THE RUSSIAN SONGS BY ANTON DELVIG: THE PROBLEM OF PRESERVING NATIONAL SPECIFICITY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

The article focuses on the problem of reproducing the national specificity of a text in translation. The object is the “Russian songs” by Anton Delvig, stylized as folk songs. They were created with the use of poetic means of Russian folklore. The subject is the peculiarities of reproducing national specificity, typical of Delvig’s poems, in English translations. The following texts were analyzed: translations of “Nightingale”, “Sang and sang a bird...”, “Ah, you, night...”, “Tis not autumn’s drizzly rain...”. The translations were carried out both by English and Russian native speakers. The main objective of the research is to determine what artistic means can convey the national features in a text. The tasks of the study were: to describe conveying metrics; to outline the key words of the poem, describe discrepancies in their translation, еxplain, why the variant, chosen by a certain translation, is possible or impossible in translating Delvig's text; indicate how the translators reproduce the artistic means of Russian folk songs in English. The continuous sampling method, the descriptive one, the componential one, the conceptual one, the contextual one, that of collocation were used in the course of the study. The study showed that translators preserve the national specifics of the original by creating a stylization in their own language. In the case of Delvig’s “Russian songs” the palette of artistic means, conveying national specificity, was developed in the course of a century and a half. It includes archaisms, repetitions and parallelisms, re-creating formulas or creating analogues within the receiving culture. An important means of conveying the national specificity of the text is its rhythm. Accurate conveyng of the rhythm pattern helps the reader to get the same impression from the translation as from the original, and can even mask errors in the reproduction of content.

Keywords

• translation
• national specificity
• Russian literature
• folklore
• Russian song
• Anton Delvig
• stylization
• poetic means
• “Nightingale”