The ghostliness of translation

Abstract

Drawing on Venuti’s foreignization and domestication and Derrida’s concepts of iteration, supplementarity, différance and ghostliness, this article suggests that Khalil Mutran’s and Jabra Jabra’s translations are not duplications of Shakespeare’s Hamlet but they appear as apparitions of an apparition. This study adopts a descriptive analytical approach that presents the collected data from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1992), Jabra’s translation (1979) and Mutran’s (2012), respectively. Through the analysis of the chosen examples, we contend that intertextuality, translation and ghosts are deconstructive of temporality, ontology and meaning as they entail ‘repetition’ and ‘différance’.