Metaphrase and Paraphrase. Self-Translation as Exile Art

Abstract

The article regards the matter of translation and self-translation in view of 1) thetypology of translations: conservative, dialogical and radical and 2) the classicalmethodology of modern translation according to John Dryden: metaphrase,paraphrase and imitation. Translation, on the one hand, is conventionallypresented as a form of comparative majority literature, when one's ownexperience is a criterion and means of the complex comparison (explicitly,comparing textually and meta-textually, or implicitly, juxtaposing the textualaspects to the sum of knowledge about language in general), which works mosteffectively. from an abstract representation to a verbal description, when thetranslation is transformed into meta-text, correlating the original source and thetarget (translation) texts. Self-translation, on the other hand, is seen as a minoritysegment on the border of different systems – cultures, or social values, and whichhas their contradictory influence on authors, for whom practice prevails overtheory by analogy with the limitation of a personality in relation to a socialcommunity, when an alternative of correspondence is suggested, namely, themolding of the primary freedom of creation by the architectonics andrhythmic-syntactic organization of the source text, which intuitively stimulatesthe imagination and encourage figurative modulations in the target text, theso-called "obligatory freedom". Self-translation is exemplified by the linguisticstatus of Samuel Beckett and his bilingual texts, the central element of which isthe formality of action and communication, reinterpreted by the author'sinteraction with the text itself on the level of communication between texts, fillingthe vacuum of absurdity with inter-textual dialogue.