Poetic Translation as a Hermeneutic Dialogue of a Translator with the Source Text (On the Analysis of Multi-Temporal Translations of M.Yu. Lermontov’s “Cossack Cradle Song”)

Abstract

The article discusses the comparative hermeneutic analysis of the semantic-derivational worldview of the translators who render the classical poetic text in different historical periods. The relevance of the study is stipulated by the increased attention to the sociocultural determination of meaning generation within the framework of the cognitive-and-discursive paradigm that dominates in the modern community of linguists and translators. Cossack Cradle Song and its five translations into German carried out in different periods served as the practical material. The article aims to establish the features of multi-temporal Russian-German translations of the poem and the source text as a single semantic space that reflects the worldview of the author of the original text, variably explicated by different translators through the language of the target text. According to the research hypothesis, poetic translation reflects the translator’s hermeneutic interaction with the original text, which generates the personal meaning of the translated text. The findings of the linguo-stylistic analysis of the Cossack Cradle Song at the semantic, meta-semiotic, and meta-metasemiotic levels, reveal that the compensation technique plays the leading role in the process of translating the poetic text studied in this article, contributing to the achievement of expressive and impressive equivalence of the original and the translation in the process of explication of invariant content-factual and content-conceptual meanings, as well as the subjective-personal determinism of translation decisions, which does not contradict the intentions implied by the author of the source text.

Keywords

• translation
• m.yu. lermontov
• multi-temporal translations
• hermeneutics
• russian
• german
• linguo- stylistic analysis
• compensation technique