Article

Name: E. E. Cummings in Russian: an analysis of the poem’s «anyone lived in a pretty how town» translations

Authors: M. A. Tarasova

Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: The article analyzes five Russian translations of the poem by E. E. Cummings, one of the most prominent avant-garde poets of the twentieth century. In the last decade in Russia we have seen a growing interest in his poetry, which increases the number of transfers. Author of the article attracted the fact that there are several translations of the poem «anyone lived in a pretty how town», made by modern poets-translators V. Britanishsky, D. Kuzmin, M. Stepanova, Ja. Probshteyn, S. Boychenko. The author analyzes the specific translation solutions, which took the authors to convey agrammatism of Cummings’ poetry in Russian. Comparing these five very different poetic texts with the original, the author tries to reveal the strategy of translation of each poettranslator. Considered translations demonstrate different attitudes of their authors to the language norm. According to the degree of clarity and focus on the recipient these translations can be arranged in descending order of the characteristics: Probshteyn’s translation most clear, transparent, made with the installation on the reader, the next is Kuzmin’s translation, then Stepanova’s one, the most «free» attitude to the language normally shows Boychenko’s text. A special case is Britanishsky’s translation that carries the grammatical complexity of the original to lexis and word formation. His translation in the grammatical relation is normative, but at the level of vocabulary translator takes a step toward the occasionality that weigh down the text and makes the translation marginal. The original, which has several translations, enters the interpreters arsenal and becomes a way of establishing communication between the translated texts. There are ternary relations in which the translation is an instrument of cultural transfer.

Keywords: translation, poetic language, strategy of translation, grammatical anomality, language norm, cultural transfer

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