Imagery in Translation
PROSE UNIT 5:
TRANSLATING f. R. R. TOLKIEN INTO RUSSIAN*
Introductory Notes
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was Pembroke professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925-1945) and Merton professor of English language and literature, Oxford in 1945-1959. He was a reader in old English literature and published a number of philological studies, such as Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics, and many others. Though his chief interest was in the literary and linguistic tradition of the English West Midlands, especially in Beowulf, Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he attained to world renown among the reading public as the author of two literary works, The Hobbit (1937) and its sequel, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Posthumously, The Silmarrillion (1977) was published, in which the pre-history of his mythological fantasy was worked out.
In these books a Christian professor of philology unique myth lore creats by. The most striking feature of this mythological world of the Middle-earth, where hobbits, elves, dwarves and other fairy creatures live side by side with human beings and other personages, is that it never mentions any god, or a sacred one whom they would worship, whereas all mythologies have a kind of worshipping in their basis. In a peculiar way the Christian values and principles interlace with such heathen personages as elves, but the enemy is overt and he is Sauron, King of Darkness.
Tolkien's fantasy books have become most popular among the readers of the world and aroused many followers and imitators, researchers and critics. Actually, he did not only create his mythic world but also the kind of fiction, which in his book Tree
and Leaf he himself qualified as "a fairy story" and differentiat-
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Практикум
по художественному переводу
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it from "fairy tales" as such. By Tolkien, a fairy story is
anattempt
to create the "second world," or the alternative reality,
based
on the great human instrument, which is fantasy.
For Tolkien, the world fame began in the Sixties, the time when the superindustrialised society got afraid of its own progress, and the theory and practice of escapism came into life as vivid as it was world-wide. Tolkien's Middle-earth, his ideal of fellowship against the Enemy, his lovely characters of the Old People, dwellers of the fantastic land of the Middle-earth, seemed very attractive as a place to escape to. By Peter. S. Bingle, Tolkien's Middle-earth is "a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world."
In Tolkien's world the reader finds a diversity of places and creatures whose names may be quite unusual and sound like a spell or an echo of a dream. Most Russian translations appeared in the seventies and eighties, the first book to be translated was The Hobbit. The translated books have brought to life a few waves of Russian fairy stories and fantasy books, about Frodo Baggins, his friends and relatives among them.
It is not an easy task at all to translate the book with a great many strange names, poems, quotations in some non-existing languages, the etymologies that cannot be found natural in Russian, i. e., the etymological association between hobbit and halfling, which is deeply rooted in the history of the English language. Another problem is in the narrative rhythm of the fairy story swaying from the common and colloquial to the high-flown and mysterious, from the funny and comic to the passionate and dramatic, where each hero has his own voice and melody in the fantastic symphony of the whole.
The texts of this unit present the first part of the trilogy Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. Whereas the whole trilogy is a chronicle of the Great War of the Ring, which occurred in the Third Age of the Middle-earth, The Fellowship tells the reader about the perilous journey of Frodo Baggins, appointed the Ring-bearer by the great council, and his eight compan-
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