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 TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES
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 translationhave varied in Russia, but not greatly, from the beginning ofthe nineteenth century up to the present day. The main concept that formed thebasic principle of poetic translation can be foundin the works of Katenin who wrote about Gnedich's translation of