Probing the dramatic monologue mould of Robert Browning (1812-1899) has maintained a long tradition of portraying this poet as an experimenter and pursuer of the Victorian representation de-norming process. Browning’s narrative verse employs ambiguation through syntactic rendition of his dramatic personae who voice their minds beyond the restraints of dialogic turn-taking and divulge their impulses through verbal dominance. Browning’s bicentenary seems a most auspicious moment to creatively explore the tenacity of his discordant narrative vein in literary translation. Browning’s fixation on engendering a poetic form that would fully sustain the self-projecting techniques of his protagonists resulted in the employment of narrative verse whose dialogic nature is undermined and embedded in his creations’ monologues. The poet utilizes innuendoes which originate not only from the pool of poetic references but also from the syntactic realizations disclosing a disparity between the speakers’ intentions and their verbal acts. Their interlocutors are being gradually drawn into a puzzling locutionary display. ...

Literary texts display many linguistic peculiarities, as well as social and cultural aspects of our lives and, thus, we can assert that literary translation is one of the main ways of communication across cultures. Translating literary texts, however, is not an easy task, since it certainly poses many problems for the translator. One of the problems a translator can face arises from the fact that some words or phrases denoting objects, facts, phenomena, etc… are so deeply rooted in their source culture (SC) and so specific (and perhaps exclusive or unique) to the culture that produced them that they have no equivalent in the target culture (TC), be it because they are unknown, or because they are not yet codified in the target language (TL). When discussing the problems of correspondence in translation, “differences between cultures may cause more severe complications for the translator than do differences in language structure” (Nida 130). Moreover, several theorists, such as Santoyo, García Yebra and Yifeng, amongst others, support untranslatability when we face texts with terms which are so culture-bound and culture-specific as to defy translation (cf. Fernández Guerra, “The issue” 41)....

Znala je da je još netko u sobi. Nije bilo nikakvog zvuka, samo nagovještaj, slabo premještanje zraka. Neko je vrijeme bila sama, sjedila je na klupi posred galerije okružena slikama, ciklusom od petnaest platna, i činilo joj se kao da sjedi u mrtvačkoj kapelici uz tijelo rođaka ili prijatelja. To se zove bdijenje, pomislila je. Gledala je Ulrike, glavu i trup, ranu od užeta na vratu, iako nije sa sigurnošću mogla reći koju su spravu koristili kod vješanja. Čula je kako se netko približava klupi, muškarac teška koraka, ustala je i otišla stati pred Ulrikinu sliku, jednu od tri s istim motivom, na svakoj mrtva Ulrike, leži na podu ćelije, s glavom u profilu. Platna su bila različitih veličina. Pojava te žene, njezina glava, vrat, rana od užeta, kosa, crte lica, naslikani su, od slike do slike, u zagasitim i izblijedjelim nijansama, na jednoj jasnije nego na drugoj, usta iskrivljena na jednoj slici izgledala su prirodno na drugima, sve skupa nesistematično. „Što misliš zašto je to tako naslikao?”...

In his essay on Australian poetry of the early twentieth century, Nicholas Birns claims that the poetry of the given period was not at the time fully appreciated in the rest of the world, and that metropolitan centres placed low esteem on Australian poetic production (173). There was the lack, as he puts it, of “an efficient market”, caused by various factors, including the remoteness and isolation of the country, its distance from the hotspots of political crisis, and its “perceived rejection of modernism” (Ibid). It was the Anglo-American experimental modernism that the young Australian poets rejected, composing verse that “tended to rhyme and obey metrical contentions” (Ibid, 174) or at least have a certain melodic quality. In its stylistic aspect, this poetry was rather traditional, and the themes used were also quite different from those explored by American or English modernist poets: exploration by sea and land, and the European explorations of Australia in particular, was a very popular theme, along with the descriptions of nature and typically Australian landscape (as was the case, for instance, with the Jindyworobak school of poetry). Australian literature of the first half of the twentieth century, as noted by Tom Englis Moore, a well-known poet and professor of Australian literature, was marked by “[t]he ideals of peace, freedom and social justice combined with a marked realism” (Waten 26). The anti-realist strain in Australian literature was rather weak at the time when poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote their best works across the globe. The only group of poets truly infatuated with modernism gathered around Max Harris (1921–1995) and called themselves the Angry Penguins. The group that was stimulated by the literary magazine Angry Penguins, was founded in Adelaide in 1940 by Harris and is today probably best-known not for their attempts to introduce modernism into Australian poetry, but for the infamous literary hoax perpetrated by two poets of a more traditionalist orientation, James McAuley (1917–1976) and Harold Stewart (1916–1995). Their main purpose was to debunk modernist poetry as meaningless babble, but what they actually succeeded in doing, as this paper aims to show, was advancing Australian literature beyond modernism into the kind of poetry that stylistically and thematically could be described as postmodern, and thus debunking not only the Angry Penguins’ writing, but their own traditionalist verse as well. ...