Techniques of Textual Nomination in Ironic Narrative: Interpreting the Forms of the Present Historical in Russian Translations of Short Story by O. Henry

The article is devoted to the analysis of ways of textual presentation of narrative fragments using the forms of the present historical tense. The use of such forms in a narrative is an eff ective way of shifting the deictic center, which makes it possible to draw the reader’s attention to a certain plot twist. However, the translator can relate to this technique more freely: use it more often than in the original, highlighting other events, or, conversely, make the text more homogeneous. The article discusses strategies for using the present historical tense in Russian translations of O. Henry’s novella “The Ransom of Red Chief”: preserving the form in the same cases as in the original text, replacing it with past tense forms, and changing predicate taxicab relations (using structures with dependent taxis). The research material was 9 translations of the novel into Russian (from the 1920s to the 2020s). Comparing the translations of the novel with the English-language original allows, fi rstly, to study the features of grammatical transformations of the specifi c tense forms of the verb in texts from diff erent eras, and secondly, to analyze various translation strategies and identify the variant closest to the original in pragmatic terms. In general, in modern translations, the inclusion of the forms of the present historical is more common than in the translations of the 20th century, and one of the earliest translations is characterized by the complete absence of such fragments, even in cases where the forms of the present tense are used in the English-language original.