Location, Location, Translation: Mapping Voice in Translated Storyworlds

The concept of “voice” is notoriously slippery and is often used in literary studies in rather vague and undefined ways. The term voice can fluctuate according to user and usage, and its meaning in a particular context is often not made explicit. The difficulties posed by the term are neatly encapsulated in Monika Fludernik’s use of scare quotes every time she mentions voice in an argument that, straddling literary studies, linguistics, and narrative theory, focuses on how speech and thought are represented in narrative (Fludernik 1993). For readers based in these fields, voice may refer to the grammatical term that distinguishes between the active and the passive, to the way speech is represented in a text, or to the distinctive traits of a textual narrator or author.¹ Taking cognizance of these complexities, my essay seeks to lay new groundwork for investigating the nature and manifestations of voice in narrative contexts and how voice may be altered in translated stories. Working to continue the dialogue between narrative theory and translation theory, I propose, first, that the concept of location in a storyworld can be used as a means of identifying the voice—as it is defined below—of the narrator; and, second, that research on the concept of voice can benefit from closer scrutiny of what happens to the voice of the narrator when a story undergoes the process of interlingual translation. More specifically, I argue that an analysis of the lexical markers that help locate the heroine in her storyworld (here, spatial adverbs, demonstratives, and place-names) can be used to pinpoint the heroine’s voice; such markers establish the position from which the narrator speaks and thus allow the reader to hear where the narrator is coming from, both literally and metaphorically. These markers inevitably change during translation—not only in the shift from one language to another, but also on account of how the translator interprets and reencodes them. This study sets out to explore how these changes affect readers’ engagement with—hearing of—a narrator’s voice.

I use as a case study a letter from the Heroides, a collection of letters by the Roman poet Ovid, along with two modern English translations of the letter. The Heroides was written toward the end of the first century BCE and purports to express the voices of the hitherto-silenced women of Greek and Roman mythology and history who have been separated from their lovers. In these letters Ovid takes the narratives of epic (such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid) and allows the women of these stories to retell small parts of the epic in their own voices. Ovid’s derivative yet creative impulses make his Heroides an ideal subject for a study in translation: just as Ovid takes the grand narratives of epic, disassembles them, and recreates them in new ways, so the translator takes Ovid’s text, interprets it, and encodes it in a different language. The Latin text itself is, therefore, “a translation to a completely new dimension” (Jacobson 1974: 354), where translation here can be understood both as a movement across languages (in the shift from Greek to Latin, for example) and as a kind of rewriting. Ovid bases the narratives of the heroines on worlds that have already been created but adapts them so as to foreground the female voice and experience. Hence the Heroides makes for an ideal illustrative example when it comes to exploring issues of voice: it underscores the relevance of research on narrative worldmaking for the study of translation—and vice versa.

I should note at the outset that scholars in the field of classics have debated how Ovid’s heroines compare to their earlier epic incarnations (see, in particular, Barchiesi 1993; Desmond 1993; Smith 1994; Spentzou 2003). My focus here, however, is different. I explore how the translator’s (perhaps subconscious) interpretation of the heroine’s storyworld and rendering of her voice in the target language (TL) trigger the reader of the translation to hear the heroine’s voice differently—that is, differently from how...