Enjambements in Rainer Maria Rilke's Poetry and Their Peculiarities in English Translations

The article is devoted to the analysis of enjambements in Rainer Maria Rilke's (18751926) Sonnets to Orpheus and the examination of their rendering into English. The material for the analysis includes the lyrical cycle Sonnets to Orpheus and its English translations, made by more than 25 English-speaking translators from 1936 to 2007. The system of methods consists of the method of a comparative linguistic analysis and the method of a comparative analysis of the original and its translations. The article examines the views of Russian researchers on the nature of enjambements; the peculiarities of their use in the lyrical cycle Sonnets to Orpheus; a comparative analysis of English translations of the first sonnet of the first part of the cycle and the identification of the degree of reconstruction of enjambements as one of the elements of the author's innovation of the poetic syntax in the Sonnets. When creating Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke did not adhere strictly to the classical reproduction of the Italian, French, or English sonnet. In Sonnets to Orpheus, the poet showed new possibilities of a traditional sonnet both at the level of form and at the level of content. One of the structural innovations of the form of this lyrical cycle as a deviation from the norms of construction of a sonnet is the use of line and stanza hyphenations in sonnets. The two parts of Sonnets to Orpheus include 55 poems. Rilke used original enjambements in 28 sonnets from the 55 sonnets of the cycle. This fact may attribute this stylistic device to a very important structural feature of this poetic work, which should be recreated by means of the English language. As an example of the widespread use of enjambements as a stylistic device in a single sonnet of a cycle, the fifth sonnet of the first part is analyzed. In this sonnet, there are both line and stanza enjambements: 4 lines (2 transfers in the first and second quatrains) and 2 stanzas (the first transfer is between the first and second quatrains, and the second is between the first and the second tercets). The conclusions of the analysis are the following. The English translations of the above mentioned sonnet were performed by 16 British and American translators. As the comparative analysis showed, Rilke's enjambements were completely recreated in three of the sixteen translations of the fifth sonnet, i.e. those translated by J. B. Leishman, L. Norris (in cooperation with A. Keele), and Gr. Good. These translators adequately conveyed the expressive and pictorial functions of Rilke's sonnet. They not only recreated the breaks in the syntactic connection of the same type and the same compositional form of Rilke's original, but also tried to convey the semantics of the words of the fifth sonnet. The rhymed translations of J. B. Leishman, L. Norris (in cooperation with A. Keele), and Gr. Good quite adequately recreated the innovative rhyme, rhythm and metrics of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.

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