Lesson 4: ‘Humour feeling’ and culture

1. University of Rome “Tor Vergata”MA IN LITERARY TRANSLATIONFour lessons onLANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CREATIVITYIN LITERARY TRANSLATION28th February, 2nd March, 16th-17 March 2007 Lesson 4: ‘Humour feeling’ and culture Sara Laviosa University of Bari, Italy saralaviosa@hotmail.com

2. “… per sei anni ha solo tradotto.” • “E così ho imparato davvero a scrivere. Perché nessuna frase ha un significato univoco in tutte le lingue: per tradurla devi scegliere ogni singola parola, ricreare le stesse sensazioni per una cultura diversa. Un lavoro faticoso, sprezzato, mal pagato. Ma un esercizio insostituibile. Paradossalmente, traducendo i grandi ho smesso di riflettarli nei miei romanzi e ho trovato il mio stile”. From an interview given by Javier Marías,  Antonella Barina, Il Venerdì della Repubblica, No. 900, 17.06.05.

3. Module aim • to show how Javier Marías’ insight into the nature of literary translation from the point of view of the author-translator is also relevant to the activity of the translator-translator, with particular reference to the translation of humour and metaphor

4. Module contents • ‘humour feeling’ and culture • humour translation in romantic comedy, popular fiction and literary fiction • the translation of wordplay in film comedy • the translation of metaphor in children’s literature and lyrics (poems and songs)

5. Contents of lesson 1 • definition of language, culture, creativity and literary translation • ‘the humour feeling’ • humour translation in romantic comedy

6. Anyone who asks ‘What is a language?’ • must expect to be treated with the same suspicion as the traveller who inquires of the other passengers waiting on platform 1 whether they can tell him the way to the railway station … The language user already has the only concept of a language worth having. (Harris 1980: 1-3, in Graddol, Cheshire and Swann 1994: 1)

7. as the object of study of linguistics, ‘language’ can refer to the general human capacity of verbal communication or it can refer to specific forms of language , for example English, Italian, French, etc.

8. What is culture? • very broadly, culture refers to the entire way of life of people, including their patterns of thinking and behaving, their values and beliefs, their codes of conduct, the political, economical and commercial arrangements under which they live (Hatch 1985: 178, in Malmkjær 2005: 36)

9. “language is essentially rooted in the reality of culture” (Malinowski 1938: 305, in Katan 2004: 99) • most linguists, philosophers and social scientists agree that there are close links between the language a person speaks, the person’s culture and the person’s understanding of the world around them. A great deal of our practical, historical, cultural and social knowledge is acquired by means of language, and the world around us is to a very large extent categorised and labelled for us in the course of our language acquisition and learning processes (Malmkjær 2005: 42)

10. Language, culture and translation • it is commonplace in translation studies that translators need to be well versed not only in their languages but also in the cultures within which the languages are spoken; this is because aspects of culture shape aspects of texts, are reflected in aspects of texts and are also in turn affected by texts (Malmkjær 2005: 36)

11. Creativity • according to the linguist Noam Chomsky (1957, in Hoey 2005: 153) creativity is a fundamental property of language, any native speaker has the ability to produce utterances that are novel • the literary sense of creativity refers to original texts that refresh the language and force us to think and see things in new ways (Hoey 2005: 153) • another sense of creativity refers to sentences that make no claim to be literary but which surprise us in some way, whether because of their incongruity, humour, wordplay or simple oddness (Carter 2004; Hoey 2005: 153; 169)

12. Literary translation • Literary translation is “an original subjective activity at the centre of a complex network of social and cultural practices” (Bush 1998: 127) • “A literal translator is bilingual and bicultural and thus inhabits a landscape which is not mapped by conventional geographies; s/he is at home in the flux that is the reality of contemporary culture, where migration is constant across artificial political boundaries” (ibid.)

13. Literary translation and creativity • “literary transltion is an exercise in self-expression. It offers the translator the opportunity to write his response to a text, to embody an experience of reading (rather than to communicate an interpretation), and to transform the text to his own voice” (Scott 2000: xi)

14. Humour • humour is whatever has a humorous effect; when a person laughs, smiles or has a more general experience of humour (or humour feeling), we have humour (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1981 in Vandaele 2002: 153)

15. Humour translation • humour translation is different from other types of translation for the following reasons (Vandaele 2000: 150): • humour as a meaning effect has an undeniable, exteriorized manifestation, e.g. laughter or smiling • the comprehension of humour (and its appreciation) and humour production are two distinct skills • the appreciation of humour varies individually • the rhetorical effect of humour on translators may be so overwhelming that it blurs the specifics of its creation; strong emotions may hinder rationalization

16. Translating humour • it consists in writing a target text capable of arousing the same or similar ‘humour feeling’ aroused by the source text • ‘humour feeling’ refers to “any sort of ‘positive feeling’ or response to a successful instance of humour (Vandaele 2002: 151) • translators must account for the (con)textual causes of humour and the further effects that humour itself causes (Vandaele 2002: 153-154)