Holden s Voice Between Salinger s Language and Halasa s Translation

Yemenat

Mohammed Al-Mekhlafi

During a qat session at my friend Abdulmajed Al-Turki’s home, we talked, as we usually do, about novels and the books we had read.

He asked me if I had read the English version of The Catcher in the Rye by the American writer J. D. Salinger. I told him, “Not yet.” He said that he had read the Arabic translation more than once, that it was one of the best novels he had ever read, and that he wanted to know what Holden Caulfield’s voice was like in the original language.

After I returned home, I looked for the English edition and began reading. I expected to encounter highly literary language, especially since the novel was published in the early 1950s, but I found the opposite: the language was very simple and smooth. As I read, I felt as though I were sitting across from a sixteen-year-old speaking to me spontaneously. He seemed to complain a lot, judge things quickly, repeat certain phrases, and move from one thought to another without any clear order.

The first thing that drew my attention to this was the way he introduces his story from the very beginning, when he says:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.”

It seems that Salinger chose this style because it reflects Holden’s personality, allowing him to tell the story spontaneously, in the everyday language spoken by New York teenagers at the time. For example, when he talks about Pencey, he says: “Strictly for the