Ludic effects in fiction: A case study of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and its Russian and Ukrainian translations

Abstract

This article discusses translation strategies involved in reproducing ludic effects in Russian and Ukrainian translations of Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Ludic effects, embedded in the text, outline the potential result(s) of literary gaming. Created in different games, a number of ludic effects trigger ludic stylistics – a new heuristic area of linguistic “ludology”. The paper defines ludic stylistics as an artistic phenomenon manifested in literary text due to unconventional combinations of various linguistic means. In Coetzee’s Disgrace, ludic stylistics is the result of psychonarrative games aimed to transform plot-driven narratives into experience-centred. Psychonarrative games are governed by two principles – “external via internal” and semantic intrusiveness through semantic, plot-building, and compositional games represented at the macro- and microlevels of literary text. The study focuses on sematic games which enable construing new, emergent textual senses which bring the personage’s / narrator’s unceasing, obsessive experience of traumatic events to the fore. The paper looks at the translation strategies of rendering ludic effects in the translations of Coetzee’s Disgrace from two perspectives – intentional and receptive. The reproduction of such effects in Russian and Ukrainian translations of Disgrace is grounded in lexico-semantic, syntactic, associative-figurative, and functional equivalence, as well as respective loss, and gain.