translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

At this point, it seems necessary to return to the issue of the
literariness of literature, to its status of communicator of values, credos and
beliefs. When Orwell, tongue in cheek, refers to the impossibility of using
Newspeak to serve literary purposes (in the section on A Vocabulary, 918),
does he announce the death of literature? Or, when having Winston Smith
write a diary, which “was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were
no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would
be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour
camp” (746), does he mock at the incapacity of many to decode the literary
text and, consequently, at their dismissing it as worthless or, worse,
deciding it is high time it were outlawed? Or, when defining translation (in
Oceania) as “a slow and difficult business, […] not expected [to be] finished
before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century” (925), does he
accuse the translator of partisanship or censorship?
The answers may be found in the text about how the text gets written,
in the fiction about the fictions that we all live but that we never expect to
read (since, while reading, we are sooner interested in finding reality
beneath the texture of the writing). All in all, however hazardous an
affirmation it might be, it must be said that what Orwell manages to attain
with his Nineteen Eighty-Four is not simply a critique of the social, historical
or political situation but, more importantly, one of language and literature,
of the language of literature and its communicative properties – supported
or hindered by translation. It is precisely this aspect of his fiction that has
made George Orwell a representative name in the literature of the
twentieth century, a memorable figure at the crossroads of modernist
formal experimentation and postmodernist historiographic metafiction.
References
Brown, G. E. (1977). Brodie’s Notes on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, London
& Sidney: Pan Books.
Orwell, G. (2000). Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Penguin Books.
Thom, F. (1993). Limba de lemn, Bucureşti: Humanitas.
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