WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE RUSSIAN POET TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS IN S. YA. MARSHAK’S TRANSLATIONS

The paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to present numerous instances of discrepancies between original texts of Shakespeare’s sonnets and their translations by S. Ya. Marshak as systematic. Marshak’s translations are compared to those by a famous linguist and translator A. M. Finkel. The comparison of sonnets with their translations brings one to the conclusion that characteristic of Marshak’s translation was a very limited use of dictionary equivalents of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. S. Ya. Marshak regularly makes use of the metonymic transfer along the pattern ‘low — high’ (in both literal and fi gurative senses), which could take such particular variants as ‘the source of sound — the sound it produces’, ‘an organ of a human being — its function’, etc. Marshak fi lls his translations with epithets absent in sonnets and changes Shakespeare’s colour palette by adding to it complicated colours. The intonation of sonnets becomes softer, as Marshak substitutes imperative sentences by affi rmative or conditional ones, and transforms a reproof or a question into an aphoristic utterance. Sonnet 66 which in Marshak’s translation is more expressive than the rest, is an exception. My hypothesis is that in this sonnet Marshak found an outlet for his own emotions related to the political situation in the Soviet Union of 1937 (Stalin’s purge) —
1948 (the climax of the fi ght against cosmopolitism).