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The work is divided into five chapters, the first one providing a brief biography of Jerome Klapka Jerome, information on the reception of the novel in the English and Ukrainian literary milieus. One of its subchapters also presents the word ‘humour’ and what it means, describes the traits of humour of the Victorian era, and lists humour devices following Alison Ross’s (1998) division. Chapter two attempts to define the principal humour device in Three Men in a Boat – irony.
Methods of transferring linguistic humor in J.K. Jerome’s novel "Three men in a boat ..." translated by Y. Lisnyak
Table of Contents
The present research is devoted to the study of humour devices in Jerome Klapka Jerome’s humorous novel Three Men in a Boat, first published in 1889, and its Ukrainian rendering by Y. Lisnyak.
The aim of the work is to analyse methods of transferring linguistic humor in J.K. Jerome’s novel "Three men in a boat ..." translated by Y. Lisnyak.
The tasks of the given research are:
- to overview the biography of J.K. Jerome and his main works;
- to overview the meaning of “humour”;
- to analyse humour devices in Jerome Klapka Jerome’s humorous novel Three Men in a Boat;
- to find out methods of transferring linguistic humor in J.K. Jerome’s novel "Three men in a boat ..." translated by Y. Lisnyak.
The work is divided into five chapters, the first one providing a brief biography of Jerome Klapka Jerome, information on the reception of the novel in the English and Ukrainian literary milieus. One of its subchapters also presents the word ‘humour’ and what it means, describes the traits of humour of the Victorian era, and lists humour devices following Alison Ross’s (1998) division. Chapter two attempts to define the principal humour device in Three Men in a Boat – irony. It focuses on types of irony and the techniques used to establish it, illustrating the study with examples from the novel. Chapter three discusses metaphorical language (including metaphors, similes and personification) and its contribution to the humorous tone of the novel. It also deals with idioms which Peter Newmark (1988) classifies as stock metaphors. In chapter four the study concentrates on register as a humour device, especially on the inappropriate usage of formal register and juxtaposition of different registers. Finally, chapter five concerns the pragmatics-based device of breaking the cooperative principle, which leads to misunderstanding or misinterpretation, and the phenomenon of ambiguity and a closely related device of wordplay. The four chapters on humour expedients also include the study and comparison of the Ukrainian rendering as well as discussions on how difficult the task of translating humour is, what the main problems of translating the individual devices are and what translation procedures can be employed. In conclusion the findings pertaining to the translation habits of the translator are summarised.
Even though Jerome Klapka Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat was and still is popular in many countries, very little has been written about his style and humour, let alone the translations of his works.
Jerome Klapka Jerome, best known as the author of a comic masterpiece Three Men in a Boat, was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2 May 1859 into a highly-religious family. His father, Jerome Clapp Jerome, worked as a non-conformist preacher and was interested in the local coal and iron industries. One of his coal-mining ventures proved to be a disaster and brought the family to financial ruin. He was forced to move the family to Stourbridge and subsequently to Poplar in the East End of London where Jerome spent his childhood in relative poverty.
At the age of fourteen Jerome left school to join various professions – a clerk on the London and North Western Railway, an actor touring the country with a stage company, a journalist, a schoolmaster and a solicitor’s clerk. In his spare time he was writing short stories, essays and satires which would be rejected for a long time. Then, Jerome had the idea of writing about his experiences as an actor which resulted in his work On the Stage – and Off, a volume of humorous sketches published in 1885. This was followed by a collection of humorous essays The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886).
In 1888 Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris (called Ettie) and acquired a daughter – Elsie – by this marriage. His own daughter Rowena was born in 1898. After the newly-weds’ honeymoon, spent on the Thames, Jerome began writing Three Men in a Boat. The book was published in 1889 and made him famous and rich and enabled him to make the acquaintance of great writers including H. G. Wells, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. From then on numerous literary works came to being, among them the novels The Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891), Three Men on the Bummel (1900, the sequel to the Boat), Paul Kelver (1902), a popular morality play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), and many more. He also excelled as the editor (of a monthly magazine The Idler and a weekly To-Day) and as the prolific columnist.
Jerome travelled a lot to Russia, America and especially Germany where he gave various lectures. He was fond of Germany, which prompted him to move his family to Dresden in 1900 where they stayed for two years. When the First World War broke out, he enlisted in the French army as a front line ambulance driver. He returned home disillusioned and a broken man. Towards the end of his life he finished his memoirs My Life and Times (1926) which, though short on domestic details and lacking chronological order, is one of Jerome’s most entertaining books.
On the way back from a motoring tour in Devon with his wife Ettie, Jerome suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died two weeks later (14 June 1927) in Northampton General Hospital. He and Ettie, who outlived him by eleven years, were buried in the Ewelme churchyard, Oxfordshire, close to their beloved River Thames (Nicholas 7 – 10).
Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat could be characterised as a comic pastoral celebrating simple life devoid of luxury, false friends and high society vices. Apart from comic events and situations the three characters experience, it contains lyrical descriptions of nature and philosophical reflections comparing the trip up and down the Thames to the voyage up and down the river of Life. In some parts of the novel social criticism comes to the fore, frowning upon greed and excessive accumulation of possession (Stříbrný 564).
Jerome Klapka Jerome claimed that all the events recorded in his novel Three Men in a Boat really happened, they were only a little embellished. Even the characters appearing in the novel were based on real people – Jerome’s friends with whom he made a considerable number of rows up and down the Thames and a cycling trip across Europe. George Wingrave (George in the novel) worked as a bank clerk and he shared a room with Jerome for some time. Carl Hentschel (Harris) was born in Poland and came to England with his parents at the age of five. He set up his own photography business and co-founded The Playgoer’s Club, on which occasion he met Jerome.
Jerome’s excellent essays The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) had been serialised in the monthly magazine Home Chimes, edited by F. W. Robinson. And it was Robinson himself who accepted Jerome’s next project called The Story of the Thames. At first the book was not intended to be funny; it should have described the river’s scenery and historical events that had taken place near the Thames, and it should have been interspersed with occasional humorous passages. However, it came quite the other way round – it became a humorous novel with occasional passages dealing with the river’s scenery and history. Robinson readily removed some of those ‘serious’ passages and insisted that Jerome made up a better title. Three Men in a Boat seemed to be the most appropriate one.
The book was published in 1889 by J. W. Arrowsmith and it quickly made Jerome’s name, the copies being big sellers. It was extremely successful not only in Britain, but also in the USA, Germany and Russia, and translated into many languages, including Japanese, Hebrew, Irish and Portuguese. The novel has been filmed three times (1920, 1933, 1956), adapted into a musical by Hubert Gregg, made into a stage play, read aloud on radio and even performed in a one-man show.
The style of the novel Three Men in a Boat was completely new and fresh. Unlike other Victorian writers – such as Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling – whose stories captured fantastical adventures and fearless heroes, Jerome’s novel portrayed three ordinary pipe-smoking men having fun on an ordinary boating trip. He used everyday language and mocked the matters of everyday life. Of course, fervent critics (especially from The Saturday Review and Puch) soon took Jerome to task. He was criticised for the new kind of humour and accused of ‘vulgarity’, using colloquial clerk’s English. The extraordinary commercial success, however, suggested that the general readership was not influenced by this sharp criticism and that people wanted to take a rest from literary grandiloquence and solemnity and to spend their spare time with a book that made them laugh (Nicholas 57 – 61).
Despite the general interest in Jerome’s works, his writings are not very highly thought of in the official English literary history. The Ukrainian readership, however, received the novel enthusiastically.
As this thesis focuses on the study of translation of humour, I would like to provide a brief explanation of the term ‘humour’ and to mention some of its expedients.
The meaning of the word ‘humour’ was originally far from what it means today. The term derived from Latin humor, meaning ‘moisture’ or ‘body fluid’, and in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance period it was used to denote the four humours of the body – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (proposed by Hippocrates) – which determined a person’s mental disposition, character and temperament. The theory of humours survives up to this day in such expressions as ‘ill-humoured’, ‘good-humoured’, ‘yellow with jealousy’, etc. In the sixteenth century the theory of humours is employed in drama for the first time when Ben Jonson names the characters in his comedy Every Man in His Humour (1598) in terms of their prevailing bodily fluids (Cuddon 313 – 4). It is not until the seventeenth century that ‘humour’ is used to refer to the comic and ridiculous. In the eighteen century the word gradually got in all the European languages, differentiating the positive, kind and comforting comicality from caricature and satire (Vlašín 141).
The humour of the Victorian era, in which Jerome Klapka Jerome created his literary works, can be described as domesticated, which means that it “settles down to chuckling over the mores of an approved social order or the harmless oddities of stock figures and types: policemen, clergymen, urchins, schoolchildren, tramps, drunks, professors, artists, eccentrics” (McArthur 488). This is exactly what Jerome does in his Three Men in a Boat. He comments on social issues, such as poverty, superabundance of wealth, criminality; kindly mocks various types of characters, among them villagers, fishermen, railway employees, boasters, oversensitive ladies; and last but not least makes fun of the three main characters themselves. The humour of this kind can be also found in the nineteenth-century magazine Punch, “a representative of the affluent middle class smirking indulgently at its own foibles, at its own establishment and its servants, at the oddities of the poor, and at the strange ways of foreigners” (McArthur 488).
What is important for the creation and reception of humour in general is the social context – humour outdates very quickly and is often dependent on specific cultures and attitudes. Humour is also a matter of personal taste as it is likely that two people will perceive a joke very differently (Ross 2 – 4). While the study of creation and perception of humour in social terms would be very complex and would differ from society to society, the study of language features that contribute to humour is far less demanding as the features are almost the same across languages and are relatively easy to detect. Humour can be elicited by structural ambiguity on phonological (homophones), morphological (compound words), lexical (polysemy) and syntactical (ambiguous sentence structures) level; or by incongruity in language. Incongruity theory “focuses on the element of surprise. It states that humour is created out of a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke” (Ross 7). Incongruity can appear in the fields of semantics (metaphors, contradictions, verbal irony), pragmatics (breaking of cooperative principle, misunderstanding), discourse (breaking the expectations) and register (using inappropriate register) (Ross 7 – 51). In Three Men in a Boat the most significant of these devices of humour are those of irony, metaphors and similes, register, and lexical and syntactical ambiguity. And these particular devices and their translations into Ukrainian are studied in the present thesis.
Irony plays a vital, if not leading, role in Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and represents an element that contributes most to the overall humorous tone of the novel. Jerome employs irony mainly to observe and criticise human weaknesses, such as laziness, lying or drinking, to express his or his companions’ attitudes (e.g. to work or food) and to complain about the “natural cussedness of things in general” (Jerome, 100).
This linguistic device is very difficult to define and even more difficult to recognise and evaluate. Martin Montgomery presents irony as the non-literal use of language “in which we say one thing but mean another” and which “is also often thought of as a type of tone, a particular way of speaking or writing” (138). Marta Mateo, on the other hand, thinks that this definition (adopted by most critics) is not sufficient and does not cover the complex techniques that are used to create irony. At the same time she admits that there is no universal set of linguistic features that could help identify irony and proposes that irony depends on context “since it springs from the relationships of a word, expression or action with the whole text or situation” (172).
Irony is a matter of interpretation and can be easily misunderstood as it works at two levels: a lower level – the situation as it is deceptively presented by the ironist – and an upper level – the situation as it appears to the observer or the ironist. There must be the element of opposition (contradiction, incongruity) between the two levels and they both must be presented as true. Another element that contributes to irony is the element of ‘innocence’ which refers to the victim’s unawareness of the upper level or the ironist’s pretending not to be aware of it. Irony is not employed to deceive the reader/hearer but to be recognized. The reader/hearer is supposed to realise that a proposition has a different – real – meaning from what is being proposed (Mateo 172). The ability to spot irony depends mostly on the awareness of how the language is used, on values shared by the ironist and the victim and on general world knowledge.
Montgomery (138 – 9) classifies irony into two main types: verbal (corresponds with Mateo’s intentional irony) and situational (Mateo’s unintentional irony). Verbal irony is being communicated and occurs when a combination of words and its literal meaning seem to be somehow odd or wrong. In order to understand the irony one has to – with the help of context and the world knowledge – find another (real) meaning. Situational irony exists already in the situation. It is created by an author, but the characters involved are not aware of it.
Jerome Klapka Jerome uses both verbal and situational irony in his novel. Several examples of verbal irony appear already in the subheadings that introduce each chapter. As Markéta Zemanová correctly points out in her diploma thesis, the irony can be traced back only after reading the whole chapters (22). Thus we can find out that bathing in rough sea, in windy weather is referred to as “Delights of early morning bathing” (Jerome 23). An accident in which J., after decrying his decision to have a bath in the cold water, unwillingly falls in the river is described as “Heroism and determination on the part of J.” (Jerome 100), and the three friend’s conversation concerning various diseases presented as “The cheery chat goes round” (Jerome 181). In all these examples the element of opposition or contradiction is clearly apparent – the author renders unpleasant feelings as delights, cowardice as heroism and chatting about diseases as a pleasant chat.
Verbal irony can be also found in large numbers in the narration itself. In the following example, in which Jerome talks about his fellow student’s rather odd health, one can see how the author works with contradiction (underlined):
He would take bronchitis in the dog-days, and have hay-fever at Christmas. After a six-weeks’ period of drought, he would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a November fog and come home with a sunstroke. (Jerome 53)
It is not common to catch bronchitis in summer time or hay-fever in winter time and it is highly improbable that one can suffer rheumatic fever when the weather is dry and sunstroke when it is foggy.
Here is another extract in which verbal irony can be traced. The character of J. describes his encounter with the owner of the material he made his raft from without permission:
His anxiety to meet you, however, is proof against all your coolness, and the energetic manner in which he dodges up and down the pond so as to be on the spot to greet you when you land is really quite flattering. (Jerome 152)
Here the underlined words are used inappropriately and are in opposition to the real situation that is most likely in progress – the owner is very angry (“his anxiety to meet you”) which means that he probably won’t greet the thief and the encounter won’t be flattering in any way.
Montgomery mentions two main techniques that are used to create irony: overemphasis and internal inconsistency (140). When an author employs overemphatic language, he uses words that have “the effect of overemphasizing what is being said, and so drawing attention to it. What makes them excessive is that their presence needs to be explained; we can account for their presence as a clue to the reader that what they are saying is not plausible (hence it needs excessive emphasis)” (140). I selected two examples from the novel in which overemphatic language (underlined) is apparently used to express the narrator’s ironic attitude:
It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me; my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do. (Jerome 148 – 9)
It was my misfortune once to go for a water picnic with two ladies of this kind. We did have a lively time! (Jerome 62)
When a statement does not make sense or the style of a narration is not consistent (e. g. unexpected changes in register), it is a case of internal inconsistency which is the second type of mechanism for creating irony (Montgomery 140). Jerome frequently switches suddenly from one register to another or from commonplace to poetic, refined language as in this example:
And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods, and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night. We seemed like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset.
We did not go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three old men were fishing. (Jerome 121 – 2)
In the first part of the extract, Jerome employs poetic repertoire and language including several poetic devices – vivid imagery (e. g. ‘mystic light’, ‘deep enchantment’, ‘ecstatic hope’, ‘rainbow shadows’), a simile (‘like knights of some old legend’) and personification (‘the gloaming . . . wrapping the world’, ‘crept the night’). In the following paragraph, the author all of a sudden switches to ordinary language (underlined), describing the collision with the boat. Thus, he produces a comic and ironic effect related to the characters’ absentmindedness.
Muecke (in Mateo 173) distinguishes three types of irony that are characteristic of novels: impersonal irony, in which the ironist as a person is in the background and the irony lies solely in his words; self-disparaging irony, in which the ironist presents his qualities, such as ignorance or naivety; and ingénu irony, in which the ironist uses a character (an ingénu) for his irony.
There are several techniques for creating impersonal irony. In Jerome’s novel the most frequent is that of innuendo, i.e. an indirect remark about something or somebody:
There is an iron “scold’s bridle” in Walton Church. They used these things in ancient days for curbing women’s tongues. They have given up the attempt now. I suppose iron was getting scarce, and nothing else would be strong enough. (Jerome 78)
He said it, The Pride of the Thames, had been in use, just as it now stood (or rather as it now hung together), for the last forty years . . . (Jerome 183)
The first example alludes to some women’s cantankerousness and garrulousness, the second one to the miserable state of a boat called The Pride of the Thames.
Other techniques include overstatement (dealt with above as overemphasis) and understatement as in this extract:
And at that precise moment the man did it, and the boat rushed up the bank with a noise like the ripping up of forty thousand linen sheets. Two men, a hamper, and three oars immediately left the boat on the larboard side, and reclined on the bank, and one and a half moments afterwards, two other men disembarked from the starboard, and sat down among boat-hooks and sails and carpet-bags and bottles. The last man went on twenty yards further, and then got out on his head. (Jerome 85)
The author here describes an accident when a boat hits the river bank and the passengers fall out of the boat in different directions. He makes use of words (underlined) that do not match the situation and thus disparages it.
Pretended innocence or ignorance also ranks among the impersonal irony techniques that occur frequently in Jerome’s novel. The following example again concerns J.’s encounter with the proprietor of the material which J. made his raft from. The irony here is based on the double meaning of the expression ‘to teach somebody to do something’. The character pretends not to recognise the threat and interprets it falsely as a mere offer made by the proprietor to teach him something new: