Denisova D. Weird fiction: translating the term into ukrainian

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of possible variants of translation of the English literary term “weird
fiction”, which designates a specific movement in the Anglophone 20th and 21st
-century literature of the fantastic.
The necessity to address the problem arises out of the lack of a corresponding analogue in the Ukrainian
terminological apparatus of literary studies. Since neither “weird” nor “fiction” has an exact equivalent in
Ukrainian, this article sets out to present a descriptive translation of the term. The article analyzes two variants of
the term translation: “khymerna proza” (“chimerical prose”) and “khymerna fantastyka” (“chimerical fantastic
literature”). The Ukrainian lexeme “khymerna” (“chimerical”) was selected based on its correspondence to the
meaning incorporated in the term “weird fiction”. The second part of the term – “fiction” – was translated as: 1)
“prose” since prose is the favoured literary form of Weird Fiction (WF) writers; and 2) “fantastic literature”
given that WF belongs to the domain of the Fantastic. The fact that there was a phenomenon termed “khymerna
proza” in Ukrainian literature of the 20th century which differs distinctly from Weird Fiction makes the use of the
term “khymerna proza” to refer to Weird Fiction inadequate. Therefore, we conclude that “khymerna fantastika”
renders the English term most accurately since it does not interfere with any existing Ukrainian terms and enables
the Ukrainian reader to infer the defining features of the phenomenon from its name.