Translating Heterophony in Olive Senior's Stories
Translating Heterophony in Olive Senior's Stories
The conflation of voices in Caribbean literature reflects is oraliture – a heterophonic layering of voices inducing specific rhythmic patterns, which entail a great deal of linguistic and cultural negotiations to be recovered in translation. This particular aspect is quite representative of Olive Senior's stories. In this paper, the author discusses the difficulties that she faced when translating Senior's diglossic stories, in which several lects collide in a very few pages, identifying the major problem as being that of revealing this linguistic conflict and dissonance, while managing to remain within most readers’ reach. The complex original enunciative system at work invites an intercreative process, engendered by intercultural dialogue. However, it also calls for ‘creativity within bounds’ – that is the bounds of both languages-cultures concerned in an attempt at creating a new ‘mosaic-whole’, a new assemblage of ‘hetero-elements’ seeming to compose an incoherent structure, but which nevertheless fashions a new creative whole.
Keywords: Heterophony, Diglossic, Orality, Oraliture, Vocality, Vocaliture, Exoticism, creolizing translation, mosaic-whole, Olive Senior
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