Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

This article considers particular nodal points in the translational career of British journalist and poet-translator Faith Elizabeth Joan Rich, better known by her pen name Vera, and the pivotal aspects of her translation strategy oriented at attaining greater semantic accuracy, which often turns out to be “an impossible ideal” (in her own words). Rich had been translating and retranslating the works of Ukrainian Romantic poet and artist Taras Shevchenko (1814‒1861) in the endeavour to give the English readers a complete version of Shevchenko’s poetry collection “Кобзар” (“The Kobzar”). The discussion in this article analyzes self-editing as an integral and never-ending stage of the translation process, viewed through the prism of George Steiner’s theory of hermeneutic motion. In particular, it focuses on the Taras Shevchenko Memorial in Washington, D.C., inscribed with 8 lines from Shevchenko’s anti-imperialist poem “The Caucasus” in the translation by Vera Rich. It also compares translation strategies of Ethel Lilian Voynich and Vera Rich – two congenial interpretators of Shevchenko’s poem “Testament” in their striving to reflect the Ukrainian poet’s soul, mirror his recognizable identity, and animate in English the ST dynamic fusion of meaning and sound, verse and style.