IS METAPHOR LOST IN TRANSLATION: A COGNO-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF METAPHOR IN CLOSE READINGS OF LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

After 2000 years in which metaphor was strictly relegated to the domain of literature, during the last 40 years, after the revolution instantiated by Lakoff and Johnson, as a reaction, metaphor research was alienated from poetics. Instead, it focused predominantly on metaphor use in the real world, its experiential and embodied grounding, and its role in thinking and ideology. The methodology of the study of cognitive metaphor initially involved introspection, later the use of mono-lingual corpora which provided ample material for analysis and, lately, the use of parallel texts. They are seen as an efficient way to study the linguistic and culturally-defined differences that come into play during the process of translating metaphor. The aim of the research is, by identifying the conceptual metaphor behind the metaphorical linguistic expressions in key texts from one of the greatest stylists of the English language, Joseph Conrad, and comparing them to their translation in Bulgarian, to check whether metaphor is lost or transformed, where the conveyed message of the metaphor is similar, what kind of loss is most frequent. Conclusions are made regarding literature in translation, suggesting cases in which it is inferior to original writing in terms of metaphor type and density.