Imagery in translation. Exercises for comparison

EXERCISES FOR COMPARISON

• Find out more about the writer and his art of s.tory-tel
ing. Look through some other stories by him.

• This story is unfinished: think about its completion:
accordance with the main character. Try to answer the questic
why Lawrence left it unfinished.

• Pick up the words and proper names which need con
ments or references. Make up a glossary of them. Consult dictic
naries and reference books for more information. Note how tr
traditions of the names differ in English and in Russian.

• Study the vocabulary, syntax and style of the text; decic
upon the peculiarities of the diction. Compare it with the choic
of words in the translation.

• Read both texts aloud to feel and compare the rhythm <
them. How does the inevitable syntactical transformation infli
ence the rhythmic image of the story in translation?

Task for translation: Things

THINGS

They were true idealists, from New England. Several yeai before the war, they met and married; he a tall, keen-eyed youn man from Connecticut, she a smallish, demure, Puritan-lookin young woman from Massachusetts. They both had a little mone; Not much, however. Still — they were free. Free!

But what is money? All one wishes to do is' to live a fu and beautiful life. In Europe, of course, right at the fountain-hea of tradition.

Therefore the two idealists, who were married in New He ven, sailed at once to Paris: Paris of the old days. They had studio apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and they Ы came real Parisians, in the old, delightful sense, not in the moc

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Практикум по художественному переводу

I, vulgar. It was the shimmer of the pure impressionists, Monet i his followers, the world seen in terms of pure light, light)ken and unbroken. How lovely! How lovely the nights, the er, the mornings in the old streets and by the flower-stalls and: book-stalls, the afternoons up on Montmartre or in the Tuil-ies, the evenings on the boulevards!

They had both painted but not desperately. Art had not taken:m by the throat, and they did not take Art by the throat. They inted: that's all. They knew people — nice people, if possible, >ugh one had to take them mixed. And they were happy.

Yet it seems as if human beings must set their claws in mething. To be "free," to be "living a full and beautiful life," u must, alas, be attached to something. Human beings are all les seeking something to clutch, something up which to climb ivards the necessary sun. But especially the idealist. He is a le, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man ю is а тете potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.

Our idealists were frightfully happy, but they were all the ne reaching out for something to cotton on to. At first, Paris is enough. They explored Paris thoroughly. And they learned ench till they almost felt like French people, they could speak so glibly.

Still, you know, you never talk French with your soul. And ough it's very thrilling, at first, talking in French to clever enchmen, still, in the long run, it is not satisfying. The endless-clever materialism of the French leaves you cold, gives a sense barrenness and incompatibility with true New England depth. > our two idealists felt.

Imagery in Translation

possible, or are going to create some particular manner of pre­senting it in Russian.

• Look for some stylistic manner in Russian literature that
would be parallel to the source. You may try Bunin, Chekhov or
Kuprin.

• Create your glossary finding Russian counterparts for the
problematic words and names.

• When translating the text, mark the grammatical prob­
lems to be solved.

• Think over the italicised words and their value in the
source text. Should you italicise them in Russian?

• Point out the devices used to convey of irony in the source
text and choose their Russian counterparts carefully.

• Read your Russian version aloud to feel the rhythm of it.
Compare the impression produced by reading the source text
aloud.

EXERCISES FOR TRANSLATION

• Decide on the main principle of translation for this text:

liether you are going to keep to the source structures as close as _

Практикум по художественному переводу

Imagery in Translation

PROSE UNIT3: TRANSLATING EVELYN WA UGH INTO R USSIAN

Introductory Notes

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was born in Hampstead, the second son of Arthur Waugh, a publisher and literary critic, and brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. He was educated at Oxford. He published his first novel, Decline and Fall, in 1928. That novel was followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and others. All those years he was extensively travelling in Europe, Africa, Central America. During World War II he was first commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia. His novels, Put Out More Flags (1942) and Brideshead Revisited (1945), and his historical trilogy Sword of Honour (1952-1961), a brilliant and witty satire to the "good old England," were marked by the events, ideas and emotions associated with the war and the sea of changes which it caused in people's minds and modes of life. In the Preface to Brideshead Revisited he wrote: "It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the six­teenth century... Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin."

Black Mischief one of the of author's, first books was writ­ten after a winter spent in East and Central Africa. The scene of the novel is a fanciful confusion of many territories, events, and characters, mostly associated with Zanzibar. In those years it was impossible to imagine that any part of Africa should be indepen­dent of European administration. As Waugh noted thirty years

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later, "history has not followed what then seemed its natur course."

Decline and Fall, his first novel, was an immediate sw cess. The history of Paul Pcnnifeather, a modest Oxford stude: of theology, caught up, quite by chance, in a tremendous whirl i adventures, is depicted with a professional brilliance, though tl writer was still quite young then. It is in this novel that Evelj Waugh showed his peculiar sense of humour and proved himse to possess outstanding fantasy and a rich palette of linguistic teel niques — irony first and foremost. Some of the characters fir mentioned in Decline and Fall would later appear in his oth novels. His critical perception of the values of contemporary Ei glish society and the decline in moral standards was embodied fantastical characters and situations depicted with acuteness ar strange sympathy like that of a surgeon performing an unpleasa but necessary operation.

One of his main motifs is cultural legacy of the past. It present in the conversation of personages, in quotations and all sions; it manifests itself through a diversity of artistic, litera and historical names. Waugh's cultural position is developed I comical imitation of the ignorant speech and low-brow interes of a nouveau riche family as well as through the grotesque pi tures and figures of the world created by the author, a world whi< looks like that "good old England" he both loved and mocked.

Being a brilliant novelist, Evelyn Waugh wrote a few, n table short stories spanning a broad scale of humour, sometim soft and sad, sometimes sharp and even "black." The Cruise st ry is written as a collection of letters and post cards from a foe ish and ignorant young girl, the daughter of a rich family, wl lives as if floating over the surface of life, not knowing, nor сг ing to know its real values. The language of the letters imitat the colloquial jargon of society to reveal lack of education well as lack of that noble spirituality which alone may test tl true core of a personality. The character speaks for herself ai thus reveals her own cultural and spiritual insolvency.

5 3;iK. № 50 '

Практикум по художественному переводу

Apart from fiction, Evelyn Waugh wrote books of literary icism, essays and religious biographies. In 1930 he was re-'ed into the Catholic Church, which was an important event in spiritual life. He was married and had six children.

;k for comparison:

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