Tsvetaeva in English translation: an analysis of three of the latest translations of the poem ‘Longing for the motherland’/ ‘Yearning to get back home’/ ‘Homesickness’

Pertsev Evgenii Mikhailovich, Julius Kochan

The lexicon, rhythm, imagery and virtuosity of Tsvetaeva’s poetry is so idiosyncratic that the translator of her works is faced with a practically impossible task: how to convey not only the content and rhythm of the original, but also the idiolectical, neologistic use of language. But it is probably exactly this which explains translators’ ambition to reconstruct, in the language of translation, the perennially relevant themes which the poet raises, whilst at the same time rendering their translation as close to the original as possible. Guided by the principles of communicative-functional theory of translation, the concepts of multi-layered equivalence and communicative interchangeability, we propose in this article an analysis of three variations of translation of Tsvetaeva’s poem ‘Longing for the motherland’/ ‘Yearning to get back home’/ ‘Homesickness’, which were published in the University of Edinburgh’s journal ‘Translation and Literature’. The article analyses the means of translating lexicon, the poem’s particular features of expressive syntax, the significance of punctuation as a meaningful component of the poetic idiolect.

Keywords:Tsvetaeva, «longing for the motherland», communicative theory of translation, expressive syntax, equivalence, punctuation.