Two Riddles" of Friedrich Schiller in V.A. Zhukovsky's translation

The poetic riddle is a specific genre which reflects the cognitive and linguistic picture of the world. In poetry, the enigmatic structure strongly influences the reader at all levels of the text. Frie-drich Schiller, the great German romantic, showed special interest to the genre of the riddle. For the play "Turandot, Prinzessin von China", in which "the fate of the hero depends on solving three riddles", Schiller wrote 13 original verse riddles, two of which were translated by V.A. Zhukovsky for his pupils and were published under the title "Two Riddles" in the Muraveynik collection, Issue 3. The aim of this article consists in studying V.A. Zhukovsky's translation and pedagogy strategies on the example of riddles about the rainbow, about the month and the stars, a complex analysis of which is carried out for the first time. The comparative analysis of the original and translated texts was done at the level of the content considering the particular features of the riddle as a genre in which, according to genre canons, implicit and explicit plans of expression must cooperate. The semantic analysis was supplemented with the prosodic expertise during which the structural analysis of meter and rhythm of the original and translated texts was carried out. All these facts allow saying about the objectivity of the obtained data. It is set that Zhukovsky carefully, though not always accurately, reproduced the metaphysical picture of the universe represented in Schiller's riddles. The rainbow in it, as well as in the original, is likened to a bridge from pearls, the sky to a pasture, stars to sheep, month to a shepherd. But he supplemented all these enigmatic images with new features, significantly expanded the system of metaphors, which was due to the educational focus of his translations. Zhukovsky not only transformed the lexical-semantic structure of the prototype through numerous mythological associations, but also violated the equivalence of the translation, changed the rhythmic-syntactic and compositional structure of the German riddles, introduced a complex system of enigmators, which complicated the search for answer. All these transformations were made to ensure that his pupils and readers learned to appreciate the metaphorical depth of the Russian poetic word, the characteristics of the Russian mentality and the beauty of the surrounding world became better known. The rhythmic handwriting of Zhukovsky's riddles is extremely individual. He uses all models of iambic tetrameter to enhance the expressiveness of translation and thematic transitions. The imagery structure of the two riddles convinces us that the Russian poet significantly changed the idea of the genre of the poetic riddle. Without a doubt, we can say that V.A. Zhukovsky introduced the enigmatic landscape into the broadest context of Russian lyrics in the first half of the 19th century.

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