Lakhasly

Anne Cluysenaar, in her book on literary stylistics, makes some important points about translation.The translator, she believes, should not work with general precepts when determining what to preserve or parallel from the SL text, but should work with an eye 'on each individual structure, whether it be prose or verse', since 'each structure will lay stress on certain linguistic features or levels and not on others'.She goes on to analyse C.Day Lewis' translation of Valery's poem, Les pas and comes to the conclusion that the translation does not work because the translator 'was working without an adequate theory of literary translation'.

Anne Cluysenaar, in her book on literary stylistics, makes some important points about translation. The translator, she believes, should not work with general precepts when determining what to preserve or parallel from the SL text, but should work with an eye 'on each individual structure, whether it be prose or verse', since 'each structure will lay stress on certain linguistic features or levels and not on others'. She goes on to analyse C.Day Lewis' translation of Valéry's poem, Les pas and comes to the conclusion that the translation does not work because the translator 'was working without an adequate theory of literary translation'. What Day Lewis has done, she feels, is to have ignored the relation of parts to each other and to the whole and that his translation is, in short, a case of

SPECIFIC PROBLEMS OF LITERARY TRANSLATION 83

perceptual "bad form"". The remedy for such inadequacies is also proposed: what is needed, says Cluysenaar, 'is a description of the dominant structure of every individual work to be translated.'¹

Cluysenaar's assertive statements about literary translation derive plainly from a structuralist approach to literary texts that conceives of a text as a set of related systems, operating within a set of other

systems. As Robert Scholes puts it: Every literary unit from the individual sentence to the whole

order of words can be seen in relation to the concept of system. In particular, we can look at individual works, literary genres, and the whole of literature as related systems, and at literature as a system within the larger system of human culture.2

The failure of many translators to understand that a literary text is made up of a complex set of systems existing in a dialectical relationship with other sets outside its boundaries has often led them to focus on particular aspects of a text at the expense of others. Studying the average reader, Lotman determines four essential positions of the addressee:

(1) Where the reader focuses on the content as matter, i.e. picks out the prose argument or poetic paraphrase.

(2) Where the reader grasps the complexity of the structure of a work and the way in which the various levels interact.

(3) Where the reader deliberately extrapolates one level of the work for a specific purpose.

(4) Where the reader discovers elements not basic to the genesis of the text and uses the text for his own purposes.3