The ideology of Welsh-English Literary Translation
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Of particular interest, in the light of the kind of work undertaken by Translation Studies, are the various politico-cultural impulses and imperatives that have given rise to translations and have been inscribed in them. The following therefore represents a crude taxonomy of the ideologies manifested in/as Welsh-English translation:
Foundationalism
Translation began as a local expression, in the late eighteenth century, of the Europe-wide phenomenon of the “search for origins” – a key aspect, of course, of the modern process of nation building, the attempt to define a nation as an ancient, established historical “fact”. It is worth noting that, in the Welsh case, it began as an accompaniment to the discovery (counterpointed by the brilliant forgeries of Iolo Morganwg) of genuine, and genuinely old, poetical manuscripts that provided a culturally subordinated people with historical evidence of the previously “suspect” ancient authority of their “subaltern” culture.
Contributionism
From the beginning, and right throughout the nineteenth century, many translators were concerned to distinguish between their own cultural nationalism and a political nationalism that would seem to threaten the integrity of the “British” state. There was also – as prefaces from the period testify – an anxiety to represent translations as “tributary” offerings; that is, as evidence of the (laudable, but previously invisible) contribution Wales had made to what had become a gloriously world-dominating British culture.
Celticism
From early times to the present, there has been a strain of translation that seeks to dehistoricise and depoliticise the material by representing it as being primarily Celtic, and only incidentally Welsh. There are many aspects to this practice, but it is obvious that in certain respects it represents the “othering” of Welsh language culture along the same exoticising lines as those identified by Edward Said in his famous discussion of Orientalism.
Scholarship
Because of its antiquity and richness, Welsh language literature has proved very attractive to scholar translators, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Their contributions have been extremely impressive and valuable. Yet even their activities can sometimes seem suspect to native speakers, because there is the danger of appearing to mummify and entomb the literature while it is still very much alive – a practice that, given the present state of the Welsh language, can (in all innocence) represent a very serious threat to its culture.
Reintegration
As the population of Wales was very decisively turned by history towards English at the end of the nineteenth century, so literary translation became for some a means of reintegrating the nation by remedial intercultural action. This aim – although inflected in a number of different ways – has remained central to Welsh-English translation throughout the twentieth century.
Assimilation
This is related to reintegration, but conceives of translation not as a means of welding the two cultures of Wales together but as a means of “naturalizing” immigrants. The Thatcher years saw a great influx into impoverished West Wales (then still a heartland of Welsh language culture) of English speakers from the wealthier regions of England (as well as from Anglophone south-east Wales). Writers such as Menna Elfyn (originally extremely resistant to the translation of her own work into English) eventually came to feel that translation might be the means of introducing the newcomers to the indigenous culture and inducting them into it.
Solidarity
Translation can be a means whereby writers can “talk across” differences of culture and of gender. A recent feature has been the readiness of prominent Welsh Anglophone writers to serve as translators of contemporary Welsh language poetry.
Creative exercise
Several Anglophone writers in Wales have used translation from the Welsh either as a means of keeping their hand in during a lull in their own output, or as a form of experimentation with a new “language” for their own writing. See, for instance, Leslie Norris’s deliberately loose “adaptations” (or reworkings) of Gwenallt’s poems; or Joseph Clancy’s adaptation in his own work of Welsh barddas forms. But perhaps the major instance of “influence” of this kind is the original poetry of Tony Conran – one of the most important and productive of modern translators from the Welsh – the deep structure of which has been decisively shaped by the insights that Conran earned by using translation as a means of x-raying, and thus articulating, the bare bones of a different mode of social relating to be found in the body of the great Welsh poetry of the Middle Ages.
Mobilisation
Particularly during the sixties, writers such as Harri Webb explicitly turned to translation as a means of promoting an awareness in the English speaking population of the nationalist issues addressed by many of the greatest of Welsh language writers. It is worth noting, at this point, that the two literatures of Wales were, during the first half of the twentieth century, politically out of step, since some of the greatest Welsh language literature was written to a nationalist political agenda that was, at that time, anathema to Anglophone Wales.
Internationalism
Translation may be seen as a means of connecting Wales to a wider world of “minority” languages and cultures that, paradoxically, has adopted English as a lingua franca, yet shares a cultural and political language not with hegemonic English culture but with a Welsh language Wales struggling to survive that hegemony. Additionally, a leading feature of Welsh language culture since the last century has been a pro-Europeanism; its valuing of its own historical ties to the multi-culturalism of the continent.
Alternative Culture
An evident incentive to some Welsh-English translation has been (and is) the pre-modern (and therefore potentially anti-modern or post-modern) features of traditional Welsh language culture. Hence, for instance, the valuing by some translators of the rural, communitarian, and above all religious, character of Welsh language culture (only fairly recently transformed by the forces of urbanization, secularization and mass consumerism).
The above is only an indicative listing of motives for translation. But it is worth adding that these in turn “translate” into a preference for different styles and genres. Emphasis on tradition, on cultural wealth and continuity, leads to the publishing of books spanning centuries of literature; anthologies allow the juxtaposition of English language and Welsh language materials and are therefore excellent texts for the purpose of cultural reintegration.
And finally, undue
emphasis on the ideology of translation leads to the overlooking,
for instance, of the economics of production. It needs to be stressed
that there is not, and has never been, a strong dependable market
for Welsh-English translation. Therefore very few initiatives have
been market-led – and where they have been, that has usually been
due to a market interest having briefly been created by political
developments. (So, for example, interest in Welsh Wales was stimulated
during the sixties by the political unrest in Wales at that time;
and again, at the end of the nineties, devolution created a passing
interest in things Welsh, as consequently did the brief popularity
of a handful of Welsh pop bands and media personalities.) Translation
has therefore been either the result of personal initiative and commitment
(hence unsystematic and not infrequently out of synch with publicly
evident economic and political developments) or of cultural management
(e.g. the role of educational institutions and the Welsh Arts Council
in commissioning and fostering translation programmes).