The Interplay of Ballet and Literature: Translation Issues

Abstract

The history of addressing of ballet art to literature has lasted for more than one century. However this cooperation increasingly causes discrepant appraisements from both specialists and viewership. They even offer opinions about unnatural character of alliance of ballet and literature as completely heterogeneous phenomena. Literature sources in their softer variant refer to be only a distant primary push for completely self consistent and autonomous choreographer’s creativity. Such affirmations seem to be not enough convincing. Bearing in mind inevitability of organic relations between various phenomena, belonging to one and the same cultural sphere, while interacting, each one reproduces definite features of the other. This is all the more characteristic in the situation of intersemiotic translation of the text content into a language common to a phenomenon of another indicative nature. In this case basis of adequate translation is built from common significant patterns characteristic of the both texts. For literature and ballet such patterns are visually entertaining aspects of a work, embodying narrative, conceptual and emotional aspects of the content. They are internally enclosed into the literature text, they are perceived by a choreographer, and they form basis for the creative conception. Specification of a scenic image is an aspect of a complex of actual socio-cultural contexts of the historic epoch, in which the act of transferring of literature into a ballet action takes place