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Article published In: Im/politeness and Stage Translation
Edited by Maria Sidiropoulou
[Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 6:1] 2020
► pp. 64–78

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Aggression and narrative in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story

 | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Published online: 17 February 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.00044.lam
Abstract
The study draws on scholars (Leech, Geoffrey N., and Mick H. Short. 1981. Style in Fiction. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Wales, Katie. 1994. “Bloom Passes through Several Walls: The Stage Directions in Circe.” In Reading Joyce’s Circe, ed. by Andrew Gibson, 241–276. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Fowler, Roger. 1996. Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology. Toronto: Toronto University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Semino, Elena. 2002. “A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Mind Style in Narrative Fiction.” In Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, ed. by Elena Semino, and Jonathan Culpeper, 95–122. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Leech and McIntyre, Dan. 2006. Point of View in Plays. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) who focused on the ‘point of view’ in dramatic texts as a concept which permits an authoritative voice to enter the narrative and arise in discourse. It intends to examine how im/politeness contributes to renegotiating some special themes in fiction like, for instance, how the human-animal relationship is to be portrayed in two Greek translations (1995, 2015) of Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story (1958). The claim is that translators’ ideological positioning regulates pragmatic aspects of meaning-making like the use of aggression and intimacy in reshaping the identity of characters and entities in the translated versions. Τhe study traces how the two translators attributed aggression to humans/animals in the universe of The Zoo Story by taking into account lay people’s evaluation of the two translations. Results show that TTa (by Kaiti Chistodoulou 1995) uses im/politeness strategies which indicate lower esteem for animals and higher esteem for humans. By contrast, TTb (by Errikos Belies) shapes a different identity of the human-animal relationship: it indicates higher esteem for animals, doing justice to the zoo imagery. The findings suggest that the narratives that permeate discourse crucially affect the use of im/politeness of the fictional interactants and that im/politeness is a powerful tool in the hands of translators. Im/politeness research may also benefit from translational data in that they can provide multiple contexts in which im/politeness can be studied in interaction cross-culturally.
Article outline
  • 1.Pragmatics, impoliteness, point of view, translation
  • 2.The play
  • 3.The theoretical viewpoint and presentation of empirical data
  • 4.The layperson’s view
  • 5.Discussion of findings
  • References
  • Texts
References (30)
References
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Texts
Albee, Edward. 1999. “The Zoo Story.” In Modern Drama, ed. by Walter Levy, 548–559. USA: Prentice-Hall, Inc.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Άλμπυ, Έντουαρντ. 1995. Ιστορία ζωολογικού κήπου. Μτφρ. Κατερίνα Χριστοδούλου [Story of the Zoo, translated by Katerina Christodoulou]. Αθήνα: Yψιλον.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Άλμπη, Έντουαρντ. 2015. Η ιστορία του ζωολογικού κήπου. Μτφρ. Ερρίκος Μπελιές [The Story of the Zoo, translated by Errikos Belies]. Αθήνα: Ηριδανός.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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