Modelling Translation as a Theatre of the Mind: Reporting clauses and inward affect

Received on: 07/02/2020 Accepted on: 08/03/2020 Abstract: This paper argues that a literary translator performs the original work by expressing inwardly her emotions and feelings under character-masks. Her lexical choices are indicative of her inner performance whose intimate subjectivities are visible when in contrast with the language of another translator. To support my point that literary translation is emotionally performative and happens in the state of psychological transition between the fictional Other and multiple selves as well as between mimesis and autothesis, I will explore the possibility of modelling it as a theatre of the mind by means of contrasting semantically the reporting verbs found in the first chapter of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and its six translations into Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and French.


INTRODUCTION
Literature has the uncanny ability to affect and be affected. It may make us angry, sad, pensive, or otherwise deeply altered as in The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. This intensely atmospheric tale takes the reader on an adventure through the sunlit towns and deserts of Africa. And even though the images of light and sun are evoked directly 100 and 84 times respectively, in the end the reader arrives at a very dark emotional place.
The emotions of a literary work spill over and beyond its pages and geopolitical divisions to define the Zeitgeist of historical times or generations. Baker (1927, p. 774) exclaims that what Romantic poet Byron felt, rather than what he thought, "is usually of the highest importance; for he represented, as was indicated by his contemporary popularity, the smouldering rebellion of millions of Europeans -a rebellion which did not know what it wanted but which was very much aware of itself none the less".
Literary affect is resilient and travels far. The angst of youthful disappointment, for example, resonated with the readers of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Kerouac's On the Road across the antipodal American and Soviet societies (YOUNG, 2009;SHERRY 2015). Yet literary affect is a mercurial passenger whose anthropomorphic face, voice and temper change with its reader. Even though it is normally defined as an outer expression of emotions, it finds its inward ways to be articulated as a voice, gesture or posture of fictional characters brought to life in a multitude of readings. In translation, it is in the hands of a translator whose perceptions and feelings meddle with an author's vision.
Translation has hardly been conceptualized as a dramatic performance, unless it concerns a theatrical piece translated from one language into another. While much has been said about the artistic, cultural and historical significance of translation, its affectual nature is little explored (ANDERSON, 2005). It is easy to overlook that much of what is mediated by language in translation is primarily a process of becoming and acting as someone else.
For that matter, I will argue that literary translation is emotionally performative, which leaves traces in textual patterns. Its underlying meaning can be explained in terms of a translator's theatrical imagining and enactment of her own emotional response to literature. To conceptualize the subjective performativity of translation, I will borrow the term theatre of the mind from the radio context in which it means programmes that use sounds and words to stage a drama (VERMA, 2012). To illustrate my point, I will compare in visual terms how six translations deal with 961 reporting clauses of the pronoun + say pattern found in the first chapter of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury narrated by an unusual character named Benjy. Before I narrativize how affect varies in those cases, I will expand on the premises that literary translation is performative, its performance is theatrical, and its theatrics is inherently existential.

TRANSMEDIALITY OF TEXT & THEATRE
The notions of theatre and text intersect in conceptual and practical ways. They collaborate and co-evolve as when a theatrical piece is scripted before going onstage or when a literary text is adapted for the stage. Inspired by the popularity of the theatre at the time, Stephane Mallarmé, for example, was torn between choosing the former and the book as a model of the all-encompassing medium. Eventually, he chose the book as a container for his spatial, performative and kinaesthetic ideas that run throughout his other works. As it transpires in his letter to Vittorio Pica, he saw literature as intrinsically theatrical (GORELICK, 2018). So did Charles Dickens draw much of his literary inspiration from the theatre (GLAVIN, 2001;PLATTEN, 2001).
Contrast is often used to bring one thing into a sharper focus at the expense of another whose features are selected to provide a basis for antithesis. Text is, however, often taken to be that rudimentary thing whose ontology is viewed to be flatter than that of the performing arts. Theatre is rooted beyond language, argues Gossman (1976), while a text is primarily placed in its verbal medium, which sets it apart from performance: "the drama is what the writer writes […] the theatre is the specific set of gestures performed by the performer [and] the performance is the whole event" (SCHECHNER, 1988, p. 85). Goldstein and Bloom (2011) insist that, unlike literature, movies and plays rely on intense detail that produces an authentic sense of reality. Yet the examples of specificity they provide are not a theatrical or cinematic birthright. It is not unusual for paintings to be recreated onscreen. Classical paintings, for example, inspired many indoor and outdoor mise-en-scènes in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.
A rhetorical device called 'ekphrasis', on the other hand, translates works of visual art with words. For the literary schools of realism and naturalism, a detailed visual description is a principle that offers a social commentary or a version of unselective and accurate record of human behaviour, psychology and relations. Charles Dickens and Donna Tartt alike have an obsessive eye for detail that places a reader at the centre of a scene or an event.
The absence of detail, on the other hand, may have a stronger psychological impact than the abundance of other features. The aesthetics of absence is agnostic of media. Ernest Hemingway would often neglect the physical appearances of his characters. Instead, he would let their dialogues to define them. In the Brechtian manner, Lars von Trier removes realistic attributes from the scenes of Dogville. His minimalist scenography helps to deliver the story of an isolated corrupted town as a critique of the capitalist world.
Theatre exists in "the subjectivity of those who practise it", argues Boal (2007, p. 37). And so does text. It is anthropo-morphic and -centric since it always embodies whoever engages with it. And where there is a body, there is a movement, gesture, interaction and emotion. Both reading and writing are corporeal and sensory as much as they are mental: our eyes consume words, our hands fidget, emotions rise and ripple through the body. Whatever happens on the neuro-physiological or emotional levels constitutes text as much as graphemes, words and sentences.
The important premise of this article is that performance takes place in the imagination prior to any onstage or intext expression. Armstrong (1997) finds theatre and consciousness to be mutually inclusive terms since both are self-adaptive processes of "biological intentionality". Both span bodily experiences and mental realities. And like theatre, text is also psychodramatic. That is, consciousness is their primary medium.

PERFORMATIVITY & THEATRICALITY OF TEXT
Language is performative in many ways. It can effect social change beyond our intentions (CULLER, 2000). Reflecting on Wolfgang Iser's notion of the play of a text, Natoli (1992) observes that both are related reciprocally: texts are played by us and are playing us. Language often acts inwardly and in subliminal ways. Its emotional and experiential registers are impactful though too subtle to be observed directly. Our figurative speech may be psychologically motivated. If we use the metaphors of war to describe our attitudes or relationships, it is likely that we are in the fighting mindset (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 2003). Our metaphors eventually affect our behaviour and belief systems. Language places us in fictional worlds where we become and experience someone or something. When we read what characters say, we perform their part, which may have a lingering or transforming effect.
The mechanism of theatrical placement is primarily neuroanatomical. Mirror neurons and embodied cognition are the concepts that explain the relation between spectators and actors in a theatrical space. The theory of mirror neurons argues that the same part of the brain lights up when one does an action and the other observes the doing (FALLETTI, 2016). How text places us in concrete experiences is less obvious to the eye and mind than how the same effect is achieved by conventional theatrical means. On the surface, the immediate materiality of text seems to be composed of ink, page, words, lines and other elements. There is no proscenium to remind us that we have entered a space where both the mind and body are engaged. There is no direct knowing on which side of that proscenium we are -as actors or beholders? There are no props or masks to help us internalize our acting as in the Noh theatre where a mask is smaller than a performer's face and its eye slits are just wide enough for little light to help a performer ease into his role.
Performance, however, does not have to take an outward shape. An actor can create an effect on spectators without even moving. In theatre anthropology, it's called "pre-expressive level" (FALLETTI, 2016). Falletti's concept of non-verbal disequilibrium emphasizes the continuum between the physical and the emotional, working in tandem to create the energy that the body of an actor emanates. What gives away that a translator performed rather than read the original work is her affinities with fictional characters mediated through her language. In neuroanatomical terms, we can think of translation as a "re-synthesis" of various imagery components stored in different parts of the brain and then relived as an imaginary drama in our consciousness (YOUNG;SAVER, 2001).
In the sense of doing something rather than merely saying it, translation is performative in two ways. The original text does things to a translator who in turn does something to that text. In other words, we perform and are performed by the text. Both ways, the doing is psychodramatic. A translator enters other bodies, voices, minds, and acts out their feelings and states of mind. Here the division between performing others and self-representation grows ever blurrier. A translator is cast to imagine the acting and staging of scenes in her mind when she relives what has happened to her or speculates what it would be like if she made a different choice. These acts are likely to be less verbal and more visual. Culler's term (2000) performatives is somewhat too generic to describe psychodramatic effects of translating since it evokes art forms other than theatre, including dance, music and the like. When stripped down to its etymological roots, the verb perform appears to have evolved from a wider sense of doing or making various things. Dreams and time were said to be performed, for example, in Middle English. In its current sense, the verb places an emphasis on accomplishing something. Things as diverse as music, play or contract can be performed. Unlike the generic noun performatives, the noun theatrics and the adjective theatrical, as in "translation theatrics" or "theatrical consciousness", seem to be better fitted than usual linguistic descriptors to capture how we act out our affects in translation.

SURVIVAL THEATRES OF THE SELFISH GENE
Like any form of creative writing, literary translation is to an extent autobiographical and self-fictional at the same time. Something personal will always slip into translation through the doors between the conscious and the unconscious. Some new senses of self will be invented at the encounter with the Other.
The evolutionary views frame language, theatre and other socio-cultural inventions as means and machines of surviving. Theatre, as a "substrate of consciousness" or a state of "heightened consciousness of mind and body", is argued to have been evolving as an adaptive system that defined humans as a species (ARMSTRONG, 1997). Since theatre is inherently existential, it is not confined to on-stage performance. The ways we understand and relate to theatrical performances express and forge our adaptation to the physical and social worlds.
In psychological terms, the art of theatre is more than a machine of pleasure. Amongst other things, it provides a space to hide or survive under a mask. It is this self-estrangement that allows us to model experiences and situations to make sense of latent discontent, indeterminacies, crises or fears. The discovery of inward empowerment begets and shapes a theatrical consciousness. It also takes some theatrical selfengineering to construct fictions through which we survive and adapt in the world. Adaptation may take on many skills of which communication between mind and body is key to a performer. One of the functions of the human brain is to control muscles (DAWKINS, 2006) to survive in the face of a present danger. On the psychological level, a post-mortem survival is even more essential when traumas linger within us.
The lens of adaptivism places existentialism at the centre of a translator's work. A translator's primary choices are not linguistic but those between the author and herself. Seeing boundaries as separating us from the outside world may be biologically conditioned as a mechanism of self-defence (DENNETT, 1991). The issue of untranslatability that preoccupies translation theory is not the result of linguistic or cultural differences as much as it is of this biologically pre-programmed autobiographical resistance. A translator's revolt begins with her conflict of having to renounce her Self under the pressure of reconstructing an author's vision.
While in her pursuit to preserve whatever she believes constitutes the author and his intentions of foisted or self-imposed ideals and theoretical prescriptions, the biological imperative of the selfish gene is to survive as a singular entity (DAWKINS, 2006). A translator's selfish gene, hence, seeks to outlive the author of the original in her double agency as a spectator who mirrors the Other and as an actor who plays herself, though self-play is never precise in a documentary or factual sense.
The defensive boundaries of socially constructed selves are blurred in the creative moments of selfplay. The image of the Other offers a conflict but also a fantasy for the censoring Self. We cannot become entirely the Other but only mimic the Other. On the other hand, the Other cannot entirely possess us without being owned: the authoritative Other becomes a dissident mask, and the experiment of self-fictioning begins.

PERFORMATIVE TRANSCENDENCE OF SELFHOOD
Our personalities may be described as cohesive and unified as opposed to incoherent and split. Personality disorder entails punishment and suffering in the Greek myth where jealous Aphrodite sends Eros to punish the mortal Psyche by making her fall in love with the most hideous man. Instead Eros falls in love with Psyche only to flee away when his hidden identify is revealed. To become whole, Psyche goes searching for Eros and endures many trials. Yet in the end she is rewarded with reunion and is made into the goddess of the soul. These archetypes of search and journey promote a sense of self-expansion. Yet the social construct of identity often stigmatizes the notions of fluid Self as signifying mental disorders.
Whether due to psychological trauma or metaphysical longing to mend broken things, we may abandon the fixed centres of our self-imposed or forced identities. Terms such as "self-transcendence" (GARCIA-ROMEU, 2010), "transliminality" (THALBOURNE; HOURAN, 2000), "thin and thick" boundaries of the mind or "permeable ego boundaries" (HARTMANN, 1991) were coined through observation of how porous our consciousness may be. Biological self-preservation may compel us to adopt a social mask, called persona in the Jungian terminology; yet the suppressed shadows of alter ego long to live in the light of consciousness. The creative engagement with fictions is one way for the shadows of desire to pull free from under the control of the censoring Self.
Eugenio Barba (1994, p. 173) celebrates theatrical transcendence: "Theatre allows me to belong to no place, not to be anchored only to one perspective, to remain in transition". He construes it as an existential performance of surviving under the pressures of codified and socially constructed ceremonies of life. Of his years in the military school, Barba reminiscences that only his body was engaged in being there, while a part of himself "was excluded" since the expression of certain emotions was banned in that environment. What happens to the excluded part? It survives and perhaps thrives somewhere reincarnated as a fiction in the theatre of one's mind. The theatrics of imagination allows us to explore our endless and multiple aspects in an attempt to fabricate versions of Self. The original text is a loose script for a translator, and its author is just another fictional character that we construct and appropriate along with other figures that inhabit his fictional world.
The experience of the translating mind is akin to the state of in-betweenness, which in the vocabulary of theatre anthropology is defined as a state where a performer is suspended between her masks/roles and her Self (SCHECHNER, 1988). Schechner (1985) asks what was it that he observed in the performance of a Yaqui deer dancer -a man underneath a deer's mask or the deer itself ? His anthropological premise is that a performer becomes someone in a "dialectical tension", in fact, someone in between multiple selves. The territory we enter when we translate a literary text is likewise a psychological in-betweenness. In translation theory, we are often preoccupied with transferring the meaning in between texts, languages or cultures. But in existential terms, those destinations are never reached since the centre of where a translator performs is always somewhere in between.
Faulkner's novels are intensely polyphonic. Their multiple narrative voices and viewpoints envelope and engulf the reader. Faulkner created many of his conflicted characters in his own image in the reflection of his multiple senses of self, argues Watson (2002), who interprets Faulkner's novels as a form of selfrepresentation based on family photographs, manuscripts and letters. Caddy from The Sound and the Fury, for example, mirrors his conflicting feelings for his wife Estelle and daughters, one of whom was dead before the birth of the other (WATSON, 2002). Cruelty and anguish abound in his fictional worlds, where his characters suffer with and for him, offering images in which a translator may recognize herself. In the theatre of her mind, a translator's selfish gene is likely to react in some way. She might shift powers around, and suppress or amplify some voices, depending on what memories, phobias or conflicts they summon. Some translations, indeed, reinvent the Faulknerian characters and their relations, as discussed later in Sections 9 and 10. Yet personal dimensions in translation are routinely construed as a form of misinterpretation or disregard of an author's intention, which distances the reader from the original work (PAVILAVIČIŪTĖ, 2019). Textual criticism also often commits a translator's creativity to broader norms (LAVIOSA et al., 2017) rather than to her existential poetics.

BEYOND LITERARY NORMS OF LANGUAGE ACTS
A writer's style is traditionally seen steeped in his life and experiences, including his emotional biography. Dickens' reporting verbs, for example, are observed to be oriented to performance owing to his passion for the theatrical practices of reading his novels aloud in public (LAI-MING, 2008) and acting out (PAGE, 1988). Meanwhile, a translator has had to wait to "earn the right to a biography" until recently, as Baer (2018) aptly notices.
Although a translator's choices make an interesting subject whenever they differ from the language of a writer, they are seen as normative rather than uniquely personal. We are indeed entangled in many social agreements, but the way that translatorial norms are conceptualized obscure subtler idiosyncrasies and geocultural nuances. The notions of foreignization and domestication, for example, capture the pressures of accentuating either the character of the original or of the language into which it is being translated. Domesticating strategies were politically instrumental to the control and suppression of the Other in the Soviet translation of Western literature (SHERRY, 2015).
The centralized mechanism of Soviet censorship was put in place as a form of colonial control and propaganda over minority languages and those spoken in satellite countries (VENCLOVA, 1979;COTTER, 2008;STRAVINSKIENĖ, 2008). A "good" translation is one which takes the reader into the Soviet reality, observes Cotter. What did not comply with the Soviet aesthetics and could not be appropriated was subjected to oblivion. The examples of how words, phrases and sentences were removed from Soviet translation abound. Faulkner's fame was not spared. The sentence "This is not Russia, where just because he wears a little metal badge, a man is immune to law" appears in the Dilsey chapter of The Sound and the Fury where Jason accuses the police of indifference. It disappears in the Polish translation by Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska and the Russian version by Осия Сорокa, both of which were published during the Soviet period. Many religious references also vanish in СОРОКA's version of the Benjy chapter.
While the plain verb say dominates English fiction, its plainness was too foreign for the Soviet translation which would replace it with close or distant synonyms. There is something liberal and at the same time displaced about this as if the characters are allowed to speak freely because they are translated fictions that will disguise a genuine speechmaker. For many aspiring and even recognized writers of the Soviet period, translation became a sort of existential exile, but also a place to both hide and survive. One could translate what they could not write. On the other hand, the seemingly innocent register of reporting clauses is transformed with commentaries and instructions of how the reader should see characters act and interact. This change is not merely stylistic but rather political since it produces a critical shift in consciousness from the role of performer to spectator.
While those norms are no doubt at play to some extent in all six translations of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the whole operational layer of experiential register remains hidden because, at the same time, Western authors were not the only Others to be suppressed and subverted. Soviet domestication was foreignization in disguise from the perspective of ethnic minorities. Venutti (1995), who speaks in favour of "foreignization" as a form of invigorating minorized cultures, overlooks this irony noted by Cotter (2008) in his thorough discussion of the Sovietization of Romania (2008). Through theory and practice, Soviet translation enforced the Russification of translating cultures. Western literature, for example, happened to be translated into minority languages from Russian versions rather than from the original texts, which often was hidden from public scrutiny.
The acknowledgement of this geo-political perspective alone cannot frame the discussion of what constitutes the emotional identity of translations. Even under constraint, translators have a choice, and literary norms have always been challenged, questioned and subverted (MALMKJAER, 2005). The acceptance that languages are malleable for the selfish gene to act under the disguise of multiple Others would position translation as a medium of self-fictioning performance.

WHERE SEMANTICS MEETS PSYCHOLOGY
The reporting clauses belong to neither the flow of narration nor that of speech. They are staging instructions that remind a reader of being an intruder in the consciousness of the Other. They can tell us how to see the Other speak and act, which either distances us from or brings us closer to unfamiliar and alien states of mind.
Like most fiction written in English, The Sound and the Fury tends to use the plain verb say in reporting clauses. Although Faulkner abstains from controlling his reader's gaze here, he still does something unusual. First, he uses reporting clauses in excess, often to help his reader identify whose voice emerges in the stream-of-consciousness of Benjy's narration. Here Faulkner's style is genuinely polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense. The writer removes himself from stage centre to observe whoever inhabits his fictional world. This illusion of an authorial absence vacates a polyphonic space for a reader to slip on a mask made in the image of an author or character and to perform her emotional response. The original text thus becomes a rough script in the eyes of a translator.
Second, Faulkner employs unusual means such as punctuation to place his reader right in the centre of the narrating mind. In the Benjy chapter, for example, he separates the direct speech of other characters and the reporting clauses with a period. As a "technique for establishing the limits of Benjy's comprehension" (MORRISON, 2008, p. 23), the period severs the connection between all the conversational noise and Benjy's mantra-like repetition of "she/he said".
The way a translator deals with the reporting verbs may signify her affectual response, even when she chooses to suppress her reactions. Change in a translator's vocabulary vis-à-vis the language of the original is performative on the narrative and autopoietic levels. That is, the scrutiny of how fictional characters are made to respond in affective ways may offer a voyeuristic glimpse of a character's theatre of the mind as well as that of the author, the translator and the reader herself. Figure 1 compares the semantic choices that six translators made to render the verb say in their interpretation of the Benjy chapter. Each choice in one translation is aligned with a corresponding variant in another version. The fewer semantic choices that were made, the less disrupted is the fabric of the translations, which is represented by a specific colour and the number of word threads.  The Lithuanian and two Polish translations of the Benjy chapter are semantically abundant in comparison to the other versions featured in Figure 1. Both Polak and Tauragienė published their versions in post-Soviet times when translators were no longer expected to domesticate literature as much as before (DANYTĖ, 2008). The plain verb say came to be translated more routinely in a literal way. The question hence arises as to why the translators did not embrace the new tendencies. The semantic extravaganza of Tauragienė might be influenced by the old-school aesthetics. But this rule is after all self-imposed, which, amongst other things, provides emotional control over the fictional Other. In our correspondence, the translator stressed that she chose those writers to whom she could relate emotionally, and Faulkner's sense of passion for life was central to her work [V Tauragienė, personal communication, 11 June 2020). Her confession provokes further questions as to whether her interpretation of Faulkner was guided by emotional appropriation, or rather invasion; and what literary self-projection made her experience at all.
The other three translations also defy the notion of norms. Both Осия Сорокa and Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska published their translations during the Soviet period. Ирина Гуровa's version, though said to have been completed around the same time as the work by Сорокa, was made available in print only in post-Soviet times. Both Russian translators follow the Faulknerian imperative to keep the reporting verbs in the Benjy chapter simple, which goes against the norm of domestication. Сорокa's approach, however, changes in the other three chapters.
Even though both Russian translators and Romanian Mircea Ivănescu refrain from dramatizing the characters through speech acts, their emotional response to Faulknerian bodies can be found elsewhere. The English Caddy, for example, sounds gentle and concerned when she calls Benjy "my poor baby", but all three translators amplify that emotion in their own ways as follows: [1] "My poor baby." [Faulkner] "Copilul meu, săracul de tine, copilaşul meu" The way that other characters treat Benjy touches a nerve. The reader must feel helpless since she does not own the story the way the original writer does. And yet she can fantasize happy moments and endings. A translator's agency is such that she can bring some semiotic justice by shifting power relations at the semantic level. Ivănescu's tripartite folkloric chanting as if wraps up Benjy in the verbal layers of gentle sorrow. Technically, the Romanian strategy might be called addition, expansion or even domestication, but the terms fail to capture the translator's psychodramatic impulse. It begs a question as to what exactly elicited Ivănescu's emotional overflow. Both Сорокa and Гуровa choose the same adjective for poor, yet Гуровa uses the diminutive form. The rhythm is also significant. Гуровa's word order is literal and her emphasis falls on the diminutive form of poor. In Сорокa's rendition, the pronoun my breaks the phrase in half, thus creating the effect of a vocal quiver. Neither foreignization nor domestication can explain the poetics of these intimate gestures of affect.
The Bakhtinian distinction between polyphony, understood as voices insubordinate to authorial power, and monologism as a rejection of that plurality, is not clear-cut in translation. On the surface, translation is polyphonic to a reader who perceives multiple characters speaking in different voices. The Soviet tendency to deforeignize Western literature created a space for social critique as well as for intimate self-expression. Since the author always casts a shadow over a translator, changing how characters speak might be one way to subvert his power. But whose voices are those in the end? Is the translator aware of having a conversation with multiple Others; or does she slip into them without noticing that a line has been crossed? On closer examination, some translatorial choices appear to convey conflicting views on how characters interact with each other. The personal might be speculated to reside especially in the types of conflict that the translators create.

REPORTING CLAUSES AS THEATRICAL GESTURES OF AFFECT
To identify emotional patterns in the translations, I grouped the verbs the translators used to render the reporting clauses of the Benjy chapter into seven semantic categories. The neutral category consists of the verbs that are the most direct translations of the English say such as sakė or pasakė in Lithuanian, powiedział in Polish, and сказал in Russian. Six other categories are spread along the continuum of affect. On one side, there are emotions of agitation, domineering and hostility. Their counterparts include collaboration, empathy and submission. The opposites are neither negative nor positive in a strict sense. They rather capture the emotional intensity with which characters are translated to speak or otherwise interact with each other. The hostile group, for example, comprises the verbs that vary in their expressiveness of anger and frustration. Some characters only retort or snap out, while others threaten or shout. There is a lot of room for further exploration of the semantic annotation of how translators deal with the reporting verbs. But my experimental strategy was to have a small number of categories to identify meaningful counterpoints across the translations.
The translatorial verbs not only state the fact of someone speaking; they also denote the manner of speaking, mood, vocal intensity, facial expressions and bodily responses, e.g., gniewal się ("he was angry") in Polish, pakėlė balsą ("raised her voice"), guodė ("consolled s.o.") and gūžtelėjo pečiais ("shrugged shoulders") in Lithuanian. Figure 2 shows how each emotional category is divided between six translations.  The Lithuanian and two Polish versions display more contrastive patterns of semantic variation. Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska's translation of 1971 scores highest in the submission and agitation categories. Jędrzej Polak's version, published in 1993, contains the highest proportion of hostility. In his interpretation, some characters are more often depicted as screaming or threatening. By contrast, the Lithuanian characters are equipped with more empathy, but they are also collaborative and domineering in great measure.
Since the Russian and Romanian translations deal neutrally with the reporting clauses in the Benjy chapter, the other versions that employ semantic variance are more instrumental in identifying how the translators engaged with their fictional performances. Figure 3 shows the proportions of emotions displayed by characters in the Benjy chapter. Caddy's daughter Quentin is marked in the visual as Quentin-she to differentiate her from Caddy's brother who bears the same name. She plays a small part in the overall speech, but her manner of interacting stands out in Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska's version. Unlike other characters, she is significantly more agitated.  In Polak's translation, as seen in Figure 4, on the next page, the range of emotions of all characters shrinks, except for Father whose speech acts are the most diverse. Polak's characters also display proportionally stronger emotions than Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska's characters. They tend to be more hostile. In the eyes of Polak, Quentin-she is the most forceful in how she interacts with other people, which contrasts with her portrayal as being agitated and collaborative in Figure 3.
Quentin is trapped in the hapless family. Her uncle Jason often bullies her for she reminds him too much of her mother Caddy. He plays a part in her estrangement from Caddy who is banned from the household. He also appropriates the money meant for Quentin. In one scene, Quentin falls out with Jason, which escalates to the point where Dilsey feels the need to put herself in between them to prevent a physical fight. The emotional intensity with which Polak makes Quentin to articulate her speech constitutes an idiosyncratic pattern not found in the other translation.  Some scenes display more emotional contrast between the translators. The final chapter that focuses on Dilsey, for example, culminates in the harrowing scene that exposes intolerance, blind range, and domestic violence as a central feature of the Compson family. It depicts how Luster takes Benjy and his Mother out for a ride. They peacefully cross the gates of the ailing household until Benjy breaks into tears. Benjy's uncle, Jason, aborts their journey by beating both the horse and Luster. Jason has spent all day chasing his run-away niece. He thinks the entire world is against him. But he vents his anger on the most vulnerable characters: Benjy and Luster. At the sight of violence, Benjy starts wailing, to which Luster responds notably differently in two translations. Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska makes Luster take his anger out on Benjy (e.g., gniewal się), while in the Lithuanian version he pleas for forgiveness in attempt to calm him down instead (e.g., ramino, teisinosi).

PSYCHOSEMIOSIS OF THE TRANSLATORIAL AFFECT
The monotony with which each speech act is delivered in the original novel is frustrating. The dispassionate neutrality of Faulknerian verbs is suppressive and disempowering. The reader is as voiceless as Benjy who, though an intelligent observer, cannot articulate to the outside world what he sees and feels. While the translator may find herself restrained to change radically the unfortunate developments of the original storyline, she can (dis)empower her characters by semantic means.
In the Lithuanian version, Mother emerges as the least sympathetic in terms of how she is depicted to interact with other characters. She shouts at her children and servants, but most often her animosity targets her daughter Caddy. The heatmaps in Figure 5 contrast the emotional performance of Mother and Caddy throughout three translations of the Benjy chapter. The Russian and Romanian versions are not included here since their translators refrained from dramatizing her character through speech acts.  In Figure 5(a), the Lithuanian Mother displays strong emotions more often than she does in the two Polish translations. The Lithuanian pattern also seems to progress along the narrative time. The hostile and domineering verbs flock towards the end where the Lithuanian Mother is often made to object, reproach or command (e.g., paprieštaravo, papriekaištavo, paliepė) when she deals with Caddy.
Tauragienė explicitly negativizes the trope of the mother-daughter relationship. Whether it comes from her experience or imagination, it is deeply personal, nonetheless. She also tends to show three key female characters -Mother, Caddy and Dilsey -as domineering. As aspects of a mother figure, they form the triangle of rivalry between one biological and two surrogate mothers. It is curious to observe that no such accentuated conflict emerges in the Polish translations.
Black servant Dilsey keeps together the entire household of the dysfunctional and broken Compson family. She tries to cover them with a blanket of gentleness, yet her expression of care is often disrespected. While Faulkner himself did not hide his affections towards Dilsey's character (BLEIKASTEN, 2008, p. 52), he uses her as a narrative device to explore the emotional atrophy of the Compson family. In Tauragienė's translation, however, Dilsey assumes a more assertive voice in how she speaks, e.g., paragino ("urged"), paliepė ("ordered"), nutraukė ("interrupted"), subarė ("scolded"). Her Lithuanian portrayal seems to emancipate (a) (b) Dilsey and thus compensate for the semiotic injustice that her character endures in the original novel. However, Dilsey is not granted that much willpower in the other translations. On closer inspection, the heatmap in Figure 5(b) reveals several interesting patterns of contrast in how the translators perceive and convey Caddy's emotional performance. For example, in the scene where Mother asks whether Caddy is taking Benjy out without his overshoes, the Lithuanian Caddy responds in an apologetic manner (e.g., teisinosi), while such cues of guilt are absent in both Polish versions. In yet another scene, the kids are told to stay quiet in the kitchen. They eat supper and hear Mother wail in the other room, which makes Benjy break into tears. The Polish Caddy is empathetic in her attempt to hush him (i.e., prosiła "asked'), while her Lithuanian version is fixated on keeping order and control (i.e., paliepė "commanded"). The Polish translations seem to contrast with each other on yet another level. Whenever Caddy comes across as gentle and caring (e.g., prosiła "asked", martwiła się "worried", szepnęła "whispered") in Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska's version, Polak depicts her in emotionally neutral ways, which potentially highlights the distinction between the female and male gazes. As seen in Figure 4, Polak also uses a wider emotional range than other translators to characterize Father.

SCREAM BETWEEN MIMESIS AND AUTOTHESIS
It is curious that the three translators agree on one affect. In their rendition of the Benjy chapter, the verbs denoting shouting and screaming make up a prominent group which comes second after the neutral verbs of speaking. They occur 63 times in Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska's version (e.g., wołał, wołała), while Polak (e.g., krzyzcał, wrzasnął) and Tauragienė (e.g., šaukė, rėkė) each use them 39 times. Yet how and where they depict the act of shouting reveal phenomenologically different emotional worldviews and produce different narrative ontologies. The dramatic quality of scream functions as a narrative device, but it also vocalizes how the translators experience and enact other emotional displays on the fictional and autobiographical levels.
On the aesthetic level, the sound of screaming foregrounds a specific scene or moment. Wagner, for example, inserts scream in the middle of Der Fliegende Holländer and in his other operatic works (FRIEDHEIM, 1983) to mark a turning point in the plot. As it appears from his theoretical musings, his scream device is a philosophical embodiment of Schopenhauer's Universal Will (FRIEDHEIM), rather than being informed by insight into a character's psyche. While Wagner's device has its origin in aesthetics, the translatorial scream arises somewhere else in that psychological area of in-betweenness where a translator is neither entirely herself nor a character she performs.
The Lithuanian and Polish translators seem to externalize the suffering and frustration of Faulknerian characters to whom they can relate psychologically. They enter the screaming body and thus mentally produce the visual expression of a shouting person, and perhaps the sound, its length and pitch. While the Other shouts, its beholders experience the affect in a similar way to that which the performer and spectator coperform in a theatrical space, as explained by the mirror neuron theory (FALLETTI, 2016). On the other hand, the bodily presence of the translators does not dissolve in this psychosemiotic mimesis. They may be casting inwardly their own affects vicariously experienced outside the text rather than derived from the altruistic imitation of fictional characters.
The psychology of screaming is also dual. We may scream in fear or to claim our powers. A wideopen mouth distorts the image of a horse in Picasso's painting called Guernica to depict the horrors of war. In Munch's Scream, the mouth of a man is shaped as a circle outlined in black and filled with nothingness. The voiceless distortion pierces and disfigures the face, the most human aspect of our bodies. Helene Weigel, the actress member of Bertold Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, who played the titular character in his play Mother Courage, opens her mouth in a silent scream at the sight of the body of her tortured son. Similarly, Meryl Streep performs a silent scream in her role as Sophie when she hears her daughter scream while being killed by Nazis in the movie Sophie's Choice. In all those cases, the scream-images are stripped of the physical sound, which amplifies the traumatic experiences of horror.
Screaming, however, may subvert power relations. In an unsettling movie called The Shout, Jerzy Skolimowski draws his visual inspiration from Francis Bacon's painting Head VI to depict shouting as a technique of subjection, control and exploitation. The one who masters this loud sound dominates the others. The question arises whether the translators use the verbs of shouting to emancipate the characters or themselves. By depicting Caddy's daughter Quentin as agitated and shouting in the attempt to overpower Jason, both Polish translators may have vocalized their despair in recognition of her predicament. Quentin is thus emancipated, and Jason is punished for bullying by being placed in an inferior position. Yet, on another level, the shouting may be directed at both characters, even though Quentin may evoke empathy. In Skolimowski's movie, the powers of shouting corrupt both sides. Quentin and Jason are both emotionally difficult to mirror and perform. It is suffocating to be Quentin or to see the world through the eyes of Jason whose toxic language is full of hatred towards women, black race, Jews and society at large. In view of these semiotic traps, the instinct of the selfish gene is to survive the overpowering mimesis of the Other. It is thus plausible to assume that scream-images help the translators return from the state of in-betweenness by screaming themselves back into being.

SUMMARY
The semantic modelling of the reporting verbs reveals how the translations vary in portraying fictional characters by lexico-performative means. Neither linguistic nor literary norms can explain the extent of individual variation observed in the emerging patterns, in light of which the assumption that translation is autobiographical and self-fictional is ever more compelling. Whenever emotions were manifested in the language of the translations, they could not have been assumed to belong to the fictional world alone. Literary translation may be emotionally demanding and disturbing. While the psychological effects of, for example, community interpreting have been acknowledged and largely discussed in research, the psychodramatic dynamics of literary translation is yet to be explored and understood.
Conceptualized as a theatre of the mind, translation emerges as an intimate form of psychological appropriation, self-manifestation and reinvention. Translation theatrics allows us to un-perform self-images by experimenting with our senses of fluidity, justice, guilt or pleasure. On the other hand, it provides the space for self-realization under the disguise of fictional identities. Many budding and experienced writers of the Soviet period, including Сорокa considered in this article, chose existential exile by becoming translators. Although not discussed in any depth here, the links between broader socio-historical contexts and individual biographies propose a productive strand of research into what constitutes emotional patterns in literary translation.
While semantic modelling is highly interpretative, it creates the room to explore translation from a fundamentally phenomenological perspective as a mental performance deriving its energies from autobiographical and self-fictioning imagination. The other trajectories to pursue would involve asking whether a translator's affective strategies differ in direct and indirect speech; whether and how her emotional response evolves over time; or how self-censorship is entangled with self-performance.