The interaction of genres in memoir-autobiographical texts and its influence on translation

Mukhin Nikita Andreevich ORCID: 0009-0000-3013-3056 Lecturer; Department of English; Moscow State Linguistic University 62 Usacheva str., Moscow, 119048, Russia muhaniksan@gmail.com

Introduction

Currently, researchers often emphasize one of the distinctive properties of the modern stage of the development of knowledge about language – anthropocentrism ^{[1; 2]}. Some are even beginning to talk about the formation of a completely new paradigm – the anthropocentric one ^[1]. This dynamic can be traced not only by research optics, but also by the choice of the studied material, namely by referring to texts built around a particular person and the genre categories to which they belong. Based on which of them are covered by researchers ^[3-7], it can be noted that the following are of the greatest interest: memoirs, autobiography and biography. It is worth noting that all three categories are characterized by genre hybridization ^[8], that is, the author of the text switches between different genres during the narration. At the same time, the influence of this phenomenon on the translation process has been little studied at the moment. In the article, we will identify which translation problems are created by genre hybridization in anthropocentric texts, which aspects of the original text can increase the likelihood of errors in the translation process, and which translation competencies can solve these problems.

Genre issue

The genres of memoirs and autobiographies, on the one hand, and biographies, on the other, have a number of similarities: documentary, since they are based on facts; retrospect; consideration of the events of a particular person's life; analysis of his personality. At the same time, there are significant differences, primarily related to authorship. So, unlike a biography, in an autobiography and memoirs, the author's personality and the object's personality coincide. In addition, the author of a biography can be separated from the object of his description even for centuries and millennia, but in the case of an autobiography/memoir, this gap cannot exceed the life span of the author-object (even if the text was significantly influenced by the co-author). As a result, unlike the translation of a biography, the problem of accurately conveying idiosyncrasy when translating an autobiography/memoir is particularly acute, since in this case the idiosyncrasy characterizes both the author of the text, the person-object, and the socio-cultural conditions of the time. As a result, memoirs and autobiography were chosen to study the translation features of anthropocentric texts with a hybrid genre nature.

However, the question arises about the significant differences between these two genres. The existence and stability of two different designations suggests that the phenomena they designate do not completely coincide. Let's determine whether the genre boundaries between autobiography and memoirs are tied to various manifestations of genre hybridization in them. On the one hand, researchers do recognize the existence of a boundary between the genres of autobiography and memoirs, on the other hand, the nature of this boundary turns out to be debatable ^[9]. Thus, a number of scientists ^[10-15] define it based on semantic dominance (an autobiography is recognized as focusing on personality, while memoirs are recognized as focusing on external events). Other researchers find other explanations. In particular, James Cox argues that the boundary is conditional and is related to the assessment of artistic value given by critics ^[16]. However, regardless of the position, the researchers do not identify the influence of the genre belonging of a text to an autobiography or memoir on the presence/absence of genre hybridization and the nature of its expression. In addition, the translation aspect is not affected.

So, at the moment, on the issue of genre hybridization, researchers do not note the difference between an autobiography and a memoir. Consequently, the conclusions drawn based on the analysis of translation problems that arise when genres are hybridized in a particular autobiographical or memoir text will be relevant for both genres.

Translation Studies Commentary

The autobiography of William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, entitled My Life, and its translation into Russian were chosen as the research material. The choice is due, on the one hand, to the fact that interest in the personality of Bill Clinton is significant, despite the fact that his political career has long been over. So, for the period from January 2023 By January 2024, 260,215 queries with the phrase "Bill Clinton" were made in the Yandex search engine [Yandex Wordstat]. On the other hand, the autobiography My Life itself attracts considerable attention from readers: in the first day alone, 400 thousand copies were sold in the United States [RBC. "B. Clinton's "Life" sets a world record"].

The original text of My Life is characterized by a combination of the autobiography genre with a number of genres that are quite expected for a politician's memoirs (news report on election results, biography essay, essay), and quite unexpected (sports summary, historical background, poem). For example, the fourth chapter contains extensive historical information about the city of Hot Springs, where the Clinton family moved in 1953, covering the period from the 16th to the middle of the 20th centuries. Another striking example of a text fragment with a different genre nature from the biography is the description of the battle in Mogadishu, which took place in October 1993. Non-genre inserts can cause translation problems. Let's analyze a few examples where such difficulties have led to a violation of the equivalence and adequacy of translation.

Although Bill Clinton himself did not serve in the armed forces, the topic of military conflicts occupies a significant place in his autobiography, as his final years of school and university studies took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which in one way or another affected the lives of all Americans. In addition, the author pays considerable attention to the military conflicts that took place during his political career, especially during his presidency. A vivid example of genre hybridization related to this feature of My Life can be found in the sixteenth chapter. Bill Clinton interrupts the description of the events of his personal life by mentioning that he learned from a local newspaper about the death in Vietnam of his old rival for the position of chairman of the student council. This is followed by an excerpt that can be attributed to the genre of the obituary. Due to the circumstances of death, several military-related terms are used in it: unit, take cover, line of fire, mortar shell. Of particular interest is the transfer of the last of them. An appeal to the "English-Russian military dictionary" allows us to find the terminological equivalent of "mortar mine" [Sudzilovsky G.A., Polyukhin V.M., Shevchuk V.N. et al. English-Russian military dictionary: about 70,000 terms. 3rd ed., revised and additional M.: Voenizdat, 1987. p. 374]. However, due to the dual genre affiliation of the passage as an obituary of a serviceman when viewed independently and as part of the autobiography of a politician, taking into account the broader context, the tautological nature of the term will complicate its perception. The translator's decision also turns out to be problematic: without a definition for the word "mine", ambiguity arises, since the situation in the translation passage can be interpreted both as an explosion of a stationary mine and as an explosion of a shell fired from a mortar. Several solutions seem to be more adequate:

1) the use of a hyperonym for a mortar mine, i.e. the term "shell";

2) the use of the above-mentioned hyperonym with the definition of "mortar", i.e. the term "mortar shell";

3) adding the definition of "artillery" to the existing translation;

4) replacing the participial phrase "exploded nearby" with the participle "arrived", which will remove ambiguity without directly indicating the artillery nature of the mentioned mine.

Thus, the author's use of autobiographical terms related to fields of knowledge that are not fundamental to him may present significant translation difficulties. Solving this problem requires considerable erudition in a wide variety of unexpected areas, as well as a good understanding of the asymmetry between the plan of expression of the original language and the translating language.

In the eleventh chapter of My Life, Bill Clinton's use of the genre of biography to reinforce theses about the dangers of excessive naivety and stubbornness is noteworthy. The author refers to the experience of two American politicians studying at Oxford: James William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Nick Rusk, the US Secretary of State. Bill Clinton examines how the political situation during their studies influenced the formation of their diametrically opposed political positions on the Vietnam War. So, B. Clinton says that for Fulbright, who observed all the injustice of the Versailles Peace Treaty, conflicts were never black and white, he always looked for a way to dialogue with his opponents; for Rask, who studied in the 30s of the XX century against the background of rampant Nazism in Europe, according to the author of his autobiography, communist totalitarianism He was the equal of the Nazi, because he fought the spread of communist ideas in Southeast Asia with maniacal tenacity. After giving a similar comparative biography, B. Clinton proceeds to the conclusions that can be drawn, describing both personalities as well-meaning and hardheaded, respectively. In the Cambridge Dictionary online dictionary, the first lexical unit is defined as follows: "wanting to have a good effect, but not always achieving one." Taking into account the biographical text dedicated to Jameson William Fulbright, the following translation is more adequate than "who is guided by ideals": "guided by good intentions". The second lexical unit of interest, hardheaded, has two interpretations in the online dictionary.The Free Dictionary:

1. Inflexible; stubborn; overly willful or obstinate. Also written as "hard-headed";

2. Very practical and shrewd; not concerned with or influenced by emotions. Also written as "hard-headed".

The translator chose to convey the second meaning, although it contradicts the content of the previous comparative biography. Thus, taking into account the genre hybridization observed in B. Clinton's text, another translation seems more appropriate: "However, stubbornness also has its weaknesses."

In the fourteenth chapter, in the original text of Bill Clinton's autobiography, within one paragraph, there is a sharp transition from the genre of a news article when describing the election results ("He lost the election by 500,000 votes, 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent to 13.5 percent for Wallace. Nixon won 301 electoral votes, 31 over a majority..."), to a conversational style when Clinton presented his own views on the impact of the events of 1968 on further decisions by Nixon's staff ("Its success may have contributed to the Nixon crowd's belief that they could get away with anything, including all the shenanigans that surfaced in Watergate"). The author uses the colloquial word shenanigans, which was omitted in the translation. The translation turns out to be more stylistically neutral than the original: part of Bill Clinton's personal attitude to the situation is lost. To preserve the stylistic contrast within the paragraph, it seems appropriate to use the phrase "undercover games." In this case, we get the following translation: "The success of that time allowed Nixon's entourage to think that they could get away with anything, including the underhanded games that became known after Watergate." The example shows that idiosyncratic features are refracted at the junction of genres, the failure of which in translation can lead to a partial violation of adequacy (for example, in this example, the shades of the attitude of the Democratic president to the Republican president, who is at the center of a major political scandal, are lost).

In the sixteenth chapter, two paragraphs are inserted into the autobiographical narrative, which are a commentary on the so-called "Game of the Century", an American football match between the Texas Longhorn and Arkansas Razorbacks teams, held in 1969. There is a hybridization of the genres of autobiography and sports resume, as a result of which there is a problem of transmitting special vocabulary, for example: kicked off, forced a fumble, touchdown run, tailback. These professional qualities can be attributed to gaps, since there are no equivalents in the Russian language due to the low popularity of American football in Russian-speaking culture. Therefore, translators have to turn to transcribing (quarterback, kicker, field goal, down, receiver), selecting equivalents from other sports (putting the ball in play, opening the score, substitutes), calculating (forty-two-yard touchdown, on the thirteen-yard line) and descriptive translation (knocked it out of the hands of the Texas forward). Despite the well-used translation techniques, there are still some losses and distortions when working with gaps. Consider an excerpt from the translation: "In the first game of the fourth quarter... Texas quarterback James Street scored a stunning forty-two-yard touchdown pass." The highlighted fragment in the original text corresponds to the phrase on a busted play. In the English-language online sports dictionary, SportsLingo, you can find the following definition: "This is a term used to describe a play in football that goes unintentionally wrong, immediately after the ball is snapped [the snap being a backward pass of the ball, that begins at the line of scrimmage]." Both the hybridization and the active use of professionalism related to American football are related to the fact that Bill Clinton is a fan of this sport, which needs to be reflected in the translation. As a result, in the absence of an equivalent for the phrase on a busted play, it is necessary to resort to a detailed descriptive version, which will give the following option: "At the beginning of the fourth quarter ... Texas quarterback James Street, after putting the ball into play, unable to pass, improvised and scored a stunning forty-two-yard touchdown." From the above, it becomes clear that the author's experience and personality traits can be realized in the text of an autobiography/memoir, leading to hybridization with genres characterized by the active use of special vocabulary. In the case of its inaccurate transmission, there may be a distortion of the image of not only the personality of the author, but also the personality of the object.

In the thirtieth chapter, when describing the inauguration ceremony of President Bill Clinton, he gives fragments of the inaugural speech. As a result, there is a hybridization of the autobiography and the inaugural address. The latter, as noted by researchers of this genre, acts as the semantic core of the inauguration as a theatrical political event ^[17], and, as a result, is replete with means of linguistic expression ^[17-19]. Bill Clinton's inaugural address is no exception. As a result, a sharp increase in the frequency of using language expressiveness during genre switching further complicates the translator's work and increases the likelihood of semantic losses. For example, the sentence "Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom..." uses the double metaphor shadows of the Cold War – warmed by the sunshine of freedom. Only the second part of this metaphor has been preserved in translation: "Today, the generation that grew up in the harsh conditions of the cold war assumes a new responsibility in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom...". The fact that this particular passage was chosen for inclusion in the text of the autobiography testifies to the importance of the meanings contained in it for the author's worldview. A more equivalent translation is: "Today, a generation that grew up in the darkness of the cold war is taking on a new responsibility in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom." Thus, hybridization can occur between genres characterized by a different frequency of use of language expressivity, which exacerbates the dilemma of preserving the expressivity of the original text or neutralizing it during translation.

The hybridization of the genres of autobiography and the inaugural speech leads to another difficulty for the translator. Bill Clinton articulates not so much personal values as the values of the nation, which is typical for inaugural speeches ^[17]. A translator, not being a representative of the American nation, must make a conscious effort to convey its worldview, which turns out to be important in order to achieve an adequate translation, taking into account the characteristics of one of the genres involved in the hybridization process. So, in the translation "America must continue to play a leading role in the world, because we have done so much to achieve this", the sentence "America must continue to lead the world we did so much to make" partially distorted the self-perception of Americans. They see themselves not so much as a world hegemon as a messiah ^[20]. Thus, the translation seems more appropriate: "America must continue to play a leading role in the modern world, which we have put so much effort into creating." Based on the above, it follows that genres can enter into the process of hybridization, which are characterized by a different degree of expression of the socio-cultural conditions of the time. If the translator does not take into account the hybridization factor, he may not notice the change in the degree to which the text reflects the "spirit of the times" and allow inaccuracies in the translation.

Conclusion

The problems arising from genre hybridization may seem trivial, but without taking into account the complex genre nature of memoirs/autobiographies, potentially difficult-to-translate fragments of the original text may not be noticed. The difficulty is not the fact of genre change itself, but how idiosyncratic features are refracted in fragments of different genre nature, special vocabulary and means of language expression are used, and socio-cultural conditions of the time are reflected. Translators encounter these difficulties regularly, but in conditions of hybridization, as a result of which the text turns out to be heterogeneous, in order to achieve the adequacy of the translation, the translator requires great concentration in analyzing the text.