The Punning Muse

One method much-practised by the Oulipo is ‘homophonic translation’: taking the sounds of one language and trying to recreate them in another. Thus Keats’s ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ becomes in French ‘Ah, singe débotté, hisse un jouet fort et vert’ [‘Oh, unshod monkey, raise a stout green toy’]. But this type of extended punning has also always had a crucial role in psychoanalytic interpretation, and in this chapter we find members of the Oulipo framing their exercises in homophonic translation as spoof scholarship, thereby sending up reductive or overzealous reading in both psychoanalysis and literary criticism. The chapter also introduces two of the Oulipo’s acknowledged precursors: the poet Raymond Roussel, and the quack etymologist J.-P. Brisset, who believed that phonetic similarity was never merely coincidental (thus, if grammar sounds like grandma, then this tells us something about grammars, grandmas, and the world at large).

Doubletalking the homophonic sublime: Comedy, appropriation, and the sounds of one hand clapping

Homophonic translations create poems that foreground the sound of the original more than the lexical meaning. I begin by discussing the concept of "sound writing," referencing Haroldo de Campos's concept of "transcration," Pound's "transduction," and the concept behind calques. I then consider my homophonic translation of Finnish poet Leevi Lehto follows and Ulises Carrión's isophonic translation. After noting Basil Bunting idea that meaning is carried by sound more than lexical content, I discuss Khelbnikov's approach to zaum (transense), and soundalike works based on bird song and animal sounds. The essay then takes up several specific examples: David Melnick's homophonic translation of Homer, Pierre Joris's voice recognition translation of Magenetic Fields, and Jean Donneley's version of Ponge. The essay concludes with a discussion of Caroline Bergvall's Drift, her version of "The Seafarer" as well as her Chaucer transcreations. A central part of the essay references "homophonic" translation in popular culture, in particular the "doubletalking" of Sid Caesar," the most popular TV comedian of the early 1950s. A discussion of his work in the context of American Jewish comedy is central to the lecture. But other more recent popular example of the homophonic are discussed with special reference to cultural appropriation.

Linguistic Means of Expressing Humour in the Music Parodies by the Galician Project “Páramo Pictures”

The purpose of this article is to analyze the linguistic means of expressing the retranca – the subtle humour which is considered to be typical of the Galicians – in the music parodies by the project “Páramo Pictures”, whose video clips have become rather famous in the region during the last five years.The study method we apply is based on the linguo-stylistic, cultural and semiotic analysis of the audiovisual text.The songs, which “Páramo Pictures” choose to parody, are usually recent hits that have well-known video clips: “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi, “Súbeme la radio” by Enrique Iglesias, “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Syrus, etc. They film new videos trying to reproduce the elements of the original plot, but adapting both the lyrics and the scenery to rural Galicia.The success of the project can be explained by the perfect use of all the elements of the audiovisual text, stereotypes about rural Galicia, and – in terms of linguistics – of the wordplay and the homophonic translation, all of which shows the effective interaction of the analogy and the contrast, two essential components of the genre of the parody.

Homophonic Translation as Humpty-Dumpty’s Choice

The article considers mechanisms of sense formation in the course of receptive speech activity and deformation of the source text meaning as a result of intentional receptive distortion in the course of auditory perception. Homophonic translation termed soramimi is discussed as a product of audial perception, as a carnivalized text and as a result of an interpretative strategy of cognitive dissonance alignment. We hereby address the auditory modality from the viewpoint of its inherent potential for misinterpretation, both intentional and unintentional. The perceptional phenomena are viewed through addressee’s strategies of realizing the semantic potential of the target text across several languages.

The semiotics of phonetic translation

This article is devoted to translations of poetry that are not equivalent to the original on the lexical level, but attempt to reproduce the sound, rhythm and syntax of the source text. The Russian formalist Yuri Tynianov was presumably the first scholar to discover this phenomenon, which was later referred to as “phonetic facsimile” (George Steiner) and “homophonic translation” (Lawrence Venuti). The present discussion of the linguistic, semiotic and cultural aspects of (homo)phonetic translation is exemplified by translations made by Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

WOMEN SCORNED: A NEW STICHOMETRIC ALLUSION IN THE AENEID

Intense scrutiny can raise chimaeras, and Virgil is the most scrutinized of Roman poets, but he may have engineered coincidences in line number (‘stichometric allusions’) between certain of his verses and their Greek models. A handful of potential examples have now accumulated. Scholars have detected Virgilian citations of Homer, Callimachus and Aratus in this manner, as well as intratextual allusions by both Virgil and Ovid, and references to Virgil's works by later Roman poets using the same technique. (For present purposes I disregard the separate, though related, phenomenon of corresponding numbers of lines in parallel passages: G. Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer (Göttingen, 1964) suggests several examples of such correspondences between Homer and Virgil, especially in speeches. Another purely formal mode of allusion faintly present in Roman poetry is homophonic translation (the technique which Louis Zukofsky's 1969 translations of Catullus pursue in extenso); thus Virgil's fagus, beech, corresponds with Theocritus' phagos, oak.) If genuine, the phenomenon lacks any consistent method or regular pattern (and the degree of plausibility varies); if genuine, it is very rare, even if accidents in textual transmission could have obscured some examples; if genuine, it probably originated in the Hellenistic period, although such a case has yet to be made. Virgil presently seems the earliest and most copious practitioner of stichometric allusion. A previously undetected example in the Aeneid is proposed below.