번역의 음영: 창조적 오역인가 단순한 오역인가

Abstract

The act of translation may be likened to that of transplanting a flowering tree. If the tree flourishes in the garden of new soil, with its boughs blooming like native flowers, then the transplantation was a good one indeed. If the tree fails to stand the foreign environment and finally withers away, then, maybe, it was simply a poor choice as a new garden tree. A literary work that is beloved of virtually all readers of a nation is not necessarily an object of admiration in another country. More important, though, is the possibility of the failure in question really having to do with the way the transplantation has been carried out. ‘More important,’ in the sense that a caveat should be filed more against the translator's caliber and qualification. For, even a literary gem that could otherwise glitter across language barriers may end up, under a clumsy care, as a total waste, attracting no attention. What has allegedly been translated may actually have been transmogrified a real case of a translator proving to be a traitor. A well-known issue among translators involves the so-called Croce's problem, namely, ‘faithful ugliness or faithless beauty?’ Confronted with ‘impossibility of translations,’ we are to negotiate and struggle between these two alternatives, and this means that we are already beginning to lose our claim of faithfulness to the original text. At any rate, Croce's proposition observes that ‘faithless beauty’ wins over ‘faithful ugliness’ in the final analysis. Upon scrutiny, however, Croce's problem is only two-pronged when in reality there may be four-way interpretations: a translation can be ‘faithful but ugly’ or ‘faithful and beautiful’ whereas it can also be ‘faithless but beautiful’ or ‘faithless and ugly.’ The present article touches on these four categories, some of them more or less marginally, focusing on those instances of translation that may be called ‘faithless and ugly.’ Examples are adduced from a group of translated poems that have been brought to my attention mostly on casual occasions, a couple of them even through the grapevine, so to speak. The issues involved are not simple ones. For, in the first place, a poem is a language event that is replete with such subtleties and intertwined shades of meaning that virtually no process of clarification, however exquisite, can do justice to them. Besides, what is meant by being faithful or faithless to the original? Which level or kind of faithfulness or faithlessness are we talking about? For expository ease, our discussion draws on Ezra Pound's triad of logopoeia, phanopoeia and melopoeia as points of reference. It is stressed in conclusion that, in spite of Croce's dictum that gives rise to a variety of important questions, the ultimate answer rests on the faithfulness to the original the accuracy of translation, that is to say which does in itself, in its best form, account for the ‘beauty’ of translation.