Translating Experimental Literature

Experimental literary works enable fertile translation discussions due to their rich and observable stylistic peculiarities. Such works provide rich material to revisit the relation between the concepts of style and visibility in translation. As an experimental novel Burroughs’ The Soft Machine written in the “cut-up” technique forces the translator to face new challenges and outstandingly exhibits a potential for the discussions concerning the style and visibility of the translator. The present study aims to find out how and to what extend the stylistic differentiation of the target and the source texts contributes to the visibility of the translator. Though the visibility issue has long been discussed by the translators and translation scholars what makes this piece interesting is that probably for the first time the visibility issue is discussed within the general framework of experimental literature. The findings of the study suggest that in the context of the translation of experimental literature the correlation between the translation strategies adopted by the translator and the resulting visibility of the translator may fall short of the conventional expectations.