POETIC NEOLOGISMS AS A UNIT OF TRANSLATION: THE CASE OF ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV’S “GRASSHOPPER”

Based on Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “Grasshopper” and its English translation by Paul Schmidt, the article examines the inter-language transfer of complexly structured meanings of poetic neologisms. The re-expression of a poem containing “untranslatable” neologisms is considered as an act of translator’s co creation of Khlebnikov’s aestheticphilological experiment. The formal aesthetic equivalence of translation (the maximum possible transfer of all ideological, aesthetic, pragmatic, linguistic and individual stylistic features of the source text) begins with the selection of translation units of diff erent levels. At the macro level, the translator deals with a system of textual meanings that are produced by the poem as a meaningful whole. At the micro level, it is required to re-verbalize source-text experiments with form and content, which result in the appearance of neologisms as individually expressive signs. Guided by the requirements of minimality and motivation of translation transformations, the translator takes into account the possibility of full or partial (a) reconstruction of the original word-formation mechanism for the production of neologisms and (b) non-conventional meaning reconstruction. Equivalence of non-conventional meanings in the source text and the target text is achieved through a complex semantic transformation. Non-trivial translation decision-making and the use of translation techniques of compensation, explication, lexical substitution, addition and permutation allow minimizing losses in the inter-language transfer of meanings. Partial reconceptualization (the use of construal operations in the target language that differ from the source language) is an objectively necessary procedure that allows achieving translation equivalence at the macro-textual level.