Translating Old Negatives by Alasdair Gray. Rendering a poetics of “absences an reverses”

Abstract - The most noticeable feature of Alasdair Gray’s first collection of poems is the predominance of loss, absence, and void in all its manifestations. The absence is mostly of love and the beloved ones, either dead or gone, but also of meaning, of God, of light and warmth. So, my translation of Old Negatives focused primarily on the analysis of this poetics of what he himself calls “absences and reverses”, accounting for the linguistic phenomena of negation. This article concentrates on the translation strategies, as well as the actual solutions, adopted in order to preserve the “un-factor” which permeates Gray’s entire poetic production. The translation strategies employed range from the linguistic and etymological study of Italian negative prefixes or periphrases to the creation of neologisms. The purpose is to achieve what Zdanys (1982) called “affective equivalents”, namely a type of objective correlative which can capture as many of the cognitive implications of the original as possible.