Translating style and styles of translating: Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe in Catalan

Abstract

This article aims to examine the relationship between style and translation from two complementary perspectives: how the style of original texts fares in translation and how the style of individual translators or groups of translators sharing a common poetics becomes visible in their translated work. The first aspect is illustrated through an analysis of transitivity patterns in a passage from Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, and of deviations from those patterns in two Catalan translations of the story. As to the second, the focus is on the notion of structural calque as displayed by the work of two prominent Catalan translators, Josep Carner and Carles Riba. Riba’s tendency to calque in his translation of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is broken down into two aspects of structure: word order and transitivity.