Abstract
Translation is everywhere in The Carpathians, both as concept and as linguistic process. Several connections may be made between translation and the metaphorical power of the novel’s Gravity Star to make everything simultaneously absent and present, to make that which is foreign and inaccessible close and known. The aphasia created by the linguistic apocalypse at the heart of the novel highlights the need for new languages to express new worldviews, and resonates with language policies in Aotearoa New Zealand at the time The Carpathians was published. As a privileged mode of close reading, translation offers insights into works of literature at macro and microstructural levels. Accordingly, this article examines the Portuguese version of The Carpathians as a case study, in order to determine how the translation leverages the language issues of its source text, and how different translation strategies highlight the book’s cultural specificity, or, on the other hand, contribute to affiliating it with broader, and more generic, global configurations. Special attention is paid to the translation of linguistic and cultural features that are New Zealand-specific.
Is it possible to approach the work of Janet Frame without discussing issues of language? Unsurprisingly, scholarly criticism dealing with Frame’s work has focused on different dimensions of her language use, from conceptual aspects of language to specific language features, which are omnipresent in her writing. In Frame’s eleventh novel The Carpathians (1988) alone there are multiple characters struggling with language issues: Mattina, the American woman who travels to Puamahara, a fictional town in Aotearoa New Zealand, has trouble understanding New Zealanders when she first arrives; Hene, a Māori woman, is embarrassed at her lack of proficiency in te reo Māori and worries about the judgement of the younger generations who have grown up speaking the language; the elderly Penultimate Madge, along with her niece Olga and grandniece Sharon, find it difficult to understand each other due to generational dialectic differences; Decima, the daughter of local residents Joseph and Gloria James, has autism and does not speak; Jake, Mattina’s husband, has writer’s block, so in a way can be seen as failing to represent language; and even the authorial voice of the novel keeps being seized by competing narrators who inhabit different subjectivities articulated through contending points of view. Examples such as these multiply in Frame’s work and become all the more salient as they are delivered through her legendary linguistic inventiveness. Marc Delrez summarizes and confirms the views expressed by several critics on this matter: “Frame’s concern with the limits of language is ubiquitous of course, from Owls Do Cry onwards” (1992: 219).
Whereas language in Frame’s oeuvre has been widely scrutinized, its corollary, translation, on the other hand, has received considerably less attention from Frame scholars. This article begins to address that lacuna by reading the Portuguese translation of The Carpathians, the only work by Frame that exists in European Portuguese, against the English-language text, and seeing how it leverages issues of language in Aotearoa New Zealand. The article examines The Carpathians in Portuguese translation in order to perceive whether the novel retains its engagement with the socio-political and linguistic context of the time when it was written. Does the Portuguese text capture the specificities of New Zealand English which are unique to Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history and contemporary policy of state biculturalism or, on the contrary, do lexical choices and specific translation strategies originate a target text which invites hermeneutic approaches to the novel that align it with other, more generic, cultural flows? Of course, questioning a work of translation in this fashion is only possible if one stops seeing translations as lesser, derivative products and acknowledges them as texts that are co-authored and that stand in their own right as original versions in different languages, which is the stance that this article adopts.
In an attempt to answer the questions above, this article will first establish thematic continuities between language and translation in The Carpathians. It will then demonstrate that the changes in language policy taking place at the time of the writing of the novel inform an undercurrent of commentary on language politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. Finally, the Portuguese translation of the novel will be read in relation to the contexts expatiated upon in the preceding sections of the article. These then determine whether the specificities and the politics of language in Aotearoa New Zealand are still apparent when a third language, Portuguese, becomes involved.
Language and translation: Thematic continuities in The Carpathians
Translation is everywhere in The Carpathians, and its presence is not limited to translation’s most traditional remit of linguistic transfer. Although that aspect of translation is immediately observable in Mattina’s struggles to translate specificities of New Zealand English (NZE) into her own American English (AmE) variety of the language, throughout the book different characters also feel the need to translate entire worldviews to make sense of their predicaments and of their surroundings. In this sense The Carpathians relates to recent developments in Translation Studies and specifically the area of Epistemic Translation which, according to Karen Bennett, sees translation as no longer a merely interlingual process, constrained to the quest for verbal equivalents across geographies and cultures. Instead, it has become a dynamic concept with the potential to explain how things change through the modelling of the new upon the old […] A transdisciplinary concept, it has tremendous potential for straddling the epistemological divides that have produced such cognitive inequality in our world. (2024: 6)
Translation can accordingly be seen as a solution to the aphasia created by the linguistic apocalypse that occurs towards the end of the novel, a surreal midnight rain of letters which renders the residents of Kowhai Street incapable of articulate speech and which highlights the need for new languages to express new worldviews. 1 Furthermore, there is a host of connections to be made between translation and the metaphorical power of the Gravity Star. The latter is an ominous presence in the novel, described as an astronomical event that makes everything simultaneously absent and present, and renders that which is foreign and inaccessible close and known. It mirrors, after all, what translation in all its declinations strives to achieve.
Over and over again in Frame’s work, the limitations of language are emphasized and its prescriptive confines are breached, but perhaps more strikingly than in any other novel by Frame, in The Carpathians the heralding of the end of language is equated with something akin to an epistemic apocalypse. One of the several examples that could illustrate this point is Mattina’s attempt to grapple with the consequences of the (yet to be felt) effect of the Gravity Star: the demolishing of logical thought, its replacement by new concepts starting at the root of thought, would cause the natural destruction of known language. A new language, a new people, a new world; and perhaps the end of known civilization as human cognition, no longer supporting and supported by the words of the former languages. (Frame, 1988: 119)
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This is at once an image of an ending and of a beginning. Destruction is accompanied by renewal. However, the nature of that renewal is vague. The effacement of known language is fear-inducing because what will replace it is not only unknown, but also perhaps unknowable, and as is consistent with Framean denouements, it remains unspelled.
Likewise, translation is constantly riddled with intimations of its own limits and often with the paradox of its very existence, not to mention its battles with the supposed inexorability of its own demise since well before the possibilities offered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI. In Translation Studies the (im)possibility of translation is often discussed, whereas outside the discipline there are frequent references to the inevitable losses in translation. The much-debated untranslatables (Cassin, 2014) and the right to untranslatability (Apter, 2013) continue to divide critics. But in the same way that what Translation Studies terms an “untranslatable” does not limit the possibilities of translation, but rather emphasizes the need to continue to retranslate a term taking into account the context in which it is being used (Cassin, 2014; Apter, 2013), the end of language in Frame’s writing tends to signal the opening up of new possibilities. The scope and nature of those possibilities, however, are often only hinted at, or left unrealized, in her works, and often only through laborious hermeneutics can those possibilities be grasped at. As the ultimate exercise in close reading, a translation, stricto sensu, is always already an interpretation of a text that has been written in another language. Looking at literary texts in translation can provide a better understanding of how an author exists in other languages, and, ultimately, in the world. The accumulation of such references provides a more accurate picture not only of the international standing and the global reach of an author, but also of how their work is perceived in terms of the dialogues it may establish with the cultures of the vernacular literatures it enters through translation.
Rather than suggesting that The Carpathians is about translation, the connections sketched above between language and translation in the book attempt to reinforce the relevance of considering translation when language is discussed, and to highlight a thematic continuity that extends outwards into the wider context of language in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article suggests that issues of language and translation inextricably connect the fictive realm of this novel to the very concrete context in which it was produced, a time when language policy was being redefined in Aotearoa New Zealand. Moreover, translation, of course, looms large over narratives concerned with language in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the founding document of the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti o Waitangi continues to be challenged on account of the mistranslation of important concepts. 3
Language politics and language policy in The Carpathians
As Frame’s work constantly exposes the inadequacy of language it is also trying to find ways to overcome what it perceives to be the shortcomings of the form through which it is materialized. The deconstruction of that form in The Carpathians, particularly with respect to the repeated flaunting of expectations in relation to the shifting identity of the narrative voice, has led to readings of the novel as exclusively postmodern to the detriment of more political interpretations. This article builds on Janet Wilson’s readings of Living in the Maniototo and The Carpathians, which emphasize the latter’s dealings with language issues and their close relation with biculturalism. Wilson asserts that “Puamahara society provides a microcosm of the encounters which constitute colonial and post-colonial history” (1993: 127), namely in the way the different characters relate to language.
The question of language is therefore paramount in a postcolonial reading of The Carpathians, as the book was published the year after the Māori Language Act 1987, which finally made te reo Māori an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand and put structures in place that would encourage its revitalization. And what is the following passage if not a veiled reference to such a law?
how would the residents of Kowhai Street survive within the new order of thought, in the world of the Gravity Star? How could they find the new words when they may not realise that they had lost the old? No doubt the government would soon speed the change by passing laws against the use of the old language and the old ways of thinking, using the old ways to describe the prohibitions! (121)
The tone of this comment is best described as sarcastic, which is not to say that either Frame or her novel occupy a negative position in relation to these issues; other commentaries on the matter, as will be seen later, seem to be more positive. This article does not purport to settle the issue as to what Frame’s positioning in relation to Māori-Pākehā issues is, whether in The Carpathians or in the rest of her work. The difficulties in establishing her politics have been commented on by other critics. For example, Wilson notes that “Frame’s attitude towards the meaning of maoritanga is enigmatic” (1993: 128), Delrez points out that “Frame’s postcolonial agenda is only a limited dimension of her overall concern with the epistemological unraveling of historical closure” (2002: 210), while Mark Williams argues that Frame’s “unearthing of a political context to New Zealand’s favoured self-imagery does not mean that [her] texts urge the readers towards the adoption of an anti-colonial stance” (2011: 70).
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This is an assertion that can certainly be extended to The Carpathians, if not to all her writing, and a point that is brought home in Williams’s conclusion that Frame’s strategy of bringing the forgotten violences of colonisation to notice is too fluid, and in a sense too disengaged, to be attached to any express politics. Her fictions do not possess a unified body of moral ideas about power; they work around political and ethical problems — just as they do religious and epistemological ones — without resolving them into any discernible position or allowing the reader to suppose that their own sympathy for the subjects of violence might alter the ubiquitous patterns of violence that govern social reality. This does not make the work apolitical. (75–76; emphasis in original)
Even if Frame does not adopt a clear-cut stance, closely observing language in the novel suggests that The Carpathians participates in conversations around one of the most significant political issues of its time in Aotearoa New Zealand, one which resulted in tangible policy-making, and which was the culmination of ongoing concerted efforts to revitalize te reo Māori. Rather than proposing a sociological reading of the book, this article takes into account the political context and the debates around language and language policy in Aotearoa New Zealand at the time Frame published her final novel, which thus makes its views on language topical rather than abstract. That so much literature on The Carpathians fails to recognize this engagement with its situated domestic colonial reality, or indeed displaces the commentary on imperial and neo-imperial relations to connections between New York (where Mattina comes from) and Puamahara, is a symptom of the continued emphasis on the “inwardness” of Frame’s writing, to borrow an oft-used term. To a large extent, anchoring her writing to this realm of interiority tends to produce insular readings which avoid situating her novels in any cultural or political context.
Independently of the success of the outcomes of the Māori Language Act 1987, its symbolic importance cannot be overstated. One of the provisions made in the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti o Waitangi was that British migrants were allowed to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand in exchange for the Crown’s protection of Māori taonga. One of the early conclusions of the Tribunal of Waitangi was that the Crown had not honoured that promise of protection in relation to the Māori language, which is considered by Māori to be taonga. This ruling of the Tribunal eventually led to the Māori Language Act 1987, which was later repealed in favour of the Māori Language Act 2016. The existence of these two acts shows how the linguistic dimension of Aotearoa New Zealand culture does not relate solely to the past, but continues to provide grounds for contested sovereignty. Consequently, The Carpathians is not sealed in a historical late twentieth-century context, but remains relevant as a response to ongoing legacies of colonialism and Māori rights in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Māori Language Act 1987 declared “the Māori language to be an official language of New Zealand, to confer the right to speak Māori in certain legal proceedings, and to establish Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, and define its functions and powers” (http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1987/0176/latest/whole.html). Katharina Ruckstuhl describes the situation of the Māori language leading up to the 1987 Act as follows: an increase in English-speaking immigrants and the mandatory use of English in schools had meant that, already during the nineteenth century, the use of Māori had started to decline, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that Māori stopped being the main language used among Māori people. This was largely a consequence of Māori migration to urban centres where English was the dominant language. In addition, and in spite of the fact that they could speak the language, many adult Māori stopped teaching it to their children (2017: 4).
Also, due to restrictions to the use of te reo, many understandably believed that using it would hinder their success in and acceptance by the Pākehā world. The role of the Language Commission established by the 1987 Act was to develop a strategy for the Māori language, which was, by then, perceived as endangered. Accordingly, it took steps towards language regeneration that included “the setting up of Māori language immersion early childhood, school and tertiary education providers; Māori language radio and television; funding for community-run Māori language initiatives and regular attitudinal surveys towards the Māori language” (Ruckstuhl, 2017: 5). 5
In The Carpathians, this situation is illustrated through the conundrum that the Hanueres face. When Mattina first meets Hene, she assumes the Māori woman speaks Māori, but that is not the case: “I get by with English,” she said. “It’s the language I’ve always spoken. It’s the younger generation that are speaking Maori. I’m learning, you know, it’s not so easy when you’ve been brought up Pakeha, but it’s coming back. The trouble is, it’s been away so long.” (26)
Hene goes on to explain that the situation has changed; she does not refer to the language policies that were put in place and that amplified and gave momentum to the continued effort, on the part of Māori activists, to protect and revitalize te reo. The first kōhanga reo, for example, which are mentioned in The Carpathians, had already appeared in the early 1980s, when the Māori Renaissance in culture and literature was in full swing. Hene describes instead the separation from and the reacquaintance with Māori language and culture, both of which were strongly determined by language policy. Here, however, that separation is described as a result of Māori rejecting their language, which is not what the findings of the Tribunal of Waitangi confirmed: “We’re all changing back now. It’s strange, you know. Like someone you turned out of your house years ago, and now they’ve come home and you’re shy, and ashamed of having turned them out and you have to get to know them all over again […] You know, it’s been lonely without our language. People from overseas sometimes understand this more than those living here.” (26)
In any case, the Hanueres are spared the fate of the other residents of Kowhai Street precisely because of their efforts to reconnect with Māori language, culture, and traditions, and thus keep the memory of the land, embodied by the Memory Flower, alive.
The increased circulation of te reo Māori in the public space and the increased adoption, in all spheres, of Māori lexical items for certain terms, and not just the already prevalent ones for fauna and flora, rather than their English-language equivalents (Kennedy and Yamazaki, 1999) intensified a trait that language scholars agree is the most differentiating aspect of NZE from other Englishes around the world: “its Māori element” (Deverson, 1991: 18). That is, the most salient characteristic of NZE is the incorporation of te reo Māori words without gloss in spoken and written speech. Moreover, attitudes towards their use are a predictor of a personal political positioning towards the policy of biculturalism, as is the respect for correct pronunciation of Māori words (de Bres, 2010), a point that is also made in The Carpathians. It is first alluded to in the dialogue between the Penultimate Madge and her grandniece, and it features explicitly in the following passage, when Jake pays a visit to Puamahara after Mattina’s death and meets with the local real estate agent, whose connection to the tradition of colonial plunder of Māori land is satirically signposted in his name, Albion Cook: “Kowhais,” Albion Cook said. “You pronounce it ‘korfy’, or some such.” He repeated the pronunciation, making a sound like an angry cat. “Though why we should have to be so exact beats me. All this language business.” […] “I should think all words deserve the dignity of correct pronunciation,” Jake said sternly. Albion Cook had spoken so angrily about the pronunciation of “kowhai”, calling it a “mere word”. A mere word. (182)
But of course, in the context of NZE, no Māori word is “a mere word”, and the position voiced by Jake, an outsider, that correct pronunciation is a matter of respect, is one that separates attitudes to Māori and to te reo Māori that continue to be relevant. At the time Frame was writing this novel, there was a clear demarcation between those who had never learnt the language and those who had (either through the education system or through ties with Māori communities). As a result, mispronunciation was more common (as was the incorrect use of the English plural –s in Māori words, such as kōwhai, for example), whereas now the expected practice is the de-Anglicization of Māori pronunciation, syntax, and grammar. Among other things, the next section in this article attempts to explore how this performance of political and cultural positions fares in translation.
The Carpathians in our garden: Linguistic hybridity and universe of discourse features in translation
Published under the title Os Cárpatos no Nosso Jardim [The Carpathians in Our Garden] in 2004, and translated by António Costa Santos, a journalist, translator, and writer, The Carpathians is the only work by Janet Frame to have been published in Portugal, and is currently out of print. It appeared with a highly reputed Portuguese publishing house, Editorial Caminho, which included it in a collection that mostly published African and South American authors, and had a strong anti-colonialist bent. When the publisher was first set up in 1975, immediately after the end of the Estado Novo, the fascist dictatorship that ruled the country between 1933 and 1974, Caminho had strong ties with the Portuguese Communist Party. When they started publishing books, in 1977, focusing mostly on Portuguese and foreign fiction, they still maintained a strong political line, but over the years, the publishing house became associated with left-wing ideology in general rather than with an exclusively Communist agenda (Maués, 2019). As an example, other titles in the collection in which Frame’s book came out, which was called “Uma Terra Sem Amos” [A Land Without Masters], a line taken from the lyrics of The Internationale, include Ousmane Sembène, Liam O’Flaherty, Maxim Gorky, Bohumil Hrabal, Buchi Emecheta, Naguib Mahfouz, Paulina Chiziane, Mia Couto, and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, among others. But Editorial Caminho’s biggest claim to fame was that it was the publisher of the only Portuguese Nobel Prize winner for Literature, José Saramago, who also worked as a translator before starting to publish his own work. The collection ran from 1978 to 2004 and had a strong anti-colonialist catalogue of titles from around the world, although towards the end of its existence, the focus was almost exclusively placed on foreign authors from other Portuguese-speaking countries (Melo, 2019). Published in 2004, Os Cárpatos no Nosso Jardim, a book about the end of language, was fittingly the last title in that collection. In 2008, Editorial Caminho, one of the most iconic Portuguese publishing houses of all time, was swallowed up by the Leya Group, a giant publishing conglomerate, becoming nothing more than an imprint, a fate that has befallen several Portuguese independent publishers. As a result, The Carpathians, and other books in the collection it was published in, went out of print and now remain difficult to get hold of.
Judging from the publisher, then, and more specifically, the collection in which The Carpathians was published in Portugal, the book is clearly presented as postcolonial. Even so, both domestically and internationally, the Janet Frame myth is possibly as important as her work. Throughout her literary career, and even now, this myth remains a double-edged sword. Frame remains best and (in)famously known as the writer who was saved in extremis from a lobotomy because her first book of short stories won a significant literary prize in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is mentioned in the biographical note on the front flap of the Portuguese translation, in the same exploitative tone that is to be found frequently in relation to her work, particularly as a means to make her sound “interesting”. The biographical note continues in a rather distasteful vein: “With a life full of enriching personal experiences (she spent part of her life interned in mental institutions), Janet Frame was known for her good humour, her distance from exposure to the everyday world, and her intimate relationship with writing” (Frame, 2004, front flap; my translation). 6 The international recognition that was afforded to Frame’s work by Jane Campion’s film adaptation of the autobiographical trilogy, An Angel at My Table, is also mentioned on the front flap, as is the fact that Frame was referenced several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and that The Carpathians won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989. So, while the publishing agenda might be postcolonial, the biographical information presented still attempts to tick all the boxes of commercial appeal: the tormented writer, film adaptation, and literary prizes.
The Carpathians uses more Māori words than any of Frame’s previous books. In Translation Studies, the incorporation of segments of other languages in a text is referred to as “linguistic hybridity” (Bennett, 2019). As this is thought to be an accurate representation of many postcolonial conditions around the world, it is therefore discussed as a positive characteristic of literary texts (Bandia, 2008). Responses to the translation of linguistic hybridity in literary fiction fall within a spectrum that is flanked by two contrasting approaches. One endorses the provision of as many layers of context and explication as possible for the target readers for reasons of accessibility (this can be done through the use of paratextual devices, for example). The other contends that no mediation should be used when none is provided in the source text, and that both for reasons of agency and aesthetics, the target text should refrain from trying to convey meaning that is absent from the source. However, these two responses are only apparent opposites. Through different strategies, both acknowledge the necessity of dealing ethically with minoritized languages without repeating the patterns and the structures of colonization that have forced those languages into those positions in the first place. That entails making deliberate choices, on the part of the agents involved in the production of the target text, to impart or to withhold privileged knowledge. It should also be acknowledged that in the case of Portuguese, these choices are being decided in a colonial language, one with its own history of suppressing and arbitrating on the languages of colonized peoples.
The Portuguese text deals with linguistic hybridity in The Carpathians in the same way that the English-language text does: without trying to be an explicator or a conveyor of Māori “meaning”. Māori borrowings are used with no gloss in both editions. 7 The differentiating factor is a typographic one: Māori words appear in italics in the Portuguese text, but they do not in the English text, which means they do not blend as seamlessly with the rest of the Portuguese text as they do in the source text, and therefore their foreignness becomes highlighted. However, this is also true when words from other languages are used, so it is not a case of singling out te reo Māori, but one of singling out all non-Portuguese words. Both texts place the onus of accessing the information contained in the Māori terms on the readers, encouraging them to cross the epistemological gap between their knowledge of the world and Māoritanga.
The difficulties the Portuguese translation of The Carpathians faces relate to what André Lefevere terms “universe of discourse features” that are “particular to a given culture” and therefore “hard to translate” (1985: 235), in this case pertaining to aspects of Anglophone and/or New Zealand Anglophone culture. Some of these, as will be shown in the two passages under scrutiny below, do impact on the perception of the specificities of Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to other Anglophone cultures, and contribute to an image of a distinct national identity. These two passages are significant because they deal with two important language issues raised in the book. The first sees characters struggling to communicate across linguistic generational divides; the second portrays a linguistic divide which is geographical. For ease of reading, the English-language text will be presented first, and it will be followed by a quasi-literal back-translation, into English, of the Portuguese text. Here, the punctuation is kept as it appears in the Portuguese edition, and the page numbers presented refer to that edition, the text of which can be found in the notes.
In the first example, Madge McMurtrie, the Penultimate Madge, is visited by her niece and grandniece, and communication is complicated by Madge’s realization that she belongs to a different time to that of her relatives, a “time of highland dancing, of Saturday night socials at the Scottish Society, and the Maoris in their place, the haka as something for the All Blacks to perform before the test match with the South Island or the Springboks” (29). Madge thinks the fact her grandniece is learning Māori is worrisome; her grandniece, on the other hand, describes her great aunt’s language as “Victorian”; Madge privileges English over Māori as the language of Aotearoa New Zealand, and believes the younger generations are in the wrong. Madge does not feel inept; rather, she thinks that her point of view is valid, but her position disappears when she gets murdered. When Madge McMurtrie dies, the old language supposedly dies with her, but before she does, she holds this conversation with her relatives: Olga laughed, “Oh yes, ‘long sock’. Never fear, Aunt Madge.” (Never fear!) “Even I use words that are out of date. And where have all the creeks gone, and the paddocks?” She leaned forward, her eyes glistening, almost accusing, for the dying are targets also of accusations. “They now say streams. And fields. And the Minister of Agriculture has been talking of the New Zealandisation of Fisheries!” “Oh, Mum, don’t go on about it,” Sharon urged. “At least you can still understand what people are saying. And the language is never dead anyway, it’s the people using it that can’t keep up. And you’re not so bad, Mum. These days you even say tena koutou or haere mai without saying Hairy My and looking nervous.” “Creeks,” Madge murmured. “A lost word.” (30–31; emphasis in original) Olga laughed: — Oh yes, «a big sock». What the heck, aunt Madge. (What the heck!) Even I use words that are out of date. And where have all the tarts and floozies gone? She leaned forward, eyes glistening, almost accusing, for the dying are also targets of accusations. — Now one says broads. And chicks. And even the Minister of Agriculture has been talking about the New Zealandisation of Fisheries! — Oh mother, don’t go on about it — Sharon asked. — At least you can still understand what people are saying. Language, in any case, doesn’t die, it is the use that people give it that does not endure. And you get by, mother. You say tena koutou or haere mai without becoming nervous. — Floozies — Madge murmured. — A lost word. (46; my back-translation)
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Whereas in English, the Penultimate Madge ponders on the loss of creeks and paddocks, in Portuguese she is left mourning the loss of tarts and floozies, which introduces an element of the absurd into this episode, as the words are unrelated to the topic of conversation, including the reference to the Minister of Agriculture and the Fisheries, which appears immediately afterwards. Indeed, the word “paddock” poses a serious problem for the translator into a language that does not have a similar referent, but “creek” does not, which suggests that one translation difficulty snowballed into a whole comedic episode which might have been avoided if the word that stood for “paddocks” in Portuguese still pertained to the semantic field of the land and nature. “Tarts” and “floozies” are certainly an odd replacement for “paddocks” and “creeks”, particularly if you take into account the context of the conversation.
Again, this resonates with an aspect of Frame’s use of language mentioned by Williams: Frame’s early fiction directs a potent attack on New Zealand exceptionalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the language that reflects the conviction among Pakeha New Zealanders of their advantage over the rest of the world in respect of peace, plenty and safety, themes initiated in the effusive language of pastoral promise in the promotional campaigns of the New Zealand Company in the 1840s. The inheritance of this language is rendered in Frame’s fiction of the 1950s as ossified truisms, clichés and national boasts. (2011: 68)
This is the old language that gets destroyed in The Carpathians, and the pastoral promise that Williams mentions, so engrained in the national imagery, is the lexical field of the words that get translated very differently (paddocks, creeks). They are rejected in favour of words that can only be charitably speculated to emphasize the gap between the great-aunt and the grandniece in terms of a supposed judgement by the former on the latter. In any case, the specificity of place can be said to be weakened in the Portuguese version. The generational gap enacted in this scene is no longer one that is marked by changing attitudes towards language, biculturalism, and ultimately national self-representation in Aotearoa New Zealand, but one that highlights stereotypical and conservative gendered prejudice of older generations towards the behaviour of younger ones.
In the second example, the use of certain words causes confusion for the newly-arrived New Yorker in Aotearoa New Zealand. It should be said that whereas Mattina intuits the Māori word “kōwhai” (at first she thought it might be the name of a bird, but she quickly realizes it refers to the tree), she struggles with the specific New Zealand use of some English words, despite it being her mother tongue: “Oh, everything’s fine,” Mattina said. “I need to know about the trash, food, and so on.” “Albion Cook will have left a list of instructions. There’s a dairy around the corner if you want to buy milk. We put out a milk bottle under the letterbox and the milkman delivers every day — you buy tokens at the dairy. The rubbish is left on the verge, in a regulation blue plastic bag, every Friday morning. Early. Make sure it’s early or they’ll miss you!” Dorothy’s voice held a tone of longing, deprivation, almost of desolation. “A blue plastic bag? Must it be blue?” “Oh yes, they’ll take nothing else. Regulation blue. We had green for a time until they changed; now blue’s here for good.” Mattina felt confused. Dairy? Rubbish? Regulation blue? (22; emphasis in original) — Oh, everything is going well — Mattina said. — I need to know what it’s like with the trash, the shopping and such. — Albion Cook must have left a list of instructions. There is a place over there on the corner if you want to buy milk. We leave an empty bottle under the letterbox and the milkman delivers one every day; you can buy tokens at the place. The trash is left on the verge, in a regulation blue plastic bag, every Friday morning. Early. It has to be early, or they miss the collection! — Dorothy’s voice rose in a tone of nostalgia, of loss, almost of desolation. — A blue plastic bag? Must it be blue? — Oh, yes, yes, they won’t collect another colour. Regulation blue. We had green bags for a while, but then they changed; blue has been working for a long time. Mattina felt confused. Place? Trash? Regulation blue? (33–34; my back-translation)
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Readers of the Portuguese translation are left feeling doubly confused: confused at Mattina’s confusion, and at the awkwardness occasioned by using such a general word as “place” for what can be inferred from the text to be a shop. Part of Mattina’s bafflement is, of course, caused by the use of different words pertaining to two varieties of English: NZE and AmE. For the local characters, widely exposed to AmE through globalized American culture, this is not a problem, but for Mattina it is, and this is a running theme throughout The Carpathians. The Portuguese translation does not reflect any of this. “Dairy” is translated as “place”, which makes as much sense in Portuguese as it does in English, and the same word is used for “rubbish” and “trash”. Once again, the difference in language highlighted in the text is eliminated in Portuguese.
Whereas these examples alone do not change the text significantly, the accumulation of such translation choices does, and there are several in the Portuguese Carpathians. Other examples include instances of outright elimination of segments that cause difficulty due to the presence of universe of discourse features, as in the passage that mentions the difference in pronunciation of “scone”: “‘You know,’ she said. ‘The stone of Scone, but we say scon. We do spend a good deal of time eating’—” (Frame, 1988: 122). This becomes “— You know — she said. — [Ø] We spend a good part of our day eating” (Frame, 2004: 180; my back-translation). 10 In another passage that deals with sports, metaphors drawn from cricket and rugby (football), sports that are neither popular nor understood in any detail by Portuguese audiences, become reduced and homogenized and are turned into soccer (football) metaphors: “Already she’d heard repeated talk of ‘first and second leg’, ‘having a good innings’, ‘going in to bat’, ‘scoring a try’, where the topic had no reference to cricket, horseracing or football” (Frame, 1988: 71). This becomes “She’d already heard expressions such as «first and second leg», «being well placed in the betting» or «taking a good shot», in conversations that had nothing to do with cricket, horseracing or football [soccer]” 11 (Frame, 2004: 106; my back-translation). In another instance, the word footpath is translated in its British use: “She inspected and made notes about the houses, their architecture, their gardens, the sidewalks, known as footpaths” (Frame, 1988: 78), which is translated as “She inspected and made notes about the houses, their architecture, their gardens, the sidewalks and footpaths, known as tracks” 12 (Frame, 2004: 116; my back-translation). And in yet another instance, the word pudding loses its specific local usage: “Renée served dessert, formerly known as ‘pudding’, lemon meringue pie with fresh cream” (Frame, 1988: 59) is rendered in the following way: “Renée served for dessert something that was formerly known as pudding, lemon meringue pie with fresh cream” (Frame, 2004: 89; my back-translation). 13
Such examples can be found throughout the text and in their active elimination or substitution of referents that are distinctive to Aotearoa New Zealand, they dilute or homogenize Aotearoa New Zealand specificity. And while these examples might appear minor, the accumulation of such strategies flattens characteristics that make NZE a distinct variation of the English language. The erosion of what is specific to a situated context creates a blurred generic otherness that is indistinct from that of various postcolonial locations around the world.
Conclusion
Clearly, The Carpathians describes a time of change in language policy and the context of state biculturalism that differentiates Aotearoa New Zealand from other settler-invader contexts, but in the Portuguese text these aspects are largely effaced through particular translation strategies, such as lexical choices that flatten those specificities in favour of more generic terms. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not the Māori element that has been more problematic in translation, but those universe of discourse features that pertain to Aotearoa New Zealand’s Anglo heritage. It is in its radical difference signalled by the incorporation of borrowings from a different language that New Zealand English conveys the specificity of Aotearoa New Zealand’s national identity scripts. Because it remains untranslated, te reo Māori is accessible to those who want to engage with it, thus fulfilling the “unleashing of possibilities and impossibilities” (Frame, 1988: 123) that the linguistic event in Kowhai Street originated. It is the elements of Aotearoa New Zealand life that are Pākehā that get distorted or eliminated in their Aotearoa New Zealand specificity. Because those terms are unsuspected of having shifted in the translation, and because the translation confirms what is known to a Portuguese audience about “Anglophone cultures”, that aspect of Aotearoa New Zealand is lost to the Portuguese audience, and that is also the language that disappears in the fictive world of The Carpathians.
