Output details

Edward Hopper

In translating Catalan poet Ernest Farrés’s book, Edward Hopper (2006), Venuti sought to explore several issues, namely linguistic and cultural minority, ekphrasis or the verbal representation of visual art, and the translation of ekphrastic poetry. The project involves three kinds of translation: 1) Hopper’s paintings which are probing representations of modern American culture according to his psychological state, nostalgic, voyeuristic, lonely; 2) Farrés’s poetic adaptations of the paintings which stage an emulative rivalry in which a writer in a minor language and literature ventriloquizes a canonical painter in a hegemonic culture; and 3) Venuti’s interlingual translations which recreate that rivalry while critiquing both Hopper’s paintings and Farrés’s poems. The relations between these translations are at once interpretive and interrogative.

To perform this exploration, Venuti addressed the issues in the introductory essay and annotations, but also developed revealing translation strategies. He aimed to write English-language translations that function as poems in their own right, relatively autonomous from the Catalan texts they translate, but that nonetheless establish relations of equivalence to those texts as well as to Hopper’s paintings. The conceptual parameters of his translation practice derive from four kinds of research: translation theory, especially the notions of foreignizing and deconstructive translation found in Friedrich Schleiermacher and Philip E. Lewis; literary theory and poetics, mainly commentary on ekphrasis and on free verse, including James Heffernan and James Longenbach; art history, concentrating on Hopper’s oeuvre and biography, notably the specialist Gail Levin; and archival documents relating to Hopper and his wife Josephine Nivision, their correspondence, diaries, and record books. While maintaining a semantic correspondence, Venuti translated Farrés’s poems into a heterogeneous English that not only resembles the poet’s own varied Catalan lexicon but samples Hoppers’ American vernacular. The translation bridges yet calls attention to the gap between Farrés’s poems and Hopper’s paintings.