摘要：The article examines the translation of William Shakespeare’s sonnets into Lithuanian by the poet Sigitas Geda (Vilnius: Žara, 2009). The authors discuss the importance of translations and interpreting via a third language for the formation of Italian and English sonnet structure; provide a short overview on Lithuanian translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and their research; present some modern theoretical principles of poetry translation including translation adequacy, equivalence and cultural transfers (James S. Holmes, Francis R. Jones, Raymond van den Broeck, Theodore Horace Savory); examine general linguistic and cultural issues of Lithuanian translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A detailed analysis of the translation of six sonnets by Geda is done applying comparative and close reading methods. The article focuses on the transfer of figures of speech (sonnets 18, 73 and 116) and the deciphering and transformation of meaning (sonnets 27, 66 and 13). The resources include the edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets with commentaries (ed. Katherine Duncan Jones), the research of sonnets and their translations carried out by foreign authors (Manfred Pfiter, Niveen Aziz Muhammed Tinah, Douglas Trevor, Lukas Erne, Catherine Belsey, Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells, Zacharij Plavskin, Michail Morozov, Aleksandr Anikst). Occasionally, comparisons are made with translation by Samuil Marshak that had a greatly influence on Geda and with other variant translations of Russian and Lithuanian authors (Aleksys Churginas, Alfonsas Tyruolis - Šešplaukis, Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, Antanas Danielius). In conclusion, sonnets translation by Geda preserves the text structure of the original, its syntactic and semantic nexus – extended metaphor and antithesis; however, it results in a great loss of poetic and semantic features and does not reveal the poetic talent of the translator. Keywords : sonnet, poetry translation, translation equivalence, Renaissance, cross - cultural dialogue, William Shakespeare, Sigitas Geda. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/zz.2014.031
