Papers by Enora Lessinger
Israel Studies in Language and Society, 2024
Our contribution explores the audio-visual representations of narrative silence and ambiguity in ... more Our contribution explores the audio-visual representations of narrative silence and ambiguity in films adapted from novels characterised by their unreliable narrator. Based on a number of conceptual paradigms – among which are studies on multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Weissbrod & Kohn, 2019) and adaptation (Bassnett, 2001; Hutcheon & O'Flynn, 2013) – the investigation qualitatively compared three films adapted from novels with unreliable narrators: Mark Romanek’s (2010) Never Let Me Go, after Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 dystopian novel; Roger Michell’s (2017) My Cousin Rachel, after Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 novel; and Lenny Abrahamson’s (2018) The Little Stranger, after Sarah Waters’ 2009 novel – all bearing the same titles. Using the films mentioned above, the paper links cinematic and literary unreliability, identifying and classifying the devices used to represent unreliability in an audiovisual context, while comparing this new typology of cinematic unreliability devices to the original novels.
מחקר זה בוחן את הייצוגים האודיו-ויזואליים של עמימות ושתיקה נרטיבית בעיבודים לקולנוע של רומנים המסופרים בקולו של מספר בלתי מהימן. בהסתמך על מספר פרדיגמות תיאורטיות, ובהן מחקרים בנושא מולטי-מודליות (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Weissbrod & Kohn, 2019 וחקר האדפטציה (Bassnett, 2001; Hutcheon & O'Flynn, 2013), נערכת השוואה איכותנית של שלושה עיבודים לקולנוע לרומנים הכותבים בקולו של מספר בלתי מהימן: סרטו של מארק רומנק (2010) ״לעולם אל תיתן ללכת״ – עיבוד של הרומן הדיסטופי של קזואו אישיגורו (2005), סרטו של רוג׳ר מיצ׳ל (2017) ״דודנית רחל״– עיבוד של הרומן המפורסם של דפנה דה מוריה (1951) והעיבוד של לני אברהמסון (2018) ל״זר הקטן״ מאת שרה ווטרס (2019). באמצעות זיהוי ומיון של האמצעים האודיו-ויזואליים לייצוג התופעה בשלושת הסרטים האמורים והשוואתם לרומנים המקוריים, המאמר קושר בין תופעת המספר הבלתי מהימן בקולנוע ובספרות.
Interdisciplinar - Revista de Estudos em Língua e Literatura , 2024
ABSTRACT:
The present study explores the film adaptations of three British novels characterised b... more ABSTRACT:
The present study explores the film adaptations of three British novels characterised by unreliable narration, in order to determine to what extent and via which tools this narrative strategy is maintained in intersemiotic translation. The corpus consists of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, and Daphné du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, and their respective adaptations. Results show that the narrator’s unreliability is maintained on screen through six main techniques: verbal habits, voiceover, framing of the narrative, visual effects, soundtrack, and camera perspective. The analysis further shows that these techniques used to stage narrative unreliability only partially overlap with those used in literature.
RESUMEN:
O presente estudo explora as adaptações cinematográficas de três romances britânicos caracterizados por uma narração não confiável, a fim de determinar em que medida e por meio de quais ferramentas essa estratégia narrativa é mantida na tradução intersemiótica. O corpus consiste em Never Let Me Go, de Kazuo Ishiguro, The Little Stranger, de Sarah Waters, e My Cousin Rachel, de Daphné du Maurier, e suas respectivas adaptações. Os resultados mostram que a falta de confiabilidade do narrador é mantida na tela por meio de seis técnicas principais: hábitos verbais, narração, enquadramento da narrativa, efeitos visuais, trilha sonora e perspectiva da câmera. A análise mostra ainda que estas técnicas que encenam a falta de fiabilidade narrativa se sobrepõem apenas parcialmente às utilizadas na literatura.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Estudos de tradução. Tradução intersemiótica. Adaptação. Narração não confiável. Estudos de narração.
The translation of cultural references has taken centre stage in translation studies in the last ... more The translation of cultural references has taken centre stage in translation studies in the last few decades, particularly since the cultural turn observed in translation studies from the 1980s onwards. With the emergence of audiovisual translation (AVT) as an increasingly important subfield of translation studies, new tailored typologies of cultural references and corresponding translation strategies started appearing at the turn of the century. This paper investigates the interplay between the multiple sets of challenges faced by interlingual subtitlers dealing with source texts where cultural references abound, through a case study of the subtitles in English and Spanish of the French series "Call My Agent" ("Dix pour cent"). Relying primarily on Newmark's classification (1988) of culture-specific items (CSIs) and Pedersen's typology (2011) of translation strategies for extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs), I provide a contrastive overview of the strategies used for the translation of cultural references in both languages. The results obtained show that foreignisation prevails in both English and Spanish, and that French cultural references with high cultural significance (e.g. cuisine, fashion and cinema) are more likely to be foreignised.
Lexis, 2019
Introduced to feminist wordplay and neologism in the books I read as I was nursing small children... more Introduced to feminist wordplay and neologism in the books I read as I was nursing small children in the late 1970s, I remember laughing till the tears came: Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology. The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) was my first exposure to the daringly creative and inventive subversion of conventional language or "malespeak" a subversion she deploys provocatively in the preface and introduction to this book. Her work and other contemporary writers' disruption of mainstream "malestream" language that had arrogantly placed "man" in first position as the representative of the human race and denigrated women, girls, and female preoccupations were absolutely hilarious. The various disruptions of conventional language they practiced spoke to my own interests in language and languages and my sensitivity for nuances of meaning. More importantly, they set off a "laughter of recognition" (Lothane [2008b]) that is vital to developing a sense of complicity, drawing the reader and author together in mutual understanding and support. Further, and much more importantly than during my university years, the subversive work on language that feminist writers were producing in those years offered a political explanation for the sense of isolation, neglect, and disrespect I felt as the mother of several small children. 2 In academic terms of the period, I enjoyed the play "with institutionalized meanings" (Zijderveld [1983: 8] cited in Mackie [1990: 12]) which define the ideology of public knowledge, disseminate it, and constantly reinforce it as "normal". Marlene Mackie's work on the role of humour in the social construction (or de-construction) of gender addresses two functions of humour, which later writers on the subject maintain (Kein [2015]; Leng [2016]; Reilly [2021]): the conservative social control function and the
The concept of a poetics of silence has acquired a central place in literary theory in recent dec... more The concept of a poetics of silence has acquired a central place in literary theory in recent decades, with unreliable narration as defined by Booth (1961) playing an important part in the conceptualisation of an aesthetics of silence. Both silence and unreliable narration are key components of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing strategy. I want to show that the poetics of silence that is so constitutive of his style was already at work at the very beginning of his writing. In order to achieve this goal, this paper studies one of Ishiguro’s first published short stories, “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” (1981), in which a first-person narrator evokes memories of her time in Nagasaki during World War II. The narrator progressively turns out to be an unreliable one, due to the unspeakability of her traumatic experience. Her reluctance to report certain facts and to express some of her feelings is emphasised by the overabundance of details provided on safer subjects. The implied reader is compe...
This contribution explores humour as a means of resistance against patriarchal authority in Gerd ... more This contribution explores humour as a means of resistance against patriarchal authority in Gerd Brantenberg’s Egalias døtre (1977), a work of feminist science fiction, and its translation into English by Louis Mackay (1985). In this Norwegian gender-bender, humour serves as a facilitator for critical thinking: the coinage of a playful and subversive matriarchal language undermines and ridicules at once the male-as-norm premise that operates in everyday language. This article reflects on the literary tradition the novel belongs to and the key role of lexical creation in the feminist struggle, before analysing the means and effects of lexical creativity in the source text and its translation, from compounding and neologisms to gender-inverting idioms. The results of this contrastive analysis show that the all-important female-as-norm principle at work in the novel, combined with structural differences between source and target languages, lead the translator to make full use of his cr...
Meta, 2020
The paradox that lies at the heart of the phenomenon of explicitation, taken as a broad category,... more The paradox that lies at the heart of the phenomenon of explicitation, taken as a broad category, is that explicitation on one level of analysis can correspond to implicitation on another. Some explicitations add or change linguistic elements to clarify the original text, others serve to reinforce the original speaker’s attitude; however, clarifying the text might in fact affect its global meaning, in particular when the text’s intention is precisely to remain obscure. In these cases, from a semantic or syntactic point of view, such translational shifts are explicitations, but on a deeper level of meaning, they can be considered implicitations, since they obscure the speaker’s stance, thus making the global meaning of the text more implicit. We thus advocate studying narratological explicitness from the angle of the more specific phenomenon of “reduction of complex narrative voices” (Chesterman 2010: 41).
La traduction du silence dans les romans de K. Ishiguro : une approche narratologique de l’hypothèse de l’explicitation
Cette these explore la traduction de quatre romans de Kazuo Ishiguro en cinq langues : le francai... more Cette these explore la traduction de quatre romans de Kazuo Ishiguro en cinq langues : le francais, l'espagnol, l'hebreu, le portugais et le turc. La centralite de l'implicite et du non-dit dans le pacte narratif appelle a une participation active du lecteur implicite, ce qui a naturellement des consequences sur le procede de traduction : d'une part, le traducteur est en premier lieu un lecteur, et de l'autre la traduction comporte un risque communicationnel accru (Becher 2010a). Afin d'explorer le defi lie a la recreation de la poetique du silence a l’œuvre dans la strategie narrative de ces romans, le present travail croise l'etude des universaux de traduction a celle de la poetique narrative, testant au niveau narratif l'hypothese de l'explicitation proposee par Blum-Kulka en 1986. Cet universel de traduction potentiel postule l'existence d'une tendance a l'explicitation dans le passage du texte source au texte cible. L'approche...
Le président est une femme
The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender
Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills
Palimpsestes
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Papers by Enora Lessinger
מחקר זה בוחן את הייצוגים האודיו-ויזואליים של עמימות ושתיקה נרטיבית בעיבודים לקולנוע של רומנים המסופרים בקולו של מספר בלתי מהימן. בהסתמך על מספר פרדיגמות תיאורטיות, ובהן מחקרים בנושא מולטי-מודליות (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Weissbrod & Kohn, 2019 וחקר האדפטציה (Bassnett, 2001; Hutcheon & O'Flynn, 2013), נערכת השוואה איכותנית של שלושה עיבודים לקולנוע לרומנים הכותבים בקולו של מספר בלתי מהימן: סרטו של מארק רומנק (2010) ״לעולם אל תיתן ללכת״ – עיבוד של הרומן הדיסטופי של קזואו אישיגורו (2005), סרטו של רוג׳ר מיצ׳ל (2017) ״דודנית רחל״– עיבוד של הרומן המפורסם של דפנה דה מוריה (1951) והעיבוד של לני אברהמסון (2018) ל״זר הקטן״ מאת שרה ווטרס (2019). באמצעות זיהוי ומיון של האמצעים האודיו-ויזואליים לייצוג התופעה בשלושת הסרטים האמורים והשוואתם לרומנים המקוריים, המאמר קושר בין תופעת המספר הבלתי מהימן בקולנוע ובספרות.
The present study explores the film adaptations of three British novels characterised by unreliable narration, in order to determine to what extent and via which tools this narrative strategy is maintained in intersemiotic translation. The corpus consists of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, and Daphné du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, and their respective adaptations. Results show that the narrator’s unreliability is maintained on screen through six main techniques: verbal habits, voiceover, framing of the narrative, visual effects, soundtrack, and camera perspective. The analysis further shows that these techniques used to stage narrative unreliability only partially overlap with those used in literature.
RESUMEN:
O presente estudo explora as adaptações cinematográficas de três romances britânicos caracterizados por uma narração não confiável, a fim de determinar em que medida e por meio de quais ferramentas essa estratégia narrativa é mantida na tradução intersemiótica. O corpus consiste em Never Let Me Go, de Kazuo Ishiguro, The Little Stranger, de Sarah Waters, e My Cousin Rachel, de Daphné du Maurier, e suas respectivas adaptações. Os resultados mostram que a falta de confiabilidade do narrador é mantida na tela por meio de seis técnicas principais: hábitos verbais, narração, enquadramento da narrativa, efeitos visuais, trilha sonora e perspectiva da câmera. A análise mostra ainda que estas técnicas que encenam a falta de fiabilidade narrativa se sobrepõem apenas parcialmente às utilizadas na literatura.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Estudos de tradução. Tradução intersemiótica. Adaptação. Narração não confiável. Estudos de narração.