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Dracula in Translation View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives Not so uncanny after all: Bram Stoker’s Dracula in translation Tina Resch Master thesis in Comparative Literature / ILOS UNIVERSITETET I OSLO May 2011 NOT SO UNCANNY AFTER ALL: BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA IN TRANSLATION Illustration inspired from the 1992 motion picture Bram Stoker’s Dracula, source: http://www.holistix.org/person/mz/album-mz-eng.html © Tina Resch, 2011 Not so uncanny after all: Bram Stoker’s Dracula in translation Tina Resch http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=118295 Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo Abstract What is the cost of translation? This is the essential question of this thesis. Comparing three interdependent texts, namely a Victorian novel and its Norwegian and German translations, is the means by which an answer to that question shall be given. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is today one of the standard works of Gothic fiction. Modern vampire fiction shows clear references to Stoker’s original work. Also translation of the text is an intertextual act of interpretation and reference. But do the existing Norwegian and German translations of the text do justice to the original work? Dracula, being a complex work, composed of diverse texts, albeit edited by a more or less unknown editor. This complexity asks a lot of the reader – and the translator – who has to (re-)construct the plot during the reading process. The reader is confronted with different media, different genres and different registers of languages use in this one fin-de-siècle novel. Additionally, the novel’s then from 1897 has to be realised in the reader’s now of 2011, which is a challenge as well: to what degree shall the original text be transported to the reader’s now, and to what degree has the reader to be led back to the novel’s then? Vampire fiction, nowadays being a popular genre following in the wake of Stoker’s 1897 novel, has over the years contributed to an increasing degree of simplification concerning the vampire motif. This has apparently left its traces also in the works of translations of the text: a lot of the original’s ambiguity, one has to conclude, is reduced or even lost in translation. In order to prove this claim, the argumentation will approach the problem from two sides: Firstly, the complexity of the original will be demonstrated, with special focus on media, genre and use of language – the text itself is challenged. Secondly, selected text excerpts will be compared to their respective translations – in order to challenge the theory. Stoker’s ambiguous literary work seems to be outsmarting its translators – or is simply in need of a new translation both in Norwegian and in German. Preface When deciding to examine the problems of translation, it is easy to fall for the temptation to judge the entire business of text translation as “impossible”. Translation, always being an act of interpretation itself, is always only approaching the original text that is being translated. With every single translation done on one particular text, chances increase for “getting a bit closer” to the original text than the previous translation did – yet, translations can never be a one-to-one copy of an original text. However, it is impossible to expect every possible reader of literature to learn every existing language in the world in order to read all texts in their respective original language. In other words, we need translations. And there are even examples of translation making it easier to understand a certain text: reading Kant is supposed to be “easier” in the English translation than in the German original. This is due to the German nature of constructing long, embedded sentences which at times can be hard to follow from the beginning to the end. The fact that this phenomenon is not common in English forced the translator to separate one “original” sentence into several translated sentences, thus making it easier to follow Kant’s complex argumentation. This example illustrates how helpful translation can be. In fiction, however, as opposed to non-fictional texts, the problem of translation is a different one: here, not only the meaning of words and phrases has to be maintained, but also literary stylistics needs to be considered: a Victorian English novel has to remain somehow “old-fashioned” also in translation, even though the translation is done “today”. A person speaking a thick dialect creates a different image than a speaker of what is regarded as “standard” language. There are many other examples of what a “good” translation “should” consider and maintain in order to do justice to the original. But languages differ, amongst other things, in their variety of synonyms: while there are a certain number of words for describing, for example, a certain colour in one language, there might be fewer synonyms for the same colour in a different language. Of course, this is only one example for the possible differences in lexicon in various languages. But it illustrates how easily a translator can be confronted with difficulties translating a text from one language to another. In this thesis, I compare Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula to one Norwegian and one German translation – English, Norwegian and German are languages which are considered to be fairly “close” to each other. And yet, even though the languages are “close” to each other, problems occur. Dialects and sociolects, as well as other language variations, are an important element in Stoker’s novel, and an extra challenge to the translators. Unfortunately for the translators, the original text appears to be too big a challenge – there are several aspects that serve as “negative” examples of translation, regardless of the obstacles the translators had to overcome. After all, literary translations have to “re-create” the original’s atmosphere, and in the case of Dracula, a lot of the original’s ambiguity and “liveliness” has been lost during the translating process. Hopefully, future translators of Stoker’s Victorian classic will manage to maintain the original’s atmosphere, in order to make sure that Stoker’s uncanny vampire Count will continue to haunt readers for a long time. This being my second master thesis, I thank everybody involved in this process together with me: The Department for Literature And European languages (ILOS) for making this second thesis technically possible, my supervisor Jon Haarberg for his patience and guidance through the more often as not confusing writing process, Axel Ottenheym for spontaneous late-night phone discussions on the text in general, Arthur Jahnsen for help with the technical gremlins and Kåre Jon Lund for proof-reading and correction. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 11 2 The original ..................................................................................................................... 19 2.1 Media and gender ...................................................................................................... 19 2.2 Genre ......................................................................................................................... 25 2.3 Language variation (dialects, sociolects, patois, gender) .......................................... 31 3 Sociolects in translation ................................................................................................... 35 3.1 The Norwegian translation ........................................................................................ 36 3.2 The German translation ............................................................................................. 37 4 Dialects in translation ....................................................................................................... 39 4.1 The Norwegian translation ........................................................................................ 40 4.2 The German translation ............................................................................................. 43 5 Patois in translation .......................................................................................................... 47 5.1 The Norwegian translation ........................................................................................ 47 5.2 The German translation ............................................................................................. 48 6 Reading text and translation ............................................................................................. 51 6.1 Mina’s journal ............................................................................................................ 52 6.2 The Count’s attack on Mina ...................................................................................... 57 6.3 Van Helsing ............................................................................................................... 65 7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 75 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 79 1 Introduction Published for the first time in 1897, Dracula, although being probably the most popular work of vampire fiction, is not the first vampire novel. Neither was the book an immediate success at the
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