Foreign inclusions in Edgar Poe's prose and their perception in Russian translations

The paper is devoted to a topical issue of modern literary studies, particularly, to the literary bilingualism in Edgar Allan Poe's prose and in its Russian translations. Most Russian translations of Poe's short stories seem to be incomplete, as some freedom and inconsistencies in them led to elimination of meaningful fragments. Their cultural adaptation is hardly to become an alternative either. All units of different languages in the authentic prose by Poe constitute a particular system, and the reader is influenced by absolutely all foreign components the author used. The aim of the paper is to analyze the units of different languages in Poe's prose. The paper also deals with the Russian perception of Poe's short stories. Here are attributed the results of the study on how Russian translators of different periods were introducing the complex of foreign inclusions. The empirical material includes the authentic stories by Poe of the 1830s, and one text of 1844. The comparative linguistic and literary analyses, as well as the methods of the history of literature, were applied to achieve the goals of the study. The research included two phases: 1) the study of Poe's original prose of the period under discussion; 2) the analysis of the Russian reception of the material. The following conclusions have been made. In the period from 1832 to 1837 not only the genre of satire was being formed by Poe, but also the stories of horror and psychological stories were emerging. Sometimes the line between the stories of horror and parodies was barely discernible. The nature of the changes and the inconstant number of foreign inclusions indicate that Poe was looking for a clearer genre classification and thematic ranking of his works. The foreign languages units were also aimed at creating the most acceptable form to convey the motive of extraterrestrial interference and the ideas about the essence of human existence. The study has revealed that the problem of incomplete translation of foreign units in Poe's texts into Russian has not been fully solved yet. In the 19th century, due to the prevailing biographical and psychological approaches, this issue was not paid close attention to. Meanwhile the analysis of modern translations has revealed the deficit in the reproduction of all the intricacies of the author's ideas, visualized in the text with the help of foreign inclusions. To achieve the effect of the original short stories, as well as to make their genre specificities vivid, it is necessary to develop strategies for the complex and systematic transfer of foreign language units found in Poe's prose by means of the Russian language.

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