Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The article attempts to determine the degree of obligatory nature of the clerihew title and the extent of its influence on the genre canon. The emphasis is made on those features of a title that may potentially be important for the pre-translation analysis of the source text, as they may create some difficulties in the future process of reproducing clerihews in Ukrainian.The author concludes that clerihew is a genre with a stable canon, one of the features of which is either the absence of a title as such or the so-called “zero character title”, when the title contains the first line of a quatrain, which in the classical version consists only of the name of the clerihew character.The main function of such titles is imitative. Clerihews are pseudobiographic by their nature, and thus any collection or anthology of such verses looks like a biographical dictionary that includes nonsensical stories about prominent representatives of humanity. Clerihews are easily catalogued by their ‘name’ titles, and so they resemble dictionary entries and indexes.All other types of titles (apart from the personalised ones) can lead to blurring of the boundaries of the genre due to: a) excessive allusiveness; b) introduction of additional projections on people who are not the heroes of a particular pseudobiography; c) bringing in negative connotation (forbidden in clerihews).Clerihew titles may cause some genre shift or even substitution of a genre.Due to the requirements for the adequacy of the target text translators have no right to omit titles when translating. The main issue in reproducing clerihew titles (if they are already present in the original version) is that there is a danger of going beyond the genre canon by introducing elements into the translation that are not characteristic of the genre-and-style core of the source text.
Source: Мова Література Фольклор
Author: I. M. Shama
Institution: Zaporizhzhia National University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413046795