EMPATHY IN POETRY TRANSLATION: THE CASE OF METAPHOR

Abstract

The present article addresses empathy in poetic metaphor translation. Numerous works being dedicated to metaphor translation (Dagut, 1979; Van den Broeck, 1981; Mason, 1982; Newmark, 2008), the ‘cognitive turn’ in translation studies (Tabakowska, 1993; Mandelblit, 1995; Schäffner, 2004; 2017) shifted the research focus from figurative language to figurative thought. However, poetic metaphor translation has not so far been theorized as a re-conceptualization nor identified as an empathic experience. This article focuses on metaphors for space in the ‘last years’ poems’ by the Polish lyric author Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (1891–1945) translated into Russian by Natalia Astafiewa (1922–2016), the aim being to reveal empathy in the translator’s figurative thought. The parallel corpora of the study comprise 28 original poems created in 1942 and their Russian translations. Identified linguistically with the MIPVU (Pragglejaz group, 2007; Steen et al., 2010; Nacey et al., 2019) and conceptually with the MSDIP (Reijnierse, Burgers, 2023), the original metaphors are compared to their translation equivalents. Having analyzed the interaction between metaphor translation procedures (Newmark, 2008) and strategies (Delisle et al., 1999), we establish that empathy may parameter poetic metaphor translation.