Gothic Metaphors in Translation: Strategies for Preserving Literary Imagery

Abstract

This study explores the translation of Gothic metaphor from English into Spanish in Part II: The Legacy of Magnus of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985), with particular attention to the strategies used to preserve the stylistic features of the source text. Rice’s writing relies heavily on evocative and sensory imagery, through which metaphor contributes to the representation of horror, immortality, and decay. The analysis draws on Peter Newmark’s taxonomy of metaphor, including dead, cliché, stock, adapted, recent, and original metaphors, as well as his seven proposed translation strategies. A qualitative, descriptive, and comparative methodology is applied to examine the selected corpus and determine how translation choices influence the reproduction of Rice’s poetic and Gothic style in Spanish. Preliminary findings indicate that original metaphors tend to retain their source-text imagery, while stock metaphors and clichés are more frequently adapted or reduced to their underlying meaning. Such choices may preserve semantic content while slightly reducing the expressive richness of the original Gothic imagery. By examining these patterns, the study contributes to discussions on literary translation within genre fiction and considers the applicability and flexibility of Newmark’s model when dealing with the stylistic demands of contemporary horror literature.