NAMES OF PILGRIMS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER’S “CANTERBURY TALES” IN TRANSLATION

Abstract

In 2019, a long-awaited event took place – Ukraine for the first time in its history saw a full Ukrainian translation of “The Canterbury Tales”, an outstanding work by Geoffrey Chaucer, a classic of English literature. Maksym Strikha’s translation from the original Middle English text not only allowed Ukrainian admirers of English literary heritage to read Chaucer in Ukrainian, but also provided scholars interested in diachronic translation with rich new material for research. In this paper we look at the translation of the names of Chaucer’s narrators – pilgrims, who set out from London on their journey to Canterbury. The aim of the paper is to compare the Ukrainian versions of these names created by Maksym Strikha with the Middle English original names, their modern English and Russian translations. The conducted semantic analysis of the names gave the possibility to draw conclusions about the adequacy of the translation and to make assumptions about the translators’ motives behind selecting a particular counterpart. A significant problem for the Ukrainian translator was the need to overcome the influence of “canonical” Russian translations, which until 2019 had no alternative in Ukraine. In this context, the explanations provided by Maksym Strikha in his preface to the Ukrainian edition are of particular interest. As a result of the translation analysis, two groups of the pilgrims’ names were identified – the names in the first group were translated by common dictionary equivalents, while the translation of the names in the second group shows deviations from their obvious neutral equivalents. The conducted analysis of the Ukrainian versions of Chaucer’s pilgrims’ names showed that the Ukrainian translator sought to be true to both the meaning of the original word and its historical and sociocultural associations, which in most cases was successfully accomplished. In our opinion, a valuable and original solution of the Ukrainian translator was to bring together in the name of a character the Middle English reality and the Ukrainian historical context, which was realized through the selection of archaic and rare names.