27 research outputs found
Genesis of a Poetics of Silence
No full textThe concept of a poetics of silence has acquired a central place in literary theory in recent decades, with unreliable narration as defined by Booth (1961) playing an important part in the conceptualisation of an aesthetics of silence. Both silence and unreliable narration are key components of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing strategy. I want to show that the poetics of silence that is so constitutive of his style was already at work at the very beginning of his writing. In order to achieve this goal, this paper studies one of Ishiguro’s first published short stories, “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” (1981), in which a first-person narrator evokes memories of her time in Nagasaki during World War II. The narrator progressively turns out to be an unreliable one, due to the unspeakability of her traumatic experience. Her reluctance to report certain facts and to express some of her feelings is emphasised by the overabundance of details provided on safer subjects. The implied reader is compelled to try and fill the text’s blanks, which themselves shed light on the gap between narrator and implied author. This short story prefigures very clearly Ishiguro’s later novels, and deals with themes dear to him: memory, family, trauma and guilt, the atomic bomb as an absent centre. It also presents a very clear picture of the genesis of his writing style, centred around a poetics of silence, both at the diegetic and narratorial levels.Le concept de poétique du silence a acquis une importance centrale dans la recherche littéraire ces dernières décennies, tandis que la narration non fiable telle que Booth l’a définie en 1961 joue un rôle essentiel dans la conceptualisation d’une esthétique du silence. Narration non fiable et poétique du silence sont deux éléments clés de la stratégie d’écriture de Kazuo Ishiguro. Le but de cet article est de monter que la poétique du silence caractéristique du style d’Ishiguro était déjà à l’œuvre au tout début de sa carrière d’écrivain. A cet effet, cet article étudie l’une des premières nouvelles publiées d’Ishiguro, ‘A Strange and Sometimes Silence’ (1981), dans laquelle une narratrice à la première personne évoque des souvenirs de sa vie à Nagasaki pendant la guerre. La narratrice s’avère progressivement d’une fiabilité très limitée, du fait du caractère indicible de son traumatisme. Sa réticence à rapporter certains faits et exprimer ses sentiments est accentuée par la surabondance de détails qu’elle donne sur des sujets plus neutres. Le lecteur implicite est amené à combler les blancs du texte, qui mettent en lumière l’écart entre la narratrice et l’auteur implicite. Cette nouvelle préfigure clairement les romans plus tardifs d’Ishiguro, et aborde des thèmes qui lui sont chers : mémoire, famille, traumatisme et culpabilité, et la bombe atomique comme centre absent. Elle présente également un aperçu très clair de la genèse de son style, centré autour d’une poétique du silence, aussi bien au niveau diégétique que narratologique
[Reporté / Postponed] Congrès 2020 "Figures du hasard" / "Figures of Chance" 2020 Meeting (23-25 mars / March 2020, Paris)
No full textPRC-ANR -ALEA – Figures du Hasard/ Figures of Chance 2020 Meeting Paris, 23-25 Mars/ March 2020 Maison de la Recherche Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris-3) 5 rue des Irlandais, 75005 PARIS P.I. Anne Duprat (CERCLL-UPJV/IUF), avec / with Anne-Gaëlle Weber (Textes et cultures-U. Artois), Fiona Mc Intosh-Varjabédian (ALITHILA-U-Lille), Alison James (U. Chicago), Karin Kukkonen (U. Oslo), Divya Dwivedi IIT Dehli) Traduction des discussions / translation : John DeWitt, Kelsey Davies, Enora Lessinger,..
“La receta del pistou”: Referencias culturales francesas en la TAV The Spanish subtitling of French cultural references
No full textThis article explores the translation of French cultural references in AVT by analysing the Spanish subtitles of the series Dix pour cent (Call My Agent). An adaptation of Pedersen’s 2011 typology of ECRs and their translation strategy in subtitling is used as a theoretical frame. The quantitative analysis shows that foreignisation is the dominant strategy, while a more detailed and qualitative analysis of the data reveals that this tendency is significantly more pronounced in ECRs thematically linked to France’s strongest areas of soft power, such as luxury brand or food and drink
Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills
No full textThis article explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills as a translation of the avant-textes made of the typescripts and notes held at the Harry Ransom Center archive (Austin, Texas) on the basis of on Jakobson’s (1959) threefold definition of translation comprising intralingual translation. The dossier génétique of the novel shows the process of encoding of the narrator’s unreliability and of erasure from the text of information that is merely hinted at in the published version. The study of the different self-translational strategies at work reveal that Kazuo Ishiguro plays on different levels of implicitness and ambiguity. In particular, the second typescript contains an alternative ending much more explicit than that of the published novel. I argue that the key process at work here is not simplification, as Zethsen (2009) claims to be generally the case in intralingual translation; rather, the translational shifts at play show a tendency towards complexification through a process of erasure that makes the processing of the text harder.Cet article aborde le premier roman de Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, en tant que traduction des avant-textes composés des tapuscrits et notes archivés au Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas). L’analyse se fonde sur la définition de la traduction proposée par Jakobson (1959), dont l’une des catégories est la traduction intralinguale. Le dossier génétique du roman révèle le processus d’inscription de la non-fiabilité de la narratrice, ainsi que l’effacement d’informations presque imperceptibles dans la version publiée. L’étude des différentes stratégies d’autotraduction mises en place par l’auteur montre que Kazuo Ishiguro joue sur différent niveaux d’implicite et d’ambiguïté. Ainsi, le second tapuscrit contient une fin plus explicite que celle du roman publié. Cet article suggère que le procédé clé n’est pas ici la simplification, que Zethsen (2009) considère comme la principale tendance en traduction interlinguale. Au contraire, les variations traductionnelles révèlent une tendance à la complexification qui rend la compréhension du texte plus ardue
La traduction du silence dans les romans de K. Ishiguro ˸ une approche narratologique de l’hypothèse de l’explicitation
No full textCette thèse explore la traduction de quatre romans de Kazuo Ishiguro en cinq langues : le français, l'espagnol, l'hébreu, le portugais et le turc. La centralité de l'implicite et du non-dit dans le pacte narratif appelle à une participation active du lecteur implicite, ce qui a naturellement des conséquences sur le procédé de traduction : d'une part, le traducteur est en premier lieu un lecteur, et de l'autre la traduction comporte un risque communicationnel accru (Becher 2010a). Afin d'explorer le défi lié à la recréation de la poétique du silence à l’œuvre dans la stratégie narrative de ces romans, le présent travail croise l'étude des universaux de traduction à celle de la poétique narrative, testant au niveau narratif l'hypothèse de l'explicitation proposée par Blum-Kulka en 1986. Cet universel de traduction potentiel postule l'existence d'une tendance à l'explicitation dans le passage du texte source au texte cible. L'approche narratologique adoptée ici constitue une nouvelle perspective dans l'étude de l'explicitation en traduction. Les approches linguistique et cognitive sont présentes avant tout pour permettre de situer l'approche narratologique dans le champ de l'étude de l'explicitation. Les résultats obtenus montrent une tendance globale à l'implicitation de la stratégie narrative dans les récits caractérisés par un pacte narratif collaboratif. Cette implicitation peut prendre la forme d'un remplissage des blancs narratifs et d'une résolution de l'ambiguïté du texte, ou passer par la disparition d'indices textuels permettant au lecteur implicite d'accéder au sous-texte. Ces résultats suggèrent que l'universel de traduction en jeu n'est pas l'explicitation, mais plutôt la réduction de voix narratives complexes (Chesterman 2010).This thesis explores the translations of four of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels into five target languages – French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. The centrality of the implicit and the unsaid in the narrative pact entails the implied reader’s active participation and naturally has consequences on the translation process, both because the translator is initially a reader and due to the increased communicative risk involved in translation (Becher 2010a). In order to explore the challenge of recreating the verbal restraint and poetics of silence at work in these novels’ respective narrative strategies, this investigation crosses the study of translation universals with that of narrative poetics, testing at the narratological level the explicitation hypothesis put forward by Blum-Kulka in 1986. This potential universal of translation posits the existence of a tendency towards greater explicitness in target texts than in corresponding source texts. The focus on narrative poetics adopted here constitutes a new approach to the study of explicitation in translation; linguistic and cognitive explicitness are considered chiefly in order to situate narratological explicitness in relation to them. The results obtained show a generalised tendency towards implicitation of the narrative strategy in unreliable narratives, i.e. in narratives where indirectness is a central narrative device. This implicitation can correspond to blank-filling and resolution of ambiguity, or to the disappearance of the textual clues pointing the implied reader to the subtext below the surface narrative. This in turn suggests that the translation universal at play here is not explicitation but reduction of complex narrative voices (Chesterman 2010)
"The rule is no fuss": An analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s shift to unnatural narration from the perspective of intralingual translation and editing
No full textIn this chapter, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled is approached from the perspective of intralingual self-translation, exploring the genesis of the novel’s narrative strategy of unnatural narration (Richardson, 2000), through an analysis of the Ishiguro Archive at the Harry Ransom Center. The analysis focuses in particular on translational shifts linked with the implementation of what Ishiguro describes as “dream techniques”, which aim to replicate dream logic in the fictional world. The strategies observed consist primarily in omission, shortening and implicitation, through the removal of rationalising explanations and of manifestations of the narrator’s surprise at the unlikeliness of the situations he encounters. The intralingual translation at work from the first draft of the experiment to the published novel thus gives the narrative a firmer anchoring in unnatural narration
'Just pull a Bardot' : subtitling French cultural references in ‘Call my agent’
No full textThe translation of cultural references has taken centre stage in translation studies in the last few decades, particularly since the cultural turn observed in translation studies from the 1980s onwards. With the emergence of audiovisual translation (AVT) as an increasingly important subfield of translation studies, new tailored typologies of cultural references and corresponding translation strategies started appearing at the turn of the century. This paper investigates the interplay between the multiple sets of challenges faced by interlingual subtitlers dealing with source texts where cultural references abound, through a case study of the subtitles in English and Spanish of the French series Call My Agent (Dix pour cent).
Relying primarily on Newmark’s classification of culture-specific items (CSIs, 1988) and Pedersen’s typology of translation strategies for extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs, 2011), I provide a contrastive overview of the strategies used for the translation of cultural references in both languages. The results obtained show that foreignisation prevails in both English and Spanish, and that French cultural references with high cultural significance (e.g. cuisine, fashion and cinema) are more likely to be foreignised
Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills
No full textThis article explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills as a translation of the avant-textes made of the typescripts and notes held at the Harry Ransom Center archive (Austin, Texas) on the basis of on Jakobson’s (1959) threefold definition of translation comprising intralingual translation. The dossier génétique of the novel shows the process of encoding of the narrator’s unreliability and of erasure from the text of information that is merely hinted at in the published version. The study of the different self-translational strategies at work reveal that Kazuo Ishiguro plays on different levels of implicitness and
ambiguity. In particular, the second typescript contains an alternative ending much more explicit than that of the published novel. I argue that the key process at work here is not simplification, as Zethsen (2009) claims to be generally the case in intralingual translation; rather, the translational shifts at play show a tendency towards complexification through a process of erasure that makes the processing of the text harder
