La abadía de Northanger (Spanish Edition)

La abadía de Northanger (película)

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La abadía de Northanger (película) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

Nor could we say that all readers, especially in this country, feel nostalgia for the green world of Meryton and Fullerton. We read Jane Austen for those marvellous people to whom she gives flesh and blood; we read her for her presentation of human predicaments and themes universally acknowledged to be relevant; and we read her for her rich and elegant language. And these things can be translated — with varying degrees of success, to be sure, but they can be translated. In fact, in the history of translation some have even been considered better than their originals.

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It has been reported, for example, that the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, quite possibly the most highly-respected writer living today, has said that he prefers to read Don Quixote in English. Let us look at her treatment of characters, at her accuracy, at her ear for language, and her capacity to capture the flavour of various aspects of the art of the novel.

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Let us see first how some of the characters survive the trip to the Antipodes. As one might expect, General Tilney floats along wonderfully on his buoyant ego. Although it is obvious that the translator would not have access to the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary that Jane Austen would use to take the General down a peg, the rather high-flown Latin terminology she gives him suits him admirably.

Here he is describing his garden. The desire to gratify my children and my neighbours would suffice to make me strive to that end. Also, she allows him to speak in the first person rather than in the more modest indirect speech Jane Austen gives him. He talks more elaborately than anyone else in the book, and the elaborateness of his language is set against the hypocrisy of his actions just as much as in the original. Unfortunately, not all characters travel with equal success.

Allen seems to be more of a fat sigher of sighs than in the original. That judgment may be true about her head, but not necessarily about her body. Allen is not her maudlin sentiment but her colourlessness. John Thorpe, also, loses a bit in translation. In English he has a plain face and ungraceful form , but in Spanish only a common appearance — more abstract and less telling than in the original.

Right at first — perhaps to make the later butterfly more beautiful — she is uglified more than the original would warrant. Whereas Jane Austen tells us that her features were in general very plain , the translator says they all lacked in physical beauty. Her body in Spanish is excessively skinny , not the rather touching thin and awkward of the original.

She has, surprisingly, not strong but inexpressive feature s. In short, the Spanish version pronounces, she lacked absolutely in beauty. Certain unfortunate omissions change certain aspects of her personality, as well. Another kind of disappointment is the simple error. Still another probably results from unfamiliarity — explainable, to be sure — with English literature when Camilla, Cecilia, and Belinda become the names of readers of novels rather than their titles. The most disappointing feature, however, is the missed irony.

Fortunately our text does not have any passage that falls with quite such a clunk as does the first sentence of the latest — and very popular — Sarpe edition of Pride and Prejudice mentioned earlier. Here is a direct translation back into the parent language: But lest I begin to sound too excessively negative, let me say that there is much that is positive.

The Spanish language, for example, offers subtle definitions of human relationships by way of the formal and informal you. Some translations are really quite felicitous. It may take one aback a bit, but after a while one feels that the connotations are not far apart when calling a man caballero rather than sir.

Nicely effective also is the scene in which Henry interrogates Catherine in the style of a Bath beau. Let us look at the English first. I have been very negligent — but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly. Now let us go on. Were you never here before, madam? The Spanish — which I am retranslating directly back into English — carries across the affectation:. I confess my negligence and I entreat you to help me repair my failure and satisfy my curiosity.

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If it appears acceptable to you, I will help you to formulate the questions in correlative order. But let us continue: Have you spent any other season in this watering-place? Despite some differences, the translation is really not half-bad. We have seen omissions, changes, and happy interpretations. However, our translator does something else; she adds to the original text.

The reasons for each, however, should be fairly obvious. When she mentions the game of cricket, she adds parenthetically for her non-English audience, a game especially British. A squire, she adds, is the most important man in the district. And when she identifies the romantic hero and future lover Henry Tilney as a clergyman , she adds to the we may suppose largely Roman Catholic audience that this is a minister of the Anglican church.

These are a few of the ways in which one work has been misunderstood, changed, and even felicitously reborn into another language. Is it a success? I think I would have to say, as with many other things, yes and no. The work generally reads smoothly. Naturally, English sentence structure has to be changed to accommodate Spanish patterns, and paragraphs are shortened. But most of the characters are clearly drawn, the actions and themes cannot be lost, and the language, though often lacking the bite of the original, is clear and smooth.

But at this time, I would like to change course and speak of translation — carrying across — in yet a larger sense. This past summer, I was extremely fortunate to be able to talk with professors of English literature at two separate university-level schools. The report that I can give is a mixture of bad and good news, triumph and frustration.

At both schools, all works must be read in the original version the students are, after all, English majors , yet simply getting the works presents difficulties. Not that Catherine was always stupid—by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinner; so, at eight years old she began.

She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off.

The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another.

Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: What a strange, unaccountable character! Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave way to an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart; she had now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her father and mother remark on her personal improvement.

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books—or at least books of information—for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information — amongst the rest, that—. So far her improvement was sufficient—and in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own composition, she could listen to other people's performance with very little fatigue.

Her greatest deficiency was in the pencil—she had no notion of drawing—not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover's profile, that she might be detected in the design. There she fell miserably short of the true heroic height. At present she did not know her own poverty, for she had no lover to portray. She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility, without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient.

This was strange indeed! But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

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