AWEJ Special Issue on Translation No. (2) 2013 pp. 200-211
Translation in the Discourse of Modern Experience: The Modernists’ Reckoning with Polyphony as an Aesthetic Device
Fatiha Kaïd Berrahal
Department of English Studies
Faculty of Letters and Languages
Amar Telidji University
Laghouat, Algeria
Abstract:
The present paper discusses the modernist authors’ process in blurring the lines between literature and translation as part of their various aesthetic experiments. In contention with their contemporary English linguistic and cultural agendas, the modernist writers have internalized translational strategies to challenge the national identity and culture. Since many of them straddled two cultures, the resort to translation was inevitable introducing not only literature to the intercultural communication but translation as well to working mechanisms of culture. Taking as a point of departure the nature and function of translation as a paradigm for modernist thought, I tend to survey Jacob Korg’s idea of ‘the verbal revolution’, Venuti’s views and the emergence of various translation types among which is the intertextual translation or transmitting and introducing a foreign word into a text. Such a meeting of two different languages in literature has indeed been the focus of many scholars in translation studies echoing Bakhtin’s ‘polyphony’. Second, considered as a key to cross-cultural communication, the paper offers insights about translation as an aesthetic experiment of the modernists in their attempts to forge the discourse of modern experience based on the in
Keywords: translation, modernism, culture, extraterritoriality, intertextual translation, polyphony