| Description |
The proposed paper presents a novel linguistic approach to the anatomy of John Updike’s use of stream of consciousness and whether/how that gets across to a typologically different language, using the opening sentence of A&P and its Mandarin translations as illustration. Updike has been considered a giant in the field of modern American Literature, with stream of consciousness (or the so-called free indirect style) being one of the stylistic hallmarks in his various works, such as “A&P”, Rabbit, Run, among numerous others. In particular, Updike’s masterful combination of various lexico-grammatical strategies makes his style a vivid re-presentation of the protagonist’s mind in the narration. One of the most striking examples is the opening sentences of A&P: In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. In the first sentence, one may identify at least three linguistic means that Updike employs in representing the protagonist’s consciousness: word order, subject-verb agreement and tense marking. First of all, the word order is inverted and that has the cognitive effect of putting the narrator deep in the story world (Dorgeloh 1997; Chen 2003), thus blurring the distinction between the narrator’s consciousness and the protagonist’s. Secondly, the subject and the verb do not agree the way they normally do, as the subject (these three girls) are plural, so the verb (walk) should not carry an inflection –s, according to standard English grammar. I argue that such use of subject-verb disagreement signal the low degree of formality, which is typical of a 19-year-old boy’s casual speech. Thirdly, Updike’s shifting between present and past tense (as seen in the second and third sentence) creates a narrative straddle between the present and the story told (George 2005:59-60) that is not seen in most other literary narratives that adopt only the past tense in the narration. However, I argue that Updike’s skillful use of a wide variety of stylistic strategies, typified by the above passage, has presented an immediate dilemma to translators into Mandarin Chinese—the above structural means are all specific to the English language and do not exist at all in the Mandarin system. In particular, Mandarin is notoriously a tenseless language and does not inflectionally mark subject-verb agreement; being a topic-comment language, Mandarin Chinese also has an information-packaging system that is very different from English, a subject-predicate language (Huang and Shi 2016). The present paper will look into the ways how Mandarin translators, with no linguistic means comparable to the English original, (have to) adapt and render Updike’s style in their reproductions of the same literary scene, considering corresponding passages in English and Mandarin from A&P and other works.
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