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Carmen de Mérimée. Relicario de la España de pandereta. (Minor thesis), University of Salamanca, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. French Department, 1974.

Prosper Mérimée wrote this "nouvelle" in 1845 remembering his first trip to Spain, in 1830, and his encounter with Eugenia de Montijo, the future empress of France. Starting off from the story told by the countess about a braggart from Málaga who killed his cigar-selling lover, Mérimée builds a masterpiece in which he tries to contrast two regions and two different life styles which took place in Spain during Romanticism. On one hand, Carmen, turned into a gypsy as a result of the author's desire and almost morbid delight, represents the insular, exotic region of Andalucía with its gallery of characters which were so attractive to the European travellers of that time: bullfighters, brigands, folksingers, dancers, innkeepers, smugglers, gypsies, etc.

On the other hand, the Basque country, represented by Mr. José Lizarrabengoa, a literary copy of the braggart extracted from the countess's story, a brigadier from the northern provinces which were thriving back then, thanks to the charters and a good social and political order, a nobleman who turns into a bandit bewitched by the cigar seller and ends up in the gallows. This image of Spain, distorted by rumour and fantasy, in favour of its most enigmatic and picturesque region, has ruled, becoming more and more anchored and fake for almost two centuries in the beliefs of those beyond the Pyrenees. Mérimée knew in detail and better than anyone the reality of our country back then, as he had actually visited it a dozen times. He also spoke Spanish well enough and he even knew the language and customs of the gypsies which he was so interested in, thanks to the testimony of another English traveller, the missionary G.Borrow, who had written a real bible about our ancestors. This "nouvelle" does not just describe what has been seen and heard, but it is a true masterpiece, a reliquary of French literature which the opera written by Bizet, the parasitic and opportunistic recreator (no matter how attractive and seductive, like the gypsy, his musical version may be) has displaced and almost erased in an unfair and mistaken manner from the map and the artistic knowledge, to the detriment of arts, enriched and not less universal.

 

"Problemas de la Traducción". Seminar of French Literature and Language, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Valladolid (1978).

Under this title, the Institute for Educational Science organised for the French Department of the University of Valladolid a series of conferences attended by professors belonging to other universities: Mr. Luis Cortés Vázquez (Salamanca), Mr. Jesús Cantera Ortiz de Urbina (Complutense University of Madrid), Mr. Francisco Javier Hernández (Valladolid), and - heading the list and inaugurating the program -myself (Extremadura). During ten days split into two sections we presented translation topics, such as "Translation and civilisation", "Meditation about gallicisms in Spanish" and "Literary translation: Verlaine and Proust in Spanish". The topic of my speech was the theory and practice of translation and was a foretaste of the work I presented later on, in French, in the Philological Studies Yearbook III journal of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Extremadura in the French Department in which I gave Literature and Language classes. The translation team of the French Department of the University of Valladolid was the final item in the Seminar by introducing the topic "The problems in specialised translation: The translation of Valladolid, a Siècle d'or of Bartolomé Benassar". The Seminar was brought to a close by the Cultural Attaché of the French Embassy, M. Michel Sarre.

 

"Il pleure dans mon coeur (Pour un commentaire intégral), in the Second Philological Studies Yearbook. University of Extremadura, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Cáceres, 1979.

The author wrote this comment at the same time he did other seven or eight of them, in order to compose the third section of his thesis Verlaine en castellano (Verlaine in Spanish) in which he reviews verse translations. Needless to say that the poems he chose to do his study are the most famous or widely known ones. The difference between both studies of the same poem rests, not only on the fact that the comment is written in French, but also on the fact that it is studied in depth, "completely", as it is said in the title. The author of the thesis chose this composition to prove the critic reader what Verlaine's style is like and how his poetics works in its singularity and mastery. It regards Poetics as a science, a global art and through the application of its subsidiary disciplines, such as Metrics, Rhythm, Stylistics, Phonostylistics, Rhetoric, Neorhetoric,etc. We must not leave out the Semiotics of Syntax and Semantics, as he tries to show, through a "démontage" of the poem, what the verlainean art is like and the way its formal structure works, its know-how and what its poetic space and its genius are about.

 

"Pratique et théorie de la traduction", in Philological Studies Yearbook III, University of Extremadura, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Cáceres, 1980.

The author offers in this study a very erudite, detailed and panoramic version of the current situation of translation studies (we must not forget that this work dates back to 1980). The author also meditates about the different and serious problems which arise in the translation process. In this study we can also find in watermark the master lines of a future research task and the first traces of a typology of the different ways of applying the initial theory of Sense to the different sections of this field which embraces and is the foundation of all the vast domain of language and communication.

 

Verlaine en castellano (PhD Thesis in Roman Philology). Directed by the Doctor and back then Professor of General Grammar and Literary Critique, Mr. Ricardo Senabre Sempere at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Extremadura, the author upheld and passed achieving an Excellent "Cum Laude" mark. October, 1980.

This topic, chosen in a very intelligent way, was suggested to the holder of the doctorate by the above-mentioned doctor Mr. Ricardo Senabre, who at the time was working as the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts at the University of Extremadura (Cáceres), which had just been open. Our beloved and admired Dean started off a Faculty which sprang up from hardly anything, and he did it helped by a group of very young teachers who had been his students too. Each one of us was in charge of developing the department corresponding to his/her subject. I was assigned to work on French Literature and Language, a subject which I was also teaching at the "El Brocense" secondary school as a "catedrático".

The reviewer spent five years devoting his efforts and working on his thesis. Meanwhile, he leant towards two fields in the world of translation of which he became passionately fond in his professional future: general theoretical meditation and poetic translation critique (they should be mentioned the other way round). The thesis is divided into two wide sections: on one hand, an introduction, where we can find a detailed view of translation studies from the moment when this field of knowledge starts being meaningful and, on the other hand, a detailed list of all the versions done in Spain and Latin America from the first one to appear (written by Mrs. Emilia Pardo Bazán - in prose - in 1890 about "Colloque sentimental"), to the moment of finishing off the thesis. We will not find translations of the full works of Verlaine (which, in fact, do not exist), but versions of books or translations of random poems chosen by the translators according to their preferences and, mainly, the best ones extracted from the works of the great French poet. They have maintained the Choix created in 1891 by F.Champsaur and Ch. Morice, as well as Verlaine himself. Out of the thousand compositions our poet wrote - split into some twenty books - only a third (twelve books) out of which only the first half received a special attention, has been commented on or translated with true interest. The second part of the thesis is divided into three sections. The first one is devoted to the version, aborted by the writer's inappropriate translation focus (translation in plain prose). We are referring to the writer and poet who knew Verlaine the best, Manuel Machado. The second section is devoted to another version and also written in prose by an appointed writer, not a poet: Ramón Hervás, for Ediciones 29. The third one confronts the critique of all poems translated in verses (most of them), making a special emphasis and a detailed and attentive comment on the seven or eight poems positively affected by the critics and translators as well as on the reader's favourites. The conclusions presented at the end of each section are followed by a global one which closes the thesis.

 

Abstract of the thesis Verlaine en castellano. Publishing Service of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Cáceres, 1981.

The enthusiasm to turn what has been a "Student residence" into a Faculty was not paralleled by the funds agreed by the Ministry of Education and Science. The budget was not high enough to publish the thesis which were read and upheld throughout that year. Only one thesis was published and it was not that written by the reviewer, who, due to the lack of this normal channel of circulation, disseminated it in very few and different fields and in Spanish or Latin American cultural forums.

 

"La Traducción: problema de fidelidad", First Latin American Congress for Translators. Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, organised by the Alfonso X El Sabio Foundation and backed by the UNESCO and the INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF TRANSLATORS (FIT). November, 1982.

It is the first learned paper presented by the reviewer to a Congress of some magnitude. Such Congress, lead by the most distinguished translators in the Portuguese and Spanish speaking fields, Doctors Paulo Rónay and Valentín García-Yebra, had an abundant representation of the university and cultural world of almost all countries. During this Congress, The Latin American Society of Translation Studies was founded, as well as the Traduçao e Communicaçao journal, which was quite relevant. Nowadays, it is said that it is in the process of being recovered or that it already has.. The reader of the paper, flanked by the leaders mentioned before, took his first theoretical and critic steps and passed this acid test.

 

Paul Verlaine. Antología Poética. Bilingual edition. Preliminary study by Lidia Anoll. (Translation, introduction, bibliography and notes by the reviewer), Barcelona, Ed. Bosch, Col.Erasmo, 1984. This translation has been recently published by Editorial Orbis-Fabri, Col. Grandes Poetas, under the title Paul Verlaine. Antología poética. The text is exactly the same one that was published in Edit. Bosch (Barcelona, 1998).

It would not have been fair or honourable to have limited oneself to criticise Verlaine's translators. It would not have been enough, complete or convincing either to refrain from the applied and complementary part of the critique included in the thesis. It was also a matter of accomplishing a research and practical commitment and of giving my own version of the poet studied for years. The author, i.e., myself, had the great advantage of knowing the mistakes and wise moves of his predecessors in this determination beforehand. Thus, the new doctor in translation of French Literature, and specifically of French Poetry and Paul Verlaine, came up with and carried through to a conclusion a retrospective translation, giving his own Choix. The translation was completed with a detailed biography of the poet, a theoretical-critical introduction, a presentation of the reason in the thesis and a complete bibliography. No other translator, which is logical on the other hand, has offered a more "complete" version. The versions of the chosen poems came with abundant notes and comments about the way of poeticising of the French poet and contrasted with explanations and justifications of other people's versions compared to one's own. Today, even if the translation has been praised by some experts, I must admit that (although all or almost all linguistic and cultural mistakes made by my predecessors were eliminated and it was thoroughly supported in a compared theoretical groundwork obtained from the field of social and writing science), there is a certain imbalance in rhythm and metrics, which will have to be corrected. In order to solve this imbalance, the reviewer intends to carry out a second version of the translations about our poet (at least six) which since 1980 have been released in the market. The editor, offering reasons concerning the public and acceptation - as well as sales - as proof (and ignoring my intention of publishing the manuscript with all the comments, critiques and other notes, through which I intended to give an applied part of the thesis) reduced all the work to the version itself and a few notes or comments.