Original and translation of W. E. Henley’s poem “The Past Was Goodly Once”: A comparative analysis

Abstract

The research aims to identify integral and differential features in the original and the Russian translation of the poem “The Past Was Goodly Once” by the English poet W. E. Henley. The scientific novelty lies in revealing the similarities and differences between the original and the translation of the aforementioned poem through comparative analysis. As a result, it was found that the poems are almost identical in terms of their graphic form, except for punctuation marks. The original and its translation are similar when it comes to their discursive form, but there are discrepancies in metrics; in terms of phonetics, they hardly coincide at all. As for the linguistic form, there are discrepancies in the number of verbs at the morphological micro-level. The original, unlike the translated poem, uses many participles. At the syntactic micro-level, the number of sentences in the target text exceeds the number of sentences in the source text; the Russian version has more syntactic diversity. At the lexical micro-level, both similarities and differences were identified in the vocabulary used, which was mostly conveyed closely to the original. Some words from the source text were not translated, but other images were successfully chosen for them. However, despite this, the translation retains W. E. Henley’s original message that the past should be let go of and one must live in the present. The mood, atmosphere, and idea – all these factors, with minor differences and variations, were still preserved, so the researchers conclude that the main goal of W. E. Henley was successfully achieved in the translation of this poem.