THE TITLE AS A  CONTENT-CONCEPTUAL DETERMINANT OF THE LITERARY TEXT AND ITS TRANSFORMATION IN THE GEORGIAN LANGUAGE

Maia Bolashvili; Nana Mazmishvili

Maia Bolashvili Assistant at Gori State University, Gori, Chavchavadze St.53, 1400, Georgia, PhD student of Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University, Batumi, Rustaveli/Ninoshvili St.32/35,6000, Georgia http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4340-7671
Nana Mazmishvili Doctor of Philology, ssociate Professor at Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University, Batumi, Rustaveli/Ninoshvili St.32/35,6000, Georgia, http://orcid.org/0009-0000-3233-2702

Abstract

The first attempt to analyze the title was made in the 20s and 30s of the XXth century and it was founded by the famous Russian esthete and literary scholar Krzhizhanovsky, (Krzhizhanovsky, 1931) with his program work "Poetics of the Title", in which the main, fundamentally important postulates of the title and its relation to the text are formulated. The most important statement that the author makes is the assertion that "a book is a fully expanded title and a title is a whole text reduced to two or three words. In addition to this postulate, (Krzhizhanovsky, 1931: 4) discusses and brings to the fore a number of issues related to the title, the scientific research of which does not lose its relevance even today. In his opinion, "the title is an indicator of the author's style and artistic thinking". The connection between the title and the ideological-thematic essence of the work may be of different depth. In the special literature, it is indicated that there are two forms of relationship between the title and the text: explicit and implicit. Explicit interrelation is superficial and involves distant repetition, which is formed not only by the text itself, but also by the subtext of the work. According to Richard Sawyer's (Sawyer, 1993) classification, titles define the style and genre of a literary text. They give us information about whether this or that text is historical, romantic or autobiographical, etc. Titles can also have a "nominal" role, which serves to identify only one specific actor or place in the literary text, e.g. "Pamela", "Romeo and Juliet", "Madame Bovary", "Tristan and Isolde".

Titles of a literary texts determine the context and the concept of the literary text as they contain stylistic device and expressive means such as allusion and idiomatic expressions which are very often hidden in the titles, particularly when we analyze the literary works of modernism and their understanding is very important in the translating process as they arise some problems for a translator to properly render them in a target language (TL) from a source one (SL).

The present study deals with the translation of one of the greatest and prominent, the XXth century modernist writer’s,- D. H. Lawrence’s translation of some short story titles in the Georgian language and their analyzes in the context of modern theories of equivalence of translation. It reveals those problems and their solutions which usually occur while translating the specific titles of literary texts full of different kinds of stylistic devices, particularly in the context of intertextuality.

Keywords: intertextuality, allusion, nominal, explicit, implicit, descriptive, expressive, source language, target language.