Subject : # 14231 Traducció de Textos Literaris Anglesos Gr.A
Student´s name : Harsulescu, Gabriela
In this text, I had to look up almost all of the adverbs and
adjectives
and at times it was really hard to decide between the different
meanings I
found, as was the case with “ponderous” that in Spanish can mean
“grave”,
“importante”, “laborioso”, “pesado”, “ponderoso”, “voluminoso”. I
finally
decided to translate the phrase as “Un sajón de los
grandes.“ in order to preserve the ambiguity of
the original, “grande” meaning either heavy or important or both.
But what I found most difficult was to translate the words the
author
had practically made up for the occasion such as “gunrest” which
probably
should have been “gun carriage” -in Spanish “cureña”- or “noserag” or “scrotumtightening”. The problem
with the last two words is that even though one can very well picture
what they
mean, it’s pretty hard to say the same in just one word in Spanish. In the case of “noserag” there is a
contrast in the original text between the excessive mock-formality of
the
request –“Lend us a loan”- and the word “noserag” so I needed something
less
formal and more visual than “pañuelo” in Spanish. So I chose
“moquero”.
With “scrotumtightening” I tried to avoid a verbal construction that
would be
much longer than the original, so I went to the source and thought of
what
might cause the scrotum to tighten and discarded the cold so I was left
with
fear, hence the translation: “acojonante”.
To come up with a decent solution for “gunrest” and “parapet” I
had to
do a lot of research. Reading up on Martello towers, I found some
pictures and
even a cross section of it. Learning that it was a defensive tower that
usually
hosted a huge piece of artillery, it occurred to me that I should look
for a
Spanish artillery dictionary or a glossary and I actually found one
on-line and
that’s where I found “cureña” that seemed like the right choice.
Afterwards I looked up “cureña” in a bilingual dictionary and
found it
translated as “gun carriage” and that was all it took to convince me.
But when
I mentioned it in class, nobody had ever heard of it so I checked in
DRAE and
there it was with a description that made a lot of sense in the context
of the
original text.
In order to translate “Tripping and sunny as the buck himself” I
also
did some research and came across some very interesting material. One
is a
website called “Advanced notes for Ulysses ch1 (Telemachus)” http://www.ro
botwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/notes01.html
and the other a Google book called “Joyce´s Comic Portrait” by Roy K.
Gottfried. To translate “perch” I resorted to “A dictionary of the
Architecture
and Archaeology of the Middle Ages” by John Britton, also a Google
book. And
the Spanish artillery glossary I mentioned earlier for “cureña” is http://www.castillosnet.org/glosario/C.shtml
For most of the other words I looked up, I used www.wordreference.com.
As a conclusion, this has been the most
difficult
translation I have ever had to do but it was also a lot of fun. And it
has taught
me, that in order to do a decent literary translation, one must do a
lot of
research beforehand.
Click here to see my translation of
Ulysses.
Academic
year 2007/2008
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Gabriela Harsulescu
gahar@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press