Task for translation: Ozymandias

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Hulf sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

Практикум по художественному переводу

And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION

• Study the contents and imagery of the sonnet.

• Find out the meaning of the name Ozymandias and its
Russian counterparts.

• Study the metre and rhyme scheme of the text to deter­
mine the most important positions for words in it.

• Experiment with the text: render it in prose to change the
rhythm and analyse the results.

• Translate the text word for word to preserve as much of
the source vocabulary and syntactic structure as possible.

• Reconstruct the metre and rhyme scheme of the sonnet in
Russian; select the words for the rhyming pairs.

• Complete the lines with words and arrange the syntactic
structure of the Russian text.

• Read the resulting text aloud to compare its sound to the
source text.

• Complete the translation and discuss the results.

• Look for some more versions of the sonnet in translation.
Compare your own text with them and comment on the differ­
ence.

54

Imagery in Translation

POETRY UNIT4:

TRANSLA TING EMIL Y DICKINSON INTO RUSSIAN

Дата добавления: 2015-08-03