Poetic Deviation and Cross-Cultural Cognition

Abstract

The breaking of linguistic rules is one of the features of literary language, especially in poetry, that can be described in terms of varying or multiple meaning potential. Thus, while various forms of deviation in the language of poetry are generally considered to be a device par excellence for creating new modes of expression, they often also account for divergent analysis and interpretation of poetry. When it comes to poetic translating, deviations in rules of form and in meaning in the original text are regarded as the major stumbling block to achieving equivalent stylistic effects or even as presenting insolvable problems in translation. However, from a different angle of vision, the experience of poetic translating can become a powerful method of understanding the cognitive processes of making sense of deviant expressions. Since translation is a mode of discourse involving different languages and different social contexts, it can help gain insight not only into expected cultural diversity but also into the more complex question of cross-cultural cognitive convergence. Therefore, the thing of interest is how an analytic description can correlate specific linguistic data with the possibilities of interpretation when such data comprise various aspects of deviant language. The moot question of how analysis relates to interpretation and how an analytic description constitutes translational discourse further complicates the investigation. The paper examines what kind of answer can be put forward when some recent cognitive linguistic insights into the nature and process of making meaning from text are applied to an account of cognitive processes involved in the translation of a poetic text that is exemplary of deviant language. A poem by E. E. Cummings and its translation into Croatian are analysed from the perspective of certain principles of conceptual integration and some basic concepts of cognitive grammar. The assumption is that while language data can be critically related to a broader modality involving the experiential assumptions, aesthetic judgements and attitudinal positioning of the translator as a discourse participant, the simultaneous cognitive linguistic analysis of the mode of meaning of both the original poem and its translation may also show how the translational solutions effect the cognitive construction of a poetic text world and how some of these factors may lead to specific cross-cultural commonalities of meaning.