The complexity of translating Hemingway’s simplicity: chiastic patterns in The Sun Also Rises

Abstract

In two articles published in the North Dakota Quarterly in two consecutive years, Max Nänny (1997, 1998) analyses what he calls “chiastic patterns” of repetition and their narrative functions, in a number of short stories written by Hemingway. Nänny observes that there is some kind of parallelism between the use of chiastic patterning on the sub-narrative level of syntax and cohesion and the tendency to use a similar scheme at the level of the narrative, and he distinguishes the following functions, which he illustrates with passages taken from Ernest Hemingway‟s short stories: 1) back and forth movement, 2) opposition, symmetry, and balance, 3) framing, 4) centering. There is a number of very obvious instances of chiastic repetition throughout The Sun Also Rises which undoubtedly have an iconic function of centering. The current paper analyses three instances of chiastic patterns in this novel and compares them to the corresponding passages in the Spanish translations of The Sun Also Rises published in Spain to date: Guarnido-Hausner (1944), Solá (1979), Adsuar (1983), Martínez-Lage (2002), and Adsuar-Hamad (2003).