Translator or author – Vernon Sullivan’s reader games
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/RP.2009.010Keywords
Boris Vian, Vernon Sullivan, foreignnessAbstract
The article addresses the issue of the degree and manner of the translator’s visibility in a translated text. The analysis of Boris Vian’s four novels, published between 1946 and 1950 as the presumed translation of works by the non-existent American writer Vernon Sullivan, highlights the methods used by the non-existent translator in order to fake French originals as English translations. The methodology used in the analysis is based on G. Ludi’s typology of the translator’s trail. Ludi distinguishes equivalent (associated) trails, those that can be only identified in confrontation with the original, and independent trails, those that signal the cultural and linguistic difference without resorting to the original. The observations indicate that despite the lack of the actual original, the writer authenticated his mystification by leaving both types of the translator’s trails. The techniques which contribute to the impression of the translated work and the existence of the translator are connected both with the fictional world (foreign reality, exaggerated faithfulness to generic conventions resulting in pastiche) and the language of the texts (cliches from American slang, individual lexical borrowings without their adaptations to the system of the French language). In the Polish translations, the domestication of foreign reality and the unique social and cultural experience of the secondary reader significantly modify or even make impossible the detection of the American “original”.
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