German and Spanish rhythmic accents in Russian three-ictus dolnik

This article presents a comparative rhythmic analysis of two types of Russian three-ictus dolnik: a heterosyllabic variant used as an equivalent of the German three-stress meter and an isosyllabic variant (7M/8F/9D) used as an equivalent of the Spanish octosyllabic meter. The corpus under examination is divided into two subcorpora. Subcorpus A consists of translations of Heinrich Heine’s poems, comprising 732 lines from 51 translations by twelve Russian translators, published between 1911 and 2003. Subcorpus B consists of translations of Federico García Lorca’s and Spanish folk romances, comprising 1,006 lines from 17 translations by six Russian translators, published between 1940 and 1991. The main questions addressed are: 1) How do the rhythmic characteristics of three-ictus dolnik differ in translations from German and Spanish? 2) Is the translated dolnik rhythmically different from the original Russian dolnik? 3) If so, can these differences be attributed to the influence of foreign verse? 4) How did the canonization of dolnik in mid-twentieth-century Russian poetry influence its use in translations? 5) How do isotonic and isosyllabic factors interact within the dolnik rhythm? To answer these questions, the article outlines the structure of dolnik and its role in Russian versification. It provides a historical overview of how different variants of the meter have been used in translations and then proceeds to a detailed rhythmic analysis (including stressing, length of inter-ictic intervals, syllabic length, and the proportion of different line types) of the variants in question. The results of the rhythmic analysis demonstrate how translators’ strategies differ and evolve over time, revealing the specific properties of each subcorpus, their differences from each other, and their divergences from the original twentieth-century Russian dolnik. The findings underscore the flexibility of metrical forms and their broad potential for rhythmic imitation of foreign verse. The article also shows that the canonization of experimental meters in the original poetic tradition facilitates the canonization of these meters in translated poetry, which gradually diverges from foreign prototypes.