VERSATILE SUBTEXT BY ROALD DAHL: INTERPRETATION AND TRANSLATION

Abstract

The subtext of an artistic text is one of the most important factors responsible for the emotionality, expressiveness and uniqueness of a literary work. The phenomenon of implicitness is quite a hard subject to research due to its nature, because this plane of a literary work is carefully hidden "between the lines". Subtext can be deliberately created by the writer, although in most cases, it is an inseparable product of supreme artistic writing: a "highquality" literary work always has certain depth that "draws" the reader into the space of emotions and sensations, provokes thinking and the impulse to search for new meanings of the text. Since the phenomenon of subtext is multifaceted and heterogeneous, for the convenience of its study, one could distinguish different types of implicit meanings, both by the creation method and by the mechanism of influence on the reader. Roald Dahl’s works are a unique phenomenon, which is an "encyclopedia" of different kinds of subtext, frequently coexisting within the same text. Thus, they make an ideal object for researching the mechanisms of implicit meaning creation, as well as its influence on the reader’s perception of the text. The subtext is particularly pronounced in the writer’s «wartime» stories, where the expressiveness of implicit meanings works to reveal the theme of «war and man». Also the study of subtextual mechanisms is much more effective in this case, because the so-called «semantic vectors» of the hidden plane of the literary work manifest themselves more clearly. In particular, it is possible to distinguish the following types of subtext: emotional or suggestive, philosophical-ethical subtext («leitmotif»). A complex set of artistic means builds up the hidden meaning of a literary work, where some elements function to create a specific subtext, others are part of a semantic vectors system aimed at revealing various hidden meanings. Regardless of the type of subtext, there is a number of stylistic techniques which most frequently create the implicitness of the artistic text: repetitions, artistic details, associative networks, the title and the ending, «visions». Deeper insight into the mechanisms of subtext creation and functioning will significantly improve the adequacy and accuracy of the literary work translation.