TRANSLATION AND DISOBEDIENCE: PASSING A STORY ON IN THREE INTERLINGUAL AND INTERTEXTUAL VERSIONS OF TONI MORRISON’S NOVEL BELOVED.

• DOI: 10.22533/at.ed.929322310022

• Palavras-chave: -

• Keywords: Beloved; translation; Signifyin(g)

• Abstract:

  This article compares the source text of Toni Morrison’s (1988) novel Beloved with three different target versions of its original: the French, the Spanish and the Brazilian ones. The analysis of these four specific versions concentrates on the speech delivered by Baby Suggs to her former slave listeners, exhorting them to take care of their bodies. The discussion follows the idea that these translated texts disobey Morrison’s advice that Beloved’s “was not a story to pass on” (MORRISON, 1988, p. 275). As a matter of fact, a translated text is always the affirmation that some story is being “passed on”, is being continued in languages others than the original. This interlingual continuation is here associated with Gates’s (1988) signifyin(g), a concept stressing the intertextual conversation that is carried out through “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal of difference” (GATES, 1988, p. xxix). Methodologically, the conversation of the source material with the three target versions involves (1) two translational apposing theories, Landers’s (2001) fluency and resistance; (2) two kinds of translating interventions, Baker’s (2006) omission and addition; and (3) three translation strategies, Chesterman’s (1997) syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. These distinct categories will help the reader grasp translation not only as disobedience to Morrison’s recommendation not to pass Beloved’s story on, but also as a continuum by means of which a specific source text is rewritten and encounters with its equivalent rewritings in three specific linguistic and cultural target realizations.