Space and Silence as a Possible Form of It: Thoughts of a Literary Translator
Space and Silence as a Possible Form of It: Thoughts of a Literary Translator

Summary/Abstract: Space is often referred to as a vacuum and sound cannot travel in it, thus the silence experienced in space. At the same time, space is full of movement, thus, silence is part of that perpetual vitality and energy present in outer space as well as in other spaces defined as such in our everyday life, for example space between letters in this paper. Silence in space is gaps between particles while gaps or blanks in other fields such as literature are part of the explanation reception theorists, Iser (2006) among them, give us to the question of why we have different readings of the same text arguing that these gaps, in given parts of the text “trigger synthesizing operations in the reader’s mind ... [as they] lead to collisions between the individual ideas formed” (p. 66). Studying silence in the literary space also allows us to reflect on it as an important question of literary translation from several aspects. First of all, translation is bridging the space between different cultures. We will see that silence as a certain form of appearance associated with all kinds of space is universal and at the same time culture-bound and, thus, it also acquires meaning in context while we try to capture and trace the different meanings and notions of it in different fields and consider it from a dialectical aspect as well.

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