Exploring the Turkish Translations of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” from the Perspective of Deconstruction and Hermeneutics

Year 2022, Volume: 32 Issue: 2, 783 - 811, 15.01.2023

Ilgın Aktener

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2021-1004261

Abstract

In translation studies, poetry has mostly been discussed from the perspective of untranslatability due to a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is the subjective and personal nature of poetry: poems are considered to be specific to their creators, who incorporate much from their lives into their creations. Untranslatability of poetry brings to the fore the obsolete notion that the source text is superior to the target text. It is, therefore, necessary to disentangle the concept of untranslatability from the translation studies on poetry. To do so, this study concentrates on a highly personal example of poetry, i.e., the Confessional poet Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” (1965) and its Turkish translations by Yusuf Eradam (2014/2020) and Nurten Uyar (2015), and seeks to explore the two translators’ subjective interpretations of the death/suicide theme specific to Plath’s poetry. In doing so, figures of speech related to the overall theme of death/suicide, and specific words and phrases are studied comparatively from the perspective of deconstruction and hermeneutics. The aim is to focus on howeach translator interpreted the aforementioned elements rather than whether or not they transported these elements accurately and well. In this way, the superiority of the original over translation, as well as untranslatability of poetry, are deconstructed in harmony with the theoretical framework of this study. In conclusion, it is argued that both translators indeed translated the personal content of the poem in question through a process of subjective interpretation, which resulted in target texts that have their own peculiarities but at the same time, are similar to the source text

Keywords

Deconstruction, hermeneutics, poetry translation, Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

Thanks

I would like to thank Prof. Neslihan Kansu-Yetkiner for her valuable feedback and Dr. Simon Mumford for patiently proofreading my article.

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