W. Wordsworth’s Sonnet In Translation Aspect

Substring and translation. Dialogue and non-dialogue of cultures

This paper attempts a comparative analysis of Wordsworth's sonnets translations: "The world is too much with us" (1807) (Wordsworth, 1994, p. 311) by V. Levik "God’s world, we see it everywhere" (1975) (English Romantic poetry of the XIX century, 1975, p. 248-249), by G. Kruzhkov "We are lured by the broken path of vanity..." (2017) (Wordsworth, 2017, pp. 550-551), by S. Sukharev "Sonnet 33" (1997) (Literator, 2015, p. 142), and the sonnet "To a butterfly" (1801) (Wordsworth, 1994, p. 324) translated by I. Melomed "To a moth" (2001) (Wordsworth, 2017, p. 524). The object of the analysis was also the substrings of the considered Wordsworth sonnets in the Kazakh language made by A. Kadyskyzy (in the manuscript).

The comparative analysis of Wordsworth's sonnets in Russian and Kazakh languages allows us to establish a link between the translation strategy, including the substring, and the phenomenon of dialogue / non-dialogue as different forms of entering a foreign text into the communicative space of another culture. The modern approach to interlinear translation shows that it serves as a full-fledged instrument of deinterlinear translation (intra-language translation), when the translator-poet does not have sufficient command of the original language.

Wordsworth’s sonnet “The world is too much with us”

In this sonnet, Wordsworth shows a typical method for the poet ‒ to speak naturally about the usual. The poet notes: «The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge – it is immortal as the heart of man» (Wordsworth, 1909-14). Wordsworth mourns the loss of man's connection with nature. Lucy Kellett writes: As “the Industrial Revolution had grown too large”, the mechanics of thought, society and literary form had be-come overwhelming; hence the overweening spirit of the age was the question of when “Enough” accedes and exceeds to “Too much” (Kellett, 2016, p. 5). The dilemma outlined by the scientist reflects the dichotomy of human ambitions and social progress, which caused an unsolvable conflict in the literature of romanticism.

Longing for paganism reproduces mythological images of Proteus and Triton, the raging wind, the roaring sea in the image system of the original text. The sound and visual symbolism of the original text become images of authentic life, which is associated with the organic world ‒ nature.

The scientist writes about the philosophical and artistic syncretism of Nature and Earth as symbols and cultural mythologems, Wordsworth's worldview category, which formed the basis of the dialogue: “Wordsworth's related uses of «Nature» and «earth» in the Prelude and other poems represent differently yet connected realms. He never ex-plains in explicit terms how he distinguishes them; however, together they reveal a fundamental hinge in this thought and feeling, a hinge join-ing the immortal with morality, process with finality, eternal creation with individual, human limitation. Wordsworth draws a consistent, consious, and profound distinction between «Nature» and «earth». «Nature» is capitalized often, «earth» rarely. The scene of our mortality is earth, not Nature, and for Wordsworth, while the two differ, they of-ten are experienced in tandem, the pair presented in implied contrast. They are not synonyms; they are almost, at times, antithetical. Yet, they are not separate; for Wordsworth, both are realms of our exist-ence, and we inhabit both” (Engell, 2019, p. 166).

The scientist pays attention to the universal nature of the worldview basis of romanticism in the aspect of the changing context of science, religion and politics: “The question of life, and the nature of life, permeated the literary, scientific, and cultural spheres, influencing Romanticism at its core” (Trantham, 2019, p. 1).

The contrast of self-interest and the pursuit of benefits to the ability of the characters to feel the beauty of life and nature creates a conflict in the soul of the devastated, exhausted contemporary of the poet. Idealization of nature: The winds that will be howling at all hours / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ‒ and the alienation of man to nature animates archetypal symbolism, the idea of renewal, the miracle of rebirth and transformation of the man.

Wordsworth's concept of nature is sustained in the spirit of English romanticism philosophy, which led to the existence of the term "experiment". The scientist writes about the origins of the term that led to the subsequent literary tradition of the romantic school: Wordsworth described the poems in Lyrical Ballads (1798) as “experiments”, and seems thereby to have been the first author in the English language to describe poetry as a practice that could be “experimental” (Mitchel, 2015, p. 132).

Wordsworth's lyrical hero appeals to God. His rhetorically sublime Great God! is imbued not so much with a dogmatic-scholastic sense as with a sense of God as the Creator of the world. A sense of measurability and closeness of the world: "The world is too much with us" - gives rise to a protest and tragic feeling in the lyrical hero, an Epiphany equal to falling away, alienating him from Nature.

An additional area of internal dialogue between cultures is created by Wordsworth's creative dialogue with another Lake-school poet, Coleridge. It is interesting to contrast Wordsworth’s materialistic topic with Coleridge’s metaphysical concept. Thus, the scientist writes the following about Coleridge's "Platinum-Platonic" metaphysics, which defined the philosophy and poetics of the imagination: «dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate’’ (BL 1: 304). It disassembles and reassembles in order to construct a ‘‘creative Thought’’ out of an object. To him, moreover, imagination is a ‘‘synthetic and magical power’’ capable of revealing ‘‘itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty, with old and familiar objects’’ (BL 2: 16-17)» (Al-Saffar, 2018, p. 2).

The range of artistic strategies of English romanticism reveals a dependence on the philosophical cosmogonic view of the world. Thus, for the idealist Coleridge, the connection between the "external world" and Reason is typical. While for the materialist Wordsworth, the image of the wind has primarily physical properties. The scientist pays attention to this: «Wordsworth, likewise, began his auto-biographical epic with the description of a breeze chancing to blow across his cheek: the gust of air soon gets incorporated within the poem’s peculiar metaphorical economy, but it’s important that the breeze arrived in the first place as an unbidden breath of fresh air from out-side» (Perry, 2016). Another scholar, referring to Coleridge's biography, explains the poet's belief in the dependence of the mind on the thought, rather on the "things", by his polemic with the materialistic view of the mind and that he «seeks to isolate thoughts from the influence of material causality by taking refuge in a form of mind-body dualism» (Marshall, 2019, p. 33).

The French and Italian versions of the sonnet in Russian translations become the background for identifying the poetic peculiarities of Wordsworth's lyrics. The unity of the stanzas patterns is accompanied by a rhythmic pattern that combines the rhyming of the first two quatrains of the French sonnet and the rhyming of the two tercets of the Italian sonnet: abba abba cdc dcd . This rhythmic structure, when the poet uses two rhyming methods belonging to two varieties of sonnet, creates the romantic style of the original.

Levik's translation reconstructs the picture of the world and nature as the result of the God’s greatness. This creates a predominantly axiological strategy for understanding the original. The presence of an axiological context is probably due to Wordsworth's rejection of politics, which brings him closer to Milton. This is written, in particular, by a researcher: «How does Wordsworth’s disengagement from revolutionary politics destabilize his links with Milton? Several allusions in the Prelude (1805) indicate that Words-worth was sensitive to this issue, justifying, at least to Wordsworth himself, his rejection of political activism. This rejection, though at times uneasily, affirms Wordsworth’s solidarity with Milton, the poet» (Daniel, 2017, p. 172).

Rapture and delight: God's world, we see it everywhere — stylistically organizes the lyric hero's exalted confession: Why do we care! Why wasn't I born into paganism? The axiological and suggestive information create the genre structure of the elegy. In addition to regret and sorrow, light sadness about the lost Golden age of the unity of pagan man and nature, the parallelism of the two planes does not create a total conflict, typical of romantic aesthetics. In Levik's work, the observance of the sonnet's strophic organization is accompanied by the rhyming abba abba cdc dcd . Levik used an Italian sonnet.

Sukharev's translation also contains 2 quatrains and two tercets. The way of rhyme is abba abba cdc dcd . Sukharev also used the form of the Italian sonnet. The plot basis is close to both the original and Levik's translation. However, the rejection of axiological and suggestive information, the displacement with the habitual vocabulary benefit-expenditure and the predominance of features of the fabular text brings Sukharev's translation closer to the lyrical narrative.

In Kruzhkov's translation, the rhyme abba abba cdc dcd reproduces the structure of the Italian sonnet. Colloquial horror , the cliche will come in a wild moan deprive the text of the axiological and suggestive information inherent in the original.

Here it is appropriate to quote the scientist's opinion about the fidelity of the translation to the original, which implies the inevitable contradiction between the meaning and form of the original and the translation:

Because of the difficulty of the task, verse translation vividly exemplifies the fallacy behind the notion of ‘faithfulness,’ a notion which has been appropriately contested within Translation Studies. In a way, attempting a metrical translation entails an essentially paradoxical position: the translator is split between the desire to remain faithful to the form of the source-text and the impossibility of reproducing all the sense-units lying within the original. (Ploix, 2018, p. 20)

The general principle of the Russian translations, which demonstrate fidelity to the original, is the reader's orientation of view, which characterizes the subject-matter figurativeness of the originals. The scientist writes about it: “in The Prelude, the spectator is positioned as above or at a distance from the things being viewed, and never actually physically interacting with them” (Chapman, 2017, p. 120).

The Kazakh substring was created exclusively within the informative content of the original. However, when making recommendations on the stanza and verse parameters of the original, it can help to translate Wordsworth's sonnet into the Kazakh language.

Álem bizge kóp nárse beredi; erte me kesh,

Alys-berispen, biz óz kúshimizdi jumsaımyz:

Tabıǵatta bizge tıesili nárseni óte sırek kóremiz;

Biz júregimizdi alystattyq, ol jaqsylyq emes!

Kókiregin aıǵa tóseıtin bul teńiz,

Ysqyryp turǵan jel

Endi uıyqtap jatqan gúlder sıaqty jınaldy:

Sondyqtan biz ár bir iske zaman talabyna saı emespiz;

Uly Qudaı! Ol bizdi qozǵaltalmaıdy! Men tek

Eskirgen senimge batqan putqa tabynýshy bolar edim;

Sondyqtan múmkin men osy kóńildi jaǵalaýda turyp,

Úmitsizdikke aparmaıtyn kórinisterdi kórýim múmkin:

Proteýstiń teńizden kóterilgenin kórip,

Nemese qart Trıtonnyń konýs qabyǵynyń daýysyn estımin.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Literal reproduction of factual and verbal-emotional information of the original by the Kazakh translator preserves its axiological content. However, the subscript cannot convey the aesthetic features of the original associated with the rhythmic organization of the text, leveling the genre features of the sonnet.

Wordsworth’s sonnet “To a Butterfly”

In the first stanza, the poet recreates the feelings experienced by the lyric hero when contemplating a butterfly on a yellow flower. The picture of a summer garden becomes a field for the development of imagination and a suggestive picture of the past, the memory of childhood. The image of the beauty of a butterfly is in the immobility of the small creature, radiating peace and harmony with the outside world give rise to responding feelings in the lyrical hero’s soul. The allusive discursiveness of the original is conveyed by suggestiveness and allegorism, color symbolism. Thoughts, ideas and feelings that a butterfly on a yellow flower evokes in the lyric hero become a source of memory of the days spent with his sister in the summer garden. The lyric hero’s associations create a suggestive element of tender and grateful feelings of the poet. The elegy is represented in the form of a dialogue between the lyric hero and the butterfly. Confessional and autobiographically accented subtext create a form of heartfelt dialogue: the author-hero asks the butterfly to visit him and his sister in the garden and take part in conversations in which they recall the touching days of innocent childhood. Harmony in nature is transferred to the ideal of harmony in human relations: We’ll talk of sunshine and song, // And summer days when we were young, // Sweet childish days, that were as long.

Wordsworth's sonnet is distinguished by a psychologically refined, delicate intonation that resembles a rhythmic-strophic organization of meditation. Rhythmically, the composition of the sonnet is transformed and consists of two stanzas – 9th and 10th verses, respectively. The rhyme looks like this: in the 1st stanza — aabbcdccd ; in the second ‒ cfgghhhhhj This arrangement, close to the syllabic principle, explains the meditative sound. On the other hand, the regularity of the poem and the feeling of tranquility, harmony is created by the parallelism of mundane plan, depicting the landscape of the summer garden and the suggestive panorama, full of desire to see the hidden essence of the world, to capture the eternal in the momentary, to appreciate the place of anthropomorphic creatures (butterflies as the embodiment of the human feeling in the summer afternoon) in the universe. This is the philosophical grain of the work. Here the experimental reformatory activity of the English poet was shown, demonstrating the convergence of the poetry language and ordinary colloquial speech. The synthesis of aesthetic, cathartic, hedonistic, axiological and suggestive information contained in Wordsworth's sonnet became the starting point for a comparative analysis with the translation by I. Melamed and the Kazakh rhymed interline translation.

Melamed’s translation uses the principle of equilinearity: the same two stanzas of the original text in 9 and 10 verses. Rhyming: in the 1st stanza — aabbcdccd , in the 2nd ‒ eeffghgggh . Here we see a complete coincidence of the rhyming of the 1st stanza of the translation with the 1st stanza of the original text. The difference between the 2nd stanza of the translation and the 2nd stanza of the original text is explained by the translator's use of a chorus that is organic to Russian verse. However, the chorus and sound symbolism of the verse imitate the movement of the butterfly in a somewhat minor and "sliding" rhythm, which leads to the loss of the meditative structure of the original. From Wordsworth's philosophical elegy, the Russian translation is transformed into the genre of friendly dedication.

The compiler of the Kazakh rhymed interline translation approaches the meditative structure of the original, using the internal reserves of the Kazakh syllabic verse and choosing the principle of equilinearity.

Kóbelekke ( To a butterfly )

Men jarty saǵat boıy,

Sary gúlge konǵan ózińdi baqyladym;

Kishkentaı kóbelek! Shynynda

Uıyqtadyń ba, tamaqtandyń ba bilmeımin.

Múldem qımyldamaısyń! Muzdaǵan muhıt te

Qozǵalyssyz qalady! Sodan soń

Sizdi qandaı qýanysh kútip tur deseńshi, jel soqqan kezde

Sizdi aǵashtardyń arasynan taýyp alyp,

Sizdi taǵy shaqyrady!

Bul baý-baqsha bizdiki;

Olar meniń aǵashtarym, ápkemniń gúlderi;

Sharshaǵan kezińizde osynda toqtańyz,

Qasıetti jerde demalyńyz!

Bizge jıi kelińiz; jamandyqtan qoryqpańyz;

Bizdiń qasymyzda otyryńyz!

Biz kún sáýlesi men án týraly aıtamyz,

Jáne de jas kezimizdegi jaz kúnderin,

Balalyq shaqtyń tátti kúnderin aıtamyz, sol kúnder

Qazir alys emes tek jıyrma kún ǵana bolǵandaı!

I’ve watched you now a full half-hour;

Self-poised upon that yellow flower

And, little Butterfly! indeed

I know not if you sleep or feed.

How motionless!--not frozen seas

More motionless! and then

What joy awaits you, when the breeze

Hath found you out among the trees,

And calls you forth again!

This plot of orchard-ground is ours;

My trees they are, my Sister's flowers;

Here rest your wings when they are weary;

Here lodge as in a sanctuary!

Come often to us, fear no wrong;

Sit near us on the bough!

We'll talk of sunshine and of song,

And summer days, when we were young;

Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty days are now.

Compliance with the stanzas of the original text: two stanzas in verses 9 and 10 and rhyming: abcbcdcef in the 1st stanza and gghhhhhjkl — are inscribed in the syllabic structure of the interline translation. Here is a drawing of a rhyming substring in the Kazakh language, where the first digit indicates the number of the verse, the second — the number of syllables in the verse. In the 1st stanza: 1‒7, 2 ‒ 13, 3 ‒ 9, 4 ‒13, 5 ‒ 13, 6 ‒10, 7 ‒ 18, 8 ‒15, 9 ‒ 8. In the 2nd stanza: 1‒ 8, 2 ‒ 14, 3 ‒ 13, 4 ‒10, 5 ‒ 14, 6 ‒10, 7 ‒ 10, 8 ‒13, 9 ‒ 16, 10 ‒16. Taking into account the agglutinative structure of the Kazakh language and the fixed stress on the last syllable in the Kazakh language, these factors become additional rhythmic markers that contribute to the reproduction of the meditative structure of the original.