Аннотация:The issue of intercultural relations, especially between East and West, has always been highly thought-provoking. One of the most intriguing objects of study in this context is the translation of poetry across cultures, investigated in numerous works on semiotics of culture. Not infrequently philosophers suggested opposing views, ranging from “East is East and West is West, they are totally different and will never understand each other” to “East and West can not exist without each other”.
In the current era of globalization, when borders, either geographical or cultural tend to disappear, this work is yet another attempt to explore translatability of works beyond the boundaries of its national cultures. The term “translation” is still not that clear and, in fact, does not fully correspond to the requirements of scientific terminology. There are three meanings of this term in the “Dictionary of linguistic terms”:
1. Comparison of two or more languages targeted at finding semantic equivalences among their units.
2. Transference of information by means of another language.
3. Choosing words and forms in another language, that not only ensure transference of “information”, but maximum correspondence of the new text to the “original”, in the form (external and internal), as well, what is vital for fiction texts.
Following the approach, suggested by Professor Zadornova in her doctoral thesis, we will base our work on the second and third definitions. Accordingly we perceive translation as an attempt to find equivalents in another language to the complex set of language means, used for clarifying the content of fiction,. Thus the resulted equivalents of the original can by no means be regarded as translations in their nominal sense. They are always “variations” or “improvisations on…”.
On the one hand, in order to provide for any form of communication between the nations (cultural and historical), the so-called “free” translations to other languages are available. Such translations resemble tough competition between an author and his “interpreter”. In fact there are very few works that create full equivalent of a literary.
Japanese haiku that has become the centre of our investigation is a challenging object for a student of translation, offering a deep insight and demonstration for a wide range of highly complicated scholarly issues – one of the most burning and controversial among them being the translatability of a literary work taken out from its cultural environment as well as the choice of compensatory means for foreignness in the translation.