Taming iconicity in the Spanish and Italian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Some observations from a (Contrastive) (Cognitive) Construction Grammar perspective
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Iconicity: Some initial working assumptions
- 3.Construction Grammar(s) and interlingual translation
- 4.Towards a constructionist account of verb complementation in English, Spanish, and Italian
- 5.Some notes on the iconicity of Time-Death fracture in the Italian and Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- 5.1Some preliminary considerations
- 5.2The sensory subjective-transitive construction
- 5.3Causative constructions
- 6.Closing remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Key to the translations used in this paper
-
References
References (130)
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