“LIST, LIST, O LIST!” – THE TRANSLATION OF REPETITION IN HAMLET
“LIST, LIST, O LIST!” – THE TRANSLATION OF REPETITION IN HAMLET

Author(s): Nadina Vişan, Daria Protopopescu
Subject(s): Translation Studies, British Literature
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Keywords: repetition; parallelism; retranslation; compensation; translation loss;
Summary/Abstract: The use of repetition in Hamlet has been repeatedly remarked upon and discussed in seminal studies such as Frank Kermode’s (2001), which refers to Hamlet as a play “whose language is full of doubles, antitheses and repetitions” (Kermode 2001: 127). Considering the fact that doubling and trebling appears to be a characteristic of the language of Hamlet, the present paper endeavours to look at instances of repetition and parallelism in the exchanges between Old Hamlet and Young Hamlet with a view to tracing influences in translation from a retranslation theorist’s point of view. We have chosen these exchanges because they are rife with repetition and because repetition is used to enrich and reinforce the semantics of the source text. Based on a corpus of nine Romanian target texts, the article analyses strategies in translation as devised by Ben-Ari (1998) and highlights the crucial role that the rendering of these figures plays in “successful” retranslations of Shakespeare’s play. We conclude that the main strategies employed in the Romanian target texts are partial equivalence and omission.

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