“Increasing quality in retranslations?: Cavafy’s swift conquest of Spanish”

Cavafy is, among the Modern Greek writers, both the most translated into Spanish and the one whose works are most edited in Spain. However, the Cavafian work was a latecomer into the Spanish-speaking world: partial translations were not published until the 60s and the first full translation was not published until 1976. From then on, though, more than a quarter of the Modern Greek literature books edited in Spain account for editions and re-editions of the different translations done so far.

It comes as no surprise that all those retranslations, done by many different translators in such a short period, are all different and respond to the individual ideas and concepts that each of the translators had about how their translations should look. Five of those translators can be highlighted as being the most representative: J. M. Álvarez, L. Cañigral, M. Castillo-Didier, P. Bádenas and R. Irigoyen.

An analogical and holistic analysis was carried out on a corpus of five original poems with their five respective translations, based on current theories on quality assessment models (Hurtado, Waddington, Nobs, Rothe-Neves, Osimo, etc.) in order to determine in a quantitative way the average quality of every such translation. The aim was to obtain a numerical value —something usual for didactics though rarely done for literature—, that would allow contrasting and measuring quality in many ways that are inapproachable when relying just upon qualitative analysis.

The results of such an analysis reveal some interesting aspects of this re-translation activity, from the patent changes in sense of the first full translation (presumably through Italian rather than from the original) to the curious phenomenon of a steady increase in the average quality of the new translations regarding the previous one(s). Such increase in quality raises, nevertheless, a question that cannot be answered without further studies: is this increase inherent to retranslations or is it due to our assessment instruments, which favor most recent translations?

Enrique Íñiguez-Rodríguez graduated in Translation and Interpreting at University of Granada, and spent a nine-month Erasmus stay at the Ionian University of Corfu, Greece. He completed a MA in Creative and Humanistic Translation at the University of Valencia and he is currently a Ph.D. student at the Jaume I University. Since 2010 he is professionally engaged in translation from Greek and English into Spanish, collaborating with companies both in Spain and Greece. His research focuses on quality and literary translation from a functionalist and integrative perspective.