„ვეფხისტყაოსნის“ ინგლისური თარგმანების შედარებითი ანალიზი

Abstract

The article gives a comparative analysis of three translations of the poem by Shota Rustaveli into English by Marjory Wardrop (The Man in the Panther’s Skin, A Romantic Epic by Shota Rustaveli, Oriental Translation Fund, London, 1912), by Venera Urushadze (The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, Tbilisi, Sabchota Sakartvelo, 1968) and by Lyn Coffin (The Knight in the Panther Skin, Turkey, Poezia Press, 2015). Marjory Wardrop created a prosaic, ‘word-for-word’ translation of the poem, which is highly true to the original. The choice of the prosaic form, as Oliver Wardrop explains in the preface, was motivated by a great difference in the versifications of the target and source languages. Venera Urushadze’s translation is in hexameter. She also explains her choice by the differences in the prosody of the languages, which makes it impossible to recreate two and three-syllabled rhymes in English and points out the dangers of an attempt to imitate the verse-form of the poem. Using a hexameter has its pros and cons. On the plus side, hexameter for the English reader is associated with Homer’s poem and places The Knight in the Panther’s Skin where it belongs, namely, to the genre of great epics. Consequently, although the text is somewhat heavy and loses much of the formal charm, the translation managed to retain the nobility and epic magnificence of the original. Lyn Coffin’s translation uses a rhymed sixteen-syllable verseline. Needless to say that recreating the versification of the original is an extremely hard endeavour and an achievement. However, what should be taken into account is what is sacrificed for it and whether replicating the verse-form of the original helps to create an aesthetic equivalent of the original, which is the main target of any translation. Sadly, the new poetic translation confirms Venera Urushadze’s supposition that replicating the versification of the original would inevitably result in an artificial form. A comparison of how various stylistic peculiarities of the original are recreated into English clearly revealed that although Marjory Wardrop modestly terms her work as only a ‘word-for-word’ translation, the term does not do justice to its aesthetic quality, which though prosaic renders the beauty of the original through the imagery and aphorisms. Wardrop’s translation which is true to the text at the same time is true to the aesthetics of the poem. Although hexameter counts a four-century existence in English poetry, it is still not organic to English versification. Thus, using this meter in the translation which first appeared in English due to Chapmen’s translation of Homer, created a text which has epic grandeur, but at the same time is heavy and lacks charm and beauty of the original. Replicating a sixteen-syllable rhymed verse of the original poem in English resulted in creating an artificial form which, together with the usage of everyday language, made the poem look more like a rhymed tale which lacks the philosophical depth and poetic beauty of the original.