Thomas Tranströmer’s poetic syntax and its Russian translation

Abstract

The article discusses the syntactic structure of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems that reflects the uniqueness of his poetic worldview and the depth of philosophical meaning. Chains of homogenous parts of the sentence, mostly with conjunctionless coordination, are used to reflect the infinite diversity of the outer world as seen through the poetic vision. In these conjunctionless coordinated chains of nominal parts of the sentence — attributes and objects — commas are used for rythmical and expressive purposes, stressing the semantic significance of every component, and facilitate preserving the alliterative sounding of the poem. By contrast, when objects of the outer world are depicted with a negative value as a chaotic mass, commas between the lexemes that refer to them, are absent. Tranströmer’s poetic syntax is also characterized by a special “density” of relative clauses introduced with the conjunction som, that often expand on the main part in the form of a nominal sentence. They often have a complicated syntactic structure with “cyclic” repetition of the prop-word. Another typical feature of versification in Tranströmer’s works is the use of elaborate syntactic compounds which include various constructions — extended predicative attributes, adverbial constructions with the preposition med, as well as complex objects with an infinitive. A special function in Tranströmer’s syntactic structure is assigned to colons and hyphens. The use of colons makes it possible to express what is only accessible to the poet’s inner vision — what is hidden in the past or the future, seen in a dream, and revealing itself in the distant space. The use of hyphens inside sentences and between them expands the limits of the outer world making its image multidimensional. Translating Tranströmer involves the use of syntactic transformations caused by the typological differences between Swedish and Russian. Lexical substitutions can also be found, including the use of Russian words of a higher register, for example, the translation of the relative pronoun som ‘which’ with the conjunction что meaning ‘which’ but in a higher register and typical of an epic narrative, allows for the preservation of the rythmic structure of the original.