Reflection and Practice of Translation in the Work of Joseba Sarrionandia

Abstract

My thesis focuses on the works translated into Basque by writer Joseba Sarrionandia (Iurreta, Bizkaia, 1958), and analyzes both the theoretical discourse on translation and the translation strategies used by this Basque writer. The initial hypothesis is that Sarrionandia’s view on translation coincides with a postmodern discourse on translation, and that he is in fact the first translator in the history of Basque literature to have practiced translation from a postmodern point of view.

In order to verify this hypothesis, the first chapter deals with the different translation theories that have dominated the Western thought, highlighting the contradictions presented by the principal modern theories and emphasizing the advantages that more recently developed postmodern theories offer. The main body of this chapter draws on the contributions made by the following theories to the postmodern discourse on translation: Descriptive Translation Studies, the Manipulation School, the Cultural and Power Turn in Translation Studies, deconstruction, postcolonial theories of translation, hermeneutic theories and poetics of translat io n.

The second chapter examines the reflections on translation expressed by other Basque translators prior to Sarrionandia. Although no well-structured school or theorization has emerged from such thoughts, many of their ideas that are continually repeated in the introductions to translations (such as fidelity towards the original, subordination andinsignificance of the translator before the original’s superiority, the translator’s invisibility, the transparency of the translation, etc.) seem to answer a modern conception of translation. Though one might notice some indications of a new way to conceive translation in the work of two of Sarrionandia’s precursors, namely Jon Mirande (1925-1972) and Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975), it is in the work of Joseba Sarrionandia that the main features of a postmodern discourse on translation start to manifest themselves in a more coherent way.

These features (such as the translator’s intervening power, the creative nature of translation, the indefinite, open, changeable nature of any text, the originality of each new reading, the creation of knowledge through translation, etc.) are discussed in the third chapter as seen and practiced by Sarrionandia, and it is demonstrated that not only his reflections on translation, but also the translation strategies he uses (pseudo-translations, fictitious translators, mediating languages, variations and imitations, translations without originals, etc.) correspond to the ideas defended by the postmodern theories of translation.

The thesis concludes that translation and creation are for Sarrionandia the two faces of a same coin, and that the “literature of literature”, which consists of the many relationships between different literary traditions, can only develop if authors translate or rewrite the texts of their precursors. Translation, considered in the modern discourse of translation as a bad copy of the untouchable original text, takes on a completely new sense in Sarrionandia’s work, and it is presented as a recreation that allows the development of the possibilities that remained hidden in the original.