Peculiarities of the Translation Into German Lina Kostenko’s Poetry

Abstract

The article is devoted to the classification and analysis of the German-language translations of Lina Kostenko's poems based on the material of the lyrical collection "And again the prologue" translated by Alois Woldan. The article introduces the theoretical foundations of poetry translation as a separate type of literary translation, examines its genre-specific features, and analyses the features of the modern Ukrainian poetry and the author's style of Lina Kostenko, which jointly form the basis for further comparison of the original example and the translation. The paper shows the main difficulties that Alois Voldan faced interpreting the poems, describes the ways of overcoming them and offers a qualitative assessment of the translation. The lexical and stylistic analysis showed the wide usage of the poetic instruments in his works of pictorial and expressive language as well as aphorisms. However, to preserve the idea and reproduce the ideological motives, Alois Voldan avoided literal translation and resorted to the descriptive translation of these linguistic means. When translating lexical tautologies, which are widely inherent in Lina Kostenko's poetics, the translator replaced lexical units, graphic signs, sentence structure and transferred repetitions from one line to another to preserve emotionality and expressiveness in lyric poems. When we look closely at the grammatical level of translation, there are replacements of grammatical constructions and parts of speech. We also recognize the addition of new parts of speech that are missing in the original poem. The reason for such transformations was the differences in the grammatical structures of the German and Ukrainian languages, and the translation strategies used to preserve the rhythmic and melodic pattern of the poems. A special place is given to the characteristics because of the national specificity of poetry and the translation of its semantic equivalent. That is, the reason why the translation is used primarily for intercultural communication, and the translator, in this case, is an intercultural mediator. But Alois Voldan managed to convey the thematic orientation of the poems and the Ukrainian colour.