The Alchemist Sparknotes
The Alchemist: Coelho fights, and wins, the battle of effective reader engagement within the textual arena alone
In Paulo Coelho’s work, The Alchemist, a young boy learns to listen to his heart and trust the world around him in pursuit of living out his dreams. Originally written in Portuguese, an in-depth study of the textual arena reveals Coelho’s engagement of the reader, in both the original language and translations, function as a fail-safe. Whether or not a certain reader finds the book’s concepts agreeable, the simplicity and coherence of the textual arena and choices in language, like the use of the colloquial, cause him or her to find inspiration and thought provocation within its pages.
The main concept throughout The Alchemist is found in the form of sage advice to the shepherd boy: “The Soul of the World is nourished by people’s …show more content…
The Alchemist was written in Portuguese and has been translated into some 70 languages since its original publication in 1988. Any translation of an original text falls short of transliteration, or the exact retelling of diction, syntax, meaning, and cultural idiosyncrasies into the translated version. For that reason, any sensible overview of Coelho’s work would factor in the intangible but important differences between the original and translated works. Contrary to most rhetoric techniques in this piece, readers are put at distance from the author on much looser footing upon recognizing they are only indirectly reading Coelho’s meticulously selected words. For it is the arrangement of those words that creates an artistic impression, much like the arrangement of paint on canvas. Therefore, even the most accurate translations attempt to reprint the original artwork but – inevitably – in a slightly different hue. Nonetheless, the English language translation of The Alchemist is priced in gold regarding its rhetorical effects on
In Paulo Coelho’s work, The Alchemist, a young boy learns to listen to his heart and trust the world around him in pursuit of living out his dreams. Originally written in Portuguese, an in-depth study of the textual arena reveals Coelho’s engagement of the reader, in both the original language and translations, function as a fail-safe. Whether or not a certain reader finds the book’s concepts agreeable, the simplicity and coherence of the textual arena and choices in language, like the use of the colloquial, cause him or her to find inspiration and thought provocation within its pages.
The main concept throughout The Alchemist is found in the form of sage advice to the shepherd boy: “The Soul of the World is nourished by people’s …show more content…
The Alchemist was written in Portuguese and has been translated into some 70 languages since its original publication in 1988. Any translation of an original text falls short of transliteration, or the exact retelling of diction, syntax, meaning, and cultural idiosyncrasies into the translated version. For that reason, any sensible overview of Coelho’s work would factor in the intangible but important differences between the original and translated works. Contrary to most rhetoric techniques in this piece, readers are put at distance from the author on much looser footing upon recognizing they are only indirectly reading Coelho’s meticulously selected words. For it is the arrangement of those words that creates an artistic impression, much like the arrangement of paint on canvas. Therefore, even the most accurate translations attempt to reprint the original artwork but – inevitably – in a slightly different hue. Nonetheless, the English language translation of The Alchemist is priced in gold regarding its rhetorical effects on