As in Cathleen Ni Houlihan, we are given a Galician version of the characters’ names and the family names are preserved, a choice that favours identification. Notably, Mary is not simply ‘María’ but ‘Maruxa’, a familiar form not existing in Spanish that would generate an instant association with a popular context, just as ‘Cathleen’ became ‘Catuxa’ in the title of the other folk-drama. These choices contribute to the creation of what Vázquez Fernández describes as a ‘symbolic space that could be identified with either Galicia or Ireland’.107 In the following section, I
103 Vázquez Fernández, Translation, Minority…, p. 203.
104 ‘Saudade y arte III’, El Pueblo Gallego (15 November 1927), p. 1. 105 Ibid.
106 Yeats, The Collected Works…, p. 65.
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will provide examples from the text that illustrate the ways in which the translation strategies contribute to the construction of a viable onstage universe that corresponds to a Galician-Irish symbolic space.
O País da saudade shares many of the features found in the language of Cathleen Ni Houlihan and similarly displays an inflationist trend,intertwined with other frequent traits of translated texts, such as explicitation or compensation. Nevertheless, the plays are accompanied by a declaration of the performance aim of the translations, which suggests that the translators believed in their potential as performance texts, and I will show here that many of the additions in the translated version appear to respond to this performance intent. These choices relate to the genre adscription of the play, the theme and also the form. Such is the case with the insertion of orality markers and additional stage directions and the incorporation of characterisation elements that contribute to verisimilitude and identification on the part of the audience. However, some of the translator’s decisions make the text considerably longer and potentially hinder its effectiveness in performance. The degree of augmentation that we can observe in O país da saudade demands a closer look at the motivation behind the decision making process.
As in the case of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, one of the functions of this later translation was to showcase the expressive possibilities of the Galician language, which results in great emphasis on lexical variation. The superabundance of instances where one single adjective is translated as an adjectival synonymic pair or even as a descriptive passage responds to this norm-creating value of translation at the time of the Irmandades. In O país da saudade, we find numerous examples of such pairs, one being a frequently used term, easily recognisable or often similar to the Spanish-language equivalent, and the other a ‘differentialist’, exclusively Galician or markedly popular choice. As a strategy, this might have been considered easier to understand for middle class audiences and readerships whose first language was not Galician, while introducing them to a wider lexical range. Examples of the
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use of synonyms in the translation are very numerous and not exclusive to adjectival structures but also applied to the translation of verbs, time expressions and noun phrases:
new-married bride (p. 68)
newly-married bride (p. 78)
casada de pouco tempo (p.21)
esposa nova, esposa recén casada (p. 28)
After the fall of twilight (p. 68)
despois d’anoitecido, entre fusco e lusco (p. 21) the evil spirits (p. 68) Espíritos ruíños e cativos
(p. 21) Thinking that all the things
trouble your bright head’
(p. 72)
a matinar que tódalas cousas torvan ou acoran a túa testa escintilante (p. 23) a puff of wind (p. 69) un folgo do ar ou unha
racha de vento (p. 21)
In the third example, the absolute negativity of ‘evil’ is diluted into something closer to ‘twisted’ and ‘small’. The word ‘ribbons’ shifts to ‘galanos adovíos’ (‘e gostabas de te por galanos adovíos nos cabelos’, p. 23), relying on the sense captured from the context (‘And went about with ribbons on your head’, p. 71). Sometimes, adjectives are inserted where there were none in the original, providing additional information for characterisation purposes: ‘An arm came round the door-post’ (p. 69), ‘Un brazo vello, achacio, cúrvase arredor do marco da porta’ (p. 22). Lexical variation is also the main procedure used to translate complex verbal structures that do not have an equivalent in Galician. Such is the case of ‘Hide it away, hide it away!’ (p. 75) which becomes ‘Levaino, levaino, escondédeo’ (literally, ‘Take it away, take it away, hide it!’, p. 26), where the first verb acts as a replacement of the ‘away’ in the original and the sema ‘to hide’ is contained in ‘escondédeo’.
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near-synonyms in translations into Hebrew and, although these structures are characteristic of both originals and translations, Toury notes that their density in translated texts is remarkably high, which he interprets as an use of familiar structures in the target language in order to increase the acceptability of the translation. 108 In the case of Galician, it is not so much an issue of acceptability of the overall text but indeed of the acceptability of certain terms. Being a minorised language in the process of reclaiming its sociolinguistic territory, the linguistic norm for literary and official uses is in the process of being established. The translation of a text from a more prestigious cultural context was an integral part of the early stages of that process, since it presented an opportunity to tacitly justify lexical choices through the legitimacy lent by the status of the original. In other words, the reader/spectator would not be aware of where the author’s work ended and where the translator’s began.
Such additions counteract other strategies adopted to boost its oral character and performativity. The text, which is already considerably longer than the version for performance conceived by Yeats, is laden with redundant information. In The
Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Yeats provides certain indications regarding the
performance of the play: ‘Amateurs perform this more often than any other play of mine, and I urge them to omit all lines that I have enclosed in heavy round brackets ().- W.B.Y’.109 These passages are not marked in the Galician version. Whether the translators overlooked the author’s instructions or these were simply not present in the source text at their disposal, may never be determined.110 They certainly show no
108
Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995), pp.103-105 (p.104). One of Toury’s observations regarding the use of such pairs in translation is that ‘the share of ad hoc, free combinations among those phrases is also considerably higher in translations. By contrast, the semantic difference between their constitutive elements is often much smaller, sometimes virtually nil’ (p.105).
109 Yeats, The Collected Works…, p. 66.
110 We do know that the play was first published in 1894 and that Yeats made the following note in
1923: ‘When revived last spring the passages between brackets were left out’. Yeats, The Collected Works…, p.682.
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concern with brevity, since both in the case of Cathleen Ni Houlihan (later, Catuxa
de Houlihan) and The Land of Heart’s Desire, the resulting Galician target text is
considerably longer than the English original.
Curiously, a considerable number of the insertions that we find in the target text correspond to religious references. Many of them are simply exclamations of the kind that is common in oral exchanges but sometimes they accompany an intensification of the physical action:
MAURTEEN. It’s precious wine, so take your time about it. (p.66)
MARTIÑO. É viño do bo que dá El
Señor; conque sen presa terma do
mandado (p.20) MAURTEEN. Persuade the colleen to
put down the book (p.67)
MARTIÑO. Ao P. Hart. ¡Deus que me
deu. Terme da rapaza para que deixe o
libro. (p.20) FATHER HART. My colleen, I have
seen some other girls|Restless and ill at ease (p.67)
P. HART.Ña filla en El Señor! Eu xa