Translating ‘shame’. A translational approach (II)

Starting from the semantic and lexical sphere of the concepts of ‘honte’ (in French) and ‘rușine’ (in Romanian), my aim is to examine the way this word was translated into Romanian; for this purpose, my point of departure was a case study. To this end, I tried to elaborate a comparative translational study of Boris Cyrulnik, titled Mourir de dire. La honte (Éditions Odile Jacob, Paris, 2010) and of its Romanian translation, titled Mai bine mor decît să spun. Rușinea (French translation by Valentin Protopopescu, Editura Trei, “Psihologia pentru toți” collection, Bucharest, 2012). Cyrulnik’s text has a particularity: it oscillates between the specifics of a literary text and those of a specialized text. From this standpoint, his transposition challenges the functionalist theories of translation and mostly the skopos theory elaborated by Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer: it is interesting to analyse the way the translator “decodes” the “inten-tionality”ofthistypeoftext, ultimatelyaspecializedtext, andthewayhedecides to transpose its semantic and lexical sphere into Romanian.


The lexical field of shame: a) effects of shame
The fact that the translator did not study the dominant of this text (thus he failed to elaborate a hierarchy of his translational effort), that he did not focus enough on reconstructing in his translation the terminological grid around the concept of shame are also obvious in the way he chose to transpose the lexical field of this concept. The paraphrase, periphrasis, synonymy ended up extending the lexical field excessively and rendering it less specific than in the original text, implicitly.
For this type of text, the lexical field around the key-term, shame, is meant to construct and support the entire argumentative framework. The author of the text-this time clearly in his capacity as a specialistenumerates the effects of shame upon the ones affected by this trauma following events that had perturbed their existence significantly. Hence, he lists the following: malaise, flétrissure, fracas, and, most frequently, déchirure. The translator has to reconstitute this constellation of pain indicators, who become as many symptoms of pathology. However, the translator uses yet again synonymy massively, but he also chooses often the marked poetizing term that beatifies the lexical register, which estranges the text from its dominant function and provides it with a different coherence than the one embedded in the intentionality of the source text. In this respect, I will provide only a few examples in the following lines.
Malaise-one of the "untranslatable" terms of the French lexicon, according to the well-known Vocabulaire européen des philosophies (subtitled Dictionnaire des intraduisibles)-denotes a dysfunction between soul and body; hence, its semantic sphere reverberates both towards "the networks of affect and passion" and of the physiological disorders; both at individual and at ontological and even "national", related to "origin" (Cassin, 2004, p. 750). The translator is the one who has to operate-by the context and the type of text to translate-a selection among the various semantic paths of the term. Furthermore, he has to maintain its coherence in similar contexts, where the use of synonyms would actually perturb reception. In the Romanian version, where malaise concerns a psychological state (not a physical sickness), a disturbance, it is translated by suferință in a general sense (where the combination with contagioasă becomes inadequate) or by disconfort, or even by a frivolous indispoziție that mitigates the severity of the trauma that it expresses. Thus, "Le malaise n'est pas toujours provoqué par un effondrement traumatique" (p. 81) becomes "Indispoziția nu este totdeauna provocată de un colaps traumatic" (p. 76). The serious perturbation determined by shame generates very perceptible physical reactions: "Un adolescent rougit, évite le regard et bafouille de malaise" (p. 85); actually, se bîlbîie de tulburare [he is so troubled, he stammers], not "flecărește, spre a-și masca disconfortul" (p. 80). Flétrissure-whose semantic sphere indirectly suggest the sign applied with a red-hot iron to the convicts in the public square during the French Old Regime-is a stigma, a term that the dex is defined as dishonoring, a "shameful" mark that may be associated with înfierare. Gîndirea automată constă în a spune că, deoarece băieții bătuți și fetele făcute de rîs sfîrșesc prin a ocupa locul subaltern care li se atribuie, ar fi suficient să suprimăm orice durere și rușine pentru ca ei să înflorească și să devină fericiți (p. 138).
I do not suggest here that I support unconditionally a view of translation based on the supremacy of the signifier, but the decision to crumble the specialized lexicon in translation should have a justification, which I failed to find in this case. Concerning this lexicon, an excessive and unjustified dispersion only undermines the specific of the text: "synonymization" is not and cannot be a universal translational principle. On the other hand-and this is the essential point-, by disseminating a lexicon that aims to become a terminology, the very topic of the book (shame as trauma, as physical and mental wound) tends to become a metaphor that accentuates the essayistic and narrative side, to the detriment of a psychoanalytical journey destabilized by the lack of a stable conceptual support. However, this is the main topic of the book! Therefore, some researchers posit that the specificity of translation techniques in case of humanities discourse is the practice of various techniques for the "general language" and terminological lexicon. While for transposing the first, the translator can use the technique of equivalences, for the latter he must use correspondences systematically. Whenever possible, he must use corpuses of related terms by derivation or etymology (similarly to Saussure, a long time ago, when he named the sides of the linguistic signs). Thus, the translator should differentiate the terminology, the array of key-concepts within the text to translate, which he would subsequently have to transpose into the target language using strictly the term he decided-either the literal translation or a neologizing term, if he had enough courage to use it (Cassin, 2004, p. 298). In other words, whereas the "general" lexicon must be rendered using "idiomatic" procedures, the transposition of terminology would be done literally, "imitatively". In this case, it may be concluded that the use of literal translation and of loan technique-in other words, the dependence on the terms used in the source text-may represent a particularity of translating humanities-specific discourses. If the use of such procedures turned out to be recurrent, then it can be stated that in that type of text, the desideratum of textual cohesion tends to be treated differentially. Thus, the specialized lexicon is transposed by fully observing the density in the source text, while general lexicon admits and even requires translation by equivalence.

The lexical field of shame: b) predication of shame
At a syntagmatic level, shame develops in our text a combination focused on a relatively small number of verbs, which-through their recurrence-create a semantic network meant to specify, delimit and explicitate not only the "topic", but also the trauma of shame. Whereas it may not be very poor, the lexicon of shame is actually not very rich in Cyrulnik's book, because this is not his intention. In many cases, however, the translator dilutes the lexicon in the Romanian version, though the main verbal axes that determine shame can be transposed into Romanian by correspondence. In fact, this terminological fluctuation indicates that the translator failed to perceive the existence of a lexicon aiming to become a terminology and that he treated it like a "current" lexicon, where variation would be justified, à la limite, only by the rejection of "literalism". We may thus decipher his "project", his view of the translation for this type of text, but his view no longer coincides with the intentionality of the source text, insofar as the translator extends the technique of "idiomatizing" to the whole text, as if he had failed to grasp the hierarchy of textual levels, specialized text and essay, (specialized text being the primary level).
The text follows mainly three verbal axes, all based on the principle of lexical economy. The syntagmatic axis (of combinations in praesentia) makes up the framework around the core concept of shame. The first verbal axis circumscribes shame as a feeling, then as a provoked trauma that can end up destroying the one affected by it: the verbs related the individual perception of shame are the following, some of which (ressentir, eprouver, sentir) are almost synonyms: avoir honte -ressentir la honte -éprouver de la honte -se sentir honteux -rendre honteux -faire honte -provoquer la honte -mourir de honte The dramatic consequences of the trauma of shame are organized around the silence to which it constraints the subject, who cannot speak it for fear of the isolation to which telling it would condemn him.
la honte fait taire -dire la honte -la honte fait fuir Finally, the third axis concerns the effort of liberation, of escaping trauma, made by the individual who wants to save himself: this axis, too, features a limited number of almost synonymous verbs: s'affranchir de la honte -se libérer de la honte -sortir de la honte -se sauver de la honte Besides the times when these verbal structures were translated by correspondence, it is worth underscoring an over-diluting tendency of the translator: he uses an inventory of synonymies that exceeds the reduced inventory within the source text. Its function is actually to consolidate a certain lexicon by concentrating it, not to disperse it by disorganizing it. Sometimes, the translator's effort to find synonyms leads to rhetorizing, inadequate or downright mistranslated constructions: îmi este rușine că mi-a fost rușine, with all its redundancy present also in the source text, is not the same as a-ți fi rușine de propria rușine; that it is possible să-ți fie rușine că locuiești in a very luxurious apartment does not mean that you have concluded that faptul ar fi un lucru de rușine; to say that ți-e rușine is not the same as a-ți mărturisi rușinea; a-ți fi rușine also does not mean a descoperi ce înseamnă să trăiești cu rușinea în suflet, which may be adequate for a literary text, nor does it mean a ți se face rușine, nor a o resimți, nor a o trăi, and much less a o experimenta. In several occurrences, I also find disputable the assimilation between a-i fi rușine and a se rușina. The avoidance of repetitions-a procedure specific to this type of text-leads to the transformation of "on peut avoir honte sans raison d'avoir honte" (p. 80) into a construction lacking both elegance and clarity: "ne poate fi rușine fără să avem motiv pentru asta" (p. 75).

Mourir de honte
The height of this axis-which leads to mourir de honte-did not practically entail any paraphrase, except for the inappropriate phrase rușine letală-which I have analysed before and which destroys the connnections between the title and the text itself-and for two occurrences, "îmi vine să mor de rușine" (p. 75) and "le vine să moară de rușine" (p. 177) which inexplicably attenuate the fulfilled action in "je meurs de honte" (p. 80) and "ils meurent de honte", respectively (p. 190).

Ressentir -éprouver -provoquer la honte; dire la honte -s'affranchir -se sauver -se libérer de la honte
This axis may suggest some variation to the translator because it is also features in the source text. However, it exceeds the one of the source text again and it includes a certain number of inadequate phrases, such as a nutri rușine or a vădi rușine. Hence, provoquer in provoquer la honte is translated by: a stîrni, a declanșa, a genera; éprouver in éprouver la honte is transposed by: a încerca, a vădi, a fi, a se simți invadat, a prezenta,  a experimenta, a resimți, a avea, a arăta, a suferi, a simți, a da dovadă, a fi încercat; dire in dire la honte by: a afirma, a mărturisi; ressentir din ressentir la honte: a nutri, a i se face; s'affranchir in s'affranchir de la honte by: a se elibera, a obține; se sauver in se sauver de la honte by a se salva; éponger in éponger la honte by a se scutura; s'en sortir by a scăpa; sortir in sortir de la honte by: a depăși, a ieși; se libérer by a se elibera. Quand le réel est différent du récit de ce réel // Cînd realitatea este diferită de discursul acestei realități sortir de la honte pentru a ne elibera de rușine peut-on dire "sortir de la honte" putem oare să spunem "să ieșim din rușine" difficile de sortir de la honte foarte greu să depășim rușinea sortir de la honte depășirea rușinii Les sans-honte // Cei fără rușine des individus qui n'éprouvent ni honte ni fierté indivizi care nu arată nici rușine, nici mîndrie de ne jamais se sentir honteux să nu se simtă nicicînd rușinați la honte "éprouvée..." rușinea "resimțită..." "...ceux qui éprouvent trop de honte..." "cei care vădesc prea multă rușine..." on n'éprouve la honte que nu suferim de rușine decît ces hommes n'éprouvent pas de honte acești oameni nu resimt rușine Morale, perversions et pervertis // Morală, perversiuni și pervertiți éprouver de honte ou de culpabilité fără a da dovadă de rușine sau vinovăție Le pouvoir des chaussettes // Puterea ciorapilor nous n'éprouvons ni honte ni fierté nu ne încearcă nici rușine nici mîndrie Thus, in the target text, the concept of shame is positioned at the crossroads between a paradigmatic axis, which no longer functions by the principles of selection, of a sau... sau, but of a și... și, and a syntagmatic axis, where the goal of combinations is lexical richness. However, the specialized text determined by its dominant-namely by a certain hierarchy of functions, as defined before Katharina Reiss by Roman Jakobson (1960, p. 353; 1963) in the '60s as the determining factor of the message profile itself-is not defined by the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination, as it occurs in poetry. On the contrary, in this case it is defined by the "sequential [combination] of equivalent units" (Jakobson, 1960, p. 358): once the concept is delimited, the selection is far more rigid, and the combination follows more or less the rules of mathematical equations. Thus, substitution-specific to the paradigmatic axis-does not function as such in a specialized text; it does not replace the "central" term of a terminological grid, but it completes it. This may explain why the translation of shame in expressive texts follows another logic, where equivalence can become the rule or, in any case, also according to Roman Jakobson, "the constitutive principle of the sequence" (Jakobson, 1960, p. 358). Three examples taken almost randomly (actually, randomly from the things I have read recently) may prove this.

By way of conclusion: on the false freedom of the translator
I have mentioned-at the beginning of my analysis-that the translator hesitated to construct a grid of specialized terms symmetrical to the one in the source text. I have underscored his reticence to the neologizing of the adjective rușinos [shameful]; the price to pay was the dispersion of the terminological grid into a multitude of para-and periphrastic structures, a fluctuation that contravenes flagrantly the intentionality of the source text. However, maybe his reticence has another explanation, too: cultural, literary and historical. An entire lexicon borrowed from the French (that Pompiliu Eliade also mentioned), which I invoked at the beginning of this study would rapidly be eliminated, in late nineteenth century, from the Romanian language lexicon. Actually, the vocabulary of the characters within the plays of Alecsandri and Caragiale, which reflected the state of the Romanian society of their time, stands to prove the passage from the euphorizing Frenchisms of Chirița to their decadence in the lexicon of Caragiale's characters. The vocabulary-today almost indecipherable-of Franțuzitele by Constantin Faca, and then of the idiolect of Chirița by Vasile Alecsandri (that almost became an idiom) also increasingly hard to comprehend (insofar as the comic character is based on a French-speaking trend today in a state of accelerated desegregation) soon lost the "mark of prestige". The new jargon, practiced daily by Caragiale's characters, now comprising loan words turned into Romanian, would degrade into all sorts of deformations once it was integrated into the world of Bucharest slums. The conscience of their symbolic value in Chirița's world would fully dissipate; the language was not able to assimilate, but only to distort them.
Maybe the same thing happened with the couple rușinoasă -a rușina, which in Romanian acquired a comic and pejorative connotative load, which led to all the hesitations in their transposition. I remind here that Veta is rușinoasă and that neither she nor her sister must be rușinate: actually, the translators of Caragiale's plays into French (by the way, they are far from novice; see Caragiale, 1994) avoided la honte. They constantly transposed rușinea by pudeur or gêne: the adjective-verb couple of the same family is not mentioned; the translators oscillated between gêner, a mitigating tem, and ne pas la faire rougir.  Saint-Exupéry (1943, 1971, 1998 associates rușinea, la honte-by particularizing broader and less concrete semantic spheres-with umilința, with timiditatea, jena, sfiala and ridicolul, almost as for pudoare in this text. Furthermore, the four occurrences for honte in the original text have turned into eight in the translated version. In exchange, the physical manifestation of shame-roșeața, înroșirea-is transposed using poetizing terms: you can turn red of shame (not necessarily of shyness) or of pleasure, but a te îmbujora de rușine is rather inadequate. Actually, Saint-Exupéry's text plays with rather contrasting colours, handkerchiefs with red dots, the king's crimson, a man that was supposed to red (he is actually sometimes roșu, other times roșcovan in the Romanian version). Moreover, the Little Prince terns red many times (he also gets pale when he gets mad); this redness should have been preserved in the Romanian text, without alternating it with the poetic îmbujorare, with the risk of committing mistranslations such as: Il rougit, puis reprit: [...] (p. 30) Se îmbujoră-n obraji, pe urmă spuse mai departe: [...] (p. 10) Le petit prince rougit de nouveau. Il ne répondait jamais aux questions, mais, quand on rougit, ça signifie «oui», n'est-ce pas? (p. 94) Micul prinț din nou se-mbujoră. El niciodată nu răspundea la întrebări, dar dacă te îmbujorezi înseamnă "da", nu-i așa? (p. 29) All of these examples-randomly mentioned within the mixture of recent reads, not following a coherent program of elaborating a corpus-justify the grid elaborated by the skopos theory. At the same time, however, they show what I called the "false" freedom of the translator who has a double task to fulfil in his translational process. The first is to transpose a text into a target language, while the second is to determine to category to which the text pertains (thus to construct a typology for it in the meanwhile). Hence, a translator's freedom is limited not only by history, by the horizon of expectation of his period, by the translational traditions (also historically determined), but also by the imperative of reconstructing the same type of text in the target language. The translator is thus never completely isolated or alone: his endeavour will or will not be successful also depending on his capacity of deciphering correctly the intention of the text to translate. [Translated by Alina Piftor]