Multiplicity of voices: A Bakhtinian reading of John Crowley's the translator

This dissertation aims at exploring and analyzing the self/other relationship in the contemporary American writer John Crowley?s The Translator by Bakhtinian concepts and phraseology. In other words, this dissertation is a reading of The Translator through the perspective of Bakhtinian polyphony, dialogism, heteroglossia, and a positive unfinalizability. The self/other relationship does not only evoke a bodily difference, but rather includes the differences of language, culture, and ideology. The bond between the two characters, Christa and Falin, representing America and Russia during the Cold War years, who are their opposites in terms of gender, age, education, language, culture, ideology, personal and public history and experience, constitutes a dialogical relationship based on poetry, by which they reconstruct each other forever. Both Christa and Falin bring their own experiences and voices to this partnership of poetry and translation which eventually leads to the (re)construction and (re)shaping of their own selves. According to Bakhtin, such a relationship is dialogic embodying a positive image of unfinalizability and the self/other relationship lasts as long as the voices of each self echo in the other?s imagination even in the absence of the participants. The Translator demonstrates the polyphonic, dialogic, heteroglot, and unfinalizable nature of the short-lived relationship between Christa and Falin in interlinguistic and crosscultural exchanges.