Imagery in Translation

functions are more often than not incompatible. The personag­es lose their national identity and sound rather strange under their foreign names and cultural ways.

Drama presents difficulties of its own: here the factors of time and accent become decisive and subtle stylistic details turn out to be psychologically important. This may ruin the dramatic effect when overlooked in translation. Thus, an extra dimension is added to the written text, and that is its performability. What seems quite passable in the text of a novel, may sound too long (or too short), too literary (or too colloquial), too foreign (or too local) on the stage or screen. For instance, in choosing a substi­tute for the English expression You are crazy! one may consider such possibilities as, Вы (ты) спятил (и)! Вы с ума сошли! Да ты просто псих! Ненормальный (сумасшедший, чокнутый)! Это настоящее безумие! - etc. Any of them may suit an appropriate context but with the stage direction "sharp­ly" the words in bold type are preferable.

Prose folklore, such as fairy tales, reguires special trans­lation due to its strong fixed phrase component. Formulas of fairy time and space, names of popular personages are very close to idioms in their set structures. One can use such formulas out­side a fairy tale, and they will preserve both their sense and fairy-tale flavour indicating the presence of a fantastic element in the thing described. In Russian, the formulas за тридевять земель or долго ли, коротко ли not only denote imaginary space or time in a fairy tale but are often used as headlines or ironical remarks in the mass media. Thus they represent highly expres­sive and multifunctional idioms, while their usual English coun­terparts in a kingdom faraway, sooner or later lack the neces­sary idiomatic expressiveness. The very topography of the fairy­tale world differs in the various national traditions; the Russian дремучий лес, though substituted by the English dark forest, does not coincide with it idiomatically, as it includs such com­ponents as непроходимый, непознаваемый, воображаемый,

древний and also опасный, наводящий дрему- none of which

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Практикум по художественному переводу

is inherent in the English "dark forest." It is not for nothing that Russian fantasy writers readily use the idiom in its many mean­ings, while J. R. R. Tolkien felt the need to invent special names for his dangerous fairy-tale spaces, like Dead Marshes or Mirk-wood.

To sum up the views on the theory of poetic translation, we must concede that while the problems of translating poetry have been more thoroughly studied, many of them still require research and closer examination. In general, there is an obvious need for systematic study of drama translation where no serious theory yet exists besides very few serious works and comments on the­atrical translation and fewer still on cinematic translation. Works on folklore translation are so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is the field where the national character of the text is the strongest while the principles and traditions of translation are the weakest, something that results in numerous aberrations in the choice of substitutes and in the general misin­terpretation of the source mythical world, its chronology, topolo­gy and inhabitants.

This brief review of the problems that the translator en­counters when dealing with the overt and covert obstacles in­volved in the creative process of trying to counterpoise the means of expression in two languages makes it obvious that these prob­lems are still innumerable. For some this is grounds for proclaim­ing the fundamental untranslatability of subtle and intricate liter­ary texts and calling on people to read them in the original. Nev­ertheless, a great amount of data as been accumulated in both the theory and practice of all kinds of poetic translation.

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SECTION I: TRANSLATING POETRY

POETRY TRANSLATIONTECHNIQUES

So many problems of translating poetry have been discussed for centuries that one should just follow some of the good useful or bad and tricky recommendations of predecessors. One of the best, to my mind, is that provided by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which asserts, "... the life blood of translation is this — that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one." Presumably, we know what a good poem is and how it differs from a bad one.

Whatever the versification system, each poem is unique. It has an individual flavour and, even within a most conservative traditional metric pattern, is marked by a rhythm, pitch and inflection of its own. It is a pointless exercise to pursue absolute fidelity to the original, but it is necessary at least to attempt to preserve as much as possible of the source's principle of poetic arrangement and imagery. English translators usually pursue a middle coursw, balancing "between formal demands and seman­tic accuracy" (said Stanley Kunitz, in Translating Poetry), with an evident bias towards the latter. The Russian school of poetry translation demands both, being probably even more concerned about the formal accuracy. So what may we take for safe landmarks on the perilous path of poetry translation?

Ideas of now to approach of poetic translation have var­ied in Russia, but not greatly, from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the present day. The main concept that formed the basic principle of poetic translation can be found in the works of Katenin who wrote about Gnedich's translation of

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Практикум по художественному переводу

theIliad in 1822: «У великих авторов форма не есть вещь произвольная, которую можно переменить, не вредя духу сочинения; связь их неразрывна, и искажение одного необходимо ведет за собою утрату другого. Древние греки писали экзаметром; вопрос, как их переводить, решен: обязанность сохранить в переводе сей классический размер»¹. One of the most prolific and brilliant translators Russia has pro­duced, Vasily Zhjukovsky, was quite certain about the principles of poetic translation: «Стихотворцев надлежит, по моему мнению, переводить стихами: прозаический перевод стихов всегда есть самый неверный и далекий от оригинала. Одна из главных прелестей поэзии состоит в гармонии; в прозе она или исчезает или не может быть передана тою гармониею, которая свойственна поэзии»². Considering a translator's "duties," Zhukovsky emphasized the impression that the translated text must produce on the reader: according to him, it had to be as close to that of the original as possible. The effect of similar if not identical harmony is a matter of not only the subject but also the form of the text or, rather, the unity of both.

When a translator is to translate a poem, he may put it into one of two main categories according to its form. One is so-called "free verse," or vers libre; the other is classically structured po­etry, that is, verse based on regular metre, rhyme and stanza pat­tern. However, it is evident that the impact a free verse poem's of on the reader differs greatly from that of traditional poetic harmony. It appeals to different points of perception: while a tra­ditional poem speaks more to the emotions, vers libre tends to appeal to the reason rather than to the heart. Vers libre has proper­ties of its own, which makes the reader seek other things in such a text than he would in a sonnet. Besides, vers libre itself requires sophisticated decisions and technigucs in translation.

If you start with a vers libre poem, it may seem easy to

¹П. А. Катенин. Размышления и разборы, с. 188-189.

² В. А. Жуковский. О переводах вообще и в особенности о пере­ водах стихов / В. А. Жуковский. Эстетика и критика. - М.: Искусство, 1985, с. 283.

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