Jean Boase-Beier

Stylistic Approaches to Translation

Introduction: Style in Translation 1. The role of style in translation 1.1 Reading and writing style in translation 1.2 Before stylistics: the spirit of a text 1.3 Universals of style and creative transposition 1.4 Contextual, pragmatic and cognitive aspects of style and translation 1.5 Relativity and thinking for translation 1.6 Translating literary and non-literary texts 2. Theories of reading and relevance 2.1 Reading, style and the inferred author 2.2 Implication, relevance and minimax 2.3 Relevance theory and translating for relevance 3. The translators choices 3.1 Style and choice 3.2 Clues, games and decisions 3.3 Recreated choices in translation 4. Cognitive stylistics and translation 4.1 The cognitive turn in stylistics and translation studies 4.2 Translating the mind in the text 4.3 Ambiguity and textual gaps 4.4 Foregrounding, salience and visibility 4.5 Metaphor, mind and translation 4.6 Iconicity, mimesis and diagesis 4.7 Cognitive stylistics and the pretence of translation 5. A stylistic approach in practice 5.1 Elements of a stylistic approach to translation 5.2 Using style to translate mind 5.3 Ambiguous translation 5.4 Attracting attention: patterns and other deviant structures 5.5 Metaphorical thought translated 5.6 Keeping the echo: translating for iconicity 6. Conclusion

Knowing and Not Knowing: Style, Intention and the Translation of a Holocaust Poem

My aim in this article is to consider the role of the literary translator both as close reader of an original text and as creator of a new text which preserves essential characteristics of the original. Questions such as the intentions and choices of the original author will clearly play a large part in decisions on how to translate, and, using the notion of translation as interpretative use developed within relevance theory, I shall argue here that a translator cannot avoid such questions, and must use clues in the style of the poem to provide answers. As an illustration I look at a German poem about the Holocaust and consider how its central ambiguity can be rendered in English.

Translation and the representation of thought: The case of Herta Müller

A number of recent studies consider how the style of a text is recreated by a translator, and what issues this raises for the study of the translated text and its reception, and for both stylistics and translation studies more generally. But the changes that translation makes to perspective and structures of narrative in the text have rarely been studied. In this article I suggest how one might consider changes of this nature that have come about when the works of the Nobel-Prize-winning German-Romanian writer Herta Müller were translated into English, and the possible effects of such changes on the construction of fictional minds by the English reader. These changes are of particular importance in this case because the novels deal with repression of various types – in the community and the family, by the state – and focus especially on the disjunction between thinking and speaking, and the uncertainty of what others are thinking. Considering how specific aspects of narrative perspective change when these novels are translated raises potentially interesting questions both for the study of translation and for the study of narrative.

Translation and Timelessness

Abstract Translating poetry raises various issues to do with the relationship between form and meaning, with linguistic and cultural relativity, and with the opposition between adapting the (foreign) world of the poem to the target audience and requiring the audience to enter that world. In this article I use the translation of poetry by German-Jewish poet Rose Ausländer to consider some of these issues as they affect, and are affected by, an apparent linguistic mismatch between English and German in the expression of time and uncertainty.

Translating the Poetry of Nelly Sachs

German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, a writer who fled the Nazis, and a translator whose translations of Swedish Modernist poets profoundly affected her poetic expression, is often considered a difficult poet. Her poems have been translated into English by several different translators. A comparison of different translated versions is thus possible, and Boase-Beier argues in this chapter that such a comparison not only sheds light upon the translations themselves and the particular interpretations that underlie them, but also, by highlighting points of ambiguity or stylistic complexity, upon the original poems. The insights thus gained, in the context of critical engagement with her work in its original German, can help us to see how future English translations of her poems might be undertaken and presented.

My shadow in Dachau: poems by victims and survivors of the concentration camp

My Shadow in Dachau is an important book. Poetry is best placed, of all writing that bears witness to the Holocaust, to give us individual thoughts, feelings, and voices. And a great deal of work h...

Bringing Home the Holocaust: Paul Celan's Heimkehr in German and English

This article considers what it means to read Paul Celans poem ‘Heimkehr’ with a view to translating it. Reading for translation is understood as a particular type of reading that constructs a poetics of the text as an expression of a particular way of thinking. The importance of etymology, the exploitation of polysemy and homonymy, the use of ambiguity and other stylistic features, are discussed with reference to the historical context of the original and possible counterparts in the translation. Such stylistic features of the poem are shown to be crucial both to a poetic representation of the post-Holocaust situation itself and to the problem of what Holocaust representation can and should do.

Using Translation to read Literature

Literary translation, which I understand to include the translation of texts that have been or are likely to be deemed literary, and also the translation of any text in a way appropriate to literature (cf. Boase-Beier 2011: 43), as well as the study of both, has a history of borrowing from other disciplines. When James Holmes set out an agenda for translation studies in the early 1970s (Holmes 1988: 67), he made it clear that, just as it would have applications to other areas, it would also need to incorporate views from related fields.