Article

Name: The Problem of Poetic Iconicity in Different Languages

Authors: E. A. Shamina

St. Petersburg State University

Abstract: The article deals with a detailed analysis of the form of a poetic text (the English original of the How the water comes down at Lodore by Robert Southy and its 2 translations into Russian) with the purpose of establishing its iconic correspondence to its meaning. It is shown that traditional literary poetic techniques (rhyme, metre, strophic structure), its grammatical organization (a repetition of verbals connected by a conjunction), as well as its overall phonosemantics (higher counts of vowels and sonorous consonants) have similar iconic functions both in the original and in the translations. But the choice of other textual elements with iconic value (mean word length, alternation of open and closed syllables and long and short vocalic units) is significantly different in L1 and L2, in all probability because of the systemic (phonetic and phonotactic) differences between the languages. The phonosemantics of verbs of motion (namely, their sound imitative potential) that abound in the texts under investigation, too, demonstrates striking differences. The comparison of a poetic text with its translations into another language undertaken in the study leads to the conclusion that not all the languages are similar in their ability of iconic manifestation of certain concepts, and that major cognitive and esthetic functions of a poetic work have to realized in different languages with the help of principally different language events (as in the Russian translations of an English poem analysed in the article), or be lost, at least partly.

Keywords: poetic texts, translation, iconic elements

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