ABSTRACT
It is often what delights that is said to have been lost in translation. Playfulness, complicity and humour carry such heavy rhetorical weight in communication events that their relative attrition in an act of translation can render a target text emotionally flat (as a failed attempt). In this chapter we explore the validity of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) game vs. ritual inversions for translation theory, drawing on theoretical insights from the work of Susan Petrilli and theorists in the Rhetoric Culture project, in an attempt to refine and develop these ideas through the analysis of an empirical study based on the translation of an English language Robert Service pastiche. Petrilli argues that translators work to establish new situations of “relative alterity” out of communication conditions in which non-relative alterity, or strict otherness, prevails (2003, 2008). Working from a parallel perspective, Boris Wiseman finds that the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss is, at its core, chiastic. Of specific interest to our study here is a reciprocal chiasmus he identifies between rituals and games cross-culturally. According to Lévi-Strauss (1966), unlike games, which are meant to upset equilibrium (declaring a winner among participants), rituals are processes designed to re-establish equilibrium within a community. Mapped onto translation theory, the faithful-transgressive dichotomy may seem to correspond with rituals and games, respectively; but we argue that such a forced choice mapping is artificial or insufficient, since both occur in tandem. This argument is then developed and applied to our case study to illustrate its implications for the role of emotion in translation.
