Exploring New Avenues of Translation

A word of explanation is needed for those readers who have not previously been introduced to the idea of a greater understanding of the evolution of translation into transduction. Transduction is beyond translation: it moves beyond the transferal of one language to another to signify speculative attempts at examining and executing the belief, concepts and meaning of the different arts. The art of translating means engaging in the analytical exercise of transferring, rotating and twisting one language into another art; but for literary translation, the objective of retranslation or self-translation is to create through translation the poetic and lyrical terms of transduction, which is the main concept discussed in this book.

Translation (including retranslation and self-translation) seems to be an ancient and contemporary process of attempting to unite science and art in order to communicate information through incomplete changes and reforms of coded language determined in space or time. In today’s world, an understanding of human culture can expand translation into the unexpected force linguistic retranslation into coded and uncoded music, conveying the “expressive melody, the rhythmic experimentation, the coloristic use of harmony and instrumental timbres, [and] the relaxation of and uncertainty about formal canon” (Longyear 1969, 3). The extension of translation over the ages is called transduction, which concerns the “arts of incompletion” (Bernhart and Englund 2021) of words-and-music as illustrated and exemplified in the present book From Mimetic Translation to Artistic Transduction: A Semiotic Perspective on Virginia Woolf, Hector Berlioz, and Bertolt Brecht.

Transduction expands informational (that is, highly meaningful) language into an inventory of the literary dialects, idioms and jargons of other fine and applied arts. To judge the evolution of translation to transduction, if the operational conclusion arising from the evidence introduced in the examples of this book is a true metaphor, Peirce’s “interpretants” in transduction can signify that the details of the artistic signs are not necessarily seen as harsh and static target units but are sent forth in the fluid patterns given to received source signs. Peirce’s interpretants are called “reactor” signs, explained in terms of the stimuli, responses, needs and satisfaction of the categories of the source sign (Sebeok 1994/1999, 64–65).

Berlioz's Poetical Drama

The French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was born in La Côte-Saint-André in the department of Isère, which is located in the Rhône Valley, close to the Alps, halfway between Grenoble and Lyon. The Berlioz family had some distinction in the French region. Hector's father, Dr. Louis Berlioz, was a successful and prosperous physician in the region (see Berlioz's bibliography, Cairns 1989/1999: 3–5). He practiced healing through acupuncture to relieve chronic pain, thereby attempting to introduce this healing practice to the Western world. Acupuncture comes from Chinese medicine, originating two thousand years before the birth of Christianity, but in the Napoleonic era, acupuncture was regarded as an alternative, even occult, pseudoscience. Dr. Berlioz furthered Western medicine, helping take it from the simple observation of symptoms to the scientific reality of being able to heal patients as experienced today.

Louis Berlioz had an inquisitive mind with logical rigor, but for his children he was also interested in poetic literature, fine arts and music. His son Hector Berlioz was born in 1803. Hector turned against the financial chaos of the Old Regime. As a pioneer of the French Revolution, he seemed to mark a turning point in politics. As a result of his fascination with Napoleon's tumultuous, but short-lived, government, Hector Berlioz furnished Napoleonic ideas to the modern world. He advocated the revolutionary ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity to serve as a movement against the world of the privileged classes. Hector gained his initial education under his father's guidance. Under his father's tutelage, Hector engaged in scholarly pursuits that included the study of intellectual subjects such as Latin grammar, French literature, history and geography. In 1821, Hector passed his examinations in philosophy and rhetoric to enter the French baccalauréat in Grenoble. His Latin specialty was the ancient literature of Virgil's Aeneid, Horace and Cicero, which he had read and translated with his father (Cairns 1989/1999, 46–60). The two of them shared an enjoyment of Virgil's long poems in Latin, which Hector retranslated into French lyrics. In adapting this version, he found himself caught up in the difficulty of readapting Virgil's verse into French lyrics for the romantic opera, The Trojans.

New Tongues for Brecht's Language

The dramatic genre of opera in its modern form has abandoned the old, static poetry of formal text-with-music in response to the attraction of dynamic and unconventional rhymes, dramatic sounds and satirical melodies, thus introducing new art forms (Kerman 1956/1989, 203–213). Alternative opera developed from the operatic tradition in its exploration of new subjects and themes, accepting contemporary vocabulary and speech to intensify the lyrical effect in conjunction with modern rhyme and tempo. This allowed a remix of scenic effects to create new dramas (Kerman 1956/1989, 214–228). Indeed, the new form of contemporary drama with songs and music, along with new sets, different lighting and a readaptation of the costumes, revived the stages of opera and operetta by emphasizing the emotional gestures of the actors (Pavis 1980, 133–134, 191–195, 262–263, 354–356). Brecht's new song-play genre featured an unconventional, modern style of declamation (Sprechstimme). This “speech song” consisted of a half-singing, half-speaking recital of lyrical texts which were similar to the twentieth century's harmonic, but dissonant, arias. Sprechstimme echoed the eclectic and dissonant schizophrenia of the international politics that formed the backdrop of reality in the twentieth century. Brecht personified the new voices in his sketches using variations to and elaborations on German theater, a process which Jakobson termed as cryptanalytical hypertranslation.

Onstage, the dramaturgic effects of modern opera were altered through the mimetic involvement of playwrights in order to move away from the old, familiar tradition of the audience being amused by the amorous events depicted in Italian opera which resolved into a happy ending. Instead, Brecht manipulated his modern dramas in educative theater by offsetting the pleasure of the audience with a contrastive feeling of displeasure. Brecht coined the term Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) for his method. He used (and abused) the emotionality of the German music drama (Singspiel) genre while preaching the sacred and secular themes of the melodramatic action by recoding the language in the popular speech spoken by the “street” classes. Jakobson splendidly discussed the contrastive structure of Brecht's lyrics in his article, “Der grammatische Bau des Gedichts von B. Brecht ‘Wie sind sie’” ( Jakobson 1963/1981).

Play Within Play

The double replacement of Wagner's linguistic-and-musical songs with the equivalent linguistic words of Woolf's novel is mingled together in Jakobson's interlingual translation and intralingual translation. Jakobson and Waugh (1979) paved the way for the pseudo-critical line of thought as lived through the sound shape of language. The transduction of vocal songs and their meaning can be defined as the retranslation of singable and performable words from old to new code languages (dialects, idioms or jargons), while the music remains unchanged and untranslated. Vocal or operatic translation seeks to transform lyrical works into the new setting of a different language. The double replacement of sound is made by a specialized translator working in the mixed area of literature and musicology, which also involves knowledge of theater studies. The hypertranslation made by the musical-and-literary translator becomes a co-authoring of the source translation brought to another language or pseudo-language, meaning that the translator's role is upgraded from that of secondary interpreter of the source text to that of a primary target interpreter.

Transduction works independently on the translational work through the translator co-interpreting the thematic, space-time and conceptual qualities of the source text. These revolutionary construction methods are inspired by the brain processes of the translator. The translator changes the elastic wave of conduction into the energy wave of transduction. The speed of the waves travels from the gravity surface of water into the higher graphical waves of the ellipsis, parabole and hyperbole (Shipley 1968/1972, 270–275). These waves are layered with the private “differences” in personal and cultural choice that make the “variations” and “invariations” of the source text, reshaping the target text away from the source text. The vocal translator is in the mixed position of doing more than intellectually retranslating the verbal text into another language without touching the musical values of the text. The operatic singers reinterpret and transpose the sounds into a different key—the perfect wave to perform the song or aria as a medium between artist and listeners.

This chapter will focus on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchus, as well as the speeches quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with a view to understanding their composition and intended effects. Repetition provides a systematic framework for many of the traditional rhetorical figures, such as anaphora, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, antithesis and polyptoton (see D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969; cf. J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996). Using repetition as a lens allows analysis not only of longer extracts but also of very short fragments. These patterns will be used to test the thesis that Roman oratory continued to respond to the ancient Latin form of the carmen even while being influenced by Greek rhetorical ideas (cf. on this point E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose, Columbus 2011). The transmission of the fragments under consideration is itself heavily influenced by the rhetorical and grammatical tradition, and my discussion will accordingly take account of the screening effects which this transmission has on the evidence.