Abstract:
The poem by Rustaveli is one of the most difficult works to translate.
Many factors, for example, specific inherent features of the Georgian
language, contribute to this difficulty.
It is known that “it is impossible to find out the nature of poetry of
a nation without finding out the peculiarities of the language. The poem
and the language are inextricably linked” [Barbakadze, 2014: 13] along
with many features, for instance, the author’s unique artistic style, the
sound and metrical-rhythmic organization of Rustaveli’s poetic speech
which acquire the significance of an amazing aesthetic phenomenon in
his poem, the internal organization of a verse (lexical measure, meter),
an amazingly original trope system, a complex metaphorical system,
etc.
A complete poetic translation of “The Man in the Panther’s Skin”
by Mykola Khvedorovich and Aleš Zvonak was published in 1966.
Translators faced many problems. First of all, their translation had to
compete with other Belarusian translations of the poem. Therefore, the
translators had a somewhat creative competition with the predecessor
Belarusian translators of the poem. This means that each new translator
tries to better understand the artistic-aesthetic world of the original
text and the author’s words to give us a more accurate and adequate
interpretation of them. This is a never-ending process as getting closer
to the original text of the artistic translation is an eternal process.
Although there is no ideal translation all translators strive for the ideal”
[Gaprindashvili, 2012:97].
Mykola Khvedorovich and Aleš Zvonak did not speak Georgian
and translated the poem employing an interlinear translation. The
translators, first of all, needed to solve the issue of the meter, and they chose the choree, one of its main characteristics of which is the foot – a
repeating element of the verse. In the translation of the poem, we have
an alternation of sixteen- and fifteen-syllable syllabic-tone verses: the
first and third verses are sixteen-syllable, and the second and fourth –
are fifteen-syllable.
It should be noted that the tradition of the choree with multiple
feet was usual for Belarusian philosophical and epic poetry and was
successfully used by Belarusian poets (e.g. A. Kulishov) [Рагойша, 1979:
112].
The poem is translated by quatrains. With a few exceptions, only
the cross-rhyme авав occurs throughout the translation. The linguistic
peculiarities of the text did not allow the translators to refer to the
homonymic rhyme structure of the Georgian text.
The “high” and “low” quatrain presented in the Belarusian language
in “The Man in the Panther’s Skin”, as well as in any other language,
pose a great challenge to translators because they create difficulties
for them. It turned out to be impossible to translate them into the
Belarusian language. That is why, from the point of view of rhythm, lines
with a high and low quatrain sound identical in Belarusian.
