On Petrarch's philosophical prose principles of translation

The Francesco Petrarch’s philosophical prose written in Latin is practically unknown to the Russian reader. The Italian humanist wrote six philosophical treatises, several invectives, and a huge number of letters. The biggest in volume composition is a treatise “Means against the Vicissitude of Life”. The article deals with the problems of its translation from Latin into Russian. By its style the work is referred to a literary text; therefore, a translation should be carried out with deep consideration of its original flavor. Any translation of the foreign-language text has its certain limits of convertibility. It should be considered that one and the same word in different languages can have different emotional saturation and cause other associations. The author of the article pays special attention to the translation of synonymic ranks, word-plays, specific syntactic designs (gomeoteleutus), and to the problem of Latin realities’ transfer.