Translating the Truest Voice: Irony and Unreliable Narrators in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things

Abstract

This investigation is an exploration of translation problems unique to the translation of irony and unreliability in literature, using Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things as a case study and a source text for a translation of relevant excerpts. One of the novel’s themes is the perception and concept of truth, non-fiction and history-writing. The reader is presented with several narrators who are all unreliable in some form. Unreliability in fiction functions as a form of irony, deliberately planted by the implied author. Gray uses humour to achieve his subversion of truth and to explore how easily that subversion goes unquestioned by the reader; his use of irony creates a distance between the reader and the unreliable narrators. Much research has been done into the interrelated concepts of irony and unreliability in literature, but the unique translation problems these well-known literary devices entail are largely undiscussed. This investigation expands on these mostly macro-structural problems and the micro-structural elements on which they are built, before translating and annotating part of Poor Things to explore these translation problems in practice.