It is indisputable that the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot had a major influence on the development of modern poetry, not only in the Anglo-American environment but also across Europe. Among other things, Eliot's poetry received special attention from the young generation of Slovenian poets of the time, mainly in the 1960s, when Eliot's poetry reached our cultural environment through Veno Taufer's first translations. Almost sixty years have passed since those first translations and because it is still not possible to read Eliot’s poetic opus in Slovenian language in its entirety, my Master’s thesis dealt exactly with the translation of Eliot’s poems that have not been translated to date. In order for my translation process to be as precise and appropriate as possible, I dedicated the theoretical part of the thesis to the research of Eliot’s poetry and its characteristics, with the emphasis on Eliot’s personal understanding of the poetic language and those elements that are especially important for the translator to keep in mind. In the empirical part I researched translation theory in detail and took it into account when analysing existing translations of Eliot's poetry, which were done by Veno Taufer, France Papež in France Pibernik. These analyses proved helpful in my own translations and represented a basis for the translation decisions I made. The thesis offers a more detailed analysis of the new translations of »Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar« and »Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service«, while all other translations are annotated, offering information on the circumstances of the production of the poems, allusions, and specific translation decisions. The purpose of the thesis is to provide the Slovenian reader with new, contemporary translations of to this day inaccessible poems by an author who, also nowadays, remains one of the most important names of the literary world.
|