Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2013
Abstract
The paper is conceived as a translator's note on I. Kadare's novel Doruntine.
The book became inspired by an old Balkan ballad in which the title bears differents variants of the female name (very often dependent on the territory). From a close-up semantic analysis of the possible substitutes of the name, it turns out that all the ʺwomenʺ are related to the Albanian principle called besa.
For translators the word seems very peculiar and it is not a coincidence that the translations of Kadare's novels leave besa in its primary language, Albanian. The essential difficulty is in the fact that the word stands for one of the basic principles of Albanian common law, which target languages totally lack.