STRUCTURAL - SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF THE SONGLIKE POEMS BY О.G. MITIAEV TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN INTO GERMAN

The paper covers the study of songlike poems written by O.G. Mitiaev, one of the most outstanding representatives of the guitar song, and translated from Russian into German by the internationally known German Slavist K. Wolf, from the perspective of comparative analysis method.

The relevance of this paper is caused by the growing interest in European countries, and namely in Germany, for guitar songs, or, as they define it, the songs composed by a singer poet. The authors found out that the migration of Russian Germans in the 1990es caused the creation and wide spreading of guitar songs in that country. Apparently, it is caused by the fact that Russian and German languages act as their mother tongue for the authors. The creation of poems in Russian became not only the basis for creation of similar poems in German, but mostly for their translation, because, according to some authors’ opinion, it is not always possible to write original lyrics in German. This cultural layer was given a definition of “Lagerfeuerromantik”.

This paper analyzed the structural and semantic translation peculiarities of songs of this genre on the example of poems “It is so Cool” and “Chimney Smoke”. Basing on the analysis, the authors revealed such translation transformations as lexical substitution, concretization, transliteration and omission. The violation of typical grammatical structures of German sentences, which indicates the presence of informal style, as well as the use of nonce words, dialectisms and extended metaphors while translating, is of great interest.

The study confirmed the thesis suggested by the authors that while translating the guitar songs the traditional methods of translation are used, as well as the new forms of poetic strophes retaining the original semantics are created.