Serghei G. Nikolayev, Associate professor of Rostov State University, Faculty of Letters Autotranslation as a specific variety of poetical transversion

Dedicated to the cherished memory of
a brilliant linguist, my dear teacher
Prof. Th.G.Khazagerov

man of letters always deals with the language, and the word is the substance which eventually shapes his individual style. Showing high attention and permanent interest to the language, the author may feel a pronounced deficiency of the possibilities offered by his mother tongue. He may try to "break out" of the boundaries of one national language and overcome its powerful "gravitation" for the sake of crushing the established literary traditions, thus amplify-ing his own compositional opportunities and achieving utterly new literary results.
          Thus, foreign elements such as words, phrases, and larger fragments of utterance are often included in a work of art with the purpose of flavoring the text with enhanced originality and emphasis, personalizing the characters' speech, or creating a humorous effect (as in the case of the so called macaronic verses), etc. A title or an epigraph in an ancient or a modern foreign language might impart a certain bright stylistic coloration to a literary work.
          The history of literature knows instances when prose writers, poets, and playwrights composed their works not just in their native language, but also in some other language (s). Among the most renowned bilingual authors of the present century, one can name the Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who wrote in French and English, and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), who composed in Russian and English. The works created by the Austro-German poet Reiner Maria Rilke (1875-1926) include several small poems written in French and, even more interesting, in Russian.
          Out of those Russian men of letters who also wrote in French, one should mention the poets of the "Golden Age" of Russian literature, first and foremost, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), while from the twentieth century poets, Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941). Even in those cases when the works created in foreign languages were not intended to be published and were released posthumously, the critics do not question their merits, but rather emphasize their ex-ceptional importance for the better comprehension of the author's heritage.
          Sometimes the author is dissatisfied with the quality of the existing translations of his works (see Nabokov's "Postscript to the Russian edition" to the novel Lolita). Due to that or for some other personal reasons, he makes a decision to undertake an independent translation of his writings into a foreign language. Normally such an author, apart from good knowledge of the second language, already has certain experience and skills in literary translation into his mother tongue. A translation of this kind, known as autotranslation, differs from a conven-tional literary translation in that it may contain completely new stylistic means and devices such as tropes, figures of speech, idiomatically employed lexical units, as well as images, shades of meaning, and even meanings. In this case, the translator is also the author of his work, there-fore, he is not restricted by the problem of "copyright violation" regarding the line of thought and emotional constructions contained in the original.
          It is common knowledge that the quality of the translation is assessed, besides other pa-rameters, by the extent to which the translator's personality is concealed. Moreover, the less the translator's individual element is present, the higher the assessment of the translation. At the same time, as stated by Th.Savory, one of the most important principles of literary transla-tion in general is that, on the one hand, it has to retain the style of the original, and on the other, to possess a style of its own (see: Savory, Th. The Art of Translation. London, 1957, page 50). The notion of "style" is used in this article in the following sense: "When referring to the speaker, style is ... the controlled choice of linguistic means, whereas in referring to texts, style is the specific form of language. For the reader or listener, style is the variation (or con-firmation) of possible expectations, i.e. the observation and interpretation of linguistic specif-ics" (Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. London & New York, 1996, page 459).
          The value and singularity of autotranslation lies in the fact that this type of text both adheres to all the traditional requirements, and, at the same time, demonstrates one important characteristic: it is a piece of art as unique and idiosyncratic as its prototype. The new work belongs to a different national culture and is not constrained by the original text but rather in-spired by it, which is especially valuable.
          For a more detailed analysis I have chosen a small poetical work represented as two texts in two different languages. Both show neither significant formal disagreement, nor seri-ous "licentia poetica" of the author. Resorting to a verse is not accidental, since poetry is be-lieved to be the most difficult genre for translation. The linguists even express an opinion that translation of verses - in the sense that the term is applied to in prose - is hardly possible at all, and that it would be rightful to speak here of poetical transversion (as expressed by the Ger-man concept of Nachdichtung).
          The material I will discuss is Joseph Brodsky's poem "То не Муза воды набирает в рот..." (FOLK TUNE). Joseph (Iosif Aleksandrovich) Brodsky, a Russian poet, playwright and essayist, was born in Leningrad, Russia in 1940; for a long time he lived abroad, and in 1987 was awarded the Nobel Prize winner in literature. He died in 1996 in New York. The signifi-cance of Brodsky's creations is not restricted to Russian national literature. His verses have earned a place in the context of twentieth century world literature and culture. In his lyric and elegiac poems, Brodsky touched upon personal problems and such universal issues as life and death, love, and the meaning of human existence. To facilitate the perception of the poem, I am showing here full texts (both dated 1980), and placing them parallel to each other (quoted by: Sochineniya Iosifa Brodskogo. Vol. III. St. Petersburg, 1994, page12; autotranslation: p.380).

М.Б. То не Муза воды набирает в рот. То, должно, крепкий сон молодца берет. И махнувшая вслед голубым платком Наезжает на грудь паровым катком. И не встать ни раком, ни так словам, как назад в осиновый строй дровам. И глазами по наволочке лицо Растекается, как по сковороде яйцо. Горячей ли тебе под сукном шести одеял в том садке, где - Господь прости - точно рыба - воздух, сырой губой я хватал что было тогда тобой? Я бы заячьи уши пришил к лицу, Наглотался б в лесах за тебя свинцу, но и в черном пруду из дурных коряг я бы всплыл пред тобой, как не смог "Варяг". Но, видать, не судьба, и года не те. И уже седина стыдно молвить - где. Больше длинных жил, чем для них кро-вей, да и мысли мертвых кустов кривей. Навсегда расстаемся с тобой, дружок. Нарисуй на бумаге простой кружок. Это буду я: ничего внутри. Посмотри на него - и потом сотри.

FOLK TUNE It's not that the Muse feels like clamming up, It's more like high time for the lad's last nap. And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best Drives a steamroller across his chest. And the words won't rise either like that rod Or like logs to rejoin their old grove's sweet rot, And, like eggs in the frying pan, the face Spills its eyes all over the pillowcase. Are you warm tonight under those six veils In that basin of yours whose strung bottom wails; Where like fish that gasp at the foreign blue My raw lip was catching what then meant you? I would have hare's ears sewn to my bald head, In thick woods for your sake I'd gulp drops of lead, And from black gnarled snags in the oil-smooth pond I'd bob up to your face as some Tirpitz won't. But it's not on the cards or the waiter's tray, And it pains to say where one's hair turns gray. There are more blue veins than the blood to swell Their dried web, let alone some remote brain cell. We are parting for good, little friend, that's that. Draw an empty circle on your yellow pad. This will be me: no insides in thrall. Stare at it a while, then erase the scrawl.

          The poem analyzed falls into six stanzas of four verses, each stanza being a semanti-cally and emotionally complete segment. A reflective reading shows that this is a poet's pas-sionate monologue of an elegiac lament type. Its three motifs are: a) brooding on the creative stagnation experienced at the moment and associated in the poet's mind with b) the loss of his sweetheart, and c) a lament for past youth. From the emotional viewpoint, the whole verse is based on a quick succession of contrasting moods and feelings of the character.
          I believe it would be correct to assume that the Russian version is the original text, and the English one is the translation. While analyzing the linguistic peculiarities of both versions, I will pay special attention to the fragments that are most important semantically and stylistically.
          First, I will consider the form correspondence between the two texts. The Russian poem is composed in the form of anapest (tetrameter) with the use of plain masculine rhymes. Generally speaking, these features are preserved in the translation.
          However, while the Russian rhymes are phonologically rich and perfect, the translation demonstrates a different picture. The very first couplet is built on an imperfect rhyme which is richly represented in modern English poetry and is known as pararhyme (up - nap). Besides, the succeeding English text contains quite a number of begging rhymes which reveal disagree-ment of final voiced/voiceless consonants (rod - rot; pond - won't; that - pad), discrepancy between the initial consonants (veils - wails), and apposition of phonetically alike, yet not identical, short vowels and diphthongs (pond - won't). However, Brodsky was a real connois-seur of classical and contemporary English poetry, and would not use imperfect rhymes due to negligence. Chances are, this was done deliberately in order to give a greater "looseness" to the English text, and to "democratize" the phonetically strict and "conservative" (in comparison with the Russian verse) English rhyme. A piece of circumstantial evidence to support this con-jecture may be the typology of those "rhyme mistakes" used in the English version. The fact is that the features shown, i.e., the auditory non-distinction of some English consonants and vowels and devoicing of final voiced consonants, are inherent in native Russian speakers. That is why a Russian poet writing in English and translating from Russian, might have taken them for a "non-essential liberty", an "allowable deviation" from the established canon.
          The next item that catches the reader's eye is the title of the autotranslation and its ab-sence in the original. Brodsky's work is styled as a piece of vocal folk art which emerges from the initial lines of the Russian variant. Thus, the first stanza reminds us of a classical beginning (Russian, zachin). The evidence of that is in the words used in the second line (крепкий сон ... берет; молодец), which typically belong to the oral folklore lexicon. It is hardly possible to convey the "popular" hue by adequate means in English, even though the author does make such an effort (the words "lad" and "lass" connote with the semi-set expression "lads and lasses"). For this reason, Brodsky replaced the dedication of the Russian verse with the title FOLK TUNE which immediately raises the poem to the necessary poetical strain.
          Another important feature of the first stanza is contained in its first line. This is an ap-parent allusion to an antique epic beginning with a traditional invocation of Muse, Goddess of song, in the same way as it is arranged, say, in The Odyssey of Homer ("Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven..." [translation by Richmond Lattimore - The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer. Harper and Row. 1993]). However, this stylistic device is used here ironically. The Russian substandard pejorative idiom "набрать в рот воды " is aptly conveyed with the stylistically adequate English phrasal verb "to clam up". The parting motif first appears in the third line (И махнувшая вслед голубым платком...) and is thoroughly preserved in the translation (And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best...).
          In the English version of the first stanza the reader may find some meanings which are absent in the Russian version. Thus, the attribute last preceding the noun nap specifies the "lad's nap" (in the Russian version we have крепкий - "deep, heavy [sleep]"). It is absolutely clear that this is a hint at the final, deadly sleep, a parabolic reflection of the creative frustration which is perceived by the author as his own physical death (provided, of course, that "the lad" is how the author sarcastically names himself).
          The third and fourth lines of the Russian poem constitute a simple sentence with a complex predicate syntactically centered on the active feminine subject махнувшая. Even for a Russian reader, the use of the participial construction as a subject may significantly hamper the comprehension of the fragment, and add a certain lack of clarity to the poem. At the same time, the corresponding English segment also has a subject phrase (the scarf-waving lass), but, due to the greater syntactical distinctness of the English sentence structure in general, it fea-tures greater semantic clarity, as its syntactical center is the noun "lass".
          The second stanza of the Russian version, first line, contains the vulgar expression "встать раком" (Engl. "to be on all fours, with one's buttocks up") with the negative "не". This is a verbal metaphor (personification) expressing the poet's discontent with the "intracta-bility of words", their "unwillingness" to obey the author. In the English version, the vulgarity of style mentioned above is not manifested, while the figurativeness and object imagery of the utterance are well-preserved.
          The two final lines of the stanza contain an image of an "eye-spilling face", which sym-bolically conveys an idea of a physically sensed result of the writer's block (the loss of the outer shape, contour, face and, eventually, his identity). The English text shows almost word-for-word translation up to a precise "copying" of the "trappings": сковорода - frying pan; наволочка - pillowcase.
          In the third and fourth stanzas, the poet addresses his distant love. Here, too, the ap-parent disagreement between the connotative units of the two texts should be noted. Thus, the hint at the intimate relationship of the woman with her new lover (шесть одеял [Eng. "six blankets"] and садок [Eng. "keepnet"] symbolizing a bed), as well as the following memories (в том садке - in that basin of yours) of the same relationship between the poet and his sweetheart in the third and fourth lines, seem to be veiled, continently hidden from the Russian reader's eyes. All the information containing the semes of sexuality, is presented in a much more candid way in the English text (basin ... whose strung bottom wails), although, again, allegorically, that is implicit.
          The fourth stanza should be regarded as the emotional climax in which the semes of the poet's despair are combined with his hopes for still possible relations with his beloved one. Grammatically, in both texts, this stanza is a compound sentence with a number of predicates in the subjunctive mood (я бы ... пришил - I would have ... sewn; наглотался б... - I'd gulp...; я бы всплыл... - I'd bob up...). The surrealistic imagery and phantasmagoric symbol-ism of this fragment are reflected in the translation with an astounding precision and virtuosity, and are backed by the completive Russian historicism "Варяг". The conveyance of this lexical unit by the word Tirpitz may bewilder the reader, and it requires some explanation.
          As every educated Russian knows, Varyag is the name of the Russian battleship that fought bravely and was abandoned by its crew in the years of the Russian-Japanese War (1904-05). The Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary (Moscow, 1997) also adds that "a number of songs have been devoted to this feat" (page 181). The graphical/phonological transfer (tran-scription) of the Russian proper name into the English text would hardly reflect the dramatic anguish of the poet comparing himself to the once existing and now sunken ship. Seeking op-timal adequacy in conveying all the stylistic connotations and aesthetic potential of the Russian unit, the author (now translator) refuses even the traditional, in a situation like this, translitera-tion and finds an appropriate word which will possess the same "historical background" for the Western reader. A unit of this kind, as believed by the author, can be the name of a largest German battleship of the Second World War, - "Tirpitz". This ship was repeatedly attacked and finally wrecked on November 12, 1944 (see historical chronicles). The name of Alfred von Tirpitz, a German admiral and the chief builder of the German Navy in the years before World War I, is used here antonomastically to denote a sunken wreck (see the preceding attribute some).
          The fifth stanza bears an abrupt emotional fall which is substantiated lexically (see the close, "dictionary" translation of the idiom не судьба - not on the cards). Here, the motif of the near end becomes obstinate. However, the English version of the poem demonstrates a greater variety of the images. Thus, the first line contains an image that cannot be found in the Russian original: it's not ... on the waiter's tray. Most probably the meaning of the possible "unexpected gleam of joy", "a penny from heaven" is more easily perceived by a foreign reader through the image of a waiter holding a tray with a message from the character's love.
          The two final lines of the stanza employ "physiological" imagery in the description of the poet's senescent body. It is interesting to note that the simile between the author's thoughts and bushes in the English text is embodied in the metaphoric picture of veins resembling a web (depersonalization). Moreover, the "physiological" nature of the English images is proceeded in the fourth line: let alone some remote brain cell. As a result, the seme of "crookedness" and "lifelessness" of the bushes in the source language finds a counterpart seme of "zigzagishness" and "dryness" seen by the author in the "web of the veins" in the target language.
          The final stanza of the poem, both in its linguistic expression and meaning, is the most clear and simple fragment of the work. Its discernible pessimistic notes are stipulated by the final decision to part (навсегда расстаемся - we are parting for good) and the impossibility of regaining the lost love (that's that). This stanza expresses the greatest anticlimax of the whole poem. By its form and content it resembles a nursery rhyme (see the address дружок - little friend, the simplified lexicon in conjunction with the image of an unskillful childish draw-ing). The key concept of the stanza is the notion of "emptiness", implicitly expressed in the Russian text (простой кружок; ничего внутри; сотри) and avowed in the English transla-tion (an empty circle).
          The above analysis allows to make the following conclusions:
          1. The text of the translation as a whole is characterized by high linguistic (lexico-grammatical) precision against the text of the prototype.
          2. It follows the original in the emotional and evaluative connotations of the latter.
          3. It reveals the translator's aspiration to convey the stylistic means and devices of the original by the foreign units of the same linguistic format.
          4. Meanwhile, it contains a number of features that cannot be traced in the original, namely:
          a) The general genre key of the poem expressed in the original by words, set expres-sions, and syntax is manifested in the translation by a device placed beyond the boundaries of the text, i.e., the title;
          b) Some images employed by the author in both versions become more specific and definite in the translation;
          c) Some units lose their rude and vulgar coloring in the translation;
          d) The unit requiring the Russian reader to have some "background knowledge" of the history and culture of his nation is replaced by an adequate unit that can be understood only in case the foreign reader applies analogous "background knowledge" of his own national history and culture; and
          e) The translator introduces into the new text some images which are missing in the original. These new images are more habitual, therefore intelligible for the Western reader.
          5. The main objective of the translation, as viewed by the translator, is preservation of the emotional and aesthetic value of the poem rather than simple conveyance of the form and meaning of the original.
          The study of autotranslation has a certain significance not only in terms of the analysis of implications carried out by a literary critic or a university lecturer. An investigation of this kind is relevant from the practical standpoint as well. An expert in literary translation trying to convey all the complex associations involved by an author in a given work or in his creative work in general, should make the best use of those extremely rare opportunities offered by autotranslation. It is strongly recommended that a professional translator should previously analyze the methods, means, and devices employed by the author while translating his own writings.

You may contact the author by e-mail at serghei@excite.com