«A SONG ABOUT TSAR IVAN VASILYEVICH, THE YOUNG OPRICHNIK, AND THE VALIANT MERCHANT KALASHNIKOV» BY MIKHAIL LERMONTOV: RECONSTRUCTION OF THE NATIONAL AND HISTORICAL COLOUR IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of preserving the national and historical colour in the English translation of «A Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, the Young Oprichnik, and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov». The Lermontov’s poem is a strong manifestation of the national character of his oeuvre. Realia makes a culture-specific background of the song; the translator’s task is to translate them adequately into a foreign language.The paper compares four translations of the poem into English done by English and Russian translators in the XXth century. The author of the paper singles out the main realia found in the text of the poem: ethnographic, social and political. Then the author analyses the ways of realia translation into English by different translators from the viewpoint of preserving the national and historical colour of the original. The author points out the most productive ways of translating Russian realia into English. They include replacement, transcription and transliteration,omission. However, translators do not always manage to convey the national and historical colour of the poem. This is due to the differences in the source and target languages, the genre of the folk historical song, the poetic form of the work. J. Kurnos uses replacements more often than other translators. Translators aim to fill in the missing connotation with the help of context, choice of archaic and stylistically coloured words. In some cases, the meaning of words is revealed in footnotes, which allows an English reader to more fully understand the Russian realia. In general, all the translators in one way or another were able to reconstruct the national and historical colour of the poem and introduce the Russian poem to an English reader.