Iryna Steshenko as a translator of Anglophone literature Essays

Iryna Steshenko as a translator of Anglophone literature Essays Iryna Steshenko as a translator of Anglophone literature Iryna Steshenko is a spectacular Ukrainian actress and a prominent translator. She was brought up in a family where people treasured folk traditions and customs. All members of her family were related to literature, education and Ukrainian culture in general. In order to get to know her better as a translator, we should dive deeper into her biography. Iryna Steshenko was born on July 5, 1898, in Kyiv. She is the daughter of Ivan M. Steshenko and Oksana Steshenko, the cousin of Lesya Ukraiinka and the granddaughter of Mykhailo Starytsky - the coryphaeus of the Ukrainian Theatre . Iryna Steshenko was the last representative of the renowned ancestry, which, after her death in 1987, ceased to exist. From early childhood, she began studying foreign languages. At the age of three, she had a governess from Germany and at five - from France. Hence she obtained a good command of those languages. In 1918 she graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Higher Women's Studies in Kyiv. After graduation, in addition to her mother language, she was fluent in Russian, German, French, and English. Not every woman back then had the opportunity to obtain such solid and versatile knowledge. In 1920 Iryna Steshenko graduated from the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute. It was then that Pavlo Tychyna - Taras Shevchenko Theatre dramaturge at that time - approached her and asked to translate some comedies by Moliere. These were The Bourgeois Gentleman , The Imaginary Invalid , Scapin the Schemer . Tychyna would later edit her translations to be suitable for the theatre. These plays were often featured in Ukrainian theatres. After that Iryna Steshenko was paying more and more attention to the artistic translation, and from 1949 she devoted herself to it completely. The achievements of Iryna Steshenko as a translator are particularly notable, because she, as a person with a solid education and as a descendant of famous writers, had an extraordinary feeling of the Ukrainian language; she knew it perfectly and used it skilfully . The language of her translations is academic and graceful, but at the same time, it is alive and natural. From the very beginning, Steshenko as a translator set very strict requirements to herself. The translation, in her opinion, is a creative obsession with the work which one translates and its author, not the mechanic "transference" into another language, albeit being done at a high professional level. A translated work must feel as if it was written in the target language: only the stylistic characteristics, peculiarities of thinking and the details of everyday life should tell a reader that it is the work of a writer of another nation. She worked solely with the original pieces and was very indignant at the offer to translate from Russian to Ukrainian. In her translations she paid great attention to the logical cohesion of phrases in lines and stanzas, to euphony of verses and to the natural ease of speech as well as to the rendition of the inner force pertained to the source language idiom. Steshenko skilfully reproduced verbal images of both representatives of the highest class of society and ordinary people. It distinguishes her among other translators, especially considering the current tendency to use taboo vocabulary in translations and original works. Among contemporary Ukrainian translators who dealt with the works of William Shakespeare, Iryna Steshenko is the most productive . She translated six of his pieces: The Merchant of Venice (1950), Othello (1950), Romeo and Juliet (1952), Much Ado About Nothing (1952), The Comedy of Errors (1954), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1963). I was lucky to happen upon her translation of plays Much Ado About Nothing (1-2) and Romeo and Juliet (3) . Here are some interesting cases. Beatrice and Benedict's speech is a powerful source of wordplay in the original text. The puns were very popular in the days of Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's texts are full of them . Benedick : O God , sir , here's a dish I love not : I cannot endure my Lady Tongue : ! ... , ; Messenger : And a good soldier too , lady . Beatrice :