When translating a work, there are many things to take into consideration. Sentence structure, linguistic idioms, and ideological reworking can radically change the meaning of an author’s original work to the point of creating something completely new and different and thus undermines the meaning of the original work. To me, the purpose of a translation is to faithfully interpret an author’s original works and meanings in order to share the original work to a different audience. However, sometimes, translators use the works of others in order to express their own agenda. In her article, “Foreign Debt and Literary Credit: Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman“, Kelly Austin examines two instances of translating an author’s work in order to the extent of ideological reworking: one of involving the translation of Neruda’s address to the PEN club in 1972 by The New York Times and the other concerning Neruda’s own translation of Walt Whitman’s “Salut Au Monde!“.
In his address to the PEN Club, as Austin explains, Neruda states that politics and poetry are inseparable, a saying that is nowhere to be seen in the New York Times’ translation. By omitting this section from their translation, The New York Times showed their attempt to rework Neruda’s political and economic ideology to fit more in tune with the idea of expressing Neruda’s cultural indebtedness to America and its authors. This can easily be seen as the title of Neruda’s address was also changed from, “I Come to Renegotiate My Debt to Walt Whitman” to “We Live in a Whitmanesque Age”. While Neruda’s original address explicitly discussed Chilean economic hardship and credit nations and their connection to Chile’s cultural debt to the works of American authors such as Walt Whitman, these sentiments are completely absent from the New York Times translations. Austin explains that these changes “parallel the conservative editorial position of the paper” (3). With their translation, The New York Times successfully recontextualizes Neruda’s original address by omitting various politically driven statements in Neruda’s address, changing the original’s title, and completely omitting Neruda’s opening which discusses Chile’s evergrowning foreign debt.
In junction with The New York Times‘s complete ideological reworking of Neruda’s address, Austin points out that Neruda himself is no stranger to this concept. In 1955, Neruda employed a similar tactic when translating Walt Whitman’s “Salut Au Monde!” by deemphasizing Whitman’s democratic tone and message to promote his own ideological bias towards communism. Neruda first translates the title from “Salut Au Monde!” as “Saludo mundail”, which can be translated to something along the lines as “Universal Salute” or “Worldwide Salute”. By doing so, Neruda situates the reader more towards this idea of worldwide communism and not Whitman’s worldwide comradery. Along with this, many of the lines Whitman’s poem are also radically changed to accomodate Neruda’s ideology. Austin points out that the lines “fierce French liberty songs” from Whitman’s original poem is translated to “himnos salvajes” by Neruda, which means “savage hymns”. Neruda changes the opening line of the poem in order to focus more on the labor being done rather than the man laboring. Austin ends her article by emphasising how not-so-subtle changes like this by Neruda radically changes Whitman’s individualistic poem in order to reinforce his own socio-political beliefs.
REFLECTION:
In my high school Theory of Knowledge class, we would frequently discuss the ethical question regarding the translation of works into different languages. While many translators would try their best to faithfully translate the original works of authors, many would also try to spin and change the original source material enough to radically change the meaning of the work to be more in line with their ideology. The New York Times’ translation of Neruda’s address and Neruda’s translation of Whitman’s poem are among a long list of translations that take part in ideological reworking. While I was reading this article, I was surprised that Naruda, a fan of Walt Whitman, would go through the efforts of changing his poem in order to fit his own socio-political agenda. This article also made me question how Whitman would feel if he knew about these ideological reworkings of his work. Would he be upset at the complete restructuring of his work and their meaning or would he be overjoyed in being applied to a wider audience, even though his words are changed?
Work Cited:
Austin, Kelly. “Foreign Debt and Literary Credit: Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 29, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 1–17. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.1470-9856.2009.00303.x.
Source:
https://npg.si.edu/learn/classroom-resource/walt-whitman-civil-war-poet-and-caregiver
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda
I think this is a fascinating article and brings many different conversations to the forefront. In class we discussed the relationship between Whitman and his Spanish speaking audience. To them, Whitman was this wizened old grey beard that would spread philosophical ideas through the spirit of his writing. After reading this article, however, I wonder if they were, in fact, listening to a false prophet, a voice muddied by translations that doesn’t represent the actual voice of Whitman and his work. If this is the case, I wonder if Whitman’s foreign contemporaries would have the same reaction to his work if it wasn’t translated to meet certain socio-political agendas.
I agree completely with Dan–this article and the concept of translation are so fascinating to me. Language is power, and when your language is diminished, silenced, or changed, power is being taken from you. At the same time, translating poetry can be tricky, since it is such an evocative form of writing that relies not just on semantics but other devices like rhyme, meter, consonance/assonance, and more to convey meaning, which can be much more difficult to translate than the meaning of words. Translators often have to make decisions to omit some of these effects to save the integrity of the poem. But translators purposefully altering the integrity of the poem is a different and more insidious thing. It’s natural to have personal beliefs and an agenda, but it doesn’t seem correct to me to twist around someone else’s words to fit that–in the case of the NYT with Neruda, or Neruda with Whitman’s poem.