SPATIAL ELEMENTS OF FICTIONAL WORLD AS POSSIBLE INDICATORS OF FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE, AND THEIR RELEVANCE TO LITERARY TRANSLATION

Abstract

This paper provides an interdisciplinary approach to the hybrid phenomenon known as free indirect discourse (FID). The significance of FID, which is inextricably linked with focalization and features prominently in much of modern and postmodern literature in English, to the extent that one of its main functions is to mark the literariness of a text, has been recognized in the last decades in numerous research studies in narratology, stylistics and linguistics. FID is, however, largely neglected in the theory, practice and methodology of literary translation from English into Serbian, primarily due to the fact that FID markers are often ambivalent and imprecise, and also because no clear textual indicators for the obligatory use of FID have so far been
identified. Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2002), as well as the novel’s translation into Serbian (2003), particularly chapters II, III and VIII which contain numerous examples of shifting focalization and many narrative layers, has suggested a possibility
of interpreting the relations and interconnectedness of focalizers and fictional space as indicators of the presence of FID. The here presented research is based on Ruth Ronen’s premise of fictional space as an element of the modally structured universe of a literary text – an element that presents a relatively fixed entity in a tangle of different internal and external perspectives. Research results have shown that in-depth analysis of fictional space could be used to signal the change in perspective/focalization, and hence indicate the necessary use of FID, whose presence is connected with internal focalization or, according to Mieke Bal, the combined use of internal and external focalizations. This approach to interpreting literary texts potentially bears significant relevance for translation studies, as it offers new possibilities for identifying free indirect discourse, thus also providing methodology for a more semantically consistent and gramatically precise translation of FID from English into Serbian.