Imagery in Translation

EXERCISES FOR COMPARISON

• Read about Emily Dickinson and her poetry. Read some other poems by her.

• Read the poem attentively and study the meanings of the words and their symbolic value.

• Study the rhythm, metre and rhyme scheme of the poem. What impression does the sound and intonation of the text pro­ duce on the reader?

• Study the stylistic devices used to create the imagery of the poem.

• Identify the key-words of the text and play with them; try to use synonyms or direct meanings.

• What words of the text can we omit or transform? How will the text change with those transformations?

• How would you imagine the character of the poet from this text?

■ Comment upon the images and moods of the poem.

• Change the poem into prose and analyse the difference.

• Translate the poem word for word. Bear in mind all pos­ sible lexical and grammatical variants.

• Reconstruct the system of stylistic devices in accordance with Russian stylistic norms.

• Arrange a pattern of rhymes for the Russian text.

• Fill in the lines with fitting words within the rhyming frame. Watch possible and necessary changes in the vocabulary, grammar and style of the text.

• Read the result aloud to see if it produces a similar rhyth­ mic effect to that of the source text.

• Compare the results with the other translation versions and comment upon them.

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Task for translation:/ never saw a moor

I never saw a moor;

I never saw the sea;

Yet know I how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God, Now visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.

EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION

• Study the poem, its contents, imagery and metric pattern.

• Translate the poem word for word; identigy the most im­ portant words that are found in the strong rhythmic positions.

• Study such words as moor, heather, heaven, chart. What Russian substitutes are possible for them? Consider their com­ parative expressive value and associative force.

• Reconstruct the rhyme scheme of the text in Russian; se­ lect rhyming words as close to the source pairs as possible.

• Complete the lines with words and arrange them syntac­ tically to retain the logic and metre of the source text.

• Read the results aloud to hear how the text sounds in com­ parison with the source text.

• Complete the translation and check its emotive power.

• Discuss the results.

• Look for some other translations of the poem and com­ ment on them.

Imagery in Translation

POETRY UNIT5:

TRANSLATING ROBERT FROST INTO RUSSIAN

Introductory Notes

The American Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963), is one the most popular and prominent poets of the 20^th century. His f volumes of poetry, A Boy s Will and North of Boston, appearec England. Upon his return to New England in 1915 he settlec New Hampshire and lived the life of a poet and a farmer. Fa came to him after his collection of poems New Hampshire (191 which brought his first Pulitzer Prize and was followed by tw ty other volumes. The 1940s were especially productive, and published seven books of poetry within a decade. On the surfa his life may seem monotonous, uneventful like any other fai er's existence with its seasonal cycles, agricultural concerns ; quiet evenings when all the family gather either on the porch round the fireplace, far from the noise and bustle of big cities, even the least attentive reader will easily feel the dramatic t sion and affectionate fire in his poetic lines.

Frost is one of those poets whose works first attract reader through their apparent simplicity and colloquial diet only to puzzle him later with the depth and sophisticated, alrr metaphysical logic of the verse. American and European reac admired him for the blend of colloquial and traditional. In gland he was considered a late Romantic, maybe, the last of line, while for Americans he is definitely a realist, truthful to smallest details of reality where the grass is green, and the sk blue, and the man lives his own ways. Yet beneath the com lore and wisdom lay a more troubled, rebellious spirit, and feeling of harmony became more complicated and less comj hensible. Frost wrote quite a few short poems with traditic

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iification, but his major contribution was the so called blank ;e, traditional for English drama, which he "inherited" — and iernised — from as far back as Shakespeare. His most famous ms were written this way, including "The Death of the Hired n" (1914), "Birches" (1916), "Directive" (1947), and many ;rs.

The predominant imagery in his poems is based on nature; e are trees, farms, pastures, forests, the sky, the snow, the rain the sun. Yet the image of nature is not the only content of his try. It is much more philosophical and contains a lot of allu-is to the great poetry of the past, as well as to contemporary nts and problems.

Quite frequently the cosmos itself appears in his magic lines be form of mysterious white spaces and endless paths beyond horizon. Those cosmic images may turn out to be very far n the warmth of human life:

And yet with neither love nor hate, Those stars like some snow-white Minerva's snow-white marble eyes Without the gift of sight.

Sometimes his vast landscape is invested with Demons, spir-elves and spells that bring something dark and dangerous into peaceful world, some evil, agony, danger and death. That dark r, loneliness, storms and -winds bring us back to those ancient is and times that existed "before the age of the fern." This dan-ous and passionate Frost lives side by side with the peaceful ner whose major concern is to complete the harvest in time.

Frost has been translated into Russian by many poets and dished since 1962 when he visited our country. To cite a fa-us poet and translator, Viktor Toporov, "Frost was translated those who should not have translated him,"¹ which means that nany cases some of the magic power of Frost's verse has been t in Russian. The poem under discussion, "Fire and Ice" (1920), been translated at least ten times. The first translation was

¹ Роберт Фрост. Неизбранная дорога. - СПб.: Кристалл, 2000.