The voices of free indirect speech in translation

Abstract

In this article, we analyze “Disgrace”, by J. M. Coetzee and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, “Desonra”, by José Rubens Siqueira. It is a novel written basically in English (or Portuguese, in the translation), which also uses terms and excerpts in other languages. These occurrences are the focus of this analysis, and we consider them as culture-specific items, according to Aixelá (1996). Specifically, we investigate, among the strategies used for translating these items, intratextual gloss. With that observation, we aim to understand the effect of the added gloss in free indirect speech, considering, based on Wood (2012), that, when there are explanations that would be obvious for the character in free indirect speech, the tension between the narrator’s voice and that of the character is untied, and the narrator’s voice comes forward. Moreover, the idea that explanations detach the voices in tension in free indirect speech leads to a reflection about Moretti’s (2000) proposal that the novel in the periphery of world literature would be a compromise between foreign plot, local characters, and local narrative voice. We observed that taking Wood’s (2012) approach into consideration, makes Moretti’s (2000) proposal more complex, adding a third vector to the triangle: a translation voice.