Imagery in Translation. essarily include both reason and intuition, rational and emotional appreciation of the comparative qualities of the original text and its reconstruction in

essarily include both reason and intuition, rational and emotional appreciation of the comparative qualities of the original text and its reconstruction in the target language. Generations of transla­tors from ancient times to the present day have developed and perfected many useful techniques that can be traced both in the translated texts and in translators' pronouncements about literary translation in general and about their own experience in particu­lar. The unique school and tradition of literary (poetic) transla­tion that has formed in Russia and impressive achievements in other countries over the last three centuries provide rich and broad data for both exploration and direct usage by new generations of translators and philologists. It is especially interesting to com­pare different national traditions and their attitudes when they compete in the same direction, i.e., in translating from Russian into English.

Rules and requirements constitute the practical aspect of translation activity, while its theoretical basis involves many fields of knowledge such as psychology, informatics, linguistics, herme-neutics, logic, etc. Of special interest is the impact of ideas of symmetry, isomorphism, game and probability on the general the­ory of translation and on the theory of poetic translation in partic­ular. Considered in terms of heuristic and game, translation re­veals such aspects as game strategies, preferences, drives, roles, random decisions, etc. One of the productive directions of re­search in the theory of poetic translation may be investigation into the nature of translator's preferences in selecting substitute linguistic units and stylistic means of reconstructing the source imagery of a poem or a piece of prose. When translating Shakes­peare's "yellow leaves" (sonnet 73) Marshak uses the epithet «багряный» instead of «желтый» and reconstructs the simile "eyes are nothing like the sun" (sonnet 130) as «ее глаза на звезды не похожи», he seemingly takes liberties; yet there is some logic behind these liberties which need to be identified and defined not as something arbitrary but in respect to the system of imagery as

a whole.

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Usually the category of text has appeared in the centre of most theoretical conceptions of poetic translation. They speak about source and target texts even more often than of source and target languages. Yet of late, the conceptual structure of this category in linguistics and in translation studies has undergone considerable changes. Meanwhile, much depends upon this concept in the solu­tion of such basic problem of translation as the adequacy, or "cor­rectness" of the relationship between the source and target texts. What is to be considered "wrong" or "correct" if we do not trans­late the source text literally, that is, as a set of words? Numerous transformations that reveal themselves in the target text when com­pared with the source only prove that the translator measures the text not in words but in something else. This something is defined in many such terms as "meaning", or "sense", or "contents", or "idea", or "imagery", etc. All of them have the same drawback, and that is their vagueness, an uncertainty that does not allow them to be measured in palpable and countable units.

Linguists are skilful in seeking new terms. Thus, a new concept has arisen of intertextuality as a special feature of imag­inative (and not only) literature.⁴ The term implies that the reader (translator as well) translates or decodes the text in a process of personal semiosis, that is, using a different set of systems to that urhich the author of the text did or some other reader may do. Then it may be easy to understand the process of translation as intersemiotic and interpersonal at the same time. From this point of view, the reader is not a consumer of the text but its co-produ­cer. The idea is as old as Zen philosophy, yet it is as productive nowadays. To put it in concrete terms, the text is nothing but a set of graphic symbols on a sheet of paper until it is filled in with sense and imagery, emotions and values by its reader-author. We can only poetically translate what we reconstruct about the text, that is, its potential semiotic function in the target culture.

This type of semiosis, in fact, the translator's semiosis,

¹ Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies. London - New York, Routledge,

Imagery in Translation

may be considered as an heuristic process of sorting out pro bilities. Unlike the average reader's semiosis, the translate sorting of substitutes is complicated by a great number of e; considerations such as the difference between the source target languages, potential readers' expectations, cultural inc(patibility, personal preferences, and the like. Yet, primarily, translator's semiosis is bound by the necessity of reconstn ing the source system of imagery as a whole and not as a ch of independent substitutes, which means that the resulting tersemiotic complex must be a piece of literary art accordinj the criteria of the target language, literature and reader.

The translator may play different games with such an tersemiotic complex. Sometimes he appears a keen rival to author, carried away by the idea of creating a text in the tai language equal in its imaginative power to the source text, tho] different in linguistic, literary and cultural qualities. A brilli example of such a type was the Russian poet and translator \ ily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) whose views on translation w those of poetic rivalry. According to the Princeton Encyclo dia of Poetry and Poetics, "it would be difficult to draw a 1 between his original and translated works as he often used latter for his most intimate personal outpourings, frequer improving on the original"⁵. Such rivalry took place in the 1 tory of many European literatures and contributed to the de\ opment of interliterary communication. The main principle such translation is the reconstruction of the source systerr imagery as observed by the translator rather than its precise tails in the target language. This way is creative as well as n leading and applicable only to situations where the target lite ture (and culture at large) has not yet assimilated the basic i tures of the source one. There is an everlasting discussion how to classify such a principle of translating, imitation

" Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Pr inger. Princeton University Press, 1990.