The Poetry of William Butler Yeats in Nada Grošelj’s and Veno Taufer’s Translations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i1.10Keywords:
literary translation, poetry translation, Irish poetry, Yeats, William Butler, Slovenian translations, Taufer, Veno, Grošelj, NadaAbstract
This article discusses five original poems by W. B. Yeats in comparison with their Slovenian translations by Veno Taufer and Nada Grošelj. Its aim is to determine, through the analysis of rhythm, form and poetic devices, how and to what extent the original elements are preserved in the translations, and what was lost – or gained – in the process. The findings confirm the fact that problems may be caused by the absence of inflections in verbs and adjectives in English, the use of impersonal forms, and a large vocabulary of full-lexical monosyllabic words in English, as their Slovenian counterparts are often much longer. As the different models of translating poetry suggest, there is no single answer to the question of whether the translator should preserve the metric scheme and omit content, or to retain the content and break the metric image of the poem. This is also confirmed by the examples of translations by Nada Grošelj and Veno Taufer, which differ in their approach to rhythm and content. Despite these differences, both translators carefully preserve the original sound characteristics, which points to the answer that sound contributes at least as much to the final effect of the poem as content and rhythm.
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