The issue of authorship in translated literary texts: author vs translator (as case of ukrainian translations of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy)
Abstract
This article presents a comprehensive theoretical examination of the issue of authorship in translated literary texts, using Ukrainian translations of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy as case studies. The relevance of the study stems from the ongoing debate regarding methodological approaches to determining the translator’s agency within a literary text – ranging from the poststructuralist concept of the ‘death of the author’ and the translator’s ‘invisibility’ to the theory of the ‘third space’. The aim of our study is to provide a theoretical examination of the issue of authorship in translated literary texts, using the example of Ukrainian translations of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy and analysing them through the lens of methodological approaches from the 20th and 21st centuries. The research material consisted of literary translations (complete works and excerpts) into Ukrainian of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, produced during the 19th–21st centuries. The primary research method employed was comparative analysis, with an emphasis on a cross-cultural approach. An analysis of the evolution of translation studies revealed three main conceptual approaches to the interaction between author and translator within the translated text: authorial dominance, translatorial dominance, and the model of co-creation. In the case of the Ukrainian translation of Dante’s works, we also encounter instances of more complex translational interaction, notably editorial intervention and a conscious intertextual dialogue between translators of different generations, which has manifested as a modification of the ‘one author – one translator’ model into various hybrid configurations. The transcultural approach and the theory of the ‘third space’ explain the phenomenon of hybridity in the authorship of a translated text, which can be partially elucidated through a narratological analysis of textual levels – diegesis and exegesis. Within the translated text, the translator acts not merely as a mediator, but as an architect of hybridity, who, through a strategy of mimicry, creates a new cultural product. Prospects for further academic research lie in the comparative study of the transcultural aspects of Dante’s translation in various linguistic and cultural contexts.
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References
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