Iain Banks, born on 16 February 1954, is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain Menzies Banks. The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Complicity, a detective fiction and a little bit of a gothic story, was first published in 1993.
Its two main characters are Cameron Colley, a journalist, working for Scottish newspaper called The Caledonian, and a serial murderer whose identity is a mystery. Colley is living in Edinburgh. He smokes cigarettes and cannabis, drinks copious amounts of alcohol, plays computer games and has adventurous sex with a married woman. He regrets his addictions and misdemeanors and tries half-heartedly to give them up. He receives anonymous phone calls about a series of mysterious deaths. Suddenly he has mysterious deaths of his own to worry about when an editorial he wrote several years before comes back to haunt him. It seems someone is killing off the people on his list, one by one. Under suspicion by the police, Colley finds himself involved in the bizarre murders when the killer is revealed.
The passages dealing with Colley, the journalist, are written in the 1st person and those dealing with the murderer in the 2nd person. ( it seems like we are looking through killer's eyes)
Before starting my translation, I read an excerpt twice. It was a little bit strange for me that narration is in the 2nd person so I did a little research on the internet and found out that the entire novel is a mixture of 1st and 2nd person narration. According to the number of information given in the excerpt and the style of writing, it wasn't hard to conclude what the main idea of the text is. In this passage in particular, it is a mysterious murderer who is waiting for the owner of the house to come ( probably to kill him). Because of the 2nd person narration, we, as readers, are enabled to witness all the events and see them through killer's eyes.
During the translation I used Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary ( 8th edition), Wikipedia.com, Google.com and the notes of the analysis done in the previous class. Of course, I had difficulties during translation as not all words in the text have their equivalents in Serbian so I tried hard to translate them in a descriptive way. Some of the problems were:
1. a small telephone seat : this type of a phrase doesn't have its equivalent in Serbian, such thing doesn't exist in Serbian, so I translated it descriptive stoličica pored telefona.
2. eyes white in the half- darkness : we analysed this problem in class, stating it was impossible for eyes to be seen in the dark, it was sclera ( or white of the eye) that the writer is referring to, so having known that, I translated it in Serbian as beonjača as it is the only part of an eye that can be seen in the half-darkness.
3. the maid has pissed herself : this style of writing is quite colloquial, informal. Later on in the text, writer used the word "urine", this word being more formal. However, after a discussion we had in class I translated it as Služavka se upiškila, whereas the word "urine" I didn't translate as urin ( as this word can only be heard in medicine, by doctors) but as mokraća.
4. still- warm Aga : Wikipedia.com : The Aga cooker is a stored-heat stove invented in 1929. This type of cooker corresponds to our smederevac ( if we want to use colloquial style as well) or simply šporet, being more general.
5. Pronoun YOU : during the analysis on the class, we concluded there are several ways we can interpret this text: it can be translated in the 2nd person singular, 3rd person singular or even 2nd person plural. I choose 3rd person singular.
The text is not hard to translate, it seems easier than the previous ones, so on a scale from 1 to 10, I would say 5. It is very important to understand the text because only in that way you will be able to translate it properly and save the originality of the work and the main idea that the writer tried to convey.
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