Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky as a translator of Shakespeare’s “songs”

UDC 821.111=161.1-1

DOI  10.20339/PhS.1-24.100 

Serdechnaya Vera V.,

Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor of the

Foreign Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies Department

Kuban State University

e-mail: rintra@yandex.ru

Zhatkin Dmitry N.,

Doctor of Philology, Professor,

Head of the Translation and Translation Studies Department

Penza State Technological University

e-mail: ivb40@yandex.ru

The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the creative principles of Shakespeare’s texts translation by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950). Krzhizhanovsky was a writer, an art historian, an original thinker, whose legacy was published mostly only after the 1980s. Being a prominent researcher of the theater philosophy, Krzhizhanovsky dealt with the problems of Shakespeare’s work; while in the 1930s he dealt with the more global problems of his heritage, and in the 1940s he focused on narrower topics. One of such local themes was Shakespeare’s “songs” contained in his plays. Krzhizhanovsky not only studied them as a system, classified them, but also translated them, as it became known from newly discovered archival documents. This article introduces five texts of Shakespeare’s songs translated by Krzhizhanovsky into scientific view and offers an analysis of all his translations (three songs were previously published as part of his articles), in the context of his reflections on the principles of translation. Krzhizhanovsky developed his own concept of the translation of Shakespeare, which he managed to partially implement in the translation of “songs”. The principles of his translation, striving for accuracy, were: attention to the phonetic side of the original, up to the use of transcribed interjections-exoticisms; attention to the figurative component; the possibility of varying the poetic size: almost always Krzhizhanovsky changes the size and lengthens the lines; introduction to translations of his own figurative accents, conjecture and completion of the translation almost to the author’s lyrical poem.

Keywords: Krzhizhanovsky, Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s reception, Shakespeare’s songs, Shakespeare’s comedies, “Tempest”, “Twelfth Night”, translation problems, translation strategies, All-Russian Theater Society.