TRANSLATION AND ITS HYBRIDIZING ROLE WITHIN THE SEMIOSPHERE: FENOLLOSA -HEARN - POUND - NOGUCHI

Abstract

The present contribution takes cultural semiotics as its theoretical vantage point ontranslation, and delves specifically in the concepts of diversity and standardness asthey develop characteristically within the semiosphera (Lotman [1984] 2005).Standardness and diversity define the complex maze of intra-cultural relations thatprefigure and possibilitate the intercultural relation, especially through translation.The semiosphere is the sociocultural system within which the standard texts of theculture coexist with the rest in a hierarchy that places the standard at a position ofprominence. The standard texts of a culture occupy a core position in a hierarchythat defines them as forming the educated core. They are texts that partake of theprestige and pre-eminence of the group that circulates them, distinguishable fromthe substandard texts in the same culture. Within a semiosphere the standard is anorm and the reference point for the interpretation of symbolic value, which, forlanguage and translation studies, relies on the subcultural (High vs. Low)differentiation existing in the intraculture and conditioning the forms of crossculturaltransference. On one hand we claim that translation per se should beradically reconceptualized as being the process that possibilitates communicationthrough an understanding of diversity within –and through– discourse and, also, as aprocess of management of that diversity in pursuit of interpretative convergence(intertextual, intersubjective, intercultural) from an initial position of linguisticdivergence. This divergence is resolved in translation. On the other hand we need tounderline the importance of the individual translators’ task within these widersociocultural processes.

The important role played by translators in the modernization of theirsemiospheres will be discussed presently in relation to a highly significant case,which was the onset of Anglo-American Imagism and Literary Modernism at the endof the Meiji Era, or the end of the Victorian era. It was not coincidental that afterdecades of novel translation work (from Japanese into English and from English intoJapanese) conducted by translators like Noguchi, Hearn, Fenollosa, or Ezra Pound,the modernization of Japanese and Anglo-American literature would take place. Inthe process of translating, these translators were learning from Source textualityhow to write Target texts whose new hybrid forms taught them, and the literary profession surrounding them, how to renovate the standards of their nativesemiospheres.