The voice of the (in)visible translator

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unequal relationship that occurs between author and reader¹²³. Unlike adult narrative, in children’s literature there is an asymmetrical communication that takes place between the adult writer and the child reader, which occurs first and foremost outside the text:

The principles of communication between the adult author and the child reader are unequal in terms of their command of language, their experience of the world, and their positions in society, an inequality that decreases in the course of the young reader’s development. Children’s literature is thus regarded as literature that must adapt to the requirements and capabilities of its readers.

(O’ Sullivan, 2005: 14)

The aspect of the supposed capabilities and life experience of the intended audience in children’s literature becomes even more evident in translation, when the voice of the translator as mediating agent in the communication process between author and child reader steps in at some point in time to speak to a different audience often distanced from the original audience in terms of time and cultural background.

To account for this presence, O’Sullivan identified the communicative role of the translator in the narrative process as illustrated in Figure 14¹²⁴ as an active mediator:

123 In the first decade of the 21^st century Emer O’Sullivan analysed children’s literature in translation from a comparative point of view, with reference to the German and English production context and the voice of translators (1993, 2003). Lathey (2010) studied the historical development of children’s literature in translation also through the declared strategies adopted by translators through time in English-speaking countries, namely the UK and the US. Both studied the effects of the presence of the translator in target texts, whose choices were often aimed at catering for a supposed lack of knowledge of target readers about the source culture.

124 O’Sullivan resorted to Seymour Chatman’s model of narrative communication (1978) intended as a continuum between author and reader. This model was further developed by Giuliana Schiavi (1996) to introduce the figure of the translator in the process of translating fiction.

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Figure 14. O’Sullivan’s structure of a translated narrative text (2005: 108)

The view proposed by O’Sullivan differentiates between source narrative and target narrative, where there is the presence of an implied translator that is the counterpart of the implied author¹²⁵ in the source text. The translator actually plays two different roles that show the complex process that stands at the basis of translation for children. When the translator reads the source text, s/he becomes part of the group of implied readers intended for the source text: the further away in time the source text is from the translator, the more difficult it becomes to understand – for example – cultural or topical references present in the narrative. On the other hand, once the translational process begins, the translator becomes the initiator of the narrative exchange to rewrite the source text in view of a different implied reader from the original. Thus, the translator experiences the narration from a vantage point:

[A]s someone familiar with the source language and culture, the translator is in a position to assume the role of the implied reader of the source text and, above and beyond that, to try to identify the natures of the implied author and the implied reader(s). (O’Sullivan, 2005: 105)

125 In Chatman’s words, the implied author is “ […] not the narrator, but rather the principle that invented the narrator, along with everything else in the narrative, that stacked the cards in this particular way, had these things happen to these characters, in these words or images.” (1978: 148) He is made of a multiplicity of voices, all those that construct the narrated events as a whole. O’Sullivan recognises this difference in her discussion, going further on in defining the implied author of children’s literature as the entity that makes presuppositions on “interests, propensities and capabilities of readers at a certain stage of their development” (O’Sullivan, 2005: 15), and writes accordingly.

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The translator is an ‘ideal reader’ able to communicate with the implied author in order to create new meaning and produce another text (the translation) derived from the original, yet conceived to be meaningful to the implied readers of the target culture¹²⁶.

As shown in Chapter 1, translations for children are the result of the initiative, intuition and curiosity of a group of initiators including publishers, translators, and illustrators. Therefore the figure of the implied translator in Figure 14 cannot be represented by the translator only, but by all those who contribute to the creation and distribution of the target text. Their mediation impacts on the reception of translated works throughout the process from selection to distribution by anticipating the reaction of intermediaries between children and translated literature (namely parents, teachers, etc.)¹²⁷.

But “the voice of the narrator of the translation” (2005: 109, italics in the original) according to O’Sullivan can be detected in the translated narrative speaking to the implied reader in a different culture at a different time from the source text. The voice of the narrator of the translation can be heard on a metalinguistic level in paratextual

126 The notion of implied reader has been discussed by Alexandra Assis Rosa with an overview article on defining the target text reader in Descriptive Translation Studies (2006). First of all, she diverges from Giuliana Schiavi’s (1996) and Hermans’s identification of a “target culture implied reader” as a collective entity for readership. Rosa posits that the target text implied reader is analogous with the implied reader of general literary theory (Chatman and Booth) and this can be detected in translated texts through specific language features that occur regularly. Moreover, the implied reader “seems to be more the translator’s expectations of the expectations of a given reading community that seem to play a role as motivation or constraint of his/her activity” (Rosa, 2006: 103), thus dictating the norms that the translator will take into consideration or not in the translation process. Rosa’s further research (2009) concentrated on the dichotomy of implied translator and narrator in translation as existing at two different levels of enunciation, unlike O’Sullivan’s work which considers the narrator in translation as the voice of the implied translator. Moreover, Rosa provides a complex framework of communication between addressers and addressees in literary texts, working on a polyphonic multi-level transaction. Her linguistic analysis on the power of ‘voice’ in translated fiction (2013) is based on corpus linguistics and tokens of speech within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory and Narrative Theory in terms of

“ideology and relations of power” (Rosa, 2013: 228).

127 Anticipated problems relate to the already mentioned moral conventions accepted in the target culture, therefore initiators tend to delete “elements regarded as unsuitable or inappropriate in the target culture, especially accounts of supposedly unacceptable behaviour which might induce young readers to imitate it.” (O’Sullivan, 2005: 82).

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material, when it explains the choice of that particular text for translation, or even giving some pieces of information about the original author to bring him/her closer to the target readers and provide some background to the translated text. In the narrative, this voice may speak directly to the implied readership to make the voice of the source narrator more explicit than it was originally, or, for example, be less evocative in terms of intertextual references through reductions in narration. This last aspect is called by O’Sullivan “drowning out” (2005: 118) the voice of the original narrator through rewriting. The translator becomes the initiator of the narrative relationship with target readers, the only one responsible for the choice of the narrative voice to be adopted in translation:

[...] the translator may wish to tell the story differently from the narrator of the source text; may have difficulty in mimicking that particular voice; may think that children should be addressed in a way other than that adopted by the source text; or may be guided by narrative methods of children’s literature more familiar to the target culture. (2005: 118)

If the translator is guided by target narrative methods s/he is domesticating the text to marginalise the original voice of the author in order to make the target text acceptable to the receiving public. O’Sullivan calls this translation method “monologic”, and has the effect of eliminating the voice of the original narrator to the point that it cannot be heard anymore in the text, in favour of the voice of the translator: the reader perceives the familiarity of the context, but cannot be challenged by the original implied author because everything has already been laid bare for him/her by the translator. On the other hand, and more closely related to foreignisation strategies, when the translator is able to remain as close to the voice of the original author as possible, then the translation

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becomes dialogic¹²⁸ and the two entities have a balanced presence in the text as two voices speaking in turn.

O’Sullivan provides examples of this “drowning out” of the voice of the original narrator by the translator from a variety of sources including a picture book, but there is no specific linguistic analysis that, for example, relates these choices to the full text to understand whether the translator drowned out the voice of the original narrator consistently or only occasionally. O’Sullivan’s main interest is to account for the

‘audibility’ of the voice of the translator in children’s literature: “the translator as s/he becomes visible or audible as a narrator is often more tangible in translated children’s literature than in literature for adults” (O’Sullivan, 2003: 198). Basically, this voice is less audible if the target book is intended for an adult public, more audible if children are expected to read the book; in other words, domestication strategies are adopted in view of young readers, foreignising strategies target for an adult public.

Gillian Lathey’s (2010) diachronic analysis of children’s literature dedicated to

“invisible storytellers” discusses the role of translators in Anglophone countries with special attention to the UK. Following Venuti’s terminology, Lathey posits that translators are invisible presences in the history of children’s literature, providing evidence from various authors. Lathey identified that, from a historical point of view, the tendency of translations in English “has been to move the source text towards the reader in a process of linguistic and cultural domestication that results in a fluent English text” (2010: 117). Her research sets out to investigate examples of retranslations and also picture books, to account for the translators’ motivations and methodologies behind any translation for children, trying to bring to light the “invisible storytellers” mentioned in the title of her book.

128 The term is borrowed from the Russian scholar Michail Bakhtin. O’Sullivan extends the concept of dialogic narrative to translation: “[D]ialogic translation is […] when the translator tries to allow not only the unavoidable presence of his or her own voice to be heard in the text, but also the various other voices as they were heard in the original.” (2005: 80-81)

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Lathey studied the receptive side of translations, identifying the elements that characterised translations in English through translators’ prevalent strategies as well as the presence of the adult mediators who actively promoted and disseminated translated fiction for children, editors and publishers in particular. More importantly, the cultural and professional background of translators seemed fundamental to hypothesise the processes that brought such works of art into being. The chapter dedicated to translators’

voices highlights the relationship between publishers, editors and translators, as well as the methodologies followed by professional translators in the 20^th century through interviews with three of the most famous translators for children in the UK, Anthea Bell, Patricia Crampton, and Sarah Ardizzone. The interview is one among the various analysis tools that Lathey used to outline the presence of the translator in children’s literature, which includes the paratextual material available in introductions, prefaces/postfaces, articles, but also from a study of the forces within the social system that catered for translations to reach young readers - in contrast with the Anglocentric vision of children’s literature in English-speaking countries.

To conclude this section dedicated to the voice and presence of translators in children’s literature, the discussion that follows in Part 2 of this research is dedicated to the voice of Gianni Rodari in English translation. It takes steps from Lathey’s contextual analysis of the reception of translations in Anglophone countries in order to analyse the paratextual material that surrounded Rodari’s works in the UK and in the US. The following chapters will present first the changing image of Rodari as mediated by publishers, reviewers and scholars, but also by giving some indications on the background of translators to see whether it eventually influenced their ‘voice’ in the translation of Rodari. The analysis of paratexts cannot be complete without a linguistic analysis that investigates in depth a selection of works by Rodari from Italian to English, with reference to O’Sullivan’s intuition on the audibility of the translator as mediator in children’s literature. The discrete linguistic analysis is based on the translation trajections proposed by the linguist J. L.Malone in 1988, with the objective of defining

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the predominant domesticating or foreignising strategies that the translators of Rodari’s works adopted through time, in view of the receiving public of their translations.

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PART 2: Gianni Rodari in English Translation through Paratextual