Imagery in Translation

Мой день беспутен и нелеп

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Мой день беспутен и нелеп: У нищего прошу на хлеб, Богатому даю на бедность,

В иголку продеваю — луч, Грабителю вручаю — ключ, Белилами румяню бледность.

Мне нищий хлеба не дает, Богатый денег не берет, Луч не вдевается в иголку,

Грабитель входит без ключа, А дура плачет в три ручья — Над днем без славы и без толку.

Translated by Angela Livingstone and Elaine Feinstein:

My day is dissolute, absurd,

I ask the beggar for the bread,

I give the rich man poor man's coins,

I thread a needle with a ray,

1 trust the burglar with a key,

I rouge my pallid skin with bleach.

The beggar doesn't give me bread, the rich man doesn't take my coins, the sunbeam won't go through the needle, the burglar enters without a key, and now this fool dissolve in tears over the senseless, gloryless day.

Translated by David McDuff:

My day is dissipated, mad.

I ask the beggar for the bread,

I give the rich man pauper's pennies.

With light I thread my needle's eye, I give the burglar my door's key, With white I rouge my face's paleness.

The beggar will not give a thing,

The rich man spurns my offering,

The light will not go through the needle.

The thief gets in without the key, The idiot woman weeps her three Streams over a day absurd, ignoble.

EXERCISES FOR COMPARISON

• Read more about Marina Tsvetayeva and her poetic works.

• Study the metre, rhyme and phonics of the poem and compare
their functions with what is done in English translation. Which expres­
sive functions of the form have been reconstructed and which lost?

• Study the choice of words and compare them with the
English substitutes; see which English words do not compensate
for the intersemiotic distance between the two languages.

• Study the imagery of the poem and stylistic devices used
to convey it.

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• Compare the stylistic features of the source text with those
of the translated versions.

• Comment upon the grammatical problems of translating
of the poem and the ways the translators have solved them.

• Read the translated texts aloud to see which of them
sounds more expressive in English and closer to the nervous
rhythm of the Russian poem.

• Try to translate the poem on your own and comment upon
the results.

Task for translation:

Моим стихам, написанным так рано

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Моим стихам, написанным так рано, Что и не знала я, что я — поэт, Сорвавшимся, как брызги из фонтана, Как искры из ракет. Ворвавшимся, как маленькие черти, В святилище, где сон и фимиам, Моим стихам о юности и смерти — Нечитаным стихам! —

Разбросанным в пыли по магазинам (Где их никто не брал и не берет!), Моим стихам, как драгоценным винам, Настанет свой черед.

Imagery in Translation

• Study the syntax of the poem and comment on its expres­
sive functions.

• Study the imagery of the poem and comment on the sty­
listic devices used to convey the poetic task.

• Experiment with the Russian text changing its metre,
rhyme, vocabulary and stylistic features. Consider the results.

• Formulate the basic objective for translation of this poem
and follow the principles.

• Translate the Russian text into English word for word.
Consider the result.

• Reconstruct the rhyme scheme of every stanza in English
using words as close to the original rhyming pairs as possible.

• Complete the lines so as to preserve the main words, sty­
listic units and syntactic structures of the poem in English.

• Read the resulting text aloud to compare its sound with
the source text.

• Complete the translation and discuss the results.

EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION

• Study the rhythm, metre and rhyme scheme of the text in
their expressive functions.

• Study the choice of words and their poetic functions in
the text.

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Практикум по художественному переводу