MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Algernon Blackwood: The Willows Translation and analysis Diploma Thesis Brno 2017 Supervisor: Author: Mgr. Martin Němec, Ph.D. Bc. Michal Břenek Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Mgr. Martin Němec, Ph.D., for his endless patience and invaluable advice during the whole writing proces. Declaration “I declare that I have worked on this diploma thesis independently, using only the sources listed in the bibliography.” Brno, 30th November 2017 Bc. Michal Břenek ……………………….. Bibliography Břenek, Michal. Algernon Blackwood: The Willows, Translation and Analysis, Diploma thesis. Brno: Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English language and literature. 2017. 77 pages. The supervisor of the Diploma thesis: Mgr. Martin Němec, Ph. D. Abstract This diploma thesis focuses on translation and analysis of selected excerpts of a story The Willows by an English writer Algernon Blackwood. In the first part I briefly introduce the author, his work and background that influenced his writing. The second part deals with the translation of selected parts of the story into Czech whereas the third part concentrates on the analysis dealing with distinctive linguistic means of the author’s writing style with regard to the translation process. Further, it examines the methods and approaches used in the translation. Anotace Tato diplomová práce se soustřeďuje na překlad a analýzu vybraných pasáží z povídky Vrby anglického spisovatele Algernona Blackwooda. V první části krátce představuji autora, jeho tvorbu a postoje, které ovlivnily jeho literární styl, druhá část se zabývá překladem vybraných částí do češtiny, zatímco část třetí analyzuje charakteristické jazykové prostředky textu, jejich rozbor s ohledem na překladatelský proces a rovněž popisuje metodiku a postupy překladu. Keywords Algernon Blackwood, translation, translation analysis, The Willows, weird tale, gothic fiction Klíčová slova Algernon Blackwood, překlad, analýza překladu, Vrby, hororová povídka Contents 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Gothic fiction and the weird tale .............................................................................. 3 2 Algernon Blackwood ...................................................................................................... 4 2.1 Biography and work ................................................................................................. 4 2.2 The Willows ............................................................................................................. 6 3 The translation of The Willows ..................................................................................... 8 4 The Analysis of the Translation .................................................................................. 49 4.1 Toponyms ............................................................................................................... 49 4.2 Gender .................................................................................................................... 52 4.3 Idioms and phrases ................................................................................................. 54 4.4 Metaphor ................................................................................................................ 58 4.5 Similes .................................................................................................................... 60 4.6 Interjections ............................................................................................................ 65 4.6.1 Water .............................................................................................................. 65 4.6.2 Wind (Air) ...................................................................................................... 68 4.6.3 Animal sounds ................................................................................................ 70 4.6.4 Willow sounds ................................................................................................ 72 5 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 74 6 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 75 1 Introduction My first encounter with Algernon Blackwood was rather accidental and fortuitous. A few years ago, when writing my bachelor thesis on supernatural elements in Arthur Machen’s short stories The Great God Pan and The White People, I needed an author from the same subgenre of Gothic fiction called the Weird tale for a comparative analysis in relation to aforementioned work. Consequently, I read masterpieces of several prominent representatives of the genre including H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood. While all the authors caught my interest with its own distinctive style, Blackwood’s approach to writing left me speechless from the very first page of The Willows and since then I have read several of his books, I found it more and more excited in terms of the way he is able to describe the “inner” world of emotional processes often overlapping with spiritual experience as well as the “outer” world around us concerning various types of environment, being at his best when depicting nature and its phenomena, and then connect these two worlds into one, intertwining and interacting with each other. However, as my research on Blackwood progressed, I was absolutely staggered at the fact that while he is regarded as one of the most prominent authors of the British Gothic fiction of the beginning of the 20th century side by side with such names as, for example, H. G. Wells, A. C. Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, B. Stoker, A. Machen and others, he remains unknown to the general public and overlooked by literary critics with the exception of a very few of them as, for instance, Edward Wagenknecht who included Blackwood in the book on literary criticism Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction, Mike Ashley – author of his biography Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life, or S. T. Joshi who wrote about this issue in his publication The Weird Tale: “The complete ignorance of Blackwood in the critical community is a fact that stupefies me the more I think about it. It is not […] that the bulk of the material written about him is bad; it is that there is simply nothing written about him at all. […] In both academic and popular criticism Blackwood is a cipher” (Joshi 131). Moreover, one of the most significant authors of the horror fiction H. P. Lovecraft praised Blackwood for writing “some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age“, further stating that “of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute” (Lovecraft 64). 1 Sadly, there has not been a single piece of his work translated and published in the Czech language, however popular the supernatural (or fantasy) literature may be at present. This fact has troubled me ever since I finished my bachelor thesis and I have often thought about trying to translate it myself, the idea of doing so was attractive and scary at the same time, for I consider it as a task carrying a great responsibility due to the necessity of sensitive approach to preserve the atmosphere and overall impression of the work. Nevertheless, despite my lack of experience in the field of translation studies, I have opted to translate selected parts of the short story The Willows as a topic of this diploma thesis, since, in my opinion, Algernon Blackwood deserves to be better known, for his work can speak to a wide range of people - not only by his literary work but also by his philosophy and attitude towards life. In the first part of the thesis, I am going to briefly introduce the author, his work with a special regard to The Willows and also his background which contain vital information to the translation process as the story carries autobiographical features. In the second part, I am going to translate the first chapter and a part of the second chapter of the short story The Willows. The selection represents an overview of author’s writing style including literary and stylistic devices he used to achieve the intended impact on the reader and convey the thoughts behind the work. The third part is then dedicated to the analysis of the distinctive features of the writing with regard to the methods and approaches used in the translation process. 2 1.1 Gothic fiction and the weird tale The Gothic genre “came to prominence in Great Britain between 1760 and 1820, a genre distinguished by its supernaturalist content, its fascination with social transgression, and its departures, in formal terms, from the emerging norm of realism” (The Cambridge Companion 190) The British Gothic fiction of the beginning of the 20th century brought to the genre the feature of “abhumanness” dealing with a supernatural being or creature “taking on a human form” and posing a threat “to the integrity of human identity” (Companion 190). And it is this merging of the human reality and the supernatural one while artfully integrating the gradual atmosphere of horror in remote setting that places Algernon Blackwood among Gothic authors. As mentioned in the introduction, Algernon Blackwood belongs among prominent representatives of British Gothic fiction. Nevertheless,