Salman Rushdie’s iconic syntax and its translation into
French
Among the varied stylistic liberties that characterise
Salman Rushdie’s baroque writing style, two opposite syntactic
peculiarities stand out. The ‘syntax of continual flow’, which is
achieved through psychological sequencing and juxtaposition, tends to mimic the
protagonist’s inner state, while the ‘syntax of restraint’, which
consists of very short and elliptical constructions, reflects the
tense atmosphere of the depicted scene. Both mark exophoric iconicity in that they mirror the diegesis of Rushdie’s
narratives. This paper aims to discover how this diagrammatic
iconicity can be translated into French. It consists in an analysis
of two selected extracts from Midnight’s
Children (1981), Rushdie’s second novel, and their French
translations by Jean Guiloineau. It turns out that, owing to the
discrepancies between the English and the French syntactic systems
and constraints, the translator cannot simply mimic the syntax of
the original text. Yet its iconicity can be preserved through an
approach based on custom-made strategies. Rushdie’s iconic syntax of
continual flow can only be preserved if the translator compensates
for its lack of punctuation marks by resorting to small syntactic
and semantic modifications aiming to ensure that his version is
comprehensible enough. As for the syntax of restraint, although its
main device, the zero article, generally cannot be retained in
French, the translator may manage to recreate its iconicity through
an appropriate and consistent combination of determiners.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Rushdie’s iconic syntax of continual flow
- 2.1The original text
- 2.2The English to French translation process
- 3.Rushdie’s iconic syntax of restraint
- 3.1The original text
- 3.2The English to French translation process
- 4.Conclusion
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Notes
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References
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Corpus