Dwelling upon Metaphors: The Translation of William Gass’s Novellas

Abstract

In this paper I will present a contextual approach to metaphor translation in literary discourse, with specific reference to a collection of novellas by contemporary American writer William H. Gass (1927-). Metaphor translation has been considered as exemplifying the limits of translatability (Van den Broeck, 1981) and has since intrigued a number of scholars in Translation Studies, who have tackled the issue from several points of view (prescriptive, contextual, descriptive and cognitive) and in relation to different types of discourse.