TRANSLATION AS MEANING-MAKING: PHILOSOPHICAL ATTITUDES IN THE RUSSIAN VERSIONS OF W. BLAKE’S “THE FLY”

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to identify the interpretative possibilities of poetic translation based on William Blake’s poem “The Fly” and its Russian versions. The author seeks to reveal how translation decisions - semantic, syntactic, metrical, and punctuational - shape different philosophical attitudes in the text. The novelty of the article lies in approaching translation not through the traditional categories of equivalence and adequacy, but within the framework of the rhizomatic logic of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, as a process of meaning-making. The author interprets translations not as copies of the original but as independent events that actualize different potentials of the source text. As a result of the analysis, it was possible to identify fourclusters of Russian translations with regard to the philosophical attitude of the final stanza: Stoicism, Romanticism, existentialism of “authentic presence,” and existential skepticism. The study shows that individual translation decisions can radically transform the philosophical perspective of the text. The article concludes that the corpus of Russian translations of “The Fly” represents a network of equal interpretations, each expressing a particular view on life, death, and consciousness, not a hierarchy of “faithful” and “deviating” versions. This approach allows translation to be seen as philosophical and literary creation, rather than as a secondary reproduction of the original text.