Sabbatical Report – This is an outline of the report I gave at
In-service (Fall ’05).
I.
Introduction
and Overview of Project –
The impetus for my project was work with students, especially those in the
courses I teach for English language learners as well as bilingual courses I
have taught. Two parts: research and translation
A. Research on impact of translation on Second
Language Acquisition (SLA) – broadened scope to include pedagogy for teaching
translation
II.
Translation
and Second Language Acquisition
– clarify translation as a focused activity for advanced language learners (not
as means for basic 2nd language acquisition by beginning learners)
A.
Results of the
studies were mixed
B.
However, an
analysis of the studies revealed pedagogical implications:
1.
Must consider
learning style preferences to determine if translation is beneficial
2.
Study supports
explicit instruction on selecting appropriate vocabulary for a given writing
context and coaching/ training students to use translation strategies
3.
Support for
using translation as a means to study culture
4.
Translation as
opportunity for critical thinking and interpretation in academic courses
III.
Pedagogy for
teaching literary translation
– many articles read were ‘action research’ – instructor as researcher. Among
most helpful were non-traditional approaches to teaching translation – will
mention three:
A. Specific techniques for teaching/ guiding
students in translating cultural references.
B.
Strategies for
using collaborative learning with translation (may not sound innovative, but is
especially when consider most translation is solitary work). One researcher
reported several positive outcomes for students including:
1.
More in depth
understanding of source text
2.
Better grammar,
more accuracy in translation
3.
Social support,
self confidence, esteem
4.
Increased use
of L2 during discussion
5.
Better student
L2 acquisition
6.
Students better
able to accept criticism
C.
Use of
metacognition – students keep diary of what they learned from translation in
terms of vocabulary, grammar points, translation problems, comments on
discussion about translation with peers, …–ironic I did same as part of my
project.
A. Benefits:
1.
Improved
writing ability in first and second languages (L1 and L2)
2.
Increased
vocabulary in second language (L2)
3.
More broad and
deep cultural understanding
4.
Increased
awareness of literary devices, register, tone, nuances of author’s style that
can only come with such an intimate knowledge of a text
5.
Better
stylistic writing in target language (TL)
V. What did I translate? I worked on
literary translation of a novel from Spanish to
English, Bella y oscura (Beautiful and Dark), by a contemporary
feminist writer from Spain, Rosa Montero.
The highly respected Rosa Montero was born in Madrid in 1951. Since 1976 she has worked as a journalist for Madrid’s daily newspaper, El País, and continues to write weekly opinion columns. She has published eight novels since the early eighties, all of which have become best sellers in Spain. At the same time, her works receive high acclaim for their literary merit as they are studied in universities around the world. Montero’s novel, La hija del caníbal (1997), won Spain’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Primavera de novela and was also the basis for the Mexican film Lucía, Lucía. In addition to novels, she has also published a book of biographical essays on women, children’s stories, and collections of her journalistic interviews and articles, and an autobiographical hybrid narrative. Unfortunately for the English readers of the world, thus far, only Montero’s first two novels are available in English translation.
The story begins as Baba, a young orphan girl, rides a train into the city. As she recalls she, “was born out of that tunnel’s blackness, daughter of the clamor and clatter of the tracks, birthed from the entrails of the earth on a cold April afternoon at an enormous and desolate station.” There, she meets her Aunt Amanda, an awkward woman who leads her through the labyrinthine streets of the city until they reach the red-light district where they live.
Along with her young cousin Chico, Baba learns the ways and unwritten laws of the neighborhood, yet maintains a certain degree of innocence. She meets her Uncle Segundo, an intimidating and aggressive man who is alternately on the run, making deals behind closed doors, or performing magic acts with the dwarf woman, Airelai. By day, Airelai entertains Baba with amazing stories: her illustrious past as a child goddess in her land, her memories of blissful moments with her convict lover, tales of human cruelty, a new version of the Biblical story about the fall from Paradise, and a narration on her magical powers. By night, Airelai sells her body on the street to support the family. Baba also spends time walking through the cemetery with her proud Grandmother Barbara, despite her declining health. All the while, Baba nervously awaits her father who has been in jail all of her life.
Throughout her time in the neighborhood, Baba learns dark family secrets and sees the harsh realities of life on the street. However, she keeps hoping that someday the dwarf woman’s shooting star will flash through the sky, a sign that she will be able to live a happy life. In the last pages of the novel, Baba meets her father for a brief moment just before he disappears with Airelai, and they take off on a plane that bursts into flames suddenly in the sky above Baba. Her magic star finally arrives.
Translation
Airelai’s letter (pp 18-22 of original text)
My dear,
I miss you so much that I’m living with half an imagination, half a heart, half of my ideas and feelings, like a drunk who is at the point of losing consciousness halfway between wakefulness and passing out, or like a dying person with one foot in this world and the other foot already placed in the black nothingness. I’m trying to say that I’m half a person without you, just a speck, a scrap of flesh and nerves standing on end yearning for the being that completes me. That’s why I’m writing you, knowing that you will never even be able to read these lines; words create worlds, and they are capable of creating, as I’m writing to you, the consoling illusion of your presence for me now.
Once I met a man - I don’t know if you know about it – who was my mentor in the art of speaking. This happened a long time ago, when I was very young, and in a remote corner of the Adriatic, on the border of what is Albania today. A time and a place very favorable for mystery, for credulity and for magic, and not like here now. My mentor was what today would be called a carnival charlatan, but then he entertained and taught people, and people trusted him. I worked to lure people for him; we would arrive at the market squares and I would do some cartwheels and two or three flips because I was a good acrobat in my youth. The show attracted onlookers, and once a big circle of spectators had gathered, my mentor began with his art. He was a very good narrator: as soon as he opened his mouth the whole world became captivated by his words. He told sweet stories of young lovers and cruel stories of ambitious knights; very ancient stories that men and women like him had repeated century after century; or stories he invented as he went along. At the end, after the stories, he sold something. Chalk scrapings mixed with sand, which he said was moon dust and that scattered on the threshold of the house, worked to keep misfortune from entering; or some pretty colored feathers that belonged to a phoenix bird that one had to put under the pillow at night to avoid bad dreams. When what I’m going to tell you now happened, he was selling some rings. We had a lot; an old artisan had made them very cheaply in a distant city. They were some bronze rings set with a black, unpolished stone. They weren’t pretty or good, but the people paid for them as if they were because they believed they were dealing with a magic stone.
Do you know the old legend of Charlemagne and the enchanted ring? That was the story my mentor told them before selling them the rings. Charlemagne, being already very old, fell hopelessly in love with a peasant girl whom he married and made her his queen. He loved her so much, and the old emperor was so dazzled by his love that he began to neglect his official responsibilities, thus tarnishing his dignified and respected life. Then the girl died suddenly; Charlemagne ordered that they put her in a decorated room, and he closed himself in with the body day and night. The kingdom was abandoned; the subjects astonished. Alarmed by the excess and suspecting a spell, the archbishop Turpin entered the mourning room and searched the body furtively, and in fact, he found a magic ring under the girl’s tongue and took it out. Charlemagne lost all interest in the deceased girl at once, but he fell entrancingly in love with the archbishop. Upset and scandalized by the emperor’s passion, the archbishop cast the ring into the bottom of Lake Constance. And the old emperor spent the rest of his days sitting on the damp hillsides contemplating the lake. It’s a sad story as you can see. In that lake alight with the dim, fading rays of the setting sun is the portrait of desires that are never attained. My mentor told the legend very well: I cried some afternoons upon hearing him. And that was before I had even met you, you who are my lake.
After talking of Charlemagne my mentor took out his rings. He was a very bright man, and he knew that a ring that was too powerful would be terrifying; he didn’t say, consequently, that the rings were like that of the poor emperor, a magnet for hearts and hopes. He explained that Charlemagne’s ring and the ones he was selling had the same stone, which was a rock split by lightening one moonless night; and the material radiated the power and energy of that shaft. Sorcerers used those lively stones to make magic rings that worked for one marvel or another, depending on the incantation that had been consecrated. My mentor’s rings possessed an honest quality, and when they felt near an evil person, with blood on their hands, the ring’s black stone began to sweat. He sold a lot of pieces. Everyone wanted to know whom they were dealing with.
We were in a small provincial city one night when they came to where we were sleeping. It was the police, and they were very brusque. We found out, once we were at the police station, that an old woman’s throat had been slit, and a good malachite and gold necklace had been stolen from her. The deceased’s neighbor saw the thief leave and was sure that it was my mentor who he had seen a couple of days earlier at the market. There was no more proof than that testimony; the necklace never appeared, nor the knife from the crime, nor a drop of blood on the accused’s clothing. But the neighbor had bought one of the rings, and when he went to the police station to make the identification and my mentor drew near, the ring’s stone began to sweat and it pearled into a transparent water. The judge didn’t formally admit the sign as evidence, but everyone was convinced that the ring had signaled the murderer. That surely influenced his condemnation to death, such that one could say my mentor lost his life to his own eloquence. I went to visit him the last night, and then they gave me his belongings because he didn’t have friends or relatives. They told me that he had spent the last hours calmly reading a book and that when they came to get him to go up to the gallows, he made a sign between the pages to mark the place where he was reading. I later received the book: it was a French edition of One Thousand and One Nights and it had, in fact, a corner folder between two stories. I still keep the volume and the mark. For a narrator like him, folding that page with so much integrity faced with nothing ahead of him, was a dignified way to die and a very elegant gesture. That’s what I would like: to die from my own death, to know how to end it with a certain grandeur. Since we came to the world as animals – bloody and blind, useless and irrational – we’ll leave this life as humans. With notable and symbolic deaths like the heroes we are of the narration of our lives. Because what differentiates us from inferior creatures is that we are capable of telling our stories and even inventing our own existence for ourselves. From this side of the words, at last, without a ring, without a lake, and without patience, desperate from your absence, writing you to remember you, your
Airelai.