Poetic effects in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine certain passages of the poetic work of Thomas Gray, attempting an interpretation in the light of the cognitive proposal developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986; 1995) and their principle of relevance, applied to the field of translation by Ernst-August Gutt (1991; 2005). This perspective attempts at accounting for the phenomenon of translation as an example of interpretive resemblance in the interlinguistic exchange between any two languages, an instance of inferential ostensive communication. More specifically, we seek to account for the interpretive resources set in action while the translator, first as a receptor of the original text and then as a communicator of the translated text, puts all the information across —same propositions and resembling contextual implications— purported by the literary texts. Quite important information, in fact, for the reader of poetry is conveyed through the so-called “poetic effects” (Pilkington, 2000).