| Abstract [eng] |
Although there exists a might gap in time – a few hundred years – between the coming of intertextual literary theories and the first editions of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, it is precisely the kind of text that lends itself to fruitful intertextual analysis. The poet of Paradise Lost remakes the biblical narratives of the creation of the world, man, the temptation brought on by Satan man’s fall and many more. Although there is plenty of explicit allusions to the Bible through the names of characters, places, symbols, histories, the “tissue” of the text itself is ripe with intertextual echoes. This is due to the fact that Milton assimilates in his poem the language of various English Bible translations (and others). Therefore, even without its explicit allusions, the language of the poem itself hides a wide variety of biblical intertexts, which is difficult to delineate. The aim of this work is to analyze the Lithuanian translation of Paradise Lost, which has only entered Lithuanian literature in the year 2022. The methodology of this work is based on the philosophy of the Manipulation school, a movement for descriptive translation studies. Since the translation is incomplete, the analysis begins with examining the difference between the original and translation texts. It is observed that the selection of excerpts, even though less than half of the poem’s original lines, conveys the central narrative elements of the poem with marginal collateral damage. Moreover, the selected parts for the translation imply a strategy to reduce the number of explicit allusions to historical, classical, and biblical motifs in the translation text. This makes an examination of “the tissue” of Paradise Lost even more important, as the ratio of underlying intertexts only increases in the translation. The main part of the analysis concerns itself with an examination of universe and characters of Paradise Lost. This allows to locate relevant and specific intertexts between the lines of the poem and excerpts from the Bible. Lastly, a comparative qualitative analysis is carried out by comparing the text of the poem, the translation, excerpts from an English Bible variant (KJV in this instance), and excerpts from a Lithuanian Bible translation. The findings of this analysis include several examples, where the translator was not only successful in translating the intertext, but also highlighting it. The examination revealed examples where a translation of the intertext was impossible due to the linguistic difference of the two languages, or linguistic tradition. Lastly, the findings yielded examples where the translator was not able or chose not to translate the intertextual echo. Since this work was carried out in the spirit of descriptive analysis, it does not concern itself with finding mistakes or illuminating the shortcomings of the translation, but rather providing a thorough examination of what is manifest in the translation. |
