translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065 - 3514
(2008) Year I, Issue 1
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru and Floriana Popescu (First volume)
Proceedings of the Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
9 – 11 October 2008 “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, ROMANIA
pp. 98 - 103
TO BE AN AUTHOR OR A CRITIC OR BOTH?
THIS IS THE QUESTION
- Translating criticism into fiction and viceversa –
Steluţa Stan
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
[m]etafictional novels are [...] novels written by people who do
know how to tell a story but whose narratives turn back on
themselves in differing levels of self-consciousness, self awareness
and ironic self-distance.
(Currie, 1998: 62)
It would be wrong to describe the new trends in literary theory as
being the only cause for the changes in fiction. If we take as an example the
relationship between Saussurian linguistics and literary modernism, we
notice that both are areas focusing on the self-referentiality of language as
well as on its capacity to refer to an extra-linguistic world.
For Saussure, referential language is implicit and self-referential, in
the sense that it depends on the hidden system of differences at a systemic
and contextual level, conferring value to each sign. According to this
argument, language disguises the conditions allowing for the production of
signs, and the structuralist is bound to make these conditions – differential
relations, contextual factors and conventions – explicit. At the same time,
through a hard to explain coincidence, the modernist novel undertakes a
similar project, trying to reveal the hidden conditions of fiction – structural
principles, creative process, conventions. The self-referential dimension of
literary modernism aims, to a great extent, at the rejection of the
conventions of realism, of traditional narrative forms, of principles of unity
and transparency of the referential language, in favour of
‘defamiliarization’ techniques meant to break the crust of the habit, to dare
and lure the readers outside the inevitable patterns of thinking and
representation they are accustomed to, in favour of frequent intertextual
reference, multiple points-of-view and a poetic language much more
opaque and, consequently, demanding. In modernist fiction, these
98