Imageryin Translation

A typical framing formula begining an English folk tale will include once and there as tokens of the other world's space and time. It is more or less easily translated by the similar Russian forms жил-был, однажды, когда-то. But a special feature of English folk tales is the exact naming of a place, like a small farm near Kentchurch in Herefordshire, the elements of which may be purely imaginary (not in this case, though: Kentchurch is situated about halfway between Hereford, county town of Herefordshire, and Abergavenny) but sound very much like real ones. The Russian folklore tradition avoids any exact naming of places, it is always uncertain or may include such marks as на краю деревни, у леса, в одной деревне, etc. Thus, when transliterated into Russian, imaginary toponyms sound very much like real places, which makes such a story sound less like a fairy tale and more like a legend or even a true story of obscure date.

The border between this and that world, that is, between cosmos and chaos, often takes the form of the hedge, a feature well-known in England but not in Russia. When a boggart (bog­gard) seeks to cross a hedge, he has to overcome a real obstacle, whereas in Russia the role of the hedge is played by a simple boundary-strip, межа, which is most often merely a mark on the surface of the land, or a stone on the border. If we-translate the hedge as живая изгородь, in Russian it sounds too descriptive; загородка, забор, изгородь would be rather strange for a field, being more appropriate to a vegetable-garden. This cultural gap creates a certain shift in the comprehension of a story in transla­tion.

Welsh folk tales are usually more romantic and include very ancient features, like spirits of lakes and mountains, fami­ly myths and relationship between human and supernatural be­ings. Their style is more lofty and elevated, and includes rhymes and poetic diction. To balance this, a story is well supplied with "precise" geography: every imaginary lake, mountain, village, county, let alone hero, has its own name that sounds even more

Welsh than a normal one. Abundant use is made of double con-

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Практикум по художественному переводу

sonants and unusual letters (11, dd and ff are separate letters in Welsh), which make such names sound very old, strange and mythical. To match this in Russian, we may use variants; for example, in the parish of Treveglwys in Russian may become в округе Тревеглис, while a cot commonly called Twty Cwm- rws will give хижина, известная под названием Тут-и-Кумрус. The main hero of the Welsh tale (see Task for Trans­lation) Gronw may be translated in different forms: Гроно, Грону, Грон or some other way.

Task for comparison:

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