Imagery in Translation. Task for translation: The Catcher in the Rye

Task for translation: The Catcher in the Rye

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (from Chapter 25)

It was Monday and all, and pretty near Christmas, and all the stores were open. So it wasn't too bad walking on Fifth Ave­nue. It was fairly Christmassy. All those scraggy-looking Santa Clauses were standing on corners ringing those bells, and the Sal­vation Army girls, the ones that don't wear any lipstick or any­thing, were ringing bells, too. I sort of kept looking around for those two nuns I'd met at breakfast the day before, but I didn't see them. I knew I wouldn't, because they'd told me they'd come to New York to be schoolteachers, but I kept looking for them anyway. Anyway, it was pretty Christmassy all of a sudden. A million little kids were downtown with their mothers, getting on and off buses and coming in and out of stores. I wished old Phoe-

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be was around. She's not little enough any more to go stark star­ing in the toy department, but she enjoys horsing around and look­ing at the people. The Christmas before last I took her downtown shopping with me. We had a helluva time. I think it was in Bloom-ingdale's. We went to the shoe department and we pretended she — old Phoebe — wanted to get a pair of those very high storm shoes, like the kind that have about a million holes to lace up. We had the poor salesman guy going crazy. Old Phoebe tried on about twenty pairs, and each time the poor guy had to lace one shoe all the way up. It was a dirty trick, but it killed old Phoebe. We finally bought a pair of moccasins and charged them. The salesman was very nice about it. I think he knew we were horsing around, because old Phoebe always starts giggling...

I know I didn't stop till I was way up in the Sixties, at the zoo and all. Then I sat down on this bench. I could hardly get my breath, and I was still sweating like a bastard. I sat there, I guess, for about an hour. Finally, what I decided I'd do, I decided I'd go away. I decided I'd never go home again and I'd never go away to another school again. 1 decided I'd just see old Phoebe and sort of say good-bye to her and all, and give her back her Christmas dough, and then I'd start hitchhiking my way out West. What I'd do, I figured, I'd go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I'd bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I'd be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody'd know me and I'd get a job. I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people's cars. I didn't care what kind of a job it was, though. Just so people didn't know me and I didn't know any­body. I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stu­pid useless conversations with anybody...

I got excited as hell thinking about it. I really did. I knew the part about pretending I was a deaf-mute was crazy, but I liked thinking about it anyway. But I really decided to go out West and

all. All I wanted to do first was say good-bye to old Phoebe. So

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all of a sudden, I ran like a madman across the street — I damn near got killed doing it, if you want to know the truth — and went in this stationery store and bought a pad and pencil. 1 figured I'd write a note telling her where to meet me so I could say good-bye to her and give her back her Christmas dough, and then I'd take the note up to her school and get somebody in the principal's office to give it to her. But I just put the pad and pencil in my pocket and started walking fast as hell up to her school — I was too excited to write the note right in the stationery store. I walked fast because I wanted her to get the note before she went home for lunch, and I didn't have any too much time.

EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION

• Read the text thoroughly to be sure of its content. Com­
pare it to the text for comparison and see how Holden develops as
a character.

• Analyse the vocabulary of the text and see which words
need references and commentary. What transformation means
would you use to translate such words as Christmassy? Bloom-
iiigdale? Salvation Army? Holland Tunnel?

• Analyse the energetic expressions like hell of, like a bas­
tard, goddam and the like to decide about their functional substi­
tutes in translation.

• Reconstruct the narrative type of the text and point out its
major characteristics to find substitutes in translation.

• Analyse the comparative role of the alternation of shorter
and longer syntactic structures in the rhythm of the text to recon­
struct this rhythm in translation.

• Read the text aloud to feel the rhythm of it.

• Translate the text and edit the translation till it satisfies
the features you have pointed out as above recommended.

• Read the translation aloud to compare its rhythmic value

with that of the source text. __

Imagery in Translation

PROSE UNIT 5:

TRANSLATING f. R. R. TOLKIEN INTO RUSSIAN*

Introductory Notes

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was Pembroke professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925-1945) and Merton professor of English language and literature, Oxford in 1945-1959. He was a reader in old English literature and published a number of philo­logical studies, such as Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics, and many others. Though his chief interest was in the literary and linguistic tradition of the English West Midlands, especially in Beowulf, Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he attained to world renown among the reading public as the au­thor of two literary works, The Hobbit (1937) and its sequel, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Posthumously, The Silmarrillion (1977) was published, in which the pre-history of his mythological fantasy was worked out.

In these books a Christian professor of philology unique myth lore creats by. The most striking feature of this mythologi­cal world of the Middle-earth, where hobbits, elves, dwarves and other fairy creatures live side by side with human beings and oth­er personages, is that it never mentions any god, or a sacred one whom they would worship, whereas all mythologies have a kind of worshipping in their basis. In a peculiar way the Christian val­ues and principles interlace with such heathen personages as elves, but the enemy is overt and he is Sauron, King of Darkness.

Tolkien's fantasy books have become most popular among the readers of the world and aroused many followers and imita­tors, researchers and critics. Actually, he did not only create his mythic world but also the kind of fiction, which in his book Tree

and Leaf he himself qualified as "a fairy story" and differentiat-

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ed it from "fairy tales" as such. By Tolkien, a fairy story is an attempt to create the "second world," or the alternative reality, based on the great human instrument, which is fantasy.

For Tolkien, the world fame began in the Sixties, the time when the superindustrialised society got afraid of its own progress, and the theory and practice of escapism came into life as vivid as it was world-wide. Tolkien's Middle-earth, his ideal of fellow­ship against the Enemy, his lovely characters of the Old People, dwellers of the fantastic land of the Middle-earth, seemed very attractive as a place to escape to. By Peter. S. Bingle, Tolkien's Middle-earth is "a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world."

In Tolkien's world the reader finds a diversity of places and creatures whose names may be quite unusual and sound like a spell or an echo of a dream. Most Russian translations appeared in the seventies and eighties, the first book to be translated was The Hobbit. The translated books have brought to life a few waves of Russian fairy stories and fantasy books, about Frodo Baggins, his friends and relatives among them.

It is not an easy task at all to translate the book with a great many strange names, poems, quotations in some non-existing lan­guages, the etymologies that cannot be found natural in Russian, i. e., the etymological association between hobbit and halfling, which is deeply rooted in the history of the English language. Another problem is in the narrative rhythm of the fairy story sway­ing from the common and colloquial to the high-flown and mys­terious, from the funny and comic to the passionate and dramatic, where each hero has his own voice and melody in the fantastic symphony of the whole.

The texts of this unit present the first part of the trilogy Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. Whereas the whole trilogy is a chronicle of the Great War of the Ring, which oc­curred in the Third Age of the Middle-earth, The Fellowship tells the reader about the perilous journey of Frodo Baggins, appoint­ed the Ring-bearer by the great council, and his eight compan-

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