Imagery in the translations of the gazelle Nizami «Amade bud» («Came») into Azerbaijani and Russian

Abstract

The subject of scientific research is the textual analysis of the translation of one of the most famous gazelles by a brilliant Azerbaijani poet Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209) "Amade bud" ("Came") from Persian into the Azerbaijani and Russian languages. The article discusses in detail the imagery created in these translations and their adequacy to the original, as well as a comparative semantic analysis of each beit; it interprets some situational free interpretations of the original made by translators. In each beit are analyzed the concepts on which the transmission of images is built in translation into Azerbaijani and Russian which in poetic translation include size, rhythm, a number of poetic figures and other artistic means. The study was carried out with the use of theoretical-literary and comparative-analytical methods and at the junction of literary criticism and translation studies. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the research approach applied by the author in comparative analysis allows us to identify methods and means of rendering the high imagery of the primary source in translations of the classical gazelle into Azerbaijani and Russian by recognized poets-translators − Jafar Khandan (1911-1961) and Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989), which makes an undoubted contribution to the development of the basic translation problem − the adequacy of literary translation. Naturally, the concept of imagery in the three texts is expressed differently, due to the typological differences of the compared languages. The Azerbaijani language is agglutinative, while the Persian and Russian languages are inflective. Accordingly, in the comparative analysis all the linguistic subtleties of each language are taken into account in the process of poetic imagery creation as well as their adequacy. Also, a detailed textual conceptual comparative analysis of the poetic text of one gazelle in three languages − the original Persian and translated Azerbaijani and Russian − allows us to draw an important conclusion that an adequate translation fiction text is undoubtedly a work of art in itself that has a long-term aesthetic and substantive value, which makes the position of a number of translation scholars insisting on the need of updating translations irrelevant.