Abusive translation in English-language versions of N. Gogol's Dead Souls

According to L. Venuti (1995), translation involves three transfers: from one language into another; from one time into another; and from one culture into another. These transfers can result in a domesticating translation where the target text is perceived as if originally created in the target language. Alternatively they can lead to a foreignizing translation, which may violate linguistic and cultural norms of the target language. Due to the scope of his generalizations, Venuti somewhat overlooks the changes in modern "postmodernist" approach to translation, inspired by post-sructuralism and psychoanalysis. These changes are exemplified in the English-language version of N. Gogol's Dead Souls by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (1996). The translators did not seek to achieve balance between foreignization and domestication. Rather, they created a text, which, in addition to retaining the original's ''foreigness'', highlighted the peculiarities of Gogol's unique word usage, even if it resulted in incorrect and apparently nonsensical phrasing. The following fragments illustrate Gogolian usage preserved in the translation. "Here he produced a small silence <...>'' (unusual word combination); "a neighbor <...> interested in knowing every little detail about the traveler'' (unusual word combination); "<...> in the course of all Nozdryov's babble, Chichikov rubbed his eyes several times, wanting to be sure he was not hearing it all in a dream.'' (rubbing eyes is inconsistent with the desire to verify audial information) The strange usage in these cases was repeatedly toned down by translators. The translation created by Pevear and Volokhonsky cannot be sufficiently described in terms of domestication and foreignization, as it involves an additional transfer, not reflected in Venuti's theory: from one idiolect into another. Treatment of an author's idiolect can result in naturalization (toning down the strangeness) or defamiliarization (articulating the strangeness). Extremely defamiliarizing translation is sometimes called ''abusive''. Just as domestication and foreignization made translators pledge allegiance to either the source culture or the target culture, naturalization and defamiliarization test translators' loyalty to the linguistic personality of a concrete author.

Keywords

Authors

References