COMIC ELEMENTS IN G. K. CHESTERTON’S VERSES AND THE PECULIARITIES OF THEIR TRANSFORMATION IN RUSSIAN TRANSLATIONS
The paper deals with G. K. Chesterton’s comic verses, which form a large and significant part of his poetry and reveal many features of his philosophy and poetics. Religious views of the author form the basis for the extensive use of humour (a catholic paradox). Nonsense appears to be a means of world perception. A hilarious atmosphere of the texts, their humour, puns and buffoonary make them attractive not only for the native reader. There exist several Russian translations of the poems by M. Borodnickaya and G. Kruzhkov of Chesterton’s comic poems, which are analyzed in this article ( A Dedication, The Oneness of the Philosopher with Nature, Donkey, Variations on an Air: Composed on having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole). The peculiarities of the original texts form a wide range of difficulties and obstacles for interpreters. Among them: intertext elements, nonsense traditions and generic features. The article studies the ways these obstacles are or are not overcome by translators. The difficulties are caused both by objective reasons (national peculiarities of English humour) and subjective ones (when interpreters do not take into account the author’s creativity in general). The most adequate is G. Kruzhkov’s translation of the parody of the song about King Cole.