scholarly journals The Challenges of Translating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into Romanian

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-145
Author(s):  
Alexandra Mitrea
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
Target Readership ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

Abstract A classic of American literature, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has had a huge impact not only on American literature but also on world literature. Its bold and freshly creative style, its humor and the author’s endless verve and vitality, the multifaceted and novel approach to life have all contributed to its success and popularity. However, Twain’s greatest merit probably lies in the way in which he used language, crafting art out of the speech of ordinary people. His experiments with language, the vernacular in particular, have meant a huge step forward in American literature and have been a source of inspiration for many writers. However, the translation of the novel has generated huge challenges related to the linguistic register appropriate for the translation of the novel and the strategies for rendering dialect, the African-American one in particular. It has also divided Romanian translators with regard to the target readership the original novel addressed: children, adults or both.

Huckleberry Finn: Aktuelle Zensur eines Klassikers?

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Angelika Zirker
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
American Library Association ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Library ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in England in 1884 and a year later in the US, is paradoxical in that it is one of most frequently censored books of world literature – and, concurrently, one of the most frequently read and praised. The following article will try to explain this paradox and, in a first step, address the history of the novel’s censorship and the (various) reasons given for it. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has undergone censorship since its first publication, and even today it is included in the list of »Banned and Challenged Books« of ALA (American Library Association). What are, in fact, reasons for banning the book? And how are these reasons questioned by defenders of the book? Which strategies are used? Since the novel’s publication, those who have completely dismissed the book and those who have appreciated it as a »masterpiece« have opposed each other. An overview of these controversies will result in a close reading of one of the most debated chapters in the novel, with a focus on the autodiegetic narrator Huck, who has been characterized as a naïve child that simply does not know any better, as a »fallible narrator«, or as a liar. But it remains doubtful whether the narrator’s weakness is the answer to the question of Huck’s alleged racism. The paper will offer alternative roads into the novel that consider both the text and the context of its origin.

Revisiting the Circus with Huckleberry Finn: Huck's Pleasure and Mine

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-653
Author(s):  
Barbara Hochman
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

With the exception of occasional quiet moments on the raft, the circus scene in the adventures of huckleberry finn is arguably the only episode of the novel where Huck is absorbed by an experience that gives him pleasure: I went to the circus. … It was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest sight that ever was, when they all come riding in two and two, a gentleman and lady, side by side, the men just in their drawers and undershirts and no shoes nor stirrups, and resting their hands on their thighs, easy and comfortable—there must a' been twenty of them— and every lady with a lovely complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang of real sure-enough queens. … It was a powerful fine sight. I never see anything so lovely. … (Twain 134–35)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Twain
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
American Novels ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, but that ain’t no matter. So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor, illiterate white boy living in America’s deep South before the Civil War, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of Huck’s escape from his brutal father and the relationship that grows between him and Jim, the slave who is fleeing from an even more brutal oppression. As they journey down the Mississippi their adventures address some of the most profound human conundrums: the prejudices of class, age, and colour are pitted against the qualities of hope, courage, and moral character. Enormously influential in the development of American literature, Huckleberry Finn remains a controversial novel at the centre of impassioned critical debate. This edition discusses all the current issues and the evolution of Mark Twain’s penetrating genius.

Huckleberry Finn; or, Consequences

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey Margolis
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Bad Faith ◽  
Social Conformity ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

A long-standing debate over Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns on the question of intention. While defenders of the novel say that Huck's change of heart toward Jim represents a critique of social conformity, recent detractors claim that the novel's celebration of this change of heart represents a form of liberal bad faith. This essay argues that both readings misunderstand the novel, which works not only to highlight Huck's good intentions but also to replace this sentimental model of responsibility with one drawn from the emergent law of negligence. Having effects rather than intentions be grounds of liability, this new legal paradigm made persons responsible for the inadvertent harms they caused others. From the perspective of negligence, Huckleberry Finn is an indictment of post-Reconstruction racism—not because it offers friendship as a model of reform but because it imagines accountability even in the absence of malice.

scholarly journals Comparative Analysis of the Reproduction of Style in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish Translations of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (30) ◽  
pp. 200-210
Author(s):  
Maryna Aloshyna
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

The author has studied the problems of the reproduction of stylistics in translation. Examples of domestication in translation have been analysed on the basis of different Ukrainian translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two famous novels written by Mark Twain. The first Ukrainian translators of Mark Twain’s novels in the first decade of the 20th century were Maria Zahirnia and Nastia Hrinchenko, wife and daughter of the prominent Ukrainian writer, scholar, and public activist Borys Hrinchenko. Their work was greatly influenced by the circumstances of the time (i.e., printing any translations into Ukrainian was banned in the Russian empire till 1905, no official body for the codification of the Ukrainian language existed, etc.). Later Ukrainian translations of the novel (Mytrofanov, Steshenko), together with Russian and Polish (by Chukovskii, Daruzes, Bilinski, and Tarnovski) were selected for comparative analysis with a consideration for their historical background. The linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of these translations have been studied. It is demonstrated that Zagirnya and Hrinchenko translations reproduce the original work quite exactly. Their translations have features of domestication and colloquialism, but at the same time, all important elements are fully reproduced. Their translations have a natural conversational tonality which corresponds to the original text. The later Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish translations under examination tend to keep to the norms of literary language to a greater extent. The level of domestication in these translations is lower (or even zero). Sometimes they include too-literary elements together with inadequate colloquial ones. Nevertheless, stylistically colored elements are successfully reproduced in these translations.

scholarly journals “Away From Home and Amongst Strangers”: Domestic Sphere, Public Arena, and Huckleberry Finn

Prospects ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 125-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Knoper
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Acute Responses ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Public Behavior ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

Despite Mark Twain's situating the story “forty to fifty years ago” and in a rural river valley, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn closely engaged daily dilemmas and concerns of a Northern, urban, middle-class audience. As Carolyn Porter has argued, the familiar comprehension of American fiction as fantasies of escape from society and history, as authorial efforts to light out for the territory, needs to be dislodged by a sensitivity to such writings as acute responses to their immediate context – a developing industrial and capitalist society and culture. Although Huck's world may appear cut off from the landscape and society of bourgeois city dwellers of the 1880s, and although there are not explicit references to industrialization or urbanization, the novel reproduces and addresses new features of daily life, alterations and stresses in private and public behavior and interaction that were being precipitated by the accelerated economic and demographic changes of the late 19th Century.

A Tramp at Home

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
AXEL NISSEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn ◽  
Homeless Men ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Romantic Friendship ◽  
Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) contains the materials for a wide-ranging analysis of the different and competing understandings of American manhood in the nineteenth century and the ways in which men might interact with each other and love each other. In order to understand better the sexual and emotional dynamics of the novel, we must understand the other kinds of writings about men alone and together that Twain was responding to. In this essay I place Twain's classic novel in two nineteenth-century discursive contexts that have been obscured in the existing criticism: the fiction of romantic friendship and the public debate on the homeless man. Huckleberry Finn may be seen as the reverse of the medal of normative, middle-class masculinity in Victorian America and as a counterpoint to the more conventional, idealized accounts of romantic friendship in the works of several of Twain's contemporaries and rivals. I suggest that while Huck and Jim negotiate an uncommon type of romantic friendship across barriers of race and generation, the duke and the dauphin appear as a grotesque parody of high-minded "brotherly love." By co-opting some of the conventions of romantic friendship fiction, Twain decreased the distance between his underclass characters and middle-class readers. Yet by writing and publishing the first novel about tramps during a period of heightened national concern about homeless men, Twain increased the topicality and popular appeal of what was, in its initial American publication in 1885, a subscription book that needed an element of sensationalism in order to sell.

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