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71.More information
The paper “The unutterable: an instrument of analysis or aesthetic item?” proposes a reflexion about the modern meaning (sense) of this notion as it appears in some works about witness literature. It examines the manner in which this notion permits one to state the impossibility to narrate extreme experiences and to study narrative strategies mobilized by these texts. The author tries to construct a brief “history” of this notion in modernistic literature since Mallarmé, especially in Russian literature in which appears in the early 20th century a figure of the gap, later permitting witnesses of the Gulag to stage a silent residue inherent in their experience.
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72.More information
Written at the end of the 19th century by Pushkin, Eugene Onegin is perceived as one of the masterpieces of Russian literature. Yet in other countries, this fame is often overshadowed by Tchaikovsky's eponymous opera. Nevertheless, the great number of translations of this work do not correspond with its relative obscurity outside Russia. Pushkin named Eugene Onegin a “novel in verse.” This hybrid work blurs literary preconceptions of the distinction between prose and poetry, novel and poem, and makes use of a great variety of styles and genres. His approach fits with Bakhtin's definition of a multilingual text, which is characterized by polyglossia and is shaped by a unique structure so later known as the “Onegin stanza.” For all these reasons, Eugene Onegin is a challenge for translators, be they Russian speakers or not (Hofstadter, Giudici).Though Western language poetry uses a wide variety of meter and rhyme, translators are inclined to transpose the Russian into Western verse, Western translators first must define the nature of the text to translate, as it does not belong to traditional genres.On the other hand, for Asian languages, such as Korean or Japanese, which have entirely different linguistic mechanisms as well as literary and poetic traditions, the challenge first seems far more complex, since the translator has to either invent or denounce a form as significant as the content of the text. However, as the text problematizes this very relationship, the distinction between form and content becomes irrelevant.Observing the various translating approaches—both Western and Asian—sheds light on this particular feature of Eugene Onegin and its translation. While the familiarity of Western languages with meter, verse, and rhyme seems to leave the translator with the problem of genre (novel/poem, poetic prose/prosaic poetry), the otherness or strangeness of Asian languages reveals that the translator's task is, and has always been—even for Western translators—not merely to (attempt to) reproduce a versified form, but to create a new form, a new text that does “what the text does.” (Meschonnic).
Keywords: Pouchkine, poème narratif, roman poétique, rythme, Eugène Onéguine, comparatisme, Pushkin, narrative poem, poetic novel, rythm, Eugene Onegin, comparatism
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73.More information
This article takes the american controversy on the death of the novel, in the sixties, as an example of a cultural crisis. Especially because this death of the novel controversy is not an exceptional event, but one in a series of deaths, which have touched not only a literary genre, but also God, Man, the author, music, art, history, ideology, and more recently the book and print culture. To better understand how this last crisis, the end of books, is a repetition of the death of the novel controversy, I will describe both as a manifestation of the same apocalyptic imagination, which invariably transforms a transition into a crisis bringing about an end.
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74.More information
There is, in some novels, a disruption of textual continuity though this disruption does not destabilize the concept of a predetermined textual rhythm. However, novels such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, Koster's TheDissertation, Cortázar's Hopscotch and Milorad Pavic's The Dictionary Of the Khazars appeal to the reader's free choice to determine textual order. Pale Fire and The Dissertation offer two options: the reader must decide between two possible ways of reading the text. Hopscotch, on the other hand, can be read in any number of ways but it also renders explicit the theme of anguish which comes from the exercise of such frecdom. The Dictionary of tbe Khazars adopts the arbitrary and aleatory form of a dictionary, presupposing no particular textual order and freeing readers from any feeling of anguish about their choice. Readers decide the order of the text and, consequently, determine their own rhythmic experience. Such novels revalidate the reader's free choice and reading as play. In so doing, they subvert the concept of one single rhythmic experience predetermined by textual order.
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