Linguistic Creativity in the Translation of Poetry (on the Example of the Translation of Christian Morgenstern's Gallows Poems into Czech)
Abstract
In our paper, we focused on translator's linguistic creativity in translating poetry. As an example we used the gallows poems of the German poet Christian Morgenstern, whose poems are closely linked to the expressive possibilities of German.
The gallows poems teeter on the edge of the figurative and literal meaning of words; there is a play with hidden unspoken meaning, the aim of which is to break down the established meaning of words. Thus, the translator must constantly bear in mind that he is translating the ideological-aesthetic content of the work, of which the German text is merely a vehicle.
In other words, it must be borne in mind that the gallows poems are directly conditioned by the German language in which they were stylized, and other indigenous means must be chosen to preserve their values and meaning. In our paper we tried to outline different translation practices and possible linguistic solutions on the example of 3 selected poems.