Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros34Brouillons et dactylographiesGenesis of a Self-Translation: In...

Brouillons et dactylographies

Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

Enora Lessinger
p. 84-100

Résumés

Cet article aborde le premier roman de Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, en tant que traduction des avant-textes composés des tapuscrits et notes archivés au Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas). L’analyse se fonde sur la définition de la traduction proposée par Jakobson (1959), dont l’une des catégories est la traduction intralinguale. Le dossier génétique du roman révèle le processus d’inscription de la non-fiabilité de la narratrice, ainsi que l’effacement d’informations presque imperceptibles dans la version publiée. L’étude des différentes stratégies d’autotraduction mises en place par l’auteur montre que Kazuo Ishiguro joue sur différent niveaux d’implicite et d’ambiguïté. Ainsi, le second tapuscrit contient une fin plus explicite que celle du roman publié. Cet article suggère que le procédé clé n’est pas ici la simplification, que Zethsen (2009) considère comme la principale tendance en traduction interlinguale. Au contraire, les variations traductionnelles révèlent une tendance à la complexification qui rend la compréhension du texte plus ardue.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

“Le devoir et la tâche d’un écrivain sont ceux d’un traducteur.” (Proust, 1924: 469)

Introduction

Etsuko, in A Pale View of Hills, speaks in a kind of Japanese way because she’s a Japanese woman. […] So [her language] has to have that kind of carefulness, and, particularly when she’s reproducing Japanese dialogue in English, it has to have a certain foreignness about it. (Mason, 1989: 345)

In this 1989 interview with Gregory Mason, Ishiguro describes the way he consciously imbued his narrator’s speech with traces of the Japanese language in his first novel, a process he returned to when crafting the narrative voice for his second one:

Ono in An Artist of the Floating World [is] supposed to be narrating in Japanese; it’s just that the reader is getting it in English. […] It has to be almost like subtitles, to suggest that behind the English language there’s a foreign language going on. I’m quite conscious of actually figuring these things out when I’m writing, using a certain kind of translationese (ibid.).

The writing strategy described here, as well as the positively connoted twist brought to the infamous translationese style, are a striking illustration of the blurred line between monolingualism and plurilingualism, and thereby between writing and translating—largely regarded as intralingual and interlingual activities respectively. In this article, I seek to further challenge these distinctions by approaching the drafts of Ishiguro’s first novel through the prism of genetic translation studies, regarding the published text as an intralingual translation of these drafts.

  • 1 . “Revaloriser la traduction implique qu´elle soit une écriture. Sans quoi c’est une imposture” (M (...)

1The reappraisal of the status of translation long called-for by critics such as Meschonnic1 contributed to the emergence of genetic translation studies as a discipline of its own in the past fifteen years, through the crossing of the fields of genetic criticism and translation studies. As pointed out by Meschonnic, “traduire n’est traduire que quand traduire est un laboratoire d’écrire” (1999: 459). This re-evaluation of the status of translation and of its intimate relationship with writing both results from and feeds into the postmodern endeavour to destabilise textual authority, as “genetic critics sought to challenge the sacrosanct authority of the published text by showing how it is but one phase in a continuum of textual creation […] [R]evealing the labour of the text’s creation undermines the much-vaunted myth of the author’s genius” (Cordingley & Montini [eds], 2015). For instance, in her article “Vulnérabilité de l’œuvre en traduction”, Samoyault goes as far as seeing translation as a form of subsequent draft: “[p]enser la traduction comme brouillon postérieur de l’œuvre” (2014: 57). Conversely, “le processus de réécriture dans la genèse d’un texte original répond à une intentionnalité comparable à celle qui préside au travail du traducteur” (Lebrave, 2014: 38).

2My approach is comparable or even complementary to Samoyault’s, but similarly to Lebrave I adopt the writer’s perspective as a point of departure: I see Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills as a translation of the avant-textes made of the manuscripts held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, in Austin. Contat, Hollier and Neefs’ notion of genetic criticism as an “esthetic of the possible” (1996: 2) is particularly relevant to Ishiguro’s writing, in which suggestion is the keyword, with several competing versions of the same story echoing perceptibly between the lines of the surface narrative as they would in a palimpsest. By exploring the avant-textes as a process of self-translation, I hope to illuminate these underlying versions and their role in the poetics of ambivalence developed by the author.

3I ground my hypothesis in Jakobson’s three-fold definition of translation, which includes intralingual translation:

We distinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal sign: it may be translated into other signs of the same language, into another language, or into another, nonverbal system of symbols. […] Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. (1959: 114)

In After Babel (1975), Steiner defends the idea that translation is implicitly present in every single communicative act, and that the issues raised by interlingual translation or “translation proper” (Jakobson 1959: 114) already exist in intralingual translation (Steiner, 1975: 144). The likeness between the challenges posed by synonymy and equivalence, for instance, has been noted by several critics (Jakobson 1959, Steiner 1975, Zethsen 2007). Similarly, Weissbrod (2004) defends Even-Zohar’s thesis that all three types of translation described by Jakobson could be labelled as transfer. According to her, in the case of intralingual translation “[i]t is possible to regard the adaptation of a text or model for a new audience in the same semiotic symbols, language and culture, even with no significant gap in time, as a form of transfer” (25).

  • 2 . The word skopos is “a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation” (Vermeer, 2000: 22 (...)

4The call for a broader definition including intralingual translation was relayed by a number of critics in the past decade (Baker [dir.], 1998; Zethsen, 2007 & 2009; Whyatt 2017), usually on the basis of Jakobson’s definition and/or Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” (1953). However, as Zethsen points out, “despite Jakobson’s classical definition, intralingual translation or rewording is extremely peripheral to translation studies, more so than it deserves, and the relationship between interlingual and intralingual translation is a neglected area of research” (2009: 795). Zethsen offers what she calls an “open definition” based on Jakobson’s (1959) and Toury’s (1985) definitions and on the notion of skopos2:

A source text exists or has existed at some point in time. A transfer has taken place and the target text has been derived from the source text […] This relationship can take many forms and by no means rests on the concept of equivalence, but rather on the skopos of the target text. (Zethsen, 2007: 299)

This is the definition that I adopt in this paper, which explores the genesis of Ishiguro’s writing strategy in A Pale View of Hills. The narrative strategy in this first novel is characterised by textual blanks resulting from the narrator’s unreliability and her silence on the novel’s absent centres: a close analysis of the self-translation at work in the novel’s genetic dossier shows the process of encoding of the narrator’s unreliability, and of erasure of information that the reader of the published text can access only indirectly—and often partially.

5Through a process of “intralingual paraphrasing” (Whyatt, 2017: 140), the author goes back and forth between several versions characterised by different levels of ambiguity, playing with different degrees of implicitness and uncovering what lies under the surface of the published novel. I argue here that the key process at work is not simplification, as Zethsen (2009) claims to be generally the case, but rather a tendency for complexification that makes the processing of the text harder.

Material

6In June 2017, I had the privilege of working as a visiting scholar at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) on the “Kazuo Ishiguro Papers” acquired by the Center in 2015. It contains material on all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels except the most recent one to date, The Buried Giant (2015).

7The archives of A Pale View of Hills contain both endogenetic and exogenetic documents, respectively two annotated manuscripts and a number of notes. Since Ishiguro only started keeping his rough papers in the 1990s, there is relatively little material on A Pale View of Hills, which was published in 1982. The two manuscripts are late drafts, which Ishiguro labelled “penultimate draft” (container 14.4) and “final draft” (container 14.5), hereafter MS1 and MS2. As for the final, published version, I call it FV—not in the sense that it corresponds to a hypothetical ideal and unalterable version, but rather because it is the one that was chosen for publication and came to be known as Ishiguro’s first novel. The genetic dossier also comprises notes on A Pale View of Hills taken by Ishiguro during the writing process of later novels. The notes refer back to his first novel, commenting on writing techniques and narrative choices, as well as their success or failure according to Ishiguro.

8It must be noted that the question of chronology is a delicate one here, as only part of the handwritten notes on MS1 predate MS2. The elaborate process of revision is described as follows in a sticky note accompanying the folder:

In the pink folder are 2 original typescripts of A Pale View of Hills. The one with the Guildford address was submitted to my agent, Deborah Rogers (whose letter from the following year I found attached to the MS). This version incorporates the handmarked corrections in the MS with the Cardiff address (where the novel was written). After discussions with Deborah and my Faber editor, Robert McCrum, I made changes to the submitted Guilford version; in particular, I gave the novel a new ending. These revisions don’t show up on the Guildford MS, but become further alterations on the Cardiff one (which is the one I kept for my own use after submission). / There must have been another MS I typed out (in those days each copy took a week or so of tedious typing even for a fast touch typist as I was then!) for the Faber edition with all revisions incorporated. I don’t have this: maybe it’s in the vaults of Faber & Faber??! (HRC 14.4)

In other words, MS1 was written first and manually amended; MS2 was then typed out incorporating these changes, and sent to Ishiguro’s editors. Following their comments on MS2, Ishiguro then brought further manual alterations to MS1, so that it is impossible to tell which modifications pre-date the editor’s comments and which ones came after. FV, which corresponds to the published novel, is not available in the archive and incorporates all of the changes brought to MS1—and more, as I show in this article.

9The genetic analysis of the text is thus particularly complex, in particular in terms of chronology. For that reason, I focus here primarily on the contrast between manuscripts and final version rather than on the contrast between the different manuscripts.

Skopos

10In A Pale View of Hills the first-person narrator, a Japanese woman named Etsuko, recounts her younger daughter’s visit to her home in England shortly after the suicide of her elder daughter Keiko. She also reminisces about her past in Japan, and in particular about her friendship with a woman named Sachiko and her little girl Mariko. The two narratives become progressively more intertwined, sometimes making it difficult to differentiate between past and present. This confusion between the novel’s two timelines is a typical feature of what is generally termed unreliable narration. As a literary critic wrote in the Daily News shortly after the novel’s publication, “But how much of what she remembers is true? […] Gradually we come to realise that her memories are flawed, but there is no omniscient voice to tell us exactly how or why” (March 1984). Indeed, the novel is riddled with insinuations that Etsuko and Sachiko might be one and the same person, or at least that on some level Sachiko might stand for the narrator’s past back in Japan and Mariko for Etsuko’s dead daughter. This alternative reading of the novel can be regarded as a subtext, although it is impossible to pinpoint it as the only one. Unlike more conventional unreliable narratives, there is no single unquestionable version to be established by the attentive reader—the novel’s only truth value is that several readings coexist up to (and beyond) the end.

  • 3 . “To translate means to produce a text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addres (...)

11As analysed by another critic in The New York Times, “Etsuko’s memories, though they focus on her neighbor’s sorrows and follies, clearly refer to herself as well. The lives of the two women run parallel. […] A delicate, ironic, elliptical novel, A Pale View of Hills means much more than it says” (May 1982). This elliptical quality of Ishiguro’s first novel is precisely at the heart of the novel’s purpose as a text—its skopos. Although this concept was originally developed by Vermeer (1987) within the frame of translation proper3, the use of a broader definition of translation means that the notion of skopos is equally relevant to intralingual translation:

[I]n all cases of intralingual transfer (as in interlingual translation) there is a pre-existing text from which a new text is derived and tailored for a new purpose and new receivers. The need to rephrase, paraphrase or reformulate a text will result in a range of linguistic and conceptual alterations as dictated by the skopos of the new text. (Whyatt et al., 2017)

In Ishiguro’s notes on An Artist of the Floating World, the retrospective glance cast on A Pale View of Hills sheds light on the central role of a double thread of competing narratives in his first novel’s skopos: “What kind of themes would interest us? The twin narrative one; […] one narrative is perhaps distorted by memory—as in A Pale View of Hills—while the other is distorted by madness” (Kazuo Ishiguro Papers, 1.2).

12As these notes imply, An Artist of the Floating World is also a second attempt at writing about what the author originally wanted to express in A Pale View of Hills. The question of the narrator’s unreliability is a central feature throughout Ishiguro’s work, and notes on one novel often prove just as relevant to the author’s writing strategy as a whole. We can thus read in the notes on An Artist of the Floating World that

[t]he language must be one which “hides more than it reveals”; the language refers to both the 1st person narrator and some lines of dialogue. But the language has to reflect this: the need to self-deceive in order to preserve dignity. Thus, the “Japanese” language should be exploited for its qualities of concealment, its little strategies of avoiding naughty issues; it’s the way of preserving the fiction. (Ibid., emphasis in original)

The deliberate choice of a “language that hides more than it reveals” is representative of the global tendency to erase and conceal that takes place in the passage from the typescripts to FV in A Pale View of Hills. This propensity runs contrary to Zethsen’s claim that the main tendency in intralingual translation is simplification: “[T]he most significant difference [with interlingual translation] seems to be that in many kinds of intralingual translation simplification is the keyword” (2009: 808). Whyatt’s (2017) study on the frequency of conjunctions in inter- and intralingual translation tends to underpin this claim: “The findings of the product analyses indicate that there might be a tendency to simplify texts when paraphrasing them. This would support Zethsen’s (2009) observation that the tendency to simplify texts is frequently observed in intralingual translation.” Ishiguro’s self-translations, however, show on the contrary a process of complexification in terms of meaning processability. I would argue that this is due both to the specificity of self-translation and to the novel’s distinctive skopos.

Variantes liées (Interconnected variations)

13The first textual clues pointing towards the subtext, i.e. the suggested overlap between the two protagonists, are sown as early as the first chapter, in a passage that takes place shortly after Etsuko and Sachiko have met. I call this passage example 1:

1. MS2-FV Then one afternoon I heard two women talking at the tram stop, about the woman who had moved into the derelict house by the river. One was explaining to her companion how she had spoken to the woman that morning and had received a clear snub. Her companion agreed the newcomer seemed unfriendly—proud probably. She must be thirty at the youngest, they thought, for the child was at least ten. The first woman said the stranger had spoken with a Tokyo dialect and certainly was not from Nagasaki. They discussed for a while her “American friend”, then the woman spoke again of how unfriendly the stranger had been to her that morning.
Now I do not doubt that amongst those women I lived with then, there were those who had suffered, those with sad and terrible memories. But to watch them each day, busily involved with their husbands and their children, I found this hard to believe—that their lives had ever held the tragedies and nightmares of wartime. It was never my intention to appear
unfriendly, but it was probably true that I made no special effort to seem otherwise. For at that point in my life, I was still wishing to be left alone. (12-13, emphasis mine)

Two elements in this passage point to the blurriness of the line between Sachiko and the narrator. Firstly, Sachiko is never referred to by name but rather by non-specific terms such as the woman or the stranger. Secondly, there is an apparent mismatch between the two paragraphs, as the narrator goes from reporting the women’s conversation on Sachiko to apparently unrelated remarks on their past and finally to a comment on her own behaviour, in which she uses the same adjective as the one that was used twice in the previous paragraph to described Sachiko: unfriendly. At this point in the novel, the reader has little reason to suspect that the referent may not be Sachiko, but in hindsight this contributes to the narrative’s ambiguity. Both the use of common nouns and the repetition of unfriendly have their significance, as they form part of the text’s system and correspond to what Lebrave (2014: 36) calls liaisons à distance:

[L]e traducteur doit progressivement identifier à l’intérieur du texte un ensemble de liaisons à distance. On sait que ce phénomène apparaît dans l’écriture littéraire, où les généticiens ont très tôt repéré des systèmes de corrections interdépendantes intervenant en plusieurs points de la chaîne textuelle. Il s’agit de ce qui a été appelé les variantes liées.

In the particular case of example 1, the liaisons à distance in FV are already present in both MS1 and MS2, but the annotations on MS1 help confirm their significance. In the following transcription, angle brackets signal handwritten words above the crossed-out words in print, while bold indicates a sentence altogether missing in FV:

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, penultimate draft, f° 4, c. 1980, Kazuo Ishiguro Collection (container 14.4), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Transcription of MS1

1. MS1 Then one afternoon I heard two women talking at the tram stop, about the woman who had moved into the derelict house by the river. One was explaining to her companion how she had spoken to the woman that morning and had received a clear snub. Her companion agreed the woman <newcomer> seemed unfriendly : <–> proud probably, she guessed. She must be thirty at the youngest, they agreed <thought>, for the child was at least ten. The first woman said the stranger had spoken with a Tokyo dialect and certainly was not from Nagasaki. They then discussed <for a while> her “American friend”, probably <most likely> a soldier, they thought, <then> T/the first one <woman> repeated said again <spoke again of> how unfriendly the woman <stranger> had been <to her> that morning.
Now I do not doubt that amongst those women I lived with then, there were those who had suffered, those with sad and terrible memories. But to watch them each day, busily involved with their husbands and their children, I found this hard to believe—that their lives had ever held the tragedies and nightmares of wartime.
In a word, they seemed happy, and perhaps that was why I avoided them. It was never my intention to appear unfriendly, but it was probably true that I made no special effort to seem otherwise. For at that point in my life, I was still wishing to be left alone.

The alterations to the words woman and stranger, replaced respectively with newcomer and woman, show that Ishiguro never considers referring to Sachiko by her name, which substantiates my claim that this avoidance constitutes a clue to an alternative reading. The repetition of unfriendly is already present in the first version of MS1 since it bears no notes, and the transition towards its use in reference to Etsuko is preceded by a sentence that makes the parallel between Etsuko and Sachiko more obvious than in MS2 or FV. In MS1, it is more apparent that the narrator is justifying herself for what the women reproach Sachiko with: her avoidance of them and her unfriendliness. The self-translation operated from MS1 to MS2—which is itself identical to FV—results in complexification: the processing of the clues to the subtext is made more difficult by the erasure of the logical link expressed in the deleted sentence.

Erasure

14The overall trend from MS1 to FV is one of implicitation, defined by Klaudy as a “translation technique which consists of making what is explicit in the source language implicit in the target language, relying on the context or the situation for conveying the meaning” (2009: 104). One of the main manifestations of this tendency is the erasure of information in the passage from the manuscripts to the published text. For instance, certain facets of the narrator’s personality are rendered close to imperceptible in the published novel by the deletion of whole dialogues. Such is the case with her curiosity and envy towards her friend Sachiko, who is as direct and liberated a woman as Etsuko is restrained and subdued. In FV, Etsuko systematically refrains from questioning Sachiko on her relationship with her American boyfriend, something that Sachiko herself points out and takes offence at:

2. MS1-MS2-FV “Why do you never ask me about him, Etsuko? There must be all sorts of questions you’d like to ask. So why don’t you ask them?” […] / “But really, I …” / “Come on, Etsuko, I insist. Ask me about him.” (71-72)

In the manuscripts, however, Etsuko’s fascination for Sachiko’s love life is blatant. Although she does not directly quiz Sachiko, when she finds herself alone with Mariko she presses the little girl with inquisitive questions. In MS1 and MS2 we have:

3. MS1-MS2 “What do you think she’s doing, Mariko-San? What do you suppose she’s doing now?” / The whispering noises stopped. We stared at each other for a second. / “Your mother was telling me all about Frank-San”, I said. He sounds a very nice man.” / She remained silent. / “He sounds a very nice man”, I repeated. / “He’s a bad man.” / “Now that’s not a nice thing to say, Mariko. Your mother told me all about him and he sounds very nice.” / “He’s a bad man. He’s always thinking bad thoughts.” / “Oh? And what kind of bad thoughts are they?” / She did not reply. One of the kittens began clawing at the tatami. / “What kind of bad thoughts, Mariko-San?” / […] “Does he stay here sometimes?” I asked her. “Does Frank-San stay here?” / “Sometimes he stays.” / “And he stays here at night?” / Mariko reached forward. The spider moved quite slowly along the wall.

By contrast, Etsuko’s interest remains discreet enough that her underlying motivation can easily be overlooked in FV:

3. FV “Your mother should be home soon,” I said. “I wonder what she can be doing.” / Mariko continued whispering. / “She was telling me all about Frank-San,” I said. “He sounds a very nice man.” / The whispering noises stopped. We stared at each other for a second. / “He’s a bad man,” Mariko said. / “Now that’s not a nice thing to say, Mariko-San. Your mother told me all about him and he sounds very nice. And I’m sure he’s very kind to you, isn’t he?” / She got to her feet and went to the wall. The spider was still there. / “Yes, I’m sure he’s a nice man. He’s kind to you, isn’t he, Mariko-San?” / Mariko reached forward. The spider moved quite slowly along the wall. (80-81)

Etsuko’s straightforward question to Mariko in MS1 and MS2—“What do you think she’s doing, Mariko-San?”—has been translated into an indirect one in FV: “I wonder what she can be doing.” Moreover, although the narrator’s insistence is still present in the repetition of her question—“he’s kind to you, isn’t he?”—the feigned assumption that Frank-San is beyond reproach aims to conceal her desire to find out what his faults might be. Finally, Etsuko’s desire to find out details on Sachiko’s sex life, only hinted at in example 1 but clearly perceptible through Etsuko’s questions in MS1 and MS2, has been erased from the final version. In MS1 and MS2 this side of Etsuko’s personality is repressed, but only to the point that she dares not question Sachiko directly, questioning Mariko instead. In FV however it is almost completely repressed, so that the suggestion that Sachiko’s brazenness might be the expression of Etsuko’s hidden side is less prominent in the published text.

15This erasure of clues signalling the possible overlap in the identity of the two women means that the narrator’s unreliability is less perceptible in FV, so that when the overlap between Etsuko and Sachiko is made obvious towards the end of the novel through a confusion in the use of pronouns, as will be seen later, it is likely to be perceived as a new element rather than a confirmation of something towards which the text was building up.

Implicitation

16Something that all the examples examined thus far have in common is the expression of a conflict between the will to achieve greater subtlety—suggesting rather than stating—and the need for clarity in order for the subtext not to be lost altogether on the reader. The tension between these two poles is most perceptible in passages central to the narrative strategy of unreliability, and in particular in chapter 10, towards the end of the novel. In this passage, the two protagonists are discussing Sachiko’s imminent departure for America now that her boyfriend has come back to her once more and promised again to take her there:

Fig. 2

Fig. 2

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, penultimate draft, f° 128, c. 1980, Kazuo Ishiguro Collection (container 14.4), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Transcription of MS1, MS2 and FV

4. MS1 “I suppose you think I’m a fool,” she said, quietly. “Don’t you, Etsuko?” / I looked back at her, a little surprised. / “I realize we may never see America,” she said. “And even if we did, I know how difficult things will be. Did you think I never knew that? (Did you really think, Etsuko, I believe even a fraction of the things I say?”)

4. MS2 “I suppose you think I’m a fool,” she said, quietly. “Don’t you, Etsuko?” / I looked back at her, a little surprised. / “I realize we may never see America,” she said. “And even if we did, I know how difficult things will be. Did you think I never knew that? Did you really think, Etsuko, I believe even a fraction of the things I say?”

4. FV “I suppose you think I’m a fool,” she said, quietly. “Don’t you, Etsuko?” / I looked back at her, a little surprised. / “I realize we may never see America,” she said. “And even if we did, I know how difficult things will be. Did you think I never knew that?” (170-71)

The published text still exposes Sachiko’s unreliability to a point, in that she does confess to keeping some things quiet. However, the scope of this revelation is much more limited: it is no longer suggested that she does not mean most of what she says, as is the case in the extra sentence present in both MS1 and MS2 but crossed out in MS1. Whether the crossing-out of this sentence pre- or post-dates MS2, the hesitation between several levels of explicitness evinced in this example is a manifestation of the challenge the writer is faced with: finding a way to leave things unsaid without leaving them out altogether. Moreover, many of the passages erased in the process of self-translation shed light on what I call, after Fonioková (2015), the implicit version of fictional reality—in other words, the subtext of the unreliable narrative told by Etsuko. Unlike more traditional forms of unreliable narration (Fonioková, 2015: 109-112), including some of Kazuo Ishiguro’s later novels, Ishiguro’s early fiction “departs from traditional unreliable narration by leaving some riddles unresolved and thus preventing the reader from reconstructing an unambiguous version of fictional reality” (112).

A metonymy of the manuscripts

17It is towards the end of the novel that the process of self-translation gives rise to the deepest alterations, in a passage in chapter 10 that brings some element of resolution to the characters’ ontological ambiguity by shedding light on the overlap between the two women’s stories. This scene bears striking similarities with an earlier passage in chapter 6: in that first scene, the narrator has gone out to look for Mariko and scared her by approaching her with a piece of rope in her hand: “an old piece of rope had tangled itself around my ankle and I had been dragging it through the grass” (83-84). In the ending in chapter 10, the word rope itself is absent from the passage, and only thanks to the echo with chapter 6 can the reader understand that the referent of that in Mariko’s question is indeed a rope: “Why are you holding that?” (172-73).

18Throughout this scene, Mariko is once more referred to by neutral phrases such as “the child” or “the little girl”. The narrator goes out to look for her and approaches her, presumably holding again a piece of rope found in the grass. The child tells Etsuko that she does not want to go away to America, and while trying to reassure her the narrator uses what seems like the wrong pronoun: ““Everything will turn out well, I promise”. The child said nothing. I sighed again. “In any case,” I went on, “if you don’t like it over there, we can always come back.” This time she looked up at me questioningly” (ibid.). In MS1 and FV, this scene bears striking similarities with the earlier passage in chapter 6 (p. 83-84), one of which is the presence of the rope—in itself an echo of Keiko’s suicide by hanging, and of the swing that the narrator and her younger daughter see a little girl play on. The presence of two variants of this scene in MS1, MS2 and FV shows that the dual pattern that runs throughout A Pale View of Hills is inscribed in the very structure of the text, which highlights its centrality in the novel.

19MS2 stands out from the other two versions with three additional passages—the first of which is present in MS1 with a question mark next to it—that add to the thriller-like dimension of the novel. In these passages, the morbid tension lies in references to the woods rather than to the rope. The first one takes place at the end of the first “rope” episode.

5. MS1-MS2 I remained standing in the doorway, watching her. Eventually, I said: /
“Do you want to come with me? Over there, across the river?” / Mariko turned and looked at me. / “You could show me the woods, Mariko. I’m sure it’s very nice over there. Why don’t we go over there now. Your mother wouldn’t mind, I’m sure.” / “I don’t want to go to the woods.” / “But I’m sure your mother wouldn’t mind. After all, it won’t be dark for some time yet, will it? Why don’t we go there together?” / “I don’t want to. I don’t want to go to the woods with you.” / “It won’t be dark for a long time yet.” / “But I don’t want to go to the woods.” / “But it won’t be dark for a long time.” / Mariko stared at me silently. Behind her, the kittens continued to play on the tatami. / “Very well,” I said with a laugh. “Just as you wish.”

The narrator’s insistence and Mariko’s reluctance both point to the narrator’s threatening side, something that in FV is only perceptible through the two “rope” scenes and expressed in a much more ambiguous fashion. This scene is paralleled in MS2 by a second “woods” scene in which the narrator tries once more to entice the little girl to the woods, right at the end of the second “rope” episode in chapter 10.

6. MS2 For some time, the child said nothing. She continued to look at her hands with empty eyes. Then, once, she glanced quickly over her shoulder. I followed her gaze across the bridge, then looked down again at the little girl. / “Were you thinking of going over there?” I said. “Over to the woods? / The child was now watching me carefully, but still said nothing. / “Why don’t we go there now,” I said to her. “Before it gets completely dark. You could show me where you play.” / For a moment, the child continued to look at me. Then slowly she got to her feet, taking a step backwards as she did so. I could see fear coming into her eyes. / “Shall we do that?” I said. “Shall we go to the woods now?” / She turned and ran from me, her footsteps drumming along the bridge. Then realising I was not chasing her, she stopped halfway across and looked back at me. I smiled reassuringly, then stepped up onto the bridge. The child began to run again, and the boards shook beneath my feet. I continued to follow her at an easy pace.

“I don’t know where she could have gone,” I said, as I sat down. “I walked all down the river but I couldn’t see her.” / “Don’t worry, Etsuko. She’ll come back.”

Here, Etsuko’s threatening attitude is made clear not only by the child’s body language, as in the two “rope” scenes, but also by the explicit mention of her fear. Similarly, rather than only hinting at the narrator’s guilt indirectly through the morbid element of the suggested rope, the possibility of her innocence is seriously undermined by her claim that she could not find Mariko and does not know where she might be, which the reader knows to be a blatant lie. Moreover, Mariko is never referred to by name but only as “she” or “the child”, which underpins my claim that this avoidance is a clue pointing to the overlap between Mariko and Keiko, and indirectly between Etsuko and Sachiko.

20In FV, a variant of this scene is present—the second “rope” scene—but it includes no mention of the woods. The passage also ends on the little girl running away: “Once, through the dimness, I thought I could see Mariko running along the riverbank in the direction of the cottage” (173). However, the narrator does not follow her and this sentence closes chapter 10: at the beginning of the next chapter, Sachiko and Mariko have gone to America, or so the narrator assumes. By failing to tell the reader what comes after the second rope episode and her troubling conversation with Mariko, the implicit author opens up a gap in the narration. The reader can intuit that a tragic episode lies in this gap, but remains unable to fill it with any definite version of fictional reality. Ishiguro himself describes this strategy in his interview with Mason: “In that book, I was trying something rather odd with the narrative. The main strategy was to leave a big gap. […] I was trying to explore that type of language, how people use the language of self-deception and self-protection.” (337)

  • 4 . Sachiko was originally called ‘Sako’; the change of name took place between MS2 and FV.

21In both of the manuscripts and in the final version, this gap is given a greater prominence by its inscription in the text as a typographic blank after Etsuko and Mariko’s chilly interaction and Etsuko’s return to the cottage, and by the abrupt shift from one time-frame and place to the next. In MS1, the blank is framed by the sentences “I turned away and stepped back out into the bright sunlight” and “‘Oh, it’s you Etsuko’ Sako4 said”, while in MS2 and FV it is framed by “I continued to follow her at an easy pace” and “I don’t know where she could have gone”. The presence of a typographical blank in both cases, in spite of different co-texts, confirms that the function of this blank goes beyond mere typography: it gives an illustration of and draws attention to the narrative gap between the two passages.

22Moreover, in MS2 and FV the co-occurrence of these two sentences sheds light on the discrepancy between the narrator’s words and her report of events, in other words on her misreporting. Fonioková describes this type of “narrator’s contradictory statements” as a typical sign of narrative unreliability: “[o]ther possible indicators of narrative unreliability at the story level are situations in which the narrator makes contradictory statements at different points throughout the narrative” (2015: 52). In both manuscripts, the narrator’s unreliability is thus more clearly perceptible than in FV.

23Finally, a third “woods” scene in MS2 points much more explicitly than either MS1 or FV to the link between Mariko and Etsuko’s dead daughter, whose hanging body is evoked several times in the published novel. After coming back to the cottage claiming she could not find Mariko, the narrator goes back out again, allegedly looking for the little girl, and goes as far as the woods where she encounters a mysterious object swinging from a tree:

7. MS2 I realised I was standing in a kind of clearing. I held the lantern high up, then once more swung it around me in a slow arc. Indeed, I was in a clearing. But this time, as the shadows had moved with the lantern, I had seen something amongst the trees. I remained still for a moment, then held the lantern up as high as I could. A little way away, just beyond the pool of light, there was some object suspended from a branch. I could not see clearly the object itself, for it was obscured by the dark background of the neighbouring trees. My arm grew tired and I lowered the lantern. / I considered for a moment what I had seen. Objects suspended from trees were not an uncommon sight during the war, and the clearing in which I stood was a likely spot for rifle practice. Quite probably, then, what had caught my eye was a remnant from these days. Or otherwise, it could have been something put up by children. A swing, perhaps. / I decided it would be unwise to continue any further into the woods and began to retrace my steps back along the mud path. […] / When I reached Sako’s cottage again, I remained standing outside in the darkness. I could hear voices from within, those undoubtedly of Sako and her daughter. […] I carefully placed the lantern down on the ground, then started back towards the apartment block.

Here, the gap opened in example 6 is partially filled, or at least one possible way of filling it is made available to the reader through the suggestion that the narrator may have killed the little girl—whether this is to be taken literally or as a manifestation of her feeling of guilt about the suicide of her elder daughter, though, is a different question, to which the novel offers no definitive answer. Either way, the level of explicitness is higher than in either MS1 or FV, confirming the parallel between the latter two and the eventual choice of a greater subtlety in the translation into FV, in accord with the author’s desire to use a language that “hides more than it reveals”.

24Even though some clues and key scenes are absent from FV, all these different passages revolving around the relationship between Etsuko and Mariko towards the end of the novel function as a system. The study of the palimpsest formed by the different intralingual paraphrases reveals that recurrent sentences and turns of phrase, interpersonal dynamics, props etc. echo one another not only at the textual level but in an intertextuality that runs across all three versions. Here, the published text is truly a metonymy of the manuscripts, with several intertwined underlying versions of fictional reality contained within one text.

Absent centres

25The fluctuating nature of the novel’s ending is also perceptible in the author’s notes from the time of publication. In a self-critical document entitled “Thoughts on A Pale View of Hills on publication Jan 1982”, he writes:

Themes don’t interplay—most important theme upstaged by less important ones—e.g. suicide/threat to Mariko theme; this was prompted as way of making book more readable—i.e. have a “thriller” run alongside real story. (Kazuo Ishiguro Papers, 1.4)

The use of the slash when referring to the suicide/threat to Mariko theme reflects the ontological instability characterising that subplot. As for the mention of the real story, it illustrates a recurring feature in Ishiguro’s writing: the recourse to absent centres. This writing strategy is reflected, among other things, in the way the narrator both avoids and is constantly drawn back to painful memories from her past, and in particular to her daughter’s suicide.

26Although Keiko herself is seldom mentioned by the narrator, her haunting presence is felt throughout the novel. In particular, the motif of the rope gives away the narrator’s persistent feeling of guilt, reflected in the repeated suggestion that she might be involved in Mariko’s alleged death by strangulation. Thus, the narrator repeatedly has a disturbing dream in which she sees a little girl playing on a swing:

8. MS1-FV “I dreamt about that little girl again.” / “What little girl?” / “The one we saw playing on the swing the other day. When we were in the village having coffee.” / Niki shrugged. “Oh, that one,” she said, not looking up. / “Well, actually, it isn’t that little girl at all. […] / It was just a little girl I knew once,” I said to her. “A long time ago.” / “Which little girl?” / “No one you know. I knew her a long time ago.” / […] “In fact, I realized something else this morning,” I said. “Something else about the dream.” / My daughter did not seem to hear. / “You see,” I said, “the little girl isn’t on a swing at all. It seemed like that at first. But it’s not a swing she’s on.” / Niki murmured something and carried on reading. (95-96)

Part 1 ends on these words in MS1 and FV, but in MS2 an additional sentence reads: “It wasn’t a swing at all.” This addition gives more prominence to the suggestion that the little girl might have been hanging on a rope, an image we already know to be haunting the narrator: “I have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture—of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end” (54). The adittion of the sentence it wasn’t a swing at all in MS2 corresponds to the description made by Zethsen of the process of simplification through addition in intralingual translation:

[Simplification] may take the form of considerable reduction of the text by leaving out what is deemed to be superfluous information in order to make the processing of the text easier. Alternatively, it may take the form of considerable addition to the text with the aim of explaining or making explicit difficult or implicit information. (2009: 808)

Here it is the second case that is relevant, so that MS2 is once again more explicit than either MS1 or FV: indeed, the insistence expressed in the additional sentence results in an easier processing of the clue to the narrator’s unsaid guilt. However, the removal of this additional sentence in the self-translation into FV does not correspond to the first type of simplification mentioned by Zethsen: on the contrary, this erasure results in a greater implicitness of the clue contained in the passage, and therefore in a complexification of the processing by the reader.

27However, while the apparent absence of Keiko from the narrative clearly forms part of the narrative strategy, the novel’s other absent centre results from a discrepancy between the elements that Ishiguro intended to give prominence to and those that ended up forming the core of the story for most readers and critics. Indeed, the mention of a real story can be understood not only as a reference to where Etsuko’s attention truly lies, but also to the apparently secondary subplot of her father-in-law, Ogata-San, which the author had intended to be one of the main foci of the novel. This character bears strong similarities with Masuji Ono, the narrator of Ishiguro’s second novel An Artist of the Floating World, also a retired artist who reached the peak of his career making patriotic art during the war and has since fallen into disgrace.

28It is apparent both in Ishiguro’s notes and in the two manuscripts under study that Ogata’s way of dealing with the knowledge of having dedicated his life to an unworthy cause—a recurring theme in Ishiguro’s fiction—was meant to be one of the novel’s main threads, which were meant to be three and not just two: “Too many things conveyed in the 3 stories don’t interplay—Niki story and Ogata do, but Sachiko story is linked artificially through devices” (Kazuo Ishiguro Papers, 1.4).

29Moreover, both typescripts comprise an extra scene between Etsuko and Ogata that is missing from the published text and gives Ogata’s character more prominence, if only because these pages are located in the very last chapter. In the HRC archive, MS2 is thus labelled: “Final draft (with original ending). Clean copy typescript (with note from Deborah Rogers dated 22 February 1982), circa 1981”, while the finding aid drafted by Amy E. Armstrong during her processing of the archive in 2016-17 notes that:

Ishiguro clarifies that the ‘final draft’ contains his original ending, but after conversations with his editor, Robert McCrum, and his agent, Deborah Rogers, Ishiguro devised a new ending. So, the ‘final draft’ is actually the last draft of the original story before it was revised. Unfortunately, the archive doesn’t contain a final typed draft with the changes incorporated; only the ‘penultimate draft’ with the handwritten-changes.

In MS1, this original ending comes at the beginning of chapter 11 and is then followed by the same closing paragraphs as FV; in MS2, the order is reversed, with a few extra paragraphs absent from MS1 between the two passages. Interestingly, in all three versions the novel ends on a wave—to Etsuko’s daughter in the case of MS1 and FV, and to her father-in-law in the case of MS2: “As the train began to move, Ogata-San took his seat and waved to me through the glass.”

30In the scene in question Ogata is about to go back home, shortly after a trying confrontation with a former student who told him that during the war “[his] efforts were spent in a misguided direction, an evil direction” (147). In the two manuscripts Ogata chooses to reaffirm his feeling of self-righteousness, whether out of pride or self-deception:

9. MS1-MS2 “A man’s work is very important to him, Etsuko. He gains his self-respect by doing it well. You remember how occupied I used to be.” / “Yes”, I said, smiling, “I remember. Life must seem very quiet for you now.” / He leaned his head to one side and smiled. “I don’t mind it so much. A man should be able to enjoy a quiet life after he’s finished his work. It’s a good feeling, Etsuko, to know you’ve done your share. It’s a good feeling, and it’s worth all the hard work to earn it.”

The whole scene is crossed out in MS1 and is absent from FV, so that Ogata has effectively become one of the novel’s absent centres by the time of publication. In his second novel, Ishiguro draws from this experience, and the theme that he meant to explore with Ogata is at the forefront of his second novel, with some passages strikingly reminiscent of the erased scene from the manuscripts of A Pale View of Hills:

It is hard to describe the feeling. […] It was a profound sense of happiness deriving from the conviction that one’s efforts have been justified; that the hard work undertaken, the doubts overcome, have all been worthwhile; that one has achieved something of real value and distinction. (221)

Here again, we see that the author’s endeavour to inscribe the novel’s skopos into the text takes place through a process of self-translation that goes beyond A Pale View of Hills and carries over from one novel to the next, performing a re-focus on the first novel’s absent centre.

Conclusion

31As the examples studied here have shown, in the self-translations under study the text’s skopos lies both in the content—the three intertwined stories that the author wished to explore, only two of which make it to the forefront of the published version—and in the form, with a narrative strategy that relies by and large on the implicit and the unsaid. Indeed, the choice of unreliable narration involves walking a fine line between showing too much and not enough, as it demands that the writer should leave crucial information unsaid while at the same time making the gaps apparent and the text’s silences tangible.

32The specificity of this complex skopos partly explains why the genetic dossier of Ishiguro’s first novel departs so drastically from Zethsen’s (2009) and Whyatt’s claim (2017) that “the tendency to simplify texts is frequently observed in intralingual translation” (2017: 153), showing on the contrary a tendency to complexify.

33Moreover, the fact that we are dealing with a self-translation is likely to play a crucial role. Because he enjoys the status of author, Ishiguro is in a better position to take risks and deviate from the norm than professional interlingual translators. Responding to Pym, who speaks of the “relative absence of rewards for translators who take risks” (2008: 312), Becher (2010a) aptly demonstrated the link between the increased communicative risk for translators—as opposed to writers—and the prominence of the phenomenon of explicitation in translation:

[T]ranslators have to cope with a certain kind of risk – the risk of not being understood. Accordingly, it is not surprising that translators will go to great lengths to ensure understanding, and this is where explicitation comes into play (2010a: 20).

For Ishiguro, the communicative risk lies not in falling short of the original text’s standard, since it was still unpublished, but in over- or under-estimating his Model Reader’s (Eco, 1984) interpretive faculties:

To make his text communicative, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by the possible reader. The author thus has to foresee a model of the possible reader (hereafter Model Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them. (Eco, 1984: 7)

34The evolution from a higher degree of explicitness in the typescripts to greater implicitness in the final version is thus the expression of the author’s endeavour to translate the skopos he has himself built for the text into words that will convey it to the Model Reader in the most effective way. The manuscripts attest to the fact that the author is fully conscious of what is at stake in this tightrope exercise, while his post-publication notes and interviews show a critical self-appraisal of the results and his determination to make adjustments accordingly in later novels. Further research is needed (and under way) to assess the impact of a skopos based on an unreliable narrative strategy in terms of interlingual translation as well, and to contrast it with these first results based on Ishiguro’s intralingual self-translation.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Baker, Mona (dir.), 1998, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London, Routledge.

Becher, Viktor, 2010 (a), “Abandoning the Notion of ‘Translation-Inherent’ Explicitation, Against a Dogma of Translation Studies”, Across Languages and Cultures, vol. 11, n° 1, p. 1-28.

—, 2010 (b), “Towards a More Rigorous Treatment of the Explicitation Hypothesis in Translation Studies”, trans-kom, vol. 3, n° 1, p. 1-25.

Contat, Michel, Holloer, Denis & Neefs, Jacques, 1996, Introduction to Drafts, Yale French Studies, n° 89, p. 1-5.

Cordingley, Anthony & Montini, Chiara (dir.), 2015, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies, n° 14, Anvers.

Deppman, Jed, Ferrer, Daniel & Groden, Michael (dir.), 2004, Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Eco, Umberto, 1984, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Ferrer, Daniel, 2010, Dictionnaire de critique génétique, http://www.item.ens.fr/dictionnaire/.

—, 2011, Logiques du brouillon : modèles pour une critique génétique, Paris, Le Seuil.

Fonioková, Zuzana, 2015, Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration, Frankfurt am Main / New York, P. Lang.

Ishiguro, Kazuo, Kazuo Ishiguro Papers, 1955-2015, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

—, 1982, A Pale View of Hills, Faber & Faber, Kindle Edition.

—, 1986, An Artist of the Floating World, Faber & Faber, Kindle Edition.

Jakobson, Roman, 1959, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, in Lawrence Venuti (dir.), The Translation Studies Reader, London, Routledge, p. 113-118.

Klaudy, Kinga, “The Asymmetry Hypothesis in Translation Research”, in Rodica Dimitriu & Miriam Shlesinger (dir.), 2009, Translators and Their Readers. In Hommage to Eugene A. Nida, Brussels, Les Éditions du Hazard, p. 283-303.

Lebrave, Jean-Louis, 1992, “La Critique génétique : une discipline nouvelle ou un avatar moderne de la philologie?”, Genesis, n° 1, p. 33-72.

—, 2014, “Genèse d’une traduction : Comment Elmar Tophoven a annoté La Jalousie d’Alain Robbe-Grillet”, Genesis, n° 38, p. 35-56.

Lewis, Barry, 2000, Kazuo Ishiguro, Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Mason, Gregory, 1989, “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 30, n° 3, p. 335-347.

Meschonnic, Henri, 1999, Poétique du traduire, Paris, Verdier.

Paret-Passos, Marie-Hélène, 2011, Da crítica genética à tradução literária : Uma interdisciplinaridade, Vinhedo, Editora Horizonte.

Proust, Marcel, 1988 [1924], Le Temps retrouvé, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ».

Pym, Anthony, 2008, “On Toury’s Laws of How Translators Translate”, in Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies. Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, p. 311-328.

Samoyault, Tiphaine, 2014, “Vulnérabilité́ de l’œuvre en traduction”, Genesis 38, p. 57-68.

Shaffer, Brian W., 1998, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press.

Shlesinger, Miriam & Simeoni, Daniel (dir.), Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, p. 312-328.

Steiner, George, 1975, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press.

Toury, Gideon, 1985, “A Rationale for Descriptive Translation Studies”, in Theo Hermans (dir.) The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation, London/Sydney, Croom Helm, p. 16-41.

Vermeer, Hans, 1987, “What Does it Mean to Translate?”, Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, vol. 13, p. 25-33.

—, 2000, “Skopos and commission in translational action”, in Lawrence Venuti (dir.), The Translation Studies Reader, London / New York, Routledge, p. 221-233.

Weissbrod, Rachel, 2004, “From Translation to Transfer”, Across Languages and Cultures, vol. 5, n° 1, p. 23-41.

Whyatt, Bogusława, Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta & Stachowiak Katarzyna, 2017, “Intralingual and Interlingual Translation: Designing a Comparative Study of Decision-Making Processes in Paraphrase and Translation”, in Arnt Lykke Jakobsen and Bartolomé Mesa-Lao (dir.), Translation in Transition. Between cognition, computing and technology, Copenhagen, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell.

Zethsen, Karen Korning, 2007, “Beyond Translation Proper – Extending the Field of Translation Studies”, TTR : Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, vol. 20, n° 1, p. 281-308.

—, 2009, “Intralingual Translation: An Attempt at Description”, Meta: Translators’ Journal, vol. 54, n° 4, p. 795-812.

Haut de page

Notes

1 . “Revaloriser la traduction implique qu´elle soit une écriture. Sans quoi c’est une imposture” (Meschonnic, 1999: 28).

2 . The word skopos is “a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation” (Vermeer, 2000: 221), its function in the target communicative situation.

3 . “To translate means to produce a text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances” (Vermeer, 1987: 29).

4 . Sachiko was originally called ‘Sako’; the change of name took place between MS2 and FV.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1
Légende Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, penultimate draft, f° 4, c. 1980, Kazuo Ishiguro Collection (container 14.4), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/docannexe/image/5982/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 430k
Titre Fig. 2
Légende Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, penultimate draft, f° 128, c. 1980, Kazuo Ishiguro Collection (container 14.4), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/docannexe/image/5982/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 122k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Enora Lessinger, « Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills »Palimpsestes, 34 | -1, 84-100.

Référence électronique

Enora Lessinger, « Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills »Palimpsestes [En ligne], 34 | 2020, mis en ligne le 09 octobre 2020, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/5982 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/palimpsestes.5982

Haut de page

Auteur

Enora Lessinger

Ancienne élève de l’École normale supérieure (Lyon), Enora Lessinger a soutenu en 2019 une thèse de traductologie à la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Son sujet de thèse, « Translating Silence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels: Testing the Explicitation Hypothesis on Unreliable Narratives », croise narratologie et traductologie à partir d’un corpus en six langues. Elle a enseigné le français à Cambridge et l’anglais à la Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search