On amateur translation of Polish poetry into Russian: versification study

The article examines the phenomenon of amateur translation of works of fiction, which has recently become widespread. The analysis of academic literature and Internet resources focused on the issues of amateur translation of poetic texts prove the relevance of the problem; since, despite the early use of this term at the beginning of the 20th century, there are still no precise criteria for the definition of this type of translation, and the term itself is often used only in an evaluative manner. The purpose of the article is to identify the features and specifics of amateur translation based on the analysis of formal poetic factors and their reflection in Russian translations of the poem «Song of the Dear Family House» by the Polish poet Maria Konopnitskaya. Due to the importance of a poem’s formal components, when assessing the quality of translation, it is this aspect that this paper is focused on. The use of a set of research methods while comparing the original poem with its translations, revealed that the translations qualified as amateur, show, primarily, the translators’ disregard towards the formal side of the translated text, i.e. failure to observe the metric originality of the poetic text, violation of the author’s rhyme, disregard towards accentological features and the quality of rhyme, as well as reluctance to preserve the graphic appearance of the stanza. The author of an amateur translation rarely analyses the formal features of the poem, conveying the author’s thought in the most convenient way.