Author’s ontology in poetic text through time and space: not to overlook when rendering

The paper deals with the issues of recreating time and space features of a poetic text in translation. Their shifts are analyzed within the paradigm of individual artistic and aesthetic views of a translator as an interpreting intermediary. A.S. Pushkin’s lyrical poem “Brozhu li ya vdol’ ulits shumnykh...” and its seven English translations of various periods have made the material under study. The situation of multiple translations helps disclose important implications and leads to a more profound understanding of the author’s ontology, unless the author’s time and space are distorted by translators’ neglecting the details of text constituting elements: the rhythm (as a rapport of elements at various text levels), the correlation of grammatical forms, its syntactical organization etc. These features’ analysis is not an ultimate goal, but the means of understanding how the temporary correlates with the eternal, the universal relates to the individual, the external corresponds to the inward in the author’s creativity. Structurally, the poem is built on a wide range of binary oppositions: street - temple, to wander - to enter, years - hour, birth - death etc. But there is one constant: the thought of death which glues all the stanzas. Thus, the fluctuating world of oppositions finds its first center of stability, and it is not that everything on earth is subject to decay, but the human thought, which acts as a power well able both to create and to destruct. A range of other stylistic means (anaphoras, metaphors and rhythmically compared elements) binds together and opposes the time and space of a lyric hero to both the earthly and the universal. One of the central images, the oak, a symbol of eternity, turns out to be as well the poetic synonym of “eternal vaulting”, the indication of death, as it is juxtaposed with it by phonetic means and related word roots in attributes. Being deaf to such indications, translators have failed to render Pushkin’s paradoxical finding: only life though doomed to decay is eternal, and eternity is dead. The poem falls into two parts, the first rendering the present of the lyric hero, and the second giving no indication of his further existence through persistent avoiding of any verbs in the first person, though they are abundant in the first one. Thus, the evidence of a lyric hero’s new, non-existent state, when he refuses of his will to cognate the universal laws and appeals to external forces. Having neglected these signs, translators have created a soliloquy of a pondering mind thinking of itself as existing in the future. When the constructive complicacy of a text is its main feature, translators have to be very attentive to its spatial and temporal parameters rendered through rhythm, tense forms, metaphors etc., as they substitute the logical forms of elements’ and ideas’ interrelations. Neglecting spatial and temporal elements, which are the meaning-making ones, leads to distortion of functional equivalence in translation.

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