Narrative and syntactic organization of Dmitry Bakin’s small prose: equivalence and idiomaticity of translation

Abstract

Using the methodological framework of narrative linguistics and linguistic stylistics, this article studies the narrative organization of Dmitry Bakin’s short stories. Functional, structural-syntagmatic, and figurative-expressive parameters of the writer’s unique literary language are illustrated through analyzing the story “Leaves”. Andrew Bromfield’s English translation of the story is examined to identify optimal translation techniques for recreating the complex aesthetic form of the source text, constructed according to the principle of narrative polyphony and dynamic shift s in narrative modes (with zero, external, and internal focalization). The comparative translational analysis is used to identify a general program of translation actions (translation strategy) that enables the translator to achieve formal-aesthetic equivalence between texts in two languages and fulfill the pragmatic task of preserving the source text compositional and syntactic invariance in all its structural, semantic, and stylistic complexity. Translational syntactic assimilation is described as a translator’s strategy for working with the narrative form of a text, the development of which occurs through the cascading syntactic complication of simple sentences and through the branching juxtaposition and contrasting of different types of coordinative and subordinate connections within a single narrative passage.

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