Creativity in translation Guerberof-Arenas, Ana; Toral, Antonio
Translation Spaces,
11/2022, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a short story by Kurt Vonnegut from English to Catalan and Dutch using three modalities: machine-translation (MT), ...post-editing (PE) and translation without aid (HT). Our aim is to explore creativity, understood to involve novelty and acceptability, from a quantitative perspective. The results show that HT has the highest creativity score, followed by PE, and lastly, MT, and this is unanimous from all reviewers. A neural MT system trained on literary data does not currently have the necessary capabilities for a creative translation; it renders literal solutions to translation problems. More importantly, using MT to post-edit raw output constrains the creativity of translators, resulting in a poorer translation often not fit for publication, according to experts.
Raj and Kumar examines the novel Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. Bluebeard, purported as the autobiography of a fictitious Abstract Expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian, derives its title from a ...French fairy tale. The most popular surviving version of the tale, written by Charles Perrault, recounts the gory story of a wealthy man called Blue Beard known for his multiple marriages and missing wives. The tale has come to be so notorious that the word "Bluebeard" is often used to describe "a man who marries and kills one wife after another," or, a philanderer.
Kurt Vonnegut's corpus boasts of works deriding humanity's ethical infirmity and the human hand in the planet's effacement whilst suggesting ingenious reforms. His most vocal appeal is Galápagos ...(1985), written during the Cold War when the impending threat of a Third World War troubled the author with grim forebodings. A spiritual culmination of a series of novels charged with Vonnegut's trademark satire at human-made debacles like World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, Galápagos disses the human brain as the source of all evil - reminiscent of Kant's idea of humankind's innate evil - and imagines human apocalypse by a virus outbreak and the evolution of a brain-less post-human species in a utopian future. This article attempts a close reading of Galápagos against the cosmogonic cycle of creation and destruction of worlds as chronicled in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). It unravels in the novel the archetypal creation myth which Vonnegut, a trained anthropologist, seems to have adapted to serve his humanist ends. The article assesses the drivers - divine, human and chance - involved in effecting the fictional cosmogony, studies Vonnegut's take on religion, comments upon his authorial god complex, and goes on to locate Galápagos as his greatest god-act.
Rather than simply accept the "official" historical record, historiographic metafiction reexamines these records and events in showing different perspectives. This creates a dialogue between the text ...of the novel and the original texts of history, forcing the reader to examine more closely the texts being presented in both the "official" record and the novel. Two novels that operate along these lines are Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1962), the supposed memoirs of an American who becomes a Nazi officer in Germany during World War II; and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), a novel examining the interwoven histories of the narrator's family and events in the history of India, including independence from Great Britain and the Emergency period under Indira Gandhi. These texts experiment with history by examining how those histories are constructed as memoirs by their character authors as well as what they mean and communicate to their contemporary audiences. By examining the methods by which histories are created and what they communicate to their audiences, Mother Night and Midnight's Children speak directly to the levels of meaning and construction in the histories chosen for re-vision.
Comics has a complex relationship to trauma. Earle argues that comics offers unique representational strategies for narratives of trauma and distress (See). Trauma (specifically the individual ...experience) is often characterised by symptoms relating to temporality *flashbacks and catatonia), and a compulsion to repeat acts. Comics pivots on an ability to make time visible and to keep it moving through a narrative using sequential images. The relationship between the two offers rich and diverse opportunities to look at how trauma can be made visible to a reader.
In this paper, I demonstrate the ways in which the comics adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut, North and Monteys,
2020
) visually represents the traumatic experiences within the source text and, moreover, how the book is able to speak to the experience of trauma that trauma theory has been grappling with since Freud. I explain how the presentation of this text in a visual form is able to create something that I am calling traumatic absurdity - the coming together of textual and visual tropes to create a story that neither glorifies, nor condemns, war, but highlights the absurdity of the experience and creates a comic that is at once both amusing and emotionally affective.
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) has remained the most widely discussed of his novels in the five decades since its publication. However, the volume of critical work produced on it far ...outweighs the unique lines of thought investigated. The critiques have mostly been limited to - diagnoses of Billy Pilgrim's mental disorder, locating the sources of the diagnosed ailments, examinations of Vonnegut's intended philosophy, comparisons of the novel to other anti-war works, and investigations of the elements of humor and science fiction in the novel. This article attempts a close reading of the novel along the lines of the hero quest, or monomyth, as chronicled in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell. The article disentangles the novel to release the inherent quest narrative from its non-linear structure and reinterprets it in terms of Campbell's quest stages to reveal an uncanny resemblance to the mythical hero's journey. The nature of the journey and the hero's traits, and the departures observed in Vonnegut's monomyth from Campbell's determine the relevance and implications of Billy's quest and warrant the need to coin his quest anew, namely the anti-monomyth.
This essay chronicles a turning point in the concept of legal evidence as it is used to establish the reality of atrocity. In the wake of the Eichmann trial that began in 1961 and Hannah Arendt's ...coverage of the trial in her landmark thesis, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the discourse of 'authenticity' became central to representing atrocity, as atrocity became enfolded within legal discourse, rendered in terms of legal concepts of truth and verification. Yet the concept of 'authenticity' itself became contested, torn between the demands of aesthetic representation on the one hand and legal representation on the other. Using current research on Eichmann alongside my archival investigation into Arendt and Eichmann's papers, I juxtapose Arendt's version of the 'real' Eichmann, drafted during the Jerusalem trial in 1961, with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s character, Walter Campbell Jr., who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eichmann in his 1961 Mother Night. Doubling the historical figure of Eichmann, Mother Night oscillates between fictional and factual discourse in its attempt to locate an authentic representation of atrocity. I argue that in the attempt to determine and assess the facts of atrocity, fiction may itself produce a type of authentic factuality.
Kurt Vonnegut's work, with the exception of Slaughterhouse-Five, is often dismissed as too simply written, too whimsical, and too reliant on genre-specific forms to be considered serious literature. ...His 1962 novel Mother Night is no exception; even Vonnegut scholars tend to emphasize the book's absurdity and the cartoonish nature of its characters. But previously neglected historical background reveals parallels between Vonnegut's characters and specific real-life American fascists active in the 1930s and 40 s. Mother Night engages deeply and meaningfully with American history as it exposes the bona fide danger ofa virulently fascist and white supremacist underbelly in America that did not disappear with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945.
My intention was, not to survey political novels, or the ones I like best, or novels that meet some ahistorical standard of excellence, but to consider those that are in one way or another central to ...American bourgeois culture, and to help students understand that culture through their reading of the novels…. I adopted an approach that might be unsympathetically described as building the novels up in order to knock them down. But I think the strategy is warranted. Looking closely at what's good in one of these novels almost invariably means following some insight into the difficulty of living a good life on the terms offered by our society. (Many of the novelists would probably let it go at "living a good life," but since they take America as a given, the mimesis of capitalism is always there.) This is, to put it crudely, the problem posed by each novel, often revealingly. Most go on to hint at solutions, and here's where I think they fall apart. They displace politics and offer personal or anarchist or pre-industrial remedies for human sorrows that are rooted in advanced capitalist, industrial society.
...technique," from Greek tekhnikos, "pertaining to art," from tekhnē "art, skill," requires a sensual relation to the object in the process of crafting a work of art. (204) In a later interview, ...published in 1996, to a question relative to the fact that despite his dissatisfaction with its final form, the novel proved to be his most successful book, Vonnegut rather humorously replied: "Well, at times you can get away with it or you can't. The question at the heart of my critical inquiry is: "How is it possible to make sense of it all?" Crafty writing, indeed, requires crafty reading, in turn, so as to avoid "misreading" or easy, hasty technical skills in hermeneutics. Yet, as one of the first admirers of Slaughterhouse-Five, James Lundquist claims that the major difficulty in approaching the novel has to do with aesthetics, that is, it lies in Vonnegut's art "to conceptualize and define the night terrors of an era so unreal, so unbelievable, that the very term fiction seems no longer to have any currency" (1).4 Hence, the difficult question for Vonnegut, which I will try to develop later on, has to do with mimesis, that is, the writer's (im-)possible craft of representing the disastrous experience of World War II in which he is a protagonist and a witness who happens to be traumatically marked by its aftershocks.
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