Oldal 84 [84]
OCR
LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING A prominent counter-example would be Eva Hoffmans informative use of Polish insertions in her language memoir Lost in Translation.? For example, Hoffman employs the Polish word polot in her text in a scene relating back to her piano lessons as a child. Ihe word is presented as having no eguivalent in the English language, as a “translated untranslatable word”.% Hoffman describes it as carrying the meanings of “dash, inspiration, and flying” as well as “flair”, “melancholy” and “wilderness”.° By elaborating on the uniqueness and untranslatability of the term, Hoffman highlights the difference between languages and invites the presumed monolingual English reader into the Polish world by adding a further layer of meaning to the given scene. While Montilla’s descriptive translation and Con’s arguably redundant explication can be an aid to the English-only reader, both are essentially limited to information from dictionaries, whereas Hoffman’s given explanation goes beyond literal translation, rendering the ‘exact’ translation of polot irrelevant to the account of the narrator and emphasizing the narrator’s individual experiences instead. A more nuanced explication is presented in Pavel’s aforementioned nonfiction text “Freedom”. In this text, a Russian broadsheet newspaper is referenced, which was the official public medium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The embedded word’s literal meaning is given in parenthesis: “My father joked that he had never had anything so good that came out of a newspaper, referencing newspapers like Pravda (which ironically means “truth’)”.6° The scene including this sentence takes place on the English coast, when the protagonist and her father are having fish and chips, wrapped in a paper. As the narrator provides the literal meaning of the paper’s name and adds the qualifier “ironically” to this explication, Soviet history and culture as well as the narrator’s perception thereof are thematized. The modifier “ironically” takes on the role of a signpost in Pavel’s text. Without explicitly mentioning the Soviet Union, the English reader is made aware of the potential unreliability of broadsheet papers in the family’s home culture. In fact, Pavel left Communist Czechoslovakia in 1967 at the age of 18 to escape persecution or war. As this example shows, a minute aspect in the act of literary code-switching can, alike a personalized translation as presented in Hoffman’s memoir,° have a substantial impact on the interpretation. If done successfully, an instance of weak intra-sentential code-switching can outline the 62 Eva Hoffman: Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language, 1989, London, Vintage Books, 1998. 6 Lennon: In Babel’s Shadow, 152. 64 Hoffman: Lost in Translation, 71. Pavel: Freedom. 66 Ibid. 67 65 Hoffman: Lost in Translation. + 82 +
