Dialogism and Polyphony: Silent Cry of Text

Abstract

Novel is inherently full of linguistic and paralinguistic subtleties. More than one actor is usually presented in novel; each of them has its own tone and speech by which they enter into interaction and dialog with each other. Through these conversations some parts of the actors’ identity along with the author’s intention is revealed to readers. This issue could be considered relevant to Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism and polyphony. According to Bakhtin, each narrative personality has its own voice (Ahmadi, 1393, p. 109) and finally all these different voices together form the literary text. Recognizing and reflecting these two phenomena in literary translation has great significance as it results in creating almost the same aesthetic-affective impact of the original text. In this qualitative-analytical study, the way of reflecting and transferring these features in translation is investigated; to this end, a contrastive analysis was applied to two different translations of Le père Goriot by Balzac. The results indicate that the translator’s awareness of coexisting voices in a text and ability to distinguish the various registers and tones of the actors end in preservation of dialogic and polyphonic nature of the original text; consequently by avoiding homogenization a more faithful translation has been provided.