This book has been written with the generous support of The Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers' and Translators' Association (nff), who granted me a six months' writer's stipend in 2011. Due to other responsibilities in academic management in the ensuing four years, the book has been longer in gestation than initially planned.Furthermore, its completion and publication have been supported by the
Irony is often perceived to be an inherent quality of Jane Austen’s narrative voice and attitude, but is it translatable? It has been argued that Austen should ‘stay at home’, since foreign versions tend to alter her novels in various ways. However, her novels are nevertheless translated into more languages, giving her a more global presence than ever before. What kind of Austen is received in these versions? Does she still have a sharp eye for human peculiarities and wry comments on the vagaries of romance? The study of Austen in translation is still in its early phase, with most languages yet to be investigated. This article will focus on Norwegian translations between 1871 and the present time. They include serials for newspapers and journals, paperbacks for the popular market, as well as handsome classic author editions. The challenge of understanding and transmitting Austen’s irony cuts across such genres and channels of publication and is always a prominent issue when studying them. In this article, I will choose some examples of narrative irony from the novels and compare them to several translated versions (in back-translation). They serve as illustrations of what is at stake, but also, implicitly, as demonstrations of Austen’s own peculiar voice and authorial qualities.
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Cuts and Simplifications1 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 86.2 "[T]he imperialistic impulse that may well be indissociable from translation" (Venuti, Translation Studies Reader, 20); "the ethnocentric violence that every act of translation wreaks on a foreign text" (Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility, 121). This violence, he finds, can only be matched by a "foreignizing" strategy, see Chapter 9 below. 3 The quotation describes the fruits of the "cultural turn" in translation theory in the 1990s (Bassnett, Translation Studies, 86).
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