Definiton of the Genre

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS A – Ackroyd AS – Anglo-Saxon Bitt - Bittner Bu – Burian Cz - Czech D – Defoe Gr - Greene Gs – Grossmith F- Fielding Pa - Payne Pe – Peterová SC – source culture SL – source language Š - Šiklová TC – target culture TL – target language T - Townsend Va – Vaculík Vách – Váchal Vie - Viewegh W – Woolf 1 0. Introduction. The genre of diary literature has established itself in the national literatures of both Czech and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions throughout the centuries. In the beginning, it was considered as appropriate only for strictly personal purposes, but gradually, the perception of the diary changed and finally it was considered as a legitimate literary genre. It may not be in the centre of interest for literary scholars, however, this is one of the reasons why I chose this topic for my thesis. A lot has been said about the translation of the other genres of prose, poetry or drama. Such a 'low' or marginal genre as diary literature deserves not to be overlooked. The aim of my thesis is to provide a comparative analysis of Czech and Anglo- Saxon diaries in order to find out what the specific features of the genre are in both traditions (with regard to the fact that the corpus is relatively small) and to see how those features are reflected in the translations of the particular Anglo-Saxon diaries into Czech, e.g. if any differences in the features of diary literature in either group of diaries are recognized, I will try to find out what translation strategy the individual translators decided for in the process of translation and which tradition they tended to. For this purpose, I created a corpus of seventeen books that are to be analysed in chapters four and five of the thesis. In chapter four, I will deal with the comparison of original versions of Anglo-Saxon and Czech diaries, while in chapter five, the original Czech diaries and the translations of the Anglo-Saxon diaries into Czech will be compared. In chapter three, the corpus and the method for its analysis will be introduced. The first two chapters are devoted to the definition of the genre and its history, and chapter six will conclude the thesis and sum up the results of the analyses. 2 The last chapter of the thesis, chapter seven, is devoted to the bibliography. Appendices to the thesis are placed on the CD attached to the thesis and they contain samples of analysed diaries – each sample covers several entries of the given diary. The samples run to approximately two or three pages depending on the length of each entry. 3 1. Definition of the Genre. First, it is necessary to give a definition of the genre. According to The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Literature, diary is “a day-by-day chronicle of events, a JOURNAL” (157) People writing diaries usually keep a record of personal and to some extent intimate events and thoughts, the diaries can be therefore divided into two categories: the intimate and the anecdotal. To this, Dr. Szladits adds a categorization according to gender as she argues that female authors “communicate more intimately in their diaries … [while] men concentrate on facts and subjects more than on themselves.” (qtd in Mitgang 1) Another division within diaries is that which takes into account the writer-reader relationship, in other words what the purpose of the author is, whether he wants his diary to be published and therefore writes for the reader or if he just keeps the record for himself. Vlašín, together with Lederbuchová, suggests the latter is called the authentic diary and the former takes on the form of books of travels, memoir literature and autobiographies which, according to Lederbuchová, are to be listed in the category of a stylized diary – a diary that is meant to be published. The last division arises from the opposition of fictional versus non-fictional. Authentic and stylized diaries represent a non-fictional part of the genre, while diary novels are its fictional counter-part. Among the fictional diaries, Peter Merton distinguishes pseudo-diary and mock-diary. He asserts that in the pseudo-diary, “every attempt is made to present fiction as a real diary, ostensibly written by protagonist “ and that “there is no ‘gap’ between the diarist-narrator and the reader.” (Morton 1) In mock- diary, according to Morton, “the diarist and the diary itself are handled 4 ironically.” (Morton 2) According to Morton, “the English mock-diary emerged definitively in the late-Victorian years, when a flood of pompous, self-regarding diaries and memoirs finally drew the attention of satirists.” (Morton 2) Particular features of some of the abovementioned sub-genres are to be analysed in the following chapters of the thesis in terms of comparing Czech original diaries with Anglo-Saxon originals, then the translations of the AS diaries in Czech with Czech original diaries. 5 2. History of the Genre of Diary Literature. As for the history of the genre, The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Literature says that keeping a diary became habitual in the 17th century, although there are some instances from the 16th century to be found. E. Jane Dickinson suggests that popularity of keeping diaries in this era was caused by “greater literacy, cheaper paper and a newly advanced awareness of the self.” (Dickinson 1) Cynthia Griffin Wolff points out that in the 17th century, the spread of religious diaries became remarkable. According to her, “the Puritan's diary...was not to be the record of the events in his life...[or] the world about him;...it was a faithful, accurate mirror of himself.” (Wolff 6) Just to mention several significant authors, the two great diarists of the 17th century were John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). In the 18th and 19th centuries the diaries transformed into the “essentially ... personal political document, a chance for writers to reorder the universe according to their lights” (Dickinson 1), i.e. they ranked in the category of non-fictional and mostly autobiographical works. At the end of the 19th century, however, the fictional tendency became more common in diary literature than in previous centuries, i.e. writers use a form of diary for their novels – thus arose a new genre – a diary novel which was immensely popular and spread in the 20th century. Comic fictional diaries were popular in the 1880s, of which the most celebrated example is Grossmiths' The Diary of a Nobody (1892), and was successfully revived by the end of the 20th century with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend (1982; originally created for BBC) and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996). Dickinson explains the 6 popularity of various diaries in the 20th century: “in our own, post-Freudian century, the diary was claimed, increasingly, as the arena of the imagination, a kind of 'safe house' for free expression” (Dickinson 1). In the 21st century, the fast development of computer technologies and internet has brought yet another sub-genre of diary literature, a blog. The blog is a type of diary that is published online and as such is usually written with an audience or readership in mind, on the other hand, it does not undergo any professional proofreading or any kind of an (auto) censorship; therefore it represents a mix between an authentic and a stylized diary in terms of the genre definition. These days, almost every one has a blog, ranging from a teenage pupil to a politician with a heavy influence. 7 3. Analysed Diaries. The Corpus. For my analysis, I created a corpus consisting of samples of the various diaries. Actually, I chose the books for the corpus at random according to their forms and titles, i.e. I chose the books that had a word 'diary' or 'journal' in their title or were possible to be classified as diaries according to the extent to which they match what was presupposed to be a diary form – containing entries, dates etc. The aim was to cover the genre with its various sub-genres as defined in the first chapter of the thesis, i.e. both non-fictional diaries (autobiographies, books of travels) - which are divided into authentic diaries and stylized diaries - and fictional diaries (diary novels). The opposition of intimate and anecdotal is also present in the corpus. The corpus will be analysed in terms of its “diariness”, i.e. as John Frow puts it “the structural dimensions that cluster together to constitute the specific configuration of a genre” and these are suggested by him to be formal organisation, rhetorical structure and thematic content. (Frow 74) The chapters dealing with each of the features are, however, sorted in the reversed order as the formal organisation seems to be the most relevant for the analysis. In this chapter, the analysis is devoted to the AS vs. Czech originals; in the following chapter the opposition of Czech originals vs. the translation of AS diaries into Czech will be analysed. The corpus consists of nine English and eight Czech diaries, the length of each sample runs to approximately twenty pages. However, all the books are considered as a whole as well. The following list of the diaries in the corpus is meant to set the preliminary division of the sub-genres that is to be reflected mostly in the chapter concerning rhetorical structure and thematic content. 8 Non-fictional diary, a sub-genre of the authentic autobiographical diary, is represented by Josef Váchal's Deníky, Graham Greene's My Dream Diary: A World of My Own and Virginia Woolf's The Diary of Virginia Woolf .

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