LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, CULTURE – TRANSLATABILITY AND DEPENDENCY

Abstract

Starting from the sphere of concepts including identity, language and culture, the paper examines the works written by three contemporary Croatian writers, Dubravka Ugrešić, Mirko Kovač and Miljenko Jergović, from the aspect of translatability (and the “task of the translator”) with particular regard to the connection between the constitution of partial or even complete binding of identity or culture through languag, and the issue of translatability. In the cases where general questions of personal identity are not directly and explicitly thematized, there the bearers of identity are hidden in the context of culture and language. Naturally, these kind of texts are the more impossible to translate the less the identity bearing elements of the source language are present in the culture of the target language. In the case of texts which are built on fabulation, and at the same time strongly shift towards cultural “paranomasia”, the more the translator is at home in the source language culture the more he faces (or can face) the possibility of taking in/understanding the outer/strange world, yet also with the impossibility of translating this experience into words of another language.