Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira has observed a fictional turn in translation in Brazilian and Spanish Latin American (post) modern literature, where fiction has both provided theoretical parameters for translation and offered itself as an alternative source of theorization. Sherry Simon has noticed this fictional inscription of the translator, too, with particular reference to Québécoise writer Nicole Brossard's novel Le désert mauve, as an indication of just how central a Western intellectual and cultural preoccupation translation has become. In his examination of fictional texts where a second language is extensively deployed but already under translation, Leo Tak-Hung Chan suggests such texts signal a need to theoretically rethink translation. For example, Roman Jakobson's description of intralingual translation as rewording and designation of interlingual translation only as "translation proper" strikes Chan as too narrow when applied to texts that are not purely monolingual” (Chan 2002: 68). The deployment of translation within monolingual writers' works, such as the novels of anglophone Canadian writers Michael Ondaatje and Kerri Sakamoto, suggests an activity of even greater breadth and complexity. In less theoretical realms, when the US Department of Defense sponsors a conference on languages and links the knowledge of multiple languages with national security, there seems little doubt that a linguistic "lack" in now being recognized by English speakers, regardless of global ubiquity of the language.
The English Patient raises issues of blockage, allegiance and agency, identity construction, and global and discursive migration. The narrative situates the fictional translator within a broad historical sweep and locates him at a specific and special moment in terms of history and translation: World War II. Major changes in translation practice took place immediately after the war, when it became professionalized, and even industrialized, through the creation of large international organizations, such as the United Nations. World War II is significant in historical terms because of the magnitude of its powerful technology and degree of its horror; the psychic tremors of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to resonate. As the mayor of Hiroshima Akiba Tadatoshi said during the 2004 memorial service for A-bomb victims, "[T]he human race still lacks both a lexicon capable of fully expressing that disaster and sufficient imagination to fill that gap." A sense of linguistic shortfall is a powerful presence in the construction of many of the fictional translators whom I have been looking at in my research, although it is seems to be absent in the English patient. In spite of painfully shedding his skin, he retains through his command of multiple languages membership in a polyglot professional class.
Ondaatje's fictional translator assumes that his own erudition and linguistic skills allow him to pursue his interest in geography in the Libyan deserts as if "he was alone, his own invention" . This sense of free agency contradicts historical research which "rarely supports the view that translators are characterized by romantic alienation and freedom from culture, whatever their place of enunciation". The fictional translator in The English Patient operates within a mirage of selfsufficiency until pressures of the private and the political fissure his hermetic sense of self. In his nomadic explorations of the desert, the self-proclaimed "international bastard" resists notions of national affiliations and personal ownership, but later, burnt beyond recognition, he is dependent on morphine and the care of Hana, a young Canadian nurse.
责任编辑：admin
上一篇：TRANSLATING PROSE
下一篇：Eye on Structures for Poem Translation
微信公众号搜索“译员”关注我们，每天为您推送翻译理论和技巧，外语学习及翻译招聘信息。