Poetry: the Author’s Conception and the Translator’s Individuality

Keywords: literary translation, poetry translation, translator’s individuality, national realia. The paper is devoted to the problems of poetry translation. It focuses on the concept of a translator’s individuality. The aim of the research was to study intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors affecting poetry translation and to examine the concept of translator’s individuality manifesting itself in poetry translations. The research included studying papers devoted to poetry translation and translator’s individuality, selection of materials for further research, analyzing original poems in order to determine language difficulties, semantic and stylistic analysis of the original text units and a comparative analysis of the original texts and the translations. The material subjected to analysis included ten poems (five of them were in English and five in Russian) and two translations of each poem into Russian and English, respectively. This choice enabled us to observe the differences in each translator’s individual perception of the original text more clearly. The advanced hypothesis consisted in the fact that a translator’s individuality manifested itself most clearly in the way a translator dealt with specific language difficulties, namely with culture-specific text units and various kinds of wordplay. As a result of the conducted research, the proposed hypothesis was proven. In the paper, the primary importance of a translator’s comprehensive awareness of the author’s biography, the circumstances in which the poem was created, the events and personalities it deals with is stressed. The paper makes a contribution to poetry translation studies, summarizes the data concerning translator’s individuality, language difficulties in poetry translation and ways to overcome them.