FEATURES OF CREATING THE EFFECT OF DRAMATIC TENSION IN THE NOVEL “NEVER LET ME GO” AND THEIR REPRODUCTION IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the investigation of linguistic and stylistic features in creating the effect of dramatic tension in Kazuo Ishiguro’s work “Never Let Me Go” and their reproduction in the Ukrainian version of the work, titled «Не відпускай мене». The contemporary literary space is filled with works that exhibit a diversity of genre and compositional solutions which simultaneously satisfy the individual reader’s desire for answers to eternal existential questions and create an irrational image of the surrounding world. In this context, it is relevant to examine the works of British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of the novel “Never Let Me Go”, in which, alongside rich psychological character portraits, discussions on important moral and ethical issues are present. Despite a significant amount of research on Ishiguro’s works, the linguistic and stylistic features of his novels and their reproduction in translation remain underexplored. Given the genre specificity of “Never Let Me Go”, classified as a contemporary dystopia, dramatic tension plays a particular role in it, as it helps maintain the reader’s interest in both the global issue of cloning and the inner experiences of the characters. Using a complex methodological approach, it has been determined that dramatic tension in the work primarily manifests itself on three levels: discussions of mysterious events among the students, disputes about the source of these mysteries, and reflections on the overall situation of the clone characters. The verbalization of dramatic tension in the original and in the Ukrainian translation of the novel is mainly achieved through such nominative units as “mystery”, “danger”, and “fear” in various lexical combinations. In the Ukrainian translation by Sofiia Andrukhovych, the sense of dramatic tension remains faithful to the original, providing grounds for asserting its high artistic quality. Further research could be directed towards a detailed comparative analysis of the lexical and stylistic features of the author’s works, taking into account their genre.