Retranslating Ambiguity: On the New Translations of Two Tales by E.A. Poe

Abstract

The paper comments on our new translations of E.A. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Black Cat” (1843). The introductory section reviews retranslation theories since the birth of the so-called Retranslation Hypothesis. We consider Lawrence Venuti’s idea of retranslation as best fitting our strategy. According to his point of view, each retranslation is, in fact, a reinterpretation. Besides correcting or debating other translations of Poe, we preserved what we thought to be insightful and eloquent in them. Our major objective was to retain the cognitive obstacles, the contradictory meaning of Poe’s prose, rather than to avoid its ambiguity, discrepancies, and repetitiveness. The non-native reader’s verdict, his or her assessment of the narrators’ sanity at the moment of crime and the validity of their post-crime narratives, would largely depend on the translator’s effort to savor both gothic undertones and numerous indications of mental instability in Poe’s tales. Such indications allowed numerous critics to diagnose the narrators with a variety of mental disorders. Another goal of our translations was to savor a distinctiveness of Poe’s prose, its affectiveness – the diction and phrasing of the oral spontaneous speech of “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrator and the penned account given in “The Black Cat”. We made it a point to preserve where possible the authorial syntax and punctuation i.e. the numerous dashes, as well as italicized words and phrases, in order to project a tone of voice and sketch the psychological contours of the characters, especially that of the first narrator, whose pathological reactions could be caused by external or delusory sensory overload.