Poetic Imagery Transformations In Translation

The article deals with transformations in imagery of a poetic text in interlingual translation. A poetic text is one of the most difficult objects for translation as a translator should pay close attention to the content and the form and to two close planes – imagery and symbolic. A word is regarded as a unit of a literary text which concentrates an image in itself and a symbolic aspect behind it. A literary image is of many aspects and translator’s success depends on the ability to see and render these aspects. This diversity of aspects is of high difficulty for a translator because lack of attention to a word-symbol results in corruption of the author’s idea. In this regard the article sets the aim to show the imaginative aspect of key words and to study translator’s variants that lead to preserving or loss of imagery and symbolic meaning. The analysis is based on the semantics of the words participating in creating imagery and through semantics explains shifts in the translated image. The article studies the problem stated in Russian-to-English translation on the material of Boris Pasternak’s poetry. The article states that while working with such words or symbols a translator should conduct profound semantic analysis and carefully choose translation equivalents in order not to interfere with the author’s imagery.