Voloshuk V. The Peculiarities of Syntactic Struture in r. m. Rilke's Poetic Works and Their Preservation in Ukrainian Translations

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of syntactic features of G. M. Rilke's idiostyle and their preservation in Ukrainian translations. Rilke masterfully builds his poetry  syntactically  and compositionally due to diverse phenomena. Repetitions and leitmotifs shape the structure and emphasize the events that the author tries to convey to the reader. In the works presented there is a variety of compound and composite sentences, but the emotive syntax in the form of rhetorical questions, exclamations-parentheses, parcellations and other things stands out especially vividly. All these syntactical constructions make Rilke's style uniquely diverse and complicate the work of translators. Trying to preserve the content and structure of Rilke's poems, Ukrainian translators use a number of syntactic transformations. Most often, these are permutations (changing the word order in a sentence, inversion). Also various types of substitutions are applied, among them replacement of  parts of speech and sentences and types of syntactic connections (sentences with conjunctives into sentences without them) , complex sentences into simple ones, compound with two sentences into one). The transformation of the object is usually manifested in deploying  elliptic, reduced Rilke's structures into detailed or complete sentences. When it is impossible to find the full equivalent of the object it is necessary to expand it descriptively in the translation. Conversely, translators sometimes use omission (the opposite to adding transformations) when there is excessive information in the original. However, it is used by Rilke’s translators less.