Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English-language Translation Bc. et Bc. Dominika Slepánková A Comparative Analysis of Two Czech Translations of John Irving’s The 158-Pound Marriage Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph.D. 2019 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ………..…………………………………… Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph.D., for his valuable feedback and his enormous patience with me. I have to thank my mom and my husband who put up with my constant mood swings during this whole process. And last but not least, I have to thank the kind souls that really held me above the water. Thank you, Tereza, Jeffrey and Andrea. List of abbreviations ST source text DB+MF translation by Danka Boháčiková and Michal Formánek PK translation by Pavel Kříž Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1 The 158-Pound Marriage ........................................................................................................ 3 1.1 Plot of the novel ............................................................................................................... 4 2 Czech translations ................................................................................................................. 10 3 Comparative analysis ............................................................................................................ 13 3.1 Book and chapter titles ................................................................................................... 13 3.2 Author’s style ................................................................................................................. 21 3.3 Idiomatic language and culture-specific items ............................................................... 34 3.4 Profanity ......................................................................................................................... 46 3.5 Foreign language ............................................................................................................ 61 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 69 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 72 Resumé ..................................................................................................................................... 75 Summary .................................................................................................................................. 76 Introduction To this day, John Irving has written fourteen novels and he is considered one the best contemporary American writers. His first novel Setting Free the Bears was published when he was just 26 years old. What brought him his international fame was his fourth novel The World According to Garp published just four years after the novel which is central to this thesis. His books were translated into more than 35 languages. Czech translations of his novels are usually produced no later than a year after their original publication date in the United States. In the former Czechoslovakia people had to wait a little before they were able to read the first ever novel by John Irving translated into Czech. It was up to 1987, meaning nine years after the original publication of The World According to Garp in the United States (“Svět podle Garpa“). Nowadays, Czech translations of John Irving’s novels are usually produced no later than a year after their original publication date in the United States. This thesis will focus on two Czech translations of John Irving’s third novel published in 1973, The 158-Pound Marriage. It mainly focuses on the textual analysis of selected excerpts from the novel and aims to reveal the tendencies and strategies of each translator. The first part provides information about John Irving and the novel. Origins and his inner motivation considering this particular novel are described too, because they play an important part. The plot of the novel is explained in necessary detail, so the reader of the thesis is capable to understand all the connections between the characters, their actions and their behaviors and then can consequently follow the analysis that simultaneously works with all this information. In the chapter titled Czech translations, background information about the translations and the translators is given. 1 The second part analyses the translations and describes the findings in five subcategories: book and chapter titles, author’s style, idiomatic language and culture-specific items, profanity and foreign language. The examples chosen for the analysis were taken from the source text without any prior knowledge of the translations so as to avoid any bias. In every subchapter I provide the reasoning behind each category and also the information that introduce the category further. 2 1 The 158-Pound Marriage The 158-Pound Marriage is Irving’s third novel. It was published in 1973. It is very different from all his other novels in many ways, certainly in the terms of the narrative. For the first and so far the only time, Irving chooses one of the protagonists as the narrator, an unreliable one to be exact. The narrator is the only protagonist that does not grow, or learn anything about life or himself; Irving deviates from his usual Bildungsroman structure. Irving wrote this novel during a difficult part of his life. He was rather burnt-out from his teaching job in Iowa he had at the time, he hated the fact that he was staying at one place where nothing was going on, according to his words. He channeled all his anger and frustrations into this book: I felt I’d been to Iowa. I’d gotten a lot out of it, I’d liked it fine. But now I wasn’t wrestling so well anymore. I was getting beaten up. I was feeling old, physically. I was sick of teaching. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I was restless, aimless. We lived in four houses over a three-year period in the same dull city, Iowa City. I thought I was gonna die a death of boredom. (Marcus 1979: par. 53) He openly admits that two other novels inspired him to write this one: Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and John Hawkes’ The Blood Oranges. He even quotes excerpts from them at the beginning of the book. Both of them also deal with spouse swapping. After his first book Setting Free the Bears received good reviews, but did not sell very well, the publishing house he was working with at that moment, Random House, did not really attempt to promote his second novel The Water-Method Man. When The 158-Pound Marriage was released without almost anyone noticing it, because of the lack of any form of press, Irving decided to make big changes and terminated his contract with Random House. It proved to be a step in the right direction (Miller 3 1982: 6). When Irving channeled all the negativity from his system into Marriage, he decided he wanted to write something “life-affirming”. With that wish in mind and with a new publishing house standing behind him, The World According to Garp came to existence and catapulted Irving to the status of one of the most acclaimed contemporary American authors. 1.1 Plot of the novel The main protagonists of this novel are two married couples in the center of a four-way affair: Severin Winter, Edith Winter, Utch and the nameless narrator. Severin Winter is a wrestling couch and a professor of German at the New England university. He and his wife Edith (maiden name Fuller) met in Vienna, to where she traveled as an unofficial ambassador of the New York Museum of Modern Art to acquire a few paintings of Kurt Winter, Severin’s father. The second married couple is Utch and the narrator of this novel. Utch’s legal name is Anna Agati Thalhammer, but nobody called her that name since she was five years old. At that time, in 1943, the Russians were coming to her Austrian village and Utch’s mother hid her in the chest cavity of a cow she just slaughtered. After several days of Russian looting, killing and raping, she was literally born into the arms of a Russian officer when the cow she was hidden in was moved, because it started to rot and smell. The Georgian Russian officer, captain Kudashvili, decided to name her Utchka, meaning a calf in Georgian slang. The narrator changed her name to Utch when she reached her thirtieth birthday, because “it is natural … that a woman in her thirties would no longer be an Utchka, so I called her Utch” (Irving 1986: 17). Similarly to the first couple, they met in Vienna. The Georgian officer decided to adopt Utch and took her to live with him in the occupied Vienna. The narrator decided to travel to Vienna to 4 research materials for his upcoming historical novel. The narrator is a professor at the same university as Severin Winter. At the beginning, the plot is unraveling rather inconspicuously despite the tale of Utch’s rebirth in the first chapter. The notion that the two couples are sexually involved is hinted at very gently, but the reader cannot be entirely sure at first. The time line of the novel is linear, but because the narrator is a historical novelist (not very successful one at that), he is focused on the past of other three protagonists and