Article,
Anger-like Feelings in Translation: Intensity Shifts and Macrostructural Impact. A case-study of Gűnter Grass’s Unkenrufe and its Catalan and Spanish versions
New Voices in Translation Studies, (2010)
Abstract
Like Grass’s other masterpieces, Unkenrufe has a strong emotional dimension that determines the whole macrostructure of the novel. It is structured around what in terms of Natural Semantic Metalanguage are called ‘anger-like feelings’. Analysing how these are expressed in the Catalan and Spanish versions of the novel may be an effective way to trace major changes operating on a macrostructural level. Assuming that the novel’s narrator is a key character in which all other voices are included, a set of anger-like feelings expressed by him, and representative of the emotional dimension of the novel, is taken as a starting-point in order to pursue two goals. Firstly, the paper aims to show that the notion of intensity is an appropriate tool to identify and describe shifts resulting from the translation of emotion words and expressions, and secondly, it aims to confirm or refute the initial hypothesis according to which both translations render the narrator’s anger-like feelings as less intense, and that this carries macrostructural consequences. This hypothesis is partially confirmed: the Catalan version shows no major intensity shifts, but the Spanish version shows consistent and regular lessening of the original anger-like feelings, leading to a macrostructural shift.
