Imageries of Horror in Literary Translation: The Turkish Translations of Clive Barker's The Books of Blood Volume I

Abstract

Horror fiction occupies a significant place in Western literature, although it is not historically canonical. It has maintained its popularity since the emergence of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. With relatively fewer examples of horror fiction in Turkish, Turkish readers have been exposed to horror largely through translated works. Since the emotion of horror is central to the horror genre, transferring this emotion to the target text is crucial. Imagery as a literary device is a major contributor to the emotion of horror, termed “art horror” (Carroll, 1990). This study aims to analyze the use of imagery in both source and target texts and to provide a descriptive analysis of the target texts, based on the translation strategies employed by the translators. Within this scope, the present study compares Clive Barker’s The Books of Blood Volume I and its two Turkish translations. Ultimately, as a result of the analysis, it is found that particular translation strategies serve the purpose of re-creating ST art horror imagery in varying degrees and it is reasonable to evaluate those strategies in terms of their applicability in the reproduction of the source text art horror by prioritizing image representation over text representation.