Abstract

This article addresses the issues involved in translating complicated prose into English, focusing on the translation of Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych's postmodernist novel Perverzion. Andrukhovych's novel echoes elements of several genres--the philosophical novel, the saint's life (vita), the mystery novel, the picaresque, and the travelogue. The novel is replete with linguistic and stylistic complexities that require creative resolution by the translator. The major issues addressed include the translation of meaningful names, the translation of linguistically deformed text, and the translation of poetic passages. The translator concludes that creative resolution of these problems--the conveying of multiple and subsurface meanings as well as the effects of the original--gives an anglophone reading audience a better approximation of the author's true nature as a writer.

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