Specificity of Translation of the Three-line Verse Poetry Haiku from the Standpoint of Dichotomy «Logographic – Alphabetic Writing» : comparative – typological aspect

←2017. – Vol.11

Pyrogov V.

PhD., Assoc. Professor

Kyiv National Linguistic University

FULL TEXT PDF (UKRAINIAN)

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to study the possibility of translating culture-specific concepts of Japanese haiku poems into non-logographic languages. Relationship between thinking and verbalization of haiku poetical images is analyzed with respect to “logographic – alphabetic writing” dichotomy. The problem of relationship between Chinese character writing and structure-semantic and esthetic aspects of haiku has not yet been comprehensively studied. Character conveys a whole image, idea, concept, containing much more information than any single letter of an alphabet. The way Japanese people think as representatives of the Far East civilization is ecological in its essence since it is not affected by the influence of formal logic which always hinders the establishment of harmonious relations between Man and Nature. The important factor of emotional and esthetic impact of haiku verse on the reader is the calligraphic and stylistic form of the characters they consist of. Hence, haiku literary genre could hardly have emerged in a language other than logographic, taking into account specific graphic-semantic, structural and esthetic features of the characters it is composed of, while on the other, this genre appeared exactly in the Japanese language essentially because it employs a mixed system of writing called kanjikanamajiribun. Thanks to kanji the thought emanated by consciousness is almost instantly converted from the state of mental corpuscular clusters into motivated words. Hence, kanji function as universal, self-interpretative, graphicsemantic codes of a complex architectonic structure that can be respectively interpreted and converted into grammatically and syntactically determined messages while being verbalized.

Key words: haiku, three line poem, character writing, alphabetic writing, character writing, alphabetic writing, hiragana, romaji, thinking, poetical worldview, poetical concept, semantic content, esthetic potential, interpretation

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