Robert Graves’s Claudian novels

Abstract

The article outlines the relevance of pseudotranslation for Translation Studies, using a case study of the novelsI, ClaudiusandClaudius, the Godby Robert Graves. The paper provides a list of partly overlapping motivations for adopting pseudotranslation and illustrates this motivation paradigm on the basis of particular findings in Graves’s novels: if an author wants to attribute a pseudotranslation to an existing person, the author has to account for stylistic differences between the pseudotranslation and genuine texts by that person. By claiming to translate from a different source language than the language normally used by the existing person, the author of the pseudotranslation can mask those stylistic divergences.