Ludic effects in fiction: A case study of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and its Russian and Ukrainian translations

Abstract

This article discusses translation strategies involved in reproducing ludic effects in Russian and Ukrainian translations of Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Ludic effects, embedded in the text, outline the potential result(s) of literary gaming. Created in different games, a number of ludic effects trigger ludic stylistics – a new heuristic area of linguistic “ludology”. The paper defines ludic stylistics as an artistic phenomenon manifested in literary text due to unconventional combinations of various linguistic means. In Coetzee’s Disgrace, ludic stylistics is the result of psychonarrative games aimed to transform plot-driven narratives into experience-centred. Psychonarrative games are governed by two principles – “external via internal” and semantic intrusiveness through semantic, plot-building, and compositional games represented at the macro- and microlevels of literary text. The study focuses on sematic games which enable construing new, emergent textual senses which bring the personage’s / narrator’s unceasing, obsessive experience of traumatic events to the fore. The paper looks at the translation strategies of rendering ludic effects in the translations of Coetzee’s Disgrace from two perspectives – intentional and receptive. The reproduction of such effects in Russian and Ukrainian translations of Disgrace is grounded in lexico-semantic, syntactic, associative-figurative, and functional equivalence, as well as respective loss, and gain.

The interplay of linguistic means managing the reader's attention: the slow reading method

“…The attentionality of the passage above is achieved by means of bringing psychonarrative game to the focus of narration. Such game is signaled by the semantics of intrusiveness [7] grounded in the psychological phenomenon of intrusiveness (lat. inrusion -a thrusting, or pushing in).…”

“…It objectivizes the destructive impact of the external events on the narrator's / character's inner world, thus rendering exaggerated fictionalized psychological senses. In literary text, intrusiveness takes the form of the narrator's / character's self-immersion into their inner world, persistent, repetitive, sometimes even obsessive-compulsive experience of some psychotraumatic events [7]. As a marker of ludic stylistics, intrusiveness is verbalized here via lexical and figurative means portraying the main character's paradoxical psychoemotional state of agitation (if they arouse me like this) deepened by the feeling of shame.…”

“…Although literary games have been extensively researched in contemporary linguistics [6,7], little attention has been paid to the receptive and methodological aspects of gaming in fiction. This paper aims to fill in the lacunae which can be observed in recent studies concerning the methods of reading games in fictional narratives.…”

Ludic stylistics: Narrating a thought experiment (A study of "The Science of Discworld" series)

“…From a linguistic perspective, ludic stylistics is thought of as an artistic phenomenon represented in literary text due to the unconventional combinations of various textual means (Izotova, 2021(Izotova, , 2022. The latter, either individually or jointly, tend to create singular or multiple ludic effects at the micro-and macrostylistic levels.…”

“…In turn, macrostylistics encompasses plot-building and compositional devices, as well as the narrative representation of ludic stylistics. As the potential outcome(s) of language and narrative gaming, the ludic effect is embedded in literary text and manifested through a variety of ludic techniques (Izotova, 2021;Tykhomyrova, 2011Tykhomyrova, , 2014.…”