Article sans comité de lecture
| Résumé : | This paper sets out: first to briefly examine why wordplay (and incidentally poetry) often poses apparently insurmountable difficulties in translation. To that end, I will successively consider the entanglement of form and content, the metalinguistic dimension of punning, reflected meaning (Leech, 1981), and metalinguistic connotation (Rey-Debove, 1997). Subsequently, in the light of these reflections, I will turn my attention to the way in which a special brand of wordplay was dealt with in the French translation of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. This unusual kind of pun might be labelled the ‘meaningful stammer’: Sisodia, an Indian film producer, has a bad stutter that ‘accidentally’ endows his utterances with an additional layer of meaning: (1) ‘For the moomoo movies also TV and economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.’ (519) Finally, drawing on this discussion, I will argue that a more acute awareness of the mechanisms that underlie puns — which mechanisms I suggest are metalinguistic — make better results possible in the translation of puns. |
