Not Quite a Juggler of Identities: Joseph Brodsky's Translations within the American Literary Tradition
| Thesis title in Czech: | Překlady Josifa Brodského v rámci americké literární tradice |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | Not Quite a Juggler of Identities: Joseph Brodsky's Translations within the American Literary Tradition |
| Key words: | Brodsky,překlad,Americká poezie |
| English key words: | Brodsky, translation, American poetry |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2013/2014 |
| Thesis type: | Bachelor's thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | doc. Justin Quinn, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 28.05.2014 |
| Date of assignment: | 28.05.2014 |
| Administrator's approval: | not processed yet |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 04.06.2014 |
| Date and time of defence: | 02.02.2016 09:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 01.06.2015 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 02.02.2016 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by worker on behalf on and finalized |
| Opponents: | doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil. |
| Guidelines |
| The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the difficulties in bringing JosephBrodsky's poetry in English. It is also an attempt to locate Brodsky’s poetry in relation to the multilingual American literary tradition by considering the factors that resulted in Brodsky being exceptionally successful in English, and the negative criticism of his translations into English. This research explores translation by considering the linguistic, literary and cultural factors involved in the transition of the poems from Russia (and Russian) to America(and English). It raises a set of broader issues connected with questioning the authority of the native speaker, the nature of the American literary tradition, and defining a good translation. Yet, it also considers the particularities of the literary niche of the exiled writers, the extend and the approaches to the transformations of English done by the authors-representatives of ethnic minorities, the appropriateness of slang and the connotations of certain rhyme schemes in English and Russian. The thesis approaches the subject by discussing the ethics of translation specifically in the context of the Russian poetry translated into English with the main focus placed on Brodsky. It provides the overview of the debate around Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, and briefly examines the mechanics of the methods of translating poetry from a flective into an analytic language. It lists the methods (mainly based of Levý’s Umění překladu) that the native and non-native speakers tend to undertake and discusses them in relation to the purpose of translation. The argument proceeds by locating Brodsky in the American literary tradition. It defines the multilingual nature of the American literature largely relying on Bharati Mukherjee in “Immigrant Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature” and Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien’s Weird English as the framework. It also considers the criticism of Brodsky’s English and Russian-speaking contemporaries in order to refer to the non-literary aspects of belonging to a literary tradition. Having considered the cultural, ethical and theoretical dimensions of Joseph Brodsky’s translations of his own poetry, the argument proceeds to the linguistic comparison of the architectonics of Brodsky’s poetry and translations with the emphasis on syntax, register, stanza, rhyme and meter. It relies on both, language corpora and criticism, by comparing Brodsky’s Russian originals, Brodsky’s translations of English poetry into Russian, Brodsky’s translations of his own work and the translations of Brodsky’s poetry by the native speakers of English. The main issue this thesis is bound to encounter is the overlapping of its subsections. However, it will attempt to maintain the target structure. |
| References |
| Bayley, John. “Mastering Speech.” The New York Review of Books [New York] 12 Jun. 1986:501. Boyd, Brian. Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Brodsky, Joseph. “Translating Akhmatova.” New York Review of Books [New York] 9 Aug. 1973:174. Brodsky, Joseph. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Brodskij, Iosif. Pisma Rimskomu Drugu. Sankt-Peterburg: Azbuka-Klassika, 2009. Burton, Rob. Artists of the Floating World: Contemporary Writers Between Cultures. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2007. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” Poetics Today. Spring 1990: 45-51. Levý, Jiří. Umění překladu. Praha: Kosmas, 2012. Losev, Lev, and Piotr Vajl. Iosif Brodskij:Trudy I Dni. Moskva: Nezavisimaja Gazeta, 1998. Losev, Lev. Iosif Brodskij: Zhizn Zamechatelnych Ludej. Moskva: Molodaja Gvardija, 2008. Mukherjee, Bharati. “Immigrant Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature.” American Literary History 23. 3 (2011): 680-696. JSTOR. Nien-Ming-Ch’ien, Evelyn. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pinsker, Sanford., “Is There An American Literary Tradition?” The Virginia Quarterly Review [Charlottesville, VA] 12 Dec. 2003. Shaitanov, Igor. “Uravnenije s Dvumja Neizvestnymi.” magazine.russ.ru. Voprosy Literatury 1998. Shirato J. and P. Stapleton. “Comparing English Vocabulary in a Spoken Learner Corpus with a Native Speaker Corpus: Pedagogical Implications Arising from an Empirical Study in Japan” Language Teaching Research. October 2007: 393-412. Sollors, Werner. New-York: Multilingual America. NYU Press, 1998. Sukharnikova, Maria. “Reflections on the Nature of Free Verse and Poetic Form.” Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. April 2013:90-96. |