The Translation of Metaphors in William H. Gass’s Novellas
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/nvts.2007.11Keywords:
metaphor, William GassAbstract
This thesis is a study of metaphor translation applied to a literary text, Cartesian Sonata and other Novellas (1998), by the American writer William Gass. It combines a theoretical- analytical framework on metaphor and translation, with a practical part, in which I offer the first translation of this collection of novellas.
The first chapter is devoted to a critical review of the works of William Gass. Moving from his peculiar interpenetration of philosopher, essayist and fiction writer, I try to highlight the key points of his aesthetics – especially its fascination for language and for metaphor – and to place Cartesian Sonata within the wide and diversified corpus of his works.
The second chapter is devoted to the debate on metaphor and translation. First, I trace a necessarily selective path through the millenarian history of thoughts on metaphor, from Aristotle to the modern cognitive theories. Then I offer a critical review of the debate on metaphor translation, elaborating an approach that combines a contextual study of figurative language with the perspectives offered by recent cognitive studies.
The third chapter presents the analysis of my case-study. I isolate a series of emblematic cases, leaving to the rich paratext of the translation the analysis of several others (including issues other than metaphorical language). In particular, I try to reconstruct the metaphorics of the text along some thematic lines, namely the three key themes of Cartesian philosophy (mind, matter and God), which run through the four novellas and give the collection its deep structure. Then I describe the strategies used in the translation, stressing the constraints imposed by the intermingling of linguistic, stylistic and cultural factors, which represents the true challenge of metaphor translation.
When the rendition of the various levels of information collides with the imperative brevity of expression – true trademark of metaphors – translators have to define a hierarchy of priorities according to their critical reading of the text. The norm suggested by Raymond van den Broeck (1981) fittingly describes the problem, when it defines translatability as keeping an inverse proportion with the quantity of information manifested by the metaphor, and the degree to which this information is structured in the text.
My own experience of translation, premise and result of these considerations, represents the second part of the thesis, and indeed an essential one, for it feeds and integrates the analysis seen so far. At the end of the thesis, a detailed bibliography in three parts covers the works of William Gass, the scholarship on metaphor and translation, and the tools used in the translation.