Taming iconicity in the Spanish and Italian translations of Shakespeare’sSonnets

Abstract

Building on Tabakowska’s (1993, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013) full-blown defense of a cognitive linguistic approach to literary translation as well as on previous research dealing with the implementations of Construction Grammar(s) for translation studies (Szymańska 2011a, 2011b; Serbina 2015), this paper critically examines the role of iconicity in selected lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnets capitalizing on the passage of Time-Death and their corresponding translations in present-day Spanish and Italian. Specifically, drawing on Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and Contrastive Construction Grammar (Boas 2010a; Boas & Gonzálvez-García 2014), I focus on instances of secondary predication with verbs of sensory perception, causative constructions and aspectual constructions iconically connected with the above-mentioned motif and demonstrate that iconicity emerges as a very useful communicative ‘filter’ that can help to minimize any undesirable arbitrariness which may obscure the semantico-pragmatic interpretation of the source text and/or its rendering into the target text.