Yann Apperry’s third novel, Diabolus in musica, is a pastiche of diabolic and gothic tropes that tells of a musical genius who composes a ballade that kills. Resurrections, doppelgangers and triads are reoccurring themes. Although the narrator kills his doppelganger on the first page, the name of this double, Lazarus, haunts the narrative with the threat of resurrection. Similarly, the threefold tritone, the “diabolus in musica,” is not only echoed in the numerical structure of Apperry’s novel but also in the familial triad: the father’s presence is dark and demoniac, provoking the cruel music that the son in turn forces onto the exterior world; the mother is a ghostly distillation of the Eternal Feminine. In terms of comparative readings, Diabolus can be read alongside Suskind’s Perfume as the Bildungsroman of an outsider raised without love who turns astounding genius to homicidal ends. It shares narrative and structural similarities with Mann’s Doctor Faustus: each tells of a prodigy who composes music and a faithful sidekick who composes narrative; each arranges his novel according to number. Nabokov’s influence on Apperry’s work is also significant; many parallels are to be found with his third novel, The Defense.
Approaches to translation diverge according to their foundational conceptions of language: do we create language or does language create us? To conclude the former is to adopt an approach that focuses on the meanings of source texts while to conclude the latter is to focus more on their formal properties. Caught between these differing conceptions, the translator must choose between domestication and foreignization; I favour the latter for literary translation. I define the literary through a reading of the aesthetic in Dauenhauer and Kristeva, and then I review the arguments that Benjamin, Derrida, Berman and Venuti make in favour of word-based translation. From this I conclude that translation can, in refusing to hide its foreign origins, lead readers into the unknown territory of a strange language, author and text, where they become strangers, and where their language and culture become foreign. With this partial translation of Diabolus, I seek to provoke such an encounter with foreignness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/78 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Lane, Sarah Vania |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 1170335 bytes, application/pdf |
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