O. Tokarchuk’s Czuły Narrator in the Ukrainian Translation

Abstract

In the paper, the author has compared the semantic structure of the Polish adjective czuły and the Ukrainian version of “chulyi” and its synonyms sensitive, tender, subtle, etc. The aim of such comparison was to underline the best equivalent for the epithet used by the Polish writer Olga Tokarchuk in her Nobel Prize speech “Czuły narrator”. Different languages conceptualize the world in various ways, moreover, they form concepts that describe reality, and categorize them in different ways to give a concrete name to a certain phenomenon. In different languages, other features are attributed to fragments of the world fixed in the concept. Therefore, the accents may be distributed differently among features, connotations, or additional associations related to them. As the comparative analysis demonstrates, sensitivity is conceptualized in the same way in the Polish and Ukrainian languages, however, in Polish, among the features of the concept of sensitivity; the important feature of love is clearly identified. As a result of the contextual analysis of Tokarchuk’s speech, the author concludes that in the author’s understanding of the key concept of a sensitive narrator, the trait of love is additionally emphasized and associated with a kind of maternal, caring love, marked by special responsibility for the object of sensitivity. Such a feature is not directly found in the semantic structure of any Ukrainian vernacular counterpart, so it is desirable to add some compensatory means to convey this nuance of meaning in the translation by using one of the three possible Ukrainian counterparts: sensitive, responsive, or subtle. The range of semantics of the adjective gentle is narrower and it is much more limited in comparison with the semantics of the epithet used by Tokarchuk. Therefore, it is not suitable for conveying the semantics of Polish czuły in the translation of this speech.