Cubo-futuristic poetics in the poem “Night” by V. Mayakovsky in the interpretation of Chinese translators

Abstract

The futuristic poetics of V. Mayakovsky's work received the attention of researchers in China only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Chinese reader owes the discovery of Mayakovsky as a lyrical poet of a futuristic persuasion to the skill of translators. A characteristic feature of cubo-futuristic poetics, which focuses on the principles of abstract painting, is fragmentation, instability, elusiveness of meaning, which, on the one hand, presents a great difficulty for adequate translation of such information by means of another language, on the other hand, gives the translator freedom in interpreting the suggestive content of the text. The authors provide a comparative analysis of the translations of Wang Feibai and Zheng Zheng of V. Mayakovsky's poem “Night” into Chinese in order to identify the subjective image of the perceived text, which is formed during the relaying of artistic information into translation. The study of translations helps to identify previously unspoken meanings in the pretext, which enriches the perception of the original.