Paragraphs on Translation by Peter NewmarkReview by: Maureen T. KrauseThe Modern Language Journal, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 269-270Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers AssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/329050 .

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Reviews 269

reader. It appears that the Qasidahs, highly regarded as a model of poetic excellence within the Islamic system, are not available in accepta- bly translated terms because of an incom- patibility of the poetics between Islamic and European cultures, and perhaps, because no translator has yet solved the subtle problems of conveying the nuances of the corresponding images of acculturation. On the other hand, well-known texts can be deemed partially unac- ceptable at a certain historical moment and cleverly adapted, with their final effect on the reader depending on a combination of devices employed by the rewriter. Excellent and thor- oughly enjoyable examples are provided from Homer's Iliad and from Catullus's second poem.

In the final four chapters, the author analyzes categories of rewriting other than translations. For example, using the works of seventeenth- century Dutch writer Willem Godschalk van Focquenbroch, Lefevere dissects how the use of historiography can turn an author who was very popular in his time, and continued being so for a century after his death, into a nonperson, vil- ified and edited out, only to be presented recently again in a somewhat kinder light.

Another form of rewriting is anthologizing, with all its agonizing decisions of inclusion, exclusion, and delicate balancing of practical demands made by the publishers, the ultimate dispensers of patronage. We are made aware of these processes in a chapter concerned with the intricacies of anthologizing African literature. The final two chapters deal with the manipu- lative and powerful worlds of criticism and editing. As is true throughout the entire book, the reader is given an abundance of precise examples, smoothly connected in elegant prose.

Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame is a useful and scholarly contribu- tion to Translation Studies, a field of growing importance. The book should appeal to anyone interested in translation, comparative litera- tures, literary and social history, and literary theory.

ALAIN SWIETLICKI University of Wisconsin, Madison

NEWMARK, PETER. Paragraphs on Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1993. Pp. x, 176. $59.00, cloth; $19.50, paper.

Upon a cursory glance, Newmark's book appears to fill a gap in the library of translation theory, namely the need for an encyclopedic lexicon of linguistic and translatological termi- nology. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the work is merely a compilation of twenty col- lections of discrete, titled "paragraphs" of vary- ing length and merit. The entries are not even alphabetized but arranged in clusters accord- ing to the date of their original publication in twenty issues of The Linguist.

The entries are essentially the musings and pontifications of a professor of translation and self-proclaimed translator, who proves his incompetence with his translation of the Brech- tian aphorism "Erst das Fressen, dann die Moral" as "First comes the grub and then the morality" (p. 76; emphasis mine)-which, in accord with Brechtian dramaturgy, should read "the moral." Newmark's ineptitude is underscored by his rendering of Schndppchen as "little bite," when "tidbit" is the proper term for the context, namely Gunther Grass's statement that the GDR will become a "tidbit" for the Federal Republic (p. 77).

Newmark superficially treats philology in translation, translation equivalence, translation theories, and the subordination of translation to the source and target languages, syntax, logic, and the translator's ideology, among other things. The better discourses concern intensifiers, drama translation, creativity in translation, methods of translating French con- cisely, and translating alliteration. Other entries address such self-evident subjects as recasting long sentences, punctuation, ellipses, untranslatability, the purpose of translation, and the "inability" of German dictionaries to keep pace with new compounds. Newmark also includes shallow book reviews, vapid aphorisms, and extraneous matters such as the expense of renaming Leningrad. His treatment of some topics is nonsense, e.g., technical translation, religious translation, mistranslations, and transference. The overall weakness of the book is due in part to the breadth of the intended audience-from the general public through translation theorists and academics. Conse- quently, it offers little to any one group.

Two sections address foreign language teach-

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270 The Modern Language Journal 78 (1994)

ing. Newmark advocates the outmoded ap- proach of using literal translation to promote foreign language comprehension, enhance memorization, and expand vocabulary. He also presents the well-known method of introducing vocabulary based on word frequencies as if it were a new concept. Moreover, he recommends using translation to verify the student's acquisi- tion of the language. Far superior methods have existed for years. Nonetheless, he does contribute some suitable concepts for foreign language pedagogy and instruction, e.g., teach- ing intervocalic and interconsonantal relation- ships, common Indo-European roots, the mean- ings of prefixes and suffixes. He advocates applying Verner's Laws in teaching German-a fairly innovative notion.

While this book offers nothing new to transla- tion pragmatics or translatology, it does present a few good ideas for language teaching theory and methodology. The brief descriptions, how- ever, are not worth the exorbitant price of the book. According to the cover notes, the author is controversial. This publication clearly dem- onstrates the nature of that controversy. More- over, Newmark-an Englishman-reveals him- self as arrogant and ethnocentric in his dismissal of German Romantic poetry as "rub- bish" (p. 53)-a term accurately descriptive of his own work.

MAUREEN T. KRAUSE Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Turkish Linguistics Today. Ed. Hendrik Boeschoten & Ludo Verhoeven. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. Pp. x, 194. $48.72, cloth.

This helpful volume addresses a variety of aspects on Turkish linguistics and begins with a general discussion of the language, combining "traditional Turkology with current linguistic theories." Republican Turkish, the editors say, is not really based on the Istanbul dialect of the educated, but rather emerges after 1928 with the Latin alphabet, which reflects the nearby phonology of "an eastern Rumeli basis" (p. 1). This dialect and others throughout Anatolia still show deviations from a strict vowel har- mony, while in morphology, the language lost, following 1928, only the Persian izafet construc- tion. (Curiously, Armenian, no doubt as a liter- ary flourish, employed this construction as

early as the seventh century.) Turkish syntax has been a neglected field, and the agglutina- tive nature of the language has "enticed scholars to treat Turkish syntax as morphosyn- tax only" (p. 8). In reforming the lexicon, the Istanbul dialect had a most minimal influence, and it was the eastern dialects that provided the bulk of the new authentically Turkish vocabu- lary. The differences between Ottoman and Republican Turkish are, thus, a result of all these changes that took place after the alphabet reform.

The editors give some interesting figures on mother tongues. In Turkey, for example, there are six million Kurdish speakers and four hun- dred thousand Arabic speakers. Incredibly, there remain sixty thousand Armenians, and although there is a small but active Armenian intellectual cadre, many Armenians speak their language poorly and largely refuse to speak any- thing but Turkish in public. Other small minor- ities remain: Circassian speakers, Laz and Geor- gian, Jewish (Ladino), and a small fragment of the surviving Asoris whose language is now called Turoyo. Curiously, in a world where women are usually the bearers of conservative custom, more Turoyo fathers than mothers address their children in their dialect. Finally, some figures on literacy are provided. They fall precipitously, for males, from ninety-one per- cent in Istanbul to seventy-seven in Kars, an area dense in Kurdish speakers; the figures for female literacy are almost shocking: seventy-five percent in Istanbul, and a mere thirty-nine per- cent in Kars.

The text is divided into five sections: phonol- ogy, syntax, semantics, Turkish language acqui- sition, and some general comments on lan- guage variation. The section on phonology by van der Hulst and van de Weijer, largely a con- servative view of this Anatolian phenomenon, discusses the phoneme inventory and the stress system but breaks new ground by availing itself of "unary components which may extend over supersegmental domains like the world" (p. 11).

In the syntax section, Jaklin Kornfilt, a shin- ing light among Turkologists today, affirms her belief in generative principles. Lexical entries are plugged into deep structure, but the model of grammar is now modular, and the terminol- ogy is that of Government and Binding theory. She discusses various aspects of grammar, but finds, inter alia, that there is no satisfactory account of Turkish relative clauses "in all their aspects" (p. 92).

Birgit Nilsson deals with semantics and con-

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