DOMINANT TROPES IN THE LYRICS OF R.M. RILKE, AND THEIR PRESERVATION IN UKRAINIAN TRANSLATIONS

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of stylistic features of R. M. Rilke's idiostyle on the example of tropes and their preservation in Ukrainian translations. The use of tropes in the poet's idiostyle discourse plays a structural role. The metaphor in R. M. Rilke's poems is multifunctional: it serves to specify representation, identifies rhetorical purpose (by emphasizing, highlighting, advancing) and aesthetic expressiveness. Due to partial personification, R. M. Rilke’s polysemantic and poetic world of nature acquires different colours. Epithets allow the German poet to show the subject of the image from an unexpected perspective and find new features in it.

The author's epithets make R. M. Rilke's idiostyle unique and difficult to translate. Finally, comparisons belong to the poet’s dominant tropes and are characterized by a particularly wide range of comparable concepts. With the help of comparisons, such distant concepts as the alive and inanimate, physical and mental converge; comparisons can refer to quality and number of emotions and expressions, in other words, comparisons expressively manifest their unity of mastering people’s cognitive world. R. M. Rilke is a master of unexpected comparisons. Coloronyms often appear in comparisons created by R. M. Rilke.

Trying to preserve the original meaning and style of R. M. Rilke, Ukrainian translators use a number of translation transformations and in most cases they manage to keep the tropes of R. M. Rilke's poems. To convey metaphors, translators use the following translation transformations: specification, generalization of meanings, semantic (or logical) development, holistic restructuring of the sentence, etc. Unfortunately, sometimes we come across the cases of demetaphorization. When transferring epithets, Ukrainian translators add words, replace a part of speech and, occasionally, use descriptive translation. However, epithets are generally reproduced in the translation, respectively, and are stored by the translators. As for comparisons, as a rule, syntactic deployment (subordinate clause) is used, as well as descriptive translation.