Book chapter
Последний каламбур Снорри? (Заметки на полях «Саги о Стурлунгах»
In book
The article deals with different methods of teaching translation and interpretation on the basis of the novel "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome. The author describes in detail the technique of doing pre-translation exercises, singling out the difficulties connected with grammar and vocabulary transformations and offers the ways of solving them. Different ways of teaching with the help of listening comprehension, films, role plays and theatrical performances are paid great attention to. The article dwells upon the great educational value of the book for mastering various layers of speech owing to its great diversity of styles. The author draws a conclusion that historical, philosophic and ironic implications found in the novel can be highly beneficial for teaching the translators and interpreters-to-be. The article sums up practical ideas of how to work with idiomatic expressions and how to make an exact and transparent translation. The author concludes saying that the book teaching literary translation resources are unlimited.
The homily on the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (Assumptio sancte Marie) is part of the collection usually referred to in the historiography as “The Icelandic Homily Book”. Composed, by all appearances, before 1200, the homily is one of the earliest Icelandic written texts as well as an example of the prose of Christian instruction. The homily composer faced a challenging task of expressing new notions and describing new phenomena with the language which was not used to them, and the solution of this task resembles, on the one hand, the colloquial language of the sagas of Icelanders, while, on the other hand, it is a rather obscure “learned style” seeking to imitate the rhetorical techniques of Latin. It is unknown whether this homily was to be read in front of the audience or was it some sort of an example for a homilist. The latter suggestion is supported by the heterogeneous structure of the “Book” as a whole as well as by the presence of non-liturgical texts in it, whereas the former — by the use of the first-person pronouns and direct addressing the audience. This paper provides a translation of the homily, together with a few introductory remarks.
This article is devoted to a problem of development of modern German discourse of advertising. Properly selected linguistic means allow for success of the advertising texts. Today it is more important to put emphasis on the creation of the ideal image of the consumer rather than demonstrate the value of the product to the customer. So the structure and components of modern advertising texts differ from the text of the end of the twenties century. Presently the slogan is the most important and long-term part of the modern advertisement. It transfers the essential meaning of the whole message. Consequently, the creation of a slogan requires specific linguistic methods.
The paper deals with the problem of reflection of Slavic legends about first rulers in the text of the Polish chronicle Gesta principum Polonorum by Gallus
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Anonymous (the early twelfth century). The author compares the story of the Piast dynasty’s coming to power in Poland with that of the rise to power of King Haraldr Fairhair in Norway (in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, c. 1230, and Flateyjarbók, 1387–1394). It is obvious that in the basis of both texts lays a common motif: “at a feast of a ruler food suddenly disappears, and then the ruler loses his power and dies”. All the basic and additional motifs in these two stories are the same. The plot is based on the juxtaposition of two feasts, one of which is meager, and the other is generous. In the both texts we clearly see a description of the pagan rite called potlatch — a periodic mandatory emulative public delivery of products and values, which requires the current ruler to outdone his opponent in generosity. We have two implementations of the same invariant plot. There can be two assumptions about the time of the formation of such a plot, common for the Scandinavian and the Slavic traditions. It is possible that it is a “wandering plot”, typical for the period of intensive contacts between the Slavs and the Scandinavians in the circum- Baltic area from the seventh till the eleventh century, or it could be a more ancient time when the contacts between the Germanic tribes and the Slavs are fixed linguistically: the periods of exchange between the Teutonic and Slavonic languages.
A comparison of the texts of Snorri Sturluson and Gallus Anonymous gives us an opportunity to confirm the hypothesis that oral legendary tradition underlays the first Polish chronicle. Even for Gallus, an educated foreign Benedictine monk, an appeal to the pagan past of the ruling dynasty, for which he was writing his chronicle, was actually necessary. We clearly see here a dictate of the local audience, the requests of which could not be ignored. Note also that chronicle was such a form of historiography that badly needed oral epic and folklore sources for its anecdotal narrations.
The early Polish historiography demontsrates a number of typological parallels, as well as a number of structural differences in comparison with the Old Rus chronicles. The arrangement of material in Gesta principum Polonorum seems remarkably close to that in the first Russian historiographical work, the so-called Oldest Tale (or Oldest Chronicle), written in the first half of the eleventh century. This non-extant text can be reconstructed in its main features from the text of the Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century. The Russian Oldest Tale, just as the chronicle of Gallus, was a record of a series of episodes from the early history of the ruling dynasty. Both texts were purely secular in main topics, both aimed at glorifying the ruling prince and his ancestors, both lacked an annalistic framework.