The dialect basis of Mykhailo Atamanyuk’s translation of the German-language Ein Kampf um’s Recht by K.E. Franzos

Abstract

The article focuses on the first Ukrainian translation of the novel Ein Kampf um’s Recht by the Austrian writer Karl Emil Francoz of the mid-19th century, which tells about the struggle of Galician peasants - Rusins - for their land. The translation was made in Chernivtsi in 1910 by Mykhailo Atamanyuk, a Ukrainian writer and translator, whose creative legacy has been unfairly overlooked by researchers. Mykhailo Atamanyuk grew up and got education in Austro-Hungary, where he witnessed the interethnic dialogue and intercuLturaL contacts and mastered the local dialect from his childhood. These factors, together with Atamanyuk's consonance with Franzos in the perpception of reality, formed a reliable basis for a high-quality translation into the native language of its heroes. The authors argue that the translation under analysis accurately conveys all the typical features of the local dialect. The article analyses the translation in terms of the dialectal facts on different language levels and identifies phonetic, morphological, lexical, and syntactic dialectal phenomena, typical for the Transnistrian dialect of the Galician-Bukovinian dialects within the South-Western dialect of the Ukrainian language. Basing on the two toponyms mentioned in the novel, the authors determine its linguo-spatial background - Kolomyisky, Tlumatsky, Horodenkivsky, and Snyatinsky districts of Ivano-Frankivsk Region of modern Ukraine, which represent the Transnistrian dialect at the Ukrainian dialect map. These dialects formed the basis of the Western Ukrainian variety of the literary language, which contributed to the popularity of the novel among Ukrainian readers. Thus, for the first time, the dialect basis of Atamanyuk's Ukrainian translation of the novel Ein Kampf um’s Recht by K.E. Franzos has been established.