Poetry Translation in the Cross-cultural Context (Russian – English Perspective)

Abstract

The article explores matters of poetry translation from a cross-cultural perspective. Translation of poetry has traditionally been viewed predominantly from the point of view of the translated text fidelity to the original. However, a much more fascinating question is what kind of cultural transfigurations take place when a poetic text is translated from one language to another. This article shows that most significant changes can be found at the levels of themes, key words, genre, stylistic devices, grammar, punctuation, intonation, prosody (rhythm and rhyme) and phonosemantics. The theoretical points are illustrated with contrastive analyses of Russian poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Lermontov, Gavriil Derzhavin and their English versions.