A TRANSLATOR'S APPROACH TO LITERARY LANGUAGE

This paper* attempts to chart a prospective course for literary translation, and to a degree the criteria for literary translations in the past. In this paper, I am concerned with 'valid', and not with 'deficient' texts. A distinction between literary and non-literary language has to be made. The substance of both languages is the same, but literary language is concerned with fiction, the imagined world; non-literary language with reality; literary language is personal; non-literary language is more standardised, more conventional, and has a large number of discourses related to class and occupation; fundamentally, literary language is centred in individual people, allegorical or typical though they are, and directly in their imagined worlds; non-literary language is centred in facts, in society or in groups, in processes and in objects, often at a reporting or an indirect stage. Literary language is pre-dominantly connotative, non-literary language is denotative. Unlike non-literary language, serious literary language, which may be innovative in punctuation, words and syntax, but may also be natural and non-innovative, should not be normalised, lexically, grammatically or in the punctuation by the translator.