Ivan Turgenev as a translator of William Shakespeare

The article discusses an important problem of the perception of William Shakespeare's works translated by Ivan Turgenev. For the first time, the author raises and resolves the issue of translation reception of the English playwright in the context of Turgenev's creative work. The study researches small poetic fragments from Shakespeare's tragedies which Turgenev translated to insert them in his own artistic-critical (and epistolary) prose. Throughout Turgenev's live, he made several short and independent versifications of Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Tragedy of Macbeth and King Lear. The last one is the most complete translation. Turgenev inserts a fragment from Act 7 Scene 6 into his article about S.T. Aksakov's “Notes of a Hunter of Orenburg Province” (1853). Turgenev turns to the tragic episode on the sea cliff, particularly to the cliffed coast panorama Edgar described. He translates this scene in prose, saving the graphic form of a poetic verse. The Russian text almost copies the lexical and syntactic structure of the English original. Turgenev carefully selects the Russian equivalents; however, he also inserts some changes which make the Russian version more lyrical. One of the ways to reflect Shakespeare's text clearly is to insert significant marks of the literary tradition to the Russian version. In Turgenev's work, details from Shakespeare's artistic system become the important marks of the Russian (or wider - the world) verbal culture. The bright peculiarity of Turgenev's translation is “epic equivalence”: with the help of the aesthetics of the ordinary, the writer renders the immensity of Shakespeare's character. Turgenev's translations of two verses from Hamlet are equally representative (Act III Scene 1: the ending of the monologue “To Be, or Not to Be”). The writer aspires to render the mightiness and universalism of the Prince of Denmark character implicated in his dramatic nature. By translating in prose the famous monologue of Macbeth (Act V Scene 5), which represents a double metaphor of life, Turgenev intensifies its lyrical and philosophical sounding. Based on the analysis of separate fragments translated by Turgenev, the author of the article tries to discover Turgenev's trace in the prosaic versification of the tragedy Hamlet, which was poetically translated by N.Kh. Ketcher (1873). The author also discusses the possible influence of Turgenev on the translation principles and individual ideas of A.A. Fet and A.V. Druzhinin. The aesthetics of genre synthesis becomes the principal feature of Turgenev's translations. Lyrical philosophical and moral psychological generalization is also significant in the Russian writer's works.

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