Milorad Pavić Lost in Translation: Analysis of the Dictionary of the Khazars translation from Serbian to Italian

Abstract

This paper features, through a linguistic analysis of the translation of the novel Dictionary of the Khazars from Serbian into Italian, some of the basic issues concerning translation: to transpose, apart from the faithful meaning and form of a literary text, the very style of the author, as well as to recognise the function and impact a certain expression has on the reader. With regard to this, the paper primarily analyses the expressions from the aforementioned novel that characterise the unique writing style of Milorad Pavic, which attempts at infusing prose with a poetic material. In doing so, Pavic uses the existing phraseological expressions as a subtext, but he blurs their meaning by changing their form. The translator, as a link between the sender and the receiver of the information, is supposed to transpose such linguistic constructions to the target language in their original form, thus making the reader familiar with the original text. Through a comparative analysis of the original text and translations of Pavic’s stylistic expressions, the author comes to the conclusion that what can be deemed as successfully translated expressions are those in which all the original elements of the writer’s poetics are preserved and suggests that, when translating a writer such as Pavic, the literal translation method should be preferred to the free one.