Introductory Notes

Imagery in Translation

POETRYUNIT1: TRANSLATING WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE INTO RUSSIAN

William Shakespeare was and is the most mysterious au-of the brilliant Elizabethan age in English literature. From ifetime to the present day his name, the dates of his birth and h, and the very authorship of this or that work attributed to have been disputed. Some scholars stand firmly on the Strat-ian position and say that the great Shakespeare was born and. in Stratford-on-Avon (1564-1616), did not have any univer-education, spent a few years in London as a second-rate actor ie Globe Theatre, during which time he managed to write the dramatic works in the history of European literature and a sury of the most delightful poems.

Some would still dispute this tradition and say that Shakes-re was the greatest mystification of the time perpetrated by a jp of aristocratic poets. They would mention a variety of les, from Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex (1566-1601) to;er Manners, the Earl of Rutland (1576-1612), and bring ar-lents for the co-authorship of Elizabeth Sidney, Countess of land, in the works that go under the name of Shakespeare¹. h a line of argument may be quite strong when applied to the of great poets, adventurers, explorers and rebels. Suffice it to ill a few names, like Sir Philip Sidn ey, Christopher Marlowe,

' И. Гилилов. Игра об Уильяме Шекспире, или Тайна Великого икса. - М.: Международные отношения, 2000; Марина Литвинова, ичная воительница, потрясающая копьем / Столпотворение, 2001, N° М. Д. Литвинова. Задачи, стоящие перед переводчиками, в свете пос-шх открытий в шекспироведении / Вторые Федоровские чтения. Уни-:итетское переводоведение. Выпуск 2. - СПбГУ, 2001.

Ben Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others who liked to play both with life and death, with art and poetry, as well as with time and space.

Whoever their real author was, Shakespeare's Sonnets oc­cupy a place apart among his works. It was for them that Shakes­peare was called "mellifluous and honey tongued" by his con­temporaries, though, later, rejected and sharply criticised by John Dryden and George Stephens in the 18"¹ century only to be resur­rected in the age of Romanticism.

First published in 1609 as a complete sequence of 154 son­nets, nowadays, in terns of the number of researches and popular­ity amang readers, the Sonnets are second only to Hamlet. Some features of Shakespeare's poetry make him sound quite unusual for his time. His style was more direct and natural than that of many of his contemporaries, who paid tribute to bookish stylistic devices and conventional imagery. The best of Shakespeare's son­nets are filled with a sense of reality.

The basis of his imagery, like in most poems of the English Renaissance, was comparison. According to the aesthetics of the era, a subject should not be named directly, or even described; it should be expressed through some likeness between it and any oth­er subject thus making a conceit to be guessed. Shakespeare was particularly skilful at that and especially resourceful in inventing ever new similes and metaphors. Some of them were quite high-flown, others were almost prosaic. Death and life, the sun and the moon, Time and Love, the friend and the beloved, all of these eter­nal topics would appear in his sonnets in a diversity of forms, mo­tions, colours and relations. The inner world of his lyrical hero is affectionate, bright and somewhat sad. He plays with the reader; he asks questions to puzzle him and gives tricky answers to obscure the obvious. Many hints, allusions and enigmatic formulas have remained quite a mystery to the present day. A thoughtful reader may find his own answers to the mystery of Shakespeare's sonnets, as have many of his translators.

Shakespeare's sonnets usually follow the classical English

pattern (less sophisticated than its Italian counterpart): 14 lines of

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Практикум но художественному переводу

iambic pentameter arranged in three quatrains and a concluding couplet. Deviations from the standard form are rare. What is spe­cial about his sonnet is its paradoxical development. According to the sonnet rules, a sonnet should be devoted to a chosen theme, which had to be formulated in the very first line, while the rest of the poem was a path throuth to the conclusion. Shakespeare au­daciously broke the rules, making his thoughts run in contradic­tory manner, and his concluding couplets are very often unex­pected.

Considered as a whole, Shakespeare's sonnets remind one of a romance in poetic letters; we can find certain cycles in them devoted to one and the same topic, written in a particular mood, or concerned with one image.

The history of translation of these sonnets into Russian is very long and complicated. The sonnets were not translated into Russian before the 19^th century, the best translations were done in the 20^th century. The most famous and widely published transla­tions are the work of Samuel Marshak (1930s), who translated the complete set of all 154 sonnets. Boris Pasternak tackled only four of them but his translations are, as always with him, quite individual, subjective and expressive. One of the latest (but not the least) Russian translators of Shakespeare is Sergey Stepanov, a writer, poet and translator from St. Petersburg, who has re-searcheed the chronology of the Shakespearean sonnets. Stepanov, an ardent supporter of the Rutlandian version of the Shakespeare mystery, has done much to identify the part of Elizabeth Sidney, Duchess of Rutland, in the sonnets².

The sonnet under consideration is known as Sonnet 73 (the true chronology is questionable, though). It is one of the best and, probably, most lyrical of the cycle. The poet creates a cosmic landscape in words comparing his life first to the late autumn, then to the fading light of sunset, and at last to the failing fire. The final couplet of the sonnet is a paradox in itself, while it also

³ С. Степанов. "Жалоба влюбленной" - шифр к порядку Шекспи-ровых Сонетов // Перевод и межкультурная коммуникация. - СПб.: ИВЭ-СЭП, 2002.

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Imagery in Translation

contradicts the theme of the poem. Death is there, but there also love. Between this death and this love, stand two human soul alone in that vast and cold universe, fragile and yet capable < resisting the power of it.

The three Russian translations we include here view th poem as if from different positions, thus providing different v sions of it. You may try to detect the translator's position wi regard to the original poem in each version. The one by Marsh* is marked as it were by a well-arranged cosmic view, wise ar unhurried. Human, visible and almost palpable is the realm tran lated by Pasternak. Tragedy and irony dominate in Stepanov version through the choice of words and nervous prosody. In tl Task for Comparison we shall come back to all these and oth differences to compare and evaluate them.

A general problem for translating the Sonnets is the arch ic diction: one has to decide whether to follow the elevated sty in Russian or to use contemporary style with only subtle hig flown components. The first approach will make the text sour solemn and remote in time (as we can observe in Marshak's tran lation), while the second admits that Shakespeare himself w much ahead of his time in both poetic diction and imagery, ai not archaic at all (in Pasternak's and Stepanov's versions we c< find the second principle in action).

Chosen as the task for translation, Sonnet 102 is more tran parent, if such a description is appropriate to Shakespeare's рое ry at all. Its imagery is not very sophisticated, though again mark» by irony. Translating it, one may come across such problems the poetic name Philomel for the nightingale, which further e hances the difficulty with the feminine gender of the image English, whereas соловей is masculine in Russian. Neither is easy to transfer the array of such key words in the sonnet as lay hymns, song, pipe, music altogether into Russian. Difficulty m; be caused by such archaic forms as doth and burthens, and n only by the forms but also by their functions, too. We have decide whether to translate them in a way that reflects the poel

2 3;ik. № 50 \

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tion of the early 17^th century or to present them in contempo-y Russian as turns of phrase natural and not especially poetic Shakespeare's time. As to the basic metaphor of the text, it is у important to balance between such terms as merchandize 1 sing, and to retain the parallel between doth publish every ere and burthens every bough.

sk for comparison: nnet 73

SONNET 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

ревод Б. Пастернака:

To время года видишь ты во мне.

Кргда из листьев редко где какой,

Дрожа, желтеет в веток голизне,

А птичий свист везде сменил покой...

Во мне ты видишь бледный край небес,

Где от заката памятка одна,

И, постепенно взявши перевес,

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