Problems in the Translation of Paul Austers The New York Trilogy

Abstract

In this paper I examine an original text, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, and its translation into Spanish. The source text chosen displays a wealth of instances of symbolic names, rhymes, wordplay, idioms, cultural references, colloquialisms and other stylistic features which are hard to transfer to Spanish without a significant loss of information. I attempt to identify those phenomena and discuss how the translator confronted them. I am particularly concerned with the lexical level. The conclusion of my paper is that the assessment of the translation problems posed by this literary work reveals the possibility of achieving an acceptable version at the readership’s level. This kind of studies are useful for the subsequent systematisation of strategies for the translational problems found in any literary text.