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.
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.
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The Problem of Poetic Iconicity in Different Languages С. 262–271. DOI 10.25205/2307-1737-2019-2-262-271