THEY DO IT WITH NURSERY RHYMES. THE MYSTERY OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN AGATHA CHRISTIE'S DETECTIVE FICTION FROM A LITERARY CRITIC'S AND A TRANSLATOR'S PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The paper looks at Agatha Christie's thought-provoking selection of titles for her detective stories both from a literary critic's and from a translator's perspective. The fact that many titles include or allude to well-known English nursery rhymes is not a mere coincidence, but the deliberate choice of an author who created a subtle interplay in her reader's horizon of expectation, between the tension and thrilling atmosphere of a classical crime narrative and the tranquility and playful mood of a children 's poem or fairy tale. Observing the Romanian translations of Agatha Christie's original titles, we comment on situations when this interplay is replicated; when it is not, we pay attention to the compensatory strategies - if any - used by the Romanian translators.

Headnote

Abstract: The paper looks at Agatha Christie's thought-provoking selection of titles for her detective stories both from a literary critic's and from a translator's perspective. The fact that many titles include or allude to well-known English nursery rhymes is not a mere coincidence, but the deliberate choice of an author who created a subtle interplay in her reader's horizon of expectation, between the tension and thrilling atmosphere of a classical crime narrative and the tranquility and playful mood of a children 's poem or fairy tale. Observing the Romanian translations of Agatha Christie's original titles, we comment on situations when this interplay is replicated; when it is not, we pay attention to the compensatory strategies - if any - used by the Romanian translators.

Keywords: crime fiction title, detective story, intertextuality, literary translation, nursery rhyme

1. Introduction

Almost 130 years after her birth, Agatha Christie continues to be one of the best known and best-selling authors of detective fiction worldwide. Even if she wrote books pertaining to a genre that was - and still is - regarded as popular, lowbrow, her influence and authority over later generations of writers and the elements of the narrative which became, due to her contribution, invariables of this genre, undoubtedly turn her into an auteur. Moreover, as the most notable female writer of detective fiction and the creator of the best known lady sleuth as well as of the equally famous Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie gives readers and literary critics solid grounds for regarding her work as a convincing instance of écriture feminine.

Last but not least, this writer offers as many puzzles to her translators as to her general public, among other things, in the subtle tension she creates between the titles of her novels and their plot. Sometimes, she gives her books titles with a strong intertextual resonance, this highly literary connection extending its aura of authority and prestige to the thriller, which, in this way, remains not only a good example of craftsmanship, but also a piece that claims canonicity.

On many occasions, Agatha Christie intrigues her readers by giving her stories titles which contradict the very expectations of a detective story. She employs many easily recognizable lines extracted from nursery rhymes and fairy tales, a strategy which may be given a complex justification. The contrast between the serenity and innocence promised by a genre for children and the technicality of the most atrocious murder has an almost cathartic effect on the readers. Beyond the individual drama which is singled out in the story, with a victim whose violent death is avenged by a clever detective, these "world-of-innocence" additions are reassuring in the sense that a universal tendency towards order will always prevail. In this paper, we analyze several examples of Christie's titles containing nursery rhymes and elements of other texts for children, discussing whether the choices made by the translators when rendering these titles into Romanian are true to the author's original intentions or not and, implicitly, whether they are as functional in the translated versions as they are in the original.

2.All's well that ends well? The literary critic's perspective on intertextuality in Agatha Christie's titles

Many recent analysts of the detective genre insist on the contribution of women writers to the stability and credibility of this fictional mode in a century which has been very whimsical in its support and appreciation of literary movements and their representatives. After the genre was established in the 19th century as a witness of the middle-class respect for order, the early decades of the 20th century consolidated it as a male domain, in the shape of hard boiled narratives. But quite a few women writers tackled this genre and succeeded, with less stereotypical heroes, more colourful and detailed settings, or more socially sensitive subjects, in keeping the whodunit afloat and alive in the attention of readers and critics. Sally R. Munt (1994: 5) observes that, in contrast with early versions of whodunits, dominated by the "sizzling irrelevance" of female characters, in the recent years, the feminine version of the crime narrative has consistently rewritten the archetypal masculine framework.

One of the most prominent contributors to the genre was Agatha Christie, who gave a particular twist to the image of the average private investigator. Not only is Poirot a sophisticated, exotic gentleman with a slightly effeminate inclination towards fashionable elegance, refined cuisine and comfortable domesticity, but Miss Marple, in her very ordinariness, is one of the most extraordinary sleuths. An elderly, middle-class, provincial lady, with a passion for knitting, she is a singular focalizer of post-war British lifestyle, mentalities and social order. Christie was also original in exploiting an element of the plot like no other writer of whodunits had the inspiration to do. She gave up the classical murder weapons that the public was most accustomed to and replaced them with poisons - the more elaborate, the better. Seeking inspiration in her own youth, when she served as a nurse and an apothecary's assistant during the First World War, in many of her plots, Agatha Christie puts dangerous chemical substances in her characters' hands with an authentic touch. Apart from the best known poisons, like arsenic, cyanide or strychnine, murderers in her novels use plants, taken, for example, from a medieval witch's cauldron, or modern medicines, which sparked off, in her lifetime, various pharmaceutical disputes.

Just as the portrayal of her heroes and heroines and the use of poisons as murder weapons may be considered original traits of Christie's work, her creative use of titles may be said to substantially contribute to the lasting popularity of her novels among readers and to their appreciation by literary critics. It is intriguing to account for the recurrence of nursery rhymes and other keywords recognizable from children's texts in the titles of her novels and short stories. It is plausible to assume that the writer's flair made her aware of the effect created by the juxtaposition of two universes that are totally set apart - songs, poems and games, harmlessly performed by little boys and girls vs. the aggressiveness of death, charged with negative emotions and affording a glimpse into the darkest contortions of the human psyche. Stylistically, these novels and short stories could be said to display a veritable oxymoron: the promise of tranquility and happiness in the title, broken by the drama of abuse, hatred, despair and murder in the text.

If we read Agatha Christie's diary, autobiography and personal letters, we find that the universe of childhood was always on her mind. She begins her autobiography by stating that one of the most fortunate periods in her life was her happy childhood, the freedom she benefitted from allowing her to explore and exploit her potential from a very early age. She learnt how to read and write on her own, when she was only five, and was soon scribbling poems and stories for her personal entertainment. Symmetrically, in her old age, when she was already one of the most celebrated authors of her generation, she enjoyed spending time with her grandson, whose intelligence and imagination she trained by making him solve puzzles and find clues, disguised in games for children (Curran 2010, 2014).

In some of the cases when Agatha Christie's novels have titles which are taken from easily recognizable nursery rhymes or games for children, the connection between the title and the plot is that a keyword can be identified as being part of the clue that solves the murder mystery. In other cases, the title works more like an overall metaphor, a commentary on the moral of the story. Among the most famous examples in the former category, we can mention One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940), Crooked House (1949), A Pocketful of Rye (1953), Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), or the short story How does Your Garden Grow?, included in the 1974 collection Poirot's Early Cases.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is a well-known counting exercise for small children in the form of a nursery rhyme, which pairs the numbers from one to twenty, making them more easily memorable by finding rhyming associations with familiar objects, persons, animals and events in a child's daily routine: "knock at the door", "pick up sticks", "a good fat hen", etc. In her novel, Agatha Christie quotes the song in the motto and uses a line at the frontispiece of each chapter, in a story in which several murders succeed one another, giving thus the impression that a simplistic counting of these tragedies takes place. More subtly, though, the buckle in the first line of the poem is also the clue to solving the mystery, as Poirot soon realizes. The first victim is a dentist who is visited one morning by the Belgian detective and a lady with new shoes, whose buckle falls and Poirot retrieves. When he notices the discrepancy between the modern, shiny buckle and the overall shabbiness of the lady who becomes the second victim, the detective concludes the case successfully.

Crooked House comes from a poem for children, in which the repetition of the epithet "crooked" creates an amusing effect:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,

He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together in a little crooked house. (https://allnurseryrhymes.com)

The "crookedness" of the characters, setting, and objects is on a par with the suggestion of exceptionality frequently found in fairy tales. However, Christie employs the adjective "crooked" both with its first meaning - "bent", and with its secondary meaning - "dishonest", demonstrating that the household and three generations in the family of the man who is murdered have been twisted psychologically by the negative influence of a domineering and cruel pater familias. The title, reminding of the redundant adjective in the nursery rhyme, works as a premonition of the quick succession of several dubious and violent deaths in the crime story.

A Pocketful of Rye is a line from the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence, which Agatha Christie uses twice more, in a short story entitled Sing a Song of Sixpence and in one called Four and Twenty Blackbirds. This children's song tells a simple story of a king's family and household preparing to eat a pie. It projects a calm picture of domesticity which, despite the characters' royal status, evolves within the confines of predictability: while waiting to eat the pie, the king is counting his money, the queen is eating bread, and the maid is hanging out clothes. Like other poems and fairy tales inspired by folklore, this nursery rhyme contains some elements of cultural history, such as the early modern boys' pastime of hiding birds in a pie as a mock funeral, or the lavish recipes for banquets, where the piece de resistance had not only to taste delicious, but to stun the guests: a pie from which birds would fly out when served at the table certainly is such an amazing dish (Opie 1997: 468). Christie's novel focuses on a serial killer, who wreaks havoc in the household of a rich businessman where, one by one, husband, wife, and maid are killed, the murderer choosing to double his cruelty with cynicism, by leaving signs that he is literally following the song: rye is found in the man's pocket, a clothes' peg is put on the maid's nose, etc. The police, however, are blissfully unaware of the reference and it takes Miss Marple's recognition of the nursery rhyme to establish the pattern of the murders and find the culprit.

Hickory Dickory Dock is a counting exercise for children who learn to tell the time by enjoying the adventure of the little mouse running up and down the clock. The song might have been inspired by the urban legend surrounding the astronomical clock at Exeter Cathedral: as it was made of wood, its designers provided it with a trap door, for the cat to be able to hunt the mice which would have otherwise threatened to ruin the machinery (Opie 1997). In the novel, the explicit reference to the rhyme is found in the address - Hickory Street - of the boarding house where strange incidents followed by murder take place. Indirectly, the story of the mouse can metaphorically shed light on how Poirot's investigation begins, when his attention is drawn to the fact that only petty, insignificant little things are reported stolen from the boarding house.

In How Does Your Garden Grow?, Poirot has to solve the mystery of a woman's death and is unable to do so until he remembers the woman's exaggeratedly adorned garden. The question in the title is the second line of a nursery rhyme, in which a beautiful garden is described as being full of "silver bells and cockleshells" (https://kidsongs.com), just as the detective remembers the victim's garden to be. In fact, the murderer has served the victim poisoned oysters for dinner and then disposed of the shells by hiding them in the garden. The puzzling subject of the original nursery rhyme can be explained as a cryptic reference to the Tudor dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism; Mary, a key Catholic character, as related to the Virgin's cult, possibly is an allusion to the victimization of Mary Queen of Scots, a figure used by the Church of Rome as an instrument to contain the growing Protestantism in England. Other keywords related to Catholicism are the silver bells - the church bells, the shells - a symbol of Catholic pilgrimage, and even the maids - a possible reference to nuns in the monasteries which had been dissolved upon the creation of the Church of England (Opie 1997). While such overtones are absent from the modern whodunit, we may assume that the inclusion of Katrina, the Russian companion of the victim and prime suspect, is a commentary about the intolerance - be it ethnic or religious - of the provincial, average Britons in the inter-war period when the story takes place.

The latter category, that of titles that may be considered overall metaphors or commentaries on the moral of the story, includes titles like And Then There Were None, a novel initially published in 1939 with the title Ten Little Niggers, or Five Little Pigs (1942). By far the most complex case is that of Ten Little Niggers, a title which, after securing the connection with a nursery rhyme, poses some serious issues in terms of political correctness. Launched with the word "niggers" as one of its elements, the title was later transformed so that its offensive potential disappeared in the neutral And Then There Were None (1940) ("niggers" was replaced by "Indians" in the United States editions published by Pocket Books between 1964 and 1986). No matter whether the racial prejudice is expressed or not, the title capitalizes on the idea of a countdown. The nursery rhyme generally evokes actions which are only slightly disquieting and implying death in a cartoonish, fairy-tale-like style ("one choked his little self', "a big bear hugged one") or simply makes a harmless reference to a character's exit from the story ("one said he'd stay [in Devon]") (https://allnurseryrhymes.com). The only unsettling image in the nursery rhyme is the very last, in one of its variants - one of the ten little Indians hangs himself. Conversely, the novel grows, from its very beginning, into one of Christie's most terrifying psychological thrillers because of the suspense this countdown implies when ten guests are invited on an island and left there to die, one by one. An equally chilling epilogue reveals not only the identity of the murderer, but also his approach to the deed and the reason behind the countdown-game: all ten "niggers" were guilty, but, while the least guilty was killed first, without even realizing what was happening, the others were removed in an order directly related to their culpability, the punishment being thus doubled by the burden of fear, insecurity and expectation. The last guest, the guiltiest party and the one who can no longer resist the tension, commits suicide, so, in the end, "there were none", just like in the nursery rhyme, which concludes, quite bleakly: "One little Indian boy left all alone. He went and hanged himself and then there were none" (https://www.poemhunter.com).

Five Little Pigs/ This Little Piggy is another counting game for infants, where each finger or toe, shaken by the adult reciter, is a "piggy" and is personified, engaging in various activities that an infant would easily recognize: "went to the market", "had roast beef", "went wee wee wee all the way home" (https://allnurseryrhymes.com). In the novel, Poirot is challenged with solving a many years old mystery, all the evidence as well as some of the witnesses having long disappeared. There are five equally plausible suspects in the murder of a famous painter, the last - and youngest -, like the little finger who "cried wee wee wee", being not the murderer, but the reason why an innocent woman admitted to committing the crime she wasn't guilty of. The painter's wife, thinking her baby sister committed the crime out of jealousy and wishing to protect her, goes to jail and is hanged. Just like the nursery rhyme that suggests a performance-like arrangement, Poirot organizes his ideas about each suspect, one by one, and then prepares a re-enactment at the crime scene.

3.An equivalence dilemma. The translator's perspective on intertextuality in Agatha Christie's titles

The complexity and intricacy of Agatha Christie's choice of titles for her detective stories is an element to be taken into account by a literary translator, as the expectations about the content of a book should be formed from the very beginning. As long as the title of a literary work, like any other title for that matter, fulfils both a hermeneutical function, i.e. it offers (more or less obvious) keys to how the text it "labels" should be interpreted, and a "focusing" function, i.e. it helps the reader to "select from among the main elements of core content one theme to stand as the leading one of the work" (Levinson 1985: 35), the preservation of the effectiveness of these functions when the title is translated into another language is of utmost importance.

3.1. Intralinguistic translations

Before moving on to the discussion of the Romanian equivalents of Christie's titles referred to in the previous section, we have to mention that some of the English titles also have an alternative variant, which may, at least partially, count as intralinguistic translations (as long as, we shall see, these alternative variants refer to the content of the novel in a more transparent way). Examples that illustrate this type of translation are the alternative titles for Ten Little Niggers, Hickory Dickory Dock, and, One Two Buckle My Shoe.

If Ten Little Niggers carries the allusion to the counting nursery rhymes and connects to the content of the story rather allusively, in a way already explained in the previous section, its other title, And Then There Were None, devoid of the initial politically incorrect race foregrounding, seems to more clearly create the readers' expectation that somebody was going to disappear (i.e. die). The partial reproduction of Christie's Hickory Dickory Dock as Hickory Dickory Death, the title under which the crime story was later published, in 1955, in the United States, is also more efficient as far as its hermeneutical and focusing functions are concerned: the keyword "death" in this variant of the title draws attention to the fact that the story is about someone's passing away.

As compared to their corresponding initial titles, both And Then There Were None and Hickory Dickory Death suggest more directly what the readers should expect. Death in the latter title is also an indirect hint at the genre that the story belongs to. The intensity and the kind of connection to the content that the originals set is certainly diminished in the later titles, though more in the former than in the latter, where the allusion to Hickory street is preserved and the intertextual reading of the title is still possible (in fact, one may speak here of double intertextuality, as the American title is simultaneously linked to both the original, British title and to the nursery rhyme line). The alliterative pattern in Hickory Dickory Death is similar to that in Hickory Dickory Dock and thus, stylistic equivalence compensates for the diminished expectation and tension-creating potential of the title.

One Two Buckle My Shoe, also in the category of intralinguistically translated titles, was published in the United States with titles totally disconnected from the author's original intentions. The Patriotic Murders, its first American variant, chosen by the publisher in 1941, alludes to an espionage plot hidden by mysterious deaths, as well as to the fact that the novel promises not one, but several crimes. Like in the case of Hickory Dickory Death, the keyword "murders" successfully confirms the readers' expectation that the story belongs to the crime fiction genre and synthetizes the essence of the story content. The second American variant title of One Two Buckle My Shoe, the 1953 An Overdose of Death, resorts to the medical term "overdose" to allude to the murder weapon, which is poison, administered through the dentist's syringe. Obviously, the two US versions of the initial title are much less creative choices than the original counting game line. At the same time, though they are capable of conveying clearer messages as to the kind of story they name, they fail to intertwine the counting game words with the part of the story where the murder mystery is solved, due to Poirot's seeing the shiny shoe buckle. As such, this time again, much of what can be expected from the book is clearly indicated to the prospective readers by its titles, but interest in finding out about its actual content may fade, unlike in the case of the initial title which, at least theoretically, should have a stronger potential of fuelling the readers' curiosity.

Similarly, Five Little Pigs was released overseas as Murder in Retrospect, in the same year as in the UK (1942). Reconsideration of the title by the editor thus cancels the reference to the number of suspects suggested by the initial version of the title - the nursery rhyme-title. The focus shifts to the fact that Poirot is expected to solve a past mystery and the type of story becomes clear once "murder", a word in the semantic field of "death", is used.

3.2. Translations into Romanian

Agatha Christie's novels were translated into Romanian soon after their original publication - something remarkable, given the limited book market for foreign authors in Romania before 1989. Some of the most prestigious Romanian publishers in the 1960s and 1970s, like Editura pentru Literatură Universală, Editura Tineretului and Univers, translated a number of the best known whodunits (Crima din Orient Expres, Zece negri mititei, Cine l-a ucis pe Roger Ackroyd, Anunţ ul mortuar, Misterioasa afacere de la Styles, etc.). After 1990, when the book market diversified, Christie's (almost) complete works were translated by publishers like Excelsior Multi Press, Rao, and Litera. While Rao also published the writer's diary and notebooks, edited by her biographer John Curran, Litera, inspired by the 2017 film based on Murder on the Orient Express, released a second, luxury edition of her works, with cover illustrations taken from the big screen or TV adaptations.

The analysis of the translation into Romanian of the titles we have discussed so far has revealed aspects that will be summarized in the following paragraphs.

The first thing to mention is that there is variation in the Romanian titles of the same novel or short story, just as there is English, though there is no one-to-one match between the two languages. In seeking the best Romanian equivalents, translators may sometimes have taken inspiration from the American versions of Christie's titles, simplifying them, or they proposed an interpretation of the more cryptic original: O supradoză de moarte, for example, effaces the nursery rhyme reference in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, corresponding, in a word-for-word manner, to the American edition of the book - An Overdose of Death.

Conversely, for Five Little Pigs, Cei cinci purcelus i, a word-for-word equivalent, too, was considered a better option than what would have been the faithful translation of the American version, Murder in Retrospect - Retrospectiva crimei, perhaps because the translator was aware that Romanian readers are able to recognize in the animals a children's literature reference, even though, in the story of the piglets and the wolf that blows down their house, the number of animals is different (three). This option thus preserves a quite similar, though not identical, intertextual intent as the original.

Some editors directly transferred Hickory Dickory Dock as the title of the book in Romanian, a possible explanation for this choice being rather stylistic than functional: its alliterative, rhythmic quality, reminiscent of a song or a game, which, if not acknowledged as such, may be unconsciously appreciated by a reader with a subtle musical ear. Even if it takes readers knowledge of the English speaking children's world to be able to correctly decipher the intertextual dimension of the original title, the fact that the name of the street playing an important role in the book is present in the Romanian edition renders it at least partly as suggestive as it is meant to be for its source culture audience. A more direct, explicit reference to the street where the crime is committed is present in the other Romanian variant of Hickory Dickory Dock - Ceasul rău pe strada Hickory [approx. 'Rotten Luck in Hickory Street'] (2014), a transparent title that creates undoubtful expectations that the book is about some unfortunate event that happens in the street mentioned.

Casa strâmbă is a literal, word-for-word translation of Crooked House, but the allusion to the nursery rhyme is lost for the Romanian readers. In the absence of a similar children's poem in the target culture, in the other Romanian version of the title, Crima din căsuţ a strâmbă ['The Crime in the Crooked House'], the translator attempts at compensating for the lack of similar intertextuality by employing a diminutive form of the Romanian noun "casă" (the actual equivalent of the very last words of the nursery rhyme - "little [crooked] house"). Thus, she implies the smallness of the universe alluded to, in contrast both with the actual grandness of the manor where the story takes place and with the seriousness of the subject. As for the polysemantic character of the English adjective "crooked" which we mentioned earlier as being suggestive of the psychological "crookedness" of the characters in the book, it may be considered partly embodied in the Romanian adjective "strâmb(ă)" Though the primary reference of this word is to physical aspect, it may be metaphorically extended to signify distortion of the mind, too. Intertextuality apart, the equivalent suggested by the Romanian translator may be considered as functional as the English original. On the other hand, the addition of the word "crimă" ['crime'] serves the purpose of explicitation, just as "murder" or "death" did in the American versions of some original titles we have discussed. If, once more, nothing is gained on the intertextuality side, the presence of the added word in this Romanian title renders it much more explicit than the other translated title.

Un buzunar plin cu secară, the word-for-word translation of A Pocketful of Rye, creates no intertextual connection in the Romanian readers' minds, but the phrase can be interpreted literally rather than metaphorically, as rye is actually discovered by the police in the first victim's pocket. Similarly, Cum îţ i cres te grădina?, the equivalent of How does Your Garden Grow? obtained by direct, word-for-word translation, establishes no intertextual connections. However, as long as the garden plays a key role in solving the crime mystery, it loses its stylistic value, but remains an appropriate choice. Thus, the hermeneutical, focusing, as well as anticipatory functions of both these titles are fulfilled.

We have deliberately left Ten Little Niggers to be discussed last. In its case, the Romanian equivalent - Zece negri mititei - is the most faithful of all target language versions mentioned in this section, both in terms of wording and in terms of intertextuality. The nursery rhyme in English has been so well-known that it has given birth to analogous rhymes in other languages, Romanian included. Thus, in Romanian, like in English, Zece negri mititei is the very beginning of the counting rhyme that tells the story of how, of the ten initial boys, only one was left. However, unlike in the "gloomy" English version that seems to best connect with the content of the novel, the Romanian ending is much brighter - this very last boy does not die; he marries a girl and makes her the mother of ten little niggers all at once: "Un negru mititel s-a-nsurat c-o fată/Fata i-o făcut pe loc zece negri-odată" ['One little nigger got married to a girl/The girl gave birth to ten little niggers at once']. This, perhaps, explains why the Romanian translators have never thought of providing an equivalent for And Then There Were None.

4.Conclusion

As can be seen from our analysis, the translation of Christie's titles representing quotes from nursery rhymes and children's games is not always an easy task. In the instances that we have talked about, intertextuality is, most often, absent from the Romanian translations. When the intertextual option was not considered, no adaptation to mirror the original was attempted, most probably because, if the title had been changed (i.e. adapted rather than translated in the strict meaning of the word), the content could not have been that easily altered to connect with it. Discrepancy between "the label" and "the product" would have arisen in case of no match between an adapted title and an unadapted content. The absence of intertextuality does not mean, however, that the Romanian titles were inappropriately chosen; in most cases, they were good choices, as we have shown (in some instances, this was the result of the compensatory translation strategies resorted to). In other words, by their choices, the translators demonstrated that they did not lose sight of the fact that, as Nord (1995) suggested, any piece of information a title intends to convey has to be comprehensible to its addressees and compatible with their culture-specific world knowledge.

Given the popularity of Christie's novels worldwide, special attention should be paid to translating their titles (not to mention their content). Considering that "a work differently titled will invariably be aesthetically different" (Levinson 1985: 29), it becomes crucial to be careful when choosing the equivalents of the original titles so as not to guide interpretation of the text on the wrong path and negatively influence its aesthetic value in the target language(s) and culture(s).

Sidebar

Dana Percec, dr. habil., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the West University of Timişoara, Romania, where she obtained her MA in British and American Studies and her PhD in Philology. She teaches Early Modern and Victorian literature, literary translation and literary theory. She has published several books on Shakespearean drama, British culture, and literary genres. She is also a columnist in the Romanian literary and cultural press.

E-mail address: [email protected]

Loredana Pungă, dr. habil., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the West University of Timişoara, Romania. Her domains of expertise are English lexicology, applied and cognitive linguistics and translation studies. She holds an MA in British and American Studies and a PhD in Philology from the university where she currently teaches. Her publications include books and book chapters in thematic volumes. She is (co)-editor of three volumes published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and a member of the editorial board of three academic journals. She has published over forty articles in her areas of research, both in Romania and abroad.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

Curran, John. 2010. Agatha Christie. Jurnalul secret. Bucureşti: Rao.

Curran, John. 2014. Agatha Christie. Crime în devenire. Secrete din arhiva personală a Agathei Christie. Bucureş ti: Rao.

Levinson, Jerrold. 1985. "Titles" in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (1), pp. 29-39.

Munt, Sally R. 1994. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London and New York: Routledge.

Nord, Christiane. 1995. "Text Functions in Translation: Titles and Headings as a Case Point" in Target, 7 (2), pp. 261-284.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie. 1997. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

https://allnurseryrhymes.com

https://kidsongs.com

https://www.poemhunter.com

Titles analysed:

Christie, Agatha. 1939. Ten Little Niggers. London: Collins Crime Club.

Christie, Agatha. 1940. And Then There Were None. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

Christie, Agatha. 1966. Zece negri mititei. Bucureşti: Editura Meridiane.

Christie, Agatha. 1940. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.London: Collins Crime Club.

Christie, Agatha. 1941. The Patriotic Murders. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

Christie, Agatha. 1953. An Overdose of Death. New York: Dell Books.

Christie, Agatha. 2010. O supradoză de moarte. Bucureşti: Rao.

Christie, Agatha. 1942. Five Little Pigs. London: Collins Crime Club.

Christie, Agatha. 1942. Murder in Retrospect. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

Christie, Agatha. 2010. Cei cinci purceluşi. Bucureşti: Rao.

Christie, Agatha. 1949. Crooked House. London: Collins Crime Club.

Christie, Agatha. 1999. Crima din căsuţa strâmbă. Bucureşti: Excelsior Multi Press.

Christie, Agatha. 2013. Casa strâmbă. Bucureşti: Rao.

Christie, Agatha. 1953. A Pocketful of Rye. London: Collins Crime Club.

Chrsitie, Agatha. 2014. Un buzunar plin cu secară. Bucureşti: Litera.

Christie, Agatha. 1955. Hickory Dickory Dock. London: Collins Crime Club.

Christie, Agatha. 1955. Hickory Dickory Death. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

Christie, Agatha. 1995. Hickory Dickory Dock. Bucureşti: Excelsior Multi Press.

Chrsitie, Agatha. 2014. Ceasul rău pe strada Hickory. Bucureşti: Litera.

Christie, Agatha. 1974. How does Your Garden Grow? London: Collins Crime Club.

Christie, Agatha. 2015. Cum îţi creşte grădina?. Bucureşti: Litera.