Semiotics of Translation in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”“There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind youOr your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Strating from Van den Broeck’s and Lefevere’s (1979: 61-66) laws of translatability (in to determine the degree of translatability of a text), a novel should be a quite easily translatable text, as “the larger the unit of translation, the larger the translatability would be, and vice versa.” But this is a valid statement only when referring to the first law because, on the other hand in the latter five laws an enormous importance is given to “the degree of contact between the source language and target language”, implying that “the source language and target language are on an equal cultural level of development”, and, most importantly, “translatability can be influenced by the expression possibilities of the target language. No two languages are similar. During the translation process some cultural coloring and nuances will be lost, but could also be gained due to the vocabulary and lexical diversity of the target text.”

However, these laws imply a certain loss in meaning when institutions, specific environment and culture are described. This is, somewhat, the case of “One flew….”, as both Nurse Ratched’s mental institution(who "dreams . . . [of] a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable and all the patients who aren’t Outside, obedient under her beam, are wheelchair Chronics with catheter tubes run direct from every pantleg to the sewer under the floor.”) and the cultural influences(the myth of the Fisher King, the Indian legend of the Red-Headed Stranger and so on so forth) that appear in the text are essentially different from those that appear in Romanian culture. Under these conditions, it is quite difficult for the translator to use a translation theory that meets the requirements of the discourse and its function. Generally speaking, the "weight" (connotations, denotations, familiarity) of cultural elements in the source text in order to translate them into the target text and bring about the same effect as in the source text is impossible, because it involves the problem of subjectivity.

Nonetheless, from the semiotics of translation’s point of view, the text is taken as a sign and thus is anything that can be interpreted, and must be physically and mentally perceptible, language being only one of many systems of signs (Winner 1978: 337). The semiotic aspects of a discourse such as Kesey’s text should be incorporated in order to make cultural transfer possible. In other words, not merely the random substitution of one image or symbol with another in the target language, but the use of symbols in the target language which will create the same effect and have the same impact and meaning on the target receivers as they had on the source receivers. – aspectul semantic *

2 points of view in semiotics, de Saussure vs. Peirce, Pierce’s point of view being more suitable for the given text.   It has been argued, however, that Peirce’s triadic model of the sign consists of the following: (1) the representamen (the form which the sign takes), (2) the interpretant (the

sense made of the sign), and (3) the object (to which the sign refers). The way these three are distorted when speaking of: -the title, translated in Romanian erroneously as "One flight over the cuckoo's nest", changes the whole perspective on Kesey's novel; the central character ceases to be R.P.M, but almost anyone/anything, as the subject of the action(flying) isn't mentioned. On the other hand, if translated correctly, the title would have suggested an individuality, someone capable of seeing and understanding what happened in the cuckoo's nest, its clockwise personnel and the Wasteland behind it.Critics have often compared Kesey’s novel (the Hinterland it offers to the attentive reader) to T.S.Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”. Moreover, an analogy can be made between "One flight over…."(Romanian title) and the Phoenician Sailor(“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,  Had a bad cold, nevertheless  Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,  45 With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,  Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor[…]Fear death by water.”)from T.S.Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" on one hand, and, on the other hand, the original title and The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) that is usually associated, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself. While the Phoenician Sailor epitomizes a whole range of characters that are somehow similar, the character of the poem, The Fisher King in search of the Holy Grail, represents individuality but, nevertheless, a possible Phoenician Sailor himself. -nurse Ratched – Difficulties and impasses in literary interpretation can often be traced back to erroneous generic classification. This would seem to apply in the case of the critical commonplace that fully realized “three-dimensional” female characters in American fiction written by men are few and far in between, while it abounds in women who are vicious, domineering and emasculating. Archetypal critics such as Leslie Fiedler have long contended that this shortcoming is due to the nature of the basic American mythos underlying American Fiction – “the old, old fable of the White outcast and the noble Red Man joined together against home and mother, against the female world of civilization”. According to Fiedler, the Castrating Female is an American archetype, hypostatized by Big Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s novel. She works by intimidation, coercion, electro-shock treatment and the lobotomizing scalpel, not only against Indians, but against males as well. Critics who saw Big Nurse as a realistic character had the similar task of proving that she is a vehicle of a calumnious attack on women by an openly misogynist author, expressing male fear turned aggression of the Eisenhower era.[1]. There were, however, others that proposed that the work is an Oedipal “family romance”(Bad Mother=Big Nurse, Good Father=Randal Patrick McMurphy; Sons=mental patients) or an adventure(RPM=quest hero, BNR=dragon) or even a comedy(BNR as a typical comic villain”). However, it has been argued that the central myth depicted in the novel is that of the Fisher King…

All in all, the fact is that any perception of the text is conditioned by previous memories of similar events or affects, or, metaphorically said, “the memory of one’s experience is a cage in which his new perceptions are prisoners.” Thus, both memory and experience play a key-role when translating a book. The act of translation itself is, undoubtedly, a form of subjective culture and, nonetheless, a form of transmission from the emitter (author) to the recipient(reader) intermediated by another reader, that is the translator. Moreover, it seems that the text the ultimate foreign reader receives is just a

“reproduction”(synonymously to the term used in art)of the original text, a vision of it throughout the translator’s subjective culture, that is, less euphemistically said, a distortion of the genuine version.

***According to Northrop Frye, a text has three levels of interpretation: semantic, verbal and syntactic. The process of translation implies and affects all the three levels mentioned above:-for the semantic level, the Big Nurse Ratched case when the translator might not know or understand all that has been said related to the Castrating Female Archetype. Only in deep understanding of a text, may the subtle allusions of it get to the second rang reader;-for the verbal level, i.e. the words the text is made from, there is a discussion related to the topic of the words in a phrase, that can be poetically-reductive, let’s say, for languages that do not have the same origin(English as a Germanic language and Romanian as a Neolatin one). -for the syntactic level, that is the logical relations between the phrases the text is made of, there would be a discussion about the sequence of tenses and the restricted palette of tenses usable in Romanian, that cuts off all subtleness in character’s actions.

Links:http://ilze.org/semio/017.htm