Poetics of scholarly argument. Translation studies by Umberto Eco as literature

Abstract

Umberto Eco’s book Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione (2003) is treated as a work with characteristics of the novel genre: the study of the nature of desire, the study of the limits of theatricalization, the specificity of gesture, and finally, the speech coloring of the hero, in the book creates the impression of a novel narrative. At the same time, Eco partly mystifies the reader: thus, while studying the translators’ difficulties in conveying the visibility of theatrical action, he himself uses reduced visibility as an argument in choosing a translation strategy. Such a system of mystifications allows Eco to combine his own experience as a translator, in which the skills of epideictic eloquence had to be subordinated to the historicism shared by his readers, and his experience of working with translators of his novels into different languages, where the strategies of domestication and forenization were determined not by the situation of the literary process but by each language’s own history. Thereby, Eco built an epideictic view of language, where archaization, modernization, or sustainable development acted as novel protagonists. Such introduction of novel strategies into the scholarly memoir allowed Eco to discern novel moments in the history of world poetry and to construct a semiotically consistent picture of the development of Western literatures.