Translation of Irony

Contents

I.Introduction. 2

II.Theoretical Part. . 5

1.The representation of Irony. 5

2.The foundation of Irony. 6

3.The purpose of Irony. 8

4.Irony and Clerisy. 10

5. Translation of Irony…………………………………………………….15

III.Practical Part 23

IV.Conclusion. 26

V.References. 28

Introduction

I have chosen this theme of the course work because the translation of irony
is really eternal question, and plus for all this, many translators are interested in this theme . The purpose of this work
is to reveal different ways of translation and to show how gorgeous can be the English language. What about relevance,
this question is very popular in the works of different writers and poets, no matter which language they are present. The course work is devoted to the study of translation of irony. The irony
is very complex and inconsistent process of showing our thoughts. Pretty much everything is ironic these days. Irony is used as a synonym for cool, for cynicism, for detachment, for intelligence; it's cited as the end of civilization, as well as its salvation. In the figure of speech, emphasis is placed on the opposition between the literal and intended meaning of a statement; one thing is said and its opposite implied. The essential feature of irony
is the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs. The New Oxford English Dictionary interpreted that irony was a state of affairs or an event that seemed deliberately contrary to what one expected and was often amusing as a result.

The Greek etymology of the word “irony”, “eironeia”, means “pretence”.
The Semitic root of the Greek word is derived from the Accadic term “erewum”, “covering”, by means of which irony appears as a device to avoid the direct impact of an explicit word. In this sense, in common use irony is not necessarily bound to the rhetoric concept of semantic inversion. Rather, it can be defined as an alternation of a reference aiming at stressing the reality of a fact by means of the apparent dissimulation of it’s true nature. Anyway, to reduce irony to a mere rhetoric figure or a linguistic ruse involves not seizing it’s communicative significance due to the psychological web of it’s implicit meanings. In fact, in a communicative perspective, irony springs out as a strategic “as if”, both by escaping the alternative of truth vs. falsehood, and by suspending the subsequent parameters of judgment.

So the irony is concluding in the implication of the opposite in the seemingly positive characteristics. Sometimes the implication is expressed
in the language units, which are difficult to translate, but more often the problem is the disparity between the traditionally methods of expressing irony in different cultures. Expression of irony, mockery is carried out in various ways, which may vary in form, content and function in different languages and speech traditions. The simplest way of expressing irony in English and Russian languages are the quotes when it is standard and expected word or phrase are quoted in the standard context. But in reality in spite of many difficulties in translation of irony from English to Russian there are too many attractive linguistic points in this work. There are very many cases, though, which we regard as irony, intuitively feeling the reversal of the evaluation, but unable to put our finger on the exact word in whose meaning we can trace the contradiction between the said and the implied. The effect of irony in such cases is created by a number of statements, by the whole of the text. Many examples of irony are supplied by D. Defoe, J. Swift, by such contemporary writers as S. Lewis, K. Vonnegut, E. Waugh and others.

Preparatory to disclose the course work, it’s too important to separate out the main aims of it:

● To disclose the extraction and general representation of the irony.

● To show the different matters about studying the irony.

● To show the different types of irony.

● To show the interaction between the irony and clerisy.

● To connect the translation of irony with many works of different authors.

The course work is divided into five parts:

● The introduction

● Thetheoretical part

● The practical part

● The conclusion

● The list of references

The importance and necessity of the translation of irony from English to Russian are shown in the introduction. What about theoretical part, it’s segregated into five parts: the representation of irony, the foundation of irony, the types of irony, the purpose of Irony, the irony and clerisy and the translation of Irony. In the representation of irony there are very important borders between “face value” and “what it really means”, because the irony is very conflicting phenomenon. In the foundation of irony the idea represents the appearance of irony and it’s development in the literature. In the different types of irony are shown the classifications of irony. The translation of irony
is very laborious that’s why the third of the parts is devoted to it. The forth part of the course work is about irony and clerisy. In the practical part marks five main rules of translation of irony and showed different examples for each other. So this course work is showed all methods of translation of irony in literature. All sources of irony are found in the conclusion. The theoretical and practical parts are shown the origin of irony, the different variants of it’s translation and it’s usage. The list of references and usable literature is attached.

I. Theoretical Part.

1.
The representation of Irony

First of all, it is useful to consider that irony is not fixed and narrow phenomenon, but a family of communicative processes. And all these processes are very arduous. The irony naturally has two meaning: 'face value', and 'real meaning'. In the text the usage of irony is taken sharps of double meanings of the same word. The meaning can differ communication, and some people might take the 'face value' meaning for the 'real' meaning - in other words not find the message ironic at all. Both the 'face value' and 'real' meanings of irony are highly dependent on culture, and to get to the 'real' meaning, one must be looking for a double meaning in the first place. An ironic speaker is not a deceitful one. Unlike the lie, where words and utterances are “deceptive”, irony is found underneath a disguise of pretence. In fact, while in deceptive communication a speaker deliberately omits or fabricates some significant conditions of truth and reality by concealing his intention, pretence communication instead clearly cohabits with reality, and exhibits it’s “not being true”, by winking at what is hidden behind the mask of untruth. Sometimes people do not always say what they mean, most people can be assumed to be trying to communicate some sort of meaning through their actions. All sorts of things can clue people in to look for an ironic meaning if the 'face value' meaning does not make sense. Some cultures might condition people to look for irony by giving it a sense of value. A different style or tone from that expected, understatement, cynicism, and hyperbole are all things that might clue in the observer to look for another meaning. It is almost as if finding irony were a game, or a process of translation.

II. 2. The foundation of Irony

The Irony is a real grand phenomena
. And it should seems that the study of it developed in all kinds of literature and philosophy, but the concept of irony much less expanded in the study of media. The propagation method is the message,
that must certainly mean a medium can be a tool for irony. All media contain another form of media ( the intension of movie is the narrative), so the conventions may carry over between the two types of media (like film making use of the dramatic irony of the stage). Also, before the conventions of a new medium can be fully developed, one might look for meaning in the new medium by using the conventions of old mediums.

Although the distinction of Irony is not always clear, irony differs from other ways of communicating with double meanings such as metaphor and allegory in that it does not entirely eliminate the 'face value' meaning. Irony includes sarcasm, which aims to give a meaning directly antithetical to the one presented, the original meaning cannot be discarded without losing the sense of irony. It is through comparing these two meanings that the degree or type of irony can be seen. Sometimes the ground might be taken right out from under us when irony is aimed at creating complete objectivity, and we are left not knowing what to do. Irony is a phenomenon capable of being experienced by anyone, but for people to be able to share an experience of irony, or for an author to expect a certain reaction to irony, its interpretation must become a part of the culture.

One of the earliest and best-known uses of irony comes from Socrates. Usually called 'Socratic Irony', Socrates would first appear to know nothing about a problem in order to clarify the opposing stance, and then show inconsistencies in their argument.Phase one Socratic irony is simply part of a canon of rhetorical tools devised to distract people from the fact that they've been sitting still listening to hard talk for an awfully long time. The technique, demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues, was to pretend ignorance and, to feign credence in your opponent's power of thought, in order to tie him in knots. This form of argument is called 'elenchus', and can be seen in the dialogue Euthyprho among others. While not an entirely negative technique, this type of irony does not construct arguments that are true or false, and just as irony can change perceptions through repetition, Socrates builds his arguments, in this case, inductively. Throughout medieval and renaissance Europe irony was taken as saying the opposite of what is meant. Norman Knox shows how only in the eighteenth century did the word become more widely used in literature, and was developed in various forms such as satire. Along with the rise of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century, the concept of irony took on new meanings during this period. Whereas before irony was something directed by someone at someone, it could now be something 'unintentional, observable, and representable in art'. Phase two Romantic irony was framed by Schlegel- the German philosopher. Here, it became a much more complex philosophical tool, of which the nuts and bolts were that you simultaneously occupied two opposite positions . There were problems with this as a direct path to truth later on. The point with Schlegel was that irony would give a divided self, which in turn gives you a multiplicity of perspectives, which is the only way you will unlock the truth of the whole. This romantic (or "philosophical") irony had very great influence on the English Romantic poets.

Phase three, the Irony as a tool of dissent, a grim but failsafe gag of popular culture, took hold during the first world war. The gross disjunction between patriotic rhetoric and the reality of the war itself led to a widespread use of irony as a means of puncturing deceitful propaganda. So, for instance, the Wipers Times would print a list of Things That Were Definitely True, and it would contain a proportion of propaganda ("40,000 Huns have Surrendered"), a proportion of enemy propaganda ("The Germans Have Plentiful and Tasty Meats") and a proportion of nonsense ("Horatio Bottomley has accepted the Turkish Throne on condition they make a separate peace"), thus undermining any information coming from anywhere at all.

The twentieth century has seen many attempts to formulate irony as a coherent concept. Literary critics such as D. C. Muecke and Wayne Booth have come up with scores of names describing different types of ironies, and different ways in which irony is used. Classifying and tracking the history of irony not only clarifies the concept, but also shows how it changes throughout time. Even though we have to look at irony through the lens of irony, searching for its meaning gives deep insight into the ways people see their own existence.

II. The purposes of Irony

The ironic communication is miscommunication as an oblique communication
. In fact, on one side, it shows what it hides
, while, on the other one, it conceals what it says
. In this sense, irony is “say in order not to say
”. By means of an ironic comment, the ironist can remain “opaque” and impervious to the interlocutor on a relational level, though he/she is not silent. In fact, ironic miscommunication is a kind of semantic mask
, by means of which it is possible to soften and fuzz the borders of meaning in order to improve the negotiation processes in a given situation.

14 8 The ironic comment may be seen as an emblematic instance of discursive dialogism
, according to which the word is not semantically univocal (monosemic), but it possesses “more voices” (polysemic). Its interpretation assumes different forms in terms of both its “position” within the discourse and its relation to the “focusing” game, in which some of its features are in the foreground and others are veiled. Paradoxically, in irony the foregrounded mask plays a background role during the exchange between the ironist and his/her interlocutor. As a consequence, irony carries out and satisfies different psychological functions.

Ironic communication as a sign of respect for conventions (how to evade censure in a culturally correct way)

“Where the lion’s skin will not reach, it must be patched with the fox’s”, the wise Greek strategist Lysander sentenced, according to Plutarch. A similar metaphor appears again in the works of Baltasar Morales, a seventeenth century Spanish writer, as well as in Niccola Machiavelli’s essays of diplomacy during the Italian Renaissance. This maxim describes the situation in which one realizes that a direct and impulsive expression is unsuitable for the interactive context, especially in face-threatening situations like conflict. Hence, it is not a matter of chance that its original version was uttered by Lysander, an expert in military planning. By extending this metaphor to everyday communication, an effective communicative interaction is enhanced by ironic comment in a subtle and diplomatic way, so that a speaker might achieve his/her aims in agreement with the “unwritten rules” of civilized behavior.

Irony as miscommunication arises from the need both to respect social standards, and to avoid other people’s censure, without abandoning, however, those topics that would otherwise be unacceptable. Ironic speakers accept the cultural norms and, at the same time, violate them
, remaining within the limits of social acceptability: they do not have to suppress their thoughts or their feelings. Therefore, ironic communication finds its edge in those cultures (like the Anglo-Saxon one) where self-control is very important and where it is thus a very positive thing to be able to keep coolly detached from events, without emotional arousal. In this way, a speaker can use irony to hide the expression of his/her emotions and safeguard his/her personal experience. In particular, English humor responds to these cultural expectations and standards, involving the ability to “stay in one’s place”. In English culture, where one talks about emotions in preference to showing them, as Lutz has observed, irony becomes not only a device to keep at a distance from emotions and “de-emotionalize” oneself, but also a way of showing consideration for the interlocutor’s feelings (without saying everything one feels or thinks about the other), in order to be polite and be cognizant of the situation. In fact, human beings are like actors playing their part in a “dramatic” and “carnival-like” society. In this regard, a social interpretation of Diderot’s paradox of acting is feasible: the mask of irony as miscommunication allows one to express the duplicity between being and appearing, as well as their paradoxical unification within the ironist’s consistency with the character he interprets.

Ironic communication as a border of reserve (how to safeguard personal space).
Irony can be used not only as a device to evade social censure, but also as a planned action aiming at maintaining dignity, restraint, and demeanor, as well as one’s own privacy
. An intriguing image is provided by Barthes’metaphor of the “dark glasses”, according to which in ironic communication attention is shifted from the informative function to the metacommunicative one. In fact, after crying, people do not wear their dark glasses to conceal the fact that they have cried. Rather, people put them on in order to disguise the distressing expression of pain, i.e., their swollen red eyes. The dark glasses are an “allusive mask”, aimed at preserving one’s own dignity and demeanor: they hint at the pain whose embarrassing effect they cover. People wearing their dark glasses communicating: they intend to communicate that, though suffering, they do not want to exhibit their own pain. Therefore, the dark glasses, at the same time, make the ironist an actor and a witness of him-/herself and of others. They are useful for protecting both personal space and privacy.Irony as miscommunication can be described once again by means of a metaphor: that of the sacred fence
, symbolic boundary, or even magic circle
, which makes the ironist “intangible” and “unapproachable” in the interpersonal game. In fact, irony has often been considered as connected to the talented wise man, who succeeds in observing things from a distance, avoiding unbalancing and compromising himself.This intention not to be explicitly aggressive arises from the words Mary says ironically to Lawrence, her husband, who has tried to repair an old armchair, with the usual lack of success: “You’re so genial, Lawrence! Since our marriage, your cleverness has always fascinated me!”. In this case Mary chose to be ironic rather than direct because she does not want to start an open conflict with Lawrence. Conversely, Paula jokes with her brother, who has just got a high mark in his mathematics exam, saying “You were right, Andrew. As usual, you are an idiot!”. The girl comments ironically on Andrew’s success, because her brother was scared and pessimistic before the exam.

Ironic communication as a relational ambiguity (how to re-negotiate interaction)
. The ironist, skilled in the art of skimming and lingering, just like the mythological Janus Bifrons, has two faces: one which laughs at the weeping of the other. In this way, it is possible to define irony as a “Janus-faced” communication
. The paradox about ironic communication is that, if you want to be understood clearly, you have to be misunderstood
. In fact, the ironic comment is like a skin that alludes to the hidden content at the very moment in which it conceals that content.

Therefore, ironic miscommunication can be used as an ambivalent strategy, a “tongue in cheek
” producing puzzlement and disorientation in the interlocutors. In fact, the “Janus-faced” nature of ironic miscommunication allows people, on one side, to calm their passions, while on the other one, to shift in their own favor the fuzzy borders between the different possible (and legitimate) interpretations of their comment.The ironist benefits both from the “effectiveness of the word
” and the “innocence of silence
”, to use the incisive expression. For this reason, we can speak about pragmatic polysemy
in ironic communication. In fact, by means of a systematic process of “meaning negotiation”, in an ironic utterance speakers convey a communicative intention which allows the interlocutor to interpret it with different meanings. Irony as miscommunication is a complex communicative outcome in which different signaling systems interact at the same time. In particular, in the standard ironic comment, linguistic segments are combined in a specific paralinguistic (or supra-segmental) frame. The apparent opposition between these two signaling patterns generates the ironic meaning perceived by the addressee. On some other special occasions, when there are strong contextual constraints and clues, linguistic inputs are sufficient alone to create the ironic meaning. The basic ambiguity of irony allows one to negotiate and re-negotiate the meanings of an ironic comment. In this way, the ironist is not constrained to undertake responsibility
for his/her word. This property of irony (being a skilful device to assure oneself of many more degrees of freedom than an explicit utterance does), arises from the ironic remark Anthony addresses to his friend Hillary. The lady goes to a cocktail party wearing a hideous dress and Anthony say: “Hillary! You’re so beautiful: just like Sharon Stone!”. “What do you mean?!”, George, Hillary’s husband, intervenes, irritated by Anthony’s sarcastic attitude. “Hillary is gorgeous, tonight! I was just paying your wife a compliment…”, Anthony pretends not to have been sarcastic, as if the meaning of his comment depended only on the linguistic input. In this dialogue the sense of the utterance is the subject of a skillful negotiation between them, because the semantic ambiguity of the ironic remark allows Anthony not to take full responsibility for his innuendo.

As useful outcome of ironic miscommunication, speakers have the chance and opportunity to calibrate the weight of the indirect meaning
of their speech. An indirect expression of one’s thoughts, desires and feelings cannot only hide one’s real intention, but it can also define it and re-draw the limits of social interaction between interlocutors. First of all, according to the “tinge hypothesis
, irony should express less condemnation and less approval than a direct utterance does (mitigation of the intended meaning
). A criticism ironically made is apparently lighter and less offensive than an open insult; similarly, ironic praise is less positive than an explicit form. There is a kind of “regression to the center
”, in which, on the one hand, the exultation is lessened, and, on the other, the aggressive charge is attenuated. Ironic criticism is used to emphasize condemnation rather than to dilute it: thanks to irony it should be possible to achieve one’s aims in a more pointed and controlled way, intensifying the meaning of an utterance (enhancement of the intended meaning
).

Because of a cool detachment from emotions, irony may be used as a device for wounding someone in a much more cutting way than a direct criticism oriented in the same direction. In fact, an explicit insult can be produced in a moment of rage, as a consequence of the speaker’s mood in the contingent condition. Alternatively, an ironic insult can arise from a cold calculation, so as to express, besides blame, even the ironist’s intention of not losing his/her self-control in showing the interlocutor’s lack of success.Similarly, within a context of praise, irony is feasible when the speakers know each other very well.

II. 3. The types of Irony

A person expounding the irony has to know how to encode his message, pays attention to cultural and national habits, and tunnels of the media through which his message will be sent. Television's The Daily Show takes other television footage out of context and creates its own 'fake' news coverage that ironically highlights the limitations of the television medium. When someone speaks to you in the voice of a radio disk jockey they ironically emphasize how the context for speech has changed when the medium of the radio is absent. Many critics agree that affect is a vital part of irony, as different types of irony have different feelings or colors that are not experienced in its absence. Most theories of rhetoric distinguish between three types of irony: verbal, dramatic and situational.

Verbal irony
is a disparity of expression and intention: when a speaker says one thing but means another, or when a literal meaning is contrary to its intended effect. An example of this is sarcasm. Sarcasm is stating the opposite of an intended meaning especially in order to sneeringly slyly jest or mock a person situation or thing.

Dramatic
(or tragic) irony
is a disparity of expression and awareness: when words and actions possess a significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.

Situational irony
is the disparity of intention and result: when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect. Likewise, cosmic irony is disparity between human desires and the harsh realities of the outside world (or the whims of the gods). By some older definitions, situational irony and cosmic irony are not irony at all.

Verbal irony
is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers.
For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through her voice while truly trying to claim she's not upset, it would not be verbal irony just by virtue of its verbal manifestation. An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts. Personal virtues are characteristics valued as promoting individuality. This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves. For example: as pleasant as a root-canal.

What about tragic irony
it can only take place in a fictional context. In this form of irony, the words and actions of the characters belie the real situation, which the spectators fully realize. Tragic irony particularly characterized the drama of ancient Greece, owing to the familiarity of the spectators with the legends on which so many of the plays were based. The theatre of ancient Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece. Irony threatens authoritative models of discourse by "removing the semantic security of one signifier, so, irony has some of its foundation in the onlooker’s perception of paradox which arises from insoluble problems. A paradox is a true statement or group of statements that leads to a Contradiction or a situation which defies intuition. For example: In the William Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo finds Juliet in a drugged death-like sleep, he assumes her to be dead and kills himself. William Shakespeare.

Situational irony
is a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by 'perverse appropriateness'. For example: If someone were to go on a trip and decide not to take a plane because they are worried about crashing, and take a bus instead, it would be ironic if a plane hit the bus they took, thereby realizing their fears of crashing with a plane, despite measures taken at the outset of the journey to avoid such a fate.

II. 4. Irony and Clerisy

To cultivate the self is, in effect, to discover that there is no self to cultivate. From a pedagogical point of view, in particular, to do it right is to get it wrong. Irony constitutes the crisis of the clerisy. At the same time, and as it were ironically, clerisy represents itself as the resolution of that crisis.

Both "irony" and "clerisy" emerge into peculiar discursive prominence during the romantic era. Irony's provenance as a rhetorical term dates back to antiquity, but its usage receives a new birth through the theorizing of Friedrich Schlegel, emerging in his writing as something rather different than the "merely" rhetorical strategy through which one says one thing and means another. For Schlegel (and in his wake) the divide that characterizes its traditional rhetorical definition becomes an allusive point of departure for rethinking the divided nature of subjectivity. "Clerisy" is Coleridge's coinage for a learned class of (more or less) state functionaries responsible for the preservation and dissemination of the national heritage. The role of such a class—its centrality and importance to the nation-state—is developed in various ways, theoretical and practical, throughout the nineteenth century and, in Britain, usually with explicit reference to Coleridge's formulation (see Knight, Prickett, and Readings).

The topic for this volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series was intended as something of an experiment. The initial impulse in soliciting articles under the heterogeneous rubrics of "irony" and "clerisy" was to consider each in the nature of a metonymy for broader generic and ideological questions raised in romantic writing. The irony as a stand-in, so to speak, for the romantic topoi of self-consciousness and self-division: contradiction, fragmentation, dissolution. Of course, the aporias of irony turn out to be, in many ways, the inevitable condition of clerical intervention and authority, even as the call for such intervention and authority testifies to an ironic consciousness that their influence can by no means be assumed.

One way in which these two seemingly heterogeneous strands of romantic discourse come to be linked occurs thematically through the concept of Bildung or cultivation. Irony for Schlegel played many roles not the least of which was to designate the human capacity for playing many roles. The ironist stood away from himself. He arrived at perfection to the point of irony—to the point, that is, of reflection and reversal. Perhaps the best shorthand translation for specialists in British romanticism would be Keats's negative capability.

The figure of "revolutions" evoked the radical provocation of such aphorisms for the business of Building—that lead for the production and reproduction of culture. The ongoing chain of irony must, to be genuinely ongoing and genuinely ironic, include itself as one of its links. "What gods will be able to save us from all these ironies?" Irony ends, as Schlegel himself writes, as "irony of irony," a fate from which no (human) history can escape. This has been the emphasis of most contemporary readings of Schlegel.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that an identity-oriented or traditionalist concept of the clerisy operates without its own quite deliberate ironies. The very project of instituting a social class responsible for culture bespeaks a certain ironic consciousness in and of that culture. Coleridge's account of the "idea" of the clerisy in On the Constitution of Church and State is thoroughly ironic, if by irony one means the deliberate conjoining in one form of two absolutely irreconcilable intentions (a definition that is, at least, very close to Schlegel's "antithetical synthesis. What On the Constitution of Church and State calls the "national church" comprehends "the learned of all denominations" .

Theology is not one among many, but the "head of all" the liberal arts and sciences, and yet the reason Coleridge gives for its place in the hierarchy of learning is anything but theological. Under the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science.

To associate its spiritual or "sacerdotal" function with its national one "is to be considered as un-growth of ignorance and oppression." At the same time, Coleridge refuses to make the final disciplinary cut, one that would separate sacred and profane truths with all due finality. On the contrary, he insists at several points that without reference to the sacerdotal, all other sciences would be reduced to so much empiricism and utilitarianism. There can be no national church without an other church, antithetical to the nation-state, antithetical even to the very idea of the nation-state, as its quasi-teleological framework. I write "quasi" teleological only to emphasize that actually to arrive at the telos would be, for Coleridge, to regress into "ignorance and oppression." (The structural affinities with Fichte and Schlegel are evident.) From the point of view of the nation, religion is a productive blind spot. Though, of course, from the point of view of religion, it is the nation that sees through a glass darkly.

Institutionally, the interplay of theology and nation-state is embodied in Coleridge's vision of a specifically Anglican clerisy. The guardians of culture not only may but must be embodied in the sacerdotal figure. England, of course, is peculiarly fortunate in that its national church is also a Christian one, but in any case priestly authority must be responsible for the heterogeneous though interdependent functions of national and spiritual well-being.

Two distinct functions do not necessarily imply or require two different functionaries. Nay, the perfection of each may require the union of both in the same person. And in the instance now in question, great and grievous errors have arisen from confounding the functions; and fearfully great and grievous will be the evils from the success of an attempt to separate them.

The clerisy as the guardian not just of the state's civilization but as Coleridge repeatedly insists of its culture must always be, as it were, in touch with a nominal realm "outside" the nation if it is indeed to arrive at anything approaching culture. And yet that realm must never be equated with the cultural mission of the nation-state as such. Practically, to do so would be to equate transcendental conditions of morality to the particular mores of a time and place—at an extreme, to institute not a clerisy but an inquisition. Even ideally, Coleridge cannot permit himself to imagine such an end to his project, for it would lose its antithetical and productive power. Human history and divine providence would be at all times and everywhere the same.

The irony of Coleridge’s clerisy lies in the thoroughly secular nature of its defense of theology. It also lies in the thoroughly theological ground of its secular ideals. More precisely, it lies in the impossibility and the necessity of bringing these together. The choice of the word irony to describe On the Constitution of Church and State may always seem a bit counter-intuitive. It is far from an amusing read—Coleridge could not be more in earnest—but romantic irony is no joke. To refer again to Schlegel, this time on Socratic irony in the Lyceum: "It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication". Linking "irony" and "clerisy" draws out the structure of fundamental "antagonism" that they share. In this context, too, it becomes clear that irony is not so much the crisis of clerisy or clerisy a response to that crisis as that both are negotiations of antithetical structures that can be traced across boundaries of subjectivity, culture and theology, philosophy and poetry.

Such negotiations are the topic of the essays that follow. All are variegated and nuanced in ways that the telegraphic summaries of an introduction cannot hope to convey. One rather marked difference, however, between all of them and my own formulations lies in the greater prominence they give to political questions and concepts.
Adam Carter's "'Insurgent Governments': Romantic Irony and the Theory of the State" specifically traces the relation between Schlegel's theory of irony and his theory of the state. It suggests, too, the tensions—productive but also dangerous—between an ironic dialectic of political pluralism and the impositions of arbitrary authority that bring it to a halt even in the relatively early writings of the Lyceum and Athenaeum fragments. The next two essays take up quite explicitly the question of political apostasy that, I think, hovers in the margins of Carter's discussion of Schlegel. More particularly, they take up the political turn from revolutionary to reactionary that constitutes the narrative irony of so many romantic trajectories.
Charles Mahoney's "The Multeity of Coleridgean Apostasy" reads Coleridge's own working through of "apostasy" as the very principle of vacillation against which and yet through which his thought takes shape. Mahoney suggests apostasy as a uniquely Coleridgean translation of Schlegelian irony: a falling away from any possibility of foundational or static principles, that is all too often misread—even by Coleridge himself—as the foundation for yet another stance.
Linda Brigham's "Alastor, Apostasy, and the Ecology of Criticism," reads Shelley's poem as offering an analysis of just such ironies of apostasy especially as they shape Shelley's own reading of Wordsworth. In Alastor, Shelley dramatizes a tale of two poets to explore how a Wordsworthian opposition to an earlier or an other self (a perfection taken to the point of irony) produces the mirror image of what it opposes. This reading of the poem brings it into closer conjunction with later Shelley works such as Prometheus Unbound, but Brigham also implicates contemporary literary criticism and theoretical debate in a similarly structured dialectic of opposition and identity. In Shelley, she finds a different model of reading and writing, one whose point of departure includes a sheer "communication of pleasure" that (in Shelley's view) Wordsworth has replaced with a symmetrical discourse of sympathy that can all too easily give way to ideology and totalization. This threat is reflected (in Brigham's view) in the totalizing implications, whether sympathetic or oppositional, of much academic debate. The concluding essay,
Forest Pyle's "'Frail Spells': Shelley and the Ironies of Exile" takes up similar problems, but situates them in relation to Shelley's rhetoric of exile. Pyle argues that Shelley can be productively read as deriving a powerful and liberator language of critique both from his position of exile from Britain and from a supplementary critique of the concepts of nation and homeland that underwrite that position. The dialectic of contemporary criticism that would recuperate exile—or "Diaspora"—as a position of authoritative critique fails to take such a supplementary critique of exile into account—a mistake that Shelley, in Pyle's reading, does not make. Shelly's "exile" operates, therefore, as a limit case of "epistemological irony so extensive that it disqualifies the claims of any clerisy to escape it." As in Brigham's reading, Shelley is used as a lens through which to focus on debates in contemporary criticism, though the emphasis is on the remainders of knowledge rather than those of pleasure. In a broader sense, all four of the pieces gathered here reflect an interest in "irony" and "clerisy" not only as historical artifacts but as historical forces at once enabling and disrupting the antithetical structuring of an ongoing scholarly, critical, and pedagogical Building.

II. 5.
Translation of Irony

Translation-violence-irony. These are interesting terms with which we can conceive of "The Classic". For it is we who conceive the classic, and that conception is, to follow Derrida, an invention, a translation, and thus - in its inventive deconstruction - ironically violent in its criticism.

"The classic"
is an important category in the work of J.M. Coetzee. In many of his novels, the category is deployed and problematic. In his novel Age of Iron, for instance, the narrator (Elizabeth Curren) is "a retired lecturer in classics whose canon means little to anyone but herself", as Attwell puts it (1993, 121). In Foe, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is interrogated, while in The Master of Petersburg it is Dostoyevsky (in particular The Possessed) which is rewritten. And there is the farm novel, the colonial travelogue, possibly Kafka ... At the same time, Coetzee himself has become something of a "master", who has received literary prizes, and whose work is prescribed regularly as required reading for students. And, of course, many books and various academic papers have been written on Coetzee.

What would be the relation between Coetzee's texts and the classics which they rewrite? What would be the relation between Coetzee's own texts and their deployment - being accorded the status of "classics" themselves? Rather, it is the category of the classic itself, the object of knowledge if you wish, which will provide the frame of the present purview II.

The refusal to translate the proper name "apartheid" may be read as an impossible attempt to prevent the elision of "the proper name into a common noun" to keep the discourse of "apartheid" at a distance by insisting that it "function outside the language system". This refusal to translate "apartheid" may thus be read as an attempt both to speak the unspeakable and to shirk responsibility and accountability, as an attempt to refuse contamination by (the discourse which is named by) "apartheid". The discourse named by "apartheid" is itself, of course, a discourse of disease. The discourse of disease which functions to cleanse, and purge, the pure Aryan blood, is, ironically, itself sought to be kept at a distance for fear of infection, as Derrida notes: Since then, no tongue has ever translated this name - as if all the languages of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word, as if all tongues were refusing to give an equivalent, refusing to let themselves be contaminated through the contagious hospitality of the word-for-word . But this would imply that the word "apartheid" (and what it names) is at once kept at a distance from (it is a foreign word) and, by virtue of it being used as if it were a word from the vernacular, incorporated into the language in question (rather than using a word from the vernacular to name what "apartheid" names). The word "apartheid", therefore, like the word Babel at once belongs to, and at the same time does not belong to the language into which it is transferred. By the logic of a survival through translation, the original is at once perpetuated and destroyed. In the untranslatability of "apartheid", or, then, in the refusal to translate "apartheid", this logic is suspended: the word is perpetuated by not being translated. In not being translated the original word is - or is sought to be - kept as a ghastly monument, an eternally historicized reminder of atrocity, frozen in time. Apartheid, as a translation which is not a translation, is sought to be kept singular and other by transcending and at the same time affirming history.

This paper seeks to examine the ways in which the attempt to negotiate the otherness of language (as for instance staged in the refusal to translate "apartheid") operate by examining notions of the classic as they are related to Coetzee's work, in particular to his reading of T.S. Eliot's classic essay "What is a Classic?"

In this paper it’s possible to examine notions pertaining to the relation between the classic and its translation, its afterlife, by reading Coetzee's essay on Eliot. This will be done with reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known essay on "The Task of the Translator", a text which is itself a classic on the survival of the classic, and which is left unsaid by Coetzee. Doing this would entail theorizing the relation between the classic read as original, and its various "translations", which may be read as ironic reconstitutions or transplantations of the classic. This irony, it would be contention, functions violently in that the "afterlife" of the classic is dependent - precisely - upon the denial of the notion of a pure origin, of an untainted classic. The classic needs translation; it can only survive if it becomes other to itself, if it is violated and "contaminated" by translation.

This means that the oppositional relation between classic and translation may be deconstructed. Dissemination is contamination, and the dissemination of the classic is the contamination of that classic, in a way which is ironic in a similar way that the refusal to translate "apartheid" is both dissemination and contamination.

The classic is figured in the translation as metaphor of itself; but this figuration of the classic in the translation of itself is ironic because the price attached to figuration is emasculation, as the relation is "not based on resemblance". The classic is emasculated in its embodiment; it is incorporated at the price of losing its corporeality. In its afterlife, its survival, the classic becomes a ghost, an echo of itself. It becomes an other. Translation makes the classic other to itself - "it disarticulates the original" - at the same moment that it seeks to affirm the originally identity of the classic. It is in terms of this incorporation, this loss of pure body, that Friedrich Schleiermacher's conception of what might be called "foreignizing translation" may be read.

Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him. Foreignizing translation
may be understood as an attempt to preserve the original integrity of the classic and counteract its "disappearance as a text, as writing, as a body of language" by insisting upon the difference between the original and its translation, by deploying the translation as a handmaiden of the original. This move may be seen as anti-ironic; the translation would within such a scenario function as a restatement not only of the integrity of the pure original, but of the author of that original, in that the control of the author over the text is sought to be retained.

Even though Benjamin approvingly quotes Pannwitz's remarks relating to the need for the fidelity of the translator to the original to be measured in terms of "'allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue'" , this does not amount to the kind of hierarchical reversal between translation and original which Schleiermacher would support. It does not amount to a kind of "return to origins". On the contrary, Benjamin might be said to define fidelity to the original as infidelity, or - rather - as a deconstruction of the hierarchical tension between "[fidelity" and "freedom" which "have traditionally been regarded as conflicting tendencies". This is related to Benjamin's insistence that what defines the "Dichtwerk"- the "poet's work"or the poetic work - is something indefinable which "cannot be communicated”, so that the task of the translator is not to "communicate something". Thus Benjamin asks rhetorically: "For what is meant by freedom but that the rendering of sense is no longer regarded as all-important?" .The task of the translator, then, is to transcend specific languages, not by denying the difference between them, but by regaining pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux . In this pure language - which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages - all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.

In this movement of languages in translation towards a Messianic "pure language", "free translation" must be viewed not in terms of the communication of content, but in the emancipation from content, which "is the task of fidelity" understood as a kind of infidelity to the original. Thus the task of the translator is to "release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work". The translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. Translation, in this sense, is already to be found within the original - one has to read the original between the lines, in "interlinear" fashion. The original can only be true to itself in not being true to itself, in the infidelity of a translation which is true to it. The original already contains its other.

This brings us back to the question of authority over the text. If the original contains within itself the translation of itself, then the opposition between author and translator disappears. Ultimately, then, the relation between classic and translation may be read in terms of the authority to articulate, and - precisely - the authority to articulate foreignness. As Benjamin notes, after all, "translation is ... a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages". It should not be surprising, therefore, that Schleiermacher (quoted above) refers not to the original text as much as to the author of that text .

The question of authority (both the authority to speak within a historically circumscribed if not determined situation, and the authority by implication to make accurate statements about a given set of circumstances) is of course an important one in Coetzee's work, as is already evident in Attwell's statement relating to Mrs Curren quoted earlier. On an epistemological level, the authority of the subject who narrates her/story is circumscribed because autobiography cannot but be endless, in that it is impossible for the subject to enclose her life within a narrative: one cannot recount one's own death. In this regard, it might be useful to note Coetzee's statement on the "blindness" of the autobiographer. In what may or may not be a pun , Coetzee distinguishes "autobiography ... from other biography". Not only must autobiography be distinguished from other kinds of biography; on the epistemological level biography is always other biography, or "autobiography", because it is only the history of an other which can be narrative in an apparently closed fashion. Autobiography must always remain quite explicitly open and incomplete. Of course, the autobiography in itself would be quite false, among other reasons because the act of narrating the self already implies a degree of other self, as much as narrating the other is in itself a project to be interrogated in terms of the epistemological boundaries related to the extent to which an other may be known. And autobiography is autobiography precisely because "it is the ear of the other that signs".

Both autobiography and biography as metaphors of life, as narratives and translations of history, may be said to depend on notions of pure, original primacy. History is hypostatized as a univocal, resolvable, recountable, representable, speakable text beyond history itself - a classic in other words. But what is the classic? The term "classic" may here be understood in terms of the original which, however, precisely does not have originary identity, as has been demonstrated. The classic results from the interplay of the translation upon its original as much as of the original upon its translation. The necessity of translation implies the impossibility of the classic, of classical identity. The classic may therefore be read as the object of philosophical desire: the desire for plenitude, fullness, meaning and truth. And translation, in this context, may be read as a problematic of the philosophical project. The philosophical project - the attempt to understand, to interpret, to abstract, to generalize: to control - is subverted by translation as a staging of the loss of control over the classic text. In terms of the insistence on the integrity of the original, Schleiermacher's project may, then, be understood as being properly philosophical in its attempt to reassert control over the text, over the original by - ironically - leaving it in peace. Leaving the original in peace, not controlling it, giving up authority over it, precisely reasserts the integrity of the original, and its authority, as well as the control over it by its author, and thus the identity of that author. In this regard it is, again, not coincidental that Schleiermacher refers to leaving the author in peace.

Practical Part

There are five main rules of translation of irony:

1)Full translation with slight lexical and grammatical transformations
only in cases when the verbal and grammatical structure of the ironical clause of the original texts allows it. Also if the social and cultural associations of the two languages match.

When I left my public school I had an extensive knowledge of Latin and Greek literature, knew a certain amount of Greek and Latin history and French grammar, and had "done" a little mathematics.
Окончив частную гимназию, я неплохо знал античную литературу, имел представление об античной истории и французском языке, а также "прошел " азы математики.

2) An extension of the original ironical clause
is used in those cases when the concept of the ironical word choice is not obvious for the foreign cultural environment. In such cases, a part of the implicated components of the irony is realized into a verbal form with the use of absolute and adverbial participle clauses, extended attributive constructions etc.

Thinking up titles is an art in itself, but we, legions of would-be authors, face another literary crisis: title depletion. Heedless of the future, successful authors the world over keep consuming a precious resource -- book titles -- as if there were no tomorrow, and that puts the rest of us off. And they have creamed off the best. Maybe I would have written The Brothers Karamazov, but some older guy got it first. We're left with odds and ends, like The Second Cousins Karamazov.

Придумывание заглавий -- само по себе искусство, но мы, легионы писателей будущего, сталкиваемся с кризисом жанра: с истощением источника названий. Не заботясь о будущем, писатели во всем мире, уже получившие свое, продолжают эксплуатировать драгоценные ресурсы -- месторождения названий книг, -- как будто будущего вовсе не будет, и тем самым лишают нас последнего. А сами между тем снимают сливки. Я, может, назвал бы свой роман Братья Карамазовы, да какой-то дед уже обошел меня. Вот нам и остаются только отвалы', а не назвать ли мне свою книгу Кузены Карамазовы!

3) Antonymous translation
is a type of translation with the usage of opposite grammatical and lexical meanings. It is used when a direct translation makes the translational structure more complicated due to the differences of grammatical and lexical norms. In this case, the direct translation darkens or totally loses any sense of irony.

When I left my public school I had an extensive knowledge of Latin and Greek literature, knew a certain amount of Greek and Latin history and French grammar, and had "done" a little mathematics.
Окончив частную гимназию, я неплохо знал античную литературу, имел представление об античной истории и французском языке, а также "прошел " азы математики.

4)The addition of conceptual components
is used in cases when it is necessary to maintain the original lexico-grammatical forms in terms of lack of similar or analogue forms in the target language.

To read or not to read? All books can be divided into three groups: books to read, books to re-read, and books not to read at all.
Все книги можно поделить на три группы, снабдив их этикетками: "читать", "перечитать", "не читать".

5) Culturally-situational replacement
is used in cases when the direct reproduction of the irony is impossible because of the difficulties in comprehending of the translating culture. However, the irony still has to take place, for it plus a significant role in the context.

The Ekaterininsky Canal is notorious with its muddy waters among the rivers and canals of St. Petersburg.
Екатерининский
канал
характеризуется
прямо
как
"
грязный
".
При таком раскладе компонентов, конечно, теряется часть исходной информации, но зато сохраняется сам прием иронии как способ характеристики образа.

IV.
Conclusion

In this course work are shown all methods of translation of irony in literature.
Irony is a really grand phenomena, that’s why the conclusion of the translation of irony is a highly constitutive of the theory of translation. The ironical expressions from English and American literature, translated into Russian help our people understand deeply the mentality of the oversea nations. The usage of irony is not restricted on the area of literature. It’s very important aspect in English literature. And on the contradiction of it the irony may appear in different spheres of human life. Therefore, in order not to get caught flat-footed, translator should pay more attention to the study of this aspect of translation theory. Irony poses one of the biggest challenges to the translator of texts of narrative fiction, as it depends on a wide range of factors of different nature: subjective, cognitive, pragmatic and cultural.

In the course work are exposed a deep investigation of areas in which irony is most likely to be used; different materials about the history of irony; different types of irony with interesting examples; all the possible methods of translation of irony; efforts to facilitate the work of future translators. I really hope that my course work will be helpful for the future young translators as a source of comprehensive explanation of the basic methods and ways of translation of ironical clauses from English into Russian.

Anyway, that by now the listener had a really good idea of just what irony is and how it shaped the way we view the world around us. So, the next time you walk up to a friend after you've been out working under a greasy car and getting oil splattered, or have been playing football in the mud with the guys and you come home to your wife and she says, "Well! Aren't you just a handsome sight!" You'll know she just used irony on you.

References

- Albert, Georgia. "Understanding Irony: Three Essais
on Friedrich Schlegel." MLN
108 (1993): 825-848.

- Behler, Ernst. Klassische Ironie, Romantische Ironie, Tragische Ironie
. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972.

- Breazeale, Daniel, Ed. and trans. Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings
. Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1988.

- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On The Constitution of Church and State
. Ed. John Colmer. Princeton: U of Princeton P, 1976. Vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
. 14 vols. to date.

- Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Sämmtliche Werke
. Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1845.

- Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Fateful Question of Culture
. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

- Keats, John. John Keats
. Ed. Elizabeth Cook. The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

- Prickett, Stephen. "Coleridge and the Idea of the Clerisy." Reading Coleridge: Approaches and Applications
. Ed. Walter B. Crawford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 252-273.

- Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

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