Imagery in translation. Translating Eugene o'neill into Russian

DRAMA UNIT 1:

TRANSLATING EUGENE O'NEILL INTO RUSSIAN

Introductory Notes

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is a famous American dra­matist. His literary lineage is associated with Norwegian play­wright Henrik Ibsen and Swedish August Strindberg, whose tense symbolic, psychic dramas, sometimes with a sense of the extreme and pathological, have much in common with O'Neill's plays. It is in the art of those great Scandinavians that Eugene O'Neill found the taste to the psychological, which sometimes raises high to almost mythic tragedy, e. g. in his Desire under the Elms (1924), and sometimes explores the depths of the soul of a modern man in his tragic segregation from nature and himself, e. g. in the mas­terpiece of Long Day s Journey into Night (1941).

Though quite realistic, O'Neill has something in common with a later generation of dramatists of the 1950s and the 1960s, Camus, Ionesco, Albee, and others, characterised as a group by the term Theatre of the Absurd (below, in Unit 2, we shall come back to the term). In 1936 O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The Long Day s Journey is a sombre drama, in which what is going on in action is much less important than what is going on.in the souls of personages. Dedicating the play to his wife Carlot-ta, O'Neill attested it as the "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood" and admitted it was "a sadly inappropriate gift," though full of "deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones," the personages of the play.

The performance of the play at Broadway theatres and in Sweden made it world famous and opened its triumphal tour all

over the world stages.______________________________ __

________ Практикум по художественному переводу______

The play is partly autobiographical, full of family relation­ships and reminiscences. In it, O'Neill depicts the mutual tension and complicated relationship between Mary Tyrone, a drug-ad­dict, and her husband James Tyrone, a failure and underdog in life, an ex-actor, and their two sons, of whom Jamie is a con­firmed drunkard and Edmund is a cold and melancholic intellec­tual. Edmund feels miserable and bitter in the atmosphere of the house where the unbearable tension has been going on without any hope in si'ght.

The language of the play is not very sophisticated, remarks of the personages are mostly brief and, as it were, incomplete. It issues the challenge for translation, because many short sentence structures in English become rather long in Russian due to diffe­rences between the two languages, which causes a complication for the stage performance and for the perception of speech char­acteristics of this or that personage. For example, let us consider Mary's remark in the passage below:

Just listen to that awful foghorn. And the bells.

Ты только послушай, как ужасно звучит сирена в тумане. А эти колокола.

It is easy to notice that the remark has become twice as long in Russian, both in space and time, which changes the.im­pression of the mood, character and timing of the episode. The only way possible is cutting off:

Как ужасно воет сирена. И этот колокол...

The main task of translation should be to combine the sim­plicity of the language with its natural flow and the right timing. The phrase You don't want her to see you ciying may be translat­ed in several ways:

• Ты же не хочешь, чтобы она увидела, как ты плачешь.

• Не стоит ей видеть тебя в слезах.

The first variant is grammatically correct and verbally literal but insufficient for the episode where the author's remarks say that the action goes "abruptly," "quickly," "hastily." In such a situation it is inappropriate that a man should use a long complex sentence, when it must sound short and distinct.

Translating the text, try to assess timing and mood of the situation and select proper transformation in this or that episode.

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