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stairs on the street (this difference being suggested by another common frame)? The Model Reader decomposes this 'sudden' action into more analytical propositions: if there was first a scream and then a thump on the stair, this means that the scream took place downstairs. Therefore the translation discloses the fact that there was a scream downstairs. |
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Notice that /scream/ is translated as «strilli». This is correct, but I smell, as an Italian native speaker, that /strillo/ is more 'feminine' than is /scream/ (stylistic overcoding). The Model Reader, resorting to a given common frame, has decided that downstairs there was a 'madame'. |
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Let me avoid any discussion about the presupposed ability of the reader (other than the translator) to understand why Iffet moans and why she makes the (false) forecast concerning the American Fleet. In short, if there is a violent and noisy arrival of somebody, then they must be a consistent crowd; a crowd in a brothel, in a city with a port, means sailors (unexpected) and probably ones not native to the city; in the Mediterranean area, under the agreements of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, they cannot be but the American Fleet (number of synecdoches); the entire American Fleet is too much even for a professional such as Iffet; and so on: to understand this rather sophomoric wit, the reader is supposed to take a lot of inferential walks. |
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Iffet /hauls/ (rhetorical overcodinganyway, see Chapter 8, on metaphor) the flyblown sheet (rhetorical hyperbole, connoting the regretful status of the brotheldisregarded by the translator, also because the brothel in question was previously scored as one among the "foulest in Europe"). Where the hell does this sheet come from? Suppose this text is submitted to a computer. If the computer is fed only with a lexicon, it understands /sheet/, but does not understand why there are sheets in a brothel and which one is that hauled by Iffet. Fortunately, the computer (as well as the Model Reader) is furnished with a common frame: in brothels there are rooms, these rooms have beds, these beds have sheets. According to the previous frame «sleeping in a brothel», whoever sleeps in such places sleeps on a bed, and so on. I am not playing a Byzantine game. That is exactly what a reader is supposed to do in order to actualize the surface intensional level. I could add, Why does this frightened woman cover her head with a sheet when in danger? Other frames are put in play. |
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Despite Iffet's forecasts (and probably despite the naive reader's), it is not the American Fleet which enters; it is the police. |
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Iffet believed it was the American Fleet because she was resorting to a wrong common frame (while the reader relied upon the wrong intertextual frame). The fabula obliges the reader (and Iffet) to correct their forecasts. Another frame is activated. Rightly enough, the translator introduces the new event by an /invece/ («on the other hand»: contrary to Iffet's topic). |
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