Dr Enora Lessinger

The present study explores the film adaptations of three British novels characterised by unreliable narration, in order to determine to what extent and via which tools this narrative strategy is maintained in intersemiotic translation. The corpus consists of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, and Daphné du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, and their respective adaptations. Results show that the narrator’s unreliability is maintained on screen through six main techniques: verbal habits, voiceover, framing of the narrative, visual effects, soundtrack,  and camera perspective. The analysis further shows that these techniques used to stage narrative unreliability only partially overlap with those used in literature.

KEYWORDS: translation studies, intersemiotic translation, adaptation, unreliable narration, narrative studies.

This contribution explores humour as a means of resistance against patriarchal authority in Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalias døtre (1977), a work of feminist science fiction, and its translation into English by Louis Mackay (1985). In this Norwegian gender-bender, humour serves as a facilitator for critical thinking: the coinage of a playful and subversive matriarchal language undermines and ridicules at once the male-as-norm premise that operates in everyday language. This article reflects on the literary tradition the novel belongs to and the key role of lexical creation in the feminist struggle, before analysing the means and effects of lexical creativity in the source text and its translation, from compounding and neologisms to gender-inverting idioms. The results of this contrastive analysis show that the all-important female-as-norm principle at work in the novel, combined with structural differences between source and target languages, lead the translator to make full use of his creative license. By resorting to compensation as a creative translation strategy to create similar effects throughout the novel, he ensures that the English reader also ends up “laughing at patriarchy”, thereby “[breaking] the rules” of patriarchy (Barr [1989: 90-91]).

The paradox that lies at the heart of the phenomenon of explicitation, taken as a broad category, is that explicitation on one level of analysis can correspond to implicitation on another. Some explicitations add or change linguistic elements to clarify the original text, others serve to reinforce the original speaker’s attitude; however, clarifying the text might in fact affect its global meaning, in particular when the text’s intention is precisely to remain obscure. In these cases, from a semantic or syntactic point of view, such translational
shifts are explicitations, but on a deeper level of meaning, they can be considered implicitations, since they obscure the speaker’s stance, thus making the global meaning of the text more implicit. We thus advocate studying narratological explicitness from the angle of the more specific phenomenon of “reduction of complex narrative voices” (Chesterman 2010: 41).

This article explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills as a translation of the avant-textes made of the typescripts and notes held at the Harry Ransom Center archive (Austin, Texas) on the basis of on Jakobson’s (1959) threefold definition of translation comprising intralingual translation. The dossier génétique of the novel shows the process of encoding of the narrator’s unreliability and of erasure from the text of information that is merely hinted at in the published version. The study of the different self-translational strategies at work reveal that Kazuo Ishiguro plays on different levels of implicitness and
ambiguity. In particular, the second typescript contains an alternative ending much more explicit than that of the published novel. I argue that the key process at work here is not simplification, as Zethsen (2009) claims to be generally the case in intralingual translation; rather, the translational shifts at play show a tendency towards complexification through a process of erasure that makes the processing of the text harder.

The concept of a poetics of silence has acquired a central place in literary theory in recent decades, with unreliable narration as defined by Booth (1961) playing an important part in the conceptualisation of an aesthetics of silence. Both silence and unreliable narration are key components of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing strategy. I want to show that the poetics of silence that is so constitutive of his style was already at work at the very beginning of his writing. In order to achieve this goal, this paper studies one of Ishiguro’s first published short stories, “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” (1981), in which a first-person narrator evokes memories of her time in Nagasaki during World War II. The narrator progressively turns out to be an unreliable one, due to the unspeakability of her traumatic experience. Her reluctance to report certain facts and to express some of her feelings is emphasised by the overabundance of details provided on safer subjects. The implied reader is compelled to try and fill the text’s blanks, which themselves shed light on the gap between narrator and implied author. This short story prefigures very clearly Ishiguro’s later novels, and deals with themes dear to him: memory, family, trauma and guilt, the atomic bomb as an absent centre. It also presents a very clear picture of the genesis of his writing style, centred around a poetics of silence, both at the diegetic and narratorial levels.

= Le concept de poétique du silence a acquis une importance centrale dans la recherche littéraire ces dernières décennies, tandis que la narration non fiable telle que Booth l’a définie en 1961 joue un rôle essentiel dans la conceptualisation d’une esthétique du silence. Narration non fiable et poétique du silence sont deux éléments clés de la stratégie d’écriture de Kazuo Ishiguro. Le but de cet article est de monter que la poétique du silence caractéristique du style d’Ishiguro était déjà à l’œuvre au tout début de sa carrière d’écrivain. A cet effet, cet article étudie l’une des premières nouvelles publiées d’Ishiguro, ‘A Strange and Sometimes Silence’ (1981), dans laquelle une narratrice à la première personne évoque des souvenirs de sa vie à Nagasaki pendant la guerre. La narratrice s’avère progressivement d’une fiabilité très limitée, du fait du caractère indicible de son traumatisme. Sa réticence à rapporter certains faits et exprimer ses sentiments est accentuée par la surabondance de détails qu’elle donne sur des sujets plus neutres. Le lecteur implicite est amené à combler les blancs du texte, qui mettent en lumière l’écart entre la narratrice et l’auteur implicite. Cette nouvelle préfigure clairement les romans plus tardifs d’Ishiguro, et aborde des thèmes qui lui sont chers : mémoire, famille, traumatisme et culpabilité, et la bombe atomique comme centre absent. Elle présente également un aperçu très clair de la genèse de son style, centré autour d’une poétique du silence, aussi bien au niveau diégétique que narratologique.