Cross-Cultural Dialogues in the Translations of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Lithuanian by Sigitas Geda

The whole cycle of William Shakespeare’s sonnets was translated into Lithuanian at different periods by four poet-translators: in emigration (USA) by Alfonsas Šešplaukis-Tyruolis (1964), in Soviet Lithuania by Aleksys Churginas (1965), and after the restoration of Independence in Lithuania, translations done by Sigitas Geda (2009) and Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė (2011) came out of print. This article focuses on the sonnet translations done by the most famous poet Geda (an in-depth analysis of Sonnets 18, 72 and 116 is offered) and it concentrates on the issues of Shakespearean realia, popular cultural images as well as on the selection, transfer, transformation and representation of typical poetic elements. In his sonnet translations, Geda generally retained their structure, their syntactic and semantic nucleus – mainly, by means of extended metaphor and antithesis; although some failure in rendering the poetics of the original and, consequently, loss of meaning are noticeable. His translations demonstrate a rather improvised and inconsistent conveyance of historic cultural signs. It might be the case that Geda did not feel obliged to retain the dignified image of Shakespearean times and the Renaissance era at large, and he obviously favoured his own culture. When rendering the historic context of sonnets, he made them somewhat archaic-like by using down-to-earth language; thus making the sonnets sound more local and giving them folk-like characteristics, by emphasizing the lower register of their contrastive style. In this way, he did not attempt at competing with the translations done by Churginas that were dominant in Soviet times and still remain popular in the present day but he rather tried to bridge the gap between the ‘high’ culture of English Renaissance and the ‘low’ Lithuanian culture.