Back to the Gaol: Revisiting Retranslation Hypothesis in the Translations of the Religious Terms in The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Abstract

Within the scope of literary translation studies, a translated piece of prose, a poem, and a play can be questioned over time due to the ageing or the changes in both the source and the target text itself. This questioning process may bring the retranslation of the text questioned. First introduced by Antoine Berman, the “Retranslation Hypothesis” claims that first translations are generally more target-oriented since it is the first time the text is introduced to the target; however, later translations get the text closer to the source text. The claim that the retranslated text is closer to the target text may have divergent outlets like the ageing of the translation and the formative and conceptional shifts in the target language. Nevertheless, there has yet to be an agreed consensus on the hypothesis itself yet. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, the last and the best-known poem of Oscar Wilde, describes the last days of the Royal Horse Guards trooper, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who murdered his wife and was sentenced to death. Through him, Wilde depicts different themes like freedom, death, faith, and religion within his perspective, altered by prison conditions. The work was first translated into Turkish by Özdemir Asaf in 1968 and later retranslated by various translators. Therefore, this study aimed to test the validity of the hypothesis analysing the religious terms in the re-translations. The findings of this study revealed that the re-translations, while some of the re-translations are target oriented, the others tend to be source-oriented.

Keywords

• Retranslation theory
• domestication
• poetry translation
• religious terms
• Oscar Wilde

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