Linguo-sociocultural aspects of the past eras’ poetic texts translation (on the example of A. S. Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin German translations)

The article examines theoretical and practical aspects of translation studies: the adequacy of poetic texts translation within the language pair “Russian – German” using the example of A. S. Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin translation. The paper describes the main difficulties in translating poetic texts: the need for adequate conversion of both the content and the artistic form, the heterogeneity of the source and target languages, as well as the cultural and linguistic space considerations, especially with regard to texts from past eras. The material of the study was the above-noted work of A. S. Pushkin and its translations into German: one of the early translations of the 20th century by Theodor Komischo and the latest translation to date by Viktor Prib. The research distinguishes three groups of vocabulary that cause the greatest difficulties in translating the novel by A. S. Pushkin Eugene Onegin: Slavicisms, Russianisms, markers of the era. A comparison of the provided translations is carried out. In particular, the article analyzes individual examples of Slavicisms translations that function as poeticisms, or are used to create a certain stylistic effect; Russianisms that convey cultural and historical realities and also perform stylistic functions; markers of the era, units and expressions that are associated with a particular chronological period, in this case the Pushkin’s era. The article establishes various ways of translating realias, phenomena and facts of another culture: adaptive translation, approximating translation, dynamic equivalence, pragmatic equivalence, generalization. It also identifies cases of semantic distortion, unexpressed stylistic tonality and lacunarity. The study concludes that it is advisable to use the technique of linguistic and cultural commentary when translating large volumes of poetry.