The Poetics of the Detective Genre as a Translation Problem

This article examines the poetics of classic detective fiction as a complex problem of literary translation from English into Uzbek. The study focuses on narrative architecture, the distribution of clues, the management of suspense, focalisation, characterisation and the language of deduction in selected works by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. The research combines narratological analysis with comparative translation analysis. Particular attention is paid to the fact that detective fiction communicates on two levels: it tells a story and simultaneously organizes the reader’s process of inference. A translation may preserve the sequence of events while weakening the evidential function of a clue, disclosing information too early or changing the tone of the detective’s reasoning. The article proposes a functional model for assessing the transfer of genre-forming features. It argues that adequacy in detective translation depends not only on lexical and syntactic correspondence but also on preserving the information structure, temporal rhythm and interpretive uncertainty of the source text. Illustrative Uzbek renderings are identified as the researcher’s own translations rather than as quotations from published editions.