Perceptual Images in the Poetry of Slovak Symbolists (Based on the Original and Translated Poems by Ivan Krasko)

Abstract

The article provides an analysis of perceptual images in the aspect of text-related activities based on the poems by the Slovak symbolist poet Ivan Krasko. The focus is placed on the linguistic means of expressing perceptual semantics which allow exploring the artistic picture of the author’s world within the given literary direction. The problem of artistic perception is examined in the context of current research in the field of lin-guistic semantics and philological analysis of literary texts. In the first part of the article, the authors give a definition of a perceptual image, understood as one of the forms of an artistic image that is filled with a specific lexical and semantic content in the author’s individual worldview. A review of the works of Slovak researchers who discuss the features of the symbolist poetry of Ivan Krasko is given. It is emphasized that the creativity of the Slovak symbolist is characterized by poetic parallelism between the internal state of the lyrical hero and their surrounding nature. Sensory perception in the poetry of Ivan Krasko is focused on the awareness and classification of “perceived” objects and phenomena. The second (main) part of the article deals with a comparative linguistic analysis of the original poem “My Songs” and its poetic translation by Anna Akhmatova. The most significant artistic image in the original and translated text is všednosť/ordinariness (everydayness), which reflects the internal state of the lyrical hero and is represented by a wide range of linguistic units with perceptual semantics. The analyzed perceptual images are fog, haze, poplar, mountains, flowers, etc. At the lexical level, there are similar features in the description of the landscape: nouns and adjectives with semantics of visual perception are used – greenness, whiteness, blue-ness. The differences at the formal-syntactic level are due to the peculiarities of the syntactic structure of the Slovak language and the Russian language, while the proposi-tional semantics generally corresponds. At the stylistic level, minor differences are explained by the author’s worldview: in case of Krasko, it is a symbolist worldview; in case of Akhmatova, it is the acmeist worldview. In the original text, the main images are represented by expressions with an abstract meaning: božie muky dole v cintoríne, striebro riavy, v dolinu, vzkvetlú tisícerým kvetom; in translation, the images are more specific: crucifixion, a rose hip, a crest, a cliff. As a result of the comparative analysis of the original and translated texts, the peculiarities of the representation of the percep-tual picture of the world of the author and the translator, realized at different text levels, were revealed. Poetic transformations testify to the “special type of perception” charac-teristic of the Slovak poet as a representative of the symbolist trend.