On the Language of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the Context of Recent Russian Translations

Recent Russian translations of Petrarch’s Cazoniere have raised the issue of his language: in spite of different strategies, their unifying feature is lexical heterogeneity, due to which Canzoniere appears as a book with different lexical layers and stylistic registers. The purpose of the article, therefore, is to characterize the linguistic features of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in their correlation with the tasks of translation. The author of the article has analyzed and summed up linguistic research studies over the recent years and highlights: the language of Canzoniere is not a living folk language, but an elevated and refined one created with the idea of volgare illustre. Thus, the linguistic strategy of a book translator, the author of the article states, should coincide with the main linguistic task of the literary monument itself, which is the vernacular language sublimation. Pursuing this objective, a translator is highly to convey the original effect of the source-language text.