THE RENDITION OF DAISY BUCHANAN’S VOICE IN THE BULGARIAN TRANSLATION OF FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY

Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel The Great Gatsby has remained in history as an example of a scathing criticism of American materialism, revealing the emptiness of the American Dream in a unique and inimitable way. The quintessential flapper Daisy Fay Buchanan, the central female character representing the so-called “old rich” during the period, seems to be characterized remarkably in the narrative by the features of her voice. As the rendition of Daisy’s voice is an important factor in building the image of the heroine, the present study focuses on its Bulgarian translation. The employed methodology is to excerpt fragments of the source text that give information about Daisy’s voice and trace their translation in four published Bulgarian versions of the novel provided respectively by the translators Nelly Dospevska (1966), Emil Minchev (2013), Stanimir Yotov (2013), and Pavel Boyanov (2013). The main idea is to identify the means of translation employed by each translator, discuss briefly some specific interpretations, and establish any differences in the understanding of the source text by the different translators. The study has demonstrated that due to the peculiarity of Fitzgerald’s writing style, the translators often needed to reshape or explain the phrase in the target language.