Losses and Gains in Translation.pdf

Losses and Gains in Translation: Some Remarks on the

Translation of Humor in the Books ofAidan Chambers

Emer O'Sullivan

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

"Every translation entails a loss by comparison with the original"

(23), states Wolf Harranth, a well-known translator of books for chil-

dren and young people. And there is much talk in translation studies

of "translation problems" and "malfunctions" in literary translation

that no translator can avoid.1 In Erwin Koppen's opinion such "dis-

turbance factors" (137) include, among other things, "the translation

of wordplay and comparable examples of linguistic virtuosity" (138).

We need not argue about losses in translation, but gains in transla-

tion are seldom mentioned. Can anything of the kind be found in an

author such as Aidan Chambers, an expert in wordplay and linguis-

tic virtuoso of the first rank? In this essay I shall argue that generally

the translation of Chambers's work into GermanÂ—when it is carried

out by a translator with a high degree of stylistic awareness and cre-

ativityÂ—does indeed represent a gain for that literature. On the level

of individual texts and passages I would like to concentrate on the

production of humor by different means and examine how it fares in

translation.

Hal, the protagonist of the novel Dance on My Grave (1982), collects

epitaphs, most of them funny. The wording on a postman's grave,

"Not lost but gone before" (104), is rendered in German as "Un-

bekannt verzogen" (moved to an unknown address [the usual postal

marking on mail that cannot be delivered]) (Tanz 116). Another epi-

taph runs:

He had his beer from year to year

And then his bier had him (H7)

In this couplet the author is playing on the homophony of beer (Ger-

man Bier) and bier (German Totenbahre). The grammatical relation be-

Originally published in the German language within "Hans-Heino Ewers (Editor), Ko-

Hollins College).

185

186 Emer O'Sullivan

tween man and [bi:r] changes. The man is the subject in the first line

and the object in the second. In the German translation, these two

lines become four:

Stets liebte er den Gerstensaft

Bu daÃŸ er ihn dahingerafft

Darum bedenke immerdar

Der Weg ut kurz vom Bier zur Bahr ( Tanz 117)

(He always loved barley juice [= beer, a jocular usage], until it carried

him off, so be ever mindful that the way is short from beer to bier.)

This translation conveys the idea behind the joke: an unexpected

link between beer and death is established. An element of homoph-

ony is also retained in the German text. It comes in the word Bahr

and refers us to the similarity of sound between Bahr as in Bahre, a

means of carrying the dead, and Bar, a place to drink. All the humor-

ous aspects of the source text have thus been successfully shifted to

the target text. In addition, something extra has been added. In Ger-

man, the epitaph adopts the elevated style of didactic verse Darum

bedenke immerdar only to render it ludicrous with the wordplay of the

final line. The moral tone of the warning against death from alco-

holism is held up to ridicule with the linking of Bier and Bar. This

additional comic dimension in the German epitaph is a gain in trans-

lation, and the appearance of rhymes in the couplets Saft/gerajft, im-

merdar/zur Bahr could also be chalked up as a gain.

We are more inclined to speak of losses than gains in translation; it

has something to do with the perspective of comparison. If we read

a text first in its original language and then in the language of trans-

lation, we risk setting out to hunt for "errors of translation," concen-

trating on the passages in the translation that represent problems in

the form of cultural references, wordplay, and so on. The question

about the "failed" passages is then: How far is the individual trans-

lator responsible for the failure, and how far is the passage so firmly

rooted in its source language and culture that an adequate translation

is hardly possible? Using translations of books by Aidan Chambers as

examples, I would like to ask to what extent losses in the translation

of humor are inevitable and how far gains are feasible. I shall be con-

centrating on the production of comic effect by use of the graphic

dimension of the text, by incongruity between the narrative form and

the content, and by wordplay.

Losses and Gains in Translation 187

Chambers as Author and Critic

The books of Aidan Chambers are particularly suitable for a survey

of this kind because of both their textual nature and the theoreti-

cal positions adopted by the author. Chambers, formerly a teacher

of English and drama and co-founder of a modern Anglican monas-

tery, has been a professional author since 1968. He writes children's

plays, short stories, and novels for children and adolescents, is edi-

tor or co-editor of various series of books for children and young

people, and since 1990 has also been a publisher,2 concentrating on

a field that is rather underdeveloped in the children's literature mar-

ket of the English-speaking world: translations from other languages.

As a critic of literature for children and young people, he received

the first annual award for excellence in criticism of the Children's

Literature Association for his article "The Reader in the Book."3 His

books have been translated into eight different languages; they are

translated into German by Cornelia Holfelder-von der Tann and Karl-

Heinz DÃ¼rr, among others.4

The characteristic feature of his books is his outstanding awareness

of linguistic possibilities. To take a small example, there is the name

of the protagonist Nik in the book Now !Know (1987), translated into

German by Karl-Heinz DÃ¼rr as Die unglaublicLÂ· Geschichte des Nik Frome

(The Incredible Story of Nik Frome). The letters N-I-K are the ini-

tial letters of the words Now I Know, making an acronym of a boy's

name. Much more important than this formal bit of wordplay in the

title, however, is the set of associations shown in figure 1, all of them

set off by [nik].

In a book concerned with religious ideas and the explanation of

a putative criminal act of crucifixion, the associations of [nik] with

prison, arrest, and the devil can be related directly to these themes.

The play on words is a play on meaning too. Chambers's books are

full of wordplay and employ extremely diverse levels of style and

tone. He is constantly making it clear to readers that they are read-

ing a book with a distinctive linguistic structure. On language in the

novel he writes, "Whether you ... want to write in such a way that the

reader feels s/he can reach through the book like reaching through

a window and touch what is on the other side ... or whether you are

like James Joyce, who clearly wanted his readers to feel the weight

and quality of his language on the page, you cannot escape language

either as an author or as a reader" (Booktalk 18).

188 Emer O'Sullivan

Figure 1. English-language associations of [nik]. From Chambers, Now I Know.

Chambers sees himself in the tradition of Joyce. To him, the marks

of quality in literary works are a multiplicity of layers, a wealth of

subjects, awareness of language, and density (cf. Booktalk 19). Lan-

guage and its part in shaping identity often become the actual sub-

ject. The position he takes up leads him to the frequent use of liter-

ary references. James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, and Flann O'Brien are

among the authors he quotes most frequently. He is interested in

the various possible ways of telling a story available to an author,

and he wishes to make readers of his four novels for young adults5

aware of this narrative procedure by assembling collages of narra-

tive styles and methods: the books contain texts in the shape of let-

ters, tape recordings, first-person and third-person narratives, news-

paper cuttings, cartoons, footnotes, diary entries, graffiti, scenes in

dramatic form, internal monologue, film sequences, texts using the

slow-motion technique, and so on. In his critical works Chambers has

adopted Wolfgang Iser's theories of reception aesthetics. He knows

what he is asking of readers, who must not just reconstitute the mean-

ing of his novels but also, for instance, simply get a grasp of the

chronology of a story.

All of these qualities in Chambers's prose make life difficult for a

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