Recently reading Bakhtin's essay on "The Problem of Speech Genres" something came up to my mind (Baktin 1986) something came up to my mind. The idea of the literary text as something unique and special, in need of particular attention, only on the account of its exceptionality is very credulous –especially considering that the nature of his argument was linguistic more than literary. Of course, Bakhtin wrote and worked in a very distant period and it would be very ungallant to define his idea as "obsolete" or "old fashion", given that he was one of the very first initiators of the debate on stylistics and grammar of genres, nonetheless, I will briefly list where the problem is and why does it matter regarding with my discourse. By separating texts on the basis of their belonging to the category of "primary" or "secondary" genres (meaning literary or non-literary), Bakhtin established the exceptionality of the literary with respect to any other form of human form communication.
Such an operation is linked with the issue of translation and, more precisely translating literature. Trying to squeeze in a blog post like this would certainly be too much therefore I will limit my elucubrations, sticking with translating poetry and how this is affecting Beowulf as well. First of all, translating poetry has been considered by many scholars as an impossible operation, and notably, the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile used to say that poetry is an "unrepeatable discourse" (1921, 369). To the literary text were therefore assigned traits of quasi-sacrality that imposed themselves among the defenders of poetry. Drawing from this sort of epistemological arrogance, subsequent critics will mostly oppose the idea that poetry is translatable at all. Only Roman Jakobson (1959; 1960) will try to rehabilitate the act of translating poetry based on the latest developments in semiotics. He will be, in fact, the first one to introduce the concept of "dominant" in translation, understood as the guiding principle that a translation should focus on to render a precise aspect of the poem. To this, he will also contribute to the discussion with a very precise differentiation among different kinds of translation between:
intralinguistic (within the same language), whereby a text is reformulated through linguistic signs of the same linguistic system as the original, such as in the case of paraphrases;
interlinguistic (between different languages), whereby a text is interpreted through another language; and
intersemiotic (between different systems of signs), whereby one moves from an interpretation based on a linguistic system to a non-linguistic one, such as in the case of movies or theatrical adaptations.
Each of these types, however, presupposes the possibility of a perfect correspondence between the source system and the target system, in terms of greater or lesser fidelity. To me, this fact is important since the aesthetic structure of the work of art is not endangered by going away from the assumed faithfulness to the original text, which is here acknowledged as something intrinsic in translating. Hence, Umberto Eco (1995, 121) claims that unfaithful translation should not necessarily be understood in an aesthetically inferior sense. The opposition between ugliness v. infidelity and beauty v. fidelity is an overly rigid schematization for the author. At most, through the interference between the language into which the text is translated and the original itself, it is possible to discover new and more vivid interpretative possibilities. Eco reiterates how the translation of poetic language conceals beneath an outwardly monolithic appearance a sort of multi-level facet, such that one can speak of fidelity in the plural. More precisely, Eco speaks of a linguistic level of fidelity, a cultural one, one towards a discursive universe, a stylistic one, and so on. This wide interpretative gap gives the translator particular freedom to make a choice regarding the type of fidelity considered most pertinent. For all these reasons, Beowulf (as well as any other piece of poetry) is and will always be translatable, no matter how many translations are produced.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. "The Problem of Speech Genres." In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1995. Riflessioni teorico-pratiche sulla traduzione. In Teorie contemporanee della traduzione, edited by Nergaard. Milano: Bompiani.
Gentile, Giovanni. 1921. Il torto e il diritto delle traduzioni. In Frammenti di estetica e di letteratura, edited by Giovanni Gentile. Lanciano: Carabba.
Jakobson, Roman. 1959. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In On Translation edited by Reuben Arthur Brower, 232-239. Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674731615.c18.
____. 1960. "Closing statements: Linguistics and Poetics." In Style in langage, edited by T. A. Sebeok, 350-377. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960.
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