How Spanish Translation Companies Recreated One Hand Clapping

In his writing Antony Burgess has devised a kind of idiolect that is both unusual and pioneering bearing in mind the fact that such a language never existed. Burgess did not mimic any register or slang and neither did he intend to show what factual processes were occurring in the language. However, the penetration English was made to experience was something that before that moment was never undergone. It was the dialect used by Burgess which is heavily dependent on the American slang used by Spanish teenagers that served as a guiding principle to the Spanish Translation employee Feliciano Puerto. Burgess uses in his writing a combination of English and other languages that does not point to the fact that English would one day resemble other language – something he supported. The language and the plot of A Clockwork Orange (growing cruelty and audacity of youth hoodlums) are treated by the translator as valid forecasts about what is to be expected in our modern society and Alex’s dialect is indicative of this, as it serves as a prophecy that transfers the novel to our cultural environment.

It is obvious that Burgess is an author that is not widely read, and this is explained by the fact that both readers and translators are faced with considerable difficulites owing to his linguistic creativity. What made Antony Burgess a cult writer was Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange for the cinema. In 1962 when Burgess’s career was at its dawn his work could already be divided into periods, which explains the previous statement. According to the division of the periods, it is evident that The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange belong to the “fantastic” period, which is the third period. The second one is the “the repatriate” and the first one is the “exotic. Throughout the world people are familiar in most cases with the “fantastic period” – the other two being less familiar. It is somewhat misleading to read about Burgess’s heritage as not many of his books are translated and published. Most translators were forced to apply Certified New York Translator agencies so that they could be granted the right to translate his books. Thus they were forced to abandon the other novels and to center their efforts on only one novel – which they did. Antony Burgess is incorrectly referred to as the author of one book – A Clokwork Orange, mainly due to the fact that only a selection of his novels has been translated. Sadly, Burgess left a huge legacy, which is either translated badly or neglected, e.g., A Clockwork Orange had to go through some arguably appropriate linguistic experiments, while One Hand Clapping was ideologically manipulated.

It is also worth taking into consideration the fact that Burgess is termed by the critics as an alternative author. This is proved by the fact that The Wanting Seed, which views the future quite controversially, is hard to find, while A Clockwork Orange was censored because of presenting the underground world of ultra-violence and for this it tastes like a forbidden fruit. Masterfully rendered into French by the French Translation, One Hand Clapping is a novel that will present interest to those who want to learn about the manipulative machine that uses literature for propaganda. Thus Burgess’s image is shaped up as an author of experimental fiction, and logically his work was not accepted in the mainstream literature.