When Less Is More, or the Art of Choice: The Poetics of Atwood's "Surfacing" and Its Transfer in the Russian and Latvian Translations / Kad mazāk nozīmē vairāk jeb izvēles māksla: Atvudas romāna “Iznirstot” poētika un tās apstrāde krievu un latviešu valodas tulkojumos (in English) (SCOPUS) (original) (raw)

The paper contributes towards the discussions of Surfacing s poetics and of considerations related to the requirement of equivalent effect in literary (prose) translation, as both poetics and effect-related mechanisms have gained prominence in cognitive text linguistics and in the discourse on the respective translatological implications. The main areas of research in this paper include: (1) ‘literary text’ in the broadest conceptual meaning; (2) literariness and poeticity in light of translation; (3) the relationship of ex- plicit/implicit information in the source text (ST), which may be represented both in micro-level units and through their integration into the text’s macrostructure; (4) the respective means for transferring explicit/implicit information into the target text (TT) and the translator’s task of making balanced choices. This theoretical overview provides the context for an insight (though with an element of subjectivity) into the poetic features (including the underlying ‘forces,’ general tone, and atmosphere) of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), an important 20th century novel; the paper is the first instance (to our best knowledge) of Atwood’s techniques’ being academically considered in the context of translation. These poetic features serve as an essential background and as a set of criteria for the next objective of this paper - an analysis of selected examples from the Latvian translation (translated by Silvija Brice) and Russian translation (translated by Inna Bernshteyn) that illustrate how even minor changes and additions, though acceptable in terms of their general literary features, may raise questions regarding translation quality given specific, poeticity-related requirements. The paper also seeks to provide insight into the applicability of a relatively literal (or close) prose translation.