A well-known characteristic of Steinbeck’s novels dealing with agricultural labour themes is the harmony between the language and the content. Dialogues, written in dialect and slang, alternate in a masterly way with passages composed in formal English. While this mixture of informal and formal language represents a unique challenge for a skilful translator, it seems to have the least satisfactory
reconstruction in most Slovene publications of Steinbeck’s work. How could we produce a Slovene counterpart with a similarly heterogeneous combination of styles as the authentic text, which Steinbeck achieved by deliberately distorting syntactic rules, using double negatives, sound reductions, numerous interjections, curses, and informal words and phrases? How could we preserve the coarseess of expression in the speech of Steinbeck’s impulsive protagonists without affecting the poetics and the emotional richness of the original? These were some of the dilemmas that emerged during our recent translation of Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men (1937).
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