The Principle of Symmetry in William Blake’s Poem The Tyger and Its Reproductoin in Ukrainian Translations.
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Дата
2025-12-02
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Alfred Nobel University
Анотація
The article is devoted to the analysis of Ukrainian translations of William Blake’s poem The Tyger made by V. Koptilov, V. Keis, and V. Bohuslavska, focusing on the embodiment of the principle of symmetry as an organizing principle of the poem, which ensures the integrity of its artistic world. The relevance of this research is determined by the popularity of Blake’s poem in the Ukrainian cultural space, evidenced by its inclusion in literature curricula at secondary and higher educational institutions across Ukraine, as well as by the continuous appearance of new Ukrainian translations. In this context, it becomes important to determine the degree to which the existing translations correspond both to the spirit and the letter of the original, and, in particular, to examine how well they reflect the world-modeling elements inherent in Blake’s poem. Consequently, the article aims to identify how the dominant principle of symmetry is realized across all levels of Blake’s work, and to determine to what extent and through which translation strategies this dominant feature has been preserved in several representative Ukrainian versions selected for analysis. The research employs the methods of structural-semantic and rhythmic-metric analysis of a poetic work, combined with a comparative and translation approaches applied to the Ukrainian translations of Blake’s poetry.
In the first part of the article, a comprehensive analysis of the original text of The Tyger is conducted, revealing the forms and means by which the principle of symmetry is manifested on all levels of the poem – figurative, lexical, stanzaic, rhythmic, phonic, compositional, and syntactic – and demonstrating its systemforming role in both the semantic organization and the poetic structure of the work. The analysis shows that the principle of symmetry is actualized not only through its literal realization in numerous elements of the artistic world and text, which are placed in direct symmetrical correspondence or opposition, but also through pronounced cases of symmetry violations. One of the most striking examples of such violation is the deliberate disruption of rhyme in one of the poem’s strongest compositional positions – at the end of the first and last stanzas, on the word ‘symmetry’. This technique foregrounds the very concept of symmetry in the text, while the rhyme of symmetry with itself – similar to the medieval poetic tradition, where the word ‘God’ was allowed to rhyme only with itself – symbolically frames the artistic world of the poem by appearing both at its beginning and its end. Furthermore, the lexical analysis of the poem reveals previously unnoticed intertextual parallels between The Tyger and Psalm 91 from the Psalms of David in its English version in the Douay-Rheims Bible.
The second part of the article examines the degree to which the principle of symmetry is preserved in the analyzed translations and explores how this principle interacts in the poetics of the translated texts with other stylistic emphases shaped by individual artistic decisions of the translators. The study finds that the principle of symmetry, as a world- and system-forming factor, is not consistently implemented in any of the examined translations. While all the translations preserve only the most evident figurative-lexical, stanzaic, and syntactic symmetrical structures, the translators’ choices often suggest an intention not so much to render Blake’s poem as faithfully as possible, but rather to convey distinctive features of Blake’s poetic style as a whole.
In conclusion, the systematic analysis of The Tyger presented in this article has revealed a variety of methods for implementing the principle of symmetry at all levels of the poem’s poetics: in the system of rhyme and rhythm, in the imagery of “strong points,” in lexical, figurative, and syntactic repetitions and contrasts, and in the “mirror-like” composition, where not only the first and last stanzas but also other elements of the stanzaic structure appear symmetrically (in particular, a correlation of imagery, syntax, and phonetics was observed between stanzas 2 and 5 and stanzas 3 and 4). The realization of the principle of symmetry is further reinforced by the biblical intertext of Blake’s poem, in which, as the analysis has shown, there is not only the Book of Job but also the 91st Psalm of David, with which Blake’s poetry enters into similarly symmetric relations of echo and contrast. Thus, the analysis of all levels of The Tyger confirms the status of the principle of symmetry as a dominant factor of the poem’s artistic integrity, governing the entire system of its poetics.
At the same time, the examination of the selected Ukrainian translations of The Tyger has demonstrated that the recreation of that “fearful symmetry,” which permeates Blake’s work at all levels of its art istic structure and fundamental principles of its artistic universe, has not yet been achieved with unequivocal artistic conviction in any of the translations. Nevertheless, each of them, in grappling with the decept ively “simple” material of the original, demonstrates profound and non-trivial translation strategies that are essentially consonant with the artistic philosophy and creative temperament of the English poet.
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Ключові слова
poetic image, dominant of artistic integrity, principle of symmetry, composition, rhythmics, phonics, stanzas, translation strategies, поетичний образ, домінанта художньої цілісності, принцип симетрії, композиція, ритміка, фоніка, строфіка, перекладацькі стратегії