The Twelve” of Alexander Blok in a New Serbian Translation

This study deals with the linguistics and poetics of the translation of “The Twelve” by Alexander Blok, a leading poet of the Russian “Silver age” concerning three levels of analysis :a) lexical­grammatical challenges of translating, b) challenges of translating poetical pictures (and poetics of headlines in the original and the translation), c) phonical­rhytmical challenges of translating. Taking into account the fact that the headline “Двенадцать“ in the Russian original has three levels of meaning, thematical “twelve people “, genre­compositional “twelve poems” and cultural­historical “twelve hours of the old world,” the only lexeme adequate to Serbian translation is the lexeme “дванаест” in a headline and it has to be used as a leit­motiv in three lines of the three poems of the epic. A special aspect of the study is represented by the explanation of the new recension of the Serbian translation of the poem “The Twelve”, with a grapheme “yat” (ѣ), that can be read in ekavian and yekavian dialects (with a monosyllabic reflex of a long yat pointing to the preceding apostrophy).