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- Title
OSCAR MILOSZ AS TRANSLATOR: PLAYING GAMES WITH MEMORY.
- Authors
Krūminienė, Jadvyga
- Abstract
The paper aims at the analysis of the specificity of cultural translation as reflected in Oscar Milosz' translations of the ancient Lithuanian fairy-tales and legends. The comparative method used in the given research has been developed on the basis of the theoretical insights offered by Yuri Lotman, H. G. Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and others. In Milosz' translations, the following translatory movement is observed: from Lithuanian into German and from German into French. The translator seems to struggle against the possible treatment of the Lithuanian folk texts as products belonging to cultural periphery. His aim was to introduce Lithuanian (or Baltic) culture at its best, or rather at its Indo-European best. Milosz offers the picture of idealized and intellectualized imaginary Lithuanity, thus demonstrating the translator's strong romantic inclinations. The poet-translator structures the understanding of the French (or Western) audience by deconstructing and remodifying its possible pre-understanding of unknown Lithuanian culture. No doubt, he risks the foreign reader's capacity of comprehension, yet takes him/her as a potential reader. In Miloszean tales, an obvious potentialization of the audience is observed with respect to both French and Lithuanian readers: here the volume of cultural memory is constructed as obligatory to every self-respective educated person. The memory of the translator that enters into contact with the original text and thus receives creative stimulation turns to be a complex text in itself. The tales demonstrate his skilful manipulation with the systems of different cultural, linguistic and literary codes. In some of his translations, Milosz successfully employs the Modernist manner of stylistic evocation and model of memory, at times developing a kind of jazz improvisations on a folk or legendary motif. Although the translator's interpretation opens up individual horizons, yet it does not go beyond a rule-governed play with respect to the memory of the genre.
- Subjects
MILOSZ, O. V. de L. (Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz), 1877-1939; MEMORY; TRANSLATIONS; CULTURAL codes; LITHUANIAN fiction
- Publication
Respectus Philologicus, 2010, Vol 17, Issue 22, p55
- ISSN
1392-8295
- Publication type
Article