MEANS OF METAPHOR TRANSLATION IN THE STORY BERLIN, CITY OF BIRDS BY E. ÖZDAMAR

Просьба ссылаться на эту статью в русскоязычных источниках следующим образом: Lapina L. G., Ermakova E. V. Means of Metaphor Translation in the Story Berlin, City of Birds by E. Özdamar // Вестник Пермского университета. Российская и зарубежная филология. 2017. Т. 9, вып. 2. С. 55–60. doi 10.17072/2037-6681-2017-2-55-60 Please cite this article in English as: Lapina L. G., Ermakova E. V. Means of Metaphor Translation in the Story Berlin, City of Birds by E. Özdamar. Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Rossiyskaya i zarubezhnaya filologiya [Perm University Herald. Russian and Foreign Philology], 2017, vol. 9, issue 2, pp. 55–60. doi 10.17072/2037-6681-2017-2-55-60 (In Eng.)

This paper is aimed at the study of multifaceted and multidimensional problem of metaphor translation in fiction in the framework of linguistic and cognitive modelling theory. Adequate translation of information conveyed by poetic images has remained one of the most challenging and debated issues of the theory and practice of translation for many decades. As far as Russian school of translation studies is concerned, the issue was debated by L. S. Barkhudarov, M. M. Bakhtin, V. N. Komissarov, etc. The rise of cognitive linguistics at the end of the 20th century contributed to the shift of scholars' attention from finding systemic matches between language units to the problem of communicating the cognitive dominant of the original text. Thus, modern controversies in metaphor translation theory oscillate between two polarized opinions: metaphor is a linguistic device and metaphor is a mental model.
In contemporary linguistics widely accepted is the idea of universal conceptual metaphors and metaphor modelling being the omnipresent principles underlying organization and structuring of not only belles-lettres but academic texts as well. Among the advocates of conceptual metaphor theory there are such prominent Russian and international scholars as N. D. Arutiunova, L. M. Alekseyeva, M. Black, M. Johnson, V. I. Karasik, E. S. Kubyiakova, G. Lakoff, S. L. Mishlanova, V. N. Teliya, G. Fauconnier and others whose works comprise the theoretical grounds of our research.
In terms of methodology, it is necessary to introduce a distinction between the terms metaphor and simile. According to Aristotle, a simile is akin to a metaphor with the only difference lying in the form of expression: while in metaphor something is assimilated or substituted, simile is based on the comparison with each other of two objects existing alongside through the words "like," "as", etc. His views were further interpreted and developed into stylistic metaphor theory that tends to emphasize the surface design of metaphor and neglect implicit cognitive structures' interaction. Centuries-long tradition of treating metaphor as hidden simile is based on signs vehicle from one thing to another; however, it was not until the end of XX century that the principal difference of these linguistic phenomena attracted scholars' attention when proponents of cognitive linguistics put forward the idea that every unit having two referents and categorizing one in terms of the other should be considered metaphorical. Consequently, similes can be viewed as part of metaphor construction and means of metaphorical modelling and categorizing objects of reality.
The work is based on G. Lakoff's postulate that metaphor is embedded in thought, not only in language, so metaphors in speech are secondary to conceptual metaphors. Thus, a linguistic metaphor can be viewed as a speech representation of a metaphor model. Conceptual metaphor models are in fact universal tools of new knowledge generation: the source domain -mental matrix of a thing or phenomenon taken from immediate human experienceis projected to the unfamiliar conceptual structure of the target domain. In terms of translation it means that not only language metaphors as particular lexical units should be translated, but also conceptual metaphor models that lie underneath.
We define metaphor (metaphor model) as mental cross-mapping of two objects on the basis of semantic similarity between actions, states and attributes inherent in them. From this perspective, there is no need to distinguish proper metaphors and similes, as both serve as verbal representations or manifestations of conceptual metaphorical models.
The empirical material in this study is text of the story "Berlin, Stadt der Vögel" ("Berlin, City of Birds") written by outstanding Turkish female writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar, an award-winning author of well-known plays, stories and novels written in German; in 1991 she was awarded Ingeborg Bachman Prize. The main analytical tool employed for the study of the story's conceptual landscape was MIPVU designed by G. Steen, and its application revealed the presence of key metaphors critical for communicating the main idea of the story. According to its results, poetic space of the story is structured by two extended and multi-layered metaphors: Berlin is a photograph, and Foreigners are birds. Quite interesting is to study metaphor rows or groups that represent these essential concepts: after-war Berlin and immigrants. As is clear from the name of the story, its metaphorical paradigm is drawing parallels between strangers coming to Berlin from abroad and birds. It is universally acknowledged that different language communities perceive and structure surrounding reality in different ways, so in metaphors invented by a particular author, culture-specific national codes are inevitably mirrored. This is also true in regard to the works of E. Özdamar who as a representative of the two language cultures, Turkish and German, can connect the elements of diverse images of the world.
The bird image has been well known in the world cultures from the ancient times. In European art it has long tradition of being associated with soul, spirit, freedom of thought, and was also considered a symbol of change. In Islam birds are souls living in the Tree of Life. In the context of the story city is perceived as something lifeless, man-made and still, thus acquiring the main properties of a photo, and birds represent the embodiment of life, motion and fresh blood. On a broader basis, this image can be interpreted as metaphor model of internal freedom, deliverance from the old burden of guilt and suffering, and renovation.
The main character of the story is destroyed after-war Berlin overwhelmed with the bitter feelings of guilt, fear and confusion. From the very first lines the reader is bombarded with the stream of metaphors expressing the ideas of non-alive or life imitation (theater scenery, play, photograph), ageing (a toothless mouth, languid hands), dying and demolition (tomb made of dark water, dead rails), fear (the frightened head back of an old man), and loneliness (as if the apple were her best friend). Metaphors are selected so that they could appeal to all senses: vision (a photo; scenery), hearing (barrel organ), touch (cold), smell (sausages, pea soup and cigarettes), thus altogether creating ruthless cinema-tic image of a still, motionless city between the past and the future, not knowing what to do next. Apparently, representation of a multimodal metaphor by means of language is an essential feature of Özdamar's metaphorical insight.
The metaphor of coming back to life is expressed through the image of birds -immigrants torn away from their homes like birds of passage, speaking some incomprehensible gobbledygook (birds language), flocking together (in contrast to dissociation of native Berliners), often vulgar and pushy (as if trying to beat their path through a mysterious forest). The birds "woke up the photos", i. e. roused the city from its lethargic sleep. First they "filled it with color" and even gave back to it its "original gloss", then, going through the stage of "bird bazaar" and inarticulate attempts at talking broken language returned to Berlin its rich resounding voice ready to splash out onto "a huge opera stage".
From the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory considerable interest present ways of text realization of the above-mentioned cognitive metaphor models. Using continuous sampling method and MIPVU, we have identified in the text of E. Özdamar's story "Berlin, City of Birds" 12 similes with the conjunction wie, 17 similes with the conjunctions als, als ob, ebenso, and also 18 proper metaphors.
Thus, some of the similes are the following: "wie ein Bühnenbild" (as theatre scenery), "wie ein Grabmal aus dunklem Wasser" (as a tomb made of dark water), "Armut ist wie eine ansteckende Krankheit" (Poverty is like a contagious disease), "wie der Tod" (like Death), "er hatte seinen Mantel nicht zugeknőpft, er flog hinter ihm her wie ein Flűgel" (he hadn't buttoned his coat up, it flew behind him as a wing), "wie eine Opernbűhne" (as an opera stage), "viele alte Frauen sahen so aus, als ob sie aus einem lange verschlossenen Schrank herausgekommen waren" (many old women looked as if they had come out of the locked closet).
The following extract from the text illustrates organic interaction of different kinds of similes and metaphors: "Ich sah Berlin zum ersten Mal vor 35 Jahren. Die Stadt war wie ein Bühnenbild. Es gab aber keinen Regisseur dort, man wusste nicht, welches Stück gerade inszeniert wurde. Die Menschen sahen so aus, als ob sie auf einen Regisseur warten würden, der den begrenzten Raum Berlin als eine lebendige Stadt inszeniert.
The whole text can be viewed as a twisted strip of tightly wattled metaphors whose meaning is continuously vivifying in the text. Particularly expressive is the last paragraph of the story where quite a lot of principal metaphors' manifestations are brought together and interwoven: "Wenn ich heute Berlin sehe, sehe ich die zu Fotos erstarrte Stadt nicht mehr. In Berlin hat ein Prozess des Zusammenlebens stattgefunden. Die Vögel haben in die Stadt eine neue Geschichte gebracht.
In view of the recent migration processes in Europe it is quite evident that the story under consideration is an attempt of literary and linguistic interpretation of the problem of intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue in post-war Berlin, a dialogue seen as peaceful assimilation and cooperation. Intercultural communication is pictured as the driving force and key factor of post-war Berlin's renovation; moreover, as remedy from death.
The story can be divided into two parts: the first part describes the state of Berlin immediately after the war, and the second one is to show its gradual awakening to life. The meaningful components of this renovation process are culture and language transformations: "BERLIN HÖRTE SICH DAS AN UND LACHTE! " -"BERLIN HEARD ALL THAT AND LAUGHED!" (in connection with native Berliners' attempts to adjust their language to Turkish).
In the original printed version of the story sentences marking the stages of integration process, are printed in capital letters. It is to stress that the beginning of intercultural contacts was promising and likely to succeed during the next decades. So both the central idea of the story and its language expression are relevant in terms of burning social issues of the day.
The analysis of means aimed at metaphor translation in the story was only carried out with reference to the two target images, those of Berlin and newcomers, and their numerous linguistic realizations. Due to implicit character of metaphor modelling, conceptual metaphors translation presents a difficult task, and it is complicated by the fact that different languages have non-coinciding images of the world, and poetic metaphors are inevitably culture specific. E. Özdamar as a representative of Turkish and German language cultures is a very interesting example of cross-border writing, and the translator of her story M. Rudnitskiy faced the challenging task of expressing this ambiguity with the Russian language inventory.
Having analyzed metaphor translations from German into Russian from the point of view of semantic and structural transformations applied, we identified the following means of rendering the author's imagery: 1. Full translation which preserves the meaning and structure of the original metaphor: «мертвые рельсы», (tote Bahnschienen), «запах жил» (der Geruch lebte), «грязный свет» (das schmutzige Licht), «испуганный затылок» (der ängstliche Nacken) and others. This means of translation is prevalent and accounts for about 85 % of all metaphor translations.
2. Lexical change, i. e. using a word with a different semantic structure but possessing similar meaning in the given context: «как гробница из черной воды» (wie ein Grabmal aus dunklem Was-ser) -the translator uses the word черный (black) instead of dunklem (dark). This group consists of about 2 % of translated metaphorical units.
3. Morphological change, i. e. using a word with the similar meaning but belonging to a different lexical or grammatical class: «у домов был такой вид, будто внутри за стенами не живые люди, а фотографии в рамочках» (Und die Häuser sahen so aus, als ob in ihnen eher gerahmte Fotos als lebendige-Menschen wohnen wűrden). In translation the noun в рамочках is used instead of the past participle gerahmte. This means of metaphor translation is also not very frequent; it was applied in about 4 % cases.
4. Syntactical change, i.e. using a different syntax structure of a sentence: «И БЕРЛИН ВСЕМУ ЭТОМУ НЕ ВОСПРОТИВИЛСЯ!» ("UND BER-LIN LIESS DAS ALLES MIT SICH MACHEN"). Here the translator used a different sentence structure because in Russian modal constructions similar to the ones with the verb lassen are rare. The frequency of this device is about 3 %. 5. Addition / omission of lexical units: «как будто они за своими ослами или индюшками гонялись» (Als ob sie mit ihren Eseln oder Truthahnen durch ein anderes Land gingen) -the phrase durch ein anderes Land is omitted. This group is represented by some 6 % of translated metaphorical units.
It should be noted that our statistics is not absolute, as the translator often used a combination of devices within one metaphorical unit; for example, lexical change and omission, or lexical and syntactical change.
Our analysis has shown that conceptual metaphors "Berlin is a motionless picture" and "Immigrants are birds" in E. Özdamar's story "Berlin, City of Birds" have been successfully translated into Russian with the use of the above mentioned techniques. Essential poetic, cultural, artistic and ontological semantic components of the author's metaphors were communicated to Russian readers without any noticeable loss of sense. The Russian language potential was convincingly employed to convey the dynamic and engaging image of once destroyed, drained of life power and speechless city gaining back its vitality, bright colors and diverse voices. The study leads to the following idea: if we are to seek a way for communicating over language and culture borders, it is necessary to concentrate on the kind of metaphorical models that arise from our universal basis and can facilitate the process. The subject undoubtedly has high intercultural relevance and the applied methodology enables academic community to analyze culturally marked concepts behind the use of language that has numerous practical implications.