeatedly stressed the importance of prosody in poetry translation. However, a simple scansion of source and target texts shows that this is not the case.

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As for “staying faithful to its words” we might ask ourselves what Ardanaz means by this. She certainly follows the original very closely, preserving syntactic structures and lexical meaning. She imitates the original to the point of sacrificing what Toury (1995) calls “appropriateness” in the target language. If a translation violates target language syntax, and demands a greater effort from the reader, there must be a relevant reason for it, such as an attempt to imitate metre, or to preserve internal rhymes or end rhymes.

Compared to earlier versions of Emily Dickinson’s poems, Ardanaz’s translations are gratifyingly howler-free. She possesses a proficiency in the English language which makes her steer clear of language-based mistakes. However, she now and then produces paraphrases that are more difficult to understand than the original. Her translations therefore often fall into the category of trivialization by over-explication.

An example of this is “She bore it till the simple veins…”, below in the original and translated by Marià Manent and Margarita Ardanaz.

144 She bore it till the simple veins Traced azure on her hand— till pleading, round her quiet eyes The purple Crayons stand.

The Daffodils had come and gone I cannot tell the sum And then she ceased to bear it— And with the Saints sat down.

No more her patient figure At twilight soft to meet— No more her timid bonnet Upon the village street But Crowns instead, and Courtiers

Marta Dahlgren Translation and Relevance: The Appraisal of Poetry

And in the midst so fair Whose but her shy-immortal face Of whom we’re whispering here?

(Dickinson,1992: 86-87) Llevó aquel sombrerito hasta que las sencillas Venas se dibujaron, azules en su mano; Hasta que, suplicantes, en torno de los ojos Tranquilos le dejó la púrpura sus trazos; Hasta que los narcisos llegaron y se fueron yo no sé cuántas veces; y dejando de llevarlo ya, entonces se sentó con los santos.

Su paciente figura en el crepúsculo Nunca ha de sernos delicado encuentro; y nunca más el sombrerito tímido por la calle del pueblo;

coronas, cortesanos, en cambio, allí veremos, y en medio, tan hermosa, ¿de quién es esa cara esquiva y ya inmortal, sino de quien ahora hablamos en voz baja?

(Dickinson, 1979: 48-49: translation by Marià Manent)

Lo llevó hasta que las sencillas venas Trazaron el azur sobre su mano— Hasta que, suplicantes, en torno a sus callados ojos Los Lápices de púrpura se alzaron.

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Hasta que los narcisos, llegaron y se fueron No sé decir las veces, Y dejó luego de llevarlo— Y se sentó junto a los Santos.

Ya nunca más su paciente figura Delicada encontrar en el crepúsculo Ya nunca más su tímido gorrito En la calle del pueblo— En su lugar, Acompañantes y Coronas Y en medio, tan hermosa, ¿De Quién sino de ella tímida- inmortal cara De quien hablamos en voz baja ahora?

(Dickinson, 1992: 86-87, translation by Margarita Ardanaz)

The first line of the third stanza has, in the source text a deviating word-order because “meet” has to rhyme with “street”. In the target text there is no need for deviation.

No more her patient figure/at twilight soft to meet Ya nunca más su paciente figura /Delicada encontrar en el crepúsculo Never more her patient figure / Delicate find in the dusk The third line in the fourth stanza is an example of a ‘resistant’, ‘restive’ or ‘foreignizing’ translation method (Venuti, 1992: 100). Here, the slightly deviating syntax in the ST might justify a certain deviation in the TT. Ardanaz’s version, however, demands a far greater attention on the part of the reader as it exhibits a syntactic construction that is impossible in Spanish.

Whose but her shy-immortal face… ¿De Quién sino de ella tímida -inmortal cara...?

Of Whom if not of hers timid-immortal face?.

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LEXICAL MISTRANSLATIONS AND NONSENSE The same poem, translated by Manent, is an example of paraphrase in the nonsense category. I would say that Manent follows the original very closely in his paraphrasing, but that in spite of this —or, I would say, precisely because of this— the TT reader is incapable of making sense of the poem due to a lexical mistranslation in the very first line.

Manent confuses the verb “bear” with “wear”, and produces a strange poem about the inconvenience of wearing bonnets. Ardanaz opts for ambiguity, as lo llevó can mean both “she endured it” and “she wore it”, even if a Spanish speaker’s first option is the latter. In the original, “her timid bonnet was no more seen on the street” does not mean that the poem is about the inconvenience of wearing a certain kind of headgear.

Manent proposes the following line of inference: llevó aquel sombrerito... y dejando de llevarlo ... nunca más el sombrerito tímido she wore that little hat ... and not wearing it any more ... never more the timid little hat, which implies that the bonnet (Manent’s “sombrerito” [little hat]) is the cause of suffering. When the bonnet is taken off, suffering ends, and we see only a face where there was, previously, a face and a bonnet. This face is surrounded by cortesanos, who are the members of a royal court.

The cause-effect relationship in the original is the opposite, as Dickinson uses the rhetorical figure of metonymy: the person wearing a bonnet is alive and when the bonnet is not to be seen anymore, she is dead.

Marià Manent has a reputation for being an excellent translator, mainly of English poetry into Catalan and Spanish. Pascual Garrido (1999: 169) praises his responsible and respectful attitude. It seems that, in poetry translation, the idea of following the original slavishly word for word, irrespective of the outcome in the target language, is equated with respect for the source. In any type of discourse, poetic or otherwise, to focus on words in isolation for any other purpose than that of morphological analysis brings very few rewards. It is the combination of lexical and syntactic elements that gives an utterance its (basic) meaning. When analysing discourse, this is taken more or less for granted. Why, then, do we still find translators who believe in equivalence on word level? In the poems analysed, it is sometimes painfully evident that the translators have been staring themselves blind at a certain word and forgotten about the fact that it fills a certain slot for reasons of rhythm, rhyme or, for example, because of the need for a parallel syntactic structure in the trope called epizeuxis.

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An example from Silvina Ocampo’s translation of the poem "I felt a funeral, in my brain" will illustrate this. The selection of the word numb in the line "my mind was going numb" is justified —apart from semantic reasons—by the fact that it rhymes with drum. Ocampo translates mi mente se volvía muda in a clear attempt at repetition of the consonant m, but muda means “speechless” and Ocampo makes one of her frequent language mistakes. In this instance, the result is quite acceptable, and one howler per poem is not too detrimental for interpretation. However, as Fiona Mackintosh has shown (Mackintosh, forthcoming), when howlers come in series, they add significantly to the impossibility of making sense of a poem. Ocampo excels in this kind of lexical mistranslations, as in “Like Eyes that looked on Wastes”, where the choice of basuras (trash) for “wastes”, quieta soledad (quiet solitude) for “wilderness”, miseria (poverty) for “misery” and se absolvería (this verb is not used reflexively in Spanish) produce a poem that is practically impossible to understand.

I add my own tentative version.

458.

Like Eyes that looked on Wastes— Incredulous of Oght But Blank — and steady Wilderness— Diversified by Night— Just Infinites of Nought— As far as it could see— So looked the face I looked upon— So looked itself —on Me. I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine— The Misery as Compact As hopeless — as divine— Neither — would be absolved— Neither would be a Queen Without the Other — Therefore— We perish — tho’ We reign

Marta Dahlgren Translation and Relevance: The Appraisal of Poetry

Dickinson (1975) Como ojos que miran las basuras— Incrédulos de todo— Salvo del vacío—y quieta soledad— Diversificada por la noche

Sólo infinitos de la nada— tan lejos como podía ver— así era la cara que yo miré— así miró ella misma—a la mía— no le ofrecí ninguna ayuda— porque la causa era mía— la miseria densa tan compacta tan desesperanzada—como divina ninguna—se absolvería ninguna sería una reina sin la otra—de modo que— aunque reinemos—pereceremos Dickinson (1997: 118) translated by Silvina Ocampo Como ojos que miran los desiertos— Y no se creen Nada Sino el Vacío — y la Espesura— Que varían cada Noche — Infinitas Nadas— Hasta donde abarcaba— Así era la cara que contemplaba — Así la cara me — miraba.

No ofrecí ayuda— Por ser la Causa Mía—

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La Tristeza tan Compacta Tan sin esperanza como divina— Ninguna de las dos tendría absolución— ninguna reinaría— Sin la otra —por eso Morimos—aunque reinamos— Dahlgren (2002) (unpublished) What this poem describes is the despair produced by introspection: the narrator looks into her own soul and finds nothing there. This is a disquieting poem, but the original is perfectly comprehensible. Ocampo’s version is extremely difficult to understand.

In “A Dying Tiger”, Ocampo gives a stranger image still of Emily Dickinson’s poetic persona.

566 A Dying Tiger —moaned for Drink— I hunted all the Sand— I caught the Dripping of a Rock And bore it in my Hand— His mighty Balls—in death were thick— But searching—I could see A vision on the Retina Of Water—and of me— ´Twas not my blame—who sped too slow— ´Twas not his blame—who died While I was reaching him— But ´twas —the fact that He was dead— Dickinson (1975) Un moribundo tigre—lloraba por beber— Yo busqué por toda la arena— Y conseguí el agua de una roca

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La llevé en mi mano— sus tremendos testículos—enhiestos en la muerte pero buscando—yo podía ver una visión en la retina de agua—y de mí no fue mi culpa—si acudí despacio— no fue su culpa—si murió cuando lo estaba alcanzando— pero era—el hecho de que estuviera muerto— Dickinson (1997) translated by Silvina Ocampo Tiger balls, indeed! The very presence of the word “retina” in the third line in the second stanza should have alerted the translator to the fact that the original “balls” are eye-balls, which would have avoided the surreal idea of the narrating persona focusing on the genitals of the dying tiger. A dictionary along historical principles would also have helped the translator to avoid this breach of register, and to the fact that “balls” was not used in the Spanish sense of cojones/pelotas (never testículos) until D.H. Lawrence published the then offensive Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1920’s. To imagine that Emily Dickinson might have used it in this sense defies logic.

This poem, according to Vivian Pollak (1996: 73) is “a brilliant vision of the frustration of generous nurturing impulses in a dreamlike setting charged with anxious sexuality” where the tiger is a threatening masculine symbol. This interpretation of the poem should, however, not be taken as a license for translators to shock their readers by augmenting sexual innuendo or, even worse, being explicit where the original simply presents hints. No excuse exists for making a comprehensible poem incomprehensible. Dickinson, when read with attention and background knowledge, always makes sense.

Villar Raso’s (2001) version of “A Dying Tiger moaned for Drink” is more surreal still: the narrator hunts the sand for water, and finds a rock, which (s)he takes to the poor animal, which, in view of this, quite

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logically bites the dust. The verb-form podía can take “I” or “he/she/it” as a subject and in case of doubt, the closest subject is presupposed. This would mean that the tiger, already dead, can see “a vision of water and of me”, supposedly in “my” eyes. This, to put it mildly, hampers interpretation. Silvina Ocampo (see above) solved this problem introducing the personal pronoun, habitually left out in Spanish, but vital in this context. At least, in this version, when looking for the expected water, the tiger uses his eyeballs, not the other ones.

Un Tigre Moribundo—gemía de Sed— [A Dying Tiger—moaned from Thirst] Rebusqué por toda la Arena— [I searched all over the Sand—] Descubrí una roca que Goteaba [I discovered a rock that Dripped] Y la llevé en mi Mano— [and brought it in my Hand—] Sus Poderosos Ojos—ensanchados por la muerte— [His powerful eyes—widened by death—] Seguían buscando— podía ver [Went on looking—he could see] Una Visión en la Retina [a vision in the Retina] De Agua—y de mí [of Water —and of me] No fue culpa mía —si acudí despacio— No fue culpa suya—que se muriera Mientras lo alcanzaba— Pero el hecho fue—que estaba muerto— [this stanza is a word-for-word translation] (Villar Raso, 2001: 245) Point of view and nonsense An extremely common source of misunderstanding of Dickinson’s poems stems from the altering of the point of view. This is particularly jarring in the translation of Dickinson’s adagios, or mini-poems, presented

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by Lorenzo Oliván (2001), Pujol (2001) and Villar Raso (2001). The more concentrated the “poetic essence”, the harder it becomes to retain it in translation. An example is the following: 730 Defrauded I a Butterfly— The lawful Heir—for Thee— It is possible to paraphrase this short poem as “I defrauded a Butterfly/Did I defraud a Butterfly? /What if I defrauded a Butterfly?— My/our lawful heir —and gave it [the legacy] to you/ because of you”.

This poem is rendered by Pujol (2001: 136) as: Sé que desposeí a una mariposa de su herencia legítima. Por ti.

[I know that I dispossessed a butterfly of her legitimate legacy. For you.]

Rhythm and rhyme play a vital role in the original, as does the wavering between assertion and question. Pujol’s translation is prosaic, and the introduction of sé que… [I know that…] adds an element of certainty that is absent in the original. However, as can be seen in the back-translation, the overall meaning has not been substantially altered.

Villar Raso (2001: 307) translated: Defraudé a una Mariposa— Tu—legítima Heredera— [I defrauded a butterfly your—legitimate heir] In the original there is a narrator in the first person (I), and there are two other ‘persons’ mentioned: the butterfly, present in many of Dickinson’s poems, and a human being (you) that is directly addressed.

The butterfly is to inherit the narrator but another ‘person’ appears on the scene, and the legacy is bestowed on her/him. In Villar Raso’s version, and due to the absence of the accent marking the second person pronoun tú [you], the butterfly becomes the addressee’s heir: tu legítima heredera [your lawful heir]. This brings about a total change in point of view. It

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makes this poem, which is already concentrated enough, exceedingly difficult to interpret, to a point where the reader gives up, as the translation does not furnish sufficient information to make sense of the poem. I grant that Dickinson’s poems can be cryptic to the extreme, and that certain context-less poems present close to insurmountable difficulties in translation. In such cases the translator will have to take the trouble to do a little research on Dickinson´s imagery.

My own proposal for a translation would be: La mariposa era—mi heredera— La destituí—por ti— [The butterfly was—my heir I substituted you—for her] In this translation my main aim is to maintain the internal rhymes “I-butterfly”, without sacrificing the main elements that integrate the meaning, even if the possibility of interpreting the enunciation as a question is not preserved.

In Dickinson’s poem 303, another complete reversal in point of view takes place: The Soul selects her own Society— Then—shuts the Door— To her divine Majority— Present no more— This poem, in Villar Raso’s translation becomes: El Alma elige su propia Compañía— [The Soul chooses her own company] Luego—cierra la Puerta— [Then—closes the Door] A su divina Mayoría— [to its divine Majority] Que ya no está presente— [which is not present any more] (Villar Raso, 2001: 143)

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Whereas in Dickinson it is the soul that shuts the door and is “present no more”, in the translation it is the “divine Majority” that is shut out and ya no está presente [is not present any more].

Villar Raso’s changes of point of view might ultimately have been caused by lack of proficiency in the English language, as his frequent howlers bear witness to (see for example his translation of “A Dying Tiger moaned for Drink”). Both these poem are descriptive and also structurally and grammatically very straightforward, and, if translated with a certain common sense, readily furnish the clues for interpretation present in the original.

ELLIPSIS AND EXPLICATION Ellipsis is, in fact, an element that is so common in poetry that it can hardly be considered deviant. When comparing English and Spanish poetry, we will find that the use of ellipsis in poetry follows similar patterns, from which we could draw the conclusion that no translation problems are likely to appear. Difficulties might appear on the level of interpretation, and are related to reference. To illustrate this point, any of Dickinson’s poems that contain ellipsis can be used for comparison with the corresponding translation. The famous “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”, here in versions by Ocampo, Manent and Ardanaz, is an interesting example: Original (version of 1861) Ocampo (1859+1861) Manent (1859+1861) Ardanaz (1859 only) Safe in their Alabaster Chambers Untouched by Morning And untouched by Noon Lie the meek members of the Resurrection Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone!

Protegidos en sus moradas de alabastro [Protected in their dwellings of alabaster] no visitados por la mañana [not visited in the morning/by the morning

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no visitados por la noche [not visited at night/by the night] yacen los apacibles miembros de la resurrección [lie the tranquil members of the resurrection] paredes de raso, [walls of satin] techos de piedra [ceilings of stone] Seguros, en estancias de alabastro [Safe, in rooms of alabaster] sin que les llegue el alba ni el día, mansos duermen [without the arrival of dawn nor of day, meek sleep] los cuerpos, esperando resucitar; las vigas [the bodies, expecting resurrection, the beams] son de satén, y de piedra es el techo. [are of satin, and of stone is the ceiling] A salvo en sus Alabastrinos Aposentos – [Saved in their alabastrine chambers] De la Mañana intactos [of the morning intact] Del Mediodía intactos – [of noon intact] Duermen los mansos miembros de la resurrección – [Sleep the meek members of the resurrection] Costanera de raso, [Rafter of satin] Techo de piedra. [ceiling of stone] Grand go the Years – in the Crescent –Above them – Worlds scoop their Arcs – And Firmaments – row – Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender – Soundless as dots – on a Disc of Snow Espléndidos pasan los años -el creciente - allá arriba – [Splendid pass the years—the crescent moon up there] mundos vacían sus arcas – [worlds empty their coffers] firmamentos – bogan –

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[firmaments sail] diademas caen - jefes -se rinden[diadems fall— bosses surrender] mudos como puntos – [speechless like dots] en un disco de nieve – [on a disc of snow] Sobre el alto creciente pomposos van los años; [On the hight crescent of the moon pompous go the years] Tienden arcos los mundos y el cielo boga, leve: [The worlds extend arcs and the sky sails, lightly] las diademas se caen y se rinden los príncipes [the diadems fall and the princes surrender] sin rumor, como signos en un disco de nieve [without a rumour, like signs on a disc of snow] (no second stanza in the 1859 version) Ocampo displays her habitual lexical mistranslations: no visitados [not visited] for untouched, the sloppy translation of morning and noon as mañana [morning] and noche [night]; pared [wall] for rafter, el creciente =cuarto creciente [first quarter (of the moon)] for crescent, and vaciar las arcas [empty the coffers] (sic!) for scoop their arcs.

Manent seems to have understood this poem better than usual, and perhaps this is the reason why he explains what the “meek members of the Resurrection” might refer to, and replaces the ellipsis in “rafter of satin — and roof of stone!” with the full sentence las vigas son de satén y de piedra es el techo [the beams are made of satin and of stone is the ceiling], including a subject/verb inversion in the second part. The original expression, albeit elliptical, leaves no doubt that the rafters and the roof are part of the “chambers”, that is, of the coffin, so no explanation is called for. The addition of the adjective leve [lightly] to modify el cielo boga [the sky sails/rows] can only obey the wish to create end-rhyme (leve/nieve), but at the cost of altering the original. Ardanaz has done her lexical homework as is habitual in her well-researched versions (costanera is, to be exact, the technical term for “rafter”, while viga is the “beam”), but she adds a difficulty where the original has none: “untouched by morning/untouched by noon” become

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de la mañana intactos/ del mediodía intactos [of the morning intact/ of noon intact], which is ungrammatical in Spanish.

It is easy to reconstruct the original as “untouched by the morning light /untouched by the light of noon”, the only problem being to decide whether it is the chambers or the members of Resurrection that are untouched by light. Ocampo and Manent have chosen to disambiguate, while Ardanaz maintains the doubt, using two masculine nouns (aposentos, miembros).

Another example of ellipsis occurs in “My life had stood — a Loaded Gun —“: 764 My life had stood - a Loaded Gun in Corners - till a Day the Owner passed -identified and carried Me away The participle “identified” can be connected to four elements in the following fashion: - the Owner passed and identified my life - the Owner passed and identified the loaded gun (which was my life) - the Owner passed and identified me - an entity, which I identified as the Owner of my life, passed, and carried me away.

Manent does not translate this poem. Here I present Ocampo’s and Ardanaz’s version, followed by my own.

Mi vida fue siempre – un arma cargada My life was always - a loaded weapon en rincones - hasta que un día in corners - until one day el dueño pasó – identificado the owner passed – identified -

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me llevó took me with him -] Mi vida había permanecido – como un Arma Cargada My life had remained – like a loaded weapon En los Rincones – hasta el Día en que in the corners – until the day on which El Dueño pasó – se identificó The Owner passed – identified himself Y Me llevó muy lejosand took me very far away Cual arma cargada mi vida [Like a loaded weapon-my life-] en Rincones siempre estuvo [in corners-always was] hasta que el Dueño reconocida [until the Owner-recognised] Pasó y Me llevó consigo[passed and took me with him] Dickinson 1979 translated by Silvina Ocampo, Dickinson, 1992: 235 translated by Margarita Ardanaz) Dahlgren, 2002: 109 The system of noun/adjective agreement for gender in Spanish makes it impossible to connect identificado with any other head than dueño [the owner was identified by me]. Another, and more serious, problem arises due to the choice of verb in the first line: rincones become the place where the gun was loaded, not the place where the loaded gun stood. Ardanaz interprets “identified” as a truncated reflexive verb phrase, thereby proposing still another interpretation [the owner passed and identified himself], which has the drawback of eliminating all the other possibilities of interpretation. My own translation is an attempt at maintaining rhythm and end-rhyme. The choice of the rhyming pair vida/reconocida automatically produces a reference to a female narrating persona, to the “loaded weapon” (arma cargada) and to “my life” (mi vida).

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CONCLUSION An in-depth analysis of some of Emily Dickinson’s translators shows that Manent and Ocampo (Dahlgren, 1998; 2000; 2005), both acknowledged poets, seem to follow the originals very closely. Both versions have received acclaim –Ocampo has been praised by Jorge Luis Borges (see Mackintosh, forthcoming) and Manent is generally considered as both a good poet and a faithful translator. However, many of their translations include howlers and the appraisal of their efforts shows the existence of a pervasive use of slightly deviating choices, producing the loss of the pragmatic meanings of the translated texts. Ocampo’s translation of “Like eyes that looked on wastes” is an example of this gradual edging away from the core of the poem.

If the phonetic and phonological level has not been given prominence in the translation of a poem, the lexical and syntactic levels have to be treated with utmost care. If the original presents visual imagery, the lexicon tends to take on great importance. Visual imagery, comparisons and similes appear frequently in Dickinson and must be preserved to the greatest possible extent in translation. If phonetic imitation is not an issue, what remains to be analysed is appropriateness on the syntactical and lexical level. In many of the poems analysed here, the failures are on the pragmatic level. Syntactic complexity has been added to the poems, both where anything remotely strange appears in the original and where there is no complexity that warrants the use of deviant grammar in the translation.

The narrating persona’s point of view has been altered, sometimes to the degree of making interpretation impossible. All this increases reader effort to a level high above the cost/reward rate of the original.

WORKS CITED (Pujol, Oliván and Villar Raso appear under P, O, and V respectively, as their selections have been given names that do not coincide with any edition of Dickinson’s verse) Blakemore, Diane. 1989. “Linguistic Form. The explicit and the implicit”. In Hickey, Leo (ed). The Pragmatics of Style. London: Routledge.

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Blakemore, Diane. 1993. “The relevance of reformulations”.

Language and Literature 2,2: 101-120.

Dahlgren, Marta. 1998. “Relevance and the Translation of Poetry”.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 11. November 1998: 23-32.

Dahlgren, Marta. 2000. “A Relevance-based Approach to Poetry in Translation”. Perspectives 8:2 (2000): 97-108.

Dahlgren, Marta. 2002. ”Three poems by Emily Dickinson translated into Spanish” Metamorphoses. The Five College Journal for Literary Translation. Smith College, Northampton, MA. August 2002: 108-110.

Dahlgren, Marta. 2005. “”Preciser what we are.” Emily Dickinson in Translation. A study in literary pragmatics”. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005): 1081-1107.

Dickinson, Emily. 1979. Poemas. Selección y versión de Marià Manent. Madrid: Visor.

Dickinson, Emily. 1992. Poemas. Edición y traducción de Margarita Ardanaz. Madrid: Cátedra.

Dickinson, Emily. 2000. Poemas. Edición bilingüe de Margarita Ardanaz. Madrid: Cátedra. (Paperback edition) Dickinson, Emily. 1997. (1985). Poemas. Selección y traducción de Silvina Ocampo. Barcelona: Tusquets.

Carston, Rachel. 2001. Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Castillo, Julia. 1984. Emily Dickinson. Poemas. Madrid: Libros Maina.

Champourcin, Ernestina. 1946. Obra escogida. México: Centauro.

Cureton, Richard. 1997. “Linguistics, Stylistics, and Poetics”.

Language and Literature XXII (1997): 1-43.

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Gutt, Ernst August. 1991. Translation and Relevance. Cognition and Context. Oxford: Blackwells.

Holmes, J.S. 1994 1994 (2000). “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”. In HOlemes (ed) Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Reprinted in Venuti (ed) The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

House, Juliane. 1981. A Model for Translation Quality Assessment.

Tübingen: Gunter Narr Johnson, Thomas H. (ed). 1975.(1970). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. London: Faber Paperbacks.

Jordana, Ricardo y María Macarulla. 1980. Poemas de Emily Dickinson. Barcelona: Bosch.

Mackintosh, Fiona. (forthcoming) “A Happy Transmigration?

Silvina Ocampo translates Emily Dickinson”.

Mey, Jakob. 1999. When Voices Clash. A Study in Literary Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Oliván, Lorenzo. 2001. Emily Dickinson. La soledad sonora.

Selección, prólogo y versión de Lorenzo Oliván. Madrid y Buenos Aires: Cruz del Sur. Pascual Garrido, María Luisa. 1999. “Reflexiones acerca de la labor de traducción de poesía inglesa de Marià Manent”. In Álvarez & Fernández (eds) Anovar/Anosar. Estudios de traducción e interpretación.

Vol 3.Vigo: Servicio de Publicacións. 169-178.

Pollak, Vivian R. 1996 “Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry”. In Farr, Judith (ed). Emily Dickinson. A Collection of Critical Essays. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 62-75 Pujol, Carlos. 2001. Emily Dickinson. Algunos poemas. Escogidos y traducidos por Carlos Pujol. Granada: La Veleta.

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Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 2000 (1986). Relevance.

Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond.

Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London: Routledge.

Villar Raso, Manuel. 2002. Emily Dickinson. Crónica de plata.

(Poemas escogidos) Selección y traducción de Manuel Villar Raso.

Madrid: Hiperión.

Websites: http//www.epdlp.com/dickinson.html, consulted 4 September 2003

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Negotiating borders between ‘new mannism’ and ‘laddishness’ in British men’s magazines’ problem pages: a casestudy Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Desde los años ochenta, lo que se ha dado en llamar new mannism y laddishness se han convertido en dos posiciones de sujeto recurrentes en los discursos sobre la masculinidad construidos en diversos géneros de la cultura popular contemporánea del Reino Unido, incluidas las revistas de temas generales para hombres. Sirviéndonos de un acercamiento a los conceptos de discurso e identidad desde el Análisis Crítico del Discurso, este trabajo da cuenta de las tensiones entre ambas imágenes de lo masculino tal y como se articulan en las secciones de consulta de las revistas para hombres británicas. Mediante el estudio de un caso, examinamos la construcción discursiva de la masculinidad en este género, desentrañando los procesos de negociación de identidad entre dichas imágenes de lo masculino, e iluminando el papel fundamental del lenguaje en estos procesos activados en el acto de lectura de este tipo de publicaciones periódicas en lengua inglesa.

Since the eighties, so-called ‘new mannism’ and ‘laddishness’ have become two recurring subject positions in the discourses on masculinity constructed in contemporary popular-culture genres in Britain, men’s general-interest magazines included.

Drawing upon a critical discourse analysis perspective on ‘discourse’ and ‘identity’, this paper delves into the tensions between both images of masculinity articulated in men’s magazines’ problem pages. The discursive construction of masculinity in this genre is thus examined by means of a case study which explores the mechanisms of border negotiations between ‘new mannism’ and ‘laddishness’ in men’s magazines’ problem columns. This case study likewise highlights the fundamental role of language within the processes activated when reading this type of publications in English.

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Palabras clave: análisis crítico del discurso, discurso, identidad, laddishness, new mannism, revistas masculinas británicas Keywords: critical discourse analysis, discourse, identity ‘laddishness’, ‘new mannism’, British men’s magazines

1. INTRODUCTION Since the eighties, ‘new mannism’ and ‘laddishness’ have become two recurring subject positions in the discourses on masculinity constructed in contemporary British popular-culture genres, men’s magazines included.

Although the ‘new man’ and the ‘new lad’ are often clearly – and antagonistically – represented in these publications, the borders between these images are sometimes blurred1. Drawing upon a critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) perspective on discourse and identity, this contribution means to shed light on the tensions between both subject positions as constructed in men’s magazines’ problem pages. The analysis of a sample from this genre will serve as a case study exploring the ways whereby masculine identities are discursively constructed in this genre through processes of border negotiations between new mannism and laddishness. The role of language in the identity-negotiation processes activated when reading these magazines will thus be highlighted.

2. CONSTRUCTING THE SELF AND THE OTHER, NEGOTIATING BORDERS One major approach to identity-construction processes within contemporary cultural theory considers that, being regulated by the power relations of the social formations where they emerge, discourses create ‘subject positions’ with which individuals will negotiate their own identity2.

Hall (2000: 19) has seen identities as “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us”. In particular, ‘identity’ may be said to refer to the meeting point, the point of sature, between, on the one hand, the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and, on the other, the processes which

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produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’ (Hall ibid.).

What Redman (2000: 10) has come to label as the ‘subject-oflanguage’ approach to identity production entails that “there is no ‘essential’, ‘true’ or pre-social self but that, instead, identities are constituted or ‘performatively’ enacted in and through the subject positions made available in language and wider cultural codes” (ibid.)3. As Edley and Wetherell stress, “selves are being accomplished in the course of social interactions, reconstructed from moment to moment within specific discursive and rhetorical contexts, and distributed across contexts” (1997: 2005). This has lead theorists like Sarah Mills to use the notion of ‘negotiation’ to refer to the process activated as individuals constantly redefine their identity by taking up or resisting the subject positions made available in the discourses surrounding them throughout their social lives: The categories and narratives which discourse constructs for subjects are not simply imposed, but are subject to negotiation by those subjects.

It’s the process of engaging with discursive structures that constitutes us as particular types of individuals or subject positions (1997: 96).

Admittedly, identities have been discussed as materializing in the course of ongoing processes of border negotiations between uniqueness and difference, for “it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called it constitutive outside that the positive meaning of any term – and thus ‘identity’ – can be constructed” (Hall 2000: 17). Therefore, identities are articulated as a result of a process where the self and the other negotiate borders of sameness and diversity: As maintained by Gilroy (1997: 315), the Other, against whose resistance the integrity of identity is established, can be recognized as part of the self […] This means that the self can no longer be plausibly understood as a unitary entity but appears instead as one fragile moment in the dialogic circuit that connects ‘us’ with our ‘others’.

2.1. Negotiating subject positions in media discourse Echoing Foucaultian-inspired discourse theory, Stuart Hall considers

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that identities are constructed as a result of the power of discourses to generate what they name and regulate as well: “the discourse produces ‘subjects’ – figures who personify the particular forms of knowledge which the discourse produces […] But the discourse also produces a place for the subject (i.e. the reader or viewer, who is also ‘subjected to’ discourse)” (1997: 56)4. If different types of discourse come to construct different subject positions, which happen to be “specific to discourse types and ideologically variable” (Fairclough 1989: 102), what makes media discourse specific in this respect lies in its construction of “an ‘ideal’ reader who is at the same time both produced and in a sense imprisoned by the text” (Caldas-Coulthard 1996: 250)5. Consequently, media discourse builds into subject positions for ideal subjects “and actual viewers or listeners or readers have to negotiate a relationship with the ideal subject” (Fairclough 1989: 49).

2.2. CDA and the analysis of the discursive construction of identities As substantiated by the above-mentioned approaches, ‘discourse’ is a vital notion to understand identity-construction processes. By way of example, Petersen has emphasized the fact that “increasingly, identity is seen as a discursive construction – one that is arbitrary and exclusionary, and acts as a normative ideal for regulating subjects” (1998: 14, emphasis added). CDA has thus become a major instrument for cultural analyses, providing “the methodological tools by which to demonstrate the place of language in the constitution and regulation of cultures and cultural identities” (Barker and Galasinski 2002: 27). Considering discourse as a form of social practice, CDA posits as a basic premise the fact that “discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially shaped: it constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relationships between people” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258). As it is, CDA has become a fundamental tool to examine the discursive construction of identities and the positioning of people as social subjects, disentangling the role of language in these processes as well. As Fairclough maintains, “discourses do not just reflect or represent social entities and relations, they construct or ‘constitute’ them; different discourses constitute key entities in different ways, and position people in different ways as social subjects” (1992a: 3-4).

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Norman Fairclough’s (1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1995a, 1995b, 2003) model of CDA, as drawn upon in this paper, is organised on the basis of a three-fold conception of discourse: “discourse, and any specific instance of discursive practice, is seen as simultaneously (i) a language text, spoken or written, (ii) discourse practice (text production and text interpretation), (iii) sociocultural practice” (Fairclough 1995a: 97). This approach to discourse involves a three-dimensional analytical framework involving three stages. (i) Description of textual features leads to the (ii) interpretation of the discursive practice constructed by such textual features, focusing on processes of textual production, comprehension, distribution and consumption activated in such an interaction. This interaction is finally (iii) explained as a form of socio-cultural practice, embodying a certain ideology and being socially determined.

3. MEN’S MAGAZINES, PROBLEM PAGES, NEW MANNISM AND LADDISHNESS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN Since the mid-eighties, a new generation of general-interest men’s magazines has emerged in the British print-media market6. Titles like Arena, Esquire, FHM, Loaded, Maxim or Stuff for Men have become well-established magazines for men sold on a monthly basis at two-tothree pounds per issue. Only ten years after they first started being published, men’s lifestyle magazines had already become “the fastestgrowing magazine sector” (Smith 1996: 1-2), and “had established a mass market and were, in some cases, outselling the most popular women’s magazines” (Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks 2001: 1) in Britain7. These magazines are targeted at “single, affluent, city-dwelling, high-earning and high-spending, primarily heterosexual men” (Edwards 1997: 76), and, as various market-research studies confirm (Cf. Mort 1988: 211; Smith 1996: 32), are addressed at a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old ideal male reader.

Men’s magazines incorporate various features to do with sex and women, fashion and grooming, health and fitness, sport, cars and travel.

In addition to interviews with famous male icons and celebrities and how-to sections, these periodicals include a great deal of advertising about high-tech, drink, tobacco, men’s wear and accessories. Following the long tradition of ‘agony aunts’ in women’s weeklies, problem pages

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are a regular feature in these magazines, where readers and counsellors interact about various problems associated with the assumed masculine lifestyle, for instance, conflictive relationships with women, fathering, health, personal looks, style and fashion concerns.

New mannism and laddishness have become two dominant subject positions in the discourses on masculinity constructed in present-day British popular-culture genres such as TV shows, advertisements, selfhelp books and men’s lifestyle magazines8. In contrast to traditionally patriarchal constructions of masculinity, new mannism has come to define a renovated form of masculinity characterized by a more egalitarian treatment of women, an attempt to come to terms with the realm of emotions, and a remarkable concern about personal looks: New man represents the ideal partner for the modern, liberated, heterosexual woman. He is a softer, more sensitive and caring individual, who also avoids sexist language, changes nappies and loves to shop all day his own clothes (Edley and Wetherell 1997: 204).

Following its advent in the mid-eighties, new mannism has been discussed as a response to the impact of second-wave feminism on men since the seventies attempting “to resolve some of the obvious contradictions of the Classic Macho, to recognize and make peace with the feminine within itself, in response to feminist critiques […] invigorated by his enthusiastic embrace of female roles and qualities” (Chapman 1988: 227). The impingements of consumerism on men have likewise been considered as a fundamental element contributing to the shaping of the new man imagery and “the space it represented for the display of masculine sensuality, the sanctioning of a highly staged narcissism through the codes of dress and grooming” (Nixon 1996: 202).

Nonetheless, by the late eighties Rutherford (1988: 32) echoes the emergence of a ‘retributive man’ representing “the struggle to reassert a traditional masculinity, a tough independent authority”. Throughout the nineties, laddishness has come to represent what Storry and Childs (1997: 338) consider “a reaction to the idea of the caring, sensitive ‘new man’ produced by the feminist movement”. The new lad has thus come to herald the most ‘destructively’ patriarchal aspects of masculinity by re-

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creating hegemonic male values like sexual objectification of women, aggressive and disruptive behaviour in soccer matches, homophobia or excessive drinking. As Edwards puts it, “where the New Man was caring and sharing the New Lad is selfish, loutish and inconsiderate to a point of infantile smelliness” (1997: 82).

Highlighting the media-driven character of new mannism and laddishness, Rowman has recently insisted on the mutual constituency between, and the antagonistic nature of, both subject positions: “the socalled New Man […] is a media creation who is not to be found in the real world. Even if he did exist, my belief is that he would deteriorate into the New Lad all too easily” (1997: 250). Although the ‘new man’ has become a highly celebrated and politically correct image of masculinity in various media representations of cotemporary Britain, in elbowing his way forward, the new lad has succeeded in validating and reminding society of the persistence of the most patriarchal and hegemonic burden inherited by contemporary masculinities. Both images have coexisted in media representations of masculinity ever since, but laddism has come to express the other – more repressed – side of aspirational new mannism for masculine selves.

4. CASE STUDY Since they started publishing, titles like GQ, Arena, Later or Esquire have been loyal to the representation of the new man throughout their features. The following example from Later magazine (September 1999, p. 26) dealing with masculine preoccupation with personal looks is illustrative of the construction of this subject position in the problem pages of the above-mentioned magazines: Q: My girlfriend told me that I spend more time in front of the mirror and worrying about how I look than she does. She says it’s a real turn off that I’m so vain. But I know she also likes the fact that I look good, so what’s the problem?

THE EXPERT Your problem can be broken down into two parts. First, maybe your girlfriend likes you looking good, but not

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if you make too much of a fuss about it. This leads onto the second part of the problem. Are you making yourself look good for her or for yourself? The sad part of the story of Narcissus was that by falling in love with his reflection he was condemned to isolation. Many women give up on narcissistic men as they feel that they can never love them as much as they love themselves. So be warned.

Something similar has happened with the recurrent construction of laddish images of masculinity in magazines like Sky Magazine, Loaded or Stuff for Men, whose representation of the new lad has come to pervade the problem columns of such publications, as the next example from Sky Magazine (September 1999, p.162) illuminates: Dear Karen I’m desperate to shag this 22-year-old. I know her very well and we are good friends, though I’ve fancied her since day one. She has huge tits. But I’m worried if I make a pass and she doesn’t like it, she’ll hit me.

Adam, Manchester Your problem is that you want a fuck but don’t have the balls to ask. Christ, I’ve never seen such a wimp. Pussy does not spill out of those little gumball machines at the mall, you know. (If it did, I’d own a few.) You have to risk your arse to get some – that’s the law. So, yellowbelly, why not take her for a drink and then say you fancy her? You know, in a few years you’ll look back on this and think, “All that fuss over a pair of tits that aren’t even attached to an offshore bank account and a bag of drugs.”

New mannism and laddishness have coexisted since the late eighties onwards, and, more often than not, both constructions of masculinity can be found in the same title. What is more, it is sometimes difficult to establish clear borders between both subject positions in the images of masculinity projected from different sections of titles like FHM, Maxim, or Men’s Health, problem pages included. This is the case of many questions about fathering, where a widespread strain emerges

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between a caring, nurturing and sensitive representation of the so-called ‘new father’ (Brandth and Kvande 1998: 294) as a major dimension of the new man, and more “authoritarian or distant breadwinner images of fatherhood” (Lazar 2000: 380). Drawing upon CDA, we thus proceed to examine one of such instances in order to explore such border-identity negotiations as articulated through discourse9.

4.1. Negotiating borders between new mannism and laddishness in discourse: from text to socio-cultural practice Various textual features come to construct a discursive practice taking shape around the reader’s reluctance to fulfil his wife’s wish for him to accompany her in the delivery room for fear of losing his sex drive. The lexis of committed fathering (e.g. “more involved”; “the sooner and stronger […] the connection […] between father and child”; “make yourself useful”; “mopping your wife’s brow”; “holding her hand”; “letting her crush yours”) coexists with that of laddish self-centredness and men’s sexual priority over their wives’ requirements (e.g. “don’t want to be in the delivery room”; “feel sick”; “murder my sex drive”; “excuses”; “your sexuality”; “destroy your sex drive”). In actual fact, the very lexical formulation of the reader’s question (“Got any good excuses I can use?”) is significant of the unclear border between new mannism and laddism, for, in spite of selfishly prioritizing his sexual drive at all costs, the reader manifests some consideration of her wife’s desires by seeking appropriate excuses helping him not to upset her too much. Furthermore, in describing the reader’s sexual anxiety as “a common fear among men”, the expert somehow acknowledges and shows a certain empathy with this husband’s preoccupation.

In addition to lexical features like “common fear”, masculine anxieties in the reader’s question are constructed through mental processes (e.g. “and I don’t want to be in the delivery room”; “the thought makes me feel sick”)10. However, in promoting a model of fatherhood where men are more committed and willing to comply with their wives’ needs, the counsellor tends to draw upon relational processes describing his own view upon the problem (e.g. “This is a common fear among men”; “Your sexuality is not that delicate”; “The more involved you are […] the sooner and stronger the connection will be between father and child”), and

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material processes, which hint at specific behavioural patterns for the new fathers (e.g. “Take a front-row seat”; “Make yourself useful by mopping your wife’s brow or, better still, holding her hand and letting her crush yours”). In quoting an expert’s opinion by means of verbal processes (e.g. “says Frank Pittman” [twice]), the counsellor succeeds in providing further credibility to his own advice.

This tension between new mannism and laddishness is evidenced by various aspects of mood and modality. Thus, whereas can as a modal of possibility serves the anonymous writer to wonder about which resources are available to evade his wife’s demands and preserve the full enjoyment of his sexuality (e.g. “Which excuses can I use?”), the column expert does not hesitate to use the imperative and modal auxiliary of certainty will to urge more nurturing attitudes towards fathering (e.g. “Take a frontrow seat”; “the sooner and stronger the connection will be between father and child”; “Make yourself useful”)11. On the other hand, negation helps the reader to reject what he considers as uncomfortable attitudes and behaviours of a would-be new man when in the delivery room (e.g. “and I don’t want to be in the delivery room”). This resource is likewise used by the magazine counsellor to disregard laddish overestimations of male sexuality (e.g. “This is a common fear among men, but not always a rational one”; “Your sexuality is not that delicate”)12.

From a cohesive point of view, the writer’s use of copulative and as a major information organiser in his question projects a cumulative effect in the construction of his wife’s demands as actual hindrances for the safeguarding of his libido (e.g. “My wife is pregnant with our first child and I don’t want to be in the delivery room when it pops out – the thought makes me feel sick, and I’m sure it would murder my sex drive”).

Moreover, although you refers sometimes to the reader having written to Men’s Health’s problem page (e.g. “Make yourself useful by mopping your wife’s brow or, better still, holding her hand and letting her crush yours”), this pronoun incorporates a generic value which accounts for the magazine’s attempt to diffuse its new mannist ideology amongst many other male readers assumed to share the same problem (e.g. “Your sexuality is not that delicate”; “it’s going to take more than a slippery placenta to destroy your sex drive”; “The more involved you are at the beginning”)13.

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Following the conventions of counselling columns as a printmedia genre, the choice of textual features described above may be interpreted as constructing a discursive practice constituting a subject position articulated on the basis of masculine anxieties about fathering, sexuality and the satisfaction of wives’ demands. In drawing upon the schema of the problem page as a genre, where an individual seeks advice from the expert of a periodical publication to overcome personal troubles, magazine readers will come to comprehend men’s relation with such dimensions as problematic14. Questions and answers like this have been selected and published by the section’s editorial board as representative of ideal readers’ systems of values and concerns. Whereas the projection of a man willing to preserve his sexual pleasures at all costs is consistent with the ideology of the new lad, an alternative representation of the new man emerges out of the reader’s wife’s desire to satisfy her demands and the counsellor’s recommendation that he behave as a committed father since the very birth of his first child.

Faced with masculine-identity dimensions like this, magazine readers are accordingly positioned as having to negotiate their masculinity drawing upon elements of new mannism and laddishness whose borders are often blurring. Quoting O’Hagan (1996), Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks (2001: 35) refer to this self-and-other identity-negotiation process as producing “a would be New man who can’t quite shake off his outmoded, but snug fitting, laddishness”. As proved by various textual features from this discursive instance, the borders between new mannism and laddishness are not hard-and-fast. For the reader’s self-centred concern over his sexual drive betrays a certain preoccupation with his wife’s understanding of this attitude, which somehow brings him closer to the counsellor’s recommendation to satisfy his partner’s demands.

This discursive practice involves the interaction between the individual reader writing in, Men’s Health’s counsellor, this section’s editorial board and the plurality of magazine consumers. The construction of this type of discourse may be explained as part of wider socio-cultural practices representing masculinity in popular-culture vehicles like men’s magazines. As stated above, the social matrix of new mannist and laddish discourses on masculinity emerging in genres like problem columns is to be located in the changing socio-cultural circumstances experimented by men in Britain since the late seventies, such as the challenges of

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feminism to patriarchal gender relations, the increasing effects of consumer culture on men, and the backlash against these trends. In this context, men’s magazines have succeeded commercially “through the commodification of men’s gender anxieties […] giving men the discursive resources to handle their changing circumstances and experiences” (Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks 2001: 156). Men’s magazines – counselling pages like this included – have thus had an essential role in representing and constructing such fundamentally media-driven images as the new man and the new lad, as well as in distributing the discourses on masculinity articulated around such images15.

5. FINAL REMARKS Although new mannism and laddishness have often been explored as opposite versions of masculinity, both subject positions may be taken to be two sides of the same phenomenon, the one not being understandable without the other. Soon after these images started taking shape in the eighties, Rutherford hinted at this mutual dependency between the new man and the so-called retributive man by exploring them as “two idealised images that correspond to the repressed and the public meanings of masculinity [respectively]” (1988: 28). This coexistence of new mannism and laddishness and their somehow blurring limits may thus be taken as evidence of the shifting nature of masculinities in contemporary Britain; the ongoing process involving masculine selves’ incorporation of dimensions formerly associated with the realm of femininity; and the simultaneous struggle to hold on to parameters traditionally defining male culture.

Being constructed as readers with specific identities, media discourse consumers are frequently positioned within a process where the self and the other negotiate borders of sameness and diversity. This case study of a sample from men’s magazines’ problem pages has served to explore this process of identity-construction in discourse, focusing on identity negotiations between new mannism and laddishness in this genre16. In particular, CDA has shed light on the fundamental role played by language in this process, as substantiated by the results concerning lexis, processes, modality, negation or cohesion.

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NOTES

1

Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks (2001) draw upon notions like ‘laddishness’, ‘laddism’, ‘new lad’ or ‘retributive man’ alike to refer to the same type of construction of masculinity. Due to their unusual character, such terms tend to be found written between single quotation marks; however, given their pervasive use in this paper, we will avoid quotation marks if at all possible to avoid reiteration.

2

As Davies and Harré put it, “a subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights for those that use that repertoire. Once having taken up a particular position as one’s own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned” (1990: 46).

3

Woodward acknowledges some differences between the notions of ‘self’ and ‘identity’, between which there is a great deal of overlap.

Individuals’ subjectivity includes their sense of the self, of ‘who we are’; however, our experience of subjectivity takes place in a social context “where language and culture give meaning to our experience of ourselves and where we adopt an identity” (1997: 39).

4

For Foucault, discourses designate “the practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972: 49).

5

Media discourse presupposes the existence of systems of values and beliefs among ideal readers, viewers or listeners. As Reah underlines with reference to newspapers – which may likewise be applied to other media vehicles – “newspapers assume the existence of groups that may not actually exist as groups within society and, by addressing themselves to these groups, create a shared ideology” (1998: 35).

6

Although the generation of lifestyle magazines explicitly addressed at men is fairly new, traditionally there has existed a long tradition

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of titles dating back to the nineteenth century, which have had men as their primary readers. These interest magazines comprise titles about sports, fishing and hunting, photography, cars, DIY, soft-core, etc.

7

At the beginning of 2002, the British Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a circulation of over 570,000 items per month for titles like FHM (Cf. its web site at <http://www.abc.org.uk>).

8

Strictly speaking, the terms ‘new man’ and ‘new lad’ – or ‘retributive man’ – are to be taken as mere images of masculinity represented in various cultural artefacts in the UK. ‘New mannism’ and ‘laddishness’ – or ‘laddism’ – may be understood as wider subject positions articulated around such images in the discourses on masculinity constructed in contemporary British popular-culture genres such as men’s magazines. As explored by Nixon (1996: 202; 1997: 327), images like the new man or the new lad designate ‘regimes of representation’ whereas the corresponding subject positions (i.e. new mannism, laddishness) incorporate further ideological repertoires positioning as social subjects the individuals participating in the discourses where such subject positions are constituted. Considering du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay and Negus’s (1997: 3-5) ‘circuit of culture’, we can therefore associate the new man or the new lad with the practices of cultural representation in society, and new mannism or laddishness with those of identity construction. Incidentally, despite their direct connection with the new lad, expressions like `new laddishness´ or `new laddism´ are never employed in the literature on contemporary masculinities in Britain, but just ‘laddishness’ or ‘laddism’.

9

See final appendix.

10

According to systemic-functional linguistics, reality consists of ‘goingson’ or processes. In Halliday’s (1994) typology, mental processes have to do with emotions and cognition (e.g. like, want); relational processes are processes of being (e.g. be, become); material processes concern the world of acting and creating (e.g. do, go, stop); and verbal processes reflect verbal conduct (e.g. say, suggest).

11

As Palmer (1986: 108) stresses, the imperative is to be considered as the unmarked member of the system of deontic modality.

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12

As claimed by Fairclough (1989: 154-155), we tend to use negations “as a way of taking issue with the corresponding positive statements [...] What the writer in fact seems to be assuming is that these assertions are to be found in antecedent texts which are within reader’s experience”.

13

According to Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Starvik, “[generic] you again retains something of its 2nd person meaning: it can suggest that the speaker is appealing to the hearer’s experience of life in general, or else of some specific situation, as in: This wine makes you feel drowsy, doesn’t it?” (1985: 354).

14

Schemata may be said to be “‘higher-level complex (and even conventional or habitual) knowledge structures’, which function as ‘ideational scaffolding’ in the organisation and interpretation of experience” (Brown and Yule 1983: 247).

15

As indicated by Mills (1997: 17), we can assume that “that there is a set of discourses of femininity and masculinity, because women and men behave within a certain range of parameters when defining themselves as gendered subjects”.

16

Of course, these results apply to the positioning of magazine consumers in the act of reading such publications. Further sociological analyses – which are out of the scope of this work – should be undertaken to investigate the incorporation of features of new mannism and ladishness, which are but media constructions, by actual individuals.

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Woodward, K. 1997 “Concepts of identity and difference” in K. Woodward, ed. Identity and Difference. London/Sage: The Open University.

APPENDIX: SAMPLE ANALYSED (Men’s Health, July/August 1999, p. 97) Q. My wife is pregnant with our first child and I don’t want to be in the delivery room when it pops out – the thought makes me feel sick, and I’m sure it would murder my sex drive. Got any good excuses I can use?

A. This is a common fear among men, but not always a rational one. “Your sexuality is not that delicate”, says Frank Pittman, a marriage and family therapist who thinks it’s going to take more than a slippery placenta to destroy your sex drive. His advice: take a front-row seat. “The more involved you are at the beginning of the process, the sooner and stronger the connection will be between father and child”, says Pittman.

Make yourself useful by mopping your wife’s brow or, better still, holding her hand and letting her crush yours when the going gets tough.

Laura Filardo Llamas y Marta Mª Gutiérrez Rodríguez Lexical Creativity in English: Minor Methods of Word Formation

Lexical Creativity in English: Minor Methods of Word Formation Laura Filardo Llamas y Marta Mª Gutiérrez Rodríguez Universidad de Valladolid

En el presente artículo pretendemos analizar el comportamiento de los métodos de formación de palabras en lengua inglesa. Una de las características fundamentales del inglés es su elevado nivel de creatividad léxica a través de diversos procesos morfológicos tales como la producción de compuestos, la derivación o la conversión gramatical.

Sin embargo, existen otros métodos menores de formación de palabras que no han sido tan ampliamente estudiados y sobre los que apenas existen referencias bibliográficas.

Entre ellos podemos localizar los clippings, blends y acrónimos. Por ello, es nuestro objetivo fundamental intentar establecer una descripción de estos fenómenos a través de un corpus de ejemplos extraídos de revistas destinadas a un público adolescente, basándonos para ello en los estudios realizados por Quirk (1997) y Bauer (1983).

In the following article we intend to analyse the behaviour of the minor methods of word formation of the English language. English is characterised by its high level of lexical creativity through different morphological processes, such as compounding, derivation or conversion.

Nevertheless, we can also find other minor methods of word formation such as “clippings”, “blends” and “acronyms”. They have not been so widely analysed and very few academic studies can be found about them. Hence, the main objective of our article is to present a description of these phenomena by focusing on a corpus of examples obtained from different teenagers’ magazines. The main theoretical basis will be obtained from Quirk (1997) and Bauer (1983).

Palabras clave: morfología, formación de palabras, métodos menores, clippings, blends, acrónimos.

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Keywords: Morphology, word formation, minor methods, clippings, blends, acronyms.

1. INTRODUCTION English is a very productive language as regards lexical items.

One of the means of language creativity is word formation, within which we can include three main methods: compounding, derivation and conversion. They have been widely used as tools for lexical creativity all throughout the evolution of English. However, one of the main characteristics of Modern English is the use of miscellaneous modes of word formation.

Apart from derivation, compounding and conversion, there are other methods of word formation, which receive different names depending on the author who analyses them. Laurie Bauer (1983: 232) calls them “unpredictable formations”, because “it is by no means clear that the forms of these words can be predicted by rules without appealing to such ill-understood notions as euphony”. On the other hand, Quirk (1997: 1580) groups them under the name “miscellaneous modes” as their behaviour is not yet very clear. However, both grammarians agree to include within this group the so-called clippings, blends and acronyms, even if some examples of reduplications and coinages can also be found.

Due to their novelty and the lack of comprehensive studies that analyse these three categories, they will become the focus of this article.

In addition to the previously mentioned unpredictability, all these processes of word-formation have a main characteristic in common: they belong to a very colloquial style of language. However, some of them have already been introduced into the standard language because of their common usage. Taking into account this characteristic, we have decided that teenagers' magazines are one of the most accurate places where they could be found, because of their tendency to use very colloquial language as a means to avoid the formality that can be found in some other magazines. Hence, British and American teenager magazines will make up our main corpus of study. Nevertheless, we can not forget that these types of words can also be located in specialised language texts, such as those dealing with computers, medicine, chemistry or politics. It is also

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necessary to note that acronyms are most commonly found there. One important thing to be taken into account is that both British and American English have a different behaviour as regards this aspect of the language.

From looking at the corpus, we have noticed a higher tendency in British English to use this kind of informality mark.

Taking into account the previously mentioned facts, our main objective is to present an overview of one of the characteristics of Modern English: minor methods of word formation. We intend to make a qualitative analysis in which the behaviour of the resulting words is analysed, without dealing with their frequency of appearance. Previous analyses have attempted to establish a taxonomy of this type of methods of wordformation, with a focus on blends, by highlighting the number of times each type appears. (cf. López Rua 2004; Gries 2004) There are not many theories referred to this aspect of the English language. Thus, we are going to follow the analysis and classifications developed by Quirk and Bauer. However, our intention is to obtain our own conclusions by looking at the behaviour of these words in a languagein-use context. Thus, the article will be developed around a theoretical basis which we will attempt to prove by looking at the examples found in the corpus.

2. ANALYSIS 2.1. Clippings One of the most important, and probably the most frequent, methods is clipping. Quirk describes this process as “a polysyllabic word shortened often to a single syllable”. He also adds that “this process occurs especially in nouns" (1997: 1580). Bauer's definition is slightly different and uttered in more scientific terms, as he understands clipping “as the process whereby a lexeme is shortened, while still retaining the same meaning and still being a member of the same form class. Frequently clipping results in a change of stylistic level” (1983: 233). We can then say that both grammarians set one of the most important characteristics referred to clippings. They are shortened words with a really high informality mark. An example of how the informality can be used is seen

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in the name of one of the magazines used in our corpus, Teen, which is the shortened word for "teenager". This is used as a way of calling the attention of the group of people to which the magazine is addressed, because, this way, they can see the magazine is going to be using their own language, whereas if they used “teenager” it would be more likely to be thought for another kind of readers. Hence, we can state that it is a pragmatic device for attention-calling.

We can also find that both Quirk and Bauer have a classification for clippings. As these classifications do not substantially differ, we have decided to follow Quirk’s. For Quirk (1997: 1580) the first group of clippings is formed by those words in which “the surviving fragment is usually initial.” This group of clippings could be called back clippings and it is the most common one, as most of the examples could be placed under this group.

(1) "We've just been out to the States (again) to shoot the American vid for It's The Things You Do"(Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 10) (2) "The barmy Steps crew are in Japan at the mo', doing loads of promotion, then, they'll fly back to Blighty for their Christmas hols" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 5) There are two types of back clippings depending on whether any modification in spelling is produced. Examples of unmodified back clippings could be the informal word "vid" (1)1, which is the clipped form of "video", and the reduced word "mo'" (2), used instead of "moment".

However, in the last example we should be aware of the use of the apostrophe in the clipped form. This is a way of showing the informality and the shortening of the word with an orthographic sign.

(3) "Reader’s prob" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 30) (4) "Ex encounters" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 41) (5) "The ex-files. How to act when it's over." (Teen, Jan. 2000) In (3), the word "prob" is used instead of "problem". Whenever clippings are used in titles, the actual meaning of the word is easily inferred as they are placed in specific parts of the magazines. For instance,

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this example is placed under the title of one of the sections of the magazines which aims to function like a consultancy place, whereas (4), was placed under "dating". This location lets the reader know that the prefix "ex", used here as a clipped form of "ex-boyfriend", means exactly that and it doesn't mean "ex- friends" or any other thing belonging to the past.

Hence, we can say that the linguistic and background contexts are very important to infer the meaning of the clipped forms. This example is also important because it shows the unpredictability of these items. That is, clippings are usually the outcome of the shortening of a long word.

Nevertheless, in “ex encounters” (4) or “ex-files” (5) the remaining part is also the consequence of another process of word formation: affixation.

Moreover, the importance of the context is proved by the word “ex-files” (5), where a wordplay is produced, as the clipped form "ex" is pronounced the same as the letter "X" which is the original one used for the name of the television program "X-files". This "confusion" would not have been possible if the extended word "ex-boyfriend" had been used.

(6) "The Girls will very probably be doing some Christmas telly, but, sadly, nothing’s been confirmed yet". (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 3) (7) "Nothing is confirmed at this time' ", a Saints spokey told us."

(Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 7) As we have mentioned before, there are back clippings in which there has been a modification in the spelling, such as the addition of a letter. This letter is mainly -y. For example we have the word “telly” (6), which is the informal word for “television”, in which the final part of the word has been deleted, but a “-y” has been added, and, consequently, the “l” has been doubled. The same thing has happened with “spokey” (7), which is the clipped form of the compound “spokesperson” in which the second component of the merger has been replaced by “-y”.

(8) "They split up, but she still believes in life after love. Good on ye, grandma!" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 9) A different change in spelling is seen in “grandma” (8). In this case the “o” in “grandmother” becomes an “a” in the clipped form “grandma”. This is caused by a phonological assimilation, that is, the clipped form has been transformed so as to sound as similar as possible

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to the original word, and if the “o” had been kept at the end of the word it would have been pronounced /??/, which would not be similar to the original word.

(9) "So Lee, Faye, Claire or Lisa, if you’re stuck for any last minute Chrimbo present ideas for the young scamp, we can offer just one suggestion: anything but those flippin' monkey T-shirts!" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 4) (10) "A bit like a certain breakfast show couple? Nah, that was jus' rumours" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 3) Another case of back clipping is the one in which only one letter has been taken out of the word and replaced by an apostrophe. This is the case of “flippin'” (9), in which the final “g” has been replaced by the apostrophe or “jus'” (10), in which the “t” has also been deleted and replaced by the apostrophe. We have noticed that the use of the apostrophe in the clipped forms is much more common in British English than in American English. These types of clippings seem to occur whenever there is a silent letter in pronunciation and they aim at achieving an orality trait.

Another curious thing referred to the spelling of back clippings is the way they sometimes preserve the final “s” in the shortened form (Quirk 1997: 1581), such as in the case of the word “hols” (2), which is the shortened form of “holidays”. This “-s” would not be a plural mark in this word, but the preservation of the final letter of the word “holidays”, in which the “-s” is not a plural mark.

According to Quirk (ibid), the second group of clippings is that in which “the clipped form has resulted from discarding the initial part of a word.” In this case, the final part of the word is retained. The shortened words in this group could be called fore clippings.

(11) "Snag one of these four sparkling-new Conair Smash brushes in a shade that's in tune with your 'tude" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 18) (12) "Net result: [....] Not once did you mention how extremely dangerous it can be to meet someone on the Internet" (Seventeen, Jan. 2000: 10)

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(13) "The e-mail and the article’s opening paragraphs almost suggested that the perpetrators of the Littleton massacre has a justification for their crime" (Seventeen, Jan. 2000: 10) Examples of this type of clippings are “'tude” (11), in which the first part of the word “attitude” has been deleted, and there is also an apostrophe to mark the shortening of a word. Moreover, a pragmatic effect of attention-calling by producing a rhyme seems to be achieved. “'Net” (12) could be another example of a fore clipping. In this case “'net” is the shortened word for “Internet”. If we look at the context in which this word appears, we can see that the longer lexical unit also appears in the same paragraph. However, each of them aims at achieving a different effect, as the clipped form appears in the title – so that the attention of the reader is called – whereas the long form can be found in the development of the article – in a place that readers have only reached if they are interested in the topic. We can say that computer words are a lexical field from which a high amount of clipped forms can be obtained. That is the case of “e-mail” (13) in which the first “e” would be the clipped form for the word “electronic”.

(14) "It was cool, 'cos, as you know, I've a (not-so) secret desire to appear in a blockbuster, and the vid was based on Days Of Thunder."

(Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 10) (15) "Kelly thinks that this is the perfect skirt to wear at a Faith Hill concert 'cause of its trendy country style' "(Teen, Jan. 2000: 20) Still belonging to this second group of fore clippings, we have found an interesting example to illustrate a difference between British English and American English. The clipping for “because” is spelled in a different way depending on the variety of English used. In British English, it is spelled “'cos” (14), i.e. there is a tendency for a change in spelling to create the informality by both methods, the shortening of a word and a spelling which is closer to the pronunciation. On the other hand, American English tends to shorten the word without changing its spelling, as we can see in “'cause” (15).

(16) "Phys Ed was taking place indoors because of rain" (Seventeen, Jan. 2000: 12)

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(17) "Only two inches wide, these speakers are totally hi-tech with great sound and design." (Teen, Jan. 2000: 28) In his classification, Bauer (1983: 233) adds another kind of clippings, which are those in which “clipped forms are used in compounds”.

Although Bauer’s explanation for this phenomenon is not clear, we will consider compound clippings those lexical items which are the outcome of a process of compounding, and in which at least one of the items that make up the compound is the outcome of a clipping process. Examples of this kind could be “Phys Ed” (16) – which stands for “physical education” – in which both components of the compound are clipped; “hi-tech” (17) for “high-technology”; or “e-mail” (13), in which only the first of the components of the word is clipped. In these examples we can see that clipped compounds behave in the same way as single compounds do as regards spelling rules and the use of the hyphen.

(18) "Jess is checking her email" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 21) Although the usual rule for clipped forms (Quirk 1997: 1581) states that proper names are not usually clipped, we can sometimes find clipped names of people, to achieve an informality effect. This is the case of “Jess” (18), which is the clipped form of “Jessica”.

(19) "Visit romantic getaways and islands, check out photos from around the world or find the best restaurants in your own city" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 30) (20) "You’re at the movies with the cutie from chem class." (Teen, Jan. 2000: 41) As regards the grammatical behaviour of clippings, it is important to say that most clipped words are nouns, and thus they can behave and function as any other noun. This way, “spokey” (7) would be the subject of the sentence, and moreover, it can also be premodified by any other noun. Also functioning as a subject, we have the clipped form “photos” (19), used for “photographs”. Clippings can also be used in prepositional phrases, such as in “from chem class” (20), in which the clipped form for “chemistry” is following the preposition “from”, and it is, in turn, modifying the following noun, which demonstrates how clippings can also function as nominal adjectives.

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(21) "You meet your friends at your school’s football game and just like old times, they’re hanging out with your ex’s pals" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 41) (22) "The 'Zoners are in France until December 18" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 3) Nevertheless, not only do they play the same functions as nouns, but they also have other noun characteristics, such as the adding of “'s” for the genitive to indicate possession, such as in “ex's” (21) in which the possessive “'s” has been added to the clipped form; or they can undergo a derivation process, such as in the case of “'Zoners” (22), which is a shortened word to name the components of the musical group “Boyzone”.

In this word, we can see how the suffix “-er” has been added to indicate “belonging to”.

(23) "The group met up with the young fans during a visit to open the UK's largest centre for children with the rare blood disease haemophilia" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 5) (24) "The boys will be spending a nice, quiet Christmas at home in Bucks with their parents and friends, opening pressies under the tree" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 8) (25) "Simple carbs like fruits, veggies and milk should make up at least 40 percent of your daily calorie count" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 36) (26) "These nifty black-and-white pics are taken from Leonardo’s new flick Celebrity". (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 10) (27) "If you like the official Five piccies free with this issue, be sure to buy the next issue of Smash Hits." (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 5) Clipped nouns form their plural the same way any other noun would do. They can add “-s”, such as in “fans” (23); they can also add “-es”, as in “pressies” (24), where “-es” is added to “pressy” (clipped word for “present”) and the “-y” changes into “i” as it would occur with any other noun. In “veggies” (25), apart from adding “-es” to form the plural we have to double the consonant and add “i” to “veg” –“vegetable”

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- because it is a monosyllabic word. However, as we have mentioned above, we are dealing with unpredictable methods of word formation, and, consequently, the rules are not very well settled. This instability can be seen in the two possibilities for the plural form of “pic”: “pics” (26) and “piccies” (27). These two examples were even found in the same magazine, which emphasises the lack of foresight as regards the behaviour of these word formation methods.

(28) "Wear sneakers or flip-flops with these casual, comfy pants."

(Teen, Jan. 2000: 20) (29) "So, does she have a fave scene so far?" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 60) (30) "She’s become the poster girl for go-for-it gusto, preferring to sport the simple, non-glam style she shares with her cool character."

(Teen, Jan. 2000: 58) Nouns are not the only grammatical category that can be clipped.

Following nouns in frequency, we can find clipped adjectives, such as “comfy” (28), instead of “comfortable”; or “fave” (29), rather than “favourite”. As any other adjective, clipped adjectives can be modified, as it occurs in “non-glam” (30), where the clipped form of the adjective “glamorous” is modified by “non”.

(31) "After Christmas, the boys will be performing four gigs in Ireland, so keep your ears open 'bout that. (Smash Hits, 16 Dec, 1998: 3) We can also found examples of other grammatical categories, such as conjunctions – “cos” (14) or “’cause” (15); prepositions –“‘bout” (31); or adverbs – “jus’” (10) Below, we can find a summary table with all the characteristics of clippings:

Laura Filardo Llamas y Marta Mª Gutiérrez Rodríguez Lexical Creativity in English: Minor Methods of Word Formation

Phenomenon

Types

Spelling

No modification in spelling

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Grammatical categories

No apostrophe to indicate clipped form Apostrophe to indicate clipped form Addition of a letter (ex. y)

Back Clippings Modification in spelling

Clippings

Modification due to phonological assimilation Clipping & preservation of final “s”

No modification in spelling

Fore clippings Compound clippings

Modification in spelling

Nouns Adjectives Conjunctions Prepositions Adverbs

No apostrophe Apostrophe Difference between British English & Am English

Maintenance of hyphen

Table . Summary of the characteristics of clippings.

2.2. Blends Blends are another important method of word formation. Quirk defines them “as formations in which a compound is made by "blending" one word with another. Enough of each is normally retained so that the complex whole remains fairly readily analysable.” (1997: 1583). Moreover, Bauer defines them as “a new lexeme formed from parts of two (or possibly more) other words in such a way that there is no transparent analysis into morphs.” (1983: 234) The most important characteristics of blends can be obtained from the previous definitions. They are formed by two words whose meanings are joined, but there is no rule that establishes which part of each word has to be retained. This is left to the creators’ choice, although they have to take into account pronounceability2, spelling and the word’s identity as only one lexical item.

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In the corpus of examples, we have noticed that blends do not seem to be a very frequently used process in language, although other studies on word formation state that they have a high productivity (López Rua 2004. 63).

According to Gries (2004: 645) different types of blends can be identified, taking into account the following criteria: the number of source words which enter into the blend, the number and the kind of words which are shortened, the kind of conflation (i.e. whether breakpoints can easily be identified), and the presence or absence of overlap of the source words in the blend. However, in this article we will only be dealing with what López Rua (2004: 65) and Gries (2004: 645) call “prototypical blends”, which are the outcome of the fusion between two clipped forms, and in which some type of overlapping – either graphemic or phonemic – can be found.

(32) "A thank you for making Friends America’s number one sitcom" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 3) The most prototypical example we have found in our corpus has been “sitcom” (32). As we can see, in this example both words have been clipped and the breakpoint between them is easily inferable. Moreover, it is easily pronounced and there is no overlap between the constituents.

“Chrimbo” (9) has been one of the most striking examples found in the corpus. First of all, the meaning could be hard to infer if the reader does not have a wide cultural knowledge about British traditions. We believe that the most accurate interpretation would be “Christmas Boxing Day”. Thus, it is a cultural referent to an exclusive British event “the first day (traditionally and strictly the first weekday) after Christmas, observed as a holiday” and it derives “from the custom of giving Christmas boxes to tradesman and staff on this day” (Collins English Dictionary 2001: 189). As a consequence, it does not appear in any of the American magazines. Looking at the linguistic context in which the word occurs provides us with further clues that support this interpretation, as it is premodified by “present ideas”. As regards the linguistic behaviour of the blend itself, the first part of “Christmas” has been retained and joined to the first part of “boxing”. General orthographic rules are maintained in the blend and, thus, “b” has to be preceded by “m”.

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(33) "Boyzalone" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 5) (34) "The carbcutting craze" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 36) Examples of blends could be the title “Boyzalone”, (33) and “carbcutting” (34). If we followed Bauer’s definition (1983: 236), stated above, these two examples would not be identified as blends, but just as compounds formed by a clipping and a word. However, in all the types of blends identified by López Rua (2004: 68-9) whole words are considered to be proper constituents of a blend, as what distinguishes them from a compound is the degree of semantic integration between all the components of a lexical item. The word “Boyzalone”(33) would be then made up from the first part of the name of the musical group “Boyzone” and the word “alone”, and it could be seen as a way of calling the reader’s attention to that concrete article. As regards “carbcutting”(34), it is not easy to infer the meaning of the first part, “carb”. However, the context tells us that “carb” stands for “carbohydrates”, because it is later explained in the article, and “cutting” remains unchanged.

(35) "Use plum colors for olive or black skin [...]. The How-tos: To slim a round face, sweep the color from just above the apples of your cheeks toward your temples. Teen, Jan. 2000: 16) Almost all of the previously mentioned examples of blends were just nouns, except (34), which was an adjective. But we can find more grammatical categories such as a non-finite verbal form used in a question which behaves, all together, as a single noun. This can be seen in (35).

If we focus on the second part of the blending “how-tos”, we can see that it is also the outcome of a blending process with a high degree of phonemic integration, which is reflected in a change in spelling. This makes it more difficult for the recipient to infer the meaning of the new lexical item. “Tos” is the blended form for “to use”, in which the initial part of the first constituent is maintained. However, there is phonemic overlapping between the second part of the first constituent and the second constituent.

This increases the difficulty of identifying the breakpoint between the two components of the new lexical item.

(36) "Don't miss the quiz- find out his flirt'sonality" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 11)

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In (36), we can see how blends are used as a way of calling the reader's attention. The word “flirt'sonality” is the blend formed by the first part of the word “flirting”, which is reduced in such a way that we can infer the meaning, and the second part of the word “personality”. We can see that informality is increased by the use of the apostrophe that separates the two constituents.

Below we can find a summary table of all the previously mentioned characteristics of blends: Phenomenon

Characteristics

Grammatical categories

Fusion of two words

Blends

Words are clipped

Nouns

Graphemic or phonemic overlapping

Adjectives Non-finite verbal forms

Inferability of meaning Pronounceability

Table . Summary of the characteristics of blends.

2.3. Acronyms Acronyms are the third minor method of word-formation. Quirk defines them as “words formed from the initial letters of words that make up a name.” (1997: 1581) According to Bauer an acronym is “a word coined by taking the initial letters of the words in a title or phrase and using them as a new word.” (1983: 237) The two authors we are following in our classification differ as regards the pronunciation of acronyms. Quirk (1997:1581-2) speaks of two types of acronyms. The first one comprises those in which the letters are read as a sequence and they are called “alphabetisms”. The second one is made of those which are pronounced as a word. Nevertheless, Bauer (1983: 237) thinks that the only possibility for acronyms is to be pronounced as words.

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(37) "Travelers to Europe may be perplexed about how to recover the value-added tax, or V.A.T."(Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 2) As examples of acronyms we could have “V.A.T.” (37), which means “Value-Added Tax”. This acronym takes us to one of the questions of unpredictability because we never know which parts of the collocation would be taken to form an acronym. (Bauer 1983: 237) This problem is solved by Quirk (1997: 1582) by putting in his classification two different classes, depending on whether letters represent full words or they are just letters of words.

(38) "Secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s comment [...] badly misstates the proper role of the U.S. armed forces" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 4) (39) "Then, they’ll all return to the UK to work on their new album" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 4) Acronyms are very frequently used instead of the full names of countries or groups of countries, such us “U.S.” (38) used for “United States” or “U.K.” (39) for “United Kingdom”.

(40) "They took up soccer (i.e. football) recently." (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 3) (41) "Acne-prone skin: Use an oil-free, noncomedogenic (a.k.a. won’t clog pores) formula." (Teen, Jan. 2000: 16) Acronyms can also be used for connecting words in speech, such as “i.e.” (40), which stands for “id est”, even though it would be read as “that is”. In this example, it is noticeable that a non-English word has been used to form the acronym. Another example of a connector would be “a.k.a” (41) which means “also known as”. Both examples would be as well examples of alphabetism, as they are both read as sequences of letters.

(42) "His fate will be determined by some 25 wavering G.O.P. moderates" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 18) (43) "He advocated a West German pullout from NATO’s military structure" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 27)

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Politics is one of the fields where more examples are found. In this case, acronyms are mainly used to name political parties, such as “G.O.P.” (42), which stands for the American “Grand Old Party”; or organisations, such as “NATO” (43), which means “North Atlantic Treaty Organisation”.

(44) "But just as Asia is expected to be stabilizing and recovering sometime in 2000, the Y2K problem is going to hit" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 36) (45) "I find it disgusting that some $96 billion is being squirted into space, when the same investment in alternative clean fuels, AIDS research, disaster relief in Central America is needed" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 4) (46) "All-male vocal groups are all over the charts and all over MTV" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 51) (47) "Babely Brian plays Ben, the cocky, unofficial leader of his multi-ethnic group of adopted siblings on the Saturday morning TNBC show One World" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 53) (48) "After Johnny and Denise performed Especially For You live on Children In Need the BBC was apparently "flooded with calls" requesting a copy of the single" (Smash Hits, 16 Dec. 1998: 3) (49) "JFK establishes the do-gooder organization Peace Corps" (Teen, Jan. 2000: 64) (50)"Olivia took her unique handmade bags to trendmeister Steven Alan, who decided to sell them in his ultrahip downtown-NYC store" (Seventeen, Jan. 2000: 26) Acronyms are also used for important events of the time, such as “Y2K”, (44), which was used for the “Year 2000 Keyboard”, and which is also important because of the use of numbers inside an acronym. This acronym originally belonged to computer language but it was extended to the whole Year 2000 problem. They are also used to describe nowadays diseases, such as “AIDS” (45), meaning “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome”. Acronyms stand as well for television channels, no matter

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whether they are American or English. Examples of this are “MTV” for “Musical Television”, “TNBC” for “Turner National Broadcast Company” and “BBC” for “British Broadcast Company” (46-48). One important difference between clippings and acronyms is that it is very common to make acronyms out of a proper name. The most famous case is “JFK” (49) for “John Fitzgerald Kennedy”, but we can also highlight “NYC” (50) for “New York City”.

As regards the spelling of acronyms the only thing to be remarked is the difference in spelling depending on whether the letters are separated by dots or not. We do not think there is a settled rule for this. We would rather say that this use of the dot depends on the commonness of the acronym.

(51) "A small CIA-FBI team collected intelligence on him by parking itself at what agents call the "zero line" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 35) All the acronyms explained above are nouns, except for the two connectors. Nevertheless, although they seem to be sequences of letters they behave as proper nouns that can modify another noun, such as “TNBC” (47), because it is modifying “how”. The same way we could join two nouns to form a premodifier, we can join two acronyms, as in “CIA-FBI” (51) which is modifying the noun “team”. “CIA” is the acronym for “Central Intelligence Agency” and “FBI” is the one for “Federal Bureau of Investigation”. Moreover, the same way any other noun would do, acronyms can have the possessive “-s”, such as in “NATO's” (43).

(52) "... In early December when all 11 euro-zone central banks cut rates in concert before the E.C.B. officially assumes control of monetary policy on Jan. 1" (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 27) (53) "Mary Bono, right, with Lindsey Graham, was cast by the G.O.P." (Time, 21 Dec. 1998: 21) As regards the grammatical function, once again, acronyms can occupy any place where there can be a noun. This way we can have acronyms in the subject place, such as “E.C.B.” (52), which is the subject of the verb to “assume”. The acronym “E.C.B.” means “European Central

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Bank”. In the function of object we can have “V.A.T.” (37), which is the direct object of the verb “recover”. And, finally, we can have acronyms following a preposition, such as “G.O.P.” (53) after the preposition “by”.

Below we can find a summary table of all the previously mentioned characteristics of acronyms: Phenomenon

Acronyms

Pronunciation

Letters read as a sequence

Letters read as a word

Types

Letters represent full words

Letters are taken out from different parts of the word.

Usage - proper names: persons, countries, brands...

- connecting words - political life: events, parties...

- current important issues

Spelling

Use of dots

No use of dots

Table . Summary of the characteristics of acronyms

3. CONCLUSION To sum up, as we have said at the beginning of the article, English is a very productive language, and we have tried to show the behaviour of three of the minor methods through which new words can be formed in the language. These processes are clippings, blends and acronyms, and they have a main characteristic in common, which is their informality, even though acronyms can be considered to belong to a more standard register of the language. They are also very unpredictable, as this kind of processes has no settled rules to know how they work, although they are very common in the language. In this article, we have tried to propose a set of traits which attempt to describe the behaviour of this type of new words. Nevertheless, further research is needed in order to establish a consistent typology of new word formation methods, as well as to identify their context of use. We have studied them as one of the characteristic of informal modern English, which seems to be proved by the high amount of examples found in magazines aimed for young people, who are supposedly the most frequent users of informal language. We have not

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showed in this article all the examples found throughout our research but only the most illustrative ones, which we have attempt to present as a means to understand the behaviour of these new and unpredictable words.

NOTES 1

2

Examples will be provided at the beginning of each type of word formation method, and when explained they will be referred to by using the number between brackets. Bold type has been used in each example to highlight the important words, although it does not appear in the original publications from which the examples have been obtained.

Although it will not be considered here a classification criterion, pronunciation is an important feature when categorising blends.

According to López Rua (2004: 66), there are different degrees of phonic integration depending on the extent to which the constituents that form a blend are fused.

WORKS CITED Bauer, L. 1983. English Word Formation. Cambridge: C.U.P. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, 1995. Londres: HarperCollins Publishers.

Collins English Dictionary, 2001. Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers. 21st Century Edition.

Gries, S. T. 2004. “Shouldn’t it be breakfunch? A Quantitative Analysis of Blend Structure in English”, Linguistics 42-3: 639-667.

López Rua, P. 2004. “The Categorial Continuum of English Blends”, English Studies 1: 63-76 Quirk, R. et al. 1997. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

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Estrategias de acomodación del género noticia en función de su propósito comunicativo María José González Rodríguez Universidad de La Laguna

The main concern of this paper is to deal with the generic structural pattern of hard news in two well-known British national daily newspapers, The Times and The Sun, with the purpose of describing and explaining how and why these two dailies order and categorize their news exhibiting a preference for a specific set of devices or text strategies.

Van Dijk’s model of textual superstructures (1988b) provide a starting point to learn that there is no fixed formal rule and that variation is possible depending on communicative context. The data examined show to what extent situational factors determine and influence the discourse structure of news stories. These results also indicate how in the organization of news the relationship between form and social function is very obvious.

El objetivo principal de este artículo es dar cuenta de la estructura esquemática del género noticia en dos conocidos diarios nacionales británicos, The Times y The Sun, con el propósito de describir y explicar cómo y por qué estos diarios ordenan y categorizan las noticias mostrando una preferencia por estrategias textuales específicas.

El modelo de superestructura textual propuesto por van Dijk (1988b) constituye un punto de partida para dar a conocer que no existe una regla formal fija y que la variación es posible dependiendo del contexto comunicativo.

La muestra examinada revela hasta qué punto los factores situacionales determinan e influyen en la estructura discursiva de la noticia. Los resultados indican asimismo la relación evidente entre forma y función social en la organización de la noticia.

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Key words: Quality press, popular press, genre, hard news, news schema, narrative schema.

Palabras clave: Prensa de calidad, prensa popular, género, noticia directa, esquema de la noticia, esquema narrativo.

1. INTRODUCCIÓN Los textos que se definen como pertenecientes a un género específico se organizan de acuerdo con un orden establecido, a través de una serie de pasos o etapas, contribuyendo cada una de estas etapas a una parte del significado global del género. Todos los géneros con una motivación funcional pragmática presentan ciertos elementos definitorios y otros elementos opcionales, definiéndose éstos “in terms of its obligatory elements of schematic structure, and variants of a genre are those texts in which the obligatory schematic structure elements are realized, as well as perhaps some of the optional ones” (Eggins 1994: 41). Así, por ejemplo, el género noticia1 en prensa escrita exhibe una estructura esquemática propia, encargada de definir las posibles formas en las que los temas se insertan y ordenan en el texto, a través de determinados componentes obligatorios del género en cuestión y otros opcionales (van Dijk 1985a; 1985b; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990).

El estudio que aquí presentamos se enmarca dentro de esta línea, con el propósito de dar cuenta de la estructura esquemática del género noticia en dos diarios nacionales británicos, el diario “de calidad” The Times y el “popular”2 The Sun, analizando los motivos que determinan que los emisores de estos dos periódicos seleccionen, cuando construyen sus noticias, patrones de estructura esquemática diferentes, aunque ajustados en cada caso a las necesidades de sus receptores. A este respecto, el emisor de The Times centra sus esfuerzos en conectar con un receptor de un alto nivel cultural quien, cuando lee el periódico, espera obtener información analítica, detallada, extensa, seria y que cuente con credibilidad.

Este diario de formato sábana se define por un marcado énfasis en el relato interpretativo, en la política, en las relaciones internacionales, economía, bienestar social, educación, ciencia y cultura. Por otra parte,

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el emisor de The Sun se dirige a aquellos lectores que quieren entretenerse a través de la lectura del periódico al mismo tiempo que informarse. Este diario tabloide se caracteriza por una mayor personalización de la información, por una redacción segmentada y sencilla, más esquemática que The Times, y por el empleo de un vocabulario cotidiano, sugerente, emotivo e incisivo. Se especializa en grandes fotografías y en ocasiones en una presentación dramática de la información. Asimismo, presenta titulares amplios, con frecuencia sensacionalistas que contrastan con la exposición de un relato conciso.

Con el fin de constatar cómo los emisores de estos dos diarios satisfacen las necesidades arriba mencionadas y de qué modo ello se refleja en los patrones de estructura esquemática que éstos emplean, se ha analizado una muestra de 24 noticias en cada periódico publicadas el mismo día y referidas a un mismo suceso, la guerra en Irak, durante unos días cruciales en marzo y abril de 2003 antes del ataque final americano sobre la capital. 3 Se trata, por lo tanto, de relatos informativos internacionales de interés general, los cuales fueron analizados según el modelo que, a continuación, se expone.

2. PATRÓN TEXTUAL PROTOTÍPICO DEL GÉNERO NOTICIA Uno de los estudios más completos y exhaustivos sobre la naturaleza de la noticia en la prensa diaria es el llevado a cabo por van Dijk quien, en News as Discourse (1988b), aplica su modelo cognitivo de análisis del discurso a este tipo de textos. De acuerdo con la teoría expuesta por van Dijk, toda noticia se articula siguiendo las pautas de un patrón textual prototípico o esquema convencional organizativo que él denomina news schema. Dicho esquema muestra la superestructura de la noticia. La superestructura es un esquema general que categoriza los distintos apartados o secciones caracterizadores de un texto. La organización esquemática del género noticia está compuesta por las siguientes categorías jerárquicamente ordenadas: - Sumario que establece la macroestructura semántica general del texto, habitualmente en dos entregas: encabezamiento (compuesto por un antetítulo, título y subtítulo de los cuales tan sólo el título es elemento obligatorio) y cuya misión es condensar la información del texto; y lead

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que se constituye como el párrafo de entrada de la noticia y funciona a modo de resumen de la acción central, estableciendo el punto principal de la historia.

Inmediatamente después de la categoría de sumario y separada de ésta, se encuentra el cuerpo informativo de la noticia que presenta las siguientes categorías: - Acontecimiento principal donde se exponen aquellos sucesos destacados producidos o descubiertos recientemente y que son los que dan lugar al asunto noticioso.

- Antecedentes que están integrados por la subcategoría de contexto referida a la situación actual en la que el acontecimiento principal se desarrolla o tiene lugar; sucesos previos anteriores al acontecimiento principal (desde varios días hasta varias semanas); e historia que es el contexto pasado (desde varios meses hasta incluso varios años) que conduce hasta la situación actual y a sus sucesos.

- Consecuencias que consta de dos subcategorías, los acontecimientos causados por el suceso principal y las reacciones verbales que se corresponden con las declaraciones de participantes inmediatos en la acción.

- Comentarios divididos en expectativas que implican referencia a sucesos futuros y evaluaciones donde se formulan de forma explícita observaciones que valoran el acontecimiento. La categoría de comentarios al tener la función de comentar o hacer observaciones sobre el acontecimiento se encuentra separada del núcleo de la noticia.

Estas categorías tienen un orden y una estructura lineal concreta junto con una organización jerárquica que determina las relaciones de unas categorías con respecto a las otras. Dicha superestructura no sólo refleja las relaciones jerárquicas de los respectivos fragmentos, sino que también indica qué tipo de contenido viene en primer, segundo o último lugar en un texto. Igualmente, cada categoría se correlaciona con una secuencia específica de proposiciones o de oraciones del texto.

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Dentro de la superestructura global de una noticia se dan unas categorías obligatorias (sumario y acontecimiento principal) y otras opcionales (antecedentes, consecuencias y comentarios), al igual que unas categorías que se enfatizan más que otras. Sin embargo, todas o gran parte de las categorías (tanto las obligatorias como las opcionales) suelen estar presentes en la mayoría de las ocasiones, constituyéndose de esta forma un relato objetivo completo o bien formado. Las categorías no se realizan de forma continua sino a través de entregas discontinuas que se distribuyen a lo largo de todo el cuerpo informativo del relato. De acuerdo con la propuesta de van Dijk, ésta es una característica propia del relato periodístico informativo en prensa escrita. Asimismo, las categorías no sólo tienen una realidad estructural abstracta sino que también se caracterizan por su importancia cognitiva: "several of them have direct communicative functions, such as the headline and the lead, whereas others have immediate processing functions correlates" (van Dijk y Kintsch 1983: 245).

Basándose en el trabajo realizado por van Dijk, hay otros investigadores como por ejemplo Bell (1991), quien también analiza la estructura esquemática de la noticia. En términos generales, su modelo no difiere del propuesto por van Dijk en tanto que mantiene todas las categorías previamente propuestas por éste, muchas de ellas incluso con las mismas denominaciones, a excepción de que Bell (1991: 167) añade una categoría opcional que él denomina atribución y que forma parte del texto informativo, distinguiendo entre sus componentes básicos la fuente y el lugar. La atribución, que suele insertarse después del encabezamiento o en algunas ocasiones al final del texto, especifica quién ha redactado la noticia o la agencia que ha distribuido la información. Más recientemente, White (1997a; 1997b) ha realizado un análisis sistemático de los rasgos léxico-gramaticales presentes en este tipo de textos. Si bien este autor emplea en su investigación terminología diferente y aplica un modelo distinto al de van Dijk, sus conclusiones sobre la estructura esquemática y principios organizadores de la noticia son básicamente idénticas (1997a: 14; 1997b: 131).

Los tres modelos arriba expuestos que aplicados al género noticia analizan su estructura esquemática y principios organizadores aparecen recogidos a modo de resumen en el siguiente cuadro.

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Cuadro 1. Estructura esquemática del género noticia Van Dijk (1988b)

Bell (1991)

White (1997a; 1997b)

Summary: Headline Lead

Abstract: Headline Lead

Opening Phase: Headline Lead

NEWS STORY: Main Event

STORY: Attribution, Actors, Setting (Time and Place), Action

NEWS STORY BODY: Elaboration

Backgrounds: Context Previous Events History

Background: Previous Episodes History

Contextualization

Consequences: Events/Acts Verbal Reactions

Follow-up: Consequences Reaction

Cause-and-effect Justification (Issues Reports)

Comments: Expectation Evaluation

Commentary: Expectations Evaluation

Valoration

A pesar de que estos investigadores realizan un estudio estructural de las noticias, sin embargo no desarrollan su investigación desde un ángulo comparativo analizando distintos periódicos pertenecientes a diferentes clases socioeconómicas, como podría ser el caso de los diarios nacionales británicos. En este sentido, Bell (1991: 175) en una investigación suya relativa a cómo se estructuran las noticias en algunos diarios conservadores, comenta una declaración previa de Burger (1984: 52) en la que este autor sostiene que los periódicos populares redactan titulares o estructuran las historias de forma diferente, hecho que requeriría un estudio individualizado. A este interrogante pretendemos dar respuesta seguidamente, aplicando para ello a todas las noticias de la muestra el modelo propuesto por van Dijk para describir el patrón de realización de la estructura esquemática del género noticia en The Times y en The Sun.

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3. ANÁLISIS GENÉRICO DE LA NOTICIA EN THE TIMES Y THE SUN En este apartado damos cuenta de la organización del relato periodístico informativo en una muestra de noticias directas publicadas en los diarios The Times y The Sun. Como paso previo al análisis superestructural, destacamos aquellos elementos que bien por su formato o bien por la manera en la que contribuyen a la presentación u organización de la información en una noticia son esenciales a la hora de caracterizar las informaciones o las unidades redaccionales de estas dos publicaciones.

Señalamos igualmente aquí el papel destacado que desempeñan algunos de estos elementos como muestras indicativas de que el diseño de un periódico no es independiente de su contenido, es decir, la maquetación y la tipografía son también medios efectivos para transmitir el mensaje periodístico.

3.1. Elementos tipográficos de la noticia Los diversos elementos tipográficos que acompañan a la noticia y que configuran su estructura externa no sólo se constituyen como un factor indicativo de determinadas partes que integran el relato, como sucede con la tipografía que se emplea en la titulación, sino que además su uso responde a una necesidad periodística como es captar con facilidad la atención del lector presentando noticias de acuerdo con el diseño de cada periódico.

The Times se caracteriza en líneas generales por la falta de apoyo gráfico y por el predominio del tono aséptico en las informaciones. Por contraste, el empleo de elementos tipográficos en los relatos periodísticos que se publican en The Sun es un claro ejemplo difusor de valores. El deseo de captar la atención del lector sobre aquellas historias que se consideran más significativas dentro de cada edición lleva a un mayor despliegue de elementos para componer la titulación. Así, suele haber en este diario una preferencia particular por el subtítulo o sumario en su variante de subtítulo aislado, por los ladillos o intertítulos y por el empleo de determinadas marcas tipográficas para destacar informaciones específicas que se constituyen como parte del cuerpo informativo de la noticia.

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En el corpus analizado el subtítulo aparece sistemáticamente en las noticias pertenecientes a The Sun, mientras que está ausente por completo en las de The Times. Este elemento puede situarse debajo del título principal o tener una presentación aislada. La segunda versión del subtítulo, que se presenta en un 19% de los casos en las noticias de The Sun, puede presentarse conectado con el cuerpo informativo a modo de cita sacada fuera de contexto y con un cuerpo de letras mayor que la masa informativa, o estar descolgado del título principal como un elemento totalmente independiente, incluso en lo que respecta al tema central del asunto noticioso. En este último caso, se sitúa en la posición de cierre del texto mediante el empleo de recursos gráficos que marcan una separación con respecto a la noticia central en el que se incluye. Se trata en definitiva de otra noticia que proporciona información relevante sobre otro hecho que tuvo lugar después de la anterior edición del periódico y se compone dentro de ese texto porque la información que proporciona está relacionada, en cierto modo, con la noticia al final de la que aparece.

Las noticias relacionadas (tal y como se conocen en el ámbito periodístico) son un claro ejemplo de la liberación de los esquemas clásicos y de la inclinación por la abundancia de información, que de esta manera se hace mucho más llamativa. Tal hecho, que es algo tan propio de las publicaciones tabloides, se asemeja sin lugar a dudas a anuncios o reclamos publicitarios.

Asimismo, el corpus de noticias analizadas apunta a la tendencia a presentar habitual e independientemente del título principal y subtítulo o sumario un ladillo. Éste aparece en un 80% de las noticias publicadas en The Sun y está ausente en las de The Times. En el ladillo se utiliza una tipografía distinta de la empleada en el resto del cuerpo informativo. Siempre aparece gráficamente resaltado mediante la utilización de un cuerpo de letras mayor que el texto en el que se inserta, se presenta en negras, situado en el centro de la columna y separado varias líneas de la masa de texto. Su función es la de proporcionar un lugar de descanso en la lectura, reavivando la atención del lector a medida que avanza. Además de otorgar amenidad visual al texto, resultan atractivos no sólo por el “gancho” evidente que los caracteriza sino también porque subrayan algún detalle importante, destacado e inusual de lo que se va a leer a continuación. Cabe destacar que los mencionados elementos no son contemplados en los modelos teóricos de van Dijk (1988b), Bell (1991) o White (1997a; 1997b). Ello se debe a que, si bien estos autores realizan un estudio estructural de las noticias, éstos no desarrollan su investigación desde un ángulo comparativo, analizando

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distintos periódicos pertenecientes a diferentes clases socioeconómicas, como podría ser el caso de los diarios nacionales británicos.

El estudio de la estructura visual de las noticias también nos lleva a concluir que la utilización de recursos gráficos marcados, fotografías y uso del color es más llamativa en The Sun, empleándose dichos recursos para resaltar incluso determinadas categorías de la estructura esquemática de los textos. Se trata de elementos evaluativos y claros difusores de valores, que además se constituyen como un soporte significativo en la presentación de la información. Así, el uso de mayúsculas, o marcar el texto en negras o en cursiva, tiene en The Sun una función pragmática definida y definitoria para esta publicación, como es facilitar la lectura, romper la monotonía y “enganchar” a su lector señalando aquellas partes del texto que se consideran sorpresivas, admirables o que se valoran en un sentido específico. De hecho, sin el periodista emitir un juicio de valor explícito sobre la información, con el empleo de estos recursos gráficos se cumple sin embargo la función propia de la categoría de comentarios (evaluación) en el esquema superestructural de van Dijk. Por el contrario, The Times se caracteriza por una mayor monotonía visual ante todo si tenemos en cuenta que los recursos gráficos que emplea no tienen la misma representatividad que en The Sun. Los siguientes extractos de noticias pertenecientes a The Sun muestran la realización del subtítulo aislado en forma de noticia relacionada e introducido por un bolo (a) y del ladillo Life of outrage (b), así como el empleo de determinados recursos tipográficos, en este caso mayúsculas, para destacar informaciones específicas de la noticia (c): (a) - UK troops found training equipment for nuclear, biological and chemical welfare, including a Geiger counter to measure radiation, nerve gas simulators and gas masks at an Iraqi ordnance facility south of Basra.

(The Sun, Killer evidence against Saddam, 31 de marzo de 2003) (b) Life of outrage GALLOWAY'S treachery has often been exposed by

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The Sun — but he sunk to his lowest depths when Gulf War II began.

We revealed this month how the traitor urged the Arab world to rise up and KILL British troops in Iraq. (The Sun, Paid to be a traitor, 22 de abril de 2003) (c) UP to 1,000 Iraqi soldiers killed by US forces in a ferocious battle at Najaf.

A DEVASTATING RAF attack on 12 Iraqi tanks and armoured vehicles trying to break out of Basra.

PREPARATIONS for a massive head-on-confrontation between US Marines and 5,000 Republican Guard troops on Iaq's Highway Seven. (The Sun, Saddam executes Our Boys, 27 de marzo de 2003) 3.2. Patrón de estructura esquemática En términos generales y en lo que concierne a la organización del relato periodístico anglosajón, cabe destacar en primer lugar que el tipo de organización que se emplea primordialmente en el género noticia es la organización de pirámide invertida: “Today's spot news writing is almost always done with inverted pyramid organization. Information is provided to readers and listeners in descending value of importance. This means the least important information will be the ending of the story” (Garrison 1990: 76). Sin embargo, conviene señalar que tal organización no es siempre rígida, siendo la variación posible: “some writers change the ending to make it more significant. This is up to you, but it often depends on the information you must report” (Garrison 1990: 78).

Este primer acercamiento sucinto y general a cómo se estructura la información en las noticias directas nos llevó a observar diferencias significativas en lo que a la organización del relato en distintos tipos de periódicos se refiere. A este respecto, las dos noticias recogidas en el Apéndice ilustran la exposición que sigue en torno a las similitudes y a las discrepancias entre el esquema superestructural característico de las noticias publicadas en los diarios The Times y The Sun. Tras aplicar a nuestro corpus el esquema prototípico que propone van Dijk para definir

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la superestructura esquemática del discurso de una noticia en prensa escrita, comprobamos lo siguiente: En el discurso de las noticias de The Times todas o gran parte de las categorías (tanto las obligatorias como las opcionales) suelen estar presentes en la mayoría de las ocasiones, constituyendo de esta forma un relato objetivo completo o bien formado. Las primeras instalaciones de tales categorías tienden a estar ordenadas jerárquicamente de acuerdo con la propuesta de van Dijk, teniendo cada una de ellas una función semántica específica en el texto de la información. También se pone de manifiesto que las categorías no se realizan de forma continua sino a través de entregas discontinuas que se distribuyen a lo largo de todo el cuerpo informativo (a esta propiedad definitoria de la organización de las noticias se refiere van Dijk como “installment character” (1988a: 43), mientras que White la denomina “orbital structure” (1997a: 15). Sin embargo, la formulación de la ordenación de las categorías nos ha permitido observar la posibilidad de variaciones en lo que a transformaciones específicas del esquema original se refiere. Dichas transformaciones se explican considerando el contenido del mensaje informativo que es el que repercute directamente en el tipo de información que se quiere comunicar en las primeras posiciones, por ser éstas las más destacadas. Tal es el caso de las reacciones verbales elevadas al segundo párrafo en la noticia de The Times Chirac ‘delighted’ by fall of Saddam.

Además, en esta noticia también se puede constatar que la utilización repetida de una misma categoría se revela como un claro indicio de que los profesionales del medio organizan las actividades de recolección de información con el fin de obtener o poder organizar una información que se ajuste a las mencionadas categorías. De este modo, en esta noticia en concreto destacan las reacciones verbales y las expectativas tras la caída del régimen de Saddam Hussein.

Por lo que respecta a la tendencia a emplear de manera reiterada determinadas categorías del esquema, The Times presta una atención considerable a la categoría de antecedentes (destacando, por este orden, la subcategoría de historia, la de sucesos previos y, en menor medida, la de contexto), y a la de consecuencias (en concreto, la subcategoría de reacciones verbales, que se cubre en un alto porcentaje, superando en muchos casos el 30% ó 40% de palabras en relación con las demás categorías). En las noticias de The Sun, la subcategoría de reacciones

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verbales se sigue realizando también de forma extensa, mientras que otra de las incorporaciones novedosas a las informaciones de este diario es la inclinación a no documentar la noticia con antecedentes políticos o económicos, predominando, por contraste, los antecedentes (historia o sucesos previos) casuales o anecdóticos. En este sentido, nótese que la noticia de The Sun ‘So much fury, so much resentment of Saddam’ no aparece documentada con antecedentes algunos. Si bien los componentes del esquema siguen figurando en The Sun, es la naturaleza discursiva de los acontecimientos que se incluyen en determinados eventos la que influye en la mayor o menor presencia y relevancia de algunos de los componentes, y en que la forma de manejo del texto discrepe con respecto a The Times. De esta manera, el principio de relevancia ocasiona que detalles menos destacados ocupen las primeras posiciones en el cuerpo informativo de la noticia y que, por todo ello, ese orden propuesto se vea alterado. El análisis de la muestra reveló que este orden se altera en muchas más ocasiones en las noticias pertenecientes a The Sun que en las publicadas en The Times (47% frente al 3%).

Otro aspecto destacado es el referido al deseo de excluir del relato periodístico informativo la subcategoría de evaluaciones, muestra indicativa de que los hechos y las opiniones son dos cosas bien distintas y que, como tales, deben estar separadas. A pesar de ello, las evaluaciones tienden a realizarse de manera indirecta a través de las reacciones verbales, operando el factor personal en The Times mediante personajes públicos de considerable importancia (nótese por ejemplo la presencia en esta noticia de las declaraciones del presidente Jacques Chirac de Francia), mientras que en The Sun prolifera la expresión de declaraciones por parte de ciudadanos comunes, inmersos en acontecimientos que muestran el lado humano de los eventos en los que se ven implicadas estas personas de a pie. Ello repercute en que la distancia que separa al emisor de su receptor disminuya en este diario, reduciéndose en consecuencia el grado de formalidad entre ambos. Un claro ejemplo del interés humano que suscitan determinadas informaciones lo muestra la siguiente cita de la noticia de The Sun: Laughing, the 22-year-old soldier asked the men: “Hey, guys, are you sure this is OK?” One replied: “Thank you, thank you. We are free at last. Saddam is gone. He can't hurt us any more.”

Los lectores de The Sun se ven a menudo sorprendidos por bloques informativos donde no se sigue de forma lineal un proceso de entrega de

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información de naturaleza diferente, hecho por el contrario característico del discurso periodístico de The Times. A este respecto, algunos relatos periodísticos publicados en The Sun presentan un modelo de estructuración de la información que está más en consonancia con la organización de la información de acuerdo con la adopción de un esquema narrativo.

Dicho esquema narrativo es mucho más regular en este tipo de publicaciones debido a que hay más ejemplos de historias en las que uno se encuentra con una mayor fragmentación de los bloques informativos y con una agrupación de categorías de naturaleza similar, lo cual favorece el relato cronológico. La información se encuentra casi siempre referida a un contexto pasado que es realmente el más propicio para dicha organización puesto que el relato puede presentar una complicación y una resolución (Labov y Waletzky 1967; Labov 1972; Fleischman 1990; Bell 1991). El principal cometido de esa organización secuencial de la información es el de crear situaciones dramáticas o de suspense que desembocan en reacciones sorpresivas o susceptibles de algún tipo de valoración por parte del lector, siendo el efecto resultante un relato que avanza en forma fragmentaria y acumulativa. Es precisamente esa organización estructural de la información la que, en parte, se constituye como la tarjeta identificativa de las noticias en The Sun. En relación con lo expuesto, Bell (1991: 152) refiriéndose a un estudio de Labov menciona algo sobre la narración que bien se puede aplicar aquí a las noticias publicadas en The Sun: “The events and the news actors will be given the maximum status for the sake of the story. In the same fashion, narrators of fight stories are at pains to enhance the scale of their adversary –‘the baddest girl in the neighborhood’– and hence the magnitude of their eventual victory”. A esto hay que añadir finalmente que los elementos evaluativos ayudados por la fragmentación de los bloques informativos suspenden en muchas ocasiones la acción, con lo cual la atención que despierta el relato se incrementa en mayor medida.

Las similitudes con el esquema narrativo no impiden que se revelen también discrepancias. Una de las discrepancias más notables se muestra en lo que respecta al desenlace en el recuento de los acontecimientos. Y es que, tal desenlace, tiende a figurar en la narración al final de la historia, mientras que en el relato periodístico informativo se suele hacer en el párrafo de entrada de la noticia (lead). Ello se ve como una característica de la función propia de este párrafo, que puede presentarse no únicamente para condensar una gran cantidad de información, sino que también su

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elaboración lleva consigo una selección de esa información y, lo que es tan e incluso más significativo, una jerarquización de la misma. En este sentido, los párrafos de entrada de las dos noticias recogidas en el Apéndice resumen el punto principal de la historia que gira en torno al final del mandato de Saddam Hussein.

Como observación final cabe resaltar que el desinterés que se manifiesta en las informaciones de The Sun en que impere una ordenación rígida del patrón de estructura esquemática propuesto por van Dijk se ve favorecido por la sucesión de un entramado de circunstancias dependientes no sólo del tipo de información que constituye el asunto noticioso en cuestión sino también del contexto comunicativo y social en el que se desarrolla el mismo, y que es en última instancia el determinante de que la información se ordene estratégicamente para la obtención de unos fines específicos.

4. CONCLUSIÓN El presente estudio del género noticia en The Times y The Sun permite concluir que la presentación de los acontecimientos en las noticias de uno y otro periódico es el producto de una relación pragmática con el entorno comunicativo y situacional en el que los diferentes asuntos noticiosos se encuentran inmersos. Ello se confirma en el modo en el que se realiza el género noticia en estos dos diarios, con rasgos mucho más marcados en The Sun que en The Times. En este sentido, la manifestación conjunta del factor de proximidad en la expresión de los acontecimientos y el grado de personalización de la información en uno y otro periódico resaltan su pertinencia en la composición del relato.

El modo de realización del género noticia en The Times y The Sun es un reflejo de la estrategia de acomodación del emisor a los intereses de su receptor prototipo. Uno de esos reflejos se muestra en las diferencias que estos dos diarios presentan en relación con la selección del patrón de estructura esquemática así como con los elementos tipográficos de la noticia. A este respecto, la norma habitual en las noticias publicadas en The Times es que las categorías que integran el esquema superestructural no se presenten de forma homogénea sino por medio de entregas discontinuas, con la información más pertinente de cada una de las

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categorías en primer lugar, y combinadas unas y otras categorías a lo largo de todo el relato. Por contraste, observamos en The Sun transformaciones específicas de la ordenación jerárquica propuesta por van Dijk, con organizaciones mucho más causales en el recuento de los sucesos, las cuales obedecen al contexto comunicativo, cuyas preferencias, intereses y objetivos no tanto personales como ideológicos de cada periódico marcan la diferencia. Constatamos además que la estructura visual de estos dos diarios está estrechamente vinculada a las necesidades de sus receptores. Mientras que el aspecto visual que muestra The Times es sosegado con fotografías y titulares proporcionados, The Sun, por el contrario, combina una mayor fragmentación de los bloques informativos de la noticia con diferentes elementos tipográficos y fotografías sensacionalistas, obteniéndose como resultado un mayor impacto visual en el receptor.

Las observaciones realizadas acerca del tipo de discurso analizado determinan la no existencia de una regla fija, sino más bien la presencia de reglas de carácter más pragmático, que tienen que ver fundamentalmente con el discurso del género noticia en relación con ciertos contextos comunicativos así como con situaciones sociales específicas. De esta forma, se demuestra el hecho de que los textos son “semiotic constructions of socially constructed meanings” (Eggins y Martin 1997: 251). Con todo, el factor crucial que se desprende del análisis es que el modo de realización del género noticia viene determinado por la implicación global del emisor y del receptor en el mensaje periodístico, tanto en el texto como en el contexto social en el que se produce dicho texto. En definitiva, ello se revela como especialmente importante, puesto que la información que se transmite puede considerarse como efímera y perecedera, pero los valores que se proyectan claramente no lo son.

NOTAS 2

Los conceptos noticia y relato periodístico informativo se emplean de manera indistinta en este artículo para hacer referencia al relato objetivo. En este estudio no se incluyen en dichos conceptos los artículos de opinión, los denominados features o soft news en el ámbito periodístico anglosajón, editoriales, etc., donde no es de aplicación el esquema que propone van Dijk (1991: 124).

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2

La clasificación de la prensa nacional británica como “de calidad” y “popular” puede tener matices peyorativos, sobre todo para esta última; de ahí que estos términos aparezcan en el estudio entrecomillados. Dicha denominación la empleamos aquí para hacer referencia a las diferencias objetivas que existen entre los distintos tipos de periódicos, y no a ninguna consideración relativa a la calidad del periódico en sí mismo o a la de sus lectores.

3

Para una relación pormenorizada del corpus empleado en este artículo, véase González 2004.

OBRAS CITADAS Bell, A. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

Burger, H. 1984. Sprache der Massenmedien. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Dijk (van), T.A. y W. Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. London: Academic Press.

Dijk (van), T.A. 1985a. Discourse and Communication. New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication.

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

---. 1985b. “Structures of news in the press” en T.A. van Dijk, ed.

Discourse and Communication. New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 69-91.

---. 1986. “News schemata” en C.R. Cooper y S. Greenbaum, eds.

Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches. Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 155-185.

---. 1988a. News Analysis. Case Studies of International and National News in the Press. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

---. 1988b. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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---. 1990. La noticia como discurso. Barcelona: Paidós. Traducción de News as Discourse. 1988. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

---.1991. Racism and the Press. Critical Studies in Racism and Migration. London: Routledge.

Eggins, S. 1994. An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics.

London: Pinter Publishers.

Eggins, S. y J.R. Martin. 1997. “Géneros y registros del discurso” en T.A. van Dijk, ed. El discurso como estructura y proceso. Vol. 1.

Barcelona: Gedisa, 335-371.

Fleischman, S. 1990. Tense and Narrativity. London: Routledge.

Garrison, B. 1990. Professional News Writing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

González Rodríguez, M.J. 2004. “Between narrative and nonnarrative: Make-up of the news story”. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses. 49: 135-156.

Labov, W. y J. Waletzky. 1967. “Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience” en J. Helm, ed. Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society). Seatle: University of Washington Press, 12-44.

Labov, W. 1972. “The transformation of experience in narrative syntax”. Language in the Inner City. Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 354-396.

White, P.R.R. 1997a. “Racism, hegemonic discourse and the news story: Modelling genre in a cross-cultural, cross-discoursal training context”. Paper delivered at the Ninth Euro-International Systemic Functional Workshop. Halle-Wittenberg, July 2-6.

---. 1997b. “Death, disruption and the moral order: The narrative impulse in mass media ‘hard news’ reporting” en F. Christie y J.R. Martin,

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eds. Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School.

London: Cassell, 100-133.

APÉNDICE Ejemplos de la muestra de textos y análisis genéricos The Times, Chirac ‘delighted’ by fall of Saddam, 10 de abril de 2003.

Chirac ‘delighted’ by fall of Saddam (título)

BY AGENCIES (atribución) President Jacques Chirac of France today hailed the fall of Saddam Hussein's Government and said that he hoped the fighting would end soon. (PÁRRAFO DE ENTRADA O lead) “France, like all democracies, is delighted at the fall of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and hopes for a quick and effective end to the fighting,” Mr Chirac's office said in a statement. (reacciones verbales) “It is now necessary to create the conditions which will give the Iraqi people its dignity in re-discovered freedom.” ( reacciones verbales) “What is urgent is to allow humanitarian aid in all its forms to be sent to Iraq without delay. As soon as possible, after the necessary phase of ensuring security, Iraq must re-discover – via the legitimacy granted by the United Nations – its full sovereignty in a stabilised region,” the statement said. (reacciones verbales) France led the group of nations opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq and was subsequently criticised for not

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stating unequivocally that it wanted an allied victory. It is now pressing for a “central role” for the UN in postwar reconstruction. (historia y acontecimiento principal) Today's statement from Paris is being seen in London as a sign that France is dropping its “you-broke-it-youfix-it” attitude and sinking political differences to help secure Iraq's future. (acontecimiento principal) The French President spoke to Tony Blair last night.

Both men share a desire for UN involvement despite the misgivings of many in the Bush Administration. (acontecimiento principal) Mr Chirac travels to St Petersberg tomorrow for talks with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. (expectativas) EU foreign ministers meet in Luxembourg on Monday to consider the next steps, including the establishment of a democratic regime, and the work of reconstruction. ( expectativas) EU leaders then meet in Athens on Wednesday, ostensibly to sign an EU enlargement Treaty, but now principally to agree how best to help post-war Iraq. (expectativas) The Sun, ‘So much fury, so much resentment of Saddam’, 10 de abril de 2003.

‘So much fury, so much resentment of Saddam’ (título) From PAUL THOMPSON in Baghad (ATRIBUCIÓN) TWENTY-FOUR terrible years of tyranny, cruelty and oppression came crashing to an end yesterday statues of Saddam Hussein were torn down across Baghdad.

(PÁRRAFO DE ENTRADA O LEAD)

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In amazing scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, crowds of jubilant Iraqis whooped and cheered as one huge effigy was tugged off its concrete plinth. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Freed at last from Saddam's regime of terror and torture, they leaped on the 20th bronze figure the moment it hit the ground. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Then they danced furiously on the tyrant's “corpse”.

(ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) The downing of the statue was a climax of a historic day as Baghdad was liberated by Allied troops.

(ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Thousands of young people who have known only the dictatorship of Saddam saw it as a new dawn — calling it the first day of their lives. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) A US Marine recovery vehicle pulled the statue over after attaching a chain around the figure's neck in the Shahid Square of the Martyrs — Baghdad's equivalent of Trafalgar Sq uar e. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Watching Iraqis gave victory signs, cried “Saddam is God's enemy” and hailed the US President by chanting “ Good, g ood Bus h”. ( ACONTECI MIENTO PRINCIPAL Y REACCIONES VERBALES) They also hurled shoes at the statue in a dramatic display of hatred for the dictator. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) It was a deeply symbolic act. Showing the sole of your foot is a sign of contempt in the region as it is considered one of the dirtiest parts of the body. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL)

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The toppling of the statue came at 3.49pm our time — 20 days, 13 hours and 15 minutes after the Allies launched the war. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) The scenes of joy were repeated at Arbil in the north, where people realised they were at long last free from Saddam's control as his militiamen fled US and Kurdish forces. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) The eruption of unfettered elation proved doubters who opposed the war were WRONG. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) And the ecstatic faces of millions of Iraqis showed George Bush, Tony Blair and Allied commanders were R I G H T t o t a k e o n a nd t o p p l e S a d d a m .

(ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Even Iraq's ambassador to the UN, Mohammed AlDouri, ushered in a new era by admitting last night: “The game is over. The war is over. I have no communication with Saddam.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) And at US Central Command in Qatar, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said: “I think we are at a tipping point where for the population there is a broader recognition this regime is coming to an end.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) But the sense of supreme achievement came against a backdrop of warnings from Coalition commanders that the fighting was NOT — over and enduring sorrow over those who have lost their lives. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Even as delirious Iraqis danced in the streets of the capital, battles raged around them. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL)

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Marines fought militiamen armed with rockets at Baghdad University. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) And diehard snipers took pot-shots at passing Allied soldiers. (ACONTECIMIENTO PRINCIPAL) Saddam's whereabouts were unknown last night.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) There was renewed speculation he may have been killed as he met cronies in a Baghdad restaurant bombed by a US plane on Monday. (ACONTECIMIENTOS Y SUCESOS PREVIOS) But British intelligence agents in the city believe he could have fled with sons Qusay and Uday to Tikrit, his home town north of the capital. (REACCIONES VERBALES) Other rumours had him hiding in the Russian embassy in Baghdad. (REACCIONES VERBALES) Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqis left their homes to salute American convoys as they rolled into the city centre with little opposition. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Excited crowds blew kisses at soldiers, yelled out in broken English and waved shirts above their heads.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) News spread like wildfire that Saddam's iron-fisted r e g im e h a d j us t m e l t e d a w ay ov er ni g ht .

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) Government officials and the police vanished into thin air. State minders left journalists to their own devices.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) And finally, with a spectacular release of emotion, the people of Baghdad felt able to overcome their fear of

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Saddam and his evil lieutenants. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Posters of the dictator were spat on, torn down and ripped apart across the city. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Looters rushed into government buildings, stripping offices of furniture, fixtures and even sheets of paper.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) Shops were also plundered by mobs who ran off with everything from microwave ovens to bunches of plastic flowers. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Throngs of people gathered at crossroads to welcome the troops. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) US tanks rolled up outside the Palestine Hotel, where newsmen from around the world have been based during the conflict. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Sky News reporter David Chater said: “The pincers have closed on the heart of Baghdad.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) “It is an extraordinary sight and a very welcome one.”

(REACCIONES VERBALES) Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said: “It's like Iraqi tanks pulling up on Fifth Avenue in New York or Piccadilly Circus in London. The fall of Baghdad is complete.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) Amid a party atmosphere in the city's Firdos Square, Marines took off their helmets and put on sun hats.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) Grateful Iraqis picked yellow flowers and handed them to soldiers as symbolic gifts. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Mobbed marine Corporal Steven Harris said: “This is just great — it's what the Iraqi people have been waiting for for so many years.” (REACCIONES VERBALES)

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“At first when we started to roll we thought this would be the battle we were waiting for.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) “But we kept pushing forwards and didn't get any resistance. So we just kept on rolling and hit the centre.

We are still on alert but it is such a big relief for us, and even more so for the Iraqi people. They've been liberated.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) “I was surrounded by children wanting to talk to me.

There was a lot of jubilation.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) The bronze Saddam statue quickly became the focus of the liberation. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Groups of young Iraqi men ran to the square to try to topple it. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) They climbed the column and tied a heavy rope around the effigy's neck, then hurled rocks and stones at Saddam's face. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) One huge man took swipes at the plinth with a sledgehammer, sending out a shower of concrete lumps.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) Others snatched the hammer to take a turn at battering the statue — unveiled a year ago to mark Saddam's 65th birthday. (ACONTECIMIENTOS E HISTORIA) Newsman Chater said: “They are celebrating their freedom with the lynching of Saddam Hussein. There is so much fury, so much resentment, so many years when they have not been able to say what they wanted.”

(REACCIONES VERBALES) “Everyone wants a go with the sledgehammer.”

(REACCIONES VERBALES)

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The Marine recovery vehicle rumbled into the square at 3.08pm our time to help with the demolition job.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) Another rope was attached to the head but broke when the Americans pulled it by using their vehicle like a tow truck. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) One soldier climbed up its extending A-frame to place a US flag on Saddam's face. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) But it was quickly removed on the orders of commanders desperate to make Iraqis understand they were being liberated, not conquered. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) The Stars and Stripes were replaced by an Iraqi flag.

B u t t h a t , t o o, w a s s o o n w hi p pe d a w a y.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) The Marines then put the chain in place and tugged again. This time the hollow five-ton effigy gave way and leaned forwards. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) It tumbled to a horizontal position, then stayed there for a moment until one more pull snapped it at the heels and sent it crashing to the ground. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Some Iraqis immediately threw rubbish at it — and beat it with sticks and stones. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Many could contain their emotions no longer.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) Corporal Joshua Keyes was hugged and kissed by Iraqi women and MEN alike. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Laughing , the 22-year-old soldier asked the men: “Hey, guys, are you sure this is OK?” (REACCIONES VERBALES) One replied: “Thank you, thank you. We are free at last.

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Saddam is gone. He can't hurt us any more.”

(REACCIONES VERBALES) The statue vanished under a sea of bitter Iraqis. Soon, its head was broken off and dragged through the streets on a rope. (ACONTECIMIENTOS) Millions saw the drama unfold on TV — including Tony Blair, who watched in 10 Downing Street.

(ACONTECIMIENTOS) His official spokesman said: “We are delighted at what we are seeing in the reaction on the ground.”

(REACCIONES VERBALES) “It shows what ordinary people thought of Saddam and just how much of a burden his rule has placed on them.”

(REACCIONES VERBALES) “We have seen today the scales of fear falling from the people of Iraq.” (REACCIONES VERBALES) George Bush watched early attempts to fell the statue with White House aides in a room near the Oval Office.

(CONTEXTO) But he missed the historic moment when it toppled as he had to attend a meeting with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Slovak President Rudolf Schuster.

(CONTEXTO) He glimpsed a recording as he left the meeting — and exclaimed: They got it down.” (CONTEXTO Y REACCIONES VERBALES) White House spokesman Ari FleisCher said Mr Bush had been “moved” by the celebrations of the Iraqis, some of whom waved posters of the President. (REACCIONES VERBALES Y ACONTECIMIENTOS)

María Teresa González Mínguez Cummings and Campion: are literary works definitely over?

Cummings and campion: are literary works definitely over?

María Teresa González Mínguez I.E.S. Parla II

Este artículo explora como la literatura está siempre en movimiento, y como autores de diferentes épocas y culturas pueden colaborar creando y completando obras literarias.

El escritor norteamericano E. E. Cummings fue capaz de actualizar un poema renacentista casi olvidado del inglés Thomas Campion a pesar del largo periodo de tiempo que separa a ambos autores. Cummings compartió su afición por la literatura con la pintura y la música, Campion adaptó sus poemas a la música y también se dedicó a la medicina. La combinación de estas destrezas y el gusto por descubrir lo que otras tendencias podían ofrecerles, hicieron a Cummings y Campion ser radicalmente opuestos a otros artistas de su generación, creando un lenguaje especial el cual sólo aquellos que van más allá de la realidad pueden entender.

This article explores how literature is always on the move, and how authors from different times and cultures can collaborate in creating and completing literary works. The American writer E. E. Cummings was able to update a forgotten Renaissance poem through the English Thomas Campion in spite of the lapse of time between both authors.

Cummings shared his love for writing with a career devoted to painting. Campion adapted his poems to music and was also a medicine doctor. The combination of these skills and the taste for discovering what other tendencies could offer them, encouraged Cummings and Campion to be radically opposed to other artists of their generation, creating a special language which only those who go beyond reality can understand.

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Palabras clave: literatura contemporánea, obras antiguas, experimento nuclear, catástrofe, concepción metafísica, inmortalidad, pensamiento trascendental, regeneración, individualidad.

Key words: contemporary literature, ancient works, nuclear experiment, catastrophe, metaphysical conception, immortality, transcendental thought, regeneration, individuality.

“CUMMINGS AND CAMPION: ARE LITERARY WORKS DEFINITELY OVER?” We live in a time in which a three-year-old computer is almost obsolete and teenagers do not remember the New Romantics or techno music, but fortunately, the taste for reading books published centuries ago still pervades. Without doubt, one of the most gratifying experiences for those who enjoy literature is to appreciate how contemporary authors revise and complete ancient works elaborated through generations of writing. When in the sixteenth century William Shakesperare created The Comedy of Errors, he was adapting Plautus’s Menaechmi. Although her poems were longer and more terrible, Sylvia Plath has clearly inherited Emily Dickinson’s sense of aloneness, pain and death. Thanks to their genius audiences throughout history were able to enjoy literary works composed some centuries ago.

The American poet E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) has frequently been accused of obscurity, not only due to his typographical tricks, distorted grammar and bizarre vocabulary, but because of the difficulty in understanding his works. Many critics have attacked against his jazz effects, bawdy dialects, tough guys, slim hot queens, barkers, fairies and, as Richard Blackmur points out in his article “Notes on E. E. Cummings’ Language”, “baby talk” diction (1984: 124). However, these unique features are unavoidably the symbols of his style. They are more than a simple ornament; they are substance. It is true that Cummings’ code and background require much more effort than any other poets’, but, in spite of the fact that his characteristic immediateness and rapid transmission of events is not as powerful as in other contemporary writers as T.S. Eliot or Erza Pound, neither could we understand Cummings’ poetry without knowing the multicultural references contained in it. Sometimes Cummings’

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works are rooted in old literary and scientific traditions and some others in present day tendencies. In all his prose and verse production and even his personal correspondence, he always presented a particular view of the world’s past, present and future affairs. As Richard Kennedy remarks in Cummings’ latest biography Dreams in the Mirror, he is as American as Concord Bridge and the Statue of Liberty (1980: 7), but his deep interest in what was happening in the rest of the world impulsed him to travel and investigate for himself what other countries and cultures could offer.

As Cummings grew older, meditation became a remarkable occupation in his life. His last four books –1X1, Xaiñe, 95 Poems and 73 Poems– were substantially more philosophical than the first—Tulips and Chimneys, &, is 5, ViVa, No Thanks, New Poems and 50 Poems.

Transcendence was then the writer’s business and many of his poems of this period concerned the transitory nature of life in this world. There is a piece in 1X1 that deserves special attention. “what if a much of a which of a wind” is one of the few poems in Cummings’ production with such an original and suggestive rhyme that it deserves to be read aloud. The composition is more than merely a phonetic pun. It is, as Pilar Abad rightly notes, an example of the aesthetics of Formalism (2001: 57). But it is also, in my view, today’s answer to “What if a day, or a month, or a year”, a two-stanza poem which Thomas Campion wrote in 1606. 1 Robert Wegner says that “the similarity exists only in the first lines. ...

The two lines are identical in prosody and in the use of the first three words. Beyond this the two poems are not alike” (1965: 8).

Campion (1567-1620) lived during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the early years of King James. Cummings studied at Harvard in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and Campion at Cambridge (England). The American was a poet and a painter, and the Englishman combined music and poetry with the practice of medicine.2 Some of Cummings’ poems were set to music.

Richard Kostelanetz compiles them in AnOther E. E. Cummings. We can also consider as a source of inspiration for Cummings another genre of Campion’s poems such as “Rose-Cheeked Laura”: music, spring, and a beautiful woman and her hair are topics that appear in “yours is the music for no instrument” (“SONNETS-ACTUALITIES,” Tulips and Chimneys, CP 160).

Just as Cummings did, Campion also spent some time in France where he gained a degree in Medicine from the University of Caen. If

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we compare Campion to his contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, he did not have the highest lyrical talents, but possessed a good ear in adapting words to tunes, the knack of sweet phrasing, and a mastery of complicated stanzas. His Observations in the Art of English Poesie were published in 1602 defending classical metres against, as Margaret Drabble quotes, “the vulgar and unarteficiall custome of riming” (2000: 167). However, it could be suggested that his excellent musical skills enabled him to compose a serious poem with an almost too delightful Elizabethan rhyme which brought the Golden Age to Cummings’ mind four centuries later.

Campion presents a somewhat fantastic and forced idea and leaves a wound and a question open. Cummings’ tone is even more dramatic but his characteristic optimism heals the wound opened by Campion. The idea of a catastrophe invades both poems. What the reader perceives at first sight is an apocalyptical explosion—natural or provoked. In an era where disasters menacing mankind are so common, we might think that the explosion in Cummings’ poem was a premonition that he transformed into a metaphor at a time when the atmosphere was full of rumours of the government’s nuclear experiments and the United States were involved in WWII. Certainly this poem was first published in Poetry two years before the first A-bomb was secretly exploded on July 16th 1945 at Alamogordo Desert (New Mexico).

Campion’s cataclysm is more fantastic, merely something he invented with apparently no real reference. It is true that there was an earthquake in London which the talkative Capulet’s nurse cites in her speech, but it is quite improbable that the Elizabethan poet recalled it as he was only thirteen when it happened in 1580.

The poem displays a clear progression based on movement and mutabilty. It moves from the big to the small and from the diminutive to the colossal. Campion alludes to a much more metaphysical conception than Cummings. As Frederick Candelaria observes, in the first stanza of Campion’s ballad the movement is from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the particular to the universal, from immensity to a particle: Cannot a chance of a night or an hour?

Cross thy desires with as many sad tormentings? ..............................................................................

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All our joys are but toys, Idle thoughts deceiving; None have power of an hour In their lieves’ bereauing.

In the second, Candelaria adds, the movement is more violent and everything becomes more and more confined. The poet surrounds the reader through that cosmos, comparing first the size of the earth to the universe, and then, the size of man to that of the earth (1959: 135): Earth’s but a point to the world, and a man Is but a point to the worlds compared centure; Shall then the point of a point be so vain As to triumph in a seely points adventure?

In the next lines all definitely moves from the universal to the limited by means of fast sweeping flights: All is hazard that we have, There is nothing biding; Days of pleasure are like streams Through faire meadows gliding.

At the end of the stanza, in spite of that “felicity” that Edward Albert attributes to Campion’s poems (1984: 86), he shows his pessimistic side, commenting on the ephemeral nature of mundane glories: Time is never turning: Secret fates guide our states, Both in mirth and mourning.

In Cummings’ poem, if presenting a world upside down, the structure is much more familiar to a reader although his style is less orthodox. The poem is also based on the violence of destruction but adds the component that Campion’s lacks, that of the increasing force of the man’s spiritual strength. In the last verse of the first stanza Cummings supplies that force with a statement dignifying human magnificence and presenting the immortal man inhabiting a transcendental universe as proof against catastrophe:

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what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer’s lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend:blow space to time) —when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man Why is the solution a priori in “man” and not “men”? For Cummings, always so attentive to the Romantics, the Existentialists and Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet’s insuperable loneliness is irrevocable as he depends on it for his artistic achievements. As Martin Heusser points out in I Am My Writing. The Poetry of E. E. Cummings, it is impossible for an individual who wants to create something, to step beyond the narrow confines of his own self, much less to unite himself with another individual (1997: 58). The Cummingsesque individual is not as insignificant and mortal as Campion’s. His nature in this world is not transitory; he will survive through transcendental thought.

Cummings’ stanzas display his typical seasonal patterns. The first stanza starts in summer and finishes in autumn. What is supposed to be true in summer –a very negative period of the year for Cummings– becomes a lie when the autumnal wind starts to blow. The wind displaces eternal stars and reduces a king to a beggar —as King Lear after the storm— a queen to a false appearance of one, and blows away letter “r” making a “friend” become a “fiend” to finally restrict space to time.

The second stanza moves from winter to the beginning of spring: what if a keen of a lean wind flays screaming hills with sleet and snow; strangles valleys by ropes of thing and stiffles forests in white ago? blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind (blow pity to envy and soul to mind) —whose hearts are mountains,roots are trees, it’s they shall cry hello to the spring

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There is a winter storm bringing physical devastation intensified by glaciation. However, the consequences of physical destruction are not the most dramatic. What terrifies the author is that soul becomes mind— the most denigrated concept in Cummings’ poetry. Again only the ones who survive are those “whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees” and fuse with nature to greet the new season—the symbol of rebirth and regeneration in Cummings.

In stanza three we reach spring but doomsday menaces throughout.

Here comes the cosmic explosion that destroys the universe but, although paradoxical, the poet is quite satisfied that it may happen. The number of individuals increases as the poem progresses. In line four it is not just a single person, but “me and you”, a pair of lovers who will transcend despite whatever might happen to the universe, since for Cummings the highest value is love.3 In “all ignorance toboggans into know” also in 1X1, Cummings reiterates the transcendence of life as in stanza three he says “—tomorrow is our permanent address”.

In the last line these two people have multiplied into “we”, representing, as Laurence Perrine notes, “all persons possessing true individuality and integrity, and capable of unselfish love” (1980: 12). A spiritual world will appear obliterating not only all physical life, but also the past: what if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of his grave, and sprinkles nowhere with me and you? blow soon to never and never to twice (blow life to isn’t:blow death to was) —all nothing’s only our hughest home; the most who die,the more we live Does this mean that Cummings suggests we should enjoy life only considering what may happen after death? Certainly not. As Stephen E. Whicher demonstrates in his explication of Cummings’ poem, “the poem affirms the present” (1953: 14). Regardless of the transcendental tone, Cummings was a man who, like Horace, seized the day. With his sudden questions constituting stanzas and dialogical tone, the poet does urge the readers to make the most

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of the present time and give little thought to the future. The Renaissance stoic poem is answered by an updated carpe diem lyric.

With his effort, Cummings tries to satisfy an audience troubled by an inscrutable problem centuries ago and, warn scientists, politicians and those who reject feeling of what might occur if they give priority to mind. But is the poem definitely over? Must we wait for another poet who tells us what “me and you” will be able to do in an immortal world?

NOTES 1

Robert Wegner says that “the similarity exists only in the first lines. ... The two lines are identical in prosody and in the use of the first three words. Beyond this the two poems are not alike” (1965: 8).

2 Some of Cummings’ poems were set to music. Richard Kostelanetz compiles them in AnOther E. E. Cummings. We can also consider as a source of inspiration for Cummings another genre of Campion’s poems such as “Rose-Cheeked Laura”: music, spring, and a beautiful woman and her hair are topics that appear in “yours is the music for no instrument” (“SONNETS-ACTUALITIES,” Tulips and Chimneys, CP 160).

3 In “all ignorance toboggans into know” also in 1X1, Cummings reiterates the transcendence of life as in stanza three he says “—tomorrow is our permanent address”.

WORKS CITED Abad, P. 2001. Poetología. Teoría Literaria y Poesía en Lengua Inglesa. Valladolid: Editorial Universidad de Valladolid Albert, E. 1984. History of English Literature. Walton-on-Thames: Nelson Blackmur, R. P. 1984. “Rev. of 50 Poems” en Guy Rotella , ed.

Critical Essays on E. E. Cummings. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co., 86-90 Candelaria, F. H. 1959. “Cummings and Campion”. Notes and Queries. VI: 134-36

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Campion, T. 1909. Campion’s Works. Percival Vivian ed. Oxford: O.U.P. Cummings, E. E. 1991. E. E. Cummings. Complete Poems 19041962. George Firmage ed. New York: Liveright Drabble, M. ed. 2000. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: O.U.P. Heusser, M. 1997. I Am My Wrting. The Poetry of E. E. Cummings.

Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag Kennedy, R. 1984. Dreams in the Mirror. New York: Liveright Kostelanetz, R. ed. 1998. AnOther E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1998 Perrine, Laurence. 1980. “E. E. Cummings’ ‘what if a much of a which of a wind’”. Notes on Modern American Literature 4: item 12 Wegner, R. E. 1965. The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings.

An Study in Appreciation. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Whicher, Stephen E. 1953. “Cummings’ ‘what if a much of a which of a wind’”. The Explicator XII: item 14

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Historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa (II): Antigüedad clásica – Grecia Mª José Corvo Sánchez Universidad de Vigo

Las lenguas de la Antigüedad clásica constituyen un amplio grupo lingüístico constituido por los diferentes dialectos griegos, el latín y las lenguas itálicas. No obstante, en lo que concierne a la enseñanza de las lenguas extranjeras en la Antigüedad clásica, como período dominado por la educación helenística, son sólo dos, las lenguas griega y latina, las que podemos considerar como objeto de estudio y, más concretamente, en las dos situaciones siguientes: el antiguo griego en Grecia y el griego común y el latín en Roma durante el helenismo latino.

El primero de los aspectos mencionados es el tema de este trabajo, que expondremos centrándonos en conocer la enseñanza del griego antiguo en la educación helenística.

The Classical languages consist of a broad linguistic group which includes the different Greek dialects, Latin and the Italic languages. However, as for the teaching/learning of foreign languages in the Classical period, in which Hellenistic education was predominant, only two of them, Greek and Latin, can be deemed worthy of study.

More specifically, Ancient Greek in Greece and Common Greek and Latin in Rome, during the Latin Hellenism period, are aims of our concern.

The former of these two features is the basis of the current study bearing in mind the learning of Ancient Greek in Hellenistic education.

Palabras claves: Antigüedad clásica, Grecia, lenguas extranjeras, enseñanza y aprendizaje, historia, Europa.

Keywords: The Classical ages, Greece, foreign languages, teaching and learning, history, Europe.

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1. INTRODUCCIÓN Las siguientes páginas constituyen la continuación del artículo publicado en el número trece de esta revista con el título Historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa (Corvo 2004: 93-110) y que fue concebido como punto de partida de una serie de trabajos dedicados al estudio de la historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa.

El presente artículo, como se deduce de su título, es la segunda parte de aquél, al cual remitimos de manera general para conocer los testimonios más antiguos de los que tenemos constancia y con los que se inicia la historia de la disciplina de la didáctica de lenguas extranjeras en Europa; de modo más particular, además, remitimos a las páginas dedicadas en él al primer punto, encabezado como “Introducción: observaciones metodológicas” (pp. 93-97), para tener presente tanto la metodología como la terminología que preside esta serie de trabajos.

2. LAS LENGUAS Y SU ENSEÑANZA EN LA ANTIGÜEDAD CLÁSICA Las lenguas de la Antigüedad clásica constituyen un amplio grupo lingüístico formado por los diferentes dialectos griegos, el latín y las lenguas itálicas. No obstante, en lo que concierne a la enseñanza de las lenguas extranjeras en la Antigüedad clásica, como período dominado por la educación helenística1, son sólo dos, las lenguas griega y latina, las que podemos considerar como objeto de estudio y, más concretamente, en las dos situaciones siguientes: el antiguo griego en Grecia y el griego común y el latín en Roma durante el helenismo latino.

Por lo que respecta a las ‘otras lenguas’, a pesar de que sepamos de la existencia de hablantes bilingües y de intérpretes profesionales en la Grecia antigua primero y en Roma después —lo que prueba de modo innegable que eran conocedores de ellas—, desconocemos todo lo referente tanto a su aprendizaje, como a la metodología empleada para su enseñanza.

Entre las razones que pueden ayudarnos a comprender mejor este hecho se encuentra la circunstancia de que dentro del marco de la cultura

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griega el griego clásico era la única lengua culta y, como tal, la única digna de ser aprendida; las demás, las lenguas habladas por los extranjeros —a quienes calificaban de barbari por su incapacidad de hablar como ellos— eran bárbaras y no merecían ser enseñadas (Cf. Titone 1968: 6, Germain 1993: 36 y Sánchez 1997: 33).

Este prejuicio, por otro lado común a las civilizaciones antiguas, como sabemos2 sólo se ve superado con el devenir del tiempo tras el florecimiento de la cultura latina, cuando la lengua latina es la empleada en Roma en el entorno burocrático, en relación con los asuntos militares, administrativos, etc. (Cf. Swiggers 1997: 61) y los griegos3 empiezan a aprender el latín por razones exclusivamente de necesidad a partir del siglo III d. C., conservando siempre “el carácter de enseñanza técnica”, como nos dice Marrou, al consistir básicamente en “una introducción al estudio del derecho, disciplina propiamente latina” (1965: 315).

En las páginas siguientes, y de acuerdo con el encabezado que da título a este trabajo, nos ocuparemos de presentar la primera de las dos situaciones expuestas al inicio del mismo como objeto de estudio en el ámbito la enseñanza de las lenguas extranjeras en la Antigüedad clásica: el antiguo griego en Grecia o lo que es básicamente lo mismo, el griego de Homero, el más venerado de los poetas griegos, pues su lengua se convirtió en el modelo de lengua culta en la Antigüedad clásica.

Para ello, en primer lugar, conoceremos el desarrollo de su enseñanza en la educación helenística, la cual, de acuerdo con Hovdhaugen (1996: 387), debe ser contemplada dentro del marco de la enseñanza y aprendizaje de una lengua extranjera en la medida en que se desviaba de la común hablada por la gente; en segundo lugar, conoceremos la gran aportación griega a la disciplina de la didáctica de lenguas: su regulación en torno a la ciencia gramatical —su segundo gran logro después de su alfabeto4.

3. LA ENSEÑANZA DEL GRIEGO ANTIGUO EN LA EDUCACIÓN HELENÍSTICA El griego de Homero es el modelo de lengua culta en la Antigüedad clásica y sus poemas, la Iliada y la Odisea —escritos esencialmente en

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antiguo jonio, lengua que daría forma al dialecto ático, hablado en Atenas y en sus alrededores y que con el tiempo es la variante que acaba imponiéndose sobre los demás dialectos griegos originando la koiné dialektos o lengua común, hablada por la generalidad y empleada por los prosistas en sus escritos—, que representan la lengua literaria griega, pasan a convertirse, junto a otros textos antiguos5, en el pilar de la educación helenística durante los siglos posteriores: “… eran recitados en público y considerados y citados como fuentes de preceptos morales”, como nos informa Robins (1987: 23).

El entorno donde debemos situar la disciplina de enseñanzas de lenguas en la Grecia clásica —a partir del siglo IV a. C.— difiere en muchos aspectos de los del resto de las culturas antiguas (Cf. Corvo 2004), pues en Grecia asistimos al nacimiento de la enseñanza institucionalizada y con ello a lo que es harto original en la Historia, esto es, el desempeño de la instrucción pública reglamentada oficialmente por municipios o ciudades. Su responsabilidad descansa en la figura de los maestros, pagados generalmente por la autoridad local en las escuelas oficiales, creadas y sustentadas a un mismo tiempo a través de donaciones particulares, o bien mantenidos con los pagos de los alumnos en las escuelas privadas.

Si bien es cierto que no podemos hablar de modelos de formación estándar institucionalizados6 y, por lo tanto, tampoco nos es posible hablar de una enseñanza regular ni sistematizada (Cf. Marrou 1965: 173), se constatan, no obstante, ciertas regularidades dentro del sistema educacional griego en la época helenística, en el que la educación física y artística, sobre la que se sustentaba la educación griega antigua, da paso a otra de carácter literario, de la que forma parte de un modo destacado la formación lingüística, a través del aprendizaje de la gramática. De tal forma que se distinguen tres tipos de instrucción: la elemental, impartida por el grammatistis; la secundaria, impartida por el grammatikos; y la superior, impartida por el rhetor.

De ellas sólo las dos primeras resultan interesantes para el ámbito de la didáctica de lenguas. Además, tampoco podemos olvidar que los primeros pasos en la formación lingüística del niño griego en la época helenística se dan con anterioridad al período escolar:

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concretamente en el seno familiar, donde en sus primeros años de vida era puesto bajo la tutela de una niñera quien, por lo general, junto a una estricta disciplina de buenos modales, debía dirigirle cuidadosamente en su proceso de adquisición del lenguaje, preocupándose de proporcionarle una dicción y un uso correctos e impidiendo cualquier tipo de incorrección idiomática.

Tras esta fase de iniciación formativa preescolar, que podemos considerar como el umbral educativo de su vida social e intelectual posterior, empezaba para el alumno a la edad de siete años aproximadamente la educación escolar propiamente dicha.

La enseñanza elemental en la escuela primaria, que solía durar hasta los once o doce años, consistía básicamente en el aprendizaje de las letras y de los números. De acuerdo con una instrucción que debía desenvolverse en sentido estricto desde lo más sencillo a lo más complejo, la iniciación en la lectura y en la escritura comenzaba con el aprendizaje de las letras, después de las sílabas, de palabras aisladas o nombres propios —tomados de la tradición literaria: dioses, héroes, etc.— y frases y, finalmente, se llegaba a la lectura en voz alta y a la copia de textos breves. Sólo una vez alcanzado este nivel, se continuaba con una instrucción literaria, igualmente elemental, siguiendo una metodología basada en el dictado y en la memorización de ciertos fragmentos seleccionados de poetas clásicos.

La enseñanza secundaria, dedicada en su origen al desarrollo de la actividad física y al estudio de la geometría, la aritmética y la música, toma a partir del siglo II a. C. una nueva orientación hacia el estudio de los textos literarios (Cf. Hovdhaugen 1996: 379) y pasa por ello a ser impartida en las escuelas de gramática.

A dichas escuelas de nivel secundario sólo era posible acceder una vez que el niño sabía leer y escribir correctamente y en ellas el grammatikos centra sus enseñanzas en el estudio de los poetas y de los principales escritores clásicos, ya que, de acuerdo con Marrou: “… tal es su objeto propio, que distingue a la ‘gramática’, entendida en el sentido de nivel secundario, de la enseñanza del grammatista primario” (1965: 196).

Estas enseñanzas comenzaban con la presentación por parte del maestro del contenido del texto y con la copia del mismo por parte de

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los escolares. Sólo después se procedía a la lectura exhaustiva del texto, su memorización y su recitación, a lo que seguía su explicación o exégesis, la cual, desde el punto de vista lingüístico, se convertía en un completo examen lexicográfico y morfológico de la lengua antigua de los clásicos —especialmente la de Homero, como sabemos— a través de la práctica de glosas y de léxicos alfabéticos en lengua común y de la conjugación y de la declinación de los verbos y de los nombres.

Este análisis léxico y gramatical —o glossematikon— posibilitaba la comprensión total del texto, permitiendo a continuación descifrar su contenido moral y alcanzar el objetivo primordial de estudio: conocer lo que narra el poeta, el nombre de las personas a quienes menciona, los diferentes lugares y épocas, etc., o lo que es lo mismo, saber quiénes y qué cosas, dónde, cuándo y por qué se llevaron a cabo, lo que, en definitiva, marcaba la buena educación del niño y posteriormente lo distinguiría como hombre culto.

Tras la presentación y copia, la lectura, la explicación o análisis gramatical y léxico y del contenido del texto o istorikon—, se proseguía con el juicio o la lección moral. Y todos estos ejercicios, conocidos con el nombre de progymnasmata, conducían finalmente a la práctica de la composición de fábulas, narraciones, refutaciones, descripciones, etc., con lo que el alumno aprendía, en definitiva, a utilizar correctamente la lengua (Cf. Caravolas 1994: 12).

A partir del siglo I a. C. dentro de esta educación literaria secundaria —que comprendía elementos de los más diversos campos: historia, métrica, mitología, moralidad, etc.— y completando las enseñanzas recibidas por el gramático, se introduce un nuevo enfoque de estudio, centrado en el análisis de los elementos que conforman el lenguaje: la técnica o ciencia gramatical.

A partir de Grecia asistimos a lo que podríamos denominar la democratización de la escritura y el libre acceso al saber, que deja ahora de estar en manos de unos pocos que controlan la escritura. Este hecho fomenta el desarrollo de la preocupación lingüística, que se centra ahora en otras cuestiones, iniciándose su investigación y especulación, algo que ya ha sido resaltado por algunos especialistas de modo similar a como lo hace Robins con las siguientes palabras: “Los griegos antiguos

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poseyeron el don de maravillarse de cosas que otros pueblos aceptaban sin discusión”(1987: 22).

El intento de identificar una escuela o de determinar una fecha como inicio de la práctica de la gramática técnica resulta fallido desde el estado actual de nuestro conocimiento sobre la cultura griega, como nos recuerda Kemp (1996: 303). No obstante, sí que conocemos ciertos antecedentes en esta trayectoria, en la que los poemas homéricos, como hemos visto, constituyen el origen de la preocupación por la lengua en Grecia, preocupación que a partir de la obra de Homero se manifiesta como una constante en el desarrollo del pensamiento y la literatura del pueblo griego, pasando por varias y diferentes fases de concepción: filosófica primero —donde la expresión lingüística se identificaba con la mítica-religiosa— con los presocráticos, los sofistas, Protágoras y Gorgias de Sicilia, Sócrates, Platón, Aristóteles y las escuelas estoicista y epicúrea; y antifilosófica —escépticos— y filológica después, a partir de las escuelas de Alejandría y Pérgamo, en las que ejercieron su magisterio los tres filólogos más representativos del período inmediatamente anterior a la figura de Dionisio de Tracia, autor de la primera gramática de Occidente: Aristófanes de Bizancio y su discípulo Aristarco de Samotracia7 y Crates de Mallos8.

De todo ello debemos destacar que la ciencia lingüística de los estoicos —si bien formaba parte del mismo entramado filosófico que sustentaba todos los campos del saber humano de esta época— representa el primer paso en la evolución de la lingüística como disciplina independiente dentro del amplio campo de la Filosofía: “Con los estoicos, la lingüística alcanzó un lugar definitivo dentro del contexto completo de la filosofía, y las cuestiones lingüísticas fueron expresamente concebidas en obras separadas, dedicadas a aspectos del lenguaje, y tratadas de una manera ordenada (Robins 1987: 27)”.

En cualquier caso, lo único que sabemos con absoluta certeza respecto a la aparición de esta primera gramática, a la que hacíamos referencia unas líneas más arriba, es que de su definición y cometido no encontramos testimonios hasta el tiempo de Dionisio de Tracia (170-90 a. C.) en Rodas, centro de encuentro de filósofos, retóricos y gramáticos, representantes de diferentes tradiciones, donde a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo II a. C. se experimentaría de modo más palpable el

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resurgimiento de la vida intelectual griega tras el éxodo de los maestros de Alejandría como consecuencia de la tiranía de Ptolomeo VII. Efectivamente a él se le atribuye la autoría de la primera gramática de Occidente, sin bien no sin reservas, pues, más que un trabajo original fruto de la investigación lingüística propia, se trata de un trabajo de recopilación y de reelaboración de toda la experiencia anterior, una experiencia que, como vemos, arranca cuatrocientos años atrás.

Arens (1975: 38, 39) contrapone los términos de ‘autor’ y ‘creador’ para explicar este hecho. Marrou lo expone del siguiente modo: “En efecto, solo a principios del siglo I a. C. la ciencia gramatical alcanzó su consagración, cuando Dionisio de Tracia, uno de los maestros que forjaron la gloria de las escuelas de Rodas, redactó el célebre manual, téchne, donde se codificaban los resultados obtenidos hasta entonces (1965: 208)”.

Su manual, conocido como Tév, Téchnê grammatike o arte de la gramática, constituye el único libro que nos ha llegado de este período helenístico y, por ello, representa el punto de partida del desarrollo de los estudios gramaticales en Occidente.

En él Dionisio de Tracia enlaza elementos de la tradición filosófica con la tradición literaria de los maestros alejandrinos y sienta las bases de la gramática, preocupándose a un tiempo tanto por su descripción como por su enseñanza.

Se trata de una obra muy breve —“apretada y árida en 45 párrafos”, como dice Arens (1975: 46)—, de quince páginas, a lo largo de las cuales se presentan las estructuras de la lengua griega y que empieza con una definición de gramática y una relación de su división.

La gramática es definida como el estudio práctico de los usos normales de la lengua de los poetas y de los autores de los escritos en prosa; y, de acuerdo con Kemp (1996: 304), se divide en las siguientes seis partes: lectura en voz alta, prestando la debida atención a las características prosódicas; interpretación, tomando nota de los tropos de la composición literaria encontrados en el texto; explicación de términos oscuros y de referencias históricas; aclaración del origen de las palabras;

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relación detallada de modelos regulares; y enunciado crítico de los poemas, parte más noble de todas las incluidas en este arte. Todo lo cual conlleva el estudio de acentos, puntuación, rapsodia, descripción de los sonidos a través de las letras, la sílaba, morfología de la palabra y las partes de la oración: nombre, verbo, participio, artículo, pronombre, preposición, adverbio y conjunción.

El Tév de Dionisio de Tracia fue una obra que eclipsó a todas las que aparecieron después en el mundo griego y puede decirse que, como modelo de descripción gramatical, su influencia en los gramáticos posteriores ha sido constante hasta los tiempos modernos. Así opinan, por ejemplo, Robins (1987: 41) y Kemp (1996: 316); Arens lo expresa del siguiente modo: “Quien consulte una gramática escolar cualquiera de hoy encontrará casi la misma estructura elegida por Dionisio el Tracio.

Comienza con la Fonética y termina casi siempre con la conjunción.

Incluso sigue dándose la circunstancia de que la Sintaxis resulta demasiado concisa (1975: 53)”.

Junto a Dionisio de Tracia, aunque si bien en segundo lugar, debemos también hacer mención de la figura de Apolonio Díscolo, gramático de la primera mitad del siglo II a. C. considerado como el fundador de la descripción sintáctica del mundo occidental (Cf. Kemp 1996: 317) y autor de una labor gramatical extensísima y de gran repercusión en los gramáticos latinos posteriores y, muy especialmente en Prisciano, ya en el siglo VI d. C., a través de quien la influencia de su obra se proyectaría sobre todos sus seguidores, convirtiéndolo con ello en el segundo escritor más representativo de la historia de la gramática griega.

No se conoce con exactitud el número de obras de este gramático, lo que sí podemos afirmar a través de las que se conservan —Pronombre, Adverbio y Conjunción, sus tres obras menores; Division de las partes del discurso, su obra mayor, dividida en cuatro libros; Nombre; Verbo, en cinco libros; Sintaxis, en cuatro libros, que es posiblemente la que mayor influencia ha ejercido en las posteriores descripciones gramaticales; así como muchos fragmentos de otras tantas— es que su interés abarcó un contenido muy variado: sonidos, sílabas, prosodia, partes del discurso, tiempo, género, número, caso, conjugación y sintaxis.

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En el tratado que llamó Sintaxis Apolonio estudia cómo surgen las oraciones a través de las uniones de las palabras. Consiste en el primer estudio de la oración independientemente de las otras partes de la gramática y en él se concede gran importancia a los componentes fundamentales de la oración, los nominales y verbales, basando así su descripción sintáctica en el análisis de las relaciones que nombre y verbo mantienen entre sí y las que tienen las demás clases de palabras con ellos. Sus conceptos y terminología tendrían gran difusión en el mundo latino y medieval.

4. CONCLUSIONES El griego antiguo, es decir, la lengua del más venerado de los poetas griegos, Homero, así como la de los textos antiguos, es la lengua culta y, alejada de la del pueblo, como decíamos, en la medida en que se desviaba de la común hablada por la gente, debía ser enseñada y aprendida como extranjera.

Tras conocer el desarrollo de su enseñanza en la educación helenística en las páginas anteriores, hemos podido ver cómo para ello los maestros griegos antiguos “maravillándose de cosas que otros pueblos aceptaban sin discusión” (Robins 1987: 22), se sirvieron de la ciencia de la gramática, lo que desde la perspectiva actual constituye, sin lugar a dudas, la mayor aportación de la Grecia clásica a la Historia de la enseñanza de las lenguas en general y a la de su enseñanza como lenguas extranjeras en particular.

El manual conocido como Tév, Téchnê grammatike o arte de la gramática representa el punto de partida del desarrollo de los estudios gramaticales en Occidente. Se trata, como decíamos más arriba, de un trabajo más de recopilación y de reelaboración de toda la experiencia anterior, con cuatrocientos años de antigüedad, que de una aportación original de su autor, Dionisio de Tracia, quien con su obra, enlazando elementos de la tradición filosófica con la tradición literaria de los maestros alejandrinos, sienta las bases de la gramática aleccionándonos de cómo debe ser descrita y de cómo debe ser enseñada.

La transcendencia de la ciencia de la gramática aportada por Grecia a la Historia de la didáctica de lenguas extranjeras, por tanto, es enorme

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porque supone la regulación de la disciplina de la enseñanza de lenguas en torno a la ciencia gramatical, cuyo desarrollo sería continuado posteriormente por Roma, iniciándose así el camino hacia la tradición gramatical de la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras en el Occidente europeo.

NOTES 1

Como más detalladamente refiere Marrou: La educación helenística es justamente la que debemos llamar educación clásica: es la de todo el mundo griego, cuando éste se estabiliza tras las grandes aventuras de las conquistas de Alejandro y de las guerras de sucesión que siguieron a su muerte. Y sigue siendo la educación vigente en todo el mundo mediterráneo, durante el tiempo que éste merezca considerarse antiguo: aquella educación, en efecto, rebasa la era propiamente helenística para extenderse al período romano. (…) Italia, y luego, por su intermedio, todo el Occidente latinizado, fue incorporada al área de la civilización helenística que se conoce bajo la denominación de hellenistisch-römische Kultur (1965: 114-5).

2 Véase 3

Corvo 2004: 98 y ss.

Fundamentalmente los griegos pertenecientes a la pequeña élite de las familias aristocráticas que desean entrar en el ejército o aspiran, por ejemplo, a una carrera administrativa; casos individuales, de cualquier forma, entre los que no figuran motivaciones de carácter intelectual o literario por lo general.

4 Tradicionalmente

el nacimiento de Homero se sitúa en el año 850 a. C. y puesto que a las primeras inscripciones griegas encontradas en diferentes restos arqueológicos les ha sido atribuida una antigüedad de ocho siglos, podemos suponer que la aparición de la escritura en Grecia tuvo lugar entre los siglos X y VIII a. C. El alfabeto griego es de origen fenicio y en un principio, debido a la diversidad lingüística del mundo griego antiguo, difería de unas zonas a otras en numerosas formas locales; la unificación de la escritura acontecería mucho después.

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5 Homero,

Eurípides, Menandro y Demóstenes son los cuatro pilares de la cultura clásica; si bien, como nos recuerda Marrow: “… esta preeminencia no conlleva exclusividad alguna: acaso más aún que la nuestra, la escuela antigua se abría a los escritores de segundo plano e inclusive a los ‘contemporáneos’” (1965: 200).

6

A lo largo de los siglos se observa una gran variedad de situaciones que atienden a las razones más diversas: al maestro, responsable de la organización de las clases, no se le requería ninguna acreditación o cualificación formal; las clases se impartían en lugares públicos, en las calles, en casas privadas o bien en centros ideados exclusivamente para tal propósito; el número de alumnos y la edad de éstos no constituían factores fijos ni determinantes para la formación; y tampoco se exigía una progresión o continuación ordenada desde el nivel elemental al superior, pudiendo cada alumno elegir libremente de acuerdo con su interés. Estas variables, además, diferían, según los casos, de unas ciudades a otras, pues, nunca llegó a imponerse ninguna política educativa uniforme para todas las ciudades helénicas.

6 Cuarto

y sexto director de la biblioteca alejandrina en torno a los años 257180 y 216-144 a. C. respectivamente. Aristófanes de Bizancio fue esencialmente un filólogo. Destacamos su recopilación lexicográfica titulada : “Die waren nach Sprachgruppen geordnete Wörterverzeichnisse mit zahlreichen Belegen auf Poesie und Prosa, eine Sammlung schwieriger, erklärungsbedürftiger Wörter, die in ihrem Gebrauch umfassend erläutert wurden” (Ax 1996: 278).

7 Filósofo

estoico y filólogo. Fue director de la biblioteca de Pérgamo bajo el reinado de Eumenes II (197-158 a. C.), discípulo de Diogenes de Babilonia y maestro de Panaitios. Se considera el introductor de las ideas griegas en el mundo romano, tesis que se sustenta sobre la siguiente anécdota: en torno al año 168 a. C. participó en una expedición a Roma, donde, tras romperse una pierna, se instalaría temporalmente, aprovechando el tiempo de recuperación para introducir a los romanos en la filología dando discursos sobre temas gramaticales. Compárese con Ax (1996: 288), Taylor (1996: 334) y Robins (1987: 57).

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Ax, W. 1996. “Sprache als Gegenstand der alexandrinischen und pergamenischen Philologie” en Peter Schmitter ed. Geschichte der Sprachtheorie. Sprachtheorien der abendländischen Antike. Tübingen: Narr.

Caravolas, J-A. 1994. La didactique des langues. Précis d’histoire I 1450-1700. Tübingen: Narr; Montréal: Presse de l’Université de Montréal.

Corvo, M. J. 2004. “Historia y tradición en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras en Europa (I): Antigüedad”. Babel A.F.I.A.L. Aspectos da Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemana. 13: 93-110.

Germain, C. 1993. Évolution de l’enseignement des langues: 5000 ans d’histoire. Paris: CLE international.

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Kemp, A. 1996. “The Emergence of Autonomous Greek Grammar” en Peter Schmitter ed. Geschichte der Sprachtheorie. Sprachtheorien der abendländischen Antike. Tübingen: Narr.

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Swiggers, P. 1997. Histoire de la pensée linguistique. Analyse du langage et réflexion linguistique dans la culture ocidentale, de l’Antiquité au XIXe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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