translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Textually, it presupposes a similar pattern, made up of a frame, an
embedded narrative and a metafictional/metalingual aside. From the
surface diegetic layer or framing story, to the diary it hides underneath and
to the explanatory Appendix rounding up the novel text, the reader is
taken along meandering paths imbued with philosophies of life while, at
the same time, he/she sees them resumed in the language of various texts,
all resonant of voices which reflect the social carnivalesque.
Thematically, it is concerned with the limitations imposed on human
freedom by a totalitarian regime and with human love and aspiration in the
face of overpowering odds forbidding their open expression and
manifestation.
Nineteen Eighty-Four inscribes itself in the tradition of modernist
writing through its rejecting (but not denying) the contingent and through
building a parallel, future reality which, despite its obvious fictional
scaffolding, impresses upon the mind haunting images that linger and raise
existential questions.
The novel gives its language (thick, with multiple meanings and
varied connotative forces – opposing the structures of authority it is careful
to bring to attention) the principal role in creating a complex sense and
cultural construction of reality. All the language functions that Jakobson
mentions in his Linguistics and Poetics may be seen at work in George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which adds a further reason for it to have
been considered in view of supporting a commentary on literature,
communication, politics: the emotive function, although seemingly
obliterated, remains that desired goal of all communication situations in the
novel; the referential function, with its neutrality, is deliberately
predominant in this book about limitation, constriction and manipulation;
the conative function, whose main objective is that of determining effect,
may be observed in the propaganda sections of the novel; the phatic
function, with its communication channel maintenance, is the bitter-ironic
element that reiterates and increasingly tightens the knot of imposition
around the neck of the receiver/manipulated; the metalingual function –
especially in the Appendix, where it is overt, but also throughout the text
proper, where it remains covert – is probably the most valuable component
of Orwell’s literary achievement; the poetic function serves character
drawing and presentation of setting, but, most importantly, reveals the
novelist’s own position towards the utopian dystopia/dystopian utopia he
imagines.
These and more are the arguments for sustaining that literature
communicates affectively and effectively on political issues which govern
everyday life and which can only be intervened in during the very private
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