Imagery in Translation
H
er
early leaf's a flower,But
only so an hour. Then
leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So
dawn goes down to day. Nothing
gold can stay.
EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION
Study the form of the poem, its metre and rhyme scheme.
Compare the words in the rhymed pairs to assess their enhanced expressive value. Try to make "a text within a text" based on the rhymes.
Study the style and imagery of the poem to reproduce them in Russian. Which of the image patterns may be a problem for translation? Why?
What equivalents can you find for Eden? Which of them will fit the text in Russian?
Think over the meaning of the word gold in the context of the poem to decide on its Russian equivalent.
Translate the text word for word and consider the amount of poetic information lost.
Select and arrange rhyming words in Russian to make a frame for the text.
Complete the lines with words according to the metric pattern reproducing as much of the source logic and imagery as possible.
Compare the result with the source text from the emotive point of view.
Read both texts aloud to compare the way they sound.
Complete the translation and discuss the result.
Look for other translation versions of the poem and com ment on them.
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Практикум
по художественному переводу
POETRYUNIT6:
TRANSLATING T S. ELIOT INTO RUSSIAN
Introductory Notes
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) belongs to the same generation of poets as Robert Frost, though both his life and poetry differ greatly from others. T. S. Eliot graduated from one of the best American universities, Harvard, in 1910 and moved to Europe. He continued his education at the Sorbonne (Paris) and Merton College, Oxford. In 1927 he became a British subject and a member of the Anglican Church. He lived all his life in London where, eventually, he joined Catholic Church. Eliot established himself as a major figure in English literature in the 1920s. The Nobel Prize (1948) was awarded to him for progressive experiment in modern poetry, though Eliot was not just a poet but also an outstanding playwright, essayist and critic.
His first published poem, which brought him immediate success, was The Love Song ofj. AIfred Prufrock (1915), a piece of lyric poetry, irony and philosophy, impregnated with allusions, overt and covert quotations, and a keen sense of time. It was followed by his major poems The Waste Land and The Hollow Men and many others, which struck a new note in modern poetry, satirical, allusive, cosmopolitan, at times really lyric and elegiac. In 1925 he became a director of the famous publishing house, Faber and Faber, where he published a series of modern poets who represented the mainstream of the modern movement in poetry (W. H. Auden, G. Barker, E. Pound, etc.). From that time on he was regarded as a figure of great cultural authority. His mature poems, The Journey of the Magi (1927), Ash- Wednesday (1930) and especially Four Quartets (1935-42), reflect his pilgrimage in the world of spiritual values. He describes himself as "classical in
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