Hans Sachs’s Shrovetide play “A Scholar in Paradise” and its translations into Russian and English

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation widely celebrated in Germany it is impossible not to turn to the creative heritage of one of its most ardent adherents, the famous Nuremberg Meistersinger Hans Sachs. Shrovetide plays (Fastnachtspiele) as short dramas depicting the scenes from everyday life and filled with wisdom occupy a special place in his work. The purpose of this article is to review some basic phonetic, lexical and grammatical features of the famous Shrovetide Play “Der fahrend Schüler im Paradeiß“ (1550) in comparison with its translations into Russian (“A Scholar in Paradise: an Anti-religious Play”, translated by E. G. Polonskaya in 1930) and into English (“The Travelling Scholar from Paradise”, translated by William Leighton in 1910). Written in Knittelvers, an old German broken verse common in 16^th-century Germany and later heavily criticized, Fastnachtspiele is sometimes an insoluble task for a translator from the point of view of conveying both the poetic form of the work and its lexical-grammatical and stylistic originality. Special attention is paid to the translation of the title of the work, its rhythm and rhyme (traditional alignment of the syllabic shifts typical for the original text into the correct iamb during translation, uneven use of paired rhyming), transmission of the lexical features of the text (in particular, the speech characteristics of characters, the use of lexemes related to different style registers), as well as to some syntactic features of the original and its English and Russian versions. In particular, the article attempts to analyze the general style of translations and draw a conclusion about the transfer of the national and cultural specifics of the late medieval German play in them.

Keywords:

Hans Sachs, Knittelvers, literary translation, Early New High German, Shrovetide plays