Abstract
Using pseudo translation (PT) as a high-concept deconstructive framing device in his novel Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer has transmitted linguistically a message that is usually conveyed editorially: the unreliability of reconstructing foreign events as a variable of transnational and transhistorical aporia. While highlighting the American writer’s conceptual and empathic distance from his Ukrainian family’s history before and during the Holocaust, the adoption of a purportedly inauthentic voice in the form of his tour guide’s broken English narration allowed Foer to be written by the text, his separate white and Eastern-European Jewish identities revealed to, and reconciled by, him in the process. Following on from Toury’s reasoning that some PTs have gone to such great lengths to resemble genuine translations that some sort of pseudo source text may be reconstructed from it, McCarthy–along with deconstructionists–says that if the translation creates the original, then PT creates its pseudo-original culture, which will have as much substance for the target literature as that of genuine translations. In the beginning, PT in Foer’s novel seems to highlight the initial unease, stereotyping and mistrust characteristic of many foreign encounters. But then we find that if it were not for the interplay of differences, i.e. for the différance exposed by the use of PT, the characters would not be able to co-construct meaning, merge split-off identities, and establish truth as posterior to writing–the product not of telling but of re-telling–and as a necessary break with a violent past.
Presenters
Iris GuskeAcademic Director, Languages / Communication Studies, Kempten College of Language and International Communication Studies, Bayern, Germany
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Communications and Linguistic Studies
KEYWORDS
Pseudotranslation, Identities, Deconstruction
Digital Media
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