Gestalt closure strategies for rendering personified images of Moon, Sun, Love, and Death in poetry translation into Ukrainian

Abstract

ABSTRACT This work highlights the translation strategies motivated by the matrices of the national poetic mappings of the world in the original and recipient cultures. Its purpose lies in displaying the immediate connection between the patterns of translators’ reframing the poetic source images and the conceptual structure of prototype gestalts that have taken root in the source and target poetic traditions. The methodological instrument of revealing and describing this link has been found in the conceptual analysis of images within the framework of the English and Ukrainian poetic models of the world and in the application of the gestaltist laws of Prägnanz and Closure that appear to be efficient in elucidating the motivation of translatorial decisions in case a complex source image presents a considerable translation problem due to its inviolable links with specific conceptual schemas ingrained in the target poetic worldview. The paper delineates the cognitive underpinnings of translators’ decisions in the situations of limited translatability of the source-personified images conditioned by their culture-bound gender characteristics. Although the research is performed on the basis of two concrete poetic worldview systems, it investigates universal cognitive regularities of literary translation as gestalt principles state the general rules of human perception.