THE PECULIARITIES OF THE METAPHORICAL WORLDVIEW OF BYRON’S POETRY AND ITS UKRAINIAN TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

The paper deals with the cognitive nature of metaphor and the modes of its elaboration in Byron’s poetry and its Ukrainian translations. It is important to distinguish the way we conceive metaphorically from the way a poet expresses such thoughts in his language. General conceptual metaphors are not the unique creation of individual poets, but are rather part of the way members of a culture conceptualize their experience. Poets, as members of their cultures, naturally make use of these basic conceptual metaphors to communicate with their audience. In addition to elaborating conventional metaphor, a poet goes beyond the normal use of conventional metaphor in order to point out and call into question the boundaries of our everyday metaphorical understanding of important concepts. An attempt has been made to prove that any literary text refl ects the author’s individual conceptual system, created by his artistic imagination and embodied with purposefully selected language means. The ways of actualization of basic metaphors and the main cognitive mechanisms of creating individual metaphorical concepts in Byron’s poetry and its Ukrainian translations have been defi ned. Being a preferable language means in a precise poetic text, metaphor brings to the fore the importance of studying the modes of its elaboration and translation which reveal the author’s individual choice of image presentation. Whenever a novel metaphor is created and transmitted by an image, it undoubtedly appeals to emotions and text perception. Therefore, the image has a special status, “intermediate” between the verbal and nonverbal aspects of metaphorical expression. It has also been emphasized that poetry represents a certain artistic space in which metaphors undergo modifi cations and turn into complex poetic images. Thus, metaphor is justly considered to be a core element in the author’s individual conceptual system and style. Keywords: metaphor, metaphoric worldview, modes of elaboration, author’s individual conceptual system.