Translating death: the personfication of death in translated fiction

Among natural phenomena and abstract concepts, Death is one of the best represented in art and literature. Death has many names and many faces which change from culture to culture as so does its gender. Due to this wide variety of representations, an issue in translation might arise when a translator is asked to translate a character who already has a pre-conceived portrayal in the target culture. At the very least, grammar related issues will definitely make an appearance since, as Roman Jakobson mentions on his essay On Linguistic Aspects of Translation (1959), “Der Tod”, German for death, is a male gendered noun while in Russian the word for Death is feminine thus creating two very different personifications. The same happens when translating from Germanic languages into Romance languages and vice versa. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate how the issue regarding the gendering of Death tends to be solved through an analysis of literary texts and its respective translations, all of them with Death as a character.