Essayistic style in translation: the case of Kurt Vonnegut’s collection “A man without a country“

Abstract

Humor is a popular literary feature often found in fiction and in other types of writings. Its basic function is to entertain the reader and to show the problems of society nowadays. It also shows different problems and way to solve them through aspects of irony and satire. Also, the translators must have a great command of languages they work with and together be familiar with the cultures, and the function of language because the knowledge about the source and target cultures enables solving culture-related problems that often emerge in translation. One of the most popular authors of this kind of writing is Kurt Vonnegut. He is known for his opinions and different kind of writing because in his books he was fond of values of today’s societies and damage which is done to the world. Vonnegut’s most known masterpieces are Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), Cat’s Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964) which are satirical type of writing. In this master thesis, Vonnegut’s last book A Man Without a Country (2005) is discussed which was wrote 2 years before Vonnegut’s death. This book is different from his other works because it contains a different style which is autobiographical essayistic type of writing. The translator of this book into Lithuanian is Vytautas Petrukaitis who was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1950. He is a lecturer in English Philology and freelance translator who has translated nearly 60 books and magazines, as well as nearly 70 film scenaries for theatres and television. The aim of this master thesis is, after reviewing general theories of humor and irony in literature, to analyze aspects of humor and irony in Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country and its Lithuanian translation by Vytautas Petrukaitis “Žmogus Be Tėvynės“ (2007). The theoretical part of this paper focuses on the analysis of features of translation, different text types, cultural translation aspects and translations of slang and taboo words. It is mostly based on Hatim and Munday’s (2004), Stubbs’ (1996), Lee’s (2001), Nichol’s (2011), Fairclough’s (2003), Karamanis’ (2004) and Mackenzie’s (2007) ideas. The analytical part of the work begins the analysis of the introductory parts in the original and translated books. For this research, descriptive method was used together with the comparative analysis method for the comparison between the original and translation of the book. Also, the analytical part of this master thesis includes the comparison of humorous expressions found in original book with the same expressions translated into Lithuanian language.