- setting the translator paradoxes (paradoces? paradoxen?) such as whether in allusions to refer to familiar versions of translated works, or how much to fill in for untranslated ones;
Since it's easy to get to, there's a section on this in
A Rose By Any Other Name, a piece Umberto Eco wrote for
Guardian Weekly in 1994, where he talks on target- and source-oriented translations, referring specifically to his own novel,
Foucault's Pendulum:
In other cases translation can and should be target-oriented. I will cite an example from the translation of my novel Foucault's Pendulum whose chief characters constantly speak in literary quotations. The purpose is to show that it is impossible for these characters to see the world except through literary references. Now, in chapter 57, describing an automobile trip in the hills, the translation reads "the horizon became more vast, at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages: we glimpsed endless vistas." But, after "endless vistas" the Italian text went on: "al di la della siepe, come osservava Diotallevi." If these words had been translated, literally "beyond the hedge, as Diotallevi remarked," the English-language reader would have lost something, for "al di la della siepe" is a reference to the most beautiful poem of Giacomo Leopardi, "L'infinito," which every Italian reader knows by heart. The quotation appears at that point not because I wanted to tell the reader there was a hedge anywhere nearby, but because I wanted to show how Diotallevi could experience the landscape only by linking it to his experience of the poem. I told my translators that the hedge was not important, nor the reference to Leopardi, but it was important to have a literary reference at any cost. In fact, William Weaver's translation reads: "We glimpsed endless vistas. Like Darien," Diotallevi remarked..." This brief allusion to the Keats sonnet is a good example of target-oriented translation.
I loved
Foucault's Pendulum, although I would
never have picked up on the allusion to
On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer. Every English reader may not know it by heart, the way Italians would
al di la della siepe, but it's an interesting topic and I would rather that the references were there to something I may pick up on, where possible, than have to read footnotes explaining the reference to some untranslated work.
