D.H. Lawrence’s Poetic Prose and Translation

The paper highlights on the difficulties encountered during the translation of the poetic language used by D.H. Lawrence in his major novels. The brief theoretical introduction on specific aspects of translation has in view the literary text, in general, and the poetic prose, in particular. This introduction is followed by a detailed linguistic analysis of our own translation variants of several representative passages of Lawrence’s novels: The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The lexical analysis points out towards various language peculiarities that characterize this modernist writer’s work: his creation of new words through derivation (e.g. abstract words derived by means of the affixation of adjectives and adverbs), his modifications of the topic of comparisons, or his building-up of interesting compounds. D.H. Lawrence proves a masterful language innovator in English as far as his use of the lexical means is concerned: he does this in a most natural manner, thus succeeding to create unique phrases in English. On the one hand, this study is focused on revealing Lawrence’s complex figurative language repertoire; on the other, it refers to the various stylistic effects which he manages to create though his language innovations. At the same time, our contrastive analysis underlines, through translation, some of the lexical structural shortcomings of the Romanian language such as the reduced flexibility of the Romanian nominal phrase as compared to its English equivalent. We come to the conclusion that Romanian doesn’t allow much for the extension of the nominal group, not as much as English does in this respect. The minute contrastive linguistic analysis of specific descriptive passages selected from Lawrence’s novels – for the sake of their lexical novelty and of their great capacity of evoking a whole range of emotions – often proves that the process of interpretation and translation can be risky yet challenging at the same time.