CHARACTER OF MUSICIAN IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S SHORT STORIES AND THEIR UKRAINIAN TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of musician’s character in the short stoires by Kazuo Ishiguor, a well-known British writer, and their translations into Ukrainian. The paper aims to define author-specific cognitive and stylistic features of construing the character of musician by depicting his verbal portrait, interpreting his behaviour, emotions, and actions through the lens of human personality. The analysis resulted in singling out and systematising a set of key concepts and conceptual metaphors, pertaining to the characters of musicians in Ishiguro’s five short stories included in “Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall”. Among these concepts are LIFE, LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, MARRIAGE, MUSIC, SUCCESS, CAREER, etc. Within the range of conceptual metaphors that find their manifestation in the texts under analysis prevail those, which are associated with various facets of life, love, and music. As a result, several kinds of conceptual metaphors were identified: global, e.g., LIFE IS MUSIC, conventionally used (local), e.g., MUSIC IS INSPIRATION, paradoxical, e.g., LOVE IS А FAREWELL, mirror-like, e.g., LIFE IS MUSIC– MUSIC IS LIFE, and the author’s (idiosyncrаtic) ones, e.g., MUSIC IS A NIGHTFALL. Though recreating literary characters by other languages should embrace all textual levels, the translation of musicians’ verbal portraits in the Ukrainian version of Ishiguro’s short stories under study is mostly affected by their syntax. The choice of syntactical constructions is to a great extent determined by the personages’ professional sphere as part of respective cultural context. Thus, with regards to musicians’ characters the stories under translation abound in grammatical transformations − transpositions: (і) word transposition; (іі) transposition of phrases and word-combinations; and (ііі) transposition of elements within a complex sentence − and substitutions. Кeywords: character of musician; conceptual metaphor; literary translation; verbal portrait; grammatical transformations.