CLERIHEW: COMICALITY OF THE SITUATION AND THE TRANSLATION CHALLENGE

Abstract

Clerihew is the eponymous genre of the English nonsense poetry and is little-known to the Ukrainian readership. The invariant character of humour as the manifestation of comicality in clerihew is outlined. The attention is focused on the situational humour which emerges owing to the comical positions in which the character appears. Rigidity of the Source text plot structure is stressed, as well as the coherence between the plot-line and the certain line of the quatrain. The connection between the rhyme and the creation of the humorous effect is explained. It is emphasised that clerihews are pseudo-biographic by their nature and this is reflected in the situation introduced in them. The latter is marked by the collision of two constituents – the position in which the character appears and the fact of the real biography of the character. The position is explicitly expressed, seems to be plausible, but it had never happened in the real life of a character. The fact of the true biography is expressed implicitly, in the sub-text, by means of the allusive background or other means of intertextuality.

Clerihew’s situational comicality is based on the substitution, distortion or destruction of veritable connections in space and time. Consequently, the new, false cause-and-effect chain is made, which provokes the readers’ false expectations and thus gives birth to the humorous effect. The main task of the situation in clerihew is to break the connector between the character, some fact of his biography and the situation in which this fact was used in the real life. Clerihew is one of the greatest translation challenges as its situational comicality is influenced by all constituents of the genre-and-style dominant of the original text, including the obligatory reproduction of the “rule-of-the-first-line”; difficulties in finding rhyme to the name which is foreign; impossibility of changes in the topos. It may also be difficult to correlate the allusion dictum (without which the situational comicality is out of question) with the cultural background of the Target text readership. Hence, the reproduction of the situational comicality in clerihew should become the part of the translation strategy.