Translation boundaries in For Stevie Smith by M. Stepanova

Problem statement. The book For Stevie Smith by the Russian poet Maria Stepanova is a free translation of the verses by a famous British poetess. Stepanova, relying on Grigory Dashevsky's theory and practice, explains in detail the specifics of her work. However, due to specific features in Dashevsky and Stepanova's commenting method, the status of this type of imitations in the literary process remains not fully clarified. Materials and methods. For the study, verses of the “gnomic” type were chosen. They express a single thought and allow one to see better mechanisms for constructing utterances that are different from those introduced by the rich imagery of plot poems. The main method was the reconstruction of the sources of Grigory Dashevsky's views on translation and imitation, going back to classical philology. The works were also taken into account of Stepanova's poetry experts and researchers, who posed close questions about the boundaries of art in creating new philosophical meanings similar to the philosopher and phenomenologist Anna Yampolskaya. Results. The study proved that the position of Maria Stepanova reproduces the position founded by Grigory Dashevsky in interpreting the legacy of Aratus: the return from the ideals of semiotics of the Middle Stoa to the simplicity of the Early Stoa. Stepanova, unlike Dashevsky, not only sacrifices accuracy (in the terminology of Dashevsky, “translation minus”), but also adds something. Thus, it enhances the ethical pathos of Smith's poems, without any distortion of the plot of the poem, but due to a change in the coordinates in which didactic poem is read. Conclusion. The For Stevie Smith book should be recognized as a special achievement of Russian poetry, not limited to the concepts of poetic translation and poetic imitation. This is an important experiment on updating of ancient and Christian ethics by exclusively lyrical means. In this experiment, a new type of translator refuses not from specific features of the form, but from the inertia of the romantic type of an utterance.