Woolf's Narrative Analysis

As the main source of the work production, the real or historical author is an agent, male or female, who is generally responsible for the narrative text as the final product of his/her own creativity. Here in our case, Woolf, as a historical figure who has lived in a period of history, has written To the Lighthouse. Correspondingly, we, as the real reader, read her novel and have our own interpretations that may be completely different from other readers. As for the translation, each of the three translators of Woolf’s novel, as one real reader, has read and decided to translate it into Persian. Therefore, on one extreme of the narrative model, there stands Woolf, as the real female author, and on another extreme, there stand three Persian

In fact, the translator is not a mere ‘imitator’, a ‘reproducer’, or a ‘re-constructor’ who may have wanted to mechanically render one language into another. Rather, he is, or can be, a ‘re-creator’ of the original in the target language, who, as a second writer, can harmonize the original voice with his/her voice to synthesize a third text, having the features of both the original writer and his own self. Pekkanen (2010) designate such a new text as “a duet of the writer and the translator” (p. 1). Moreover, based on such views as Woolf’s, it is just the original writers and narratives that have got their own originality and authenticity, and nothing can be added to this authenticity through its recreation in another language. In the same vein, Schiavi (1996) complains that even such narratologists as Chatman (1978) and Barthes (1970) have not made any distinction between the original and translation when they have chosen their examples from the translated texts into English, or talked about the structures of narrative, because they believe that “a narrative structure is the most universal of structures… and the translation is only the removal, and addition, of a thin, uninfluential linguistic film which has

Interestingly enough, not only this view of translation is dominant in Western culture, but also it seems that there exists still this persistent view among Iranian readership and scholars that a good translation is a translation that can be read ‘fluently’ and ‘smoothly’ and nothing should be done by the translator to distort the integrity of the original text. As far as the literary features of the original are concerned, the translator should strive to translate as faithfully as possible, but insofar as the target language and culture are concerned, the translation is a new text that should be read along with the literary system of the