REPRODUCING THE ATMOSPHERE OF SUSPENSE IN LITERARY TRANSLATION (A STUDY OF D. BROWN’S NOVEL “ANGELS AND DEMONS” AND ITS UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways of reproducing the phenomenon of suspense in Ukrainian translation. Suspense is a multifaceted literary category, which can be defined via multiple approaches: genre, motivic, component, semantic-cognitive, stylistic-textual, and translational. Suspense can be interpreted as a category that is actualised in text to create the atmosphere of tension and anxious anticipation to maintain the readers’ constant interest in the events described. The analysis proved that the key role in creating the atmosphere of suspense in literary text belongs to figurative and narrative means. Figurative means of suspense creation embrace descriptions of tense situations, associative lexical units, metaphors, personifications, wordplay, and stylistic graphemics. Among the narrative tools of suspense, the following ones are distinguished: the violation of literary text structure, aposiopesis, the technique of thought interruption, narrativized cinematographic techniques, playing with time, and increasing the pace of the story unfolding. As a literary category, suspense has its ways of reproduction in translation, which envisage the usage of a wide spectrum of translation transformations. The paper, taking as a case study the novel "Angels and Demons" by the American writer Dan Brown and its Ukrainian translation, singles out key imagistic and narrative means of creating suspense in the original novel as well as the specificity of their translation into Ukrainian. The analysis proved that such stylistic means as metaphors, descriptions fraught with tension, and wordplay are the most difficult for literary translation aimed to reproduce suspense. Therefore, multifarious translation transformations are applied to them against the background of searching for analogies in the target language. Translating narrative means of creating suspense heavily relies upon the author’s individual style and genre specificity of the original text.