Abstract
The article examines the notion of point of view (POV) in translation by drawing on examples from selected Polish translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. First, the paper deals with the question of narratologically-oriented research in translation studies and outlines a short history of the concept of point of view with an overview of definitions proposed by literary scholars. It is argued that recent linguistic analyses of point of view have contributed to examining the notion of POV in literary translations. The article also systematises different research approaches that have been developed to study “point of view in translation.” Finally, the paper follows the linguistically-oriented conception of point of view in order to examine translation shifts with regard to the linguistic indicators of POV, including time markers and modality, based on examples from Polish translations of Poe’s short story.
Highlights
We can state with high probability that this will be even more so when the two languages differ substantially in terms of grammatical categories and features. This short analysis illustrates that looking into equivalence in terms of literary point of view should include a study of an array of linguistic markers
An analysis of point of view in translation can indicate how the translator interprets and relates to the experimental and unconventional narrative techniques employed in a story
Those academics who have studied the concept, drawing on linguistics, stylistics, and cognitivism, have argued that narrative point of view (POV) “is the very essence of a story’s style, what gives it its ‘feel’ and ‘colour’.”50 This was the issue addressed by Charlotte Bosseuax, who utilised computer-assisted research to determine the frequency of translational shifts and its effect on the story’s feel
Summary
Keywords: translation studies, narratology, point of view, linguistics, stylistics Słowa kluczowe: translatologia, narratologia, punkt widzenia, językoznawstwo, stylistyka The paths of narratology and translation studies have not crossed for a long time, and few experts in both fields have pondered over how the translation process can affect the narrative structure, i.e. what kind of shifts can occur and what interventions are or can be made in this regard by translators. When Mieke Bal cites the opening passage of Lady with Lapdog by Chekhov as an example of “ambiguous focalization,” she indirectly assumes that the translated version in no way deviates from the short story’s original narrative in terms of its construction.[1] Strikingly, analogous examples can be found in other works in narratology by such prominent theoreticians as Franz K. Stanzel, Gerard Genette, and Kate Hamburger,[2] which distinctly shows a general pattern rather than a confined phenomenon. The question regarding this blind spot in translation studies, or the lack of narratologically-oriented research, has only recently been addressed by experts in the fields. A pioneering work on the subject was the 2014 issue of Language and Literature on “Narration and Translation,” which offered some plausible explanations behind this state of affairs but also brought into focus the potential contact points between the two areas.[3] In the opening essay of the volume the authors reflect on the history of scholarly interest in translation, pointing out Agnieszka Łaszczuk that its early linguistic orientation was later fiercely denounced for its restrictiveness, thus leading to the so-called cultural turn in translation studies. As a result, since the late 1970s, it is argued, “translation studies have drawn on models and methods from various relevant disciplines other than linguistics,” while “the textual level” has been left beyond the scope of research.[4] This focus on the external aspects of translations rather than on the texts themselves has also halted narratological investigations.[5] Without citing empirical evidence but rather stating it as a reasonable assumption, let us also state that equivalence in terms of principal narrative techniques is easy to achieve probably in all natural languages due their common and universal features. This, of course, should be addressed in detail and studied by linguists, although with high probability we can assume that the general structural aspects of the narrative are not severely affected by the process of translation, except for in cases when the translator strives for a form of adaptation. If he or she seeks to represent the original as truthfully and adequately as possible, no matter how obsolete this may sound today, the translation should not have a major impact on aspects “strictly pertaining to the narrated.” Such an observation was put forward by Gerald Prince, who wrote that “some fundamental narrative features other than voice, such as the order of presentation of events [...] are hardly affected by translation, if at all.”[6] Similar yet contrasting remarks were made by David Lodge, who argued that “some of the meaning attributed to a narrative will remain constant when it is translated from one natural language to another, [...] such as the writer’s choice of narrative point of view, or the treatment of time,” as they belong to the deep structure of the text.[7] Academics have effectively proved, however, that the translation does indeed affect some elements of the narrative structure, including time and place rendering, narrational gendering, or focalisation, due to various shifts resulting from the semantic and syntactic choices made by the translator as well as grammatical nonequivalences between the source and target languages.[8] This essay will look into Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and some of its respective translations into Polish. The purpose is to analyse how certain markers of the literary point of view are subject to shifts in the process of translation from English into Polish. By doing so, the aim is to make a modest contribution to narratologically-oriented research on literary translation. The limited scope of the paper does not allow to outline a comprehensive history Point of View in Translation: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado... of the concept of point of view in literary studies, as a thorough investigation into the subject would require much more space due to the vastness of the theories and models. It is, however, methodologically valid to draw a rough sketch of the term’s use and to systematise how the issue of “point of view in translation” has been studied so far. Point of view (POV) as a term in literary studies has attracted much scholarly attention since the beginning of the twentieth century, when Henry James elaborated on the concept in a series of prefaces to his novels.[9] However, as Kristin Morrison pointed out, contrary to common views, James frequently used point of view not as a critical term but in the sense of mental view, philosophy, attitude, or opinion.[10] It was the writer’s follower Percy Lubbock who, drawing on remarks made by James, proposed a coherent theory of point of view and defined the term as the relation in which “the narrator stands towards the story he unfolds,”[11] introducing an opposition between telling and showing.[12] Lubbock’s typology, comprising four points of view, was later reformulated by Norman Friedman, who distinguished eight types and added new criteria, e.g. the consistency and/or change of using a given POV.[13] Point of view was also a central concept in the classic Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth, where it was used as an umbrella term pertaining to what others have called voice and the character’s perspective.[14] In the broader metaphorical sense, point of view was understood not only as an “angle of vision,” but also as a linguistic representation of the mental self/selves − as in the so-called Fowler-Uspensky model which identifies the ideological, temporal, spatial, and psychological planes of point of view.[15] Chatman, on the other hand, proposed a terminological distinction between the point of view of the narrator (slant) and the point of view of the character (filter).[16] 10 Kristin Morrison, “James’s and Lubbock’s Differing Points of View,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16, no. 3 (1961): 247−248. Morrison notes that when James referred to specifically narrative techniques he used such terms as “reflector,” “window,” or “mirror.” Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: BibiloBazaar, [1921] 2007), 109. Ibid., 55. Norman Friedman, “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,” in The Theory of the Novel, ed. Ph. Stevick (New York: Free, 1967), 119−131. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1961] 1983). Roger Fowler, “How to See through Language: Perspective in Fiction,” Poetics 11, no. 3 (1982): 213−235. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 143. As use of the term proved to be highly inconsistent, other rival concepts began to appear. In his Theorie des Erzahlens, Stanzel wrote that although point of view is “a concise term, it is by no means clear in its application.”[17] The theorist himself introduced Innenperspektive (internal perspective) and Außenperspektive (external perspective)[18] as well as Erzahlerfigur (narrator) and Reflektorfigur (reflector).[19] Point of view was replaced by the term focalization by Genette, who argued that the term was not sufficiently accurate and did not include the distinction between the story’s voice (narrator) and the perspectives (focalisations) as being potentially employed in the narrative. Although Genette called his theory a “reformulation”[20] and a “general presentation of the standard idea of ‘point of view’,”21 his conception of narrative structures differed fundamentally from preceding approaches due to the above opposition. Bal, on the other hand, distanced herself from earlier typologies of “narrative points of view” by arguing that they were unclear in the sense that “they do not make a distinction between [...] the vision through which the elements are presented and [...] the identity of the voice that is verbalizing the vision,” or, in other words, “those who see and those who speak.”[22] Meanwhile, point of view started being examined through a linguistic and stylistic lens, with theorists focusing on smaller-scale indicators of POV rather than on devising universal taxonomies of narration or focalisation types. Working within the critical linguistics and stylistics approach, Paul Simpson argued that “point of view refers generally to the psychological perspective through which a story is told. It encompasses the narrative framework which a writer employs [...] and accounts for the basic viewing position which is adopted in a story.”[23] Despite the broad definition he proposed, the aim was to reformulate the Fowler-Uspensky model while introducing “a modal grammar” of the study of point of view in narrative fiction. Simpson focused on such aspects of literary discourse pertaining to point of view as spatial and temporal deixis as well as modality and transitivity.[24] An extensive typology of the linguistic indicators of viewpoint was proposed by Mick Short, whose checklist included value-laden language, given versus new information, and deixis, among 17 Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzahlens (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, [1979] 2008), 21. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 199. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1983] 1988), 65. Ibid., 84. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, [1985] 2009), 146. Paul Simpson, Language, Ideology and Point of View (London: Routledge, 1993), 4. Ibid., 11−100. others.[25] Short also made a distinction between discoursal (the relationship between the implied author or the teller and the fiction) and fictional (the viewpoint of a character within the story) point of view. The taxonomies proposed by Short and Simpson were later used by McIntyre, who examined the notion of POV in drama by analysing the smaller-scale linguistic indicators of point of view.[26] A recent linguistic definition was proposed by Alain Rabatel, who characterised literary point of view within the framework of “an enunciative approach, in terms of the linguistic means with which a subject envisages an object.”[27]
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