Roman Sehnal – Pavol Štubňa: Artistic Translation from Italian. Prosaic Genres. Bratislava: Comenius University, 2024. 278 pp. ISBN 978-80-223-5801-9.

The scholarly monograph is the first volume in a series on artistic translation from the Italian language and simultaneously an output of the VEGA scientific grant entitled Slovak-Italian Interliterary Relations after 1989 in the Context of Overcoming the Reception Tradition and the Emergence of New Reception Models. The authors of the publication come from the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University and have long been engaged in the issue of artistic translation not only as theoreticians but also as experienced translators who have received domestic and international awards for their work. The scientific foundation of the work is the communicative-linguistic turn of the late 20th century (in both linguistics and translation studies), when the attention of scholars shifted from the language system to actual speech communication — while simultaneously taking into account the interaction of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors — both in the production and in the reception of speech communications. The authors of the reviewed publication believe that “translation cannot be viewed merely as a linguistic operation, but the translator must grasp the work as a whole, noting the context of its creation — the culture of the country from which the work originates, the period in which the author created it, various societal influences, the audience for which the work was intended, etc.” (p. 7).

The first part of the monograph, entitled Translation of Italian Prose, analyzes translational operations aimed at transferring a specific lexical or syntactic element into Slovak as the target language, while the authors highlight related translation pitfalls. They illustrate the translational phenomena presented on the translation solutions of renowned translators and particularly emphasize the fact that, in general, there is no single — universal or ideal — way to convey the artistic qualities of the original to the reader of a Slovak translation, while simultaneously considering it a necessity (of every appropriately chosen and executed translational process) to adhere to the principle of functional equivalence, which in practice means that the translation should affect the reader in the target language in the same (similar) way as the original affects the reader in the source language. In the individual chapters, the authors address translation at the lexical (phraseologisms, ethnonyms, etc.) and syntactic (density of sentence structure, syntactic figures and syntactically expressive constructions, losses and compensations in translation) level, but in the final part they expand their research to include the issue of dialect translation.

The second part of the monograph is entitled Translation of Selected Prosaic Genres. In it, the authors deal with the translation of literary fantasy and popular science literature. Fantasy literature is characterized by a distinctive composition and arrangement of compositional elements, and places different demands on the translator than the translation of other fiction works, because it depicts an unreal (illusory) world that differs in many respects from the real one. Literary fantasy thus confronts imaginings created by fantasy with those based on ordinary human knowledge and experience.

In the process of translating its various types and genres (sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and their crossovers), theoretical knowledge of formal and content characteristics acquires particular importance, because the codes of literary fantasy that the reader or translator must be able to decipher include simulation, oxymoronicity, self-referentiality, recursiveness, parataxis, discursiveness, and other typical expressive devices (p. 147). In this part of the monograph, the authors also separately delineate so-called artistic literary fantasy, which does not prioritize an “escapist reading experience into an alternative fantasy world,” because the fictional world depicted in these works is merely a metaphor for the real one. The following subchapters are devoted to the issue of translating proper names (especially literary names), so-called functional names (which have retained appellative semantics), and the stylistically marked speech of characters (including archaic communication norms, anachronisms, historicisms, non-standard and substandard linguistic elements, as well as foreign words and phrases).

The final chapter of the monograph focuses on the translation of popular science literature and the translational pitfalls identified in the translation of those mixed genres in which narrative and expository stylistic procedures are combined, and which contain specialized vocabulary (terminology). The authors illustrate the issue of translating this type of publication (which also includes chronicles, memoirs, literary journalism, philosophical dialogues, and treatises) using a selected representative genre — popular science publications on fine arts. In the individual subchapters, they analyze the textual implications of both artistic and scientific style and their characteristic components — vocabulary (including so-called non-equivalent lexis, literary and borrowed words, anthroponyms, chrematonyms, and toponyms), pragmatic specifics of art-scientific translations, and appraisal.

The leitmotif running through the entire monograph is the focus on the choice of an appropriate translation concept on the part of the translator. This generally represents a set of specific translation principles and procedures applied in the translation of a particular (literary) work with primary emphasis on “the analysis of the source text as an inventory of the linguistic-stylistic particularities of the work — phonic (graphic), morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic fabric” (Štubňa, 2023: 9). Its components include, for example, the decision to translate or not to translate (or to translate only in specifically justified cases) neologisms, wordplay, semantically transparent proper names, and others, while the creation of the translation concept is preceded by a thorough analysis of the thematic and linguistic devices occurring in the structure of the original literary work.

The monograph Artistic Translation from Italian. Prosaic Genres is primarily intended for translation theoreticians, but also for professionals in translation practice and university educators, while simultaneously having the potential to become a significant expert tool for participants in translation study programs and the professional public.

Bibliography

ŠTUBŇA, Pavol. Artistic Translation from Italian. Dramatic Genres. Bratislava: Comenius University, 2023. 108 pp. ISBN 978-80-223-5729-6.