IMAGE OF FAUST: THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE BURDEN OF WISDOM (BASED ON THE TRAGEDY BY J. W. GOETHE “FAUST” AND ITS ANGLOPHONE AND UKRAINIAN TRANSLATIONS)

Abstract

J.W. Goethe’s tragedy “Faust” is an outstanding phenomenon of the world culture and at the same time a national work. The comprehensiveness of Goethe’s poetic idea is manifested in the depiction of the protagonist, who suffers from the gap between dream and reality. J.W. Goethe was writing “Faust” during all his life, investing everything he cared for, all his impressions, thoughts and knowledge into the tragedy. The article presents a brief translation studies analysis of the language personality of Faust from the tragedy of J.W. Goethe and its Ukrainian and Anglophone translations. The approach to character analysis through the cognitive and motivational levels of the language personality is suggested, in particular, at the cognitive level, key cognitive guidelines and the cognitive metaphor inherent in the image of Faust are considered. By analysing the character’s speech and ways of expressing emotion in the original and translations, we can come to the conclusion that the analysed language personality has been successfully reproduced. All translators have sometimes replaced Faust’s awareness of himself or of other specific and abstract people with expressions where the concepts of spirit, soul and heart are present, using the words “spirit” and «дух» much more often than the word “Geist” was used in the original. Thus, we can assume that the image of Faust is also changing in translations: he becomes more emotional and believes in the spirituality of everything that surrounds him. In the translation by I. Franko a striking difference can be observed, because the word «душа» is used only 5 times, that is, unlike all other translations that were analysed, even less than in the original. Faust by I. Franko emphasizes more on «дух» and «серце» as two principles that in their dualism provoke this character to search for the meaning of life. The analysis of Faust’s image was conducted on the basis of his entire language party in the first part, which consists of 221 utterances (replicas in dialogues and monologues), all of them to some extent were reproduced in the analysed Ukrainian and Anglophone translations (that is, the total material for analysis consists of 2 210 passages of different lengths).