When the enchantress of florence is turned into floransa büyücüsü: Translation under the gaze of stylistic analysis

Abstract

This article provides an elaborate and comparative stylistic analysis of the Turkish translation of the book The Enchantress of Florence (2008) by Salman Rushdie, translated by Begüm Kovulmaz as Floransa Büyücüsü (2009). The study aims at providing a study design for stylistic research on a work of literature within a translational scheme. Translational reflections on the characteristics of the source and target books are constituted upon two premises: content and form. This diachronic examination is composed of textual, linguistic and paratextual elements such as the cover of the book, the title of the book, lexis, syntactical structure, consonance, alliteration, wordplays, metaphors, similes, foreign proper names, foreign object names and concepts, footnotes, inserted notes, slang words and telling in Turkish. Such an in-depth examination of a literary work illustrates the foundations of the relevant piece of art and further portraits the field of stylistics as a fruitful research paradigm to question and speculate upon miscellaneous authorial and translatorial decisions of the meaning-making agents. As an interesting case for comparative studies, coalescing the premises of Literature and Translation Studies, this paper focuses on the bona fide productive nature of translation rather than on the error-hunting mechanisms.