TRANSLATOR’S CREATIVE PERSONALITY AS DETERMINANT OF DIACHRONIC PLURALITY IN TRANSLATION OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

Abstract

It is insufficient to take into account only the author’s personal linguistic and cognitive characteristics to achieve the adequacy of literary translation of the time-remote original text. An important factor in the adequacy of retranslations is the personality of the translator himself. The goal of the research is to demonstrate the influence of the translator’s creative personality that determines his choice of translation strategy and, accordingly, the style of the retranslated text. The article provides the comparative analysis of time-remote original Shakespeare’s tragedies “Hamlet” (1599) and “Macbeth” (1605) and their Ukrainian retranslations by M. Starytsky (1882), P. Kulish (1899), Y. Klen (1930), L. Hrebinka (1939), T. Osmachka (1930), and B. Ten (1986). Besides this, the research methodology incorporates general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, observation and abstraction. The article focuses on the creative personality characteristics of Ukrainian poets-translators of Shakespeare’s tragedies, formed in the XIX–XXI centuries under the influence of cultural and historical context and literary style of the epoch. The research revealed the influence of the translator’s chosen translation strategy – historization / archaization or modernization / domestication – on the stylistic variability of diachronic plurality of time-remote original texts retranslations. As a result of the interaction of the translator’s creative linguistic personality with the author’s artistic method, the meanings are deciphered and reproduced in the target language through the translator’s linguistic and stylistic means by using his own translation strategies, which determines the stylistic variability of diachronic plurality of Ukrainian retranslations.