The image of Romeo as interpreted by Ivan Roskovshenko. From the history of Russian Petrarchism

Abstract

This study of the translation strategies for Romeo and Juliet heavily relies on two aspects concerning the play’s genre complexity: the lyrical plot (drawing on the poetic fashions of the 1590s), and the comical carnival element, imbued with a Shakespearean London idiom. The process of the Russian adaptation of Shakespearian imagery was lengthy and fraught with difficulties, not only due to the play’s linguistic complexity, but because of differences in treatment of higher matters (here, poetry) and social and everyday realities. The paper discusses the first Russian translation of Romeo and Juliet, penned by Ivan Roskovshenko. The study focuses on discovering the ways in which the play’s Petrarchian stylistics transforms in the Russian interpretation. A detailed comparative analysis of the translation and its original suggests that I. Roskovshenko consistently replaced the rhetorical conventions of the 16th century with the patterns of contemporary Russian poetry, domesticating the Shakespearian text. The approach only paid off when the images of English Petrarchism, interspersing Romeo and Juliet, resonated with the Russian poetry of the early 1800s.