CRITICAL VIEWS ON TRANSLATION AND THE UKRAINIAN CULTURE OF THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES

Abstract

Enlightenment added the issues of the language system and the reader’s perception to the debate over translation problems. The Word was no longer a Divine mystery, but it was materialized in specifi c features, which were critically penetrated by translators. The contribution of Ukrainian translators (Teofan Prokopovych, Havrylo Buzhynskyi, Symon (Petro) Kokhanovskyi, Hryhoriy Polytyka, Petro Pidhoretskyi) to the framing of the Russian Empire instead of their homeland stimulated the discussion of translation as a way to defi ne tasks and specifi c features of searching for and fi xing up the own identity of a nation. Petro Lodiy’s main translation principle was to use all the registers of his native language so as to express the content of the original. On the basis of Hryhoriy Skovoroda’s texts, it is not possible to precisely determine the features of his translation term system due to lack of contexts, although he used fi ve Latin terms designating translation. It is not entirely clear if one should understand them as the hypernym “verto” / “converto” and the hyponyms “transfero (translator)” / “exprimo” and “interpreto (interpres)”, or as a coherent paradigm of “transfero (translator)” / “exprimo” – “interpreto (interpres)” – “verto”, which can be subject to overlap the paradigm of John Dryden (1680): “metaphrase” – “paraphrase” – “imitation”. Romanticism enriched translation discussions with the subject of linguistic identity: the mentality of a nation is refl ected in its language, and the reader lives – feels, perceives, understands – according to the linguistic norms, and by them only (Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Petro Hulak-Artemovskyi, Yakiv Holovatskyi, and later Oleksandr Potebnia and Panteleimon Kulish). Thus, untranslatability was advanced to the forefront of translation theory. From the mid-19th century, translation criticism incorporated the practice of comparing texts and commenting on the results of this operation, which boosted the search for the means of interpretative justifi cation. Back at this time Ukrainian scholars (Orest Novytskyi, Mykhailo Maksymovych, Pavlo Hrabovskyi) began applying the contextual and historical / etymological methods of semantic analysis. The translators (Mykhailo Starytskyi, Borys Hrinchenko) were managing to develop the lexical meanings of the Ukrainian language for its conceptual enrichment, and their views served as criteria for defi ning a successful correspondence in Ukrainian-language translations. Keywords: translation theory, translation criticism, translation quality assessment, translatability.