On Translating Simple Literature

Abstract

The article confronts the problem of diffi culty – one of dominant tropes in the discourse of translation studies – in a subversive way, that is, by attending to diffi culties that the translator faces in contact with textual material whose dominant artistic feature is apparent simplicity. The argumentation, taking as the example the short story oeuvre of a non-canonical writer, Theodore Francis Powys, focuses on such issues as the translation of syntactic and lexical simplicity, of underspecifi cation, lacunae and understatement. The author proposes a commonsensical rule of translational moderation – withdrawal from any addition to the syntactic or phonosemantic structure of the original.