The main goal of this concluding section is to show that the mythical figure of the reclusive, lonely, mad writer is false, and that it was greatly influenced by the prejudiced approach to Frame’s experience with mental illness. Since the discovery of the schizophrenia misdiagnosis has not completely erased the patina of gossip and categorisation about her, this section claims that a different approach to ‘Janet Frame the person’ is necessary for a new perspective on her history and her work.
Janet Frame found a way of coming to terms with her past and her country:
I have been in great personal danger in New Zealand. I have been in danger of being destroyed by people who decided it was their right to try to make me what they wanted me to become – and this without any detailed scientific or human investigation of me. Do you wonder when I say I’m not completely at home in New Zealand. [...] I’d rather not meet people who’ve read my work or have ‘heard’ of me. I don’t think they ever forgive me for the ordinary practical reality of myself as opposed to the myth that some people in New Zealand have created to represent me. I resent this myth.131
Frame lucidly perceived the danger of the myth-making machine that had been working against her. She knew that a legendary, complex figure is more intriguing than a woman who has been a victim of a faulty medical system and of banal literary gossip.132 She was aware that such mythologising- pathologising approaches affected the reception of her work. In an interview on ABC Radio Australia, she said she believed that people were not incentivised to read her books. The myth had worked against her as it had scared readers: they had become accustomed to the idea that a book written by a crazy person would be too difficult to follow, or perhaps not worth it.133
131 Janet Frame, Notes for interviews, quoted In Her Own Words, pp. 119–20.
132 See also In Her Own Words, pp. 81–82 and p. 94 for more insights in Frame’s view on
living in New Zealand as compared to living in London.
133
Janet Frame, ABC Radio Australia, November 1985, interview by Gina Mercer, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 128.
Frame reacted in different ways to this situation in which a legendary figure seemed more real than the real one. She contemplated legal action;134 she tried to fight it by speaking in first person about her life and her work, including personal details about her work routine, for example; she also faced the myth with the resigned attitude of those who have done all they could and are now just waiting for the storm to pass: ‘All these myths... I suppose it is too late to do anything about them. [...] I think the way I am writing the story of my life might at least show that I’m not – well, that I am a human being’.135
Nevertheless, she also found her own way to live a happy life, which, given the abuse and brutality she had gone through, any accounts of her should mention as an extraordinary achievement. Frame felt she could ‘be happy to some degree anywhere’,136
and was content with her ordinary childhood. She considered herself ‘mostly a happy person’.137
Her sense of happiness and contentment was linked to a belief in universal goodness and an attitude of positive thinking: ‘I do believe in the triumph of the human condition, over all adversity. And, although I’m not religious, I honestly feel that everything is good. Everything that happens can be turned to some use’.138
Frame did not go into much detail about her relationship with religion in interviews or her non-fiction writing, but she felt that there was something spiritual and mystical in her approach to life: ‘It’s my belief that there’s an indestructible goodness in all things, states, everything. Religious people would call it God’.139
It is known that she had a deep interest in Buddhism since her time as a student at the University of Otago.140 Indeed, it was especially in London that she felt more confident in her knowledge of Buddhism and started thinking of herself more seriously as a Buddhist. Gordon claimed that her aunt had identified as Buddhist on more than one occasion until her last years of life; she
134
Janet Frame, Notes for interviews, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 120.
135
Janet Frame, NZ Herald, 12 February 1983, article by Tony Reid, quoted in In Her Own
Words, p. 107. Italics in original. 136
Janet Frame, NZ Woman’s Weekly, 18 November 1963, article by Leah Newick, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 85.
137
Janet Frame, NZ Woman’s Weekly, 21 March 1983, article by Frances Levy, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 111.
138
Janet Frame, NZ Herald, 12 February 1983, article by Tony Reid, quoted in In Her Own
Words, p. 109. 139
Janet Frame, Notes for interviews, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 120.
140
told her: ‘I used to be a Buddhist and I suppose in a way I still am’.141
Her education was catholic and, as her autobiography testifies, her mother’s Christadelphianism deeply influenced her, especially because it made her question the validity of certain religious creeds.142 In fact, she believed it was possible to reconcile Catholicism and Buddhism. However, apart from any religious belief, what strongly emerges from Frame’s interviews is her optimism and faith in the future, mostly due to her survival – in society, wards, or any other form of suppression – which proved that she could overcome. Interviewed by Elizabeth Alley on Radio NZ, she said: ‘I’m an optimist. [...] there are people who survive. It’s a triumph of survival’.143
It appears that her serenity derived from a sense of having come to grips with her past. She stopped thinking about what could have happened if she had not been hospitalised, and she also stopped interrogating doctors on the damage her brain had suffered after the violence of the ECTs. To her, bitterness and resentment were a waste of time.144 She was focused on the fact of having survived and, above all, on the ways she could turn those terrible experiences into something positive and enriching. When Alice Steinback asked her if she was angry about the years she had lost, she replied:
Well, I think I felt more sad than angry. But then sadness is another facet of anger, isn’t it? I think I chiefly felt sad for others who didn’t survive.
I think it is really enriching if one survives it. In a sense you can compare it to people who’ve been in concentration camps. I think it gives something extra to one’s views because one has been really faced with death. We all face death, of course, but to have it thrust like that on us... .145
141 Pamela Gordon, ‘Janet Frame and Buddhism’, An Angel @ My Blog, 19 May 2010
http://slightlyframous.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/janet-frame-and-buddhism.html [accessed 30 July 2014].
142
Wrestling with the Angel, p. 45.
143
Janet Frame, Radio NZ, 30 April 1983, interview by Elizabeth Alley, quoted in In Her
Own Words, p. 117. See also In Her Own Words, pp. 136, 148. 144
Janet Frame, Sunday Star–Times (NZ), 25 September 1994, article by Susan Chenery, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 151; Janet Frame, The Whig–Standard Magazine (Canada), 27 October 1984, article by Larry Scanlan, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 126.
145
Janet Frame, The Sun (Baltimore), 18 October 1984, article by Alice Steinbach, quoted in In Her Own Words, p. 126.
Frame’s lucid, deeply sane attitude towards her past unveils an incredibly strong personality. In 2002, two years after the publication of Wrestling with the
Angel, Michael King published An Inward Sun: The World of Janet Frame, a
volume of photographs dedicated to the writer.146 In an interview for the Sunday
Star–Times, journalist Iain Sharp commented:
Some of the photos in Michael King's new pictorial biography are startling. There are shots of Frame tap- dancing, grinning on a family picnic, larking around with friends on a beach, whizzing around the North Island on her motor scooter and pausing thoughtfully with a pool cue while working out how best to demolish the opposition. This isn't how much of us think of Frame. The dominant image is of the painfully shy recluse haunted by memories of her harsh early years [...].147
Sharp effectively synthesises the contrast between ‘the real Janet’ and ‘Janet the myth’, the unreal persona that had been constructed through legends, anecdotes, and a stern, persistent process of categorisation and misinformation. The photographs King selected show a happy, lively girl, who kept her cheerful attitude as an adult, despite the tragic events she went through. He said: ‘Janet has a smile that comes from deep within. She's capable, at any time, of this sudden transforming radiance, which I also regard as a kind of inward sun’.148
146
Michael King, An Inward Sun: The World of Janet Frame (Auckland: Penguin, 2002).
147
Iain Sharp, 'In the Frame', Sunday Star – Times, 15 September 2002.
148
Michael King, quoted in Iain Sharp, 'In the Frame', Sunday Star – Times, 15 September
C
HAPTER
2
I
NTERACTIONS
:
T
RANSLATION AND LITERARY
SYSTEMS
Let poetry win without allowing scholarship to lose.1
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to establish a methodological approach to Janet Frame’s work and the translation of it. Chapter 2 works in (thematic) conjunction with Chapter 3: while the former provides a focus on systems theory and frames this study within canonical translation studies, the latter will move on to a broader philosophy of writing, and will establish how translation might relate to this. An interdisciplinary approach to methodology will allow this research to combine descriptive and theoretical elements without turning into a prescriptive guide on how to translate.
Section 2.1 aims to elicit a change in the way theory is commonly conceived in the study of translation. Building on the creative turn of translation studies, Section 2.2 will offer an insight into the links between the notions of creativity, originality, and agency in
1
translation. Section 2.3 will provide the theoretical background to help understand how a combination of different methods can boost translators’ awareness in the decision-making process. Finally, Section 2.4 will present polysystem theory, the first of the three big methodological approaches underpinning this thesis (Chapter 3 will introduce poststructuralism and postcolonialism as methodological approaches), and will clarify how it can contribute to an understanding of Frame’s work and their Italian translations. Following the debate outlined in Chapter 1, this chapter offers the tools to address the shifts between source and target literary systems. Particular attention will be given to the importance of the translator’s role in the transmission of the other, and to the agency translated literature can express in the target culture.
2.1 The role of theory
Generally speaking, theory has often been seen as one of the many limits imposed on the translator’s taste. Jean Boase-Beier, however, explains how theory can actually enhance translators’ freedom and subjectivity thanks to two specific features of theory.2
First, according to Boase-Beier, theory is an explanation of practice and, as such, is descriptive in nature rather than prescriptive; second, theories are nothing but creative constructs in themselves: they can be compared to painting, music, and art in general. Therefore they are not dissimilar – in fact, they are essentially the same as the abstract areas with which we engage through creativity.3 This idea does not disregard the objectivity of scientific theories; Boase-Beier’s point is that, from the moment a new theory is developed, the world as we knew it no longer exists, this vision has been replaced by a new one. She maintains: ‘Theories [...] fulfil a human need: the need to refresh constantly, rethink, expand and adjust our picture of the world; they are, in Mary Midgley’s words, “pairs of spectacles through which to see the world differently”’.4
Thus, if theory allows us to see the world afresh, without imposing upon us any role that was not already part of reality, it follows that it does not establish boundaries, but rather liberates new ways of thinking.
2 Jean Boase-Beier, ‘Loosening the Grip of the Text: Theory as an Aid to Creativity’, in Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies, ed. by Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela
Perteghella (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 47–56.
3 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 4
This is exemplified by the approach to semantics and pragmatics known as relevance theory. Elaborated by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, this addresses the implicit inferences that happen in a communication act. It argues that readers (listeners, translators) search for meaning in any communicative situation and, when they find something that meets their expectations, stop processing.5 Relevance theory is, therefore, a framework for the study of cognition and, when applied to translation studies, it offers the vision of translator as subject. It shows how they read a text in a certain way and, by critically engaging with it, produce another text, which will in turn allow for endless new readings by new readers.
Mackenzie and Pilkington state that poetry achieves relevance due to its characteristics of drawing the reader in, and that it manages to do so by being non-explicit. This allows inferences, which take the reader to new, mysterious places governed not only by the poem, but by the reader’s subjectivity (Weltanschauung, values, beliefs).6
The same is true for the reader-translator. Therefore, a translator of poetry cannot aim to translate the universal meaning of a specific poem, given that this does not/cannot exist. S/he will not wonder ‘what does this poem mean?’, but rather ‘what does this poem mean to me, given my background, understanding, aims and knowledge?’.7
Indeed, it is not possible, in any case, to recreate the author’s mental picture and intention.
Nobody can read without constructing an intention; this is what guides translators in their work. Consequently, there are, in theory, an infinite number of possible translations of a text, just as there are infinite intentions that an endless number of potential readers could attach to it. Relevance theory can help translators become aware of this, and appreciate that their approach/intention towards a source is ‘a construct, though a necessary one, upon which they can act, while simultaneously acknowledging that it is not final or exclusive. If I return to the poem later, I may translate differently. Someone else may translate differently’.8
Awareness of this issue varies among translators; however, it is no
5
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 256–57.
6
Mackenzie and Pilkington, quoted in Boase-Beier, p. 50. The role of the reader in constructing the meaning of the text is a crucial topic of literary theory, and had been debated in a vast bibliography. See: Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1981); Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. by Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Louise M. Rosenblatt, The
Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1994); Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Reader in the Text: Essays on audience and
interpretation (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1980). 7
Boase-Beier, p. 50.
8
exaggeration to say that this kind of awareness can shape the whole work of a translator: ‘my’ translation will become only one of the possible readings of that poem (text), namely one of the potentially infinite number of translations that can be performed. In fact, ‘[a] poem works by encouraging such constructs, so, if you construct a reading of a text and translate in such a way that the reader can in turn construct their own readings, you are doing exactly what poems demand’.9
It follows that translators should handle the task of translation as a particular type of creative writing, as well as understanding their role as that of a creative author. This kind of creativity will, inevitably, have some limitations – creativity and translation are not in the same continuum. But limits enhance creativity.10 What is important is to understand what is actually meant by the term ‘creative process’. The exploration of what lies behind authors’ creations and translations is actually an enquiry into cognitive processes.
The cognitive turn took place in parallel with the creative turn in translation studies, that is in the early 2000s.11 Cognition has had a great impact on many different disciplines: if one only considers the latest developments in cognitive linguistics (Lee, 2001), cognitive poetics (Stockwell, 2002; Semino and Culpeper, 2002), the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology (Sperber, 1996), as well as a growing interest in literary studies on how readers read (Lecercle, 1999) and how readers construct meaning (Fobb, 1997; Goldsworthy, 1998; McCully, 1998). Cognitively based approaches, in all areas, are interested in ‘what is below the surface’, implying that readers, translators, listeners, observers, and so on, activate certain processes in order to decipher what is beyond the superficial level of speech/words/texts.12
When applied to translation studies, cognition refers mainly to how translators construct a reading of a text, how that reading determines the creation of a translation, and what translators are thinking while making their choices (think-aloud protocols). Cognitive methods view poetry and literature in general as indeterminate and ambiguous constructs, full of gaps and complexities, which require a lot of effort on the part of the reader- translator. This view may lead to conclusions along the lines of the impossibility of literary translation, especially for verse translation. Nevertheless, Boase-Beier suggests an alternative position: ‘Views of translation which fall into this category can have profound
9 Ibid., p. 54. 10 See Section 2.2.1. 11 Ibid., p. 55. 12 Ibid.
consequences for the literary translator’s task because they suggest that it is the nature of the literary text to invite creative engagement’.13
It could therefore be argued that the cognitive turn emphasises, on the one hand, the reading aspect of the translation act and, on the other, the creative engagement of translators. The latter, in engaging with a text (poem) that is ‘maximally underdetermined in meaning’, need to make the greatest use of their own creativity.14
As a result, rather than working as a limit, theory
free[s] the translator from feeling too closely tied to the content of the original text and should encourage maximum creative freedom in the act of translation. [...] In this its effects are very similar to those of literature and other creative works. In this way theory can act as a counter balance to the constraints of the ST.15
Yet, if both theory and the limits imposed by the source text enhance creativity and promote a new vision of the translation task, what are, in practice, the differences between the creation of a source text and a target text? To what extent can translators feel ‘free’ and ‘liberated’ from the constraints of an existing text in a given culture? In order to address such questions, it is essential to develop a model for the understanding of creativity and how it intersects the translation process. Moreover, traditional qualities associated with writing and translation, such as ‘original’, ‘faithful’, ‘derivative’, and so on, need to be substituted with thoroughly new perspectives on creativity and translatability.