LOGOS - Multilingual Translation Portal

LITERARY TRANSLATION COURSE

By Alessandro Zignani
Translation by Robert Burchill

General Index

  Preliminary definitions:
  a)  The concept of "field"
  b)  Literary language as foreshortening
  c)  Subjectivity and objectivity of literary language

PART ONE: the principles of language in the human consciousness

1.	Literary language as the expression of national cultures. a) Semantics and psychology b) The problem of tradition c) The "plastic" tradition
2.	Culture and civilization: original elements and foreign assimilations in the historical progress of languages. a) The question of sources b) In search of roots c) Acquisition strategies
3.	National languages as visions of the world: the theories of psycholinguistics. a) The conative function b) From ideas to words c) The paradox of the two hemispheres d) Bateson's "every schoolboy knows"

PART TWO: methods and styles of representation in literature languages

1.	Linguistic codes: a) Denotation b) Connotation c) Elision d) Emphasis
2.	Rhetorical devices in literary languages: metaphor and symbol. A study of different figurative sensitivities and of the collective imagination, seen through the canonical literary milieus of every age and country.
3.	The substrate of ancient languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Saxon and their influence on modern languages. The model of the Bible: translations by Aquila, Amphictyon, the Seventy and Saint Jerome, and the Vulgate.
4.	Morphological analysis of linguistic logic: centripetal languages and centrifugal languages. Root, thematic assonance, morpheme, phoneme, semanteme: organization of meaning in literary languages.

PART THREE: Literary languages ' reason and sentiment

1.	Time and space as force fields: literature as "the stage".
2.	*The theories of semiotics: tongues* and words, that which signifies and that which is signified.**
3.	The staging of characters in different literatures.
4.	The perception of colours, sounds and fragrances: synaesthesia in translation.
5.	Organization of thought and period. Pauses, shifts, foreshortened and long fields of view: translation as the logic of interior perspective.
6.	Tradition and crisis: the misdeeds of authors. Neologisms, archaisms, jargon and "speak". Theoretical definition of incompatibility between literary languages, by levels, and its resolution in practice.
7.	Max Weber's "theory of values": a cultural map for the literary translator.
8.	*The language of puns, wit* and agudeza: the comical and the satirical as markers of the frontier between the translatable and the untranslatable.**
9.	From text to initial image: the psychology of artistic creation. Notes on the unconscious process that takes the author from vision to linguistic realization.
10.	Becoming the author: the translator as actor. How to relive the cultural and existential experiences that have generated works of literature. The paradox "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and Borges' reflection on the theme.
11.	Translation as "cloning": Vittorini, Montale, Quasimodo, Calvino and Ceronetti.

Epilogue - The Burlesque

Simultaneous translators on the internet and their progressive deformations of the literary "aura". Examples, models and considerations. Our "synergical" theory of translation turned upside down by its grotesque Alter Ego.