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An Analysis of Asyndeton in Jhumpa Lahiri's the Lowland and Its Dutch

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An Analysis of Asyndeton in Jhumpa Lahiri's the Lowland and Its Dutch Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte Annelies Leenknecht An analysis of asyndeton in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and its Dutch translation Masterproef voorgedragen tot het behalen van de graad van Master in het Vertalen 2015 Promotor Prof. Dr. Lieve Jooken Vakgroep Vertalen Tolken Communicatie 2 3 ABSTRACT Many works have been dedicated to the difficulty of translating literary style. Therefore, it seems useful to investigate the translation of a particular aspect of an author’s style. This paper analyses asyndeton, i.e. the ellipsis of coordinating conjunctions or connectors, as a feature of the literary style in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Lowland and its Dutch translation Twee Broers by Ko Kooman. The first part of this paper discusses the different types of asyndeton that can be distinguished based on the semantic relation that is expressed and the variety of stylistic effects that can be produced through its use. The present study first observes the use of asyndeta in the English novel. Then, in a quantitative analysis, several instances of asyndeton are compared with their Dutch translation to see whether they are retained or not. It is found that the use of asyndeton in the novel can be categorised according to the content of the narration. The stylistic device is often used in descriptions, to introduce a digression, to list a series of actions or to express an enumeration. Overall, the translator tries to adopt the asyndeta to maintain Lahiri’s writing style. In cases where the device is not adopted, the asyndeton is often converted into a relative clause or the conjunction ‘en’ is added. Where the linguistic feature is not adopted, a shift in emphasis can be perceived between the source and target text. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the following people without whom this paper could not have been accomplished. First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Lieve Jooken for the guidance and support she provided in the entire process of writing this paper and for her comments on the drafts of it. I would also like to thank my parents for giving me the opportunity to study. A final word of thanks goes out to my sister for the advice she has given me and for her relentless support. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................... 5 1 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 6 2 THE AUTHOR AND THE CORPUS ................................................................................ 7 2.1 The author .................................................................................................................... 7 2.2 The translator ............................................................................................................... 7 2.3 Synopsis of The Lowland ............................................................................................ 8 3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...................................................................................... 9 3.1 Definition of asyndeton and related terms ................................................................... 9 3.2 Types of asyndeton .................................................................................................... 10 3.3 Stylistic functions of asyndeton ................................................................................. 13 3.4 Studies of asyndeton as a stylistic device and its translation .................................... 16 3.5 Translating asyndeton ................................................................................................ 20 4 RESEARCH ...................................................................................................................... 23 4.1 Research questions and method ................................................................................. 23 4.2 Expected results ......................................................................................................... 24 4.3 Different uses of asyndeton in The Lowland ............................................................. 25 4.3.1 The use of asyndeton according to content ........................................................ 25 4.3.2 The use of asyndeton according to sentence structure, asyndeton type and voice 33 4.4 The translation of asyndeton in Twee Broers ............................................................ 35 5 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 44 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... 46 APPENDIX .............................................................................................................................. 49 6 1 INTRODUCTION There’s not a single word in any of the languages I translate that can map perfectly onto a word in English. So it’s always interpretative, approximate, creative. Anything that is, itself, a ‘linguistic’ quality will by definition be anchored in a particular language — whether it’s idiom, ambiguity, or assonance. – Daniel Hahn In an interview (October 15, 2014) with Ted Hodgkinson from the British Council, the director at the British Centre for Literary Translation, Daniel Hahn, claimed that translation is impossible and that linguistic features cannot be transmitted to another language, as they are rooted in a specific language. Furthermore, many works have been dedicated to the difficulty of style and translation. Transferring an author’s style may be one of the most challenging parts of a translator’s work. Therefore, it seems useful to take an interest in the issue of translating style. This paper aims to investigate whether, and if so, to what extent, the style of an author in literature can be rendered into another language. The paper focuses on a specific aspect of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing style in the novel The Lowland, i.e. the stylistic feature of asyndeton. The translation of this stylistic device will be analysed by comparing the original novel with its Dutch translation by Ko Kooman. First, this paper briefly provides some background about the author and the corpus. The next chapter deals with asyndeton as a rhetorical figure and a component of style. Different frameworks are compared and the numerous stylistic effects that can be perceived with this device are discussed. Additionally, some information will be given on the translation of this stylistic device in particular. In a quantitative analysis of the corpus, the use of asyndeton in the original novel was observed and the translation of this stylistic device in the Dutch version. The analysis and the findings are discussed in chapter four. 7 2 THE AUTHOR AND THE CORPUS 2.1 The author Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian-American author, who was born as Nilanjana Sudheshna Lahiri in London on July 11, 1967. She moved to the United States when she was two and lived in Rhode Island, where most of the novel The Lowland is set. After completing a bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Barnard College in New York, she read at Boston University and obtained three master’s degrees in literature. Jhumpa Lahiri also completed a doctorate in Renaissance studies. Her debut Interpreter for Maladies, for which she was awarded among other prizes the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and the New Yorker Debut of the Year in 2000, was published in 1999. It is a collection of short stories and some of them had already been published in The New Yorker. From a comparison with Lahiri’s other novels, viz. The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, it appeared that Lahiri often creates long sentences and connects information by means of a comma. However, asyndeton features as a stylistic device only in The Lowland. Lahiri, an immigrant herself, often treats the subject of immigration to the United States and her novels contain Indian characters. The Lowland was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in 2013. 2.2 The translator Ko kooman, the translator of The Lowland, is a Dutch translator who has translated earlier novels written by Jhumpa Lahiri into Dutch as well, namely Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake. He also translated several novels of Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut . In 2010, he provided a new Dutch translation of To Kill a Mockingbird. 8 2.3 Synopsis of The Lowland Since several extracts of the novel are discussed in this paper, it might be interesting to possess some background knowledge about the story line as this might make the reasoning easier to comprehend. Therefore, the paragraph below offers a synopsis of The Lowland. The novel tells the story of two young brothers, Udayan and Subhash, growing up in a changing India in the 1960’s. One of the brothers, Udayan, becomes engaged in the communist Naxalite movement while the other, Subhash, leaves for the United States to obtain a doctorate. Udayan secretly marries an Indian girl, Gauri, and is murdered by the police for his involvement in various illegal activities related to the communist movement. Thereupon,
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