Spineyeva O.V.

Luhansk East-Ukrainian National University named after V. Dahl

Philological Faculty

The Integral Concept of Poetic Translation in the Context of Modern World Outlook

All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech

Robert Frost

The article touches upon the problems concerning the process of poetic translation in the context of the contemporary world outlook, the analysis of the images in the initial text and its poetic translation on the example of Robert Frost’s poem “Stars”.

Translation is a process and the result of turning a text from one language into another, which means expressing the same by the signs of a different language. Bearing in mind that every sign has two planes: the plane of expression and the plane of content – the essence of translation could be described as changing the elements of the plane of expression while the plane of content remains constant. Choosing method greatly depends on the subject of research. The term “poetic translation”, associated with translating poetry, presupposes some liberties in the choice of the target language and substitutes for the source language elements. It involves an unpredictable area of transformations in the target language through the perception of the translator. Many consider poetry the most difficult genre to translate, given the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the target language. Hence poetic translation is a result of the world outlook imagery. The translator faces not only linguistic but also extra-linguistic problems which make the process of translation more difficult. Rhymes, puns and poetic meters, euphony or dissonance, highly specific cultural references, humor, concepts commonly known in one culture but generally unknown in another culture generally require the addition of an explanation, which is hardly possible in poetic translation.

The intercultural task of the integral poetic translation may be expressed as follows: to translate a literary work from a language to another language means to lose as little as possible of its original cultural authenticity while preserving as much as possible of its intercultural value. In the other words, the aim is to reconstruct the imagery of the source text as a system into the target culture by means of the target language and literary traditions.

The American poet Robert Frost is one of the most popular and prominent poets of the twentieth century. Frost is one of those poets whose works first attract the reader through their apparent simplicity and colloquial diction only to puzzle him later with sophisticated almost metaphysical logic of the verse. American and European readers admire him for the blend of colloquial and traditional. In England he was considered a late Romantic, maybe, the last of the line, while for Americans he is definitely a realist, truthful to the smallest details of reality. The predominant imagery in his poems is based on nature; there are trees, farms, forests, the sky, the rain and the sun. Being a great philosopher and a unique master of a word, he keenly remarked that “a poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words”.

The poem under consideration, “Stars”, contains allusions to the great poetry of the past as well as unsurpassed description of the beauty surrounding the author and his deep touching and philosophic feelings towards its Majesty Nature. We made an attempt to translate this poem into Russian. The version of translation is disposed below.

Stars (1) How countlessly they congregate O’er our tumultuous snow, Which flows in shapes as tall as trees When wintry winds do blow! - As if with keenness for our fate, Our faltering few steps on To white rest, and a place of rest Invisible at dawn, - And yet with neither love nor hate, Those starts like some snow-white Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes Without the gift of sight.

Звезды (2) Не сосчитать скопленья звезд на небосводе, И все скрипучим снегом из-под небес Украшено причудливо в природе А зимние ветра волнуют лес! И будто волею судьбы такою Мы делаем несмелые движенья К привалу, словно снежному покою, Едва заметному в час пробужденья И все ж в страстях нам не сгореть Ведь наши белоснежные следы, Словно Минервы взор среди зимы, Богини мудрости, лишенной дара зреть.

To compare the version of translation with Frost’s poem “Stars” it’s necessary to study the meanings of the words in the poem, to reconstruct their symbolic value, to study the metric pattern of the poem, its rhymes and stylistic devices, to check the equivalence.

As for the structure of the poem, R. Frost uses regular tail rhyme and cross-rhyming in the first two stanzas except the third line of the first and the second stanza and circular rhyming in the third stanza. We also use regular tail rhyme and preserve the same types of rhyming in all the stanzas. The poet applies to a “perfect rhyme” in the first stanza (snow - blow) and in the last stanza (white - sight). The first lines of each stanza also rhyme (hate – fate - congregate).

According to phonetic similarity assonance of the poet’s version (1) may be marked in the following words: hate – fate, snow – blow. As we may judge from the structural peculiarities of the poem under consideration, its rhyme scheme is rather complicated and specific. R. Frost’s poem is composed in iambus. We preserved it in the version of translation (2) in order not to lose the original poetic phonation and the imagery of translation on the whole.

In the first line of the poem the author uses the emphatic construction beginning with the word “how” which makes the thought, passed by the author, burst out from the very beginning. We use the infinitive “не сосчитать” which equally communicates the emotion of astonishment and admiration by innumerable stars. The first stanza of the poem contains a kind of contrast between the beauty of the “tumultuous snow” in the light of stars and the cold “wintry” wind walking among the trees. The same aspect is preserved in the version of translation (2).

The second stanza is much more philosophical. The last two lines of the poem are dedicated to Minerva and this comparison of people’s starts with her “marble eyes” form the logical center of the whole poem. Minerva is not occasionally mentioned by R. Frost, as she is an embodiment of wisdom. We also applied to this metaphor and used the method of concretization calling her the goddess of insight, that wasn’t done by the poet but is essential in the definite context.